Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

— Talk to Rinn, my grandmother said.

She repeated — Talk to Rinn.

And again — Talk to Rinn.

I ceased pushing the wheelchair. My muscles could no longer bear the strain; we seemed to have been going uphill for hours. I placed my hand on her head and bent over. Gramma, I said — I’m tired. I need help. I’m afraid. The woodsmoke smell swarmed up, occupying the spaces within my skull.

When she turned her face to me it was black and rotten.

I heard three bare, cynical handclaps.

My screams woke me up — think of that, a man alone in a white bedroom, screaming on his bed! A man alone, pursued only by himself. My body seemed heavy and incapable of motion. My mouth burned and my head felt stuffed with oily rags. Result of abuse of magic substance. I gently swung my legs out of bed and sat up bowing my back and holding my forehead in my palms. I touched the place where my hairline used to be, now smooth and oily skin instead of soft hair. My foot encountered the upright bottle, I risked a glance. It was more than half empty. Evidence of mortality lay all about me. I stood on long sensationless legs Except for the boots, I still wore Sunday’s clothes, now smudged and crusted with dirt from the root cellar. I could taste my screams.

The stairs were navigable as long as I planted my hands on the close walls.

The furniture at first startled me. It was the wrong furniture in the wrong places. Then I remembered the scene of the previous night. Duane and the flashlight stitching, into my face. That too seemed to have the quality of drunkenness. Effects can leak backward and forward in time, staining otherwise innocent events. I sat heavily on the old couch. I feared that I could fall straight through it into another dimension. On Sunday I had told myself that I knew the precise, proper location of all my grandmother’s things. Now I saw that was an illusion. I would have to experiment until the room clicked shut like a tumbler in a lock, itself again at last.

The bathroom. Hot water. Drinking water. I pushed off the couch and avoided the haphazard furniture and came into the kitchen.

Alison Updahl was leaning against the Counter, chewing something. She wore a T shirt (yellow) and jeans (brown). Her feet were bare, and I could feel the chill of the floor as if it were penetrating my own feet.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s too early for company.”

She finally finished chewing, and swallowed. “I have to see you,” she said. Her eyes were large.

I turned away, aware of the presence of a complication I was in no condition to handle. On the table was an untouchable plate of congealed scrambled eggs and shriveled bacon.

“Mrs. Sunderson made that for you, I guess. She took one look in the other room and said she would clean in there after you decided how you wanted the furniture. And she said you busted that old sea chest. She said that was a valuable antique. Her family has one like it and a man from Minneapolis said it was worth two hundred dollars.”

“Please, Alison.” I ventured another look at her. Beneath the tight yellow shirt her large breasts hung heavily, comfortably. They looked like Claes Oldenburg torpedoes. Her feet, surprisingly, were small, white, slightly puffy, beautiful. “I’m too wrecked to go public.”

“I came for two reasons. The first is, I know I did a stupid thing by talking to Daddy about that house. He really blew up. Zack warned me, but I went right ahead and asked him anyhow. That was stupid, all right. What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Are you hung over? And why are you putting all that old furniture and stuff back upstairs?” She was speaking very quickly.

“I’m working on a project.”

That stumped her. I sat down at the table and shoved the cold food away before I could smell it.

“You don’t have to worry about Daddy. He’s real mad, but he doesn’t know I’m here. He’s out in the new fields. That’s way down the road. He doesn’t know about lots of things I do.”

I finally saw that she was being very chatty — too chatty.

The telephone began to shrill. “Shit,” I said, and weakly stood. When I plucked the earpiece off the box, I waited for the caller to say something. Silence. “Who is it?” I got no response. “Hello, hello.” I heard a noise like wings, like the whuffle of a fan, like beating air. The room was cold. I slammed the earpiece down on the metal hook.

“They didn’t say anything? That’s weird. Zack says that telephones can lock you into these waves of energy from outer space, and he said that if everybody took their phones off the hook at exactly the same second all over the world you could get pure outer space energy coming in waves through the receiver. Another idea he had was that if everybody in the world called the same number at exactly the same split second, there’d be some kind of energy explosion. He says that electronic and things like telephones are all making us ready for the apocalypse and the revelations.” There was a doll-like brightness in all of this.

“I need a glass of water,” I said. “And a bath. That’s a hint.” I went to the sink and stood beside her while I watched cool water rush into a glass. I drank it in two or three large inhalations, feeling the water seem to sparkle along veins throughout my chest. A second glass failed to reproduce these sensations.

“Did you ever get any of those calls in the middle of the night?”

“No. I wouldn’t answer it if I did.”

“I’m surprised. It looks like a whole lot of people around here don’t like you very much. They talk about you. Didn’t something bad happen to you once a long time ago? Something did, didn’t it — something all the old people know about?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. My life has been limitless bliss from infancy. Now I’m going to take a bath.”

“Daddy knows about it, doesn’t he? I heard him say something, well he didn’t really say anything, he was talking about it without saying it straight out, on the telephone a couple nights ago. I think he was talking to Zack’s father.”

“It’s hard to think of Zack having parents,” I said. “He’s more the head-of-Zeus type. Now scram. Please.”

She wasn’t going to budge. The water had awakened a sharp floating pain high behind my forehead. I could sense the tension in her, stronger now than my hangover. Alison crossed her arms over her stomach, consciously squeezing her breasts together. I caught her blood smell. “I said I had two reasons. I want you to make love to me.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“He won’t be back for at least two hours. It doesn’t take very long anyhow,” she added, giving me more insight than I wished to have into Zack’s sexual life.

“What would good old Zack think about it?”

“It’s his idea. He said it was so I could learn discipline.”

“Alison,” I said, “I’m going into the bathroom now. We can talk about this later.”

“We could both fit into the bathtub.”

Her voice was light, her face miserable. I was terribly conscious of her thighs in the tight brown jeans, of the large soft breasts, the plump pretty feet on the cold floor. If Zack had been there, I would have shot him.

Mildly, I said, “I don’t think Zack is very fair to you.” She abruptly turned and wheeled out, slamming the door.

After my bath I remembered what my conversation with Duane on Sunday had resolved me to do, and I went immediately to the telephone book jacketed with the two small boys suspended over cold water. Paul Kant lived on Madison Street in Arden, but when he picked up the telephone his voice was so faraway and small that he might have been in Tibet.

“Paul, this is Miles Teagarden. I’ve been around for a week or so, and I tried to see you a few days ago.”