We Others: New and Selected Stories

The Slap

WALTER LASHER. One September evening when Walter Lasher returned from the city after a hard day’s work and was walking to his car in the station parking lot, a man stepped out from between two cars, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face. Lasher was so startled that he did not move. The man turned and walked briskly away. Lasher was a big man, six one, with broad shoulders and a powerful neck. No one had dared to hit him since the sixth grade. He remembered it still: Jimmy Kubec had pushed him in the chest, and Lasher had swung so hard that he broke Kubec’s nose. Lasher looked around. The man was gone, a few commuters were strolling to their cars. For a moment he had the sensation that he’d dreamed the whole thing: the sudden appearance of the stranger, the slap, the vanishing. His cheek stung: the man had slapped him hard. Lasher entered his car and started home. As he passed under the railroad trestle, crossed Main, and drove along streets lined with maples and sycamores, he kept summoning the little scene in the station parking lot. The man was about five ten, well built, tan trench coat, no hat. It was difficult to remember his face, though he’d made no attempt to hide it and in fact had looked directly at Lasher. What stood out was something about the eyes: a hard, determined look; not rage, exactly — more like a cold sureness. The man had hit him once: hard. Then he had walked away. Lasher pulled over to the side of the road and checked his face in the rearview mirror. He wasn’t certain, but the cheek looked a little red. He pulled back onto the street. The man must have mistaken him for someone else. A crazy guy, some loony off his meds, they should keep them locked up. But he hadn’t looked crazy. Maybe a client, in over his head, unhappy with the performance of his investment portfolio in a tanking market. Or maybe Lasher had offended someone without knowing it, the man had followed him up from the city, and all because of a sharp word, an impatient look, a biting phrase, he had no time for fools, a bumped arm in the street. The man had looked directly at him. Lasher would talk it out with his wife. They’d lived here for twenty-six years and nothing like this had ever happened to him. It was why you stayed out of the city, took the long commute. A few blocks from the beach he turned onto his street, where the lights were already on. They must have come on all over town while he was driving from the station. How could he have missed it? The man had taken him by surprise. He hadn’t had time to react. He didn’t like the man’s eyes, didn’t like the thought of himself standing there doing nothing. It was probably too late to call the police — the man would already be far away. Anna would know what to do. Lasher pulled into the drive and sat motionless in the darkening car. The man had looked hard at him: there was no mistake. He should have smashed him in the mouth. Jimmy Kubec had worn a bandage on his face for two weeks. Lasher walked across the flagstones and up the steps of the front porch. In the hall he could smell roast beef and basil. He’d save his misadventure for after dinner. The man had come right up to him and slapped him: hard. As Lasher hung up his hat he understood that he would not speak of it to Anna, who was coming toward him. “Katie called — she’s coming on Saturday. I said it was fine. I mean, what else could I do? Oh, and Jenkovitch left a message. He says he never can get hold of you. He wants you to call him back. Here, give me that. How was your day?”

OUR TOWN. Our town is bordered on the south by a sandy public beach that faces the waters of Long Island Sound and on the north by a stretch of pine and oak woods. To the east lies an industrial city, where streets of crumbling brick factories with smashed windows give way to neighborhoods of new ten-story apartment complexes rising above renovated two-family houses with porches on both floors. To the west lies a wealthy town of five-bedroom homes set back on rural lanes, with a private beach, a horse-riding academy with indoor and outdoor practice rings, and a harbor yacht club where powerboats and racing sailboats are moored on floating docks. We like to think of ourselves as in the middle: well off, as things go, with pockets of wealth at the shore and on Sascatuck Hill, but with plenty of modest neighborhoods where people work hard and struggle to make ends meet. In this way of thinking there’s a certain amount of self-deception, of which we’re perfectly aware — it pleases us to think of ourselves as in the middle, even though, as statistics show, we’re well above the national average in per capita income. Although we’re on the commuter line to Manhattan, many of us work right here in town or in small cities not more than half an hour away. For the most part our lawns are neat, our streets well paved, our trees trimmed once a year by men in orange hats who stand in baskets at the ends of high booms. Our school system is one of the best in the county — we believe in education and pay our teachers well. Our Main Street is lively, with cafés and restaurants and a big department store, despite the new mall out by Route 7. Because we’re on the commuter line, we don’t feel shut away from the center of things, as if we were stuck up in Vermont or Maine, though at the same time we’re happy to be out of the city and take pride in our small-town atmosphere of tree-shaded streets, yard sales, and the annual fire department dinner. But make no mistake, there’s nothing quaint about us, what with our new semiconductor headquarters and our high-end boutiques, unless it’s our seventeenth-century town green, with a restored eighteenth-century inn where George Washington is supposed to have spent the night. Most of us know we’re lucky to live in a town like this, where crime is low and the salt water is never more than a short drive away. We also understand that to someone from another place, to someone who is disappointed or unhappy, someone for whom life has not worked out in the way it might have, our town may seem to have a certain self-satisfaction, even a smugness. We understand that, for such a person, there may be much to dislike, in a town like ours.

AT NIGHT. In the middle of the night Walter Lasher woke beside his wife and immediately recalled the episode on the playground that had taken place forty-two years ago. He saw Jimmy Kubec with startling vividness: the thick black combed-back oily hair, the loose jaunty walk, the mocking mouth, the large long-lashed eyes. Kubec had long thin biceps, with a vein running down along each upper arm. He wore black jeans and a tight white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his shoulders. He walked toward Walter, looking at him with a little taunting smile, and as he approached he held up the palm of one hand and made a pushing gesture at the air. He did not touch Walter, who nevertheless felt the mockery and the challenge. Walter had grown six inches over the summer. His shoulders were filling out, and he felt an energy in his arms that was almost like anger. The mocking little gesture cut into him like glass. He walked up to Jimmy Kubec and smashed him in the face. He could see the surprise and pain in Kubec’s dark eyes, the blood streaming from the broken nose, the look that seemed to say: Why did you do that to me? Kubec had no friends. He stayed out of Walter’s way after that, standing alone by a tree in a corner of the schoolyard. Lasher lay in bed and thought: Could it have been him, after all these years? The idea was absurd. The man in the trench coat had sandy hair, sharp features, grayish or bluish eyes. It must have been someone else, someone who had it in for him. He saw it again: Jimmy Kubec coming toward him, the veins in his arms, the little pushing gesture in the air. Kubec hadn’t touched him. All that was in another time, another life. Anna lay with her back to him, her hair rippling over the pillow. On the street a car passed, sending a thin bar of light across one wall and up along the ceiling.

ROBERT SUTLIFF. Some sixteen hours later, Robert Sutliff arrived at the station on the 7:38. It was an hour after his usual time. The lights were on in the lot, though the sky was still gray with the last light. He had worked late — tomorrow’s design presentation was a big one. He still needed a few hours after dinner to do a little fine-tuning, a little last-minute cleanup on the three logos he was planning to show them, each with six presentation pages, with and without type. That way he’d give them the illusion that they were actively involved in the decision process, that they were making a contribution to the final product, while he slowly steered them in the direction of the third mark, the one they wouldn’t be able to resist: the yellow-gold ring surrounding a solid dark coffee-colored circle, as if you were looking at a cup of coffee from above, and in the center a design of classic simplicity, in five bold yellow lines: a horizon line, a half circle representing the rising sun, and three sun rays. Coffee and morning, coffee and the energy of the new day, the energy of a new beginning, all in a visually striking, distinctive, versatile design. It worked perfectly on a two-inch business card, and it would work just as well on a ten-foot billboard or the side of an eighteen-wheeler. He hurried down the platform stairs, the stone shining dully under the orange lights. He would talk up the first two designs, the tame one and the way-out one, then hit them with the winner. His car was parked toward the back of the lot, not far from a light pole. As he reached into his pocket for his key, he heard someone walking up to him. Sutliff turned. The man raised his arm and swung at Sutliff’s face. Sutliff heard the sharp sound of the slap, like a gunshot. “Hey!” he shouted, but the man was striding away. His cheek burned. The man had struck him hard, but it wasn’t a punch, he hadn’t made a fist. Sutliff angrily began to follow him, shouted again, and stopped. That was not how he did things. He knew exactly how he did things. Sutliff looked around, rubbed his cheek, and got into his car. He drove quickly out of the lot, turned onto Main, made a left onto South Redding, and stopped at the police station. A man in a trench coat, no hat. Five ten, five eleven. Short hair, brown, darkish, hard to tell. Clean shaven, mid-thirties. A stranger. They would send a car out right away. Sutliff thanked the officer and continued on his way home. What angered him about the whole thing was that people liked him; people took to him. It was part of his success. It had been that way as far back as kindergarten. It had all come together in high school, where he’d set a new record in the hundred-meter dash, acted the part of Tom in The Glass Menagerie—Blow out your candles, Laura! — and nailed Sandra Harding in her living room in front of the fireplace after the spring dance. UPenn, Harvard Business. Now he was someone to watch, someone on the way up, though always with a friendly greeting, a kind word for everyone. The man had looked at him angrily. Sutliff tried to think who it could be. He had a good memory for faces; it was no one he knew. Sutliff loved his wife, his daughter, his work; there had been the one brief fling in the months before Amy’s birth, but that was two years ago, no husband in the picture, no brother, she’d been good about it, disappointed but not bitter. He had nothing to reproach himself with. Who would do this? His cheek felt hot. The man had swung hard but hadn’t made a fist, hadn’t wanted anything from him. A crazy mistake. The police would take care of it.

AT BREAKFAST. At breakfast Walter Lasher turned over a page of the Daily Observer and saw a small item: Robert Sutliff, of 233 Greenfield Terrace, had been attacked by a man in the parking lot of the railroad station at 7:41 p.m. The unknown assailant had slapped his face. Police were looking for a man about five ten or eleven, with short dark hair, wearing a tan trench coat. Lasher glanced up at his wife, who was pouring herself a second cup of coffee. He was aware of a sharp, exhilarating sense of relief, almost of gratitude. The man had not singled him out from all the others, had not come after only him. Lasher knew Sutliff, though not well. Sutliff was younger, moved with a different crowd, had come up from the city a few years ago. They nodded on the morning platform, said hello in the hardware store. Lasher’s sense of relief was suddenly charged with uneasiness. The man’s hair had been light-colored, not dark. All the more reason for coming forward now, telling what he knew. Sutliff hadn’t even mentioned the color of the eyes. Details were streaming back: the pale angry eyes, the stern mouth, the buttons on the shoulder straps, the looped belt. It would be difficult to go to the police, since he’d be forced to explain his earlier silence. Better to think it over, give it another day or so. The man had to be stopped. People had enough to worry about without this kind of crap. Lasher, reaching for his coffee, missed the handle and rattled the cup on the saucer. Anna looked up. “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t say anything,” she said.

CHARLES KRAUS. Charlie Kraus, marketing manager of Sportswear West, returned from the city at dusk and walked down the steps into the parking lot. He’d read the paper at breakfast that morning and had discussed the incident on the way to the city with Chip Hynes and Bob Zussman, who had said: “It’s always a dame.” Kraus wasn’t so sure. Just like Zussman to use a word like that: dame. Kraus glanced at the rows of cars stretching from the station building to the chain-link fence at the far end. The sun had set, but the sky was still pale gray — the lights hadn’t yet come on. Two feet away, the taillights of an SUV suddenly glowed red. Kraus stopped and let the car back out. He wondered, not for the first time, how many people got hit by cars in places like this each year. Parking lots were an example of efficient but flawed design: you found a way to bring as many cars as possible into a confined space, but anyone walking to or from a car was in constant danger of being struck by a vehicle backing out. All solutions were impractical. One night it came to him: a system of overhead walkways with a separate stairway leading down to each car. He could patent it and make a fortune. In the morning he’d laughed at himself. Kraus looked around. Not much place to hide: just row after row of cars. Those ailanthus trees and sumac bushes along the fence, a big trash bin over by the slope. To take you by surprise, a man would have to crouch down between two cars, where it would be a cinch to spot him — especially at this hour, with two dozen people walking to different locations, cutting across, looking around. At night it was a different story. The fluted-steel light poles were too far apart, the high-pressure sodium lights didn’t give off as much illumination as the halide lights the Public Works folks had wanted, but hey, you get what you pay for. It wouldn’t be all that hard to keep out of sight. The thought angered him. He’d moved to this town ten years ago because it was safe. Good schools for his kids, plenty of parks, the beach: all of it safe. That’s why you moved to the suburbs. That’s why you gave up delis with jars of fat pickles on the counter. If he wanted to spend his time worrying about what could happen in a parking lot after sunset he might as well go back to Brooklyn. The whole thing would probably blow over by the time he flew out to Chicago next week. The hotel had one of the best gyms in the country, with big windows high up over the lake. Just ahead, a man stepped around the back of a van. Kraus glanced over. The man strode up to him, raised his hand, and slapped him hard in the face. He looked at Kraus for a moment, then turned briskly away. The look was hostile and cold. Kraus waited for the man to disappear — he must have ducked behind a row of cars — then took out his cell phone and called the police.

COFFEE SHOPS AND RESTAURANTS. We read about it the next morning on the front page of the Daily Observer. We had taken note of the first incident, the one reported by Robert Sutliff, which had seemed to us a misunderstanding of some sort, a bizarre error that would soon be explained. A second attack was far more serious. It seemed to be part of a deliberate plan, though exactly what was at stake remained unclear. All over town, people were talking about it: in coffee shops and restaurants, at gas station pumps, in the post office and the CVS, in high school hallways, on slatted benches beside potted trees in the mall. We wondered who he could possibly be, this stranger who had appeared among us with his angry eyes. Some argued that the man was mentally unstable and was working out some private drama. Others insisted that he knew his victims and had lain in wait for them. Still others, a small group, claimed that the attacks were some form of social statement: it was no accident, they said, that the assailant had chosen the station parking lot during early-evening rush hour, when businessmen carrying laptops were returning from the city to their leafy suburban town. Everyone agreed that the incidents were disturbing and that the station parking lot was in need of twenty-four-hour police surveillance.

TWO DESCRIPTIONS. From the two descriptions, we learned that the assailant was a male Caucasian about five nine or ten or eleven, solid in build, clean-shaven. His hair was short, light brown or dark brown, neatly combed. He had brown or gray or blue eyes, a straight well-shaped nose, and a slightly protruding chin. He might have been thirty or thirty-five years old. Both victims agreed that the man had looked angry. He wore a beige or tan double-breasted trench coat. According to Kraus, the belt had been tied, not buckled. Sutliff, who wasn’t sure about the belt, remembered the coat fairly well. It was the sort of trench coat that anyone on that train between the ages of twenty-five and sixty might have been wearing — an expensive coat, well cut, stylish in a conservative way.

RICHARD EMERICK. At 6:45 the next morning Richard Emerick parked in his space at the station, reached over to the door handle, and stopped. He glanced at his watch: too late to go back. He had made a mistake, but at least he’d caught it in time. Foolishly, without thought, he had thrown on his trench coat; the forecast was for rain in the morning, heavy at times, tapering off toward noon. But ever since the Serial Slapper had appeared, a trench coat was bound to attract suspicious attention. True, Emerick’s hair was blond, and it wasn’t particularly short, though who knew what “short” meant, and besides, people were careless. He slipped off his trench coat, draped it over his arm, and stepped out of the car. That was worse; the coat, on this chilly morning, drew attention to itself, as if he were trying to conceal it in some way, as in fact he was trying to do. He glanced around, folded the coat into a squarish lump, and placed it quickly under his arm. Worse still: he was ruining the coat, and it was no less conspicuous. The sky was darker than before; rain was definitely on its way. Emerick opened the door, popped the trunk, and walked to the back of the car. He shook out his trench coat, folded it twice, and laid it in the trunk on top of two eco-friendly reusable grocery bags decorated with fields of yellow wildflowers. He closed the trunk, pressed the lock button on his key, and set off toward the station as the first drops began to fall.

RAYMOND SORENSEN. That afternoon, a little before one o’clock, Ray Sorensen, a cable repairman at the end of his lunch break, walked out of the Birchwood Avenue branch of the First Puritan Savings Bank, where he had deposited his paycheck and withdrawn eighty dollars from the ATM. The money would get him through the next couple of days, with a lottery ticket thrown in. The Sunday landscaping gig ought to see him through the rest of the week, though he was a month late on his car payment and he might have to cash out his savings account to pay down his credit-card debt. The sky was overcast, a fifty-fifty chance of rain; he had to drive out of town and check a power line at a property up by the lake. As he walked toward his truck, a man stepped from the row of high bushes that grew on the concrete divider, walked between two parked cars, and turned toward the bank. As he drew near Sorensen, he swerved toward him and began to raise an arm. Only then did Sorensen remember the article he had glanced at in the paper that morning. He’d been amused; it had nothing to do with him. The slap was so sudden and so strong that for a moment he didn’t understand what had happened. By the time he shouted “What the fuck!” the man in the trench coat was already walking away. Sorensen started running after him. The man stepped onto the divider and disappeared behind a high bush. Later Sorensen told the police that the stranger just seemed to vanish into thin air — though maybe he’d had time to cross to the other side of the lot and climb the fence separating the bank from the house behind it. Sorensen searched behind every bush on the divider. He walked up and down the lot, circled the bank, then returned to his truck and drove out to his job. Only when he arrived home at 5:45 did he read the paper again. He thought it over and phoned the police.

AT THE RAILROAD STATION. At the moment when Raymond Sorensen noticed a man stepping from behind the bushes on the divider outside the First Puritan Savings Bank, a patrol car was cruising slowly through the lanes of the railroad station parking lot. A few hours later a second policeman appeared on the station platform, where he walked up and down and looked out over the rows of parked cars stretching away. At 5:00, on the street overpass that looked down at the tracks, the gantries, the brick station, the taxis by the curb, and the parking lot that ran along the length of the tracks for several blocks, a third policeman stood leaning his elbows on the cast-iron railing as he surveyed the movement below. The sky was clearing. Men and women walked swiftly to their cars, looking about carefully; many of them stayed in groups, which became smaller as they came to each vehicle in turn. At 6:00 the security lights came on, an hour earlier than usual. Under the pale sky and glowing lights, the roofs and hoods of cars looked glazed, like candy. The last train arrived at 2:57 a.m. A half-moon hung in the dark blue sky, like another security light.

NEXT MORNING. We read about the attack on Raymond Sorensen the next morning in the Daily Observer. We were alarmed that it had taken place in broad daylight, far from the railroad station. Even more disturbing was the violation of a second pattern: this time the victim wasn’t a businessman returning from his high-paying job in the city but a uniformed worker on his lunch break in town. We realized that we’d taken a kind of comfort in thinking of the attacks as confined to the station parking lot after sunset, when commuters in expensive suits were coming home for dinner; suddenly our anger, our anxiety, which had been confined to narrow bounds, burst free with a rush of energy. Where would the stranger strike next? The attack outside the bank seemed to strengthen the argument of those who believed the assaults were random. Others claimed that the opposite was clearly the case: the attacker liked to stage his event in parking lots. Those who had insisted that the assailant was seeking out suit-and-tie commuters as a form of social protest were forced to abandon or modify their argument, while those who had suggested that the attacker knew his victims saw no reason to abandon their explanation. New opinions had it that the stranger’s real interest lay in disrupting order, in spreading fear, in taunting the police.

THE COAT. The coat raised a number of questions that none of us could answer. If, during the attack on Robert Sutliff and Charles Kraus, the man had been wearing steel-toe work boots, jeans, and an open-necked plaid flannel shirt over a T-shirt, then we might have subscribed to the theory of protest: the attacker, a blue-collar worker, bore a grudge against the white-collar element of our town. Since, however, the man was wearing a fashionable coat, with the belt looped in front, and was therefore dressed like a successful businessman who might easily have lived in our town and ridden our train, the theory of social or class protest was unacceptable — unless, of course, the stranger had deliberately adopted a costume that wouldn’t draw attention to itself in the station parking lot. The third attack — we hadn’t yet learned about Walter Lasher — complicated our already complicated sense of things. A man dressed like a businessman had attacked a cable repairman in work clothes. What could it mean? Perhaps, we thought, the stranger had lost his job; simmering with rage, he was taking out his frustration on anyone still fortunate enough to have work. It was also possible that the coat had nothing at all to do with the man and what he was after, and that we were guilty of reading into a piece of clothing a significance that was meaningless.

IN THE HARDWARE STORE. On Saturday afternoon, six hours after the Daily Observer reported the attack on Raymond Sorensen, Walter Lasher stood in the hardware store, examining a row of light-switch plates. As he began weighing the virtues of old-fashioned brass switch plates against a display of new steel plates in bright colors, Joan Summers, who lived three houses away from him, passed the aisle on her way to weather stripping and noticed him standing there. Joan Summers hesitated. He seemed so intent on his switch plates that she felt reluctant to disturb him, even with a greeting; at the same time, now that she had paused, she felt it would be rude to ignore him, especially if he’d happened to see her out of the corner of his eye. Instead, therefore, of entering the aisle, Joan stood at the end and called down: “Oh, hello there.” What happened next surprised her. Walter Lasher glanced abruptly, as if furtively, in her direction, gave a quick nod, and turned back to his switch plates. They were not close friends, but they had been neighbors for many years and had always had pleasant exchanges. Joan Summers marched off toward the aisle of weather stripping, which she needed for the downstairs bathroom window. His behavior verged on rudeness but had not seemed rude, exactly: it had seemed peculiar. Walter Lasher was not a peculiar man. Joan Summers shook it out of her mind but was careful not to go to the cash register until she was absolutely certain that Lasher had left the store.

A RIPPLE OF DISAPPOINTMENT. As the weekend passed without incident, we wondered whether the man had been frightened away by the police presence, or whether he was lying low, waiting for another chance. It was also possible that he had settled his score, whatever it was, that he had done what he’d come to do and had left our town forever. Our sense of relief was accompanied by a ripple of disappointment. For though we were happy to be rid of him, if in fact we were rid of him, we were annoyed at our failure to catch him and troubled by our inability to understand anything whatever about who he was or what he was trying to do. Many of us, while openly expressing pleasure at his disappearance, secretly admitted that we would have been happier if something worse had happened in our town, even much worse, so long as it was something we were able to understand, like murder.

VICTIM. Even as we were growing accustomed to the word “victim” in relation to these incidents, we began to ask ourselves to what extent the word corresponded to our sense of what had actually taken place. No one doubted that something impermissible, even outrageous, had been done to all three men, but it was also true that the attacks had been carefully limited: no robbery had been committed, the stranger had inflicted no physical damage, and he had immediately walked away. Our town, it should be said, is a very safe place in which to live. We take pride in our safety and have no tolerance for crime. Nevertheless, we’re part of the world and are not spared our share of serious trouble: child molestation, felony assault, rape, even two murders in the last seven years. The crime represented by a slap in the face is at most a Class A misdemeanor. To speak of a “victim” might therefore seem to exaggerate the consequences of a deed that, for all its unpleasantness, amounts to very little in the scheme of things. Even so, it seemed to most of us that the suddenness of the attack, the strength of the slap, the apparent randomness, the anger and helplessness induced in the person receiving the slap, all suggested that those who were slapped were indeed victims, though of a strange variety that kept eluding our understanding.

A MULTITUDE OF SLAPS. Although we had read about the three slaps — the ones delivered to the faces of Robert Sutliff, Charles Kraus, and Raymond Sorensen — we knew that the total number of slaps was far greater than those reported in the paper. The three slaps were the visible slaps, the public slaps, the ones that entered the police record and the pages of the Daily Observer. But alongside those slaps there existed a multitude of invisible slaps, of subterranean slaps, which took place solely in our minds. The other slaps struck, over and over again, the faces of Robert Sutliff, Charles Kraus, and Raymond Sorensen, and they struck our own faces as well. We imagined the hand rising, the arm swinging, the palm striking the flesh of a cheek. We heard the peculiar sound of a slap, the crisp soft-hardness of it, like that of a whip. We thought of wood snapping, of ice cracking. We thought of TV footage of distant wars, the sharp clap of gunfire in the night. As we walked along the aisles of a clothing shop in the mall, as we sat at a booth in a coffee shop in town, we heard a rustling of slaps all about us. In our beds at night we heard them, obscured by the passing cars, a distant radio, the roll of trucks on the thruway: the other slaps of our town, a whole chorus of them, rising up out of the quiet like fire crackling in the dark.

SHARON HANDS. On Monday afternoon, as police cars were pulling in and out of parking lots at banks, supermarkets, car dealerships, and medical buildings, Sharon Hands, a senior at Andrew Butler High, waved good-bye to Kelsey Donahue at the corner of Maple and Penrose and continued on her way home. Basketball practice had gone well, though she’d messed up two jump shots; tonight she had a meeting with the Thespians in the school auditorium, and she’d promised her mother that when she returned she’d help go through the pile of catalogues to find a cable-knit sweater for Aunt Debra, who was hard to please at the best of times but impossible on her birthday. There was never a minute left over in the day. She couldn’t help throwing herself into things, her boyfriend had complained about it more than once, but that was who she was, at least for now, though who knew what the future held. But she loved these long walks home, the only time in the whole day, it seemed, when she was by herself. Her legs felt strong, her body was bursting with energy, even after the long school day and the two-hour basketball practice, and as she cut through the little park on the other side of the thruway overpass she looked with pleasure at the row of three swings, the climbing structure with its towers and rope ladders and slides, the slatted bench with a maroon scarf thrown across the back. People thought they knew her, but they didn’t, not really. They thought all she liked was to be surrounded by friends, lots of friends, and though she loved her friends, every single one of them, even Jenny Treadwell with her endless problems and complaints, she also loved these solitary walks between school and home with her cell off, her book bag slung over her shoulder, her long hair bouncing on her back, her arms swinging, her tights showing off her legs, and why not, if you’ve got it flaunt it, and she had it, she knew she did, it was why she loved walking down the halls between classes, walking in town in her stretch tops and jeans, or on the beach in summer, in her pink string bikini, along the hard sand at the water’s edge, the heads turning, the friends waving, the gulls skimming the water, and as she left the park and started along Woods End Road she listened with pleasure to the knock of the heels of her cognac-colored boots against the shady sidewalk. On Woods End Road the houses were large and set well back from the street. High trees rose from the lawns, and shutters spread from the windows like wings. She walked under the branches of old sycamores, their trunks such a lovely green and cream that they made you want to reach out and stroke them, as if they were big soft animals. Oh, sometimes she had strange ideas, funny ideas she shared with no one. She glanced at her watch: she’d be home in five or six minutes, just enough time to text a few friends, call Molly about Friday night, and read a chapter of American Democracy before dinner. As she approached Meadowbrook Lane, a squirrel scampered across a telephone line, a boy raced down a driveway on a skateboard, and in front of her, on her left, a handsome man stepped out from behind a tree. She was used to the smiles of older men. He walked up to her, stopped, and slapped her across the face. The blow hurt; she felt her head bend to one side. She felt like bursting into tears, or screaming at the sky — just screaming. Sharon raised her hand to her cheek, as if to comfort it. No one had ever hit her before: ever. By the time she thought to shout out for help, the man was no longer anywhere to be seen.

DARING. Just as we thought we had come to grips with the attack in the bank parking lot, the incident on Woods End Road shook us to the core. We had accepted, uneasily, the leap from the station parking lot at dusk to the bank parking lot in full daylight, and we had begun to absorb the change from upper-income commuter to two-job worker. Now the rules had changed again: the new victim was female, the scene of the attack a quiet residential street. The stranger, we felt, was widening his range, deliberately and with a kind of artfulness. For wasn’t he announcing, by this latest move, that no one was safe anymore? Of course we condemned the attack on Sharon Hands as an act of cowardice, we were outraged by its unfairness. Still, some of us sensed in it something darker: an element of insolent daring. It was daring because it took place closer to our homes, as if the attacker were moving toward our doors and windows, and it was daring above all because the victim was no match for him in strength. It was as if he wanted us to know that he was no longer limiting himself to those who might be expected to defend themselves.

ANNA LASHER. As she tossed the salad in the cherrywood bowl on the kitchen counter, Anna Lasher realized that she was not looking forward to hearing her husband pull up in the drive. They’d had difficult patches before, but this silence, this refusal to let her know what was worrying him — well, Walter wasn’t the most forthcoming of men at the best of times. Under his public manner there had always been a secretiveness. None of that was new. What was new was the averted eyes, the moody staring off, the office anecdote told coldly, without a flicker of pleasure. After dinner he cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and retired to his study. She wondered whether this was it, the famous midlife meltdown: the craving for adventure, the affair with the blond secretary in the spike-heeled boots. She remembered a cartoon he had shown her a few months ago: he’d been tickled by the punch line, but she had noticed the violently jutting breasts of the dumb blonde sitting in the boss’s lap. She carried the bowl of salad into the dining room. On the wall was a painting of Walter’s mother, with two rows of pearls around her neck. Who had a painting like that in their dining room? She wondered suddenly whether she herself had brought all this on — she’d been tired lately, moody, a little short-tempered. As Anna walked into the kitchen she heard the car pull into the drive. She could feel muscles tightening all over her body, as if she were sensing danger.

HELPLESS. In an interview with a reporter from the Daily Observer, Sharon Hands spoke of her feeling of helplessness during the attack. “I felt like there was nothing I could do,” she said. “I was completely at his mercy.” She went on to say that she now knew what it must be like to be abused by a man, and that her heart went out to women everywhere. She said the stranger was a menace to society and urged everyone to cooperate fully with the police. She invited us to check out her brand-new blog; she looked forward to reading our comments. Beside the article appeared a color photograph of Sharon Hands: a pretty girl with straight blond hair, large brown eyes, and an easy smile. On her cheek was a ruddy glow that made us think of the slap. We were upset for many reasons by the attack on Sharon Hands, and we understood her feeling of terrible helplessness. At the same time we had the sense that the interview revealed a young woman who was confident, self-possessed, and not at all unhappy to have our attention.

ANALYSIS OF A SLAP. Those of us who were inclined to distance ourselves from the drama of particular instances, and to think about the slap as a phenomenon in itself, tended to see in it two opposite qualities. In one sense, it seemed to us, a slap is a form of withholding, of refusal: it presents itself as the deliberate absence of a more damaging blow. Its aim isn’t to break a bone or to draw blood, but to fall short of both. The physical evidence of the slap — a redness in the cheek — conveys its meaning perfectly: it is the sign of blood, without the blood. In the same way, the pain of a slap is a sign of the greater pain not inflicted. But looked at another way, the slap doesn’t merely withhold: the slap imparts. What it imparts is precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld. In that knowledge lies the genius of the slap, the deep humiliation it imposes. It invites the victim to accept a punishment that might have been worse — that will in fact be worse if the slap isn’t accepted. The slap requires in the victim an unwavering submission, an utter abnegation. The victim bends in spirit before a lord. In this sense the slap is internal. It is closer to a word than to a blow. The sting passes, the redness fades, but the wound lingers, invisible. Therein lies the deepest meaning of the slap: its real work takes place secretly, out of sight, on the inside.

VALERIE KOZLOWSKI. Two days later, at 9:05 in the evening, Valerie Kozlowski sat at her kitchen table, drinking a cup of mint tea and finishing the daily crossword puzzle she had begun at breakfast. She liked coming home at 7:00 to the mail and the partly filled-in crossword; clues that had seemed vague and elusive at breakfast sometimes became transparent after a nine-hour day at the store and an hour of closing up. She put in six days a week at Now You See It, the consignment shop she co-owned with her sister; in addition, there was the sideline of estate appraisals, which sometimes had her scurrying out at night or on Sundays. They needed to hire a girl to help out, but sales were flat and her sister wanted to wait. Her sister always wanted to wait. What they really needed was a major reorganization. The vintage dresses were crowded against the back wall, pedestal tables and vanities were covered with sugar bowls and snakeskin purses and ivory netsuke warriors and fishermen, the highboy in the corner was half concealed by a rack of furs, and the sale tables along the side walls were cluttered with china teapots, antique butter dishes, and lamps with scenic shades. Items needed to be displayed clearly, without crowding, though how you did that in the cramped space of the store was another question. It was a matter of making hard choices. The Shaker rocker and the set of four nesting tables up front could be moved to the back, making room for a rack of top-of-the-line coats and jackets, but try telling that to her sister. That was why she liked coming home to her puzzle. She could sink into it and distract herself before bed, while making use of the mental energy she always brought back with her, no matter how tired she was. And she was tired at the end of the day, bone-tired, no doubt about it, especially when her sister fell into that bossy tone. She hated that tone, as though Sophia were always thirteen to Valerie’s eleven. They were both pushing forty, and Sophia looked it. You could see the lines carved into her skin from her nose down to both sides of her mouth. Valerie’s own skin was smooth as a girl’s. Not that it did her any good. Valerie had come home in a bad mood. She’d eaten a dinner of warmed-up leftovers, gone through the mail, all worthless except for a ten-dollar coupon from a new kitchen supply store she’d been meaning to have a look at, and talked on the phone for god knows how long with her father, who complained that no one ever called even though she called every single night no matter how tired she was. Now she sat sipping her mint tea and working on her puzzle. At 9:15 she put the cup in the sink, picked up the folded newspaper, and pushed open the swinging door that led into the living room. That was where she liked to finish her puzzle, seated in the armchair with her feet up on the hassock. As she stepped into the room a figure came toward her and raised his hand, and in the instant before terror came rushing in she thought, very distinctly: It’s not fair, I’m a good person, it should have been her.

