Дэймон Найт: Orbit 5

Are they changing, and how? I start back, but pause at the door to the house, and turn instead to the street and town. I slow down when I come in sight of Sagamore House. It is very late, almost two in the morning. The second-floor light is the only light I have seen since leaving my own house. I take another step toward Sagamore House, and another. What is the matter tonight? I look about. But there is nothing. No wind, no moon, nothing. But I hear . . . life, stirrings, something. This is Somerset, I say to myself sharply, not quite aloud, but I hear the words anyway. I look quickly over my shoulder, but there is nothing. I see the apple trees, familiar yet strange, eerie shadows against the pale siding of the hotel. Across from Sagamore House on Wisteria there is the old boarded-up theater, and for a moment I think someone has opened it again. I press my hands over my ears and when I take them down the sound has stopped. I am shaking. I can’t help the sudden look that I give the corner where the drugstore burned down seven or eight years ago.”

We wait in the shadows of Sagamore House, under the apple trees for the movie to be over, and then Father and Mother, Susan’s parents, Peter’s, come out and take us along with them for an ice-cream soda in the drugstore. We know when the movie is ending because of the sounds that filter out when they open the inner doors. Faint music, laughter, a crash of cymbals, always different, but always a signal, and we come down from the trees, or from the porch and cross the street to wait for them to cone out.

I stare at the theater, back to the empty comer, and slowly turn and go home again. One of the boys was playing a radio, I tell myself, and even believe it for a moment. Or I imagined it, the past intruded for a moment. somehow. An audio hallucination. I stop at the gate to my yard and stare at the house, and I am desperated afraid. It is such an unfamiliar feeling, so unexpected and shattering, that I can’t move until it passes. It is as if I have become someone else for a moment, someone who fears rustling in the dark, who fears the night, being alone. Not my feelings at all. I have never been afraid, never, not of anything like this.

I light a cigarette and walk around the house to enter the kitchen, where I make coffee and a sandwich. It is two-thirty, but sleep seems a long way off now, unwanted unneeded. Toward dawn I take a sleeping pill and fall into bed.

Roger. Sid and Doug invite me to have dinner with them in Hawley on Saturday, and I accept. The mountain road is very bad and we creep along in the station wagon that they have brought with them. No one is talking, and we all glance back at Somerset at the turn that used to have a tended scenic overlook. The trees have since grown up. and bushes and vines, so that there is only a hint of the town below us. Then it is gone, and suddenly Sid starts to talk of the experiment.

“I think we should call off the rest of it,” he says.

“Can’t.” Roger says. “Eight days isn’t enough.”

“We have a trend,” Sid says.

Doug, sitting in the back seat, speaks up then. “You’ll never keep them all here for two more weeks.”

“I know that, but those who do hang on will be enough.”

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“Boredom,” Sid says. “Good God, what’s there to do in such a place?”

“I thought that was part of the experiment. I thought you wanted a place with no external stimuli.”

“Quote and unquote,” Sid says. “Staunton’s idea. And we did, but I don’t know. The dreams are strange, and getting stranger. And we’re not getting along too well in the daytime. I don’t know how your people stand it.”

I shrug and don’t even try to answer. I know he won’t understand. Traffic thickens when we leave the secondary road for the highway on the other side of the mountain. It feels cooler here and I find that I am looking forward to a night out with more excitement than seems called for.

We have drinks before dinner, and wine with dinner, and more drinks afterward, and there is much laughter. Doug teaches me three new dance steps, and Roger and I dance, and I find myself thinking with incredulity of the plan I have been considering to take Father out of the nursing home where he belongs and try to care for him myself. I know that he will never recover, that he will become more and more helpless, not less. How could I have planned to do such a thing? He needs attendants to lift him, turn him in bed, and at times to restrain him. I have tried to think of other alternatives for him, but there are none, and I know that. I know that I have to write to the director of the home and apologize to him.

At eleven Roger says we have to go back. Doug passes out in the car as soon as he gets inside, and Sid groans. “There he goes,” he says. “So you do me tonight.”

“Where are the others?” I ask.

“On strike.” Roger says. “They refused to work on Saturday and Sunday, said they needed time off. They want to forget their dreams for a couple of nights.”

“I’ll do it,” I say.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I’ll do it. You can wire me up and everything tonight.”

It is agreed, and we drive back over the mountain, becoming more and more quiet as we get to the old road and start to pick our way down again. By the time we get back to Somerset, and I am feeling soberer, I regret my 33 impulsive promise, but can think of no way to back out now. I watch Sid and Roger half carry, half drag Doug from the station wagon, and I see the flutter of his eyelids and know that he is not as drunk as he would have us believe. I start to walk to my house, but Roger says for me to wait, that they will drive me and bring me back with my pajamas and things, so I stand on the porch and wait for them, and I stare across the street at the vacant theater. I know that three nights ago I imagined the past, but since then I have been taking sleeping pills, and my nights have been quiet, with no more hallucinations or dreams.

My house is noisier than usual. I glance at the two boys, but neither of them seems to notice. They sit in the living room and wait, and ahead of me on the dark stairs the rustlings hurry along; they pause outside my parents’ room, scurry down the hallway and precede me into my room, where, when I turn on the light, there is nothing to see. I know it is the settling of floorboards untrodden for eleven months; and rushing air; and imagination. Memories that have become tangible? I don’t believe that, but it has a strangely comforting sound, and I like the idea of memories lingering in the house, assuming a life of their own, reliving the past.

I fold pajamas and my housecoat, and grope under the bed for my slippers, and the thought comes that people are going to know that I spent the night at Sagamore House. I sit on the bed with my slippers in my hand and stare straight ahead at nothing in particular. How can I get out of this? I realize that Somerset and New York are arguing through me, and I can almost smile at the dialogue that I am carrying out silently. It seems that my strongest Somerset argument is that if I am going to live here with my invalid father, I can’t return with a reputation completely ruined. I know what Somerset can do to a woman like that. But I’m not going to come back with him, I answer. Or am I?

It is getting very late and I have to go through with it; I have promised. Reluctantly I take my things downstairs, hoping that they have left, but of course they are still sitting there, talking quietly. About me? I suspect so. Probably I puzzle them. I regard them as little more than children, boys with school problems to solve. Yet we are all in our twenties. I suppose that because I have my degrees and a position of responsibility, my experience seems to add years to my age, and even as I think this, I reject it. Sid has told me that he spent three years in the army, served in Vietnam, so what is my experience to his? Sid has tried to draw me out, has visited twice, and has even gone canoeing with me, but standing in the doorway looking at them I think of them as so very young, prying into things they can’t understand, trying to find answers that, if found, will make them question all of reality. I shake my head hard. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about, but I feel afraid suddenly, and I suspect that I have drunk too much earlier, and I am so very . . . weary. Sleeping pills leave me more tired than the insomnia they alleviate.