Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

“Sure,” I agreed, though the qualification made me uneasy. “What’s wrong with Zack?”

“He’s no good. He’s a weirdo. Listen, Alison’s right, I ought to be out doing some work, but we still should set up your desk. Or I could just tell you where everything is and you could set it up yourself. It’s no work.”

Over the noise of the television set, Duane told me where to find the door and the trestles in his basement and then said, “Make yourself at home,” and went outside. I watched him through the side windows of the kitchen as he lumbered toward the pole barn and emerged from it atop a giant tractor. He looked comfortable and at ease, as some men look natural on a horse. Somewhere he had acquired a peaked cap which I could see when the tractor had taken him behind the tall rows of corn up in the far field.

The sound of the television drew me into the unexpected room where Alison Updahl had gone. When I was a child this room had been cramped, linoleum-tiled like the kitchen, and occupied chiefly by a sprung davenport and an inefficient television. Duane had evidently rebuilt it; his skills had grown since the days of the Dream House. Now it was three times its former size, thickly and luxuriously carpeted, and furnished in a manner which suggested a great deal of expense. My cousin’s daughter, sprawled on a brown couch and watching a color television, looked, in her T shirt and jeans and bare feet, like a teenager in an affluent suburb of Chicago or Detroit. She did not look up when I entered. She was rigid with selfconsciousness.

I said, “What a nice-looking room. I haven’t seen it before.”

“It stinks.” She was still looking at the television, where Fred Astaire was sitting in a racing car. After a second I saw that the car was up on blocks in a closed garage.

“Maybe it just smells new,” I said, and earned a glance. But no more than that. She snorted through her nose and returned to the movie.

“What’s the film?”

Not bothering to look up again, she said, “ On The Beach . It’s great.” She waved off a fly which had settled on her leg. “Suppose you let me try and watch it?”

“Whatever you say.” I went to a big comfortable chair at the side of the room and sat. I watched her for a minute or so without either of us speaking. She began to jerk her foot up and down rhythmically, then to toy with her face. After a while she spoke.

“It’s about the end of the world. I think that’s a pretty neat idea. Zack said I should watch it. He saw it before. Do you live in New York?”

“On Long Island.”

“That’s New York. I’d like to go there. That’s where everything is.”

“Oh?”

“You should know. Zack says everything is going to end pretty soon, maybe with people throwing bombs, maybe with earthquakes, it doesn’t matter what, and that everybody thinks it’ll happen in New York first. But it won’t. It’ll happen here first. There’ll be bodies all over the Midwest, Zack says.”

I said that it sounded like Zack was looking forward to it.

She sat up straight, like a wrestler on the mat, and took her attention off the screen for a moment. Her eyes were very pale. “Do you know what they found at the Arden dump a couple of years ago? Just when I was starting high school? Two heads in paper bags. Women’s heads. They never found out who they were. Zack says it was a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

“That it’s beginning. Pretty soon there won’t be any schools, any government, any armies. There won’t be any of that shit. There’ll just be killing. For a long time. Like with Hitler.”

I saw that she wished to shock. “I think I can see why your father doesn’t like Zack.”

She glared at me and returned her gaze sullenly to the screen.

I said, “You must have known that girl who was killed.”

She blinked. “Sure I knew her. That was terrible.”

“I suppose she helps prove your theories.”

“Don’t be creepy.” Another pale-eyed, sullen stare from the little warrior.

“I like your name.” In truth, and despite her foul manners, I was beginning to like her. Lacking her confidence, she had none of her namesake’s awesome charm, but she had her energy.

“Ugh.”

“Were you named after anybody?”

“Look, I don’t know and I don’t care, okay?”

Our conversation seemed to be concluded. With an air which suggested that she would stay in that position for life, Alison had returned to the television set. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner were strolling across a field arm in arm, looking as if they too thought the end of the world was a neat idea. She spoke again before I could rise and leave the room..

“You’re not married, are you?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you get married? Didn’t you used to be married?”

I reminded her that she had been at my wedding.

Now she was staring at me again, ignoring Gregory Peck’s twitching jaw and Ava Gardner’s trembling breast. “You got divorced? Why?”

“My wife died.”

“Holy cow, she died? Were you upset? Was it suicide?”

“She died by accident,” I said. “Yes, I was upset, but not for the reasons you’re imagining. We hadn’t lived together for some time. I was upset that another human being, one to whom I had been close, had died senselessly.”

She was reacting to me strongly, in an almost sexual way — I could almost see her temperature rising and I thought I could smell blood. “Did you leave her or did she leave you?” She had curled one leg beneath herself and straightened her back on the couch so that she was sitting up and staring at me with those flat seawater eyes. I was better than the movie.

“I’m not sure that’s important. I’m not sure it’s any of your business either.”

“She left you.” Accent on both pronouns.

“Maybe we left each other.”

“Did you think she got what she deserved?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“My father would. He’d think that.” I saw the point of these odd questions finally, and felt an unexpected twinge of pity for her. She had lived all her life within her father’s suspicion of womankind. “So would Zack.”

“Well, people can surprise you sometimes.”

“Hah,” she granted. It was a proper rejection of my cliché then she twisted herself back around, almost flouncing on the couch, to watch the movie again. Now my audience was truly over, and this complicated little warrior queen was bidding me leave.

“You needn’t bother to show me the way out,” I said, and left the room. On the other side of the kitchen, in the little vestibule before the door was the entrance to the basement. I opened this second door and fumbled for the light. When I found the switch and flicked it up, the bulb illuminated only the wooden staircase and a pool of packed earth at its foot. I began carefully to descend.

It still bothers me that I did not go to Duane to discuss his daughter’s loony theories. But I have heard proposals more bizarre from my students — many of them my female students. And as I navigated Duane’s basement, stooping over, hands extended, going to what I hoped was the west wall, I considered that he had surely heard it all by now, his daughter’s ventriloquial act: he had said this Zack was a weirdo, and I was inclined to agree. We had presumably judged on the same evidence. And their family problems were secondary to me, or tertiary, or quaternary, if I counted Alison Greening, my work and my well-being as my interlocking priorities. Mea culpa . Also, I would not have given Alison Updahl more problems than daughterhood had.

The pad of my bandage bumped a clean flat surface and sent it rocking. With my right hand I reached to steady it, and grasped by accident a smooth long wooden handle. It too was swinging. The object, I realized after a moment’s further groping, was an ax. I saw that I could have jostled it off its peg and severed my foot. I swore aloud, and felt gently around for more axes in the air. My hand brushed another long depending handle, then another, and after it a fourth. By this time my eyes had begun to adjust to the cellar’s darkness, and I could discern the four shadowy handles hanging down in a row from one of the ceiling supports; rakes and garden hoes hung beside them. I worked my way around them, threading through bags of cement and Qwik-Ferm. I stepped over a stack of equipment catalogs. Beyond them a row of things like skinny dwarf mummies leaned against the wall. After a second I knew they were rifles and shotguns in soft cases. Shell boxes were stacked up at one end of the row. Like most farmers, Duane did not find it necessary to put his guns on display. Then I saw what I was looking for. Leaning against the wall, just as Duane had described it, was an old white paneled door, a perfect flat surface for a desk. It had odd doorknobs, but they could easily be taken off. Perhaps Duane would want them — as I got closer to the door, I saw that the knobs were glass, thousand-sided. Beside the door were stacked two trestles, Duane’s sawbucks, like insects in the act of copulation. And beside these was a case of empty Coke bottles, the old eight-ounce variety. The top had been ripped off to expose the open, sucking mouths of the bottles.