THE GOOD SISTER. It was all over town the next day: the attack on Valerie Kozlowski, the invasion of her home, the crossing of some final line. We imagined him staking out the house, waiting for nightfall, making his way along the side yard, climbing the back-porch steps. The police report indicated that he had slipped in through an unlocked window. We all knew what it meant: he was coming closer. All this was upsetting enough in itself. What made it worse was that many of us knew Valerie Kozlowski, had spent time in her store. She was the one known as the Good Sister, the one you felt easy speaking to when you asked about a Chinese vase or an old record player from the 1950s. She had a good heart, you could see that. Why would anyone want to hurt her? But as soon as we began asking ourselves such questions, we understood that until this moment we had held out a kind of secret hope. With the others, there might have been some excuse, something we didn’t know, which might have explained the attacks. Maybe each one of them, even Sharon Hands, had done something that deserved punishment. But the attack on the Good Sister was a simple outrage that couldn’t be explained away. It was as if we’d been living with an illusion, and the attack on the Good Sister had been directed not at her but at us, at our illusion. We’d been hoping for an explanation, an easy way out — but wasn’t he warning us against sentimentality? If so, it had worked. We hated him. We wanted him dead.

ANOTHER VIEW OF THE COAT. Valerie Kozlowski’s description of the attacker made it clear that he was the same man, wearing the same coat. In fact it was so clear that we began to wonder why he never tried to change his appearance. Was it that he wanted us to recognize him as the one who slapped us? If, at first, he had chosen a trench coat in order to blend in with the commuters at the train station, by now the coat served the opposite purpose: it was the very symbol of danger, the sign that leaped out at us so vividly that trench coats had virtually disappeared from our town. It was, we thought, part of his daring. He was eluding the police, he was entering our homes, adorned in the very costume that allowed him the least chance of escaping detection. Out of this thought a question arose: Why this sign, rather than another? He might have chosen a windbreaker and ski mask, he might have chosen anything. The trench coat was a sign of the suburban commuter. By extension it was the sign of our town. Was he trying to say that he was one of us? Or was he not one of us, but someone who had adopted the coat contemptuously, in a spirit of parody?

WE WHO WERE NOT SLAPPED. We of course felt sympathy for those who had been slapped. It was impossible not to imagine the moment: the stranger emerging from nowhere, the flare of danger, the hand raised to strike a blow. We wondered how they must have felt, those unlucky ones, as the sound rang out, as the stranger walked away. We wondered what we ourselves would have done, as he stepped up to us with his angry eyes. We understood that our compassion for the victims had in it a touch of superiority, of condescension, which the fortunate are bound to feel for the less fortunate, and we tried not to feel too great a pleasure in having escaped their fate. We understood one other thing. Even though we were pleased to have been spared, even though we were the ones to whom nothing ugly had happened, still we wondered, at times, whether they were more fortunate than we. After all, their ordeal was over, they had been tested, they had nothing more to fear, whereas we, the innocent ones, we, the unslapped, walked in a world crackling with danger. It was as if they knew something that we didn’t know. At times we even envied them a little.

WALTER LASHER AND THE FOOTSTEPS. Walter Lasher walked along the station platform, carrying his laptop in one hand and a New York Times folded under the other arm. It was nearly dark; he had worked late. Once again he’d drifted off at his desk in the afternoon, not a nap thank god, but close to it, sitting there with half-closed eyes and drumming temples. There was still a good crowd at this hour, though he sensed a nervous watchfulness as they approached the stairs leading down to the lot. It was lit up now by those orange lights that made everything look like a stage set awaiting the actors. He himself had no anxiety, only a dull, heavy irritation as he entered the lot and began walking toward Section B. The police were hopeless, not a clue in all this time. The town was no longer what it used to be. When he’d first moved here from the city, it still had the feeling of a small old-fashioned place tucked away at the end of the commuter line. Now you had upscale retailers fighting for prime locations, the old drugstore gone, the news store gone, corporate headquarters springing up, teardowns replaced by monster houses built out to the property line. Asians moving into the newer neighborhoods, all professionals, all very classy, even a touch of India, that woman coming out of the wine shop in a rose-colored sari carrying herself like a foreign queen. The stranger in the coat was part of it somehow, as if he’d been swept in along with everything else. It was all nonsense, he wasn’t thinking straight. As Lasher walked toward his car, three rows away, he heard footsteps not far behind him. It wasn’t unusual, in the station parking lot, at this hour, to hear footsteps not far behind you, but these were not usual times. Lasher felt a tension rippling through his upper back. The footsteps drew closer. As if he were moving a heavy weight, he turned his head slowly. He saw a man in a long coat coming swiftly toward him. Lasher turned his body around. He stepped forward and swung his open hand violently against the man’s face. As his palm cracked against flesh, knocking the face to one side and throwing the body back against a car, he felt deeply soothed, as if he had sunk down into a warm bath after a long hard day. A moment later he saw that the coat was a double-breasted wool coat, dark, no belt, the face different, older. He understood that it was all part of a necessary pattern, and a tiredness came over him, even as he took a step forward and began talking very fast.

SILENCE. When we read in the Daily Observer about the assault in the station parking lot, where both men were quickly arrested, when we learned that Walter Lasher had himself been slapped but had not come forward, we didn’t know whether we were more disturbed by his attack on Dr. Daniel Ettlinger, who was returning from a visit to his sister in Mamaroneck, or by the long concealment of information that might have been useful to the police. Had Walter Lasher gone immediately to the police, the man in the trench coat might have been apprehended, or at least prevented by police surveillance and public awareness from pursuing his series of attacks. It was true enough that Robert Sutliff’s swift response had not stopped the stranger in any way, and in fact, when we thought more carefully about it, we didn’t believe for one second that a report by Walter Lasher would have changed the course of events. Nevertheless, his silence troubled us, in a way we found difficult to define. Was it that, by his silence, he was acknowledging what many of us felt to be the dark truth of the attacks, namely, that they were a humiliation too deep to bear? We tried to imagine Walter Lasher carrying his secret with him, day after day, while police cars patrolled the streets of every neighborhood, and citizen watch committees reported the presence of any stranger, and daily editorials urged that more safety measures be taken by town authorities. We thought of Walter Lasher riding the train home from work, with his secret squatting in his chest. We imagined the secret as a small, hairy animal with sharp teeth. We wondered what it felt like, to be slapped in the face, hard, and to say nothing about it. We wondered what thoughts passed through Walter Lasher’s mind, night after night, as he lay in bed, feeling his secret biting inside him.

INEVITABLE. We now lived in anticipation of the next attack, which felt inevitable. Parents drove their children to school and walked with them from the street or parking lot into the building; when the school bell rang at the end of the last class, parents were waiting grimly outside the front door. Members of neighborhood watch groups walked up and down sidewalks, displaying the yellow-and-black armbands that had become the sign of our vigilance. Police cars roamed the streets, stopping from time to time to ask us if we had noticed anything unusual, anything at all. People were urged to keep their doors and windows locked, to stay home after dark, to travel in groups whenever possible, to keep outdoor and indoor lights on throughout the night, to be watchful at all times, to report any suspicious behavior immediately. Whether our measures were effective, or whether the man was simply biding his time, we had no way of knowing, but the days passed without incident. We tried to anticipate his next step, which we imagined as a deeper violation: perhaps the invasion of a bedroom, late at night, where he would slap us in our sleep. We would wake up and see him staring down at us with his angry eyes. Or maybe, now that he’d struck a high school girl and a woman who lived alone, he would seek out a child. He would find a little girl playing alone in her yard. He would raise his hand high in the air, he would hit her so hard in the face that she’d be hurled to the ground. We ate breakfast tensely, in town we walked briskly, we turned our heads at the slightest sound.

POCKETS. It was understood that to wear a trench coat, in the present atmosphere, was foolish and even dangerous. Anyone seen in such a coat was bound to arouse suspicion. And so they hung there, the abandoned trench coats of our town, on coat racks standing by the front door, or on hangers suspended from horizontal poles in hall closets: lacquered wooden hangers with polished-steel swivel hooks, thin metal hangers, hangers of heavy-duty chrome. They hung between fleece jackets, nylon windbreakers, quilted coats with faux-fur collars, wool sweaters, leather bomber jackets, peacoats, hooded parkas, corduroy blazers. There they hung, almost but not quite forgotten. Sometimes when we thought of the abandoned trench coats, we were inspired to strange fantasies. We imagined that the trench coats had the power to leave our closets and to roam our streets at night. We saw them drifting through town like restless and unhappy ghosts. In certain moods, we imagined them swept up by a great wind. They rise swirling into the air, the abandoned trench coats of our town, and as they turn round and round, their arms wave, their tails flap, and their pockets spill, releasing, high over the night roofs, high over the dark beach with its forsaken lifeguard stands, high over the stoplights of Main Street, a great shower of quarters and dimes, half-opened rolls of cough drops, lunch receipts, house keys on flashlight chains, sticks of chewing gum, folded train schedules, small bags of cashews, halves of cider doughnuts in waxed paper, subway cards, sunglass cases, energy bars, telephone numbers on pieces of scrap paper.

MATTHEW DENNIS. Matthew Dennis, twenty-five years old, a reporter for the Daily Observer who had been assigned to cover the attacks after Charles Kraus had phoned the police, swung out of his seat as the train pulled into the station. He had spent the afternoon in Manhattan and was returning at the height of rush hour. It was all his boss’s idea: ride the train into the city with the morning crowd, listen to the talk, get a feeling for the mood. Ride the train back, keep your ears open, give us the word on the train, the word out in the lot. Circulation was way up, everyone was following the story. Matthew had been against the whole scheme. Better to make the rounds of the neighborhoods, interview upper-management types on Sascatuck Hill, talk to the guys in the gas station next to Sal’s Pizza, but who was he to turn down a free trip to the city, and besides, he’d had some good conversations down and back and had typed up most of them on his laptop. Everybody had a theory: the man would next strike at midnight, the man was an ex-cop, the man was seeking attention for a reality show. In Matthew’s view the attacker was following a pattern, but one that was difficult to pin down. He’d begun with four men, then turned to women; he’d begun in the station parking lot, then changed to a parking lot in town, to a residential street, to a living room at night. It appeared that what he liked to do was raise an expectation and suddenly swerve away — he liked taking the town by surprise. Matthew walked along the platform, exchanging a few words with Charlie Kraus. Then he stood by the steps for a while, looking down at the lot: the lights were on, though the sky was still dusk-blue. People walked in careful groups, looking around, making sure. A man came up to him and asked for a light. Matthew had stopped smoking a year ago. The man was in his mid-thirties, sharp-featured, a solid build; except for the zippered jacket, he could have been the stranger. A woman laughed: a high, nervous laugh, like a laugh rehearsed for a play. “My husband picks me up,” he heard someone say. “I don’t park here anymore.” Matthew walked down the steps. In the morning he’d first parked near the station, then changed his mind and chosen a spot farther away. He needed to walk with the crowd, listen to what people were saying, study their faces. His job on the paper was strictly temporary, until something better came along, or until he could get going on a book, but he liked it well enough, it might lead to something, you never could tell. He turned quickly when he heard what sounded like a half-stifled cry. It was only a girl who had stumbled in her heels and was clinging to her boyfriend’s arm. Everyone was thinking about the stranger, looking around. Matthew had his own theory, which he sometimes believed: that everyone had a secret, a shameful thing they had done, and the reason they feared the stranger was that he made them remember that thing. He himself, for example, had done some things in college he’d rather forget. He stepped up to his car, bent over to glance through the window — one of his ideas was that the stranger concealed himself in parked cars, which he knew how to open — and placed his key in the door. He heard a step, a single crunch of gravel, and turned with a feeling of excitement and intense curiosity. The man in the trench coat had already raised a hand, and as the palm cracked against his cheek with a force that brought tears to his eyes, Matthew was aware of the look of stern anger in the stranger’s eyes, as if he were delivering a judgment.

HIGHLY INTELLIGENT. We read about that judgment in next morning’s Daily Observer, where Matthew Dennis recounted in detail his simulated commute, the overheard conversations, his thoughts on the station platform, his observations of crowd behavior, his walk to the car, the details of the attack. He did more than report the incident: he said that the stranger’s return to the station parking lot was evidence of a highly intelligent plan. The attacker had led us to believe that he was intent on entering our homes, on striking our most defenseless citizens, on violating our deepest privacies. As we prepared for the next attack, as our police force and our watch committees gave their full attention to our streets and houses, he returned boldly to the original scene, which he had seemed to abandon. Not only, by this maneuver, had he eluded detection; he had also made us rethink the meaning of the attacks. Far from spreading random terror, the Slapper was making a point: his target was not particular people, but the town itself. In the attacker’s mind, our town was represented largely, but not entirely, by commuters; hence four out of seven incidents had taken place in the station parking lot. Had he wished to initiate a reign of random terror, he would have spread his attacks far more widely. Moreover, the seven victims were less different than one might suppose at first glance. Although it was impossible to condone the attacks on Sharon Hands and Valerie Kozlowski, it was important to remember that Sharon Hands, the daughter of a corporate lawyer, attended a well-funded and highly regarded public high school, a symbol of membership in the community, while Valerie Kozlowski wasn’t a minimum-wage worker with no health insurance and no benefits but the co-owner of a small business. He himself, Matthew Dennis, was a reporter for the local paper, which meant that he was part of the way the town presented itself to itself. The victim who seemed to fit in least was Ray Sorensen, but that was precisely the point: Sorensen was all the others who lived in our flourishing town, all those who occupied the lower ranks of the social scale and sometimes had to work a second job in order to buy groceries and pay the bills. It was the purpose of the attacks, Matthew Dennis said, to punish all those who were guilty, not just those at the top of the heap, and what the victims were guilty of was living in our town. The long article ended with the hope that we would think less about our safety and more about the reasons why we might be guilty for living in a town such as ours. He himself harbored no resentment and vowed to become a better person.

NOT GUILTY. Although the details of the attack on Matthew Dennis drew our fascinated attention, our reading of the article resulted, for the most part, in impatience and resentment. Matthew Dennis, we felt, had a twisted sympathy for his attacker; we distrusted his analysis of the man’s motives and, in rereading the article, we began to distrust certain details of the attack itself. Most of us would not have felt “intense curiosity” at the sight of an angry man in a parking lot at night, raising his hand to strike us in the face. We were baffled, we were exasperated, by Matthew Dennis’s lack of outrage. The same absence of anger was all too evident in his analysis, which seemed less sympathetic to us than to the man who had attacked our neighbors, disrupted our peace, and frightened our children. The next morning, angry letters appeared in the Daily Observer, denouncing Matthew Dennis and questioning the judgment of the editors in running the story. What particularly galled us was the suggestion that all of us might be guilty and deserving of punishment. After all, we were not members of some revolutionary gang who had raided an enemy town and committed rape and murder, we were not passive citizens turning our heads away as smoke rose from the concentration camp chimneys. No, we were peaceful, law-abiding inhabitants of a suburban town, trying to raise our kids in a difficult world, while keeping our lawns mowed and our roof gutters free of leaves. The man was a criminal and needed to be put away. The next morning, an editorial acknowledged the storm of protest and stated that the opinions of the article were not necessarily those of the Daily Observer. The more we thought about it, the more offended we were by Matthew Dennis’s report, so that we almost forgot, in our indignation, that the stranger had struck another blow.

WAITING. Again we waited, like people looking up at the sky for a storm. This time we sensed a difference. Now there was anger in our town — you could feel it like a wind. We were angry at the presence of danger in our streets, angry at the police department, angry at being put on the defensive by reporters whose job it was to give us the facts and keep their cracked ideas to themselves. You could feel a tension in public places, an uneasiness at the dinner table. On the streetcorner across from the post office in the center of town, a dozen people stood with signs that read KEEP OUR STREETS SAFE and MORE POLICE. A bearded man with a ponytail held a sign printed in large red letters: THE JUDGMENT IS COMING. Tempers were short. In the library parking lot, a fight broke out when one car backed into another. We went to bed early and lay there listening. Waking in the dark, we pushed aside the blinds and looked out our bedroom windows at houses glowing with light: the front porch lights, the living room lights, floodlights over garage doors, lanterns on lawns — as if our town were having a party all through the night.

DIVINE PUNISHMENT. One of the more bizarre developments of the lull was the emergence of certain shrill, fanatical voices, which saw the stranger as a messenger of the divine will. A letter in the opinions section of the Daily Observer, signed Beverly Olshan, stated that our town was being punished for its sins. We became aware of small groups, which perhaps had always been there, with names like Daughters of Jericho and Prophets of the Heavenly Host; members of the latter proclaimed that the stranger had been sent by the Lord to warn us of his wrath unless we mended our ways. Even those of us who dismissed such ideas as ignorant or childish could not escape the thought that the stranger was punishing us, like an angry father, for something we had done, or for something we had failed to do, or for something else, which we ought to have known but did not.

THE PACKAGE. Seven days after the attack on Matthew Dennis, a package addressed to the police department was deposited on the top step of the post office at some time between midnight and 5:00 a.m. At 5:00 a.m. a mail carrier starting his shift noticed it from his truck. Later that morning, post office officials met for a brief consultation and decided to summon the police. Rumors about the incident first appeared on Matthew Dennis’s new website, but we had to wait for the morning paper before we could read a definitive report. The package, wrapped in brown paper, bore no return address. The police determined that the suspicious-looking parcel posed no danger. Back at the department they carefully removed the brown paper and found a plain cardboard box, tied with white string. In the box lay a tan trench coat, neatly folded. No note had been enclosed. There was little doubt, though no proof, that it was the coat of the stranger. Apparel experts had been called in, lab tests were being conducted, a thorough investigation was under way. Meanwhile we wondered what the stranger wanted us to think. Was he announcing that his attacks had come to an end, or was he warning us that we should expect a new attack in a different disguise? For a week, for two weeks, we led anxious lives, alert to the minutest signs. Toward the end of the third week, as leaves turned yellow and red and the sun shone from a cold blue sky, we began to have the sense of a burden slowly lifting.

DISSATISFACTION. Although we could feel ourselves moving toward the normal course of our lives, with all the familiar pleasures and worries, at the same time we couldn’t escape a sense of incompletion. The proper ending, we felt, should have been the capture of the stranger, who would have given us the explanation we desperately needed to hear. We would have listened carefully, nodded our heads thoughtfully, and punished him to the full extent of the law. Then we would have forgotten him. Instead we’d been left with an improper ending, an ending heavy with uncertainties, which was to say, no ending at all. The police investigation had come to nothing. We asked ourselves whether the stranger had left because he found it impossible to continue his attacks without serious risk of being caught, or whether he’d left because he had completed a careful plan to attack seven people. Even if we had known the reason for his departure, we still wouldn’t have known why he had come in the first place. What had he wanted from us? What had we done? In certain respects, the end of the attacks was more disturbing than the attacks themselves, since the attacks held a continual promise of capture and revelation, whereas the end of the attacks was also an end of the hope that had always accompanied them. In this sense, the end of the attacks was simply another way of continuing them — a way that could not be stopped.

THE SEVEN WHO WERE SLAPPED. It was at this time, when we were returning uneasily to our former sense of things, that meetings began to spring up all over town, for the purpose of discussing and analyzing recent events. There were large public meetings at the town hall and in the auditorium of one of our two high schools, gatherings at businessmen’s associations and fraternal organizations, at the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, at the Ethical Culture Society and the Jewish Community Center, at the First Congregational Church and the Church of the Immaculate Conception, to say nothing of private get-togethers in living rooms, dens, and finished basements. Often, at these meetings, one of the seven who were slapped appeared as a special guest, with the exception of Walter Lasher, who never accepted such invitations or even acknowledged them. The guest spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes and then answered questions from the audience. What did it feel like when the stranger appeared? How much did the slap hurt? Did you fear he might kill you? What was he trying to prove? Even Valerie Kozlowski, once she overcame her reticence, took to the podium with surprising vigor. The most popular speakers proved to be Sharon Hands, whose long blond hair came sweeping down over her shoulders and lay against silky blouses of cerise, emerald, and brilliant white, and the controversial Matthew Dennis, who wore an old sport coat, a black shirt open at the neck, jeans without a belt, and white running shoes, and who liked to walk back and forth in front of us, punctuating his remarks with slashing movements of his hands and turning suddenly to face the audience. Now and then a speaker appeared even at one of the fringe groups, such as Prophets of the Heavenly Host, that had begun to attract a wider membership and now held public meetings in rented halls. As we sat in the audience and watched a speaker, we sometimes experienced an odd kind of envy, as if, by not being slapped, we had failed to be part of a profound moment, had somehow, by our caution, evaded a call to adventure. At the same time we understood that we were already forgetting the precise feel of those troubled days, which were slipping away into history and taking on the warm, soft colors of a sentimental rural painting (“Red Barn and Clouds,” “Morning Sleigh Ride”) suitable for the walls of banks, hospital waiting rooms, and the lobbies of office buildings.

BLOSSOMING. One morning at the station parking lot, as if by secret agreement, the trench coats returned. Tan, beige, and taupe, they emerged from car after car, like pale flowers blossoming in the early morning light. Richard Emerick had put on his trench coat in the front hall, but he had paused, thought hard, and then removed it, choosing instead the black wool coat with lambskin-trim collar that he usually saved for later in the year. As he stepped from his car in the parking lot he immediately saw his mistake. In his fingers he could feel the pressure of the belt-ends as he looped them over in front. The forecast for tomorrow was light rain in the early morning. He would be ready for it.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE. As the slaps began to recede, as even their echo in our minds was becoming fainter and fainter, we wondered whether we had emerged successfully from our ordeal. To call it an ordeal was of course something of an exaggeration. After all, we hadn’t been murdered. We hadn’t been raped, or beaten, or stabbed, or robbed. We had only been slapped. Even so, we had been invaded, had we not, we had felt threatened in our streets and homes, we had been violated in some definite though enigmatic way. Therefore, when the attacks appeared to be over, we felt that we had emerged from an ordeal, though we were still uncertain how we felt. Sometimes it seemed to us that the stranger with his angry eyes had known something about us that we ourselves did not know. Sometimes we wondered whether he was right about us, even though we did not know what it was that he was right about. More often we dismissed such thoughts and reproached ourselves for our failure to catch him, our failure to prevent him from repeatedly attacking us. At about this time an editorial appeared in the Daily Observer. Signed THE EDITORS, the article discussed the episode of the stranger and concluded by saying that it was over now and that we ought to “learn from it and move on.” The editors did not tell us what we might learn, unless it was that we needed a larger police force in our town, nor did they tell us in which direction we should think of moving. Therefore our sense of relief, when the attacks appeared to have ended, was also a sense of unrelief; our feeling of success was also a feeling of failure. Now, that is not the way things are, in our town. Here, success is success, failure failure. There is no confusion between the two. Success that is also failure is nothing at all. We don’t know how to take hold of it. And so we wonder: What have we learned from it all? We know only that something has happened in our town that can never unhappen. On a fine spring day, when all this is far behind us, we may be walking down a street, under branches of budding maples and lindens. On the porches, reflections of porch posts and tree branches show in the glass front doors, which haven’t yet been changed to screens. The thought comes: He could be standing behind that tree. Then we look more carefully at the root rippling toward the sidewalk, at the place where the bark-edge stands clear against the background of grass, street, and distant houses, and where, at any moment, a shoulder might emerge, an arm rise, a hand swing violently toward our faces, as we walk along, under the budding branches, with their yellow-green flowers against the blue sky.

Tales of Darkness and the Unknown, Vol. XIV: The White Glove

In senior year of high school I became friends with Emily Hohn. It happened quickly: one day she was that quiet girl in English class, the next we were friends. She had passed in and out of my attention over the last year or so, and it was as if I suddenly turned my head in her direction. I liked her calmness, her unruffled sense of herself, her way of standing as if she could feel the ground under her feet. As for me, I was a floater, a cloud-man, tense, jittery, cat-wary, all nerves and bone, and I’d spent the last year so desperately in love with another girl, so whipped-up and feverish, that even my happiness had felt like unhappiness. Emily Hohn’s quietness drew me in as if it had been waiting for me all along. It wasn’t only her calmness that attracted me. That would be unfair. I liked looking at her — at her thickish brownish shortish hair shot through with lighter strands that caught the sun, her small neat hands with close-cut nails, her round wrists, one of which had a pale chicken-pox scar, her slightly lowered eyelids that made her look a little sleepy, her slow smile. She reminded me of things I liked: streetlights at night, a peaceful room. I liked her clothes — the trim fresh-smelling pastel shirts, the knee-length skirts in black or dark green wool, the cardigans worn open with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms, the broad leather belts, dark red or black, with big square buckles that made me think of picture frames. I liked watching her crinkle her eyebrows when she tried to figure something out. I liked the way she sometimes reached over and scratched the back of her left hand with two fingers of her right. Most of all, I liked that she didn’t stir me up — didn’t move her body a certain way. I was sick to death of all that. I wanted something I could count on. I was grateful for stillness.

I walked her home from school one day, a warm October afternoon that felt like summer. Under branches of sugar maple and red maple we walked through flickers of sun and shade — here and there, in the still air, a yellow-red leaf came drifting down. I carried my books against my hip and my autumn jacket slung over one shoulder. Emily had tied her burnt-orange sweater around her waist, like a backward apron, and she carried her blue pebbly three-ring binder and her crisply covered schoolbooks in an upward-tilted pile against her white blouse. Speckles of sunlight danced on her as she walked, as if bits of light were being tossed at her through the leaves.

She lived in an older neighborhood, on a street where the houses had wide front porches, and tree roots pushed up chunks of sidewalk. On her porch sat a glider with faded flowery pink cushions, beside a green wicker table that held a glass of lemonade. A rake stood up against a window shutter; a bicycle leaned against a cushioned wicker chair. Everything about the house pleased me — the tarnished brass knocker on the gray front door, the living room with its dark blue couch and its deep armchair next to a pair of old moccasins, the scent of furniture polish mixed with a bready sweetish smell of baking, the sunny yellow kitchen with its bright porcelain rooster on the windowsill. On top of the refrigerator sat a cookie jar shaped like a bear hugging his belly. Emily’s mother was standing at the sink, washing a big breadboard sticky with dough. Over a flowered dress she wore an apron decorated with richly red apples, each with two green leaves. She turned and began wiping her hands briskly on the apples. “Oh my, I can’t shake your hand or I’ll — Emmy, take the young man’s jacket, why don’t you. I’m Emily’s mother, and you must be — Will. Well, Will. Would you like a soda? A piece of raspberry pie?”

I spent that afternoon creaking in the glider in the warm shade of the front porch, sipping root beer and eating raspberry pie. Emily sat next to me with an open French grammar facedown on her lap, pushing with one leg to keep us gliding — into the sun and back into shade, into the sun and back into shade. From time to time her mother opened the front door and asked if I’d like another piece of pie or a brownie with walnuts or an oatmeal cookie. Some girls were jumping rope across the street; farther off came the quick clean sharp bursts of a basketball against driveway tar. At the same time I heard the scratch of a rake pulling over leaves. I could feel myself settling into those sounds as into my own childhood — and the warmth, the slap of the rope, the creak of the glider, the dripping sunny hands of Mrs. Hohn, the square porch posts, the dip of the telephone wires between poles, all seemed to me, as I half closed my eyes, to be part of Emily herself, as if she were flowing into the peacefulness of an October afternoon.

I began walking home with her every day, dragging my feet through unraked leaves that sounded to me like waves drawing back on a beach. As the weather grew colder we moved indoors — sometimes to the living room, where we sat on the dark blue couch beside the armchair, sometimes to the kitchen table, with its maplewood chairs that had floral-patterned cushions tied to the seats. After a while we’d go upstairs to Emily’s room, where I straddled the wooden desk-chair and faced Emily, who sat on the big bed with her back propped up against the headboard and her legs stretched out on the pink spread. I admired her desk, an old-fashioned one with pigeonholes and a writing surface that swung out on brass hinges. In one corner of the room sat a small bookcase no higher than my waist. It held a pale blue leather jewelry box, eight or nine books, a Ginny doll with one arm, and many boxes of puzzles. The small number of books surprised me, since I had two large bookcases in my room, a row of books on my dresser, and piles of books on the floor by my desk. But I quickly came to connect the absence of such things with Emily’s calmness, as if books and edginess belonged together. We talked, we laughed, we did homework — I at the desk, she on the bed. Sometimes, turning over my shoulder, I would simply look at her, as she sat reading calmly on the bed with her black flats on the floor and her ankles crossed, reaching now and then to scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.

At 4:00 there would be a knock on the half-open door and Mrs. Hohn would sweep in with a tray bearing glasses of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. At 5:30 I would hear Emily’s father opening the two front doors, the storm door and the wooden door, and ten minutes later he would drive me home. Mr. Hohn was a mild, balding man with large melancholy eyes and a rueful smile. He did something in insurance, collected plate blocks and first-day covers of every newly issued American stamp, and liked to ask me serious questions about whatever book I was reading. He said things like “Can you hand me that thingamajigger?” and “That’s for darn sure.” I felt so welcomed by the Hohn family, so bathed in their atmosphere, that when I entered my own house, with its bookcases and its polished dark piano with piles of yellow music books and its faint sweet odor of pipe tobacco, it was always with a slight shock of estrangement, before familiarity settled over me.

I kept planning to invite Emily to my house, but I never did. At my place, we would have done my kinds of things — I’d have shown her my books, and my records, and my twin-lens reflex, and my collection of labeled minerals from quarries all over Connecticut. I would have played the piano for her, a piece by Chopin or Debussy, and then, to show that I wasn’t stuck up, a boogie-woogie by Clarence Pine Top Smith. My parents would have welcomed her and made her feel at home. And as I imagined these things, all of which had happened many times before, a tiredness came over me, as if I were rehearsing for a play that I’d just finished performing in. It was as if, in my house, I could feel a continual soft pressure on me — emanating from the piano, from the reading chair in my room, from the mahogany bookcase in the front hall — to be the person I was, the one I felt I somehow had to be. What I liked about Emily’s house was that I didn’t have to be anything at all.

On weekends my father graded papers at home and let me have the car. When I asked about a curfew, he looked up from the armchair by the lamp table and said, “Your mother and I expect you home before the year is out.” Every Friday night I would drive over to Emily’s house, and every Saturday I would drive over in the late morning and stay past midnight. We did homework in Emily’s room; I helped Mr. Hohn rake leaves and clean the roof gutters; I sat in the kitchen peeling carrots and cutting the ends off string beans while Mrs. Hohn prepared the pot roast or the roast lamb. After dinner, Emily washed the dishes and I dried them with a thick dish towel decorated with little bluebirds. Then the four of us would play Scrabble at the dining room table, under a small brass chandelier with narrow bulbs shaped like flames. Mrs. Hohn liked to press her hand to her chest and say that, good gracious, with me around, who needed a dictionary, but she was a skillful and relentless player and usually won — the two of us always came in first or second, while Emily and her father trailed far behind. Something gentle and unaggressive in Mr. Hohn’s play, which reminded me of his melancholy eyes, seemed to invite defeat; but I was merciless. “I can’t believe these letters,” Mrs. Hohn would say, or “Em, don’t do that,” as Emily reached over to scratch the back of her hand. Mrs. Hohn liked to win; we inspired in each other a spirit of friendly fierce combat. At times, lashed to competitive fury by Mrs. Hohn, I glanced at Emily as she sat staring mildly at her tiles. For a moment her calmness baffled me, as if we were playing different games. Then the battle was over, with laughter and headshakes, and Mrs. Hohn served cookies and cider and apple crumb cake, while outside the winds of November rattled the dining room windows.

One Saturday afternoon when I was in the backyard helping Mr. Hohn repair a wood-framed storm window that we’d taken down and set against the house, he looked up and said, “Looks like we need a plane. Wait here and I’ll — or heck no, come on down.” He opened the sloping door, led me down six steps, and reached for a key hidden on the ledge above the red cellar door. In the deep basement he led me past the furnace and boiler to a shelf that held a ball-peen hammer, a spirit level, and a shiny black plane with a wooden knob. “Since we’re down here,” he said, and motioned me along with two quick curls of a forefinger. We came to a wall piled high with boxes; a tall metal cabinet with two doors stood in a corner. Mr. Hohn opened the metal doors. I saw a row of little dresses all hanging on small white plastic hangers. “Emmy’s,” he said. He took one out, on its hanger, and held it up for me — a little blue dress with a white collar. “Three years old.” He shrugged, rubbed the back of his neck, and hung up the dress. “We kept planning to give them away, but somehow—” He sighed. “Well!” he said, and closed the doors. Turning abruptly, he led me back up the steps into the backyard.

Meanwhile, in school, I waited for the day to end so that I could walk home with Emily. I liked to look over at her, in the classes we took together. Unlike me, always restless, always a little bored, Emily gazed at the teacher with full attention, or else bent her head over her notebook and wrote steadily. Sometimes she would give a subtle yawn, which revealed itself as a slight stiffening of her under-eye skin. Sometimes she would reach over and scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.

One day as I sat down in the cafeteria with my shepherd’s pie and my Devil Dog, I noticed that the back of Emily’s hand was a little red. “How’s your hand?” I asked. She immediately placed it on her lap. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s this dry heat.” She pointed to a hissing radiator.

