Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

I followed her to the booth, watching Zack as we went. His eyes flicked back and forth between us and his mouth was a taut line. He appeared to be charged with enthusiasm. He also looked very young. I recognized the type from my youth in Florida — the misfits who had gathered around gas stations, paying great attention to their hair, cherishing their own failure even then dangerous kids, at times. I didn’t know the type was still in style.

“This is him,” said my cousin’s daughter, meaning me.

“Freebo.” Zack said, and nodded to the bartender.

As I sat in the booth facing him I saw that he was older than I had at first taken him for; he was not a teenage but in his twenties, with those wrinkles embedded in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. He still had that look of displaced, unlocated enthusiasm. It gave a sly cast to his whole character. He made me very uneasy.

“The usual Mr. Teagarden?” asked the bartender, now standing at the side of the booth. Presumably he knew what Zack wanted. He avoided looking at Alison.

“Just a beer,” I said.

“He didn’t look at me again,” said the Woodsman after the bartender had turned away. “That really slays me. He’s afraid of Zack. Otherwise he’d throw me out on my butt.”

I wanted to say: don’t try so hard.

Zack giggled in the best James Dean fashion.

The bartender came back with three beers. Alison’s and mine were in glasses. Zack’s in a tall silver mug.

“Freebo’s thinking of selling this place.” the boy said, grinning at me. “You ought to think about buying it. You could snap it up. Be a good business.”

I remembered this too: the ridiculous testing. He smelled of carbon paper. Carbon paper and machine oil. “For someone else. I’m about as businesslike as a kangaroo.”

The Woodsman grinned: I was proving whatever it was she’d said about me.

“Far out. Listen. I think we could talk.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re unusual. Don’t you think unusual people have something in common? Don’t you think they share things?”

“Like Jane Austen and Bob Dylan? Come off it. How do you get your seventeen-year-old girlfriend served in here?”

“Because of who I am.” He grinned, as though that were both Jane Austen and Bob Dylan. “Freebo and I are friends. He knows what’s in his interest.” I was getting a full dose of his sly enthusiasm. “But almost everybody knows what’s in his interest. The Big One. Right? It’s in our interest to talk, to be seen together, to explore our ideas, right? I know some things about you, Miles. People still talk about you up here. I was knocked out when she said you were back, man. Tell me something. Do people keep laying their trips on you?”

“I don’t know what that means. Unless it’s what you’re doing now.”

“ Hoo ,” Zack uttered softly. “You’re cozy, man. Make ‘em work, huh? I can see that, I can dig it. Make ‘em work, yeah. You’re deep. You’re really deep. I got a lot of questions for you, man. What’s your favorite book of the Bible?”

“The Bible?” I said, laughing, spurting beer. “That was unexpected. I don’t know. Job? Isaiah?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I can dig it, but that isn’t it. Revelations is it. Do you see? That’s where it’s all laid out.”

“Where what is all laid out?”

“The plan.” He showed me a big scarred palm, lines of grease permanently printed in it, as though the plan were visible there. “That’s where it all is. The riders on the horses — the rider with the bow, and the rider with the sword, and the rider with the scales, and the pale rider. And the stars fell and the sky disappeared, and it all came down. Horses with lions’ heads and snakes’ tails.”

I glanced at Alison. She was listening as if to a nursery story — she had heard it a hundred times before. I could have groaned; I thought she deserved so much better.

“That’s where it says that corpses will lie in the streets, fires, earthquakes, war in heaven. War on earth too, you see? All those great beasts in Revelations, remember? The beast 666, that was Aleister Crowley, you know Ron Hubbard is probably another one, and then all those angels who harvest the earth. Until there’s blood for sixteen thousand furlongs. What do you think of Hitler?”

“You tell me.”

“Well Hitler had the wrong thing going, you see, he had all this heavy German stuff around him, all that shit about the Jews and the master race — well, there is a master race, but it’s nothing crude like being a whole nation. But he was one of the beasts of Revelations, right? Think about it. Hitler knew that he was sent to prepare us, he was like John the Baptist, see, and he gave us certain keys to understanding, just like Crowley did. I think you understand all this, Miles. There’s like a brotherhood of those who catch on to all this. Hitler was a screw-up, right, but he had insight. He knew that everything has to go smash before it can get better, there has to be total chaos before there can be total freedom, there has to be murder before there can be true life He knew the reality of blood. Passion has to go beyond the personal — right? See, to free matter to set matter free, we have to get beyond the mechanical to uh,myth maybe, ritual, blood ritual, to the physical mind.”

“The physical mind,” I said. “Like the dark seat of passion and the column of blood.” I quoted these catch-phrases despairingly. The end of Zack’s tirade had depressingly reminded me of ideas in Lawrence’s writing.

“Wow.” said Alison. “Oh, wow.” I had impressed her. This time I nearly did groan.

“I knew it, man.” continued Zack. He was just gleaming at me. “We gotta have more talks. We could talk for centuries. I can’t believe that you’re a teacher, man.”

“I can’t believe it either.”

This sent him into such happiness that he slapped Alison on the knee. “I knew it. You know, people used to say all this stuff about you, I didn’t know if I could really believe it all, about the stuff you used to do — I got another question. You have nightmares, don’t you?”

I thought of being suspended in that blue drifting horror. “I do.”

“I knew it. You know about nightmares? They show you the revelations? Nightmares cut through the shit to show you what’s really going on.”

“They show you what’s really going on in the nightmares,” I said. I didn’t want him to analyze my dream-states. I had ordered another two beers while he ranted, and now I asked Freebo for a double Jack Daniels to soothe my nerves. Zack was looking as though oil had come pouring out of his scalp, as though he expected to be either stroked or kicked, His face was wild and skinny, framed by thick sideburns and that complicated ruff of hair. When the whiskey came I drank half of it in one gulp and waited for the effect.

Zack went on. Didn’t I think the situation had to be loosened up? Didn’t I think violence was mystic action? Was selfhood? Didn’t I think the Midwest was where reality was thinnest, waiting for truth to erupt? Didn’t two killings prove that? Couldn’t they make reality happen?

Eventually I began to laugh. “Something about this reminds me of Alison’s father’s Dream House,” I said.

“My father’s house?”

“His Dream House. The place behind Andy’s.”

“That place? Is that his ?”

“He built it. You must have known that.”

She was gaping at me. Zack was looking irritated at this interruption in his sermon. “He never said anything about it. Why did he build a place like that?”

“It’s an old story,” I said, already sorry that I had mentioned the place. “I thought it would have a reputation for being haunted.”