Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

Sweating, I rolled over on the bed, gasping. The dream seemed to have lasted for hours- — I seemed to have been caught in it from the first moments of sleep. I lay panting under the great weight of guilt and panic. I was held responsible for many deaths; I had caused these deaths, and everybody knew.

Only gradually, as I saw light begin to crawl through the window, did rationality appear. I had never killed anyone. My grandmother was dead; I was in the valley to get work done. Easy , I said out loud. Only a dream. I tried to produce alpha waves, and began to breathe deeply and evenly. It took a long time for the enormous sense of guilt to dissipate.

I have always been a person with an enormous excess of guilt. My true vocation is that of guilt expert.

For three-fourths of an hour I tried to fall asleep again, but my system would not permit it, my nerves felt as though doused in caffeine, and I got out of bed just past five. Through the bedroom window I could see dawn slowly beginning. Dew lay silvery over the old huge black iron pig trough in the field near the house where my grandfather had kept hogs. The field was now used for grazing a horse and a neighbor’s cows. Beside humped cows, the tall chestnut mare was still asleep, standing with its long neck drooping down. Further up began a sandstone hill, pocked with shallow caves and overgrown with small trees and intensely curling vines and weeds. It looked much as it had during my childhood. A very light gray fog, more like a stationary mist than fog, hung in the lowest parts of the field. As I stood by the window, absorbing peace from that long green landscape edged with fog. two things happened which made me momentarily and at first without realizing it hold my breath. I had let my eye travel up across the road and the fields — the colors of Duane’s corn were beautifully muted by the gray light, and the woods seemed blacker than in the sunlight. Light fog like smoke came curling out of the mass of trees. Then I unmistakably saw a figure emerge, embraced by the fog, and hover for a moment at the boundary between wood and field. I remembered my mother telling me of seeing a wolf come from those woods forty years before — of seeing a wolf pause perhaps at that exact spot and stand tense with hunger, leveling its muzzle at the house and barn. It was, I was almost certain, the same person I had seen the previous afternoon. Like the wolf, it too stood and paused and looked toward the house. My heart froze. I thought: a hunter No. Not a hunter. I didn’t know why not, but not. In the same second I heard the bee-noise of a motorcycle.

I glanced at the empty road and then back up to the tree line. The figure had disappeared. After a moment, the motorcycle entered my frame of vision.

She was hanging on behind him, wearing a blanket - like poncho against the morning chill. He wore uniform black, jacket to boots. He cut the engine just after they passed out of my sight, and I wrestled myself into my bathrobe and hurried down the narrow stairs. I quietly stepped onto the screen porch. They were not kissing or embracing, as I had expected, but were merely standing in the road, looking in different directions. She put her hand on his shoulder; I could see his skinny intense enthusiast’s face, a wild face. He had long upswept oldfashioned rock ‘n’ roll hair, raven black. When she removed her hand, he nodded curtly. The gesture seemed to express both dependence and leadership. She brushed his face with her fingers and began to walk up the road. Like me, he watched her go, walking along with her stiff Tin Woodsman’s walk, and then he jumped back on his bike, gunned it, wheeled around in a flashy Evel Knievel circle and roared away.

I stepped back inside and realized that the inside of the house was as cold and moist as the porch. On my chilled feet I went into the kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove. In a cupboard I found a jar of instant coffee. Then I stepped back outside onto the damp boards of the porch. The sun was just beginning to appear, huge and violently red. After a minute or two Alison reappeared, coming quietly around the side of her house, taking long slow strides. She crossed the back of her house until she reached the last window, where the light still burned. When she stood before it she levered the window up until she stood on tiptoe and then she hoisted herself into the bedroom.

After two cups of the bitter coffee, gulped while standing in bathrobe and bare feet on the cold kitchen floor; after two eggs fried in butter and a slice of toast, eaten at the old round wooden table with the sun beginning to dispel the traces of fog; after appreciation of the way cooking had warmed the kitchen; after adding more greasy dishes to those in the sink; after undressing in the bathroom and with distaste scrutinizing my expanding belly; after similar scrutiny of my face; after showering in the tub; after shaving; after pulling clean clothes out of my suitcase and dressing in a plaid shirt, jeans and boots; after all this I still could not begin to work. I sat at my desk and examined the points of my pencils, unable to rid my mind of that awful dream. Although the day was rapidly warming, my little room and the entire house seemed pervaded with cold breath, a chill spirit I associated with the effect of the nightmare.

I went downstairs and took the photograph of Alison off its hook in the living room. Back upstairs I placed it on the back of the desk, tilting it against the wall. Then I remembered that there was another photograph which had hung downstairs — indeed there had been many others, and Duane had presumably packed most of them away with the furniture after our grandmother’s death. But only one of all those photographs of various grandchildren and nephews and children of nephews concerned me. This was a photograph of Alison and myself, taken by Duane’s father in 1955, at the beginning of the summer. We were standing before a walnut tree, holding hands, looking into the incomprehensible future. Just thinking of the picture now made me shiver.

I looked at my watch. It was still only six-thirty. I realized that it would be impossible to get any work done in my mood and at such an hour. At any rate, I was unused to doing any sort of writing before lunch. I felt restless, and had to get out of my workroom where the typewriter, the pencils, the desk itself rebuked me.

Downstairs, I perched on Duane’s uncomfortable sofa while I sipped a second cup of coffee. I thought about D. H. Lawrence. I thought about Alison Updahl’s nighttime excursion. I rather approved of that, though I thought her company could have been better chosen. At least the daughter would be more experienced than her father; there would be no Dream Houses for her. Then D. H. Lawrence began to rant at me again. I had written much of the middle portion of the book, but I had saved the beginning and ending for last — the ending was fully outlined, but I still had no idea of how to begin. I needed a first sentence, preferably one with several scholarly clauses. From which forty introductory pages could eloquently, commandingly flow.

I went into the kitchen, once again cold and damp. I lowered my cup into the sink with the other dishes. Then I walked around the table and took the telephone book from its shelf beneath the old wall phone. It was a thin volume, about the size of a first collection of poems, and on the cover was a pastoral photograph of two small boys fishing from a pier. The boys were surrounded by blue cold-looking river water nicked by a million ripples. Though barefoot, the boys on the pier wore sweaters. Across the river massed a thick unbroken line of trees — like an eyebrow across a thug’s face. When I had looked at it for longer than a second, the photograph seemed less pastoral than ominous. It was menacing. My own feet had been bare on cold boards; I too had been suspended above indifferent blue water. In the photograph the sun was dying. I folded the cover back and flipped to the page I wanted and dialed the number.