On a dreary Monday morning shortly before Christmas break, when the sky was so gray and dark that the school windows glowed, as at a night dance, I arrived late at the lockers and rushed into homeroom seconds before the bell. Emily’s seat was empty. Her desk, without her, seemed to be drawing attention to itself, like a lamp without a shade. It struck me that she’d never been absent before — it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. All that day her absence pressed on me. She seemed, absent, more insistently present than when she was actually there. Under the fluorescent ceiling lights I had the sensation that she was visibly, luminously, missing. At my house I let myself in with my key. I dropped my books on the kitchen table, where they slowly began to topple, and dialed Emily’s number. Mrs. Hohn answered the phone as the books slid along the tabletop. Emily was fine, there was nothing to worry about. She had gone to the doctor for a checkup. She was resting now, she’d be back in school probably tomorrow. Could I think of a six-letter word for “enliven”?

When I entered homeroom the next morning, Emily was sitting at her desk. Her ankles were crossed under her chair. The yellow collar of her shirt lay neatly on her dark green sweater. On the back of her left hand was a small white square of gauze, taped on all four sides.

On the way to English she said, “He doesn’t want me to scratch it.” She gave a little shrug. “Some sort of skin thing. It’s embarrassing.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “No way. Absolutely not.”

During Christmas vacation I spent so much time at the Hohns’ that my mother started saying things like “We hardly see you anymore” and “I hope you aren’t wearing out your welcome over there.” Once she looked sharply at me and said, “Is everything all right, Will?” Every morning I took the long cold walk to Emily’s house; I returned only at night, driven by Mr. Hohn. Late one afternoon the sky turned dark and a heavy snow began to fall. I was invited to spend the night in the upstairs guest room, under a sky-blue quilt covered with pictures of gray cats and red balls of yarn. I wore a fresh-laundered pair of Mr. Hohn’s flannel pajamas, too wide and too short, striped white and dark blue. Emily, looking in on me, said, “You look — you look—” and gave a whoop of laughter, then covered her mouth with her hand. “Just let me know if you need anything,” Mrs. Hohn said, and closed the door.

I lay in bed, in the quiet house, under the thickly falling snow. A novel by Turgenev rested open and facedown on my stomach. On the dresser stood a little porcelain man playing a fiddle, a blue glass bird, and half a dozen tiny dolls seated on two wooden benches, facing a miniature teacher standing at a blackboard. Over the dresser hung a painting of a deer in a forest, drinking from a sunlit stream. When I turned out the lamp on the night table, I could sense, behind the drawn shades, the snow falling in slanting steady lines. I imagined the streetlights shining through the falling snow.

For a long time I lay awake and peaceful in the dark, listening to quiet bursts of warm air coming through the vent at the base of the wall and a faint creak of floorboards in the attic. When at last I went to a window and pulled aside the heavy stiff shade, with its strip of wood in the cloth above the shade pull, I was startled to see a clear night sky. In the light of streetlamps, a glowing snow lay over sidewalks and bushes. It covered the fire hydrant across the street, rose thick along tree branches, swept up to the top of a corner mailbox.

Late the next morning I sat in the warm yellow kitchen peeling potatoes onto a paper towel, while Mrs. Hohn reached into a chicken and pulled out glistening dark innards, like wet stones. Emily and her father were out doing errands. “You know,” I said, “I can’t help thinking about Emily’s hand. I was wondering—”

“There’s not a thing to worry about, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said. “It’s just a pesky rash. Be a dear and fetch me down that platter, the bone-china one with the windmills. I don’t know what those people were thinking, putting up shelves fit for a giant.”

School startled me. It was as if I’d forgotten all about it during that snowy vacation, composed, it seemed to me, of long evenings playing Scrabble with the Hohns under the flame-shaped bulbs and one brilliant blue afternoon in the backyard building two snowmen with Emily: one with a wide-rimmed red hat on its head and a paper rose stuck in its chest, the other with a pipe in its mouth and an empty can of Campbell’s tomato soup on its head. School was a clash of olive-green lockers, a scraping of many desks. Already I was looking forward to summer. I would be sitting near Emily in the warm shade of her backyard, in an aluminum chaise longue with six adjustable positions, reading a library book whose stamped card served as a bookmark, while beside me, on a round white wrought-iron table with an openwork top, a glass of homemade lemonade with a slice of lemon in it stood next to a plate of fresh-baked brownies with walnuts.

One morning toward the end of January I stepped into homeroom and saw that Emily wasn’t there. I could feel disappointment spreading in me like tiredness. And yet, at the very center of my disappointment, I was aware of a prickle of satisfaction — for hadn’t I known she was bound to be absent again? All that day I tried to savor her absence. It would, I told myself, make her presence all the more vivid and dramatic. The next morning, when I entered homeroom, I didn’t allow myself to look in the direction of her desk. Instead, I imagined Emily seated there in her dark green or burnt-orange sweater, with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms and the collar of her shirt lying on both sides of her neck. When, overcoming my reluctance, I turned to look at her, I was so shocked by the sight of her empty desk that I glanced down at my watch, as if to see how much time was left before she really wasn’t there.

At home I sat on the wooden steps between the kitchen and the back porch, with the telephone cord squeezed in the closed door, and called Emily. Mrs. Hohn answered. Emily was fine. She’d had to have a little work done on her hand; she was resting now. I wanted to know what kind of work. “Some minor surgery — nothing to worry about, Will. She came through with flying colors. I’m so proud of her. She’s resting now. She ought to be back to school in a couple of days. I’ll tell her you called. She’ll be so pleased.” Only in my room, as I sat bent over my typewriter on its rattly metal table next to my desk, did I understand what I’d wanted to say to Mrs. Hohn. Why didn’t you tell me? Why? In my mind I shouted into the telephone. Anger burned in me like fever.

She was absent the next day, and the next. I called each afternoon; always Mrs. Hohn assured me that Emily was resting. The medication had left her feeling a little woozy, Dr. Morrison had said it might have that effect, she’d be up and about in no time. The next day Emily was absent again. At home I sat on the wooden steps, on the cold porch, with the phone in my lap, and did not call. I understood that Mrs. Hohn would tell me nothing — that my questions disturbed her. I called my friend Danny and invited him over for a game of chess.

The next day she wasn’t at her locker. I was unsurprised — so deeply unsurprised that I felt no disappointment — and as I entered homeroom I glanced wearily in the direction of her desk, which when it was empty always stood out sharply, like a chair in an old View-Master reel. Emily was sitting quietly there. I’d been so certain of the empty desk that for a moment I became uneasy, as if I were in one of those TV dramas where you open a familiar door and enter another world.

She was sitting very still. Her books rested in two neat piles on the rack under her chair, and her forearms lay on the blond writing surface. She was wearing a pleated tan skirt and a dark red wool pullover with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. On her left hand she wore a white glove. The glove was tight at the wrist and then flared out a little. Her gloved hand lay motionless, the fingers curved and slightly spread, facing down. She sat upright and stared straight ahead. The whiteness of the glove, the stillness of her arms, the slight tension I could see in her neck, all this made me think that it must be another girl, who was wearing Emily’s clothes and taking her place in class, so that the other Emily, the one who didn’t wear a white glove, could continue to lead her life elsewhere, for reasons she would later explain to me.

I sat down and looked over at her. She sat to my right and two seats up. She did not glance over to me. Her hair, thick with complicated small waves, concealed most of her face, except for her small rounded chin and the sharpish tip of her nose. I wondered who she was, this statue-girl with her one white glove. I glanced at the clock. I looked down at my own left hand, which had assumed the position of the gloved hand, and glanced back at her. She had turned her head in my direction and was giving me one of her slow smiles — and I felt so filled with gratitude that it was as if I had wronged her and been forgiven.

In the hall I nodded casually toward the glove. “So what’s that all about?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just some minor surgery. No big deal. He wants me to keep it covered.” She shrugged her right shoulder. “Nothing to worry about.”

I waited for her to say more, as though she’d stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“Then I won’t worry about it,” I said, and in my mind I heard my father saying: “Case closed.”

Emily said nothing. I shrugged and said, “Case closed.”

And as I walked home with her that day, wearing thick blue gloves of my own, I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t worry about it when I stepped into the warm yellow kitchen and greeted Mrs. Hohn, who smiled radiantly at me and said, “Welcome back, Will — this place hasn’t been the same without you.” I was back from exile, back in the peaceful place, after Emily’s minor surgery that was already a thing of the past, though recent enough to require a protective covering; there was probably a bandage of some sort underneath, which would have attracted its own kind of unwelcome attention; already the white glove seemed less strange, like a new hairdo that took a bit of getting used to.

Upstairs in Emily’s room I straddled the wooden desk-chair, with my forearms resting on the back, while she lay on the bed against two pillows. Her white-gloved hand rested beside her on the pink spread. I tried not to look at it. She wanted to know everything she’d missed in English and Problems of American Democracy, and I went through the classes day by day, after which I told her about Larry Klein’s latest antic: he had skipped class and was found seated in the empty auditorium, and when he was brought to the principal’s office he said he thought seniors could skip class at their own discretion. “That’s what he said: ‘at their own discretion.’ Sanders just stared.” The glove didn’t move. There was a knock at Emily’s door. Mrs. Hohn entered, with a tray of chocolate chip cookies and two glasses of lemonade. “Now you two just relax and enjoy yourselves,” she said. “And if you want anything, just holler.” At 5:30 I heard the opening of the storm door and the wooden door. The glove shifted slightly. I stood up and gathered my books. “See you tomorrow,” I said, and glanced at the glove, which had moved from the spread to Emily’s lap.

Mr. Hohn drove me home. The streetlights had come on, though there was light left in the sky; on one side of the street it was nearly night, and on the other it was still late afternoon. Through lamp-lit porch windows I could see parts of couches and table lamps and shimmering television screens. Mr. Hohn gripped the wheel with a pair of yellow-brown leather gloves that had a pattern of little holes on the back of each finger. “I was wondering,” I heard myself say, as I stared at the bent fingers, “about Emily’s hand.”

“The operation was successful,” he said, with his eyes on the road, “which is one good thing, let me tell you”—and at the word “operation” I imagined Emily’s hand streaming with blood.

“Mr. Hohn,” I said as we entered my neighborhood. “What exactly is wrong with Emily’s hand?”

“Now that,” he said, keeping his head motionless but swinging toward me his melancholy gaze, “is a good question.” He swung his gaze back. “A very good question.”

We returned to our old ways, Emily and I. It was as if nothing had changed. But I was aware at every moment of the white intruder, drawing attention to itself, demanding awareness. At the wrist it was fastened by two small white buttons. They looked like ordinary buttons, with a glimmer of iridescence when they caught the sun. On their left was a small overlap of cloth, which formed a shadowy opening that revealed nothing. The glove seemed tightly bound, as if it were meant not to slip out of place, so that I imagined Emily had trouble bending her wrist, or even moving her fingers. I wondered whether she took the glove off at night — whether she took it off at all.

In class I watched her sit down at her desk. I noticed that she rested her gloved hand very carefully on the writing surface, where she left it motionless for as long as possible. Once, after a pencil rolled off the edge and struck the floor, she bent over to retrieve it, leaving her left hand in place. Her body, for a moment, was twisted unnaturally.

It struck me that the glove was harming Emily’s grace of movement, penetrating her with a slight clumsiness. When she walked with her books cradled in her arms, she was careful not to let her gloved hand touch them — she supported the weight a little awkwardly with her left forearm. Now and then I saw a red mark on the underside of her forearm, from the edge of her notebook. At home, when Mrs. Hohn brought in sugar cookies and lemonade, Emily would lift the glass with her right hand, take a sip, set down the glass, and pick up a cookie. Her gloved hand, with the slightly curved fingers, lay rigidly in her lap.

I quickly came to know every detail of that glove. It fit snugly over the thumb but less tightly over the fingers. The left edge, where the white glove often rested, was faintly darkened. A triangle of small creases was visible in the place where the thumb joined the forefinger. A spot of blue-black ink showed on a knuckle.

Sometimes, staring at the glove in class, I could feel, on my own hand, the white cotton binding me. Then I would wriggle my fingers rapidly, or massage the back of my left hand, over and over, with the palm of my right.

But there was something else about the glove that troubled me, beyond the sharp fact of its presence. Ever since I’d become friends with Emily, I had felt an easy flow between us, an openness, a transparency. This restful merging, this serene interwovenness, was something I had never known before, something that reminded me of her porch in sunlight, or the night of the snow shining under the streetlights. The glove was harming that flow. It was, by its very nature, an act of concealment. Emily herself, by eluding the question of her hand, by refusing to reveal whatever it was she was hiding under the white cloth, was forcing me to think about her in a secretive way. It occurred to me that the glove was changing her — turning her into a body, with privacies and evasions.

But if the glove was creating a new Emily, a hidden Emily, it was also doing something to me. The peace I’d always felt in her presence was being replaced by wariness, by an almost physiological alertness, as if my body were warning me to watch her closely. At the same time, I was no longer able to look at her whenever I wished. Before the glove, I could turn my head frankly in her direction. Now, I felt compelled to throw furtive glances at her, like a stranger yielding to a forbidden desire.

One afternoon as we were making our way along an aisle of the auditorium, where someone was scheduled to bore me to death with a speech about career choices, I noticed Emily’s white glove knock lightly against the back of a seat. Her body stiffened; for an instant she closed her eyes. Then she continued forward, holding her left hand in front of her as, with her right hand, she smoothed back her hair, in little quick movements, again and again.

Now and then an image would surge up in me, of her hand under the glove — the skin a burning red, or purple and yellow, as if recently crushed by a rock. Maybe there was some sort of scar, a harsh red line slashing across the back of the hand like a trail of fire. Maybe it was worse — a raw shiny pink wound sunk into the flesh. I understood that I was fastening my attention on Emily Hohn in a way I had never done before; that what drew me was no longer her stillness, or her gentleness, but the thing hidden by her glove; and I imagined myself tearing off that white disguise and beholding, in terror and exhilaration, her mangled hand.

A warm day came, taking everyone by surprise. Through the open windows we could hear the engine of a crane as it lifted steel beams at the back of the school. Later that day the weather grew cold, but we knew the turn had come. Icicles on eaves glistened and dripped. The last snow began to melt in the shadows of garages and under bushes hung with brown leaves. Willows, still yellow, glowed in the sun. The white glove, resting in a bar of sun on a desk beside a window, was so fiercely white that it hurt my eyes. Within the whiteness I could see the creases plainly, the faint discolorations, a small darkish stain beside one button. Somewhere a dog barked. And a restlessness came over me, the restlessness before spring, when the world, in that in-between season, is waiting for something to happen.

One night I woke in my warm room. I could hear the heat blowing through the vent at the base of the wall. It seemed to remind me of something, and all at once I saw the blue-and-white-striped pajamas, the tiny dolls on their wooden benches, the glowing snow stretching away. Emily lay in her room, fast asleep. Or was she also awake? Perhaps she had taken off her glove, which rested on the covers, the five fingers slightly curved. At the thought of the glove I felt a pressure in my head, like a thumb pushing against my temple, and when I swung out of bed and thrust aside the white blinds, which rattled like coat hangers, I saw that the sky was a deep and glowing blue, the blue of warm spring evenings.

I opened the front door and stepped outside. The chill startled me — it was a blue brisk night, with a big white rippled-looking moon that made me think of refrigerator frost. I turned up my shirt collar and walked quickly under that moon, a heavy cold stone that at any moment was going to rip out of the sky with loud tearing sounds. In the distance I could hear the trucks on the thruway like low rumbles of thunder.

It was a long walk, and for a while I forgot everything but the clear black lines of television antennas against the blue night sky and the curved shadows of telephone wires like strips of black typewriter ribbon stretching across one side of the road. After a while I came to a familiar neighborhood. Porch screens, catching the moonlight, became for an instant opaque aluminum walls, which suddenly vanished to reveal shadowy wicker chairs and leaning bicycles. The windows of Emily’s house were dark. I walked along the strip of grass between the side of the house and the driveway of cracked tar. In the backyard I opened a sloping door and descended six steps. At the cellar door I reached up for the hidden key.

I made my way slowly through the dark cellar, lit here and there by long rectangles of moon-glow, and climbed the wooden stairs to the upper door. It opened onto a small space off the kitchen. A single plate leaned in the dish rack. I passed into the living room and turned onto the carpeted stairs. Halfway up I stopped, with one hand on the banister. Until that moment it hadn’t struck me how easy my break-in actually was. The sheer ease of it exasperated me. Shouldn’t the house have protected itself against intruders? The house trusted the world — it believed that it was safe from harm, that darkness was the beginning of rest. But things were no longer that way. Harm walked in the night. The glove was up there, in her room. It was always with her, always touching her — the white companion.

I continued up the stairs to the almost black landing, where I thought I recalled a painting of a red barn, and climbed the final three stairs. Then I seemed to remember that the painting showed not a barn but a barnyard, where a woman was flinging feed from her apron at white chickens. In the darkness of the upstairs hall I passed the Hohns’ bedroom and felt along the wall for Emily’s door. The familiar doorknob turned with ridiculous ease, and the door opened without a sound.

The shades on the double window were drawn, but a blurry bar of light lay at an angle on one wall. Emily was asleep on her back, her head turned to one side. On the bedspread her right arm was flung across her stomach. Her left hand, still bound in the white glove, lay beside her on the pillow. The palm was up, the fingers slightly curved. Quietly I closed the door behind me.

I came up to the bed and bent slowly over Emily. As I did so, I had the sense that I was introducing myself with a formal bow. The glove lay motionless. It seemed to be holding its breath. In the darkness made less dark by the blurry bar of light, I could see the two buttons at the wrist. I realized there were three of us in the room: the glove, Emily, and me. If I undid the buttons and pulled at the white fingertips, only the glove and I would know. “Emily,” I whispered, “are you awake?” But Emily was far away.

The glove lay very still on the pillow. It seemed to be expecting me, seemed almost to mock me a little: Here we are, you and I, what are you going to do about it? I reached out and touched the lower button with the tip of my forefinger. It felt like an ordinary button, with a slightly raised rim and a depression in the center. I could see the four holes and the tight lines of white thread crossing. The buttonhole was nearly concealed by the button. I would have to press the button through the taut slit, while at the same time I was careful not to push down on her wrist. If, with fanatical patience, I succeeded in forcing the button through without waking Emily, I would have to repeat the operation with the second button. But the glove, which fit tightly, would still be on her hand. I would have to remove it with extreme care, holding her bare wrist with one hand while I pulled at the cloth fingers with the other. At any moment her eyes might begin to open. She would see a dark figure bending over her, she’d feel a hand on her skin. The glove sat there, exposing its two buttons. They were looking at me. They were daring me, with little white smiles, to get on with it. And an anger came over me — at the grinning white buttons, and the smug white glove, and the fat white moon, and the careless house, which entrusted itself to the night, and at innocent Emily, lying there too peacefully, though with a slight look of strain between her eyebrows, and at the sky, and the stars, and the rushing-apart universe, and the vain fool who stood in the dark bedroom like a killer with an upraised knife — like a strangler with a cord in his hands — like a boy lost in a forest. “Emily,” I whispered, “I wasn’t here,” and fled into the night.

Spring came. Under budding branches I walked with Emily along squares of sidewalk that sometimes showed the imprint of numbers or the swirl of a trowel. The sides of roads were dusted by maple flowers, dark red and yellow-green. On some afternoons it was warm enough to sit out on the front porch, which Mrs. Hohn had swept clean of brown, crackly maple wings left over from the fall. Emily and I never spoke of the white glove. One day she was absent; after school I didn’t call. The next day she appeared with a new glove, white and clean, exactly the same as the first, its two buttons faintly iridescent in the sun. She held her arm very carefully and lowered it slowly to the desk. As we walked home in hot sunlight, I watched the glove pass through new leaf-shadows and patches of sun. On the porch Mrs. Hohn served us rhubarb pie and a fruit-juice punch. She set down the plates and glasses on the green wicker table. “Not yet,” she said, holding up a handful of mail like a fan of cards. Emily and I were still waiting to hear from colleges. The idea of college seemed so remote that it was like a game I had played in childhood, in which you pretended to be a famous person, like George Washington or Babe Ruth.

I remained watchful — it was all I could do. I saw the glove resting motionless on the desk, in a band of sun. The fingers, slightly curved, lay in shade; suddenly the glove darkened; beyond the window, a shadow spread across the grass; a moment later the glove glowed brilliant white. Or it lay on its side across Emily’s lap, as she sat in the glider with her legs tucked under and sunlight on her knees.

It stayed so still that sometimes, as I watched it lying there, I imagined it contained an artificial hand, stiff and shiny, like the one I’d seen a few years ago in a department store window, lying on the floor next to the foot of a mannequin with red hair. At other times, when she lowered it carelessly, I would see her lips tighten and small lines appear between her eyebrows. Then I would imagine sharp strokes of pain branching through the hand, like flashes of lightning.

Once, as she sat reading, I saw her right hand move across the desk to the back of the gloved hand and begin to scratch. As if startled awake, she snatched away her hand, glancing about as if she’d been caught in a shameful act. And once, when I left her on the porch to get a glass of water in the kitchen, where I sat talking with Mrs. Hohn, I returned to find Emily scratching furiously at the back of the glove, raking her close-trimmed nails across the cloth, over and over, while a flush showed at the top of her cheek and a coil of hair shook on her neck.

One warm afternoon I was sitting on the glider, holding a book open on my lap as I gazed across the street. Emily sat beside me, with her gloved hand resting in her lap. Beyond the porch posts it was a brilliant blue day. Across the street a small group of girls were jumping rope; the rope slapping the sidewalk sounded like sharply clapping hands. A squirrel skittered across the porch roof. Emily shifted her legs. I glanced at the glove, which hadn’t moved, and looked back at the street.

“You’re making it worse,” I heard her say, in a voice so quiet that I wondered whether she had spoken at all. The glider creaked.

“Worse!” I whispered. “How could I—”

“By thinking about it,” she scarcely said. I could feel her looking at me, as if she were touching my face.

“I never think about it,” I said, turning suddenly, but Emily was leaning back with half-closed eyes.

That night, as I sat at my desk, it struck me that her words, which had barely crept out of silence, might have had another meaning. I had thought she meant that I was making it worse by drawing attention to something she wanted to forget. But now I wondered whether she’d meant that I was literally making it worse — harming her hand by my thoughts, which she could feel pushing painfully against it, like sticks.

A few days later, Emily and I were walking home under the maples. I was talking and gesturing with my right hand, which suddenly struck Emily’s left elbow. “Sorry!” I almost shouted.

Emily smiled at me. “You didn’t exactly kill me, you know,” she said, with a little laugh.

I gave a little laugh of my own. “So tell me,” I said. “What does the doctor say?”

Emily stiffened. In the silence I could hear her wide leather belt creaking as she walked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing? The guy just stands there, like an idiot?”

“Nothing good. Nothing that helps. They don’t know anything. Anything anything anything.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.”

One night I dreamed that Emily held out her gloved hand to me. “I can’t get it off,” she said. I fumbled with the buttons, which wouldn’t come undone, and as I unrolled the glove clumsily, for it clung tightly to her skin, I uncovered a smooth, pink, perfectly formed foot.

I could sense a change. In class she would lower her hand hesitantly to the desk, as if the slightest touch were more than she could bear. When she walked in the corridors, she cradled her books clumsily with her right arm, so that they were crushed up against her. Sometimes a book would slide slowly from the pile and fall to the floor with a sharp noise, like a shot. Then, before I could get to her, she would crouch down quickly, sitting awkwardly on her upraised heels, with one knee higher than the other, and balance her books in her lap while she reached for the fallen book with her right hand.

That was what I saw; but there must have been many things I didn’t see, small embarrassments and humiliations. She had already withdrawn from typing class; she no longer went to gym. When I passed her in the halls, she was always walking alone. People gave her a little distance. No one wanted to brush against the white glove. It was easier to pretend she wasn’t there.

I watched her — watched that glove. It clung to her hand like a growth on her skin. Emily was right: I could feel my thoughts scratching at the whiteness, like fingernails. Sometimes, glancing over, I would see a white wound, a bright gash in her flesh — and I would reproach myself, for after all, it was only a glove.

One rainy Saturday night I was sitting on the couch beside Emily in her dark living room, watching a black-and-white movie. A man in a rumpled suit and a dripping hat was walking along a deserted road at three in the morning, in a splattering downpour that seemed to be part of the rain outside. I had driven over after dinner in my father’s Dodge; Mr. and Mrs. Hohn had retired upstairs after the ten o’clock news. When her parents left, Emily had turned off the lamp on the table between the couch and the armchair, for her father always liked to have a light on when he watched television. The room wasn’t entirely dark; television light flickered on the mahogany lamp table, and light from a streetlamp entered beneath two slightly raised shades and lay in dim stripes along one wall. Emily sat on my left, with her cordovan loafers off and her legs tucked under. Her knees were toward me; the white glove lay stretched along her thigh. The whiteness grew brighter and dimmer as the movie changed.

I could hear the rain falling on the porch roof and dripping along the side windows, and I could hear the movie rain beating against the deserted road. Now and then there was a crack of thunder, which might have come from either place. It was the sort of night I liked best — the sound of movie rain, the different sound of real rain, the dark room touched by streetlight, Emily sitting quietly beside me with her legs tucked under, the peaceful house. But the glove lay there, invading the night, disrupting the dark with its irritating whiteness. I wished that she’d covered it with a blanket, or held it farther away. It was so close that I could have reached over and unbuttoned it without shifting more than a shoulder.

The movie ended. The last scene showed a close-up of the man, who was sitting at a bar with rain dripping from his hat. Emily rose, walked over to the television, and turned it off. She came back to the couch and sat down, stretching her legs out on the coffee table. Her ankles lay next to a little porcelain man playing an accordion. In the dark living room I could hear the rain, which was coming down quite hard, and it occurred to me that the exaggerated sound of the movie rain had actually been the sound of the real rain striking Emily’s porch roof and dashing itself against the bushes by the windows. We sat in the dark, as we often did, and Emily said, “It’s nice, sitting in the dark.” “Yes,” I said, “it’s nice.” The gloved hand lay in her lap. It rested on its side, the palm facing me; a dim streak of light touched her bare forearm and the wrist of the glove. I could see the two buttons very clearly.

“Look at that,” I said, and lightly touched her forearm where the dim light lay across it. She looked down at her arm, where my two fingers rested. I moved my fingers slowly down her forearm until the side of a finger touched the edge of the glove. Slowly I lifted one finger and stroked the white cloth. It was softer than I had imagined. “What are you doing,” Emily whispered. “Nothing,” I said. I began stroking the part of the glove that lay over her wrist. Emily’s right hand descended onto my fingers. She lifted my hand and placed it on her collarbone. With the fingers of her right hand she unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. Then she undid the button below. I felt the sudden edge of her white bra and the skin below her collarbone; my thumb touched the small connecting strap that joined the parts of the bra. I understood, with absolute clarity, that she was offering me her breasts in place of her hand. An immense pity came over me, for Emily Hohn, for the two of us sitting there like sad children, for the dark room and the spring rain, before anger seized me. She was hiding something from me — trying to put me off the scent. I reached down and began to unbutton the glove. Emily cried out — a single high sharp note, like the wail of an animal — then knocked my hand away and swung out of the couch. In the dark her hair looked wild, and for a moment, as she loomed over me, I had the sense that she was standing in the rain, glaring down at me, her hair dripping, her face shining, as I lay in a puddle at the side of the road with the rain beating against my face.

She was absent the next day. At home I dialed her number and hung up after the first ring. I was angry at myself in every way, but it was more complicated than that — I felt I’d been driven to the edge of what I could bear by the oppressive white glove. In all this, Emily wasn’t innocent — she knew something and refused to speak. Exactly what I’d hoped to accomplish by removing the glove was no longer clear to me. But the glove had disturbed the harmony between us, had introduced a note of uncertainty, of opacity. If I longed to see what lay underneath, it wasn’t simply in order to gratify a by now ferocious curiosity, but to release Emily and me from the spell of secrecy, to return us to peacefulness — for there was no peace between us anymore, only the mocking white glove. I hated that glove, hated the way it sat there without doing anything. I wanted to tear it off and set it on fire. Better yet, I would bury it in my backyard. Then a tree would grow, and every spring, when the maples put out their yellow-green and dark red flowers, the buds of my tree would open into white gloves.

When she appeared at school the following day, she rigorously avoided my gaze. She looked tired and drawn; her anger, if it was that, seemed a kind of sadness. I stayed out of her way. It was all fine with me — fine to smash things up, fine to be done with it all. High school would end, I would drag my way through the stupefying summer, then off to college and a new life, hey ho. It was all fine: dead and fine. She was already a memory — the girl with the white glove.

A week passed, the weather grew warmer. On the way home from school I heard the sound of hedge clippers and electric edgers. Someone was tarring a driveway. The smell of fresh tar mingled with bursts of cut grass. In school the windows were wide open and I could hear the dark cry of a mourning dove and the leathery smack of a baseball against a glove. One afternoon at my locker I heard a voice say, “Are you angry at me?” and I felt as if a hammer had struck the side of my head.

“Angry! No, why would I, not really, I thought you—”

“So would you like to”—she shrugged—“I don’t know, come over?”

Then I was walking home with her, through flickers of light and shade. On the front porch we sat on the glider. Mrs. Hohn brought out a plate of sugar cookies, each with a dab of jelly in the center, and glasses of iced tea. It was as if nothing had happened — had anything happened? — but I felt something unspoken in the air, like a heaviness. I glanced at Emily. She was staring straight ahead and holding a cookie in her hand, stroking it with her thumb. Sugary granules fell in her lap. I stared out past a square porch post, one side in sun and one in shade. Shadows of maple leaves moved on the sunny part. Emily said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

“Thinking?”

“About — you know.” She shrugged her right shoulder — a quick impatient little shrug, which made the right side of her collar lift and fall. “I’m ready now.”

“Ready! I don’t know what you—”

She looked at me. “To — you know — show you.”

Her eyes burned at me — I had to look away.

“Only if you—” was all I could say.

It was to take place Saturday night. Her parents were going out and they wouldn’t be back before midnight. She’d been thinking about it, ever since that night, and she now saw that it was the right thing to do. She had feared I would never visit her again, once I knew. She’d been afraid, she’d been ashamed, but she was no longer that way. Her mother wanted it kept a secret. Her mother would kill her. But Emily trusted me. It was meant to be.

“There’s just one thing,” she said.

“Which is?”

“Whether you’re really sure.”

“You mean whether I’m sure you—”

“I mean sure you really want to.”

“What makes you think—”

“It’s just that it’s not — it isn’t what you think.”

“I don’t think anything.”

She threw me a look. “I mean it might really bother you. I mean more than you think.”

“But you — you’re the one—”

“It’s you — it’s you — you don’t like it when things — you know, when things—”

“When things—”

“When things aren’t — when they’re not — not the way you—”

And an irritation came over me, for it was as if I were the one being tested.

“Oh, don’t worry about me. But are you sure you—”

“Oh yes — yes — I mean if you’re sure you—”

This was on a Tuesday. During the rest of the week we fell into our old habits with a kind of gratitude. It was early June; under the maple leaves Emily walked through trembling spots of sun with a light jacket tied around her waist. From the porch I watched the girls across the street jumping rope. Overhead a squirrel scampered across a telephone wire and leaped onto a branch. In the warm summery air I could hear the smack of the rope, the soft clatter of a basketball against a backboard, the slam of a wooden screen door. Beside me, on the glider, Emily sat with her legs tucked under. Her black flats rested on the floor of the porch and her gloved hand lay in her lap. She was wearing a rose-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly above her elbows and a tartan-plaid skirt held in place at the side by a gigantic safety pin the size of a pocket comb. On the green wicker table, a black tin tray painted with pink flowers held a pitcher of pale yellow lemonade in which dark yellow slices of lemon floated. We talked about a paper for English, and her friend Debby’s troubles at home, and the summer. She wished she could go on a family trip the way she used to in her childhood — she missed that camp in New Hampshire — while I argued that summer was a perfect time for doing absolutely nothing. “What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” Emily asked. The rope slip-slapped. In the gleaming windshield of a parked DeSoto, I could see a perfect reflection of green leaves, brown branches, and blue sky. “Nothing,” I said, “is the least amount of effort over the greatest amount of time.” “That,” said Emily, “is so—” and burst out laughing. The glider creaked. The sun shone down.

On Friday night I played Scrabble with the Hohns on the dining room table, under the little brass chandelier with six bulbs shaped like flames. Beside the table stood a wheeled cart on which lay a plate of homemade peanut butter cookies and four glasses of limeade, each at a different level. “Don’t,” Mrs. Hohn said, glancing at Emily. I stared at my tiles, which were not promising. Later, when it was time for me to go, all three of them stood in the little front hall. The wooden door was open, and through the screen door I could see dark leaves shining green beside a streetlight, and a pale band of sky over the black rooftops. “Night, Will,” Mr. Hohn said. “Drive safe, now.” “Good night, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said, raising her hand shoulder-high and bending her fingers twice. “And thank you for keeping Em company tomorrow night. Not that she isn’t perfectly capable of taking care of herself, Lord knows. My big girl.” She placed an arm around Emily’s shoulders and looked at me fondly. “You’re all so grown up now! I can hardly believe it.”

When I drove over to the Hohns’ on Saturday evening, Emily opened the door. Her parents had already left. For a while we sat on the faded pink cushions of the glider, in the warm dusk. It was the time of day when leaves are dark and the sky is watery pale. The world seems unable to make up its mind, as if at any second it might become deep night or a new day. Suddenly the streetlights came on. “I’ve never seen that before!” Emily cried. I said, “I can’t really remember whether I have or not. It’s strange. Wouldn’t I remember something like that?” “When I was little,” Emily said, “I once saw it raining on one side of the street — right over there — and not on this side. It was magical. I ran over to touch the rain and then I ran back into the sun. And then, a few years later, maybe seventh grade, when I remembered it, I couldn’t be sure it had really happened. I couldn’t feel the memory, you know what I mean? And I still can’t be sure, even though”—she waved her hand rapidly in front of her eyes—“oh, let’s go inside, I hate these idiotic bugs.”

