Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

His wife turned in bed, whispering against sheets, taking her fingers away.

Hoover lifted his head to the dresser, chinoiserie chair, sculpt lame valet, to glazed chintz that hid the second, curiously small window. A simple room, sparse, clean, a room with no waste of motion. And a familiar room, intimate and informal as the back of his hand, yet his eyes moving through it now encountered a strangeness, a distortion. He cast his vision about the room, tracing the strangeness back to its source at the window: to pale plastic light that slipped in there and took his furniture away into distances. It occurred to him that he was annoyed by this intrusion, this elusive division of himself from his things. He watched the moon and it stared back, unblinking.

Hoover fixed his chin between his fists, propped elbows on knees, and became a sculpture. His face turned again to see the window, head rolling in his hands, ball-in-socket.

A cave, he thought: that was the effect. Gloom, and moonlight sinking through cracks: pitch and glimmer. A skiagraphy of the near and foreign. Quarantine and communion, solitude and confederation. A cave, shaped in this strange light. . .

And bruising the light’s influence, he walked to the chair and stared down at the suit he’d draped over one arm—looked at the hall clock—ten minutes ago. It was happening faster now . . .

The suit was pale, stale-olive green and it shined in a stronger light. The coat barely concealed the jutting, saddlelike bones of his hips; his wrists dangled helplessly away from the sleeve ends like bones out of a drumstick —and Cass hated it. Regardless of fit, though, it felt right: he was comfortable in it, was himself.

He took the coat from the chair, held it a minute, and put it back. Somehow, tonight, it seemed inappropriate, like the man-shaped valet that no one used. As with the room, the furniture, it had been taken away from him.

He turned and shuffled across the rug to search through the crow-black corner closet behind the creaking, always-open door, discovering a western shirt, with a yoke of roses across its breast and trying it on, then jeans, belting them tightly, and boots. The clothes were loose, looser than he remembered, but they felt good, felt right.

Stepping full into light at the door, he shattered strangeness, and looking back saw that the moon was now cockeyed in the corner of the pane.

Ticking of a clock, sound of feet down stairs.

He assassinated death with the cold steel rush of his breathing. . .

The night was pellucid, a crystal of blackness; hermetic with darkness. He moved within a hollow black crystal and up there was another, an orange separate crystal, bubble in a bubble . . . And quiet, so quiet so still, only the ticking of his feet, the whisper of breath. He pocketed his hands and wished for the coat he’d left behind.

Hoover turned onto the walk, heels clacking (another death: to silence).

A sepulchral feeling, he thought, to the thin wash of light overlaying this abyss of street. A counterpoint, castrati and bass. Peel away the light and you: Plunge. Downward. Forever.

Another thought . . . you can tell a lot by the way a person listens to silence.

(Sunday. It was evening all day. Over late coffee and oranges, the old words begin again. The speech too much used, and no doors from this logic of love. We go together like rain and melancholy, blue and morning . . .)

At the corner, turn; and on down this new abyss. Breath pedaling, stabbing into the air like a silent cough, feet killing quiet—

I am intruding.

Darkness is avenging itself on my back.

(And I, guilty realist, dabbler at verses, saying: There is no sign for isolation but a broken spring, no image for time but a ticking heart, nothing for death but stillness . . .)

Light glinted off bare windows. Most of the houses were marooned now in a moat of grass and ascending weed. Driveways and porches and garages all open and empty, dumbly grinning.

(Evening all day. World out the window like a painting slowly turning under glass in a dusty frame. Rain in the sky, but shy about falling. The words: they peak at ten, pace by noon, run out to the end of their taut line . . .)

The shells have names, had them. Martin, Heslep, Rose. Walking past them now, he remembered times they were lit up like pumpkins, orange-yellow light pouring richly out the windows; cars, cycle-strewn yards, newspapers on steps. The casual intimacy of a person inside looking out, waving.

(And I remember your hair among leaves, your body in breaking dew, moonlight that slipped through trees and windows to put its palm against your face, your waist; bright and shadow fighting there . . .)

Darkness. It moves aside to let you pass. Closes, impassable, behind you.

(Four times: you came to bed, got up, came back to bed. You turned three times, you threw the pillows off the bed. Michael, never born, who had two months to live, was stirring in you and stirring you awake.

Your hair was on the bed like golden threads. The moon had pushed your face up into the window and hidden your hands in shadow. You were yellow yellow on the linen bed, and opened your eyes.

—If I weren’t afraid, I could leave and never look back.

You say that, sitting in a hollow of b(?d, knees tucked to your flanneled breasts, arms around yourself.

—Would you follow, would you call me back?

I watch your steps track down the walk to the black, inviting street. And later, when I open the door, you’re there, grinning, coming back; coming back to make coffee and wait for morning. And another night, another day, saved from whatever it is that threatens at these times . . .)

Hoover looked at the streetlight shelled in rainbow and it was ahead, above, behind, remembered. Darkness shouldered itself back in around him. Snow hung in the air, waiting to fall. The dead houses regarded him as he passed, still, unspeaking.

(October, time of winds and high doubt. It comes around us like the shutting of a light: the same thing is happening to others. And the people are going away, the time has come for going away ... It all boils up in a man, and overflows. His birthright of freedom, it’s the freedom to be left alone, that’s what he wants most, just to be left alone, just to draw circles around himself and shut the world out. Every man’s an island, why deny it, why tread water, So people let go . . .)

Hoover picked the moving shape out of the alley and was down in a crouch, whistling, almost before the dog saw him. It raised its nose from the ground and walked bashfully toward him, sideways, tail banging at a drum, whining.

“Folks leave you, fella?” A brown shepherd with a heavy silver-studded collar; he didn’t bother to look at the jangling nametags. “Take you home with me then, okay?” The shepherd whimpered its agreement. Hoover rummaging in his pockets.

“Sorry, fella, nothing to give you.” Showing empty hands, which the dog filled with licks and nuzzles, snuffling.

“Bribery, eh. Sorry, still no food.” He stroked his hand into the dog’s pelt, found warmth underneath. It sat looking up at him, waiting, expecting, its tail swishing across pavement.

When he erected himself to full height, the dog jumped away and crouched low, ready to run. Hoover walked toward it and put out a hand to its broad, ridged head.

“It’s okay, fellow. Tell you what. Come along with me to see a friend, then I’ll take you right home and see about getting you something to eat. Think you can wait?”

They punctured the night together, down the walk, heels clacking, claws ticking. Hoover kept his hand on the dog’s head as they walked. The nametags threw bells out into the silence.

“Or maybe he’ll have something for you there, come to think of it.”