Robert Wilson: Mysterium

The construction of the research facility provoked little comment from the Town Council. Construction crews and equipment came up the highway and approached the site from the west along a corduroy logging road, often at night. There had been some expectation that the project would create employment among the townspeople, but that hope soon flickered and dimmed. Staff were trucked in as quietly as the concrete and cinder blocks; the only local work was temporary and involved the laying of high-capacity water and power lines. Even when the facility was up and running—doing whatever clandestine work it did—its employees stayed away from town. They lived in barracks on federal property; they shopped at a PX. They came into Two Rivers to arrange fishing trips, occasionally, and one or two strangers might stop by the bars or take in a movie at the Cineplex in the highway mall; but as a rule, they didn’t mingle.

One of the few townspeople who expressed any curiosity about the facility was Dexter Graham, a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. Graham told his fiancée, Evelyn Woodward, that the installation made no sense. “Defense spending is passé. According to the papers, all the research budgets have been slashed. But there they are. Our own little Manhattan Project.”

Evelyn operated a bed-and-breakfast by the lakeside. The view, particularly from the upper bay windows, was pure postcard. Dex had ducked out of a Friday staff meeting for a session of what Evelyn called “afternoon delight,” and they were savoring the aftermath—cool sheets, curtains twining in long sighs of pine-scented air. It was Evelyn who had turned the conversation to the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. She had a new boarder who worked at the plant, a young man named Howard Poole.

“Amazing,” Dex said, turning his long body lazily under the cotton sheets. “Don’t they have their own quarters out there? I never heard of one of these guys boarding in town.”

“Don’t be so cynical,” Evelyn scolded him. “Howard says there’s a housing problem—too much staff, short accommodation. Musical chairs, I guess, and he was left standing. He’s only here for a week. Anyway, he says he wanted to see the town.”

“Admirable curiosity.”

Evelyn sat up and reached for her panties, vaguely annoyed. Dex possessed a deep, automatic cynicism she had begun to find unattractive. He was forty years old, and sometimes he sounded a little too much like the toothless janitor at his school, the one who was always mumbling about “the government.”

The question was, would Dex give Howard Poole a hard time over dinner?

Evelyn hoped not. She liked Howard well enough. He was young, shy, bespectacled, vulnerable-looking. She was charmed by his accent. Bronx, perhaps, or Queens—places Evelyn knew mainly from her reading. She had never been east of Detroit.

She dressed and left Dex in bed, went downstairs to the kitchen and began to prepare a coq au vin and salad for herself, Dex, and her two boarders, Howard and a woman named Friedel from California. She hummed to herself as she worked, a tuneless little song that seemed to arise from the memory of what she and Dex had done in the bedroom. Sunlight tracked across the linoleum floor, the wooden chopping board.

Dinner went better than she had expected. Mrs. Friedel, a widow, did most of the talking, a gentle monologue about her trip across the country and how much her husband would have enjoyed it. The coq au vin put everyone in a benevolent mood. Or maybe it was just the weather: a fine spring evening, the first warm evening of the year. Howard Poole smiled often but spoke seldom. He sat opposite Evelyn. He ate sparingly but paid attention to the food. The vivid sunset through the dining room window was reflected in his oval glasses, disguising his eyes.

Over dessert, a cinnamon cake, Dex raised the forbidden topic. “I understand you work out at the defense plant, Howard.”

Evelyn tensed. But Howard seemed to take it in stride. He shrugged his bony shoulders. “If you can call it that—a defense plant. I never thought of it that way.”

“Government installation is what they call it in the paper.”

“Yes.”

“What exactly do you do out there?”

“I’m new to the place myself, Mr. Graham. I can’t answer the question.”

“Meaning it’s classified?”

“Meaning I wish I knew.”

Evelyn kicked Dex under the table and said brightly, “Coffee, anyone?”

“Sounds wonderful,” Howard said. And Dex just smiled and nodded.

Curiously, Mrs. Friedel had packed her bags and announced her intention to leave as soon as dinner was over. Evelyn settled the account but was worried: “You’re driving after dark?”

“I wouldn’t ordinarily,” the widow confided. “And I don’t believe in dreams—I really don’t. But this one was so vivid. I was taking a nap this morning. And in the dream I was talking to Ben.”

“Your husband.”

“Yes. And he told me to pack and leave. He was not upset. Just a little concerned.” Mrs. Friedel was blushing. “I know how this sounds. I’m not such a lunatic, Miss Woodward—you don’t have to stare like that.”

Now Evelyn blushed. “Oh, no. It’s all right, Mrs. Friedel. Go with a hunch, that’s what I always say.” But it was strange.

She took her evening walk with Dex after the dishes had been washed.

They crossed Beacon and headed for the lakeside. Gnats hovered under the streetlights, but the mosquitoes weren’t a menace yet. The breeze was gentle and the air was only beginning to cool.

She said, “When we’re married, you have to promise not to harass the guests”—more in reference to what might have happened than what had happened.

And Dex looked apologetic and said, “Of course. I didn’t mean to badger him.”

She admitted that he hadn’t. It was only her apprehension: of his unyielding nature, of the grief he carried deep inside him. “I saw you biting your tongue.”

“Howard seems like a nice enough kid. Bright university grad. Probably drafted by some headhunter. Maybe he really doesn’t know what’s going on out there.”

“Maybe nothing is going on out there. Nothing bad, at least.”

“It’s possible.”

“Whatever they do, I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.”

“So was Chernobyl. Until it blew up.”

“God, you’re so paranoid! ”

He laughed at her consternation; then she laughed, too. And they walked a silent distance along the shore of Lake Merced.

Water lapped at wooden docks. The stars were bright. On the way back, Evelyn shivered and buttoned her sweater.

She said, “Are you staying over tonight?”

“If you still want me to.”

“Of course I do.”

And he put his arm around her waist.

Later, Dex would wonder about the remark he had made about Chernobyl.

Did it represent a premonition, like Mrs. Friedel’s dream? Had his body sensed something, some subliminal input his conscious mind failed to grasp?

And then there was Evelyn’s tabby cat, Roadblock. Roadblock spent the evening in a kind of frenzy, tearing around the bedroom in tight circles until Evelyn lost patience and put her out. Had the cat sensed some tenuous radiation coming across the dark water of the lake?

Perhaps. Perhaps.

He woke a little after midnight.

He hovered a moment on the fragile edge of awareness, dimly conscious of Evelyn beside him, of the way she breathed in her sleep, long delicate sighs. What had woken him? A sound, a motion…

Then it came again, an irregular metallic tapping—a tapping at the window.