I followed her into the living room and sat down next to her on the dark blue couch beside Mr. Hohn’s armchair, with its slightly sagging cushion and its yellow hexagonal pencil lying on one arm. On the coffee table stood the little accordion player. His head was tilted to one side and he was looking at me with a mad grin. I leaned back, but Emily stood up and said, “Let’s go upstairs!” I followed her up the carpeted stairs, sliding my hand along the dark banister. At the landing I glanced at the painting, but it was hidden behind the glare of its glass. For some reason I thought: Now I will never know. In Emily’s room I pulled out the wooden desk-chair and sat with my arms crossed on the back. Emily sat on the side of the bed. Her feet hung just above the floor. The gloved hand lay in her lap.

She patted the bed beside her and said, “Sit over here.” Carefully I made my way to the bed and sat down. “There’s no use waiting,” she said. Her voice sounded excited and weary at the same time.

She lifted the gloved hand slowly from her lap, as if it weighed a lot, and turned her forearm so that the two white buttons were exposed.

“All I ask,” she said, “is that you promise me one thing.”

I thought about it. “All right, I promise.” I looked at her. “So what do I have to—”

“That you won’t hate me.”

“Hate you!” It struck me that I shouldn’t be having this conversation, that things were taking a wrong turn. “Why would I—”

“Because it’s bad. It’s not what you think. It’s — wrong.”

“Wrong? That’s a strange thing to—”

“I didn’t want you to know. But you want to. You want to.”

“But not if—”

“You’re always thinking about it. Judging me. Holding it against me.”

“That’s not — I’m not holding—”

“Always looking. Making it worse.”

“But that’s—”

“Promise.”

“I promise — I promise — but listen — Emily—” I stood up and began pacing up and down in front of her, like a man in a hotel room in a movie. “You don’t — not if you — I mean, I don’t have to—”

“But you do. You do. You have to. I know you. That’s — who you are. You have to. Everything was so fine, and now—”

“It’s still fine. And you’re bound to get better, I’m sure the doctor—”

“It’s not like that — you don’t know. You want everything to be a certain way. But it isn’t. It isn’t. Look. Look. I’ll show you.”

Swiftly, angrily, she undid one white button. The glove seemed to expand slightly, as if it had been closed very tight. She began fumbling with the second button, the one closer to her hand. “Don’t just stand there,” she said fiercely. “Help me.” I sat down next to her and began working the button through the hole, which was stretched to a thin line. The glove was bound so tight that it must have chafed her wrist, which looked a bit red, unless it was my tugging and pulling that was bringing the blood to the surface.

“I think I’ve got it — wait — Emily — just a — there!” The glove was now open at the wrist, though I could see nothing of the hand itself. “That must be a relief. Do you want me to—”

“Just help me get this—”

The glove seemed to be moving, rippling a little, as if, released from the buttons, it was stretching its muscles. I grasped the edge near the bottom, while Emily pulled at the fingers. The glove seemed stuck, and I imagined that it would always be like this — the glove on the hand, the frantic tugging and pulling, Emily and I on the edge of the bed, day after day, forever — but all at once something gave way and the glove slipped quickly from the hand.

“See!” she said, holding her head away, as if her hand might do something to her.

The hand was thickly covered by crinkly dark hair, which grew more sparsely on the fingers and the palm. Through twists of hair, the skin on the back of the hand looked raw and shiny, as though it were wet. Smaller, tightly curling hairs grew in the spaces between the fingers and in the grooves of the finger joints. An ointment or secretion glistened on the thumb knuckle. Not far from the hand, the glove lay on the bed, its bottom wide open, like a mouth.

“Now you’ll never—” she cried. For a moment I thought she was going to swing her hand against my face. I leaned away from her, keeping my eye on the glove, in which I could see bits of hair and wet-looking stains. “You hate me!” she said bitterly, and when I raised my eyes I saw in her face an appalling sweetness, as if she were asking me to forgive her.

I woke late Sunday morning with a tickle in my throat; by mid-afternoon my eyes were burning and I had a temperature of 102. All that week I stayed in bed, shivering and sweating. Through heavy-lidded eyes I saw my mother’s delicate fingers holding before me a glass thermometer with a silver tip. Worst of all was a sensation of itching all over my body, as if clumps of hair were growing. Then it was over, through my window screens I could hear the sound of two separate lawnmowers, and I returned to school on Monday, nine days after my visit to Emily. When I entered homeroom I saw her sitting there the way she always did, staring straight ahead. Her gloved hand rested on the desk. I tried to catch her eye but she did not turn her head. In English I kept looking over at her, but she was always turned away; at the lockers I started toward her but stopped. In her room that night I hadn’t known what to do. After a while I’d helped her on with her hideous glove and buttoned it tight. My hands itched, and I had the sensation that my fingertips were cracking apart, bursting with hairs. “I have to go,” I said suddenly, and didn’t move, then abruptly left. At home I took a shower and rubbed my hands and body hard with a scratchy washcloth. When I looked at myself in the mirror, my chest was red and raw-looking.

School was nearly over. For the next week and a half I saw her always partly turned away, as if she’d become a profile. At home I studied intensely and without interest for final exams. I was tired of my room, tired of the town, sick of everything — I wanted high school to end. One hot night I woke suddenly in the dark. It was nearly two in the morning. I dressed quickly, crept out of my room and into the attached garage, and slowly raised the door. At Emily’s house all the windows were dark. They shone like obsidian in the glow of a streetlight. Had I expected her light to be on, had I wanted her to be waiting for me? I thought of the night when I’d broken into her house and entered her room, and as I watched the front porch from my father’s car I understood that this time I had come out only to sit awhile, as if I were looking for something that had once been there.

One afternoon in August I emerged from a new bookstore in the center of town and saw Emily across the street. I stepped back into the shade of the entranceway. She was walking with a girl I knew. They were wearing jeans rolled up to mid-calf, low white sneakers without socks, and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Emily had on a straw sun-hat I had never seen before. She was laughing — a carefree, easy laugh. On her left hand she wore the white glove. I wanted to run across the street and shout at her that everything was all right, she could stop hating me now, things were still the same, weren’t they, we could walk along the sidewalk under the maple trees through spots of sun the way we always did and sit on the glider in the warm shade of her front porch forever, but Emily and her friend turned under an awning and entered a store, and later that afternoon, as I leaned back on my elbows at the beach and stared out at a sandbar with a white-and-red beach ball on it, I felt that I was about to understand something of immense importance, everything was about to become clear to me, but a boy came running along the sandbar and kicked the beach ball and I watched it fly lazily into the blue air, rising slower and slower until it stopped and seemed to float there before falling toward the shallow green-brown water.

Getting Closer

He’s nine going on ten, skinny-tall, shoulder blades pushing out like things inside a paper bag, new blue bathing suit too tight here, too loose there, but what’s all that got to do with anything? What’s important is that he’s here, standing by the picnic table, the sun shining on the river, the smell of pine needles and river water sharp in the air, somewhere a shout, laughter, music from a radio. His father’s cleaning ashes out of the grill, his mother and sister are laying down blankets on the sunny grass not far from the table, Grandma’s carrying one of the aluminum folding chairs toward the high pine near the edge of the drop to the river, and he’s doing what he likes to do best, what he’s really good at: standing around doing nothing. Everyone’s forgotten about him for a few seconds, the way it happens sometimes. You try not to remind anybody you’re there. He loves this place. On the table’s the fat thermos jug with the white spout near the bottom. After his swim he’ll push the button on the spout and fill up a paper cup with pink lemonade. It’s a good sound: fsshh, psshh. In the picnic basket he can see two packages of hot dogs, jars of relish and mustard, some bun-ends showing, a box of Oreo cookies, a bag of marshmallows which are marshmellows so why the a, paper plates sticking up sideways, a brown folded-over paper bag of maybe cherries. All week long he’s looked forward to this day. Nothing’s better than setting off on an all-day outing, in summer, to the park by the river — the familiar houses and vacant lots no longer sitting there with nothing to do but drifting toward you through the car window, the heat of the sun-warmed seat burning you through your jeans, the bottoms of your feet already feeling the ground pushing up on them as you walk from the parking lot to the picnic grounds above the riverbank. But now he’s here, right here, his jeans tossed in the back seat of the car and his T-shirt stuffed into his mother’s straw bag, the sun on one edge of the table and the piney shade covering the rest of it, Grandma already setting up the chair. And so the day’s about to get going at last, the day he’s been looking forward to in the hot nights while watching bars of light slide across his wall from passing cars, he’s here, he’s arrived, he’s ready to begin.

Though who’s to say when anything begins really? You could say the day began when they passed the wooden sign with the words INDIAN COVE and the outline of a tomahawk, on a curve of road with a double yellow line down the middle and brown wooden posts with red reflectors. Or maybe it all started when the car backed up the slope of the driveway and the tires bumped over the sidewalk between the knee-high pricker hedges. Or what if it happened before that, when he woke up in the morning and saw the day stretching out before him like a whole summer of blue afternoons? But he’s only playing, just fooling around, because he knows exactly when it all begins: it begins when he enters the water. That’s the agreement he’s made with himself, summer after summer. That’s just how it is. The day begins in the river, and everything else leads up to it.

Not that he’s all that eager to rush into things. Now that he’s here, now that the waiting’s practically over, he enjoys prolonging the excitement of moving toward the moment he’s been waiting for. It isn’t the swimming itself he looks forward to. He doesn’t even swim. He hangs on to the inner tube and kicks his legs. He likes it, it’s fine, he can take it or leave it. No, what he cares about, what thrills him every time, is knowing that this is it, the beginning of the long-awaited day at the river, as agreed to by himself in advance. Everything’s been leading up to it and, in the way of things that lead up to other things, there’s an electric charge, a hum. He can feel it all over his body. The closer you get, the more it’s there.

Julia, thirteen, isn’t like him in that way. Soon as she’s finished laying out the three blankets, she’ll run over to the edge of the drop, scamper down, and cross the short stretch of ground to the river. She’s always been like that, throwing herself into things — piano lessons, blueberrying, hiking a trail, the bumper cars at Pleasure Beach. She thinks he’s cautious, too held-back, timid even, and it’s probably true, but it’s also something else: he likes things to build up slowly, because when it happens that way, everything feels important. Does this mean there’s something un-grown-up about him, something that’ll go away one day, like his stick-out shoulder blades and his knobby anklebones?

“Come on, give us a hand, Cap’n,” Julia says. He’s not invisible anymore. Julia doesn’t like people standing around doing nothing. He takes a blanket corner and before he knows it she’s off around the table toward the pine where Grandma’s sitting, she’s scrambling down the drop and out of sight. A second later her head appears, then she’s all there except for her feet, then she’s got heels, toes. She doesn’t stop, goes right in past her knees, bends to splash water on her arms. He can see the reflections of her red suit broken up in the water. The river has little ripply waves, maybe from a speedboat out beyond the white barrels. His father once told him the Housatonic’s a tidal river. He remembers the word: tidal. Could that be the tide he’s looking at, those ripples? The Housatonic. He likes saying it, likes leaning into that “oooo” sound, which reminds him of a train coming around a bend at night in an old movie. Julia throws herself in, begins swimming out to the barrels.

“You run along now, Jimmy,” his mother says. “I’ll be fine here.” He knows it’s time to get started, you can’t delay things forever. He goes over to the sunny inner tubes, lifts up the one lying on a slant against the other, squeezes the warm dusty rubber to make sure it’s tight. Then he begins rolling it bumpily over the grass around the end of the picnic table toward the pine where Grandma’s sitting.

It’s a short walk, in deep shade broken by spots of sun. He’s stepping on softy-crackly pine needles and spongy pinecones, which press up into the soles of his feet as though he’s walking on rolled-up-sock balls. The earth feels bouncy and hard at the same time. Grandma’s sitting next to a high pine that’s leaning a little forward, as if one day it started to fall then changed its mind. To the left there’s another pine, also leaning forward, and the two trunks form a kind of frame around the sunny river and the wooded hills on the far side. Everything’s alive with interest: that big pinecone in dark shade with one end glowing in sunlight, that cherry-stained Popsicle stick lying next to a bumpy root. Grandma’s chair isn’t the heavy long one from the porch, with adjustable positions, no, she’s got the small one with a straight back that unfolds with one easy pull. She’s wearing her dark blue bathing suit and a pair of straw sandals, toenails polish-pink, her thick hair a strange sort of whitish yellowish orange. She’s always laughing about her trouble with hair dyes. She’s sitting in the shade near the edge of the drop, legs in sunlight, book in her lap. Her fingers are bent at the knuckles. She likes holding them up and showing them to him. See: arthritis. The crisscross strips in the chair are white and lime green. As he comes up to her, she turns her head, places a hand in her open book to keep it from closing.

“So, my good man, you’re going in? Look at Julia out there.” He brings this out in people, who knows why: Cap’n, my good man. It’s something about him. His sister’s by the barrels now, swimming on her back, kicking her feet, sweeping up both arms. “That’s right, my good woman,” he says, and Grandma does what he wants her to do, gives a deep-down scratchy laugh, a laugh with approval in it. It’s a witty family, you have to be on your toes. If he gets up late in the morning his father says things like “Out drinking again last night, eh, Jim?” or “Behold, the son is risen.” Standing beside Grandma, balancing his inner tube with his fingertips, he takes it all in: the two bracelets on Grandma’s wrist, one turquoise and one silver, her fingers puffy, her knuckles bumpy, the clumps of hot-looking droopy grass on the few feet of ground that go past the chair to the edge of the drop, the thick pine-root twisting out of the slope. A piece of white string hangs over the root. These are good things to look at, but sometimes you don’t see them. You see them when they’re leading up to something.

He takes a few steps to the edge of the drop, the edge of the world. Behind him’s Grandma in her chair, the floor of pine needles, the picnic table. Behind that, the sunny blankets, a field — but why stop there? Connecticut’s stretching away at his back, the monkey cage in the Beardsley Park Zoo, the Merritt Parkway with its stone bridges, then comes Grandma’s apartment on West 110th Street, and if you keep going, the Mississippi River, Pikes Peak, California. This is fun. You can do it in both directions. In front of him the slope, the sandy-earthy place at the river’s edge, Julia on her back. Then the white barrels, the wooded hills on the far bank of the river, and beyond the hills the other side of Connecticut, the trip to the whaling ship at Mystic Seaport, somewhere out there Cape Cod, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa. He likes standing here, thinking these things. He likes the picture of himself in his own mind as he stares out sternly over the river, frowning in sunlight, his fingertips resting on top of the inner tube, his other hand on his hip, Huck Finn on the shore of the Mississippi, an Indian brave with a quiver of arrows on his back, getting ready to go down to the canoes.

But he can’t stand there all day. Julia’s looking at him from where she’s resting against a barrel. She’s shading her eyes with one hand and waving him on with the other. Come on, Cap’n! Grandma’s looking up from her book to watch him. And besides, he wants the day at Indian Cove to begin, he really does, even if all he’s been trying to do since he got here is hold it back for as long as possible. There’re two ways down to the river: the hard dirt path on the other side of the pine, where the grown-ups go, or straight down the soft, crumbly slope. Gripping the inner tube under his arm, he steps over the edge and half slides half stumbles down, feeling the warm sandy earth spilling over the tops of his feet. It reminds him of salt sprinkled into his hand. He’s there — he’s made it — he’s standing on the patch of orangey sandy dirt that’s too small to be a beach. The beach they go to has real sand, lots of it, with blankets and beach umbrellas, salt water, a refreshment stand, seagulls, dead crabs, sandbars, waves. This is the shore of the river, and it’s different in different places: here the sandy orange earth, farther down some boulders and cattails, elsewhere trees and grass right at the water’s edge. This no-name place is gentler than a beach, more quiet, more shut away, with the slope behind him, the green-brown water in front of him, the white barrels moving up and down a little, as if the water’s breathing.

He starts forward, rolling his inner tube. Nine or ten steps and he’ll be at the water’s edge. He can see ripples there, like very small waves: a tidal river. If he didn’t know it was a river, he’d think he was standing by a lake. Tree branches bending down to the water hide the turn of the river on both sides, and what you see is a lake with wooded hills, a few little houses on the far shore, a pier with a tiny man fishing. He rolls his tube over the warm sand-dirt. There’re pebbles here, but no rubbery piles of seaweed, no purple-black mussel shells. A green Coke bottle, empty, stands upright and looks out of place. It belongs on the beach, tilted in the sand next to a blanket. It’s got a green shadow. Blurred footprints, a smooth flat stone good for skimming. The excitement’s building. He’s almost there.

At the water’s edge he stops. He makes sure the little waves pull back before they can touch his toes. Through the water he can see ripply sun-designs on the river bottom. They look like a chain-link fence made of light. The river is it, the beginning of his adventure, and here at the final place he stops for the last time.

Everything has led up to this moment. No, wrong, he isn’t there yet. The moment’s just ahead of him. This is the time before the waiting stops and he crosses over into what he’s been waiting for. He inhales the river-smell, takes it deep into his nostrils. He’s been moving toward the moment that’s about to happen ever since he woke up this morning, ever since last week, when his father came home from work and with his briefcase still in his hand said they’d be going to Indian Cove on Saturday if the weather held. Every day he could feel it coming closer. It was like waiting for the trip to the amusement park, like waiting for the circus tents to rise out of the fields the next town over. In another second the waiting will end. The day will officially begin. It’s what he’s been hoping for, but here at the edge of the river he doesn’t want to let the waiting go. He wants to hang on with all his might. He’s standing on the shore of the river, the brown-green ripples are breaking at his toes. The sun is shining, Julia’s waving him on, the white barrels are rising and falling gently, and what he wants is to go back to the wooden sign with the tomahawk and start waiting for the shore of the river.

What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he be like Julia? He loves this day, doesn’t he? Any second now he’ll be standing in the water up to his knees, swishing his hands around. He’ll go in up to his bathing suit. He’ll wet his chest and shoulders, hop on the tube and paddle out to Julia. He’ll laugh in the sun. Later he’ll throw himself on his blanket, feel the sun drying out his wet suit. He’ll eat a hot dog in a bun, drink pink lemonade from the jug. He’ll be sluggish with sun and happiness. At the end of the day he’ll change out of his suit in the creaking wooden bathhouse, he’ll fall asleep in the car on the way home, under the streetlights. But now, as he stands at the end of waiting, something is wrong. He’s shaken deep down, as though he’ll lose something if the day begins. If he goes into the river he’ll lose the excitement, the feeling that everything matters because he’s getting closer and closer to the moment he’s been waiting for. When you have that feeling, everything’s full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin, you’re using things up. The day starts slipping away behind you. He wants to stay on this side of things, to hold it right here. A nervousness comes over him, a chilliness in the sun. In a moment the day will begin to end. Things will rush away behind him. The day he’s been waiting for is practically over. He sees it now, he sees it: ending is everywhere. It’s right there in the beginning. They don’t tell you about it. It’s hidden away in things. Under the shining skin of the world, everything’s dead and gone. The sun is setting. The day is dying. Grandma’s lying in her coffin. Her crooked hands are crossed on her chest. His pretty mother’s growing old. Her fingers are thick and bent. Her brown hair is stringy white. No one can stop it. Julia’s dying, his father’s dying, the Coke bottle’s crumbling away to green dust. Everything’s nothing. If he stands still, if he doesn’t move a muscle, maybe he can keep it from happening. Things will stop and no one will ever die. His body’s shaking, he can’t breathe, here at the water’s edge he’s at the end of everything. You can’t live unless there’s a way to hold on to things. He can’t go back because he’s already used it up, he can’t go forward because then it all begins to end, he’s stuck in this place where nothing means anything, it’s streaming in on him like a darkness, like a sickness, he’s seen something he isn’t supposed to see, only grown-ups are allowed to see it, it’s making him old, it’s ruining everything, his temples are pounding, his eyes are pounding, he feels a scream rising in his chest, he’s going to fall down onto the sandy orange earth, “Ahoy, matey!” shouts Julia, and with a wild cry that tears through his throat he steps over the line and begins his day.

The Invasion from Outer Space

From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times? — the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer … And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment. The story broke a little after ten in the morning. The TV anchors looked exactly the way we knew they’d look, their faces urgent, their hair neat, their shoulders tense, they were filling us with alarm but also assuring us that everything was under control, for they too had been prepared for this, in a sense had been waiting for it, already they were looking back at themselves during their great moment. The sighting was indisputable but at the same time inconclusive: something from out there had been detected, it appeared to be approaching our atmosphere at great speed, the Pentagon was monitoring the situation closely. We were urged to remain calm, to stay inside, to await further instructions. Some of us left work immediately and hurried home to our families, others stayed close to the TV, the radio, the computer, we were all talking into our cells. Through our windows we could see people at their windows, looking up at the sky. All that morning we followed the news fiercely, like children listening to a thunderstorm in the dark. Whatever was out there was still unknown, scientists had not yet been able to determine its nature, caution was advised but there was no reason for panic, our job was to stay tuned and sit tight and await further developments. And though we were anxious, though quivers of nervousness ran along our bodies like mice, we wanted to see whatever it was, we wanted to be there, since after all it was coming toward us, it was ours to witness, as if we were the ones they’d chosen, out there on the other side of the sky. For already it was being said that our town was the likely landing place, already the TV crews were rolling in. We wondered where it would land: between the duck pond and the seesaws in the public park, or deep in the woods at the north end of town, or maybe in the field out by the mall, where a new excavation was already under way, or maybe it would glide over the old department store on Main Street and crash through the second-floor apartments above Mangione’s Pizza and Café with a great shattering of brick and glass, maybe it would land on the thruway and we’d see eighteen-wheelers turn over, great chunks of pavement rise up at sharp angles, and car after car swerve into the guardrail and roll down the embankment.

Something appeared in the sky shortly before one o’clock. Many of us were still at lunch, others were already outside, standing motionless on the streets and sidewalks, gazing up. There were shouts and cries, arms in the air, a wildness of gesturing, pointing. And sure enough, something was glittering, up there in the sky, something was shimmering, in the blue air of summer — we saw it clearly, whatever it was. Secretaries in offices rushed to windows, storekeepers abandoned their cash registers and hurried outdoors, road workers in orange hard hats looked up from the asphalt, shaded their eyes. It must have lasted — that faraway glow, that spot of shimmer — some three or four minutes. Then it began to grow larger, until it was the size of a dime, a quarter. Suddenly the entire sky seemed to be filled with points of gold. Then it was coming down on us, like fine pollen, like yellow dust. It lay on our roof slopes, it sifted down onto our sidewalks, covered our shirtsleeves and the tops of our cars. We did not know what to make of it.

It continued to come down, that yellow dust, for nearly thirteen minutes. During that time we could not see the sky. Then it was over. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Throughout the downpour we’d been warned to stay inside, to be careful, to avoid touching the substance from outer space, but it had happened so quickly that most of us had streaks of yellow on our clothes and in our hair. Soon after the warnings, we heard cautious reassurances: preliminary tests revealed nothing toxic, though the nature of the yellow dust remained unknown. Animals who had eaten it revealed no symptoms. We were urged to keep out of its way and await further test results. Meanwhile it lay over our lawns and sidewalks and front steps, it coated our maple trees and telephone poles. We were reminded of waking in the morning after the first snow. From our porches we watched the three-wheel sweepers move slowly along our streets, carrying it off in big hoppers. We hosed down our grass, our front walks, our porch furniture. We looked up at the sky, we waited for more news — already we were hearing reports that the substance was composed of one-celled organisms — and through it all we could sense the swell of our disappointment.

We had wanted, we had wanted — oh, who knew what we’d been looking for? We had wanted blood, crushed bones, howls of agony. We had wanted buildings crumbling onto streets, cars bursting into flame. We had wanted monstrous versions of ourselves with enlarged heads on stalklike necks, merciless polished robots armed with death rays. We had wanted noble lords of the universe with kind, soft eyes, who would usher in a glorious new era. We had wanted terror and ecstasy — anything but this yellow dust. Had it even been an invasion? Later that afternoon we learned that scientists all agreed: the dust was a living thing. Samples had been flown to Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. The single-celled organisms appeared to be harmless, though we were cautioned not to touch anything, to keep the windows shut, to wash our hands. The cells reproduced by binary fission. They appeared to do nothing but multiply.

In the morning we woke to a world covered in yellow dust. It lay on the tops of our fences, on the crossbars of telephone poles. Black tire-tracks showed in the yellow streets. Birds, shaking their wings, flung up sprays of yellow powder. Again the street sweepers came, the hoses splashed on driveways and lawns, making a yellow mist and revealing the black and the green underneath. Within an hour the driveways and lawns resembled yellow fields. Lines of yellow ran along cables and telephone wires.

According to the news, the unicellular microorganisms are rod-shaped and nourish themselves by photosynthesis. A single cell, placed in a brightly illuminated test tube, divides at such a rate that the tube will fill in about forty minutes. An entire room, in strong light, will fill in six hours. The organisms do not fit easily into our classification schemes, though in some respects they resemble blue-green algae. There is no evidence that they are harmful to human or animal life.

We have been invaded by nothing, by emptiness, by animate dust. The invader appears to have no characteristic other than the ability to reproduce rapidly. It doesn’t hate us. It doesn’t seek our annihilation, our subjection and humiliation. Nor does it desire to protect us from danger, to save us, to teach us the secret of immortal life. What it wishes to do is replicate. It is possible that we will find a way of limiting the spread of this primitive intruder, or of eliminating it altogether; it’s also possible that we will fail and that our town will gradually disappear under a fatal accumulation. As we follow the reports from day to day, the feeling grows in us that we deserved something else, something bolder, something grander, something more thrilling, something bristling or fiery or fierce, something that might have represented a revelation or a destiny. We imagine ourselves surrounding the tilted spaceship, waiting for the door to open. We imagine ourselves protecting our children, slashing the tentacles that thrust in through the smashed cellar windows. Instead we sweep our front walks, hose off our porches, shake out our shoes and sneakers. The invader has entered our homes. Despite our drawn shades and closed curtains, it lies in thick layers on our end tables and windowsills. It lies along the tops of our flat-screen televisions and the narrow edges of our shelved DVDs. Through our windows we can see the yellow dust covering everything, forming gentle undulations. We can almost see it rising slowly, like bread. Here and there it catches the sunlight and reminds us, for a moment, of fields of wheat.

It is really quite peaceful, in its way.

People of the Book

My dear young scholars: welcome. Today you have completed the thirteenth year of your lives. On such a day, a day on which you have left your old selves behind forever, it is fitting that I should reveal to you a momentous secret. For by the laws of our forefathers you are no longer children, as you were yesterday, but young men and women, entitled to the fullness of adult knowledge. Now, I have no doubt that you are wondering, as you sit here before me, on this day of days: What is that momentous secret of which I speak? It is nothing less, my dear ones, than the secret of our people. It is the secret that distinguishes us from all other people. It is the secret that makes us what we, and only we, supremely are. You are well aware, my dear young scholars, that throughout our long history we have called ourselves People of the Book. Today I ask you to consider those words carefully. What do they signify? They signify, to begin with, that we revere books; that for us the study of books is the highest of callings; that we hold all books to be a reflection, however dim, of the First Book of all; that we consider every moment spent away from books a punishment and a desolation of spirit; that we believe, in every fiber of our being, that books, far from leading us away from life, lead us directly to the center of life, to all that is vital and everlasting.

But that is not all we mean, that is not even primarily what we mean, when we call ourselves People of the Book. For by that proud title we mean that we trace our beginnings to books themselves. We mean, my dear young scholars, that we originate from books. We mean, if I may speak to you even more plainly, that books are our ancestors. And by “our ancestors” I wish you to understand, in the broadest sense, all those books that have been born in the world up to the present day, and, in the strictest sense, those first Twelve Tablets from which all others spring.

You are of course familiar, my dear ones, with the Book of Legends. You have studied its stories. You have discussed the six levels of meaning under the guidance of learned teachers. Now, it happens that within the many volumes of the Book of Legends there are pages you have not yet seen. You have not seen them because until today you were children and therefore shut away from forms of knowledge not suited to your years. Among those pages is the Excursus in the seventh volume, which in its full title is known as the Excursus on the Copulation of Books. There we are told that in the beginning, when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, the Creator breathed forth the first words onto Twelve Tablets of stone. In this manner the First Book was born. Mark well, young scholars, that I have been speaking to you of the first day of creation, before the light was divided from the darkness. I have been speaking to you of a time before the creation of man. Now, those Twelve Tablets, into which the Creator breathed the breath of his incomparable being, were living things. And as living things they possessed the powers that rightly belong to living things, among which are numbered locomotion and copulation. Thus it came to pass, in those days, after the earth brought forth its creatures, and all living things flourished and multiplied, that when one tablet lay upon another, a new tablet was born. So began the coming forth of books, each one reflecting the original tablets, but more and more faintly. The reproductive virtues of the original tablets were passed on to their offspring, who in turn brought forth new books, each giving back a less perfect reflection of the first ancestors.

My dear ones, listen. As the generations of man began to multiply and spread throughout the land, a great discovery was made. It happened one day that a scholar, reading in a garden, under the shade of a pomegranate tree, grew tired in the warmth of the afternoon. And laying aside his tablet of stone, he fell into a deep sleep. It chanced that a maiden, the daughter of the house at which the young man was teaching, entered the garden. And seeing the stone tablet, which lay in the grass, she picked it up and looked at it curiously. Then the maiden sat down in the grass, and placed the tablet on her lap; and in the heat of the sun, she soon fell asleep. And behold, the divine spirit, which breathes through the generations of books, was present in that tablet of stone, and passed into the womb of the maiden. Thus she grew big with child. In this manner our race was born.

You see by this story, my dear young scholars, that our ancestors were born of a union between a tablet and a maiden, which is to say, between the spirit and the body, the word and the flesh. Now, you may well ask whether this method of generation is in use among us today. Although stories of such couplings are told, yet we read in the Commentaries that the power of generation was lost long ago, when the offspring of tablets, though bearing within themselves a dim spark of the living breath that had animated the ancestors, no longer retained that fructifying power. But do not despair, young scholars. For the power of passing on that original breath is the gift of our people; and as we grow fruitful and multiply, we who derive, however slantwise, however remotely, from those first tablets of stone on the first day of creation, so we participate in the animating spirit of the universe, of which we are the guardians and the perpetuators.

Since the birth of our people we have spread to every corner of the earth, where we mingle with ordinary men and women. How then shall we know one another, we who are one people, yet live scattered among far-flung races? My dear ones, we are known to one another by the outward signs of our inward devotion: the intense application to study, the habit of inattention to the physical world, the rejection of external distraction, a fanaticism of the desk. By our signs you shall know us: the back laboriously bent, the neck frozen, the head immobile, the eyes burning, the arms still as stone. Only the fingers occasionally move — just enough, and no more, for the turning of a page.

But how, you may wonder, shall such a people, devoted as they are to the perpetual act of study, carried on single-mindedly during the course of an entire lifetime — how shall such a people, who seek each day, in the faded reflections of multitudes of generations of books, the original splendor of the lost Twelve Tablets — how shall such a people live? How shall we conduct our lives? How shall we, with our furious dedication to the word, pursue a life in the world, with its myriad distractions and temptations? In the Histories we learn that in ancient days the practical duties of life were given over to the care of women and failed scholars. In this way the gifted among us were able to pursue their studies without worldly distraction, at long tables in communal libraries, interrupted solely by two sparse meals taken in silence, and by four hours of sleep at night. But even in those days the authority of women, although limited, was by no means slight. Exiled from the entirely masculine world of study, forbidden to strive for the highest reaches of the human spirit, they were nevertheless so completely in charge of the practical world that the scholars in their libraries were dependent on them for their very lives. In more recent times, of course, young girls have been permitted to engage in study side by side with boys, and are no longer prevented from attaining the highest degree of worthiness, while the duties of practical life have fallen to those of both sexes who, after the fifteenth year, have proved unable to live in the loftiest realm of rigorous learning, and so devote themselves to the useful tasks that sustain and nourish our people.

But even those men and women who serve the demands of daily life spend every spare moment bent over a book, since all of us have been trained to arduous study during our first fifteen years. Thus it may truly be said of us that even outside the highest domain of learning, we are all, in a very real sense, people of the book.

Because of our fervent devotion to books, my dear ones, it is necessary that our relations with them be clearly established by law, so that the spirit of excess, so visible in the history of our people, so desirable in all matters pertaining to the higher realms of existence, shall not be applied harmfully to the physical forms that bear upon them the outward signs of the indwelling spirit. You are all familiar with the vast Book of Laws. You have all memorized many passages. You know that the Book of Laws contains prohibitions which govern the relations between human beings and books. Now, the First Prohibition is this, that thou shalt not destroy, or mutilate, or in any way injure, a book, or any portion thereof. And this law, my dear ones, has been taught to you from your earliest years. But there is a second prohibition, which you do not yet know. And the Second Prohibition is this, that thou shalt not copulate with, or perform any manner of procreative act upon, a book. For although the books of our time no longer possess the capacity to engage in acts of copulation, as they did in ancient days, as recorded in the seventh volume of the Book of Legends, still it happens that a young person, or less frequently a person of mature years, feverish with the desire to learn, conducts himself or herself improperly with a book, as, for example, by laying the body with lascivious intent upon or beneath a book, or the open pages thereof, and must be punished. Now, the punishment for violating the First Prohibition, or the destruction of a book, is death. For a book is a living thing, as I have said. And the punishment for violating the Second Prohibition, or copulation with a book, is mutilation of the sexual parts. It therefore behooves you, my dear young scholars, to maintain proper relations with books, which is not to say that you should tame your fervor, but that you should direct it toward its proper end.

