Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

I worked at this task of reclamation until my shoulders and legs ached and my clothes were covered with dirt. There was more furniture in the cellar than I had thought, all of it essential. I needed every footstool and end table, every lamp and bookcase. Too exhausted to continue, I went inside and made sandwiches from Saturday’s groceries. When I had pushed down the food, I went back out with a pail of soapy warm water and washed off what was on the lawn; that completed, I went back down the crumbled steps and began to wrestle out more things. I could remember where every stick of it had been placed, I could see the room as it had been twenty years before and would be again. She had touched every bit of this furniture.

By the time the light had begun to fail, I had it all out on the lawn and washed. The fabrics were worn, but the wood was clean and shining. Even on the lawn beside the white house in the fading light, it all looked magically appropriate — that is to say no more than that it had the tightness of all things made and used with care. That beautiful worn old stuff could make you weep. The past was enshrined in it. Just sitting out there on the lawn in the dusk, it evoked the entire history of my family in America. Like them, it was solid, it was right.

Unlike Duane’s office furniture, which merely looked naked and stunned and stupid when dragged outside. There was less of it than there had seemed. It had a negative relation to spirit.

I made the mistake of taking the lighter pieces, the dreadful pictures and lamps and chairs, down into the root cellar first. Under one of the lamps I found two neatly folded dollar bills. Under different circumstances, I might have admired the gesture, but it was proof of how badly I had acted. I finished with the light things in a disproportionately bad temper. That left me with the job of handling the heavy couches and the two heavier chairs when I was almost too tired to move them further, and in the dark. I had only the light from the porch and pale early moonlight, and the battered earthen steps, in many places now worn to a continuous pitted incline were visible only at their top. The first chair went down easily; I carried it in my trembling arms and felt my way slowly along the ruined steps. But when I tried it with the second chair, I lost my footing on an incline of dirt and fell all the way to the bottom.

To complete that Buster Keatonish stunt I should have landed on the dirt floor seated comfortably in the embrace of the chair; but I landed sprawled half-over, half-under it, with pain radiating out from all of my left leg ankle to thigh. It did not feel broken, but one of the chairs legs was, dangling from ripped fabric like a dead tooth. Cursing, I ripped it off and threw it into a corner. I disposed of the chair in much the same way.

After that, I had no patience with the couches. I was not going to baby them down the slope. I shoved the first up to the lip of the cellar, nudged it over until it was set. and let go of the arm. It crashed down to the bottom. I grunted with satisfaction and was turning to the second when I became aware of a flashlight bobbing toward me.

“Goddam you, Miles,” Duane said. The flashlight was held on my face. In a moment he had moved into the area of light from the porch.

“You don’t need a flashlight to see it’s me.”

“No, even on a dark night I’d know it was you.” He flicked off the flashlight and stepped closer to me. His face was savage. “Goddam you. I wish you’d never come back here. What the hell were you thinking of anyhow? You fucking bastard.”

“Look,” I said, “I know it looks funny, but—” I realized that as far as anger was concerned I was an amateur. Duane’s face seemed to be inflating.

“Is that what you think? You think it looks funny? Now you look. If you had to go and talk about that goddam house, why did you have to talk about it with my daughter?”

I was too stunned to reply.

He glared at me for another long moment, and then whirled to the side and banged his hand against one of the porch supports.

That was when I should have started to worry — when I was given special dispensation.

“Don’t you have an answer? You shit, Miles. Everybody’s forgotten about that house by now. Alison was never going to find out. In a little while, the goddam thing was going to fall over anyhow. She’d never know. Then you come along and tell her it was my ‘dream house,’ huh? Then she can get one of the drunken bums in Arden to tell her all about it, can’t she? I suppose you wanted to get her to laugh at me, just the way you and your cousin used to do.”

“It was a mistake, Duane. I’m sorry. I thought she knew already.”

“Bullshit, Miles, bull shit . My dream house, isn’t that what you called it? You wanted to make her laugh at me. You wanted to humiliate me. I should pound you into the ground.”

“Maybe you should,” I said. “But if you’re not going to, then listen to me. It was an accident. I thought it was something everybody knew.”

“Yeah, that makes me feel real good. I should break you up.”

“If you want a fight, give it a try . But I’m apologizing to you.”

“You can’t apologize for that, Miles. I want you to stay away from my daughter, hear that? Stay away from her, Miles.”

He might not ever have noticed the furniture around us if I hadn’t thumped his hand into the couch. Pure furious astonishment replaced the rage in his face.

“Now what the hell are you doing?” he screamed.

“I’m putting back the old furniture,” I said, my heart sinking and the foolishness of my entire project momentarily clear. “When I go you can change it all back again I have to do it, Duane.”

“You’re putting back — nothing’s good enough for you, is it. Miles? You have to spoil everything you touch. You know, I think you’re crazy, Miles. And I’m not the only one around here who thinks so. I think you’re dangerous. You oughta be locked up. Pastor Bertilsson was right about you.” He flicked the flashlight on again and shone it into my eyes. “We’re quits. Miles I’m not gonna throw you off the place, I’m not gonna pound the crap out of you, but I’m sure as hell gonna keep my eye on you. You can’t get away with squat from now on without my knowing it.”

The light came off my face and played on the few items of furniture still dotted around the lawn. “Goddam you, you’re out of your skull. Somebody ought to put you away.” For a moment I thought that he probably was right. He turned away without bothering to look at me. After he had stomped or six feet away, I got the flashlight treatment again, but this time he was unable to hold it steadily on my face. “And remember, Miles,” he called. “You stay away from my kid. Just keep off of her.”

It was too much like Auntie Rinn. I wrestled the other couch over to the abyss and savagely pushed it down. It crashed satisfactorily into the one already at the bottom. I thought I heard wood breaking. I kicked the doors over and shut. It took me another half hour to get the old furniture inside the old house. I just let it sit where I dropped it. Then I opened a bottle and took it upstairs.

All my life I have been engaged in Sisyphean and hopeless tasks, and given the ache and flutter in my muscles, it may not be odd that I dreamed of pushing my grandmother uphill in a wheelchair through an obscure territory. We were surrounded by brilliant light. My grandmother was surprisingly heavy. I felt great dread. The smell of woodsmoke burned my nostrils. I had committed a murder, a robbery, something, and forces were closing in. They were vague as yet, but they knew about me and they would find me.