And having mentioned death, I would like to speak to you for a moment about the meaning of death, for us who burn with a desire to find our way to life, to the breath of the Creator breathed into the First Book of all. My dear young people, listen. Today you have completed the thirteenth year of your lives. And yet, if I may put it so, you already lie on your deathbeds. Your hands shake. Your eyes grow dim. Your ears admit no sounds. You are old, my dear ones, you are old. Birth, it is said, is the beginning of death. But it is not only the beginning of death. It is also the continuing of death, the continuing of all the deaths of all those who have come before you, since the sixth day of creation. When you are born, you are older than Adam, who lived nine hundred thirty years. You are older than Noah, who lived nine hundred fifty years. Methuselah, compared to you, is a baby who shakes his rattle. You are old, my dear ones. You are dying. You are already buried in the ground. You are born wailing, and why? Because when you open your eyes, Death grins at you from your mother’s face. You come into the world with a knife in your neck. Your mother rocks you in your coffin. You learn to crawl inside a grave. The worm is your brother. Dead men’s bones are your sisters. Who is the bridegroom? Who is the bride? Behold the two skeletons, kissing under the canopy. What is life? A sickbed in a hospital. The nurses are busy. The doctor is dying. No one will ever come.

Why then, my dear ones, should we live at all? What is the meaning of this dying that surrounds us on all sides, that lies in wait for us, day and night? And when you are mindful that it is not you alone who will die, but all those who are dear to you, your mother and father, your sister, your brother, your beloved friends, your revered teachers, your unborn sons and daughters; when you are mindful that all those who once were living are now dust in the wind; then it seems difficult, not simply to bend your mind to a lifetime of study, but even to rise from bed in the morning, in order to begin a new day.

But, you ask, can we not take pleasure in multiplying our kind? Can we not delight in passing on to the next generation our special task? For we do not live for ourselves alone: we live for our people, for all those who have yet to come into the world. Alas, in the Book of Prophecies we read that our people, so rich in wisdom, so rich in suffering, chosen above all others to find the undiscovered words, are destined to come to an end. There we read that the mountains will fall. The sky will grow dark. All mankind will cease. And a time will come when it is the seventh day, and then the sixth day; the fifth day, and then the fourth day; the third day, and then the second day; and behold, the last day of all; and thereafter it will be as it was before the beginning of days. That is what we are told in the Book of Prophecies.

Why then should we not despair, my dear ones? Why should we continue for another day? Another hour? Why should we devote ourselves to a long life of spiritual striving, in the full knowledge of our inevitable nothingness? My dear young scholars, I will tell you why. I will tell you that in the same Book of Prophecies, we learn of a way through the darkness. The cellar has a stairway. The grave has a door. Yes, my dear ones: yes. For just as that First Book, filled with the breath of the Creator, can never cease to be, so is it with all books touched by that life-giving power. My dear ones, my lovely ones, listen to me. Listen as I tell you of the Paradise of Books.

In the twelfth volume of the Book of Prophecies, we learn that books, like all things on earth, live out their years and die. Now, when a book dies; when, that is to say, a book crumbles to dust, or is destroyed by fire, or by water, or by pestilence, or by any of the innumerable accidents that can befall the creatures of this earth; when, for any reason, a book ceases to sustain its material shape: then, in the space of a single breath, it ascends to the Seventh Paradise, which is known to us as the Paradise of Books. There you may find the eternal and unchanging shape of every book that has ever been born. There you may find the generations of descendants of those first Twelve Tablets, whether they be of stone, or papyrus, or parchment, or paper, or any other word-receiving form. There, we are told, if you are among the most fortunate, you may come upon the First Book of all. Now, the Paradise of Books is the Seventh Paradise, as I have said. It is the place to which only scholars and writers of the highest spiritual striving can ascend. But all of us, by virtue of our origin, are entitled to approach the judgment seat, at the gates of that heavenly place. Therefore study diligently, my dear young scholars, and bend your minds away from worldly things, so that when you complete your dying, you will ascend to the Paradise of Books and live in joy forever.

And now you will understand me well, my dear ones, when I say unto you: Welcome to death! — by which I mean, Welcome to life, welcome to the breath that blows through all things, welcome to the Paradise of Books. The study and the library, in which you will spend your days, are emblems of that Paradise to which we all aspire. For though the way is dark, the end is dazzling bright. And I say unto you, my dear ones: Remember well the words I have spoken to you on this day, when you have completed your thirteenth year of life, of death. Now, let me ask you to close your eyes. Let me ask you to close your eyes and see. See the study-room. See the long tables. See the scholars at their books. Do you see them, the scholars in their clothes of black and white? They do not move. They make no sound. My dear ones, I ask you: What do they look like, when you see them there? What do they resemble? Are they not, by their stillness, by their inwardness, the very sign and symbol of a living book? Are they not tablets of breathing stone? For these are your people, whose origin you now know.

Then bless you, my dear young scholars, and be mindful, as you set forth on this memorable day. For on this day I have revealed to you the secret of our people. On this day I have shown you the meaning of death. For before the beginning was, the First Book is. That is the sum of all wisdom. That is all you need to know. My dear ones, my delightful ones, tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow you will begin your long journey through the Commentaries. It is a journey that will last seven years. Some of you will fall by the wayside. The rest of you will persevere. At times you will grow tired. Your minds will grow perplexed. All life, all death, will seem to you a great riddle, which you can never solve. A darkness will come over your spirit. You will search for a way out, and there will be no way out. But in that hopeless place, in that blackness without light, remember what I have told you here today. Remember the secret of our people. Remember the Paradise of Books. And when you rise from the study-room, bowed down with weariness, then I say unto you, my dear ones: Lift your eyes to the heaven-shelves on every wall, lift your eyes to the living and breathing words that surround you, to the books that soar over you, lift your eyes in rapture, and know who you are: for behold, they are the Ancestors, row on row.

The Next Thing

The new structure rose on the outskirts of town, in the field next to the mall. It isn’t true, as some have said, that we knew nothing about it at the time and were later taken by surprise. How could that have been possible? It was right there, next to the mall, a big operation only partly concealed by a high fence, with trucks going in and out every day, to say nothing of the ads in the local paper, telling us to get ready for the big event. I even seem to recall a sign somewhere in the area of the dig, with diagrams and pictures, though I can’t swear to it now. So it just isn’t true, as some say, that it took us by surprise, as if we were innocent, that it sprang out of nowhere, like a miracle. What they mean, in my opinion, is that we didn’t really care all that much about it, at the time. The fact is, we knew places like that, we’d been going to them for years. Why should we care about another? And then there was the name itself: The Next Thing. That was a name that irritated a lot of us, made us skeptical and even resentful. It was the sort of name that seemed to smile at you and say, “I know you can’t resist me,” all with a sly wink. So I suppose it isn’t entirely true that we didn’t care about it, since our not caring was mixed with an irritation, a resistance to being treated a certain way. But I think it’s accurate to say that many of us were in no hurry to go out there, once the doors finally opened.

Of course, those of us who stayed away were bound to hear things, there was no getting around that. It wasn’t as if we were making it our business not to know anything, the way we might if we really hated it. What was there to hate? It was just another one of those places on the outskirts of town, with its opening-day hoopla and its vague promise of a better life. We hardly listened to the talk, though it’s only fair to say that a few things did stand out as peculiar. When you entered the doors, people said, you found yourself in what looked like an immense office, with many cubicles, each with a person inside, and aisles going off in all directions. Another thing we heard was that the place itself was down below, in the basement. It struck us as an odd way to arrange things, the cubicles on the main floor, the shelves below, and that’s mostly what we thought about, when we thought about it at all, in the days before we actually drove out for a look.

And we did go out there, as we’d always known we would, partly to see for ourselves, and partly I suppose to prove to ourselves that we weren’t staying away in order to make some kind of point. A few did just that, of course; they had their reasons, the same reasons they always had; but for the rest of us, the ones who hadn’t yet seen the place, it wasn’t like that. We weren’t in a hurry, that was all. What we found was the usual parking lot, the usual long flat stretched-out building with jutting wings and many glass doors. The first thing that struck us was the cubicles. I for one had imagined them very differently. They weren’t formal and over-orderly, as I had pictured them, but casual and almost festive, grouped in sections with wide aisles leading to down escalators. Each cubicle had three colorful glass panels and an open side, so that you could see into them and over the tops. What surprised me was the insides, which looked very comfortable and inviting — some had a few armchairs or small couches, some had a table and chairs, but all had little homey touches that caught your eye, like a table lamp with a fringed shade, or children’s drawings, or a bowl of tangerines. So as you walked past the cubicles, you had a desire to enter, to look around. Here and there you could see a couple, leaning forward intently as a man or woman spoke to them. Even on that first visit, as I walked toward an escalator, I remember thinking that I ought to take a moment to step into one of the cubicles, see what they were all about.

The escalators went down, way down, crossing other escalators going up. During that long ride, you had the sense of shelves rising up all around you, higher and higher, until they were lost in the lights. If you held your eyes a certain way, you could make it seem that the shelves were moving and you were standing still. This was in the very early days of The Next Thing, but already the basement had a nickname: the Under. People would say, “Have you been to the Under?” instead of “Have you been to The Next Thing?” So as I rode down, that first time, I thought: Now I’m seeing it, the Under. At the bottom, there was a feeling that you were standing on the floor of the ocean, trying to see up to the sky. The ceiling itself, I later learned, was one hundred and eighty feet high. You could tell that the architects had done what they could to counter the depressing effect of all that height — the aisles were wide, almost like streets, and here and there the management had set up Relaxation Corners, open spaces with couches and armchairs, where people sat reading newspapers or drinking mocha and hazelnut coffee from machines. Some of the crowd couldn’t help staring up, like small-town kids in the big city. I stared too — it didn’t bother me what anyone might think. The place seemed to have everything you might ever want, but a lot more of everything than you’d find anywhere else. I liked watching the big loading platforms that moved up and down the shelves from floor to ceiling, at intervals of maybe twenty or thirty feet. They looked like freight elevators open on all sides. There were also railed walkways, high overhead, that ran parallel to the shelves. Way up there, almost out of sight, clerks in yellow uniforms were unloading goods onto the platforms. Down below, youthful clerks in tan shirts and dark green ties walked through the aisles, trying to catch your eye, trying to see what they could do for you.

But I wasn’t there to have anything done for me. I was there to — well, it would have been hard to say. I suppose I was there to look around. One thing you couldn’t help noticing was the shopping carts. They were wider and deeper than the usual kind, painted bright red, with special flaps that folded out in front if you needed more room. Even better were the double-decker carts, high rumbly things that came up to your chest. You had the feeling that the people who ran the place had thought it all out, the big picture and the small. I think I was wondering what else they had to show for themselves, down here at the bottom of the ocean.

It turned out they did have something, though it wasn’t anything like what I might have expected. I was walking along, going from one aisle to another, the way you do in a place like that, when all of a sudden things stopped. I don’t know how to put it any better than that. The shelves just stopped. I don’t mean I’d come up against a wall. That at least would have been something. I mean there was an emptiness, a darkness. You could see a pretty good way into it, because of the fluorescent lights in the high ceiling above the shelves, but after that came sheer nothing — blackness. About a hundred feet beyond the shelf-ends was a construction fence, and beyond the fence I could make out the top halves of excavators and dump trucks. Between the shelves and fence I saw dirt, rocks, a few sawhorses, an orange hard hat resting on the ground. You had the impression that the place was getting ready to expand, as it eventually did, though even at that time there were rumors of cellars being dug, of lots being marked off, out there beyond where you could see.

I came away from that first visit not knowing what I felt. That in itself was worth thinking about. I’m not much for the big noisy places, all things considered, though I’ll visit them when they’ve got something I want. But this place — this place was so big that it was bigger than big; it was so big that big no longer made any sense. It meant the old words didn’t apply — you needed new ones. You needed new feelings. You couldn’t just know right off what to make of it, as you might have done with another place.

And so I wondered about it, tried to sort it all out, over the next days and weeks. One thing I knew was that I was curious about the cubicles. I liked their style, their air of patiently sitting there waiting for you to step into them. Come on, they said. Come see what I’ve got for you. And I kept remembering the slow ride down into the Under, with the shelves rising up, and the way it all ended in the dark, with a kind of promise of more to come. What I hadn’t liked was the terrible height of all those shelves. I hadn’t liked feeling that I was at the bottom of a place I might never get out of. But what bothered me most, I think, was knowing I would return. That isn’t it, exactly. I didn’t mind knowing that I’d be visiting the cubicles again, or riding back down the escalators. What I minded was that the place itself seemed to know I’d be back. It was very sure of itself, The Next Thing, very aware of its effect on people. That was the main reason I stayed away, longer than was natural, before paying my second visit.

In those days I worked at Sloane & Wilson, in the claims department. At lunch one afternoon, a colleague of mine told us she’d just switched all her shopping to the Under. She’d thought about it, she said, and decided it was the most convenient thing for her to do. A lot of people felt that way, she said. Someone said he didn’t see what was so convenient about it, since the only way you could get down there was through the cubicles. Then someone else said he thought the cubicles were the whole point of the place. When I asked him what he meant by that, he came back with “Oh, you know what I mean,” and wouldn’t say any more.

That was the other reason I stayed away. You couldn’t step out of your house, you couldn’t walk down the sidewalk, without hearing about the place. They really were helpful down there, people said. The Under was always improving, people said. Already the loading platforms were being replaced by something better, new departments were opening every day, carpenters were hammering up a storm, out there in the dark. I listened to the talk, the way you do, but at the same time I didn’t listen, I resisted it. I thought of other things. I knew it wasn’t good to get swept up in all that.

Then one day I returned, there was no reason not to. What I hadn’t expected was a new development on the outside. Covered walkways now stretched from the glass doors deep into the parking lot, as if to meet you and draw you in. The supporting columns were hung with surveillance monitors that showed people walking along, and between the columns, high up near the arched roof, white pots overflowed with pink and yellow flowers. Inside, the cubicles were pretty much as I remembered them, though busier than before. But either the arrangement had changed, or I had come in at a different door, because I’d gone only a short way before I became aware of a broad open space that looked like a park. There were clusters of trees, maples and oaks and some I didn’t recognize, and picnic tables scattered about, and a stream with stones, and here and there you could see food stands with open windows. This was the Food Park, where you could buy a rack of ribs or a plate of pad thai or an ice-cream sundae with chopped walnuts and eat it at a picnic table under a tree, or take a stroll along one of the winding paths, which had places that widened out to make room for a wooden bench. You couldn’t see the cubicles from the Park unless you were near the edges. Families sat eating under the branches of trees, kids were wading in the stream, and there was a relaxed, peaceful air about the place that reminded me of picnics with my parents by the river, under the pines, back in my childhood. You could see right away it was the kind of thing that would attract people, like a shady awning over a sidewalk on a hot summer day. I felt that I wanted to sit down by the side of the stream and rest awhile, like a traveler who has come a long way. Then I forced myself to turn back, before the shade could draw me in, since really I hadn’t come a long way, not a long way at all.

I was startled to find myself back among the cubicles. There they were, one after the other, as far as you could see. As I made my way along, I noticed that many of the panels had small signs hung on them, with slogans like WE NEVER STOP or ALWAYS BETTER, ALWAYS BEST. Not all the signs were like that — some were more restful, like WE WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU or LEAVE YOUR WORRIES WITH US. I began looking for something in between, something that wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, and finally I entered a cubicle with a small sign that said: WELCOME TO THE NEXT THING.

A young man of about thirty, wearing a light sport jacket and plain tie, rose from a table to greet me. He invited me to sit down, on a small couch with soft cushions. Still standing, he explained that The Next Thing took a close interest in the welfare of visitors and wished to serve us in every way possible. Would I care for a cup of coffee? I was, he said, free to ignore what he had to say to me, but he promised it would be worth my while to hear him out. At this point he sat down. He said he hoped I wouldn’t mind if he spoke frankly to me. I told him go ahead, it was fine with me. People, he then said, could be divided into two classes: those who were unhappy with their lives, and those who were happy. The unhappy wanted to be happy, and the happy wanted to be happier, since even the happy had little pockets of discontent that limited their happiness and made them feel incomplete. The Next Thing, he said, was prepared to help both groups achieve their objectives. As he spoke, he looked directly at me, with an energetic and friendly attention, though once or twice he turned his head a little to look off as he searched for a word or paused before a phrase. This habit, I noticed, added a sort of drama to what he was saying, an effect that got stronger when he swung his head back. I saw that he was very good at what he was doing, whatever that was, and as he spoke I asked myself whether I was an unhappy person who wanted to be happy, or a happy person who wanted to be happier, or maybe a person somewhere in between the two, if that was possible.

He hoped, he then said, in a very polite voice, that I would permit him to put a few questions to me. I gave him a shrug and a sure, why not, and he proceeded to ask about my work, my home, my health, my retirement plans, and the degree of happiness I felt, when I contemplated my life. There were many opportunities, he said, at The Next Thing, for improving the quality of your life, each day and over the long haul. Some people moved directly from their current line of work into the same line of work at The Next Thing, at a higher salary and with a wide range of investment opportunities. Others preferred to enter one of the many training programs available at all levels. Still others were unsure, or afraid of change, and for them there were programs that addressed their fears and uncertainties. He himself, he said, had at first resisted the chance to improve his life, so he knew the kinds of fear that could get in the way. He asked me to fill out a form, which included questions about my salary, the estimated worth of my home, and the degree of happiness or unhappiness I felt, in my work and in my personal life. I would receive a letter within three weeks. At the end of the interview, if that’s what it was, he stood up and shook my hand. “We believe we can help,” he said. When I smiled and replied that I didn’t need help, he gave me that direct look of his and said, “That’s exactly what we mean.”

I thought about those words on the escalator, but even on the way down I was distracted by signs of change. Below me, on each side of the escalator, I saw an arched surface stretching from aisle to aisle. Only at the bottom did it begin to make sense: each arch was a roof, spread overhead at a height of some twenty feet. The arched roofs, which covered every aisle, were attached to the edges of shelves and had been fitted with track lighting. The roofs, I knew instantly, were an attempt to overcome the oppressive height of the shelves, and it pleased me to see that The Next Thing had understood its mistake and done something about it. I say it pleased me, but that isn’t all of what I felt. It bothered me, too — bothered me, I mean, that it was making an impression on me, bothered me that it pleased me, if I can put it that way.

Then I became aware that the new roofs had brought about another change. The loading platforms had disappeared. In their place, along the stretch of shelves that were waist high, was a series of black squarish panels. Each panel was supplied with a screen and two buttons, one red and one white. A clerk stepped over to me and explained how it worked. When you pushed the red button, rows of simple pictures — a clock radio, a floor lamp, a desk organizer — appeared on the PD screen. PD, he said, stood for Product Display. When you touched a picture with your finger, different versions of the item were shown on the screen. You selected the version you wanted by touch. Then you punched the white button, and the item was released from its upper shelf to a bin at your feet; the bin was flush with the shelves and had a handle at the top that allowed you to pull it open. The panels, called Virtual Boxes, were activated by a smart card, available to members of The Next Thing.

There were lines of people at the PD screens, and an air of confusion here and there, but all in all the replacement of the loading platforms struck me as a good idea. The aisle-roofs made you forget the towering shelves, the bins opened easily, and the PD screens were simple to use, once people got the hang of it. I figured the design engineers must have invented some way of cushioning the fall of high-up goods. Then I saw that I was getting drawn into things — I who had no interest in such places. But even as I drew my mind back and warned myself against the pull of the Under, I found myself walking along, listening to the sound of items dropping into the bins, searching for the place where it all came to an end.

For a while I felt lost in the aisles, which never ran for long distances but were always being intersected by systems of shelves at right angles. This, I thought, was like the new aisle-roofs — it was intended to keep you from feeling uneasy in the presence of vast spaces. You could see they wanted to tame the bigness, break it into little neighborhoods. As I continued left and right, I became aware of separate groups of checkout counters, scattered through the Under. And a question came to me, one that I was surprised I hadn’t thought of before. How did people get their carts back upstairs? You could see shoppers on up escalators, holding bags, but what about the larger items, the lawnmowers and charcoal grills, the exercise bikes and Adirondack chairs, what about the heaped-up carts? A clerk in a tan shirt and green tie, who must have noticed my puzzlement, came up to me and asked if he could be of help. On hearing my question, he led me to a group of checkout counters. Behind them stood a row of what he called Returnways. These, he explained, were specially designed escalators with broad steps built to hold large items and entire shopping carts. The exit points of the Returnways, he said, were all located outside the perimeter of the upper building. You rode up to a system of moving walkways, which carried you over to the parking lot.

As I made my way through the aisles, I noticed that I was passing many Relaxation Corners, which seemed to have multiplied since my first visit. Some of the RCs, as people were calling them, now contained odd-looking structures: broad six-foot-high cylindrical columns, with wraparound screens showing views of different regions of the Under. On the screens you could see people filling their carts, checking the Virtual Boxes, moving along. The columns, a clerk informed me, were called Viewing Towers. They were there to help aisle coordinators check traffic flow. I thanked him and continued on my way. I was thinking about the towers when I suddenly found myself at the end of an aisle, looking out again into tracts of dark. But things had changed, even here.

The barren stretch of dirt was level and smooth, a smell of tar was in the air, and in the shadows I saw a yellow asphalt-paver moving slowly along, with a big roller behind it. The construction fence was gone. Farther away I saw a stand of black trees, with a faint glow over them. Through the trees, deep in the dark, I could make out a play of lights. They seemed to flicker, the way lights do when you see them through leaves. For some reason, probably because of the rumors, the flickering lights seemed to me the lights of streetlamps and house windows, in an invisible town, out there in the dark. And I seemed to hear, along with the clatter of shopping carts, and voices in the nearby aisles, the dim sounds of a summer night: laughter on a front porch, dishes rattling through an open kitchen window, a shout, a screen door shutting, a thrum of insects.

I turned back into the Under. It was very bright. There was a steady sound of goods dropping into bins, and all up and down the aisles you could see people lifting items out of the bins and putting them in their carts. Then it seemed to me that I was about to understand something, as I stood there watching the shoppers and listening to the unheard sounds of an invisible town. It was the sort of feeling you can get when you’re standing on a beach at night, looking off at the dark waves, out toward where the night and the water come together, except that I was standing one hundred and eighty feet under the ground at the edge of the Under, looking down the length of an aisle, and what I was about to understand had something to do with the sound of goods falling into the bins and the flickering of those lights through the trees, but whatever it was I lost it, there at the edge of things.

I returned from my second visit as if I had voyaged to another country and come home to the familiar chair by the familiar lamp. The meeting in the cubicles, the Food Park, the PD screens, the lights flickering through the trees, all this seemed strange and unlikely in the clear light of a Saturday afternoon in summer. On my block, kids were playing catch. You could see sprinklers on the lawns, and in the air you could hear blue jays, electric hedge-trimmers, the bang of a hammer. Had I really been where I’d been? The whole visit was shot through with another feeling, an impression that is difficult to pin down. I think it was an impression of wariness, as if I didn’t know what it was I’d just seen. Oh, I knew what I’d seen. I don’t mean that. But there was some other thing I hadn’t seen, something behind or within the things I was seeing. How can I explain it? The cubicles, the Under, it had all begun to work on me — that was clear enough. But I knew I wasn’t going back there, not for a while. It’s impossible to say why. But it was as if the place was too powerful, so that if you went back you’d be caught in some way.

It was during this staying-away period, when I was sorting through my impressions, that a letter arrived in the mail from the offices of The Next Thing. I was spending so much time trying to make sense of what I’d seen that I had entirely forgotten about the form. The truth is that I hadn’t forgotten it, not entirely. It was still there, waiting for me, right next to other things in my mind, but I was doing my best not to pay attention to it, I was looking off to one side. A copy of the form was there in the envelope, along with a letter from an assistant manager. The letter stated that after studying my work experience, my salary, and my life wishes, the management was prepared to offer me a job similar to mine, in the Information Division, at a considerably higher salary. There was an on-the-job training program, in which I would learn how to gather information about hourly rates of sales in the housewares department and feed it into a database. Promotion to a higher level, at higher pay, with higher benefits, was open to me after two years of service.

The letter made the same impression on me that my second visit did. It interested me, it did more than interest me, it stirred me up, but at the same time it made me wary. The truth of the matter was, I wasn’t all that happy with my job at Sloane & Wilson, where the hours were long, the rules of promotion blurry, and the future unclear. Over the last six months the company had been laying people off left and right. So it isn’t hard to see why the letter produced an uneasiness in me. It was like having someone whisper something in your ear. It made me want to pull away — it made me want to wait. And it wasn’t as if the letter was the only thing I had on my mind, at the time, since this was the period when we first began to hear about the house sales.

Houses in our town, we heard, were being sold to The Next Thing. They in turn sold them to their higher employees: product marketing managers, merchandising supervisors, purchasing trend analysts, customer taste engineers, package design coordinators, consumer desire directors, people like that. Now, there was nothing surprising about this, in itself. The housing market was in good shape, homes were being bought and sold all the time, it made sense that people who worked in our town should live in our town. Still, there it was, a fact to think about, a piece of information to turn over in our minds. The first thing we learned was that the people who were selling their homes had all recently been hired by The Next Thing. They had taken mid-level jobs as information gatherers, customer behavior profilers, product display developers, and shopper satisfaction regulators, as well as low-skill jobs as floor clerks, shelf loaders, aisle cleaners, counter helpers, screen watchers, and security facilitators.

The second thing we learned was that the people who sold their houses were moving into homes down below, which were being leased to them at very reasonable rates. It made sense, if you thought about it — the new workers were now much closer to their jobs in the Under. No longer did they have to drive to the upper parking lot, walk past the cubicles, and take a long escalator ride down to the shelves. Instead they could always stay on the same level as their work. Even so, we couldn’t help wondering, those of us who lived above, how you could give up a home in town to live under the ground. When we tried to imagine it, we saw darkness down there, darkness and gloom. Then we heard — but this was still in the rumor phase — that the homes down there had certain advantages over the ones above. The new houses, it was said, had state-of-the-art kitchens with smooth-top ranges and granite-topped islands and hands-free electronic faucets, finished cellars, big-screen entertainment centers, hardwood decks with cedar furniture. As part of the lease arrangement, the landlord maintained the specially developed lawns, took care of the plumbing, repaired light fixtures and electric baseboards. Down there, the temperature was always mild, rain never fell, and no ice would ever cover your front walk. There was even some talk of benefits to your health, since you wouldn’t have to worry about things like basal-cell skin cancer from overexposure to sunlight. All the same, we had trouble imagining a life lived like that, out of the sun, though we heard that the lighting was exceptionally good, and of course you were free to come up into the sunny world on your lunch break, or after work, or on your vacation.

When I look back on it now, it’s difficult not to think there must have been a moment when things were at a point of balance, when they could have gone either way, so that if we had been more perceptive, more alert to what was happening, we might have kept things from going too far. Many of us believe this, and some even say it aloud, from time to time, in the company of trusted friends. I myself once thought the same thing. But now, when I think about it at all, it seems to me that there never was that decisive moment, which we somehow overlooked, but rather that things were set from the very beginning, and nothing we might have done, nothing at all, would have mattered, in the long run.

It’s hard to remember exactly what took place when, but I’m fairly certain the next thing we heard about was the Discovery. It wasn’t called that at first. At the time, it was just another thing people were talking about, in the streets and restaurants and bedrooms of our town. Three teenagers had wandered around the back of The Next Thing, where there were piles of wooden pallets and a coming and going of delivery trucks. The boys were chased away by a guard, but not before they saw large crates the size of refrigerators descending slowly into the ground. That in itself was nothing special. We knew the goods had to get down to the shelves one way or another. It became worth speculating about when a second elevator was spotted behind an old warehouse, at the far end of town. In the course of the next few weeks a third and fourth elevator were discovered, one behind an abandoned mill on a different side of town, the other in a clearing in the north woods. One thing that struck us was the great distance apart of these delivery elevators. Could there be others? We imagined a system of underground tunnels, along which the goods were transported. Or maybe, some of us thought, the elevators led directly to unloading stations in the town below.

Whatever it was, people in our town began to grow uneasy. Who owned the land below us? we wanted to know. Was The Next Thing buying up the ground right under our feet? We held town meetings, where tempers flared. Some people claimed that if you owned a quarter-acre lot, you owned the quarter acre of land under your land, all the way down, as far as you could go. One skeptic asked whether that meant you owned the earth all the way down to its molten core and up the other side. It was decided at last that the land below the town, starting at a depth of eighteen feet, belonged to the town and could be sold or leased. Large portions had already been leased to The Next Thing, and the revenues had benefited our town in every way. It was true that three members of the Board of Selectmen were already employed as consultants by The Next Thing, and this caused more meetings. At a referendum, citizens turned out in great numbers to vote in favor of continuing the lease, which was said to serve the interests of both parties.

Meanwhile houses all over town were being sold to The Next Thing, who continued to sell them to upper-echelon employees. The new owners maintained the grounds and exteriors but gradually transformed the houses into places of business, with offices where the living rooms used to be. Now it became possible to speak to a representative in your own neighborhood, instead of driving across town to the cubicles. A further advantage was that any item purchased at the Under could conveniently be returned to any of the new offices, just a few blocks away.

As these events were taking place in every neighborhood, I tried to make sense of it all. I knew that a great shift was under way, all through our town, but I didn’t know whether it was good for us or bad. All I felt certain about was that everything was moving too quickly. I wanted the old slow feel of things, before all the motion set in. I had even stopped going out to the mall, which stood so close to The Next Thing that it seemed to be there only to draw attention to its rival. Besides, the mall was changing. It was beginning to have the half-deserted look of run-down amusement parks at the end of summer, of old movie theaters with springs poking through the seats. Empty shopping carts stood at different angles in car spaces on the lot. Even the old supercenter where I shopped, on the other side of town, struck me as shrunken, diminished, drained of life, a place where gloomy people wandered sluggishly, shuffling their feet. In pharmaceuticals, a bottle lay on the floor, in a thick red ooze; in an aisle in men’s clothing, an overhead light flickered madly, like heat lightning on a summer night.

Late one Saturday morning, I drove out to The Next Thing. The building had changed. New wings and extensions had sprouted everywhere, and large doorways had sprung up, with sheets of glass stretching from the lintels to the roof. The whole was flanked by high white towers that had notches at the top, like the tops of castles. A blue flag flew from each tower, showing the letters NT in white. In the new wings and entranceways stood booths and counters marked for services: banking, mortgages, universal life insurance, eye care, funeral arrangements. The old cubicles were farther in, but many now had signs like LOANS and INVESTMENT COUNSELING.

After a while I came to the place where the old Food Park used to be. It was now a much larger park, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with spiked pickets. Inside you could see fountains, pavilions, restaurants, gazebos, a merry-go-round, even a small zoo. A sign on an entrance gate said that access was restricted to employees of The Next Thing and their immediate families.

Down below, in the Under, shoppers moved from screen to screen, selecting their items, which tumbled into the bins. A few innovations caught my attention. On the row of shelves above the PD screens, I saw small stainless-steel disks the size of coat buttons. These, I learned, were audio surveillance units, or ASUs, which permitted personnel in distant listening stations to overhear and record customer responses to merchandise. Here and there, at aisle-ends or open plazas, I noted another development: red metal posts, about the size of parking meters, with a top panel containing a slot for a card. If you entered your Menu Card — which could be obtained for a reasonable fee in any of the cubicles — your purchases would be selected for you by computer. The selection was based on your shopping history and your answers to a detailed questionnaire submitted at the time of application for a card. Though the system was still in its early stages, I was struck by the vision itself: customers were invited to experience the atmosphere of shopping without any of the tiring effort associated with the act itself. You picked up your filled cart at an area near the cashiers, at which time you could remove items you didn’t care to buy. Between the insertion of the Menu Card and the pickup of your cart, you might have a pleasant sit in a Relaxation Corner or wander toward the ends of the Under, where deep changes were in progress.

The rough area beyond the shelves had vanished. The ground was paved over and reached all the way back to the line of dark trees, with the lights flickering through. To my left and right, the asphalt stretched off as far as I could see. Men were working all around, setting up surveillance cameras on poles, putting finishing touches on curbed islands planted with bushes, erecting roofed walkways that led directly out from the broad aisles. I questioned one worker, a young man in a dark blue uniform, who told me that opening day was in a week. When I expressed surprise, he explained that people who lived down here — he swept his hand toward the trees — would soon be able to drive directly to any part of the Under, park in the lot, and enter without the obstacle of a door. Some sections of the lot were already in use. The aisles would be kept open round the clock, so that the bright-lit shelves would always be on display, but doorless openings at the aisle-ends would be supplied with security-tag detectors to prevent theft. The paved area entirely surrounded the Under, and the town was on all sides, behind the trees.

When I asked whether it was possible to see the town, the young man laughed and said I was already in it. The Under was the center of town down here, and folks lived all around. At this point he swept out his arm in a wide gesture, which seemed to take in the trees, the flickering lights, and all the dark. But I could see for myself how things looked down here, if I wanted to — all I had to do was walk across the pavement into the trees. Folks did it all the time.

It turned out that the trees formed a small wood, with winding paths and a road going through. Here and there, lanterns with glass panes hung from branches. On the other side, I stepped into a well-lit street that ran parallel to the line of trees, with other streets going off at right angles. I saw homes with glowing porches and bright yards, where kids were playing Wiffle ball or running under sprinklers. In the yards, bordered by white picket fences, lanterns stood on posts. Floodlights shone down from every house, and I noticed that long fluorescent lights ran under all the eaves. A dog lay in a driveway; a young mother was pushing a stroller along a sidewalk. Despite the darkness, I realized that it was the middle of a summer afternoon. High overhead, recessed lights shone down. A man stood in a floodlit driveway, hosing off his car. Telephone poles with crossbars lined the streets, and the wires that ran from the poles to the house sides glittered in the light of streetlamps.

Except for the day-feeling mixed in with the night lights, it all felt very familiar: kids playing, sprinklers turning, a boy riding by on a bike. It wasn’t our town, since the houses and yards were a little different, but it felt like a version of our town, a town born from our town, a town more at peace with itself than ours could ever be. You could tell that some of this came from certain effects worked out by the planners, like the old-fashioned telephone poles with glass insulators on the crossbars, instead of the new metal poles you see everywhere, or the streetlamps with glass globes, nothing fancy, but reminiscent of better times. Most of the porches had old-style gliders, and I even saw milk boxes by the front doors. They were trying to take you back, you could see that, and you couldn’t help admiring the general effect, even as you saw what they were trying to do. But that wasn’t all of it. Up there, in our town, even at the best of times, you could feel a sort of worry, a tension, which flowed from the houses out into the streets and up into the leaves of the trees. I don’t know where it came from, that worry, but there were times you could almost hear it, like a hum in a wire, on hot summer afternoons under a blue sky, or on spring evenings at dusk, in the stillness between the slam of a front door and the ringing of a telephone. It was just an impression, of course. But down here, it seemed, you could get away from all that and lead a different kind of life.

I came to a corner where two small girls with blond braids sat at a table lit by a streetlamp. They were selling lemonade, which stood in a gleaming glass pitcher that made you think of aprons and cookie dough. I was thirsty — they filled the paper cup to the top. As I drank, I looked up at the sky, with its soft-glowing recessed lights. I wondered whether the lights were dimmed at night, or whether they stayed the same all the time. I put the cup down and glanced back in the direction I had come from. Over the line of trees I saw the vast shelves of the Under, fiery with light, rising up in the darkness, like a city on an ancient plain.

I returned to the Under, rode up to the cubicles, and walked out into the parking lot. The sun was so bright that I had to shade my eyes with my hand. Heat rose from the asphalt and from the cars, brilliant in sunlight, sitting there row on row. I remembered how, not so many years ago, the parking lot had been a field of high grass and wild asters, next to the mall. Twenty years back, the mall itself wasn’t there, this part of town was still farm country, and before that, who knows, bobcats and Indians. Things were always changing, there was no stopping it, and as I walked toward the car I had the feeling that if I looked over my shoulder I would see machines tearing down the building behind me, erecting steel columns, lifting sheets of glass high into the air.

For the next few days I went about my business, without thinking about anything. But I must have been turning things over in my mind, because a few days later I accepted the position offered in the letter. Two weeks after that I started my on-job training program. This took place on the ground floor, in a small office in one of the new extensions. About a week into the program I sold my house to The Next Thing at better than market value and signed up for one of the houses in a new neighborhood down below. It was a good location, away from the delivery depots. The lot was smaller than what I was used to, but the house had a granite-topped island in the kitchen, airtight triple-track windows, and a front porch with a glider. It cost me nothing except a security deposit and the first month’s rent, and they even threw in the moving costs. It was difficult for a while, driving each day from my new neighborhood to the parking lot on the other side of the trees, entering the Under, riding an up escalator, and making my way to the office in the extension, but on the positive side I was able to go shopping without changing levels, the training program was expertly run, and I knew that life would improve once I began my new job.

In those days I still sometimes visited the old town, where things were changing. The small stores on Main Street were gone — Politano’s Variety, Klein’s Men’s Shop, the tobacconist’s and the newsstand — but the street had shaken off its slump and was flourishing: the old places were now specialty outlets of The Next Thing, with big plate-glass windows and new awnings, where people in the upper town could do their shopping without having to go down to the Under. On the outskirts of town, the mall had been transformed into a suite of NT offices with a new main entranceway and a second floor. Next to the mall, the old building of The Next Thing was closed for renovations, except for a single door where you could enter. Inside, I saw workmen bolting steel beams to columns as they blocked out the inner walls of a new five-story office building. On the ground floor, past the open door, only a few of the old cubicles remained. Through the wrought-iron fence I saw a flat expanse of dirt stretching away.

The houses in town were changing, too. All but a stubborn handful now belonged to top-level employees, who were building wings, adding floors, erecting upper balconies and decorative towers. I saw three-car garages, front walks flanked by stone lions, porches with high white columns, doors with stained-glass sidelights and Victorian fanlights. Birdhouses shaped like hotels hung from the branches of shade trees. Gardeners kneeled beside beds of geraniums.

I began work a few weeks later, in an annex built out from two aisles of the Under. That was fifteen months ago. The hours were a little longer than I’d expected, because apart from the official workday, nine to six, there was the scheduled work that had to be completed each day before you went home, so that you expanded your hours to fit the work in. Luckily it was possible to save time because of the short drive home. Since I had to pass through the Under on my way to and from work, I picked up what I needed during the week. On Sundays I sometimes visited the upper town for an hour or two, though I was usually so tired that I just paid bills and did the crossword puzzle.

Last time I was up there, I paid a visit to the old neighborhood. On my block I barely recognized my house, with its third story and its bay-windowed wing off the bedrooms. Across the street some high school boys were playing basketball on a driveway, with a high white house rising up behind. I watched them from the curb. They were tall, quick-moving, their hair shining in the sun, but what struck me was the grace of their bodies, the easy flow of their movements. Then I became aware of something else, which must have been there all along — a steady banter, a light playfulness, that seemed to grow out of the flowing motions, unless it was another form of the same thing. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard that sound for a while, down in my town.

As I stood there watching, a security guard in a dark green uniform strolled over from around the corner. He asked to see my Employee Number. “Planning to stay long?” he said as he handed back my card. He thrust his fingertips under the wide black belt around his waist and looked at me curiously. “We don’t get many of you up here,” he said.

These days my work keeps me busy. I usually don’t get home till after eight, and there’s a lot of pressure to do more, to show them what you’re made of. It’s what you’ve got to expect in an expanding organization like this. They want you to work hard, they believe in hard work, and if you slack off you get a warning. Three warnings and you’re out — out of a job, and out of a house, since they won’t renew the lease. You have to move to some other town and make room for the next employee. They mean business down here. After a long day of entering sales rates from housewares, electronics, and building supplies into a database, I like to come home and stretch out on the sofa, where I sometimes fall asleep in front of the TV before I make dinner. I work a half day on Saturday and generally go in for a few hours in the afternoon, and on Sunday, my day off, I do my catch-up shopping and my household chores.

Sometimes, when I’m wandering the aisles of the Under with my cart, or sitting on my glider on my lamp-lit front porch on a Sunday afternoon, I’ll have a sudden memory of the town up there, where I used to live. I can see my childhood home, with its deep cool cellar and its sunny kitchen, and the later house, with the screened back porch that looked out at the catalpa tree. I remember the big rubbery leaves of the catalpa, the green cigars hanging down, the play of light on the porch screens. I like thinking of those houses, but that isn’t the same as wanting them back. They’re part of another time, that’s all. Some people talk about that time the way they talk about everything in the past, as if it has a special glow. Well, it does have that glow. It’s the glow of something you can’t get to anymore, the glow of something no longer there. If you reach out for it, you won’t feel anything at all.

Things have been pretty steady down here, though there have been some changes. The old Returnways were shut down about six months ago, and the last of the escalators stopped running fairly recently. People complain about it, but why should the escalators run if no one up there comes down to the Under, and besides, you can still climb the stairs if you want to get out for a while. Some of the neighborhoods down here aren’t kept up the way they should be, especially the run-down ones near the delivery depots, where goods come down at all hours and trucks are always on the move. Sometimes there’s a run on some item in the Under, like gas grills or grow lights, and they don’t restock as fast as they used to. You can go to the Complaint Department and fill out a form, but the place is hard to get to and the lines are long.

You hear people say things are better up there, but I don’t know about that. Isn’t that what people always say, about someplace else? I’ve even heard talk about how we look different, down here. I suppose there’s a certain truth to that. We’re bound to grow pale, living the way we do, it’s only to be expected, except of course for the ones who turn wrong shades of dark with their tanning lamps and their skin creams. In thirty years, some say, we’ll all be soft white squishy things with fat legs and little squinty eyes. These are people who are usually trying to get you to join their gym or take some miracle health remedy. It’s true there’s a tiredness about us sometimes, a heaviness. You can see it in the Under. The other night I saw a woman from my annex just standing there, in the middle of an aisle, with slumped shoulders, not moving, her eyes not looking anywhere, her hands hanging down. But what do you expect, after working a long shift every day, six days a week? That explains a lot of the faces, with their dead eyes, their saggy mouths. People are tired, that’s what it is. They move slowly, when they’re not working. Chins hang low. Flesh builds over the hips, moves down over the tops of shoes. There’s no escaping it. And if, as some say, people down here fall sick all the time with headaches and upper respiratory infections and what have you, well, they can go straight to the new infirmary built out from the Under and make up the work later. You’d think people never fell sick up there. You’d think people up there never had problems of their own. As I see it, there’s nothing to be gained by wishing you had something else. Maybe it’s true that things are different up there, maybe people up there get through life in a different way, without our troubles. Speaking for myself, I’m no worse off down here than I was up there, with more money in the bank from the sale of my house, though the hours are longer than I thought and the streetlamps keep flickering out. When a tree falls over you can wait weeks before a truck with NT on the side comes around to pick it up, and there’s no denying they’re behind on street repairs. Sometimes you hear talk about improvements, like an elevated monorail system that would eliminate ground traffic, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t care for the fortune-telling parlors that are springing up all over, or the fad for ghosts and spirits, or the new cults you keep hearing about, like the Fourth Millennium and the Prophets of Doom, though I suppose people need something to do when they’re not working. Things may not be exactly what I thought they’d be, back then, but things weren’t perfect up there, not by a long shot. As for work, everyone works, you work till you drop, it’s how things are. In nine months I’m up for promotion, with a good chance of moving to the office next to this one, with a big window looking out at the lot.

The other day we heard that the last house was sold in the Over, which is what we down here call the upper town. Rumor has it that field personnel from the Contact Office have been seen in nearby towns, visiting malls, taking photographs, and questioning shoppers. There’s talk of plans for new underground neighborhoods. You hear about bigger and better Unders, connecting tunnels, a town beneath our town. It’s hard to know what to make of all that. These are interesting times.

We Others

We others are not like you. We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold. We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places. We leave that to you. Did I say: more watchful? That above all. We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you. We crave your attention. We hunger for a sign. We humiliate ourselves — always. Hence our scorn, our famous bitterness. But what’s all that to you?

My name, if I still have a name, is Paul Steinbach. I was born in Brooklyn Heights, in the middle of the last century. Of my childhood apartment on Joralemon Street I remember only a kitchen so narrow that I had to squeeze past my mother’s legs, a little balcony behind a high window that I was forbidden to open, and a mahogany oval table covered with puzzle pieces. I can still see my father sitting next to me on a rug, opening a squeaky black bag and drawing from it, very slowly, a long snaky thing with a silver circle at one end. He raises the object solemnly toward my face, fastens something to each of my ears, and presses the cold circle against my chest. “Listen,” he says gravely. “That is the sound of your life.”

Shortly after my fourth birthday we rode in a train away from Brooklyn and never came back. Our new home was in a small town in southern Connecticut, where my bedroom looked down on a backyard with a clothes pole and two crab-apple trees. My father, who worked from an office in our house, struggled at first but gradually established a successful practice, represented in my mind, even then, by our move across town to a tree-shaded house with two porches: an open front porch with wicker chairs and a glider, and a screened back porch with the Brooklyn couch and my grandmother’s armchair with lace doilies. I was a happy child, well liked by my friends, adored by my mother, and encouraged by my father in all my pursuits. My favorite pastimes were collecting minerals, building model ships with masts and rigging, and taking photographs with my own twin-lens reflex that hung on a strap around my neck. I want to emphasize that from the beginning I was a normal, ordinary, well-adjusted boy, without a trace of anything that might account for the fate that lay in store for me. In eighth grade I joined the Science Club and had a crush on Diana Aprilliano. In high school I joined the swim team, learned to ice-skate, and kissed Margaret Mason on the mouth at a Halloween party. In college two things happened to me: I fell in love with a girl I had known in high school, and after a brief flirtation with English literature I switched to pre-med.

With the help of a scholarship and a federal loan I went on to medical school in Boston. Let me be clear: I did not have strange ideas. I did not spend my time brooding over the mysteries of the universe. After a three-year residency I started my own practice, paid off the loan, and married the girl from high school. A year later I put a down payment on a house in our town, not far from the old neighborhood. We were happy for a time, then less happy. There was a miscarriage; after the second one we were told it would be dangerous to try again. She became moody, withdrawn; the joy of life seemed to go out of her. I could feel her floating away, like a balloon on a string that slips through fingers trying to hold on. One day she left to spend a few weeks with her parents in Florida and never returned. After a period of unhappiness I came to understand that it had to be this way. I was able to throw myself into my work and soon became active in community affairs. I even came close to marrying a second time, but something felt wrong, I pulled back at the last moment. Over the next years my practice continued to grow. My friendships remained strong. My health was excellent. Not long after my forty-sixth birthday my father had a triple bypass that left him weak and barely able to walk; he died from a second heart attack six months later. My mother did not survive the year. I sold the family house, consulted a financial advisor, and invested the money in a portfolio of mutual funds and treasury bonds that earned a steady seven and a half percent. At no time did my thoughts take a peculiar turn. My nature was practical. I moved my office to North Main Street and the following summer delivered a series of well-received talks on medicine and morality to the Ethical Culture Society. In this and all other activities I concentrated on the here and now. The riddle of the universe was of less concern to me than the prevention of a flu. I was invited to picnics and dinner parties, widened my circle of friends, and served on the Board of Health and the Regional Planning Commission. At the age of fifty-two I felt almost like a young man. My outlook was hopeful, my income excellent. I began to entertain the idea of marriage again. One evening toward the middle of September I experienced a slight episode of dizziness. I went to bed with a feeling of uneasiness and a heaviness on my chest. I immediately took out my stethoscope and listened to my heart and lungs. As I did so I recalled my father pressing the cold circle against my chest and saying: “That is the sound of your life.” I vowed to stop working so hard, to take some time off; I hadn’t had a vacation in a long time. I soon fell into a restless half sleep.

I woke in the early dawn with a pleasant sense of lightness, as if the weight had lifted not only from my chest but from my entire body. At the same time there was an odd kind of airiness in my mind that I had never experienced before. It wasn’t a dizziness but a bizarre sort of clarity, as if I were able to perceive objects with unusual distinctness, while at the same time I felt sharply separate from them. I saw the lamp on the night table, the digital clock, myself in the bed. It struck me as strange that I should be able to see myself in the bed, and I wondered whether I was suffering from a disorder of the visual system. I was in the bed and I was outside the bed, watching myself in the bed. The figure in the bed did not move. I bent over and saw that I was no longer breathing. I remember seeing the tendon of my neck protruding, my hand rigid on the spread. On the night table my eyeglasses lay folded on a mystery novel with a cover showing a black gun and a blood-red rose. I thought: Now there is no one to return my book to the library. At that moment an understanding began to grow in me, like a ripple of terror, though even then I couldn’t have said what it was that had happened in that room.

Let me linger over that moment. A sensation is growing within me — a sensation that I’m about to understand something. I pose a hypothesis: I, Paul Steinbach, am suffering from a form of mental derangement that causes me to experience myself as two beings. My very ability to form this hypothesis makes me doubt its validity. I feel that it is extremely important for me to trust my senses, even though they may be misleading me. My senses inform me that I am observing my lifeless body on the bed. But who is this observer? I consult my memory. I see the oval table in Brooklyn, with its scattering of puzzle pieces. I see the screened back porch in Connecticut, the sunlight streaming through the venetian blinds in my boyhood room that looked down on the crab-apple trees. There can be no doubt at all that I am Paul Steinbach. Yet there he lies, Paul Steinbach, in his bed. I can see the familiar hand lying on the bedspread. The nail of the fourth finger needs to be cut. He is not breathing. I try to observe what I can of my other self, the one who’s standing beside the bed, and I see a vagueness, a sort of ripple or waver. At this instant my understanding takes a leap forward, and without exactly knowing what it is I’m doing, I burst into a laugh.

That is what we do, we others: we burst into a laugh. It is the brash, uneasy laugh of one who is about to understand. There is another laugh that we reserve for the moment of understanding itself.

I fled. There was no reason to remain. I was about to understand, but I didn’t want to understand. I wanted only to be elsewhere. How familiar I was to become with that desire! — the desire to be elsewhere. It is our nature. That, and the desire to hover, to remain.

I fled downstairs and out into the backyard. All my senses, such as they were, warned me to keep out of sight. The sky was a darkish luminous gray, the exact color of a smoky quartz crystal. A band of pallor showed in the east. At any moment the sun would leap up with a shout. I made my way through the tall hedge and entered the Delvecchio backyard, with its flagstone patio shaded by a canvas top. On the black-green grass a soccer ball sat beside a yellow sprinkler, silent in the dark dawn-light. Through hedges and fences I passed from yard to yard, under cover of a day not yet begun. Now and then I would hear a voice from a radio, the clatter of a dish. A length of downspout lay in the grass by a cellar window. I crossed Myrtle Street, disappeared between two sleeping houses, hurried from yard to yard as if I were being pursued. Once a cat on a porch arched its back and hissed at me as I passed. I fled across other streets, made my way into little-known neighborhoods. Here and there I saw a sudden figure standing in a kitchen window. In the east, the whitish band was turning pale blue. I soon found myself in an older part of town. Mailboxes with red reflectors that looked like gigantic lollipops sat at the ends of driveways. Here the houses were set deep among pines and oaks. I crept along the side of a garage, crossed a back lawn, slipped through a stand of spruce, and entered a backyard where a wooden swing hung down from the branch of an old sugar maple.

It was dark under the leaves. A coil of hose hung from a hook beside a porch with a sloping roof. A shovel leaned up against the railing. Night reigned in the dark yard, though day was breaking out above.

I climbed onto the porch and entered through the screen door, the wooden door. In the kitchen a single cup and a single dish sat in the dish rack. The living room and dining room were empty. The stairs were covered with a faded carpet. In the upstairs hall I found what I was looking for: a door that opened onto a flight of wooden steps. At the top of that stairway I stopped. I looked at the dark rafters, at the old bookcases filled with glassware and toys, at the dressmaker’s dummy beside the sewing machine, and in the dark and permanent dusk I felt, for the first time that day, that I might be able to rest awhile.

For three days I remained in that attic, as if I’d been flung into prison. At some point during the second day I burst into another laugh: the short, bitter laugh of one who knows. Otherwise I was silent as a fog. When light streamed through the small window, I sought the dark corners; at night I prowled restlessly. An attic is the most seductive portion of any house, combining as it does the aura of the department store, the museum, and the ruined city, and I began to make myself familiar with its collection of objects. Here and there rose chest-high piles of brown packing boxes, each with its neat label printed in black marker: SWEATERS, BLOUSES, PLACE MATS, MITTENS AND GLOVES, GIRL SCOUT UNIFORM: 5TH GRADE. On a tilted wooden coatrack hung a broad-brimmed straw hat with pink plastic flowers, a knitted red scarf with white reindeer, and an extension cord. Beside an old carpet sweeper stood a twelve-room dollhouse with curtains on all the windows; four little dolls were seated at a table, leaning sideways in their chairs, as if they’d been shot. I saw bears, giraffes, elephants, an old black typewriter in a sewing basket, a tall porcelain vase that held a shiny metal tube from an old vacuum cleaner. At some point on the first day I heard a car pull up to the garage in back, a key turn in a downstairs lock. Footsteps struck the floor — a single pair of footsteps, as the one cup and saucer had led me to hope. Later that day I heard her voice on the telephone. It was a low voice, without much inflection. I could not make out the words. I became familiar with her sounds: the rush of water from the kitchen faucet, the whistle of a teapot, the knock of a spoon against a cup. She left by the back door in the early morning and returned in the afternoon, before other cars returned. From the attic window at the rear of the house I could see her car, a small silver hatchback, backing out of the garage in the morning and driving up in the afternoon.

I came downstairs on the fourth night. For when all is said and done, we are curious, we others, we simply cannot help ourselves. At the bottom of the carpeted stairway I saw her sitting on the couch in the darkened living room. She was watching television. A light in the kitchen had been left on; through the half-open door a glow came partway into the dark room. She was a stout mid-fortyish woman, with big pink eyeglasses and a small girlish mouth. Her hair lay in straight bangs across her broad forehead and fell to her shoulders. She was wearing some sort of flowered housedress with short sleeves. When she moved, a barrette gleamed above her ear. She looked like a little girl who had become a big matronly woman without ceasing to be a little girl. I stood watching her until she turned her head with a slight frown, as if she’d become aware of something in the room.

I began to come down nightly, during her television time. I wanted to observe her, I wanted to be near her, I wanted — oh, who knows what we want, as we stand there watching you and trying to make up our minds! There she sat, intently watching a crime drama or an office comedy while she sipped cup after cup of herb tea and nibbled on salted almonds in a dish. At first I was careful to stay at the bottom of the stairway and peer into the darkened room. Against the wall directly on my left stood a CD player on a table. Then came a shadowy bookcase. The couch sat with its back to the bookcase, leaving a passageway.

After the first few nights I began to think about that passageway. Beyond the bookcase, in a dark corner near the half-open kitchen door, stood a lamp table and an armchair. It seemed to me that someone who was cautious but also deeply curious by nature could walk behind the couch in the direction of that armchair without attracting the attention of a person absorbed in a thrilling courtroom battle involving a beautiful defense lawyer and a corrupt judge. One night it happened. I walked along the passageway and sat down in the dark armchair. It was as simple as that. I was now closer to her and able to observe more of her: the other side of her head with its exposed ear, a moccasin sitting on a far cushion, her big pale knees. Had she turned her head, she might have seen him there — the stranger in the dark, waiting like a killer in a B movie. Did I want her to see me? Yes and no. After all, our condition is desperate. Ours is a savage loneliness of which you can know nothing. At the same time we are proud, haughty, unwilling to be known. For the moment it was enough to be in her presence.

Meanwhile I was getting to know quite a bit about her. Her name was Maureen, as I learned from the voice of someone on the phone. She taught second grade at the Collins Street Elementary School. She arrived home each weekday in the mid- or late afternoon, sometimes carrying small packages of groceries, as I could see from the attic window. She immediately climbed the carpeted stairs to her room on the second floor, where she changed out of her teaching clothes (scrape of hangers, bang of drawers) into her house clothes, which at night I saw to be either loose smocks printed with flowers, or oversized button-down shirts that hung down over baggy corduroys. Each night, at exactly eight by the mantelpiece clock — a white porcelain kitten — she called her mother and spoke to her while watching TV with the sound off. During these conversations she became tense and would rub her knuckles across her forehead or scratch her palm again and again with the curled fingers of the same hand. When she was through talking she would stride into the kitchen and return with a dish of malted-milk balls, which she devoured swiftly, as if angrily. The skin of her hands and face was very smooth, her nails short and polished. She fiddled a great deal with her eyeglasses, often removing them, holding them up toward the light from the kitchen, and returning them to her face.

It is not pleasant to observe someone secretly. For me at least there was in it no sense of exhilarating power, of mental or sensual freedom, as there might have been if I were a man of perverted appetites feeding on the sight of a seductive woman observed without her knowledge. What was it that I wanted, in that dark living room, in that lonely house, at the far end of town? To call it a desire for companionship would be to confuse it with more respectable realms of feeling. Our desire is infused with a darker, more ferocious longing: the desire for all that we have ceased to be.

I can’t say when exactly Maureen became aware of my presence. At first there were small signs — a sudden tension in her neck, an abrupt slight shifting of her head, a pause in the movement of her hand, as if she were listening. I should explain that she was somewhat nervous in temperament, and it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the new signs from her usual habits. Every evening she would get up to check the chain on the front door; she was always turning her head at the sound of a passing car. Sometimes she went to the kitchen, raised the shade, and peered out at the backyard. Once she called the police to report that someone was out there, behind the sugar maple — she’d seen something, she was sure of it. Every once in a while she sat up abruptly, rummaged wildly through her purse, and pulled out her cell phone, which was not ringing.

Now, it is my belief that these nervous natures, perpetually distracted by small disturbances in the outside world, are precisely the ones who prove unusually receptive to our kind. I began to sense a new alertness in her as I entered the room. Her body would become very still, her head would tilt slightly, her fingers stiffen, as if someone had crept up behind her and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. Once settled in my chair, beside the always unlit lamp, I would see her look around, very slowly. Sometimes she would stretch her arm across the back of the couch, place her chin on her forearm, and survey the part of the room behind her: the CD player, the bookcase, the lamp table and armchair in the dark corner.

One evening as I stepped from the bottom of the carpeted stairs and turned to enter the living room, I saw that something had changed. She was sitting on the couch, as always, but the television wasn’t on. The remote lay on the coffee table beside the cup of tea. The room was dark, except for the light that entered through the half-open kitchen door. I sensed immediately that she was waiting — waiting for whatever it was that had begun to visit her. She sat motionless and alert, before the dead TV. I hesitated. Wouldn’t it be better to return to the attic, where I had made a home of sorts among the outcast objects of a life? Why risk the dangers of an unpredictable encounter? But we are curious, we others; we are driven by irresistible urges of a kind we ourselves can barely understand.

So for a long time I stood on that threshold, feeling both sides of an argument blowing through me like bitter winds, before I stepped into the room.

As I entered I reminded myself that she had become aware of something, over the last few days. Exactly what she’d become aware of I had yet to find out. At the very least she was aware that something wasn’t right in her house, and she had taken steps to meet it head on. It was a show of courage that I acknowledged with a certain gratitude. My sense of her was that she was a lonely woman, a woman who might welcome companionship — even such companionship as mine. I was less sure of my own reasons for crossing the threshold. I suppose I craved simply to be in her presence, as someone shivering with cold might wish to be in the presence of a fire. But it was more than that. I could feel in myself a stranger desire: the desire to be seen. It struck me that I hadn’t been looked at by anyone since the flight from my house, under the smoky-quartz sky, a trillion years ago.

The couch, as I’ve mentioned, stood in the middle of the room, where it faced the television. Beyond the couch, in the far corner, my armchair sat beside the lamp table with the unlit lamp. But there was a second armchair, a more sociable armchair, situated between the couch and the television, and facing neither. It was toward this chair that I now made my way, passing behind the couch and keeping my distance from the back of a head that suddenly struck me as a child’s prank — at any moment I’d see the mop handle standing straight up between the couch cushions, the mop head peeping over the couch-back. At the end of the couch I swung around and made my way over to the chair. There I stood stiffly, facing her profile, with one hand resting on the back of the chair, like a bank president in a portrait.

She began to turn her head — not precisely in my direction, but in the direction of the empty chair beside which I stood. The fact that she’d sensed my presence, but had mistaken my position, filled me with a kind of nervous irritation that felt like an inward itching, and without caring what anyone might think I abruptly stepped around and sat down. But she had already begun to look past the chair, first toward the half-open kitchen door, and then toward a corner of the room that held a small table with a glass bowl on top. This second gesture filled me with such hopelessness that I had to turn my face away. At that moment I felt penetrated by the knowledge that this was how things were going to be from now on, this sensation of absence and emptiness, and that it would be far better for me to stop all the nonsense and return to my attic, where I would live like a spider or a bat. When I raised my head I saw that she was staring directly at me. One hand was pressed flat against the couch cushion and the other was raised to a point just below her throat. She looked like a woman who was protecting herself from a cold wind. I waited for her to leap up, to knock over the coffee table and send the cup of tea rushing across the rug, to stumble wildly from the room, but what happened next wasn’t at all what I might have expected. Stricken with a sensation of awkwardness, of sorrow, and of terrible shame, I rose slowly from the chair, looked once in her direction, and made my way out of the room. During my retreat she remained sitting on the couch with one hand pressed to the cushion and one hand resting below her throat.

I remained shut up in the attic all the next day. During the whole of that time I paced fiercely — we know how to pace fiercely! — flinging myself down in corners, leaping up, moving about, collapsing onto a metal-trimmed trunk or a box of dolls. I was so furious at myself for my cowardly flight that I wanted to dissolve into ribbons of smoke. At the same time I kept summoning to mind the unfortunate moment in which I’d been seen. She had looked at me the way a woman in an alley at midnight might look at a man with a rag around his head who is holding a knife. It is not good to be looked at in that way. It’s especially not good if one has come down from the attic in search of — in search of what? Shall we say, a pleasant encounter between two like-minded souls, in a suburban living room, of a September eve? And yet the craving to reveal ourselves spreads in us like a disease. It’s also true that we long not to be seen, never to be seen, to live out our existence — our existence! — like growths of mold in the depths of forests.

At night I couldn’t bear it anymore. I came down, but only to glance into the living room before escaping from the house. She was sitting there in the dark, waiting for me. She was waiting patiently — waiting tenaciously. I could feel that waiting like a distant storm. Outside, in the night, I felt a sudden sense of expansion, as when, as a child, after passing along the stream under the road by the side of the bakery, I came out onto a sunny field. Was it possible that I hadn’t been outside in all this time? I turned defiantly from the almost dark house and strode out into the night.

We are always striking poses, we others. It’s part of our unfortunate nature.

And yet I was happy enough, on my night journey. It was one of those summery nights in September when the sky seems to be the dark blue ceiling of an immense theater, which I had been allowed to enter even though it was long past closing time. Someone with a big pair of scissors had cut the moon exactly in half. I drifted from yard to yard with a sense of discovering new powers of movement. For though it’s far from true that there are no barriers to our kind, nevertheless we range with a freedom that, under happier circumstances, might fill us with delirious joy. I made my way through hedges and fences with dreamlike ease, accompanied by inner ripples or flutters that felt like the very sensation of transgression. Now and then I strayed onto dark back porches, where I stretched myself out on a chaise longue or sat on a motionless glider before passing on.

Such pleasures quickly pall. I struck out beyond the world of backyards and soon found myself looking up at the stone pillars and tall windows of my old high school. Inside, I roamed along rows of olive-green lockers, drifted up the stairs, entered a classroom that I suddenly recognized as my English class of thirty-five years ago, though the desks had changed and something about the blackboards was all wrong. I had sat two rows over from Margaret Mason. I remembered the heavy sweaters she wore, dark green and brown-gold. From the high windows at the side of the room I looked down at the athletic field and the distant railroad tracks. I remembered the way she would push up the sleeves of those sweaters to reveal her long forearms. But already I felt a sharp impatience. What was I doing here, creeping around like a pale criminal in the teenage museum? Back in the corridor I found another staircase and headed down. As I turned into the first-floor corridor I became aware of a motion at the far end, as of a stirred curtain. With a feeling of revulsion, almost of outrage, I understood that I was looking at another of my kind.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one. I had been feeling my way into the conditions of my new existence, brooding over my nocturnal visits to Maureen, accustoming myself to myself, in a manner of speaking — it had taken what energy I possessed simply to pass through the motions of my day. Now, all at once, I had the sense of stepping outside the narrow circle of my obsessions, into a wider realm. At the same time, as I’ve said, the feeling that seized me in the presence of my fellow outcast was not pleasant. Does the fat boy in gym class love the other fat boy in gym class? No, I kept my distance. It’s that way with all of us. In time we tame it down, that quiver of revulsion, but it is always there.

What came over me now was a violent desire I didn’t entirely understand: I longed to be back in the living room. Was it that, in the presence of my own kind, I longed all the more for what I could no longer be? The night journey had lost its power. I remember nothing of the way back.

She was still sitting there, like a marble monument in a park. I was aware of something awkward about her position and soon realized that she must have fallen asleep. She was leaning toward the far end of the couch, with her arm stretched along the couch-back and her head bent into her forearm. A pity came over me for this big girl-woman who had fallen asleep waiting for something — waiting for me — and I felt a momentary impulse to reach out my hand. It is not our way. It’s never our way. I sat down at the other end of the couch and observed her closely. The pressure of her cheek against her arm pulled up one side of her mouth, so that she appeared to be snarling. Her free hand lay palm up in her lap, with the fingers open and slightly curled, as if she were holding an invisible tangerine.

For a long time I watched her as she slept — watched over her, I couldn’t help thinking. I imagined that at any moment she would sleepily open her eyes. She would find me there — her protector, her brother. But we are sentimentalists, we others. She was dead asleep.

When at last I stood up to return to the attic, an awkwardness came over me as I loomed above her while she lay twisted against the couch in sleep; and suddenly, dramatically, extravagantly, absurdly, I bowed.

I thought about that bow the following night as I paced the attic wondering what to do. For though we’d established a rapport of sorts, I was reluctant to inflict on myself a repetition of our first meeting. Humiliation still flamed in me; to avoid another occasion for it seemed a kind of victory. Victory? For us there is no victory. For us there is only the sharper or duller savor of failure. We are the lords of desolation. We leave the triumphs to you.

Besides, darkness is our natural element, as Maureen herself had cleverly come to understand. Light harms us, like a shout in the ear. Instinctively we avoid the glare over the kitchen sink, the clock radio with its violent green numerals, the ominous night-light howling in its socket. We prefer the quiet place where the rafters slope down to the floorboards. In earlier times, before the fanatical multiplication of light, we were no doubt more present in the darkness of the world, more visible, more familiar, more woven into the fabric of things. I was pursuing this line of thought when I was startled by a flare of light that immediately went out.

She had opened the door to the attic — what I’d seen was the light from the hall — and immediately closed it. She was climbing the stairs in the dark. Maureen never entered the attic. That she had done so, and in the dark, was alarming and revelatory: she must have come in search of me. I was fortunately far away from the head of the stairs, well hidden behind a wicker hamper beside an old couch on which sat an enormous bear. Any movement might reveal me. At the top of the stairs she stopped. She stood there a long while — I could hear her breathing as if she’d run around the block. She took a step forward and stopped again. She stood motionless for a full five minutes before turning and descending the stairs.

I understood that I was in some sense to blame for having provoked this attic journey — that she was bound to search the house for a presence she felt had taken up residence. I understood another thing as well: it was in my interest to confront her on her own ground.

I listened for her footsteps in the living room before making my way down. She was sitting in the dark like a queen of the netherworld. This time I entered decisively, and as I did so I thought how rarely I had acted with decision since the moment I had entered this house. We are not decisive, we others. Or rather, our decisiveness is intermittent and erratic, with intervals of paralysis, so that what it most resembles is its opposite. Then I recalled that other life, where I hurled myself through obstacles with energy and certainty. But already I had crossed the room in front of her and was sitting down in the armchair that faced neither the couch nor the television.

I could sense the change in her, though she remained as motionless as the cushion she sat on. It was a sudden tension of alertness — a tightening that was also a readiness. All her senses had sprung open. I could see her face in the darkness, looking more or less at me but not precisely. Her eyes moved, as if trying to find someone there.

“What do you want?” she then asked.

I hadn’t expected her to speak. In her voice I heard coldness, and anger — the anger of a woman whose privacy has been violated. I heard also a touch of curiosity. And there was something else I heard, something that seemed to me a kind of wary and distrustful hope. It was the hope of someone whose desperately dull life has at last taken a turn toward the unexpected — toward the unknown.

We do not like to speak, we others. We inhabit silence as we inhabit darkness — naturally. Even among ourselves, what takes place is a species of silent speech — but more of that later. At the moment I felt a dreary need to answer her.

“What I want,” I said, and stopped. It was the first time I’d heard myself speak. I heard what sounded like a voice at a great distance — a faint, thin, rippling voice, a voice blown by a wind.

“What I want,” I said again. “What I want—” The sound of those wavering words rang out in me like a cry. I felt a violence of wanting, a rage of bitter longing. The force of it frightened me, as if I had leaped out at myself in the dark.

“It’s all right,” she then said. “Everything’s going to be all right.” And I was grateful to her for those words, for she had felt my trouble; and I was angry at her for those words, for nothing was ever going to be all right.

She allowed me to sit there in silence — it seemed enough for her that I’d come at all. Nor did she object when I rose not long after to take my leave, though the look she threw at me seemed to say that I would find her there tomorrow, at exactly the same time. And so I visited her the next night, and the night after; it quickly became a habit. She would prepare carefully for these encounters. After dinner she changed clothes a second time — clash of hangers, thud of drawers — and sometimes there were long pauses, in which I imagined her studying herself before a mirror, or combing her hair with scrunched-up eyes. Back in the living room she would close the venetian blinds and take up her position on the couch, with her cup of tea and a book. Sometimes I heard a faint whirring or grinding sound: she was sharpening a pencil in the electric sharpener as she prepared a lesson plan or corrected a set of second-grade exercises. At eight o’clock she called her mother. After that came the malted-milk balls. I would hear low sounds from the television, and sometimes I could make out the clicks of turned-off lamps. Later in the evening I might hear a faint rattling sound: salted almonds spilling into a dish. At some point I heard her moving about the living room, drawing the long curtains across the windows. In the kitchen she turned off the overhead light, leaving only the fluorescent light above the kitchen sink. Only then was she ready for me. In the not-quite-dark darkness she would take up her position on the couch, drawing her legs under her, smoothing down her dress or fiddling with the knees of her pants, turning off the TV with the remote, and subsiding into stillness.

It was about this time that I would come down, for I too had been waiting. I would make my way over to the armchair and our evening would begin.

Maureen understood that I preferred not to speak, but she herself had a good deal to say. She spoke of her childhood in a small town in northern Vermont — she had read a lot, worn eyeglasses, and felt that her older, prettier, thinner sister was the one her mother really cared about. No boy ever gave her the time of day until senior year of high school, when Ron Olsen invited her to a party and left with another girl. She went to college at the University of Vermont and after graduation began teaching in elementary school in her hometown. At her school she fell in love with an older man, married him, and divorced him a year later when she learned he was carrying on with another teacher. She moved first to upstate New York, where she felt out of place, and then to Connecticut, where she’d been teaching for over twenty years. It was difficult for a single woman, the social life here was closed, her mother was always hounding her. She saw her sister once a year, at Thanksgiving, though she was close to Andrea, the older of her two nieces. Andrea was like a daughter to her, and visited her more than she visited her own mother — not that that came as a big surprise.

I listened with wavering attention to these revelations, wondering precisely what it was that I was doing there. It was true enough that I liked being spoken to — it hardly mattered what was said. Sometimes she would seize my attention by a sudden swerve in my direction. “I can’t always see you,” she might say, “but I always know you’re here.” Evidently we moved in and out of visibility, in accordance with laws that we ourselves have never understood. “Do you see me now?” I once said, in that quavering voice — for I sometimes broke into speech. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I can see you real well. You’ve got your hair parted on one side — eyeglasses — strong chin — a distinguished-looking man. You’re wearing a sport jacket — herringbone, I think — open — no tie. Your fingers are long.” At other times she could make out my eyeglasses and my general form but without any detail. These are the things that obsess our kind. We cannot be told enough about ourselves.

I understood that what drew me to Maureen wasn’t quite the same as what drew her to me. Though she was careful not to ask questions, I knew she was deeply curious about my history — she wanted to know me so that she could absorb me into her life. At times she behaved like someone who was engaged in the act of being courted. For me she was — well: one of you. I don’t mean that I was indifferent to her. Not at all. There was a sweetness about her, a flirtatious innocence, that I knew how to appreciate. But I was what I was, and she? — she was everything I had left behind. We are drawn to you, we others, because you carry with you all that we no longer are. We are jealous. We’re angry. We are filled with unbearable longing. It is not good for you to be with us. Maureen knew nothing of this. I could feel her terrible happiness.

Thus our evenings. After a longer or shorter while I would take my leave, silently. Her visible regret was appeased by the knowledge that I would return the next night. I could feel her anticipation opening in her like a wound. For my part, I was already restless. Back in the attic, I waited for her to creak into bed before making my way down the two flights of stairs and out into the night.

The pleasures of the night! I call them pleasures, those wistful wanderings, with their intimations of freedom, their little whiffs of forgetfulness, but really there should be another word. For me the night was a larger attic, in which my restlessness might more readily seek distraction. The dark was never dark enough. I avoided the streetlights that glared down at me even in rural lanes, the store lights in town, the warm-lit front windows. I was a wanderer in the forlorn byways of the night, a seeker-out of extinguished places. I welcomed the tilted headstones of unlit churchyards, the clusters of pines and picnic tables behind shutdown ice-cream parlors. There is a poetry of abandoned public places, and I became a connoisseur of the deserts of the night: the three dumpsters at the side of the car-wash, the piles of wooden pallets in the delivery lot behind the supermarket, the row of empty swings hanging from chains beside the slide in the forsaken playground. I was the companion of lawnmowers in toolsheds, of gas grills beside tarp-covered woodpiles. In the backyards of the night, rabbits sat like stone sculptures, then darted like leaping ballerinas across dark lawns. Raccoons peered out at me from behind fat garbage cans.

Let me confess it: I wasn’t out only for poetry. The incident at the high school was with me still. Now and then I would come across one of them — a shadowy wanderer, a fellow seeker of abandoned places. We would acknowledge each other uneasily, abruptly, as our kind do, and pass into our separate solitudes. One night as I was returning home I entered a backyard and was startled to see two figures standing on opposite sides of the lawn. I say “see,” but that isn’t precisely the way we perceive our own kind. It’s first of all an almost tactile sensation, as if one should enter a black room and know that someone else is there. You must understand that these are rough approximations at best, since there can be no question of the tactile with respect to us. Second, there is an immediate and absolute perception — perhaps that word will do — of the other, which includes a knowledge of physical appearance. The distinction from seeing lies in our knowledge of certain aspects of appearance that cannot be gained from immediate sight — the back of the head, for instance, or the shape of a hand hidden in a pocket. It’s as if, in the moment of perception, we experience the entirety of the other being, without the limitation of perspective that is characteristic of sight. So it is with us. I don’t know why it should be so, only that it is so.

Two figures, then: one a man of about sixty, standing by the side of the garage in a rumpled suit, with the front part of his tie hanging out of his buttoned suit-jacket; the other a woman of perhaps thirty, in a blouse and knee-length skirt, with hair pulled tightly back, standing very erect under a tulip tree. They didn’t seem surprised that I should have entered the yard. I stood by a corner of the hedge, well apart from both of them. There was nothing unusually awkward in this dismal meeting; I understood that they, that we, were waiting to enter the house.

Soon a figure emerged from the back door and stood on the porch. It was our sign to enter. He led us through the deserted house up to the attic. It was a much larger attic than mine, well cluttered, with high rafters and a series of subdivisions that formed smaller alcoves. It was the first time I had seen so many of our kind. Disposed on barrels and trunks, on broken chairs and old couches, here standing erect, there sitting on the bare floorboards, they filled the attic like an expectant audience at a theater. Indeed it was clear to me that we were all waiting for something to begin. Several new figures entered and made their way over to empty spaces. We are of course capable of occupying the same space, we others, but the idea is inexpressibly repellent to us. The slightest accident of that kind — an arm brushing through an arm — creates in us a sensation of nausea.

A figure of about forty, wearing a pullover and jeans, stepped onto a wooden box and addressed the group. But again I am giving a misleading impression. Among ourselves we never speak, we others. Our thoughts are projected, or emitted, silently and are immediately apprehended. It isn’t a matter of having one’s darkest secrets available to others; the thought, once formed into words, must be willed outward. This is the silent speech we use among ourselves.

The subject of the gathering was the nature of our being. Last week, he said, we had discussed whether or not we may be said to exist at all, and, if so, what the nature of that existence might be said to be. The discussion had ended inconclusively. This evening we were going to approach the issue obliquely, by considering one of the questions concerning our capacities or abilities in the world in which we find ourselves: namely, our relation to material objects. If, he said, as the evidence suggests, we are insubstantial beings, how is it that we are able to assume certain relations to objects — as, for example, a chair in which we have the power to sit? It is well known that we can pass through those very objects with which we can assume relations that appear to be substantial. It’s also well known that we can rest for long periods in a manner bearing no relation to the material world. What then is our nature? What are our powers? Can we, as some have claimed, cause a material object to move? He had never witnessed it, himself, though he was open to persuasion. It seemed to him — and he’d thought about such matters for a long, long time — that although we were strictly insubstantial beings, we were, under certain circumstances, able to move in the direction of substantiality, or, more precisely, to adapt ourselves to the material conditions in which we found ourselves. Exactly how this came about was uncertain. More often than not, in his experience, it concerned the presence of them, in whose houses we took up residence.

I won’t report here all that he had to say, or the discussion that followed. Suffice to say that I found myself drawn deeply into his words, which seemed to strike at the center of what I was. The gathering lasted far into the night before breaking up rather abruptly. I learned that gatherings were held once a week, in the attics of houses known to be empty for the night. For although we avoid others of our kind, we are also compelled toward one another by some inner command, which is perhaps no more than the desire of the freak to lift the flap of the sideshow tent.

Outside, the night had already lost its charm. I returned to my attic, from whose window a streak of dawn was already visible. As I settled into unrestful rest, wondering whether I was assuming a relation to the floorboards that might be called substantial, I could already hear the sound of Maureen moving from her bed to her closet, where she would throw on her robe before descending the stairs to the kitchen.

Let me pass briskly over the next three weeks. Things happen that way: an hour expands into centuries, three weeks collapse into the space of a sentence. My existence, to call it that, had begun to settle into a shape. At half-past nine by the mantelpiece kitten-clock I entered the darkened living room and sat with Maureen for an hour and a half. Afterward I withdrew to the attic, where I waited impatiently for the sounds of her bedtime routine. Then it was off into the night with me, as I sought out abandoned places and tried to come to grips with the unthinkable nature of my unspeakable existence — then up and away, as I fled that understanding and returned to the darkness at the top of the house before the first gray began to glimmer through the dusty attic window. Meanwhile I attended each weekly gathering as if I were a responsible member of a citizens’ association concerned with neighborhood safety. Orderly in my habits, bourgeois even in my disarray, I could feel myself settling into my new unlife.

Not that the world was changeless around me. Fall was upon us, the trees — but what has that to do with the likes of us? We don’t shiver, we don’t require scarves and overcoats — those are for you. Nor does our melancholy have need of autumnal decors. Autumn, then: a fact, no more. What was changing was Maureen. Her waiting had become more charged with anticipation — I could feel it in the atmosphere. I could see it as well, for she now had a habit of changing into more elaborate clothes. One night I found her in a flouncy black dress that swooped down to her ankles, with a lavender shawl flung around her shoulders and big-loop earrings dangling like door knockers. Another night she wore a pleated mint-green skirt that came halfway down her thighs and a white V-neck sweater tucked into a wide red belt. Her hairstyles kept pace with her costumes: one night a frothy mass of curls, the next a tight updo with a French twist in back. Sometimes she talked in a rush, bursting into laughter and throwing her hands around; at others she sat silently and stared at me with an intensity that made me look away. Although she continued to honor my desire for silence, she began contriving ways to draw me into her talk. “I’m just going to ask you a question, and you just nod yes or no. Okay? Here goes. Do you find me a little — you know, attractive? I mean: this much?” Here she held up a hand, with the index finger one-half inch from the thumb. I wanted to tell her that, had we met at some other time, in some other universe — but what was the point? Her ardor made me restless. Did she really expect something of me? Was I supposed to take her out to dinner at the new bistro on South Main? I imagined the two of us sitting across from each other at a candle-lit corner table while people rose with their mouths open, their napkins falling, their wineglasses lying sideways on the red-stained white tablecloths. Even better: she would ask me to meet her mother. “Mother, this is Paul. Paul, say hello to Mother.” I was elaborating this picture when I became aware of a change in the atmosphere. The air had become denser and was pressing against me. I saw that she was leaning toward me, slowly reaching out a hand. It’s difficult for me to explain the sensation I then felt. It was a sensation of extreme alertness and above all of danger — as if something monstrous had entered the room.

I am not timid by nature and have never been afraid of the bodies of women. This fear was of a different kind — a warning that had flared up in every particle of my being. It wasn’t a physical fear. It was the fear of a child alone in the dark.

I stood up. I stepped back. I fled.

At that time I still had much to learn about the relations it is possible for us to have with your kind.

She understood; she didn’t attempt to touch me again. On her face, the next night, I saw only tiredness and gratitude — gratitude that I hadn’t taken flight forever. For my part, I wondered with irritation why I’d come back. My position toward her was becoming impossible. What was I doing there? What was I doing anywhere? Banished from her kind, distant from my own, I was nothing — nothing at all. Even that wasn’t true. If only it were! How I longed for the simplicity, the purity, of nothingness! Instead I was a something — a restlessness blown by a wind. I had sought her out for reasons still not clear to me, thereby awakening in her an absurd passion. I should have left that house, fled from that town, that solar system. But where was I to go? Besides, I was weak — we are all weak, we others. The weak are dangerous. Down with us.

During this time I hadn’t neglected the gatherings. They had about them a touch of the Quaker meeting and a touch of the secret society. It was still necessary for me to overcome an instinct of aversion, but nevertheless I found my way up to those attics and sought out the empty spaces. Some held forth inanely and at wearisome length; a few struck at the center of things. I paid attention whenever the figure in the pullover rose from wherever he was sitting. He spoke more than once of the phenomenon of what he called “presence”—the showing forth of one of our kind to one of yours. The precise conditions of its operation remained, he said, unknown to us. It was clear enough that in order for the phenomenon to take place, a receptive temperament was necessary, though what constituted receptivity was far less clear. Some of us believed that only certain human beings possessed the temperament that permitted presence to operate, while others argued that any temperament was receptive under favorable conditions, even if it remained uncertain what those favorable conditions might be. But it wasn’t only a question of the receiver. We too had a necessary part to play. We must, if he might put it that way, be receptive to being received. We must, in some sense, desire to be seen. It was true that there were cases in which we were seen unawares; such instances were uncommon, though not rare, and were not fully understood. There were also many cases in which the conditions appeared to be right, but presence was not achieved.

Such questions fascinate us, though they’re of no particular use. I knew at any rate that I had become entirely visible to Maureen, with whom I continued my nightly visits. She kept her distance, a little too pointedly, as if to assure me, reproachfully, that I was safe with her. I accepted the reproach and was grateful in my own way that she continued to receive me. One night I sensed that she was distressed about something. Her hands kept fluttering up to her face, where she would touch her eyeglasses or push back strands of hair. Had I upset her again? There was no mystery: she poured out her trouble. Her niece was coming to stay with her for a week — a whole week. She’d be arriving tomorrow. Andrea visited from time to time, and they got on really really well, but now was definitely not a good time, as I could surely understand. She and Andrea always sat up talking — but now she couldn’t bear the thought of sacrificing our evenings, since of course it was out of the question that Andrea should know anything about me. The only possible solution — she’d thought of many impossible ones — was for me to listen for Andrea’s return to the guest room, after which I would come down and visit. She would stay up late, as late as necessary, so that at least she didn’t feel she’d banished me — to say nothing about her own feelings of exile and the resentment she was bound to feel against Andrea, who to be fair was completely innocent and had problems of her own. She was the older of her sister’s two daughters, and from the beginning she’d been a disappointment to her mother — a plain-faced little girl, given to fits of sullenness, withdrawn even as a child, which wasn’t to say that she wasn’t a wonderful girl with a tender heart, but her mother saw only the outside of things — and you could imagine what happened when Sandra came along, Sandra with those big blue eyes and blond curls, happy, lovely, laughing Sandra, who looked like a cheerleader even at the age of four. Oh, but that was nasty; that was cruel; Sandra was all right, really; it was her mother who spoiled her rotten, bought the beautiful clothes that, on Andrea, always seemed a little out of place. It was only natural that Aunt Maureen should have shown an interest in poor little Andy, whom her mother was all too willing to allow to be taken off her hands. And so a bond had grown up between them, the childless auntie and the unhappy niece, each with a sister so popular that there had been nothing left for anyone else. She’d seen her niece through the throes, and brother did she mean throes, of adolescence, when Andrea had begun therapy, and she’d been there for her on Christmas holidays, when sexy Sandra and the boyfriend of the moment came rolling into town — and even now, at the age of twenty-six, holding down a decent job at the ad agency and paying her own rent, Andrea would drop in on her old Auntie Maur from time to time, especially when vacations loomed with their promise of empty days. So here she was — arriving tomorrow. There was no way out of it.

At this point in the narrative she paused to look at me.

I willed myself into the expulsion of a few words, in that thin and distant voice that put me in mind of a mournful wind. I heard my voice telling her that I would follow her plan, that things would be — all right. She was leaning forward, listening intently, as if my words were difficult to hear. Gradually the tension left her face, though she continued to look worried. She leaned back, closing her eyes.

“A week,” she said, and drew two fingers across her forehead. “Of course,” she said, “with a mother like that.” Her head slid slowly to one side, and I saw that she was asleep.

Andrea was for me a slower pair of footsteps, moving among the more energetic footsteps of her aunt. She spoke very quietly, with long silences and occasional coughs. All day she kept dragging her way up to her room on the second floor and dragging her way down again, as if she’d forgotten something but was in no hurry to find it. In her room, vague shufflings and pushings filled the silence. Later came the sounds of dinner, multiplied, interspersed with voices. The sounds moved into the living room: television, cups on saucers, low murmurs of talk. The night drew on. Slow footsteps climbed the stairs. Near the end of the hall stood a bathroom. Human beings turn a surprising number of doorknobs and faucet handles on the daily march to oblivion. The bed creaked. I went down.

“Do you think it’s safe?” Maureen whispered, leaning toward me and jerking her head toward the ceiling. Without waiting for an answer she told me that despite Andrea’s hard work, another girl had just been promoted to a position Andrea had every right to expect, it wasn’t fair the way things seemed to go against her, and on top of all that her landlord had said something rude to her, something inappropriate, Andrea hadn’t told her the exact words but it was the sort of thing that happened to women who lived alone, she’d have to look for another place, though that was easier said than done, what with rents being what they were, to say nothing of the expense and aggravation of moving, and of course Andrea didn’t make things any easier for herself by her attitude, which wasn’t hostile exactly but wasn’t what you’d call friendly either, though who could blame her after an upbringing like that, and it didn’t really help that she wouldn’t listen to a word of advice, all of which she tended to interpret as flat-out criticism, even well-meaning advice from her Auntie Maur, who only had her best interests at heart. But good heavens, listen to her! The last thing she wanted to do was bore me to death with family troubles, in the precious time we had together, though one thing she did feel she wanted to say about her niece was that Andrea could be a little, what was the best way to put it, a little on the self-absorbed side, which was understandable enough, what with her problems growing up in that family, but still, it wasn’t all that hard to imagine the needs of other people, who just might want a little time for themselves to unwind at the end of the day. Here Maureen took a deep breath and burst into tears. She immediately stopped herself and continued talking, as if her fit of weeping had been no more than a clearing of the throat.

As I listened to this rush of words, which came flying out of her like maddened bees, I contemplated my own relation to Maureen’s niece. My whole existence had been thrown into an uproar by the presence of this shuffling stranger in the house. I was irritated by the ease with which my composure could be shattered. We become used to things, we unhappy ones — we resent the slightest change. I think it’s because any modification of our precarious routine flings us up against ourselves, makes us glare at ourselves with a terrible clarity. At the same time we’re helplessly curious about newcomers, who, even as they oppress us with the weight of the unfamiliar, attract our unwilling attention. I was curious about Andrea as a dangerous phenomenon in the house, as I might be curious about a flooded cellar.

When our sitting time was over I went out into the night. Far from experiencing a sense of release from the confusion of the house, I felt only that the night was a larger form of disorder. Those wild-looking trees with their billions of branches, that wobbly moon like a child’s drawing … Back in the attic I could hear Andrea’s mattress creaking like an old floorboard. She was a restless sleeper. I imagined her continually reaching out for something that wasn’t there.

I heard her all the next day, moving slowly about the house while her aunt was at work. More than once she went up to her room and lay down. By the time Maureen returned home I’d begun to feel banished — driven into exile by those alien footsteps. I had also begun to feel a deprivation, as if I’d been condemned to experience Maureen’s niece solely through the act of hearing. I felt — the word sprang up in me — haunted. Yes, I was haunted by this unseen creature who dragged her way through the house like an invisible monster in a tale for children. By dinnertime I could no longer stand it and had contrived a plan.

Andrea, as I’ve said, had a restless habit of climbing up to her room. My plan was quite simple: I would catch a glimpse of her in the upstairs hall. With that in mind I descended the stairs and positioned myself on the step just behind the attic door. I knew that she always turned the hall light on when she reached the top of the carpeted stairs and turned it off on the way back down. I listened for her slowly climbing footsteps, heard the click of the switch, saw the line of light under the attic door. The footsteps passed directly before me and down the hall to her room. She did something in her closet. The footsteps returned to the hall. For all I knew, Maureen’s niece was a pair of ambulating feet without a body. The footsteps passed me and moved in the direction of the landing. The moment the light clicked off, I emerged from behind the door.

The hall was dark at one end and illuminated at the other by the light over the landing. I came out in time to see Maureen’s niece standing at the head of the four carpeted stairs that led to the landing and the larger stairway below. She was wearing a loose-fitting long dark skirt and a dark sweater buttoned over a blouse. What struck me was the slope of her shoulders. It suggested a terrible weariness, the weariness of defeat — there was in it a whole history of disappointments, of failed expectations. She seemed to pause there, at the top of the stairs, her head slightly bowed, as if readying herself for the difficulties of descent. She reached out a hand to the wooden rail, stood motionless for a moment, and stepped out of sight.

I returned to the attic with the sense that I hadn’t satisfied but only stimulated my curiosity. The glimpse I’d had of her was so brief that I would not have been able to recognize her in a photograph. Of her face I’d seen only a narrow pale streak, next to a broad dark streak of hair. She looked like a dashed-off sketch in an artist’s notebook. I had planned to listen for her final return to her room and then go down to Maureen for my nightly visit. Now I decided to wait for her; to watch.

It is never clear to us how visible we are to you. I thought it best to keep out of sight, like the victim of a disfiguring accident. Not far from her room was a linen closet with shelves of sheets, pillowcases, and folded towels. I entered that closet and waited for her return.

She spent a long time with her aunt that night. Wisps of conversation drifted up to me like cigarette smoke. I was trying to decipher a sound that suggested a piece of wood tapping against glass when I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She climbed slowly, as if at the end of a long hard day that had drained her of energy, even though she’d gotten up only a few hours before her aunt returned from work. I heard the click of the hall light at the top of the stairs. I listened to her steps approach the linen closet and pass by. I heard her turn the doorknob and click off the light switch at her end of the hall. At that moment I emerged.

She stood with her hand raised against the partially open door to her room. I was much closer to her than I had imagined — some half-dozen steps away. Although the light from the landing was on, the hall was nearly dark where she stood. I could see her face in three-quarter profile: the tired anxious eyes, the mouth turned down at the corners, the fleshiness under her small chin. There was a heaviness about her — like her aunt, she had the look of an overgrown schoolgirl, with something mournful thrown in. Her hair was thick and heavy, and fell into a tangle of curls at her shoulders. She had so much hair that I wondered whether she liked to hide behind it. All this in an instant — she had already pushed open the door and was halfway through.

But now she stopped — abruptly — and glanced back into the hall, as if she’d sensed something behind her. Her gaze swept down the hall, toward the well-lit landing. Then she entered her room quickly and closed the door.

“At last!” Maureen whispered, as I settled into my chair. “I thought she’d never go!”

The next day, a Saturday, Andrea rose late and went off with her aunt for a drive in the country, to look at the turning leaves. I’d grown used to hearing her shuffle about the house all day in what sounded like very soft slippers, and the silence and emptiness irritated me — filled me with a devouring impatience. We are not good at whiling away the time, we others. We don’t know how to take it easy. Loafing is not for us. Anxiety’s our pastime, desperation our sport. For a long time I zigzagged back and forth across the attic like a bored beetle. At some point I discovered that I was moving down the stairs and out into the second-floor hall. For a moment I stood before Andrea’s door, telling myself to go back, go back. Do not enter. Mistake. Go back. Sunlight filled the room like an angry crowd. At first I could barely see. Brightness lay over objects like a sheet. Then details began to emerge — a patch of pink, a swirl of blue. The curtains were pink and flouncy, drawn back with tasseled curtain ties. On the ruffled white quilt with its pattern of gigantic blue blossoms lay a big brown pocketbook and a roll of mints. On top of a chest of drawers I saw a white porcelain angel who rested one hand on the shoulder of a blue-eyed porcelain girl. A wooden clock shaped like an apple with a stem hung on one wall. On another I saw a framed painting of a girl with blond pigtails sitting on a swing and eating a pear. A dark blue suitcase sat in one corner.

From this bright and happy world I retreated into the black night of the closet. Two long skirts hung beside a fleece bathrobe. Wooden and wire hangers stretched away. A pair of fuzzy pink slippers sat on the floor.

A fine picture! — the stalker in the closet, waiting for the unsuspecting young woman to enter her bedroom. But that isn’t at all what it struck me as being, at the time. At the time I felt curious, dissatisfied — I wanted to know more about her. That was all. For us, hiddenness holds no pleasure. It’s nearness we crave — nearness and revelation.

I heard everything: the car pulling up, the footsteps leading to the back porch, the slamming of the screen door. Voices, a sneeze. A thump on a table. On the carpeted stairs her footsteps were heavy and slow. The sharp turn of the knob came a moment before I’d expected it. She was — as if suddenly — in the room. The bed creaked. I was puzzled by the next sounds, followed by a familiar thunk that explained things in reverse: she had untied a shoe and dropped it on the floor. People in rooms move around more than one might think. They pick things up, they put things down, they stride up and down like madmen, they look out of windows, they glance into mirrors, they push on. They never stop. A drawer slid open, changed its mind, slid back. A knock — a scrape — a creak of the bed. Many creaks of the bed. Had she picked up a book? Her breathing grew slow. I heard no turning of a page. I waited a little longer before I emerged from the closet.

The sunlight — the horrible sunlight — how can I explain? It was like a fistful of sand flung in my face. Even as I struggled against the glare I realized that it was softer than before — she had turned up the slats of the two blinds. Gradually I made out her form on the bed. I had expected to find her fast asleep, but she lay on her back with her eyes open. A book lay facedown on her stomach; it rose and fell slowly. She wore a long black skirt and a dark brown blouse. Her large bare pale feet were crossed at the ankles. I could see her broad face clearly: the somewhat petulant mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes, the large space between the bottom lip and the jaw. She wasn’t what anyone would call an attractive woman. I cared nothing about that. I took her in gratefully, hungrily. We are greedy, we others. We can never have enough.

I’d been observing her eagerly, in a kind of daze of concentration, when I was startled into alertness. Andrea had sat up. She had sat up swiftly, violently, with a hand clutching the V of her blouse. She looked around the room in a series of quick sharp motions of her head, with startled pauses between. Even I looked about for a moment, in search of an intruder. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat suddenly motionless. She was leaning forward a little, as if preparing for a leap. Her immobility unnerved me more than her fierce movements. She turned her head — another abrupt motion. She sat there. She listened. She sprang up and was at the door. With her hand on the knob she looked back into the room — at the closet, at the window — and vanished.

I laughed: the short, bitter laugh that gives no relief. Then, without thinking, I stepped over to the bed, bent over, and inhaled deeply. Some claim that we have no sense of smell, we others, but I can tell you that I was penetrated by the odors curling up from that bed: the laundered, lemony smell of the white-and-blue quilt itself, the darker aroma of her clothes, the sting of a hand lotion, and the fresh-acrid scent of her body, which made me think of rye-bread toast and salted boiling water.

Behold the creature of bitter laughter! — bent over the bed in a posture of abasement. I glanced over my shoulder, as if to catch someone spying on me. But wasn’t the whole point that she hadn’t seen me at all?

I returned to the attic, where I roamed among cast-off things — my comrades, my companions in exile. Impatiently I awaited the sound of her footsteps on the carpeted stairs. That day she remained below. I waited through dinner, listened for the move into the living room. What did the two of them have to talk about? Hadn’t they talked enough for one day? For a whole lifetime? I restrained myself, I crushed down my impulse to be a secret witness. Her footsteps climbed the stairs. She entered the room. After a suitable time, I went down to Maureen.

She was standing in the dark, smoking a cigarette. I had never seen her smoke before. “She suspects something,” she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, and began to walk melodramatically up and down before the couch. As she paced, she held one forearm pressed across her stomach, with the hand cupping the elbow of the upright arm. She whirled and looked at me. “She knows.”

What she actually knew was less clear than that she didn’t want to know too much. Andrea had apparently told her aunt that she’d sensed something — something in the hall, something in her room — and had thought at first it might be an intruder before she’d realized that her mind was playing tricks on her. So much at least I gathered through the sharp bursts of cigarette smoke that erupted from Maureen like hisses of steam. At one point she turned to me and said in a fierce whisper: “We’ve got to be careful. She knows, she knows. Oh, she doesn’t know she knows, but she knows. Hssst!” Here she held up a hand, turned her head sharply, listened. She shrugged. “I thought—” She listened again. “Do you think she’s listening?” She waved at the smoke with swift short strokes of her hand, as if someone might be hiding in there.

Later, on my way to the attic, I lingered in the upstairs hall. Maureen had a habit of going to the refrigerator for a drink of bottled water and a bite of whatever lay at hand before she climbed the stairs to get ready for bed. In the unlit hall I stood before Andrea’s door. A line of light showed under it. I could hear the turning of a page, the creak of bedsprings. My desire to enter the room was so powerful that I could feel it penetrating the door and coming out on the other side. But already I could hear Maureen’s footstep on the carpeted stairs. Back in the attic I listened to her enter her room, across from Andrea’s.

Please understand: it had been scarcely five weeks since I’d fled from my house through the dark dawn. I knew some things, but not many, about the conditions of my new existence. Even so, I recognized that my behavior had taken a turn toward the — well, toward the bizarre. I had always been a quiet man; a man of regular habits; a conventional man, if I may put it that way without the sneer that usually accompanies such a description. My relations with Maureen, peculiar though they might seem to an outsider, made entire sense to me. What didn’t make sense was my behavior toward Andrea. I was no bender and sniffer, no lurker in ladies’ closets. What had come over me?

Let me speak for a moment about the nature of our desire. We do not understand it, we others. Our relation to the world in which we find ourselves is murky at best. We possess the faculty of sight, though we see best in the dark. We hear, but the sound of our own voices is always disturbing to us. We are entirely without the sense of taste. Some of us are without the sense of smell, though I am not one of them. Many of us claim that we are without the sense of touch, though it’s well known that we can adapt our shapes to the shapes of the world — we can sit on couches, stand on floors, climb steps. I would argue that we have a memory of touch, a shadow-touch that permits us to conform to your world. What then of desire? Our desire resembles yours in certain respects, with this difference: it expects nothing, it believes in nothing. Above all, it does not believe in itself. Why should it? We know who we are, we others. We are not-you. We have nothing to do with you. Which is to say, we have only to do with you — for without you, we are even less than ourselves, we are less than absences. Is this clear? Nothing is clear. A murky business, as I’ve said.

As for Andrea, I knew only that I craved to be near her — to be as near her as possible. I did not crave to see her naked body. Such desires have nothing to do with us. But the desire to be near, to be as near as possible, to be nearer than is possible, to mingle, to merge, to lose ourselves in the substance of a living creature — that is what we desire, when we desire.

After Maureen was safely in her room, I found myself in the upstairs hall before Andrea’s door. I say “found myself” because I became aware of standing there without any memory of having descended the attic stairs. A moment later I was inside the room. It was entirely dark — she had closed and lowered the blinds and drawn the curtains — and it was only now, in that room, that I realized how very well I was able to see in the dark. She lay on her back with her head turned to one side and one arm lying across her stomach. The sleeve of her pajama top had been pulled back to the middle of her large forearm. I sat down on the end of the bed, next to the place where her feet pushed up under the covers. I felt gratified to be near her. I felt more than gratified, I felt soothed, as if my existence were a bleeding sore for which she — but this is a horrible metaphor. I leave it here as evidence of my agitation.

Andrea was a restless sleeper — I had known this before. What I hadn’t known was how much, in sleep, she remained in motion. She moved each of her shoulders; her hands shifted position; her head turned until she was facing straight up. Then her whole body began to roll over. I had the impression that her body was a train traveling through the night, while she lay fast asleep on a berth somewhere inside. Now she lay on her outstretched arm. Now she turned again, onto her stomach. She took a deep breath, and was still — then rolled onto her back. She said, very distinctly, the syllable “nong.” She sighed. She opened her eyes.

I hadn’t expected her to open her eyes. She saw me — I saw her see me. She sat up violently, holding the collar of her pajama top against her throat. The gesture reminded me of her aunt. She held up her forearm, as if to prevent a blow to the face. I heard myself speak — that distant, despairing sound — and with a cry she leaped from the bed and rushed to the door, where she fumbled at the knob before escaping into the hall.

I continued to sit there, paralyzed with shame, while outside I heard Andrea tear open the door of her aunt’s room and cry out “Oh god — oh god—” and as I rushed from that cry and hurled myself up the attic stairs, I could hear the women talking together, very fast.

In my high lair I paced and brooded. What else was there to do? I had seen the look of terror on Andrea’s face and I could imagine with dreadful ease the dark thoughts of Maureen. I kept out of sight all day Sunday and came out only when it was safe. Maureen was waiting for me in the darkened living room. As soon as I appeared she whispered, “You scared the life out of her! She’s practically — how could you?” She paced in a haze of smoke, waving her cigarette. “I told her it was all a dream. I think she — but she knows. She knows. I made her doubt her own eyes. I can’t believe that you — in her room, of all places. What were you doing in her room?” I stood there stiffly while she shouted in whispers. Smoke swirled around her like river mist. Light from the kitchen caught her barrettes, her eyes. She looked like a creature in a chamber in hell. Jealousy flared in her like fire. “I thought we had an agreement — an understanding—” She flung herself heavily onto the couch. Her head lay against the couch-back. A hand fell to her lap.

I breathed out an apology and made an awkward exit. I had no excuses, nothing to say. Outside, in the night, I threw myself from one refuge to another, in search of calm, but there was no calm. I had terrified one woman and mortified another — it was time for me to banish myself to the ends of the earth. But where does the earth end? The earth never ends. Besides, where could I go, really? It was also true that I wanted desperately to return and set things right — I who was wrong in my very existence.

Back in the attic I paced and paused, paced and paused, like someone with a memory disorder who is searching for something that keeps vanishing from his mind.

Have I spoken of the dawn? We do not like the dawn. We object to its youthful radiance. We dislike its suggestion of new beginnings, of the uplifted spirit. We are creatures of the downward-plunging spirit, where hope perishes in black laughter. Some claim that at dawn we cease to exist, that we dissolve in light. Blissful thought! But that is pure superstition — or careless observation. No, we’re there, always there, though in a weakened and faded way, like flowers that bloom only after sunset.

Dawn came. It was Monday morning: a school day. Maureen was soon stirring. When I heard her leave, I understood that I wasn’t going to remain locked up in the attic like an insane relative shut away from the healthy part of the house. It was absolutely necessary for me to know that Andrea was all right. I understood that I was behaving foolishly, even recklessly, and that my desire to assure myself of Andrea’s wellbeing was a mask for my imperious need to be in her presence.

I had known from days of listening that Andrea spent her time drifting about the house, but as I followed her — at a safe distance — I was impressed by the number and intricacy of her rituals of wasting time. In her long robe and big fuzzy slippers she sat at her late breakfast in front of an open newspaper that she folded carefully along the crease each time she turned the page. After this she folded the paper exactly in half and then in half again. Every few minutes she rose to go to the silverware drawer, or check the faucet in the sink, or look for something on the counter, or gaze out the kitchen window while she sipped her coffee. Later she brought her coffee and the newspaper into the living room, where she turned on the television and flipped through channels, never watching a program for more than three minutes at a time. She rummaged through her large pocketbook and removed a big comb that she pulled for a while through her hair. She went to the front door, opened it, and looked out. In the kitchen she rinsed one of her dishes and placed it in the dishwasher. In the living room she closed the blinds of each window and then partly opened them again. Once, in the kitchen, she looked around suddenly. I was standing closer to her than I had realized, but she saw nothing. She liked to rub the side of her nose, stretch out her arms, fling herself onto the couch. A moment later she would stand up and go into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and peered inside with a studious frown.

Intermixed with her restless rituals was a different species of behavior, a nervous alertness or watchfulness that I observed with interest. She would turn her head suddenly, as if she’d seen something out of the corner of her eye. Or she would stop in the middle of a room, where she grew tense and still, listening with stern attention. It was as if she knew she wasn’t alone, in that empty house, in the middle of the empty day. And an irritation came over me, for I had done my part, had I not, I had kept well out of sight, hadn’t I?

At the sound of Maureen’s car in the drive I retired to the attic. I could hear the vigorous sounds of their voices, crisscrossing far below. Perhaps they were arguing — what did I know of these women? For that matter, what did I know of myself? Of anything? Then I thought: My name is Paul Steinbach. I have fallen asleep in my bed. This is all a dream. Even as I welcomed the thought, I was repelled by its ludicrous triteness. There was nothing to do but wait. I waited. I waited for the sounds of dinner. I waited for the move to the living room. I waited for the slow, dragging footsteps on the stairs.

Scarcely had the door closed when I found myself rushing down the attic steps to the hall. In a moment I was at the landing. As I made my way down to Maureen, I became aware that I was moving more and more slowly, as if impeded by some substance in the air. By the time I reached the bottom I discovered that I had come to a complete stop — as in the old days, I couldn’t help thinking. But these were the new days, weren’t they? Maureen was sitting on the couch, in her storm-cloud of smoke. Ah, she was tired, desperately tired — she was coming unraveled before me. Her hair hung down carelessly. A button of her blouse was undone, revealing the bottom edge of a ghostly white bra. She sat there, a tired, middle-aged woman. I could feel harm flowing from me like ripples of heat.

I turned around and went back. Yes! — a coward. I confess it. Shall I say it again? A coward. She would have looked at me accusingly — pleadingly. I couldn’t — I couldn’t. In the attic I fell into a restless stupor. Dutifully I moved among her old things. Have I mentioned the porcelain cookie jar shaped like a panda? In a dusty green bowl lay an old eggbeater and a pink rubber ball. As I paced the floorboards I felt like an aging actor in an empty theater. At some point I heard Maureen’s footsteps on the carpeted stairs. The footsteps irritated me, since they meant it was now impossible for me to go down to her. Even my irritation irritated me, for, when all was said and done, what good did it do me or anyone to know, with absolute clarity, that I had failed to rise to an occasion?

I was wondering how I would drag myself through the rest of the appalling night, while the two women in their big soft beds lay calmly out of it all, when the world burst open with a roar. That is to say: a sudden noise was followed by a jolt of light. The light swept across the rafters. It withdrew. I understood that the door to the attic had opened and a flashlight was shining up. She was climbing toward me. The beam of light wavered along the stairs like low fire. I saw her rising slowly into view like a creature from the sea. I slipped behind a child’s bookcase filled with old puzzles and Golden Books. Through a crack in the flimsy back I could see her take two steps into the attic and turn off her light. “You’re here, I know you are,” she shouted in a whisper. “Are you here? Paul! Where are you? Why didn’t you—” The flashlight burst into life — the beam swept across the floorboards, leaped to the rafters, rippled across the dressmaker’s dummy and the old typewriter in the sewing basket. Off with the light — darkness swarmed back. “She told me there’s something in the house — she’s sure of it. She asked whether I’d ever — whether I’d ever seen—” She sighed. Then, in a fierce whisper: “Never!” She continued more mildly. “She won’t sleep in her room anymore. Can you imagine? Too haunted in there, ha ha. Now she sleeps with me, like twenty years ago. A bit crowded in there, as I’m sure you can imagine. Well”—in a merry voice—“now you’ll have to visit both of us! But you know”—here her voice dropped—“I’m so tired …” I heard her shuffle forward in the dark. “Oh, where are you? Paul? I know you’re somewhere.” The flashlight sprang on and she moved about, her beam of light held out before her like a sword. “You can’t hide from me!” A moment later she said, “Please, Paul. What have I done? I’m sorry.” Wearily she turned around. I could see the light shining on her moccasin slippers trimmed with red beads and white fur. She walked down the stairs, clutching the rail. I watched as she sank back into the sea.

At the sound of the attic door closing I felt a sudden stillness of relief. At the same time, in the center of that stillness, I could already detect the stirrings of the opposite of relief. That’s how we are. Our rest is unrest, our peace is unpeace, our hopefulness has a heart of doom. Things were spinning out of control. I wanted to calm it all down, immediately, forever. Yes, I wanted to assure everyone that things would be all right, in the long run. If anyone had had the gall to assure me that things would be all right, in the long run, I’d have looked at them as one might look at an elderly woman in a nursing home who has said that she is waiting to join her dear mother in heaven. But there I was, eager to spread comfort wherever I could, even as I seemed to hear, behind my back, a howl of mocking laughter.

I hurried down the attic steps with no definite idea of what I was going to do. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I knew precisely what I was going to do but concealed it from myself cunningly. In my mind there was nothing but an image — those moccasin slippers, trimmed with red beads and white fur. There they floated, helpless and forlorn. It seemed to me that I needed to protect them, to save them from harm. Swiftly — like a cleansing wind — I entered Maureen’s room.

She was sitting up in bed, in the dark, supported by a pillow that stood upright against a reading pillow with arms. “You can’t—” she whispered, in that stifled shout. At the edge of the bed lay Andrea. She was on her side, facing the wall. Only her cheek was visible above the turned-back sheet. At Maureen’s stifled words, Andrea opened her eyes and lazily turned onto her back. “What did you—” she said, and saw me. Clutching the sheet to her chest with one hand, she pushed herself back against the headboard and held up the other hand, as if directing traffic to stop. Maureen leaned forward in my direction, shaking her head and saying “No … no …” I looked at the two women sitting up side by side, their bodies touching, one pressed back against the headboard, the other straining forward, and what I most wanted, at that moment, was for one of them to move forward a little and the other to move back, so that both of them would be sitting shoulder to shoulder, looking at me with an air of quiet expectation, and in order to encourage this new arrangement I said, “What I want to say—” But at the sound of my voice, which startled me like a groan, Andrea held up a forearm in front of her face, while Maureen lifted her head alertly, raised both arms, as if she were offering me a tray of chocolate chip cookies, and let them fall heavily onto the spread, where they lay with the palms up. Unnerved by my voice, and by the sight of the two women, one staring at me from behind an arm held out across her face, the other looking sadly at me with her hands lying upside down on the spread, I felt like a man in a mask who had broken into a bedroom at night, and with a breath of apology, which sounded to me like the rattling of a distant chain, I left them there.

I left them there, but not so that I might disappear into the attic like another broken doll. No, the entire house now seemed to me a place of misery — I was eager to escape into the night. Exactly what I thought I might do, out there in the night, was as uncertain as my larger fate, but I found myself drifting from yard to yard, as on that first, fatal morning. After a while I saw that I’d come to a familiar neighborhood. I crossed a street, made my way through hedges and fences, and entered the Delvecchio backyard, with its flagstone patio shaded by a canvas top. The sprinkler and the soccer ball were gone, replaced by a leaf rake standing against the side of the garage. I passed through the tall hedge and stopped.

Nothing had changed. There stood my small back porch, with the four wooden steps and the white posts under the gabled roof. There was the cellar window with the taped pane. I wondered whether Paul Steinbach, M.D., was inside, asleep in his bed. I wondered whether he’d remembered to return that book.

In the kitchen I was startled by the refrigerator. It had become much larger in my absence. In the dish rack I saw a plate with a solid band of color along the rim, instead of the apples and leaves that ought to have been there. Somehow the old stove with its four burners had been replaced by one of those glass-topped ones. It was as if the house, in my absence, had decided to dress up in some way, like a child left alone in its parents’ bedroom. Upstairs in the hall I lingered before a familiar door — his door. What, it occurred to me to ask myself, was I doing in this house, which had abandoned me long ago? But it was too late, already I was in the bedroom, where an alien chest of drawers stood against the wrong wall. In a bed with no headboard a man lay on his side. He had a straight sharp nose, with a raw pinkness at the bridge, where his eyeglasses must have rubbed. The rimless glasses rested on their wire temples on a book at the base of a new lamp. On the cover of the book was a photograph of a woman with a boa and a feather hat. Perhaps, I thought, I had fallen asleep many years ago and lay dreaming there. In my dream I had come to this place. And if I should wake?

The sleeper stirred. He muttered something, moved a shoulder, and lay still. An eye began to open. It fell languidly shut. It opened again. Now the man began a scramble, a sideways tangled sluggish rush among the bedclothes as he tried to twist away from me. One arm, caught in the sheets, beat about like a broken wing. I had the feeling that I was watching the antics of an amateur actor who exaggerated his effects. Something shattered against the wall behind me. I looked at the floor and saw the scattered pieces of a clock. Had he thrown it at me? “It’s mine!” I wanted to shout, meaning the room, the house, his life. He was glaring at me with a mixture of wildness and wariness — a man in striped pajamas, rudely awakened in the middle of the night. In the morning he would recall his dream with bewilderment, with interest. There was nothing for me in this place.

Out in the yard I hesitated. I had fled from one home, only to be driven from another. I imagined searching for a new attic, in a new town, where I would start a new — but at this thought I could feel something stirring deep within me, and all at once I burst into a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh, that laugh. But then, ours are not pleasant laughs. I turned and made my way through the hedge.

As I approached Maureen’s neighborhood I became aware of a glow over the dark trees. I crossed a lawn, passed through the stand of spruce, and stopped in her backyard.

The house was ablaze with light. At any moment I expected to see flames bursting through the windows, leaping up toward the roof. By which I mean: all the lights were on — the kitchen overhead light, the sink light, the dining room light, the floor lamp and the table lamps in the living room, the stair light, the hall light, the bedroom lights, the bathroom lights. Even the back-porch light flung its harsh brightness across the lawn. Were they trying to drive me out by light? Like a crazed lover or father I stumbled across the brilliant grass into the blazing house. I rushed up the fiery stairway into the hall. The sharp light cut into me like splinters of glass. Behind the bedroom door I could hear them breathing quietly. I would never let them drive me from my attic. Even up there, the light was on — a single bare bulb that gave off a garish glow. Where there is light, there is dark. I made my way blindly toward a dark corner and threw myself down on the floor behind a row of peeling suitcases. A rag doll lay facedown beside me. Her yellow string hair streamed out like the rays of a child’s sun. I tried to think what to do.

I was in the midst of imagining myself on the move, passing from attic to attic, across alien lawns, through unknown towns, in remote lands, as strangers in beds rolled wildly in their sheets and clocks shattered against walls, when the attic light went out. In the sudden darkness I heard the closing of a door. Footsteps shuffled in the hall below. It struck me that I had sunk so deeply into my thoughts that I hadn’t heard the attic door open or the switch click off. Through the attic window the sky was black. For a while I lay there trying to make sense of it all. Was it still the same night? We are careless about time. We have too much of it. With a wary kind of suddenness I rose and passed across the attic and down the wooden stairs.

In the hall it was dark. I could hear the sound of breathing in Maureen’s room and the sound of movement down below.

When I reached the bottom of the carpeted stairs I saw that all the lights were out. At one end of the couch, Andrea sat tensely upright in her bathrobe.

I entered the room and started to walk behind the couch, thought better of it, and passed in front of her. Without incident I reached my armchair and sat down.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” she said quietly.

She glanced over at me and looked away. “I was afraid before,” she said. “But I decided not to be.” A pause. “I want to get to know you.” She continued to sit upright, like a student in a principal’s office.

Something about her awkwardness put me — I was going to say: at ease. But we are never at ease. It’s more accurate to say that the unease which is my nature became a little less uneasy, like a fist relaxing slightly — the knuckles are no longer white, but the fist remains closed.

“I turned on all the lights,” she said. “But later I went back and turned them all off.” She raised a hand to her hair, wound a strand round and round a finger, then removed her finger and lowered her hand. She turned her head toward me and held it there.

She continued to hold it there as I began to speak. My voice sounded to me like the rustle of dry leaves. Even in my past life I was a man of few words, but on this night I told my story: the unbreathing figure in the bed, the dawn flight, the wooden steps to the attic, the visits to her aunt. It occurred to me, with surprise, that I really did have a story to tell.

When I came to the end I waited for her to pour out her own story, but she said simply, “Thank you.” A sudden yawn, deep and shuddering, seized her. She thrust a hand across her mouth as if she were trying to stifle a laugh. “Oh god,” she said. “That had nothing to do with — it’s just so late. Look! It’s practically morning.” Through the drawn drapes I could see a faint lightness.

She stood up. “She’ll worry about me.” She looked at me. “I hope we can be friends now.” At once she turned away, walking with great strides, swinging out of sight and thrusting herself heavily up the stairs.

Above, a door shut. I remained alone in the empty room. I imagined Andrea striding fiercely through the house, turning on light after light, faster and faster. When all the lights are on, she returns to Maureen’s room. She lies down on the bed with her eyes open. She says nothing. After a while she gets up. She looks around. Then she walks back through the house, turning each light off, one after the other.

The next day it rained. It was one of those violent autumn rains that hurl themselves against roofs and attic windows, while through the water-sheeted glass there’s nothing to see but the bleak dark sky and the branches bending in the wind. The attic was dusky-dark. A good day for solitude! That was the thought that presented itself to my mind as I made my way down the attic stairs in search of — something else. Through the storm I had heard Maureen’s car backing out of the drive. I was struck by the gloom of the upper hall, as if the storm clouds had penetrated the house itself. Then I saw that the shade had been drawn on the window at the end of the hall and the two ruffled curtains pulled together. For some reason I thought: They have left me here, they have all gone away. When I reached the bottom of the carpeted stairs I saw that all the shades had been drawn and the curtains closed. A sullen day-darkness hung in the house. Andrea was sitting on the couch, in her bathrobe, erect but with half-closed eyes.

She raised an arm and swept her hand vaguely sideways before letting it drop to the couch cushion. It rose and came to rest in her lap. “I wanted you to feel — welcome,” she said, without turning to look at me.

I walked past the couch in silence and settled into my armchair. The word “welcome” had irritated me, and I looked at her without pleasure. I wanted to shout: We never feel welcome! — but I sat there, listening to the windows rattling behind the closed curtains. I stared at her large hands resting awkwardly in her big lap.

She said, “Auntie Maur told me you like to — I don’t know, sit with her at night, and I thought maybe if we — I like rain, rainy days.” She paused. “It’s all right if you don’t feel like talking. We can just sit here.”

After a while she said, “I’m going to make some tea now. I think a cup of tea would be nice. I’ll be right back.”

I watched her go slowly past my chair into the kitchen. There was strain in her face, and her stride was slightly wrong in some way, as if she were practicing a walk in front of a mirror. As I listened to her moving about in the kitchen, the thought occurred to me that now would be a good time to rise from my chair and pass out the door into the storm, never to return. I sat there thinking this thought and hearing the sound of the rain against the house, and of the teapot as she set it down on the stove.

All that dark morning she passed back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, carrying cups of tea, plates of crackers, glasses of juice. In the living room she would sit for a while over her tea, then stand up and go to a window. There she pushed aside a curtain and looked out at the rain. Moments later she would go over to the bookcase, take out a book, and bring it to the couch, where she opened it up and immediately put it aside. Sometimes she went into the kitchen, washed a cup, and set it in the dish rack to dry. Even when she sat still she was always in motion, stretching out her arms and interlocking her hands, or raking her fingers through her tangled hair. She rarely looked in my direction, but from time to time would utter a few words intended for me, such as “These rainy days are really something” or “I can see you better now.” Even as she moved restlessly about, I was sharply aware of her awareness of me. I noticed that she was very careful to keep a good distance between us at all times; but it was when she was farthest from me, across the room or hidden away in the kitchen, that I most had the feeling she had somehow wrapped an arm around me and brought me with her.

At lunchtime she carried her plate with its sandwich and her saucer with its cup of tea into the living room, where she placed them on the coffee table. She ate bending over awkwardly, while repeatedly wiping her mouth with a napkin.

After lunch she brought her dishes back to the kitchen and returned to sit on the couch. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Slowly her mouth began to open; she covered it with a hand. “Days like this,” she said, “make me sleepy.” She shifted on the couch. Then she stood up, pushed a hand through her hair, and began walking toward the stairway. There she stopped, glanced in my direction, and began climbing the stairs.

I listened to her clumping up the stairs in her fuzzy pink slippers. In the dusky light of the living room a restlessness came over me, and as I rose from the armchair I had the odd sense that she was watching me from the landing, even though she was no longer in view.

When I reached the top of the stairs, no one was there. I could hear the rain against the curtained window at the end of the hall. I made my way past the closed door of the attic to a door that stood partway open, and with a feeling of anxiety I entered Maureen’s room.

The curtain had been drawn. Andrea lay on one side of the bed with an arm over her eyes. I sat down on the other side of the bed and then lay down. I have already mentioned the sensation of danger that flares in us when the distance between us and you grows too close. That sensation was leaping in me as I lay on the bed beside this young woman with the fuzzy pink slippers who lay on her back with an arm flung over her face. But I was aware of a second sensation as well. This might be described as a sensation of disobedience, a rebellion against the very warning that sounded in me like a cry. It’s the feeling of a child who reaches toward the fire and, despite the heat scorching his hand, reaches farther. Was it perhaps only a desire to know? I forced myself closer to the flame, which in this case was also an icy wind. As I crossed the boundary I felt an unraveling, a fierce dissolution. Flesh stops at flesh — but we others, we mingle entirely, we invade and penetrate like rays of light, like dark smoke. I felt myself spreading through her like wind in a room. Who knows how long it lasted? At some point I found myself separate from her. I lay there unmoving. Tears of terror or tenderness lay on her cheek. Danger leaped along my side.

So I lay there listening to the rain against the draped windows. I became aware of pictures drifting before me: the book with the black dagger and the blood-red rose, Maureen raising her eyeglasses to the lamp, my father opening his black bag on the rug, Andrea standing at the end of the hall, her shoulders stooped and her head bent. Each picture seemed to contain a secret that eluded me. If I could grasp that secret, I would understand the universe. Then I became aware of my silence, as I lay there examining the pictures in my mind, and I recalled where I was, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon. I had the sensation that I was being looked at, and when I turned my head I saw a pair of dark tired eyes, much larger than I had remembered, looking at me with an air of expectation, as if it were my turn to say something in a conversation we had been having. Gradually her eyes changed, a dullness came over them, and she turned her head away. I was wondering what I ought to do to attract her attention when I became aware of a sound that was not the sound of the rain. It was at this moment that the door opened and Maureen entered the room.

She was stepping toward the bed and had begun to open her mouth, as if to address Andrea, for it must have seemed strange to her that the curtains were drawn in the living room and at the end of the hall, in the middle of the day, and in fact I detected in her face an expression of concern, as she looked at her niece lying in bed, in a darkened room. Her mouth was still opening when she saw me there. Her body stopped abruptly — she was leaning a little forward — and for a moment it looked as though every particle of her flesh had been replaced by a mineral deposit, as if she’d become a petrified tree, destined to remain there, leaning a little forward, with her mouth partly open, till the end of time. But gradually she came back to life, and straightening up, and raising a hand toward her cheek, without touching her face, she said, “No …” Then she began shaking her head slowly back and forth, like someone trying to get rid of a crick in her neck. Her “no,” although spoken quietly, must have been heard by Andrea, who removed her arm from her face and half raised herself on one elbow as she stared at her aunt with large, nervous eyes. “No,” Maureen said again, still shaking her head, and she began stepping backward toward the door. “Auntie Maur!” said Andrea. “It’s all right, I was just lying here.” But at this Maureen drew herself up and said in a loud voice, “I trusted you,” and raising a hand she pointed a finger at her niece. Now it was Andrea who began shaking her head, while she ran a hand through her hair and started to open her mouth, which she closed at once as if she’d thought better of what she was about to say, before she lowered her eyes beneath her aunt’s fierce stare. But now Maureen, like someone who had exhausted herself in a prolonged outburst, dropped her hand to her side, and with a distracted glance that swept across Andrea’s half-lifted torso and the lower part of my face, she took a final step backward out of the room and closed the door. As the door shut, Andrea reached out her arm, as if to pull the door back open, and kept her arm suspended there, as if she’d forgotten it.

I understood that it was of vital importance for me to go to Maureen immediately, and with this end in mind I rose from the bed and stepped over to the door. Andrea was still leaning up on an elbow, but her extended arm had fallen a little, and the fingers of her outstretched hand had begun to droop. Her fuzzy pink slippers, her dark robe partly open at the throat, her broad pale neck, her big forearm on the bed, all this made me think for some reason of a sad queen who had lost her kingdom, and I tried to remember whether I had ever read such a story. But time was passing, I could already hear sounds coming from the stairs, and with a nod toward Andrea, who was staring at her feet, I hurried into the hall.

Behind the curtains of the living room, rain spattered against the windows like bits of ice. The couch and the chairs were empty. “Maureen!” I called, in a voice like distant rolling barrels. In the kitchen I found two plates in the dish rack, a white cup on the table. Around the dark table in the dining room, with its blue cut-glass bowl, four chairs sat neatly in place. Had anyone ever sat at that table? Then it struck me that the footsteps I’d heard had perhaps come from those other stairs, leading up to my own domain. Quickly I mounted the steps to the attic, where in the afternoon rainlight it was less dark than in the curtained living room. “Maureen!” I called, trying not to listen to my voice, but she was nowhere. I walked among the piles of labeled boxes and the old chairs, looked behind the dresser and the child’s bookcases, but the attic was deserted. Then I went back downstairs and roamed the empty rooms, looking over my shoulder from time to time as though I suspected her of sneaking up behind me. From the kitchen I stepped onto the open back porch. Chimes near a porch post rocked in the wind. Gusts of rain blew across the floor. When I raised my eyes I saw Maureen striding across the stormy yard, carrying an aluminum stepladder toward the sugar maple.

I hurried down the porch steps and out into the fierce rain, but she ignored me or perhaps could no longer see me. She placed the six-step ladder beside the wooden swing that hung from a thick branch and began to climb. Over one shoulder hung a length of rope. I did not like that rope and I began to call out to her, but my words blew away in the loud wind. Her wet dress clung to her as she climbed, her hair darted up and down like flames, her skin was shiny as a seal’s. On the fifth step she stopped, looked up as if she were peering into the rage of heaven, and flung an end of the rope over the branch. She looked like a big Girl Scout engaged in some woodland skill. She caught the loose end of the rope, tied a loop into it, and slid the other end through. When she pulled, the knot slipped upward and stopped against the branch. Then she began tying a second loop into the hanging end of the rope, while I shouted her name into the storm. Rain lashed her face. When she let the rope drop, a noose turned in the wind. She slipped it over her head and stood on the ladder, staring out into the rain. I waved my arms, shouted into the rain and wind. Then it seemed to me that, far from not seeing me, she saw me clearly and wished to be seen by me. I begged her to come down, I howled into the storm like a crazed dog. Desperately I ran to the ladder and began to climb, reaching out uselessly to her ankle, her leg. As if emboldened by my nearness she jumped, kicking over the ladder, which began to fall slowly, lazily, toward the soggy ground. The rope tightened around her neck and for a moment she hung there with her arms dangling awkwardly. Then the rope tore from the branch and she fell heavily to the ground. She lay on her side with the slick rope trailing from her neck like a monstrous artery.

I rushed over to her and knelt down. Somewhere a screen door slammed. Footsteps sounded heavily on the porch. Andrea came running down the steps into the yard and knelt in the sloshy grass beside her aunt, who was trying to push herself up. “I hurt my leg,” Maureen said, wincing as she sat partway up. Andrea sat down in the wet leaves and the rain and threw an arm about her. “It’s all right,” Andrea said. “Everything will be all right now.” She pressed her cheek against her aunt’s cheek. I had moved a little away and stood looking down on them, as they leaned together in the storm like a wet marble statue commemorating a battle. Then I looked up at the rainy bleak sky, which seemed to be darkening into night. “Go away,” someone said, and when I looked back down I was startled to see the two women staring up at me in rage and sorrow.

And so I have come to this place. No one will find me here. I ask no more.

I didn’t once look back as I walked away through the harsh rain. I could feel their gaze following me, rising slowly above me, hovering in the heavens like a fiery sign.

We others have no business with the likes of you.

When the restlessness comes, like a ripple of madness, I seek out my own kind. I attend a gathering, where I force myself to crush down that little eruption of revulsion. In an abandoned attic we consider our nature, we brood communally over our fate. Then we melt away into the empty places of the night.

It is said that we haunt you. It is far truer to say that you haunt us.

Here in my retreat, here where the world ends, I return to Maureen on her ladder. What seizes me isn’t her earnest awkwardness as she climbs, or her look of innocent and childlike stubbornness as she removes the rope from her shoulder and tosses it up to the branch. No, what I return to is the instant of the leap. For in that moment I detected in myself a little hot burst of envy. To know, at every second of your life, that you can kick over the ladder and jump into nothingness — what a glory that must be! For us there is no ladder, no leap. No way out.

I used to think of myself as a good man, who took care of his patients and protected them from harm. It may or may not have been so. But I can tell you that we are not good, we others. We bring harm to you. Already I have harmed two women. I offered one a false dream and drove the other to a rope and a tree.

And yet I maintain that they are far happier than we can ever be. For they will recover from my eruption into their lives. They will console themselves with hope. For that’s what you do: you console yourselves with hope. You console yourselves with the hope of a new beginning, of another day. We others do not console ourselves.

One question that arises at the gatherings is this: Why? Why us? We all ask it. Why? Why me? Some say that we are random events, equivalent to any other random event in Nature — the birth of the first self-replicating molecule in the primal soup, the extinction of a species of lizard. Others argue that there are no random events and that each of us can be accounted for by means of scientific laws that have yet to be formulated. Still others make the claim that we are being punished, though there’s disagreement over the nature of our crimes. I myself waver between the random-events theory and the theory of punishment, with a tendency to favor the second. For a time I believed we were being punished for not having lived fully enough, for having failed to seize the portion of life that was ours — hence our terrible longing. Now I have come to think that such an argument is too comforting, that it satisfies too readily our need for an explanation. No, if we are being punished, it’s because we once thought of ourselves as good.

We are bad for you, we others. We bring unhappiness. We have no words of comfort for you. We bring no tidings of joy. Do not look for us. Cover your faces when we’re near.

For we are always near. It’s true that I have taken myself away, to this place. But we are weak, as I’ve remarked before. Sooner or later a time will come when I will deceive myself. I’ll tell myself that I desire only a glimpse, a passing glance, no more. You will be sitting in your chair, or on your couch. You will sense a change in the room. Is it a draft? Can a window be loose? You will get up and go to the window, you will fiddle with the window lock. Then you’ll return to your chair, your couch. It is a quiet evening at home. You can tell that you’re feeling a little bored. You’ll wish, just for a moment, that something new might come into your life. If only the telephone would ring! If only someone would knock at the door! That is when you will feel something in the atmosphere. It’s as if a shadow has fallen across the back of your neck. It’s as if all the streetlights have gone out. Is it possible that you’re no longer alone in the room? You’ll feel that someone may be watching you. Is someone standing behind you? You will want to turn around. You will want to look. You will want to know. Don’t turn around. Don’t look. Don’t want to know.