Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

— coughing, up behind the bushes, impatiently unbuttoning the white shirt and unlacing his boots, hearing the signal of a whistle that now, in two minutes, five minutes, they would jump on the girl and stop her contempt in the simplest way they knew, hearing her voice saying Do birds cough ? —

I heard him make a noise in his throat, The pounding stopped. The hammer thudded to the ground, the pipe sprang back. Duane hopped away from the tractor, gripping the wrist of his splayed left hand with his right, and moved with surprising speed past me and out into the sun. I went after him; his body seemed compressed, under a suddenly increased gravity. He was standing spread-legged beside the rusted hooks and curls of metal, examining his hand, turning it over. He had sliced the skin at the base of his thumb. “Not so bad,” he said, and pressed the wound against his coveralls.

I did not know then why I chose that moment to say “Last night the gas went on again,” but now I see that his accident reminded me of mine.

“Everything’s fouled up in that house,” he said, holding his hand tightly against the filthy coveralls. “I oughta tear it down.”

“Someone told me it might be a warning.”

He said, “You’re liable to get all the warnings you can use,” and stepped off toward his house, having given me another as useless as the rest.

I went back to my grandmother’s house and called the Arden police station. What I wanted was not to accuse Polar Bears or to seek a futile revenge by cursing at him, but simply to hear his voice again, with what I now knew or thought I knew in my mind while I listened to it. I felt as bottomless as the quarry was said to be, as directionless as still water, and I do not believe that I felt any anger at all. I could remember Polar Bears striking his steering wheel, enraged, saying, “Don’t you know better than to use that Greening name? That’s what you don’t want to remind people of, boy. I’m trying to keep all that in the background.” That was Larabee at work, keeping things out of sight — he would say, using his Larabee-side as he had while defending it, for my own good. But Hovre was not in his office, and Dave Lokken greeted me with a cold reluctance which barely permitted him to say that he would tell the Chief that I had called.

Upstairs, my workroom looked very little as it had on the day I had set it up. The books once piled on the floor were either given away or stacked in a far corner to gather dust. The typewriter was in its case on the floor, and I had thrown away all the typist’s paraphernalia. I was writing my memoir in pencil, being too clumsy a typist to be able to work at the speed required. All of the thick folders of notes and drafts, along with my laboriously compiled packs of file cards, I had burned a week and a half before. I read somewhere that birds shit before they fly, and I was engaged in a parallel process, stripping myself down for takeoff, making myself lighter.

I often worked until I fell asleep at my desk. That was what I did Monday night, and I must have come awake about the time the men from Arden and the valley thrust their way into Roman Michalski’s house and ruined Galen Havre’s plans by giving flesh to the rumors they had all heard. My eyes burned, and my stomach felt as though I had been swallowing cigars, a sensation precisely reproduced in my mouth. The room was icy, my fingers were cold and stiff. I stood up and turned to the window. I realized that Polar Bears had not called back. In half-light the mare tossed her head in the field. When I looked across the far fields I saw her again, standing in that vulpine way, not bothering with the shield of the trees, and staring directly at the house. I could not take my eyes from her, and stood in the blast of cold, feeling her energy come streaming toward me, and then I blinked and she was gone.

After the noise of Zack’s receding motorcycle pulled me from the second night in a row of that dreadful dream, I lay in the gray light of early morning, experiencing what seemed an utter desolation. For the second time the thought of Alison Greening brought with it no current of joy and anticipation. The wrong things had happened; I was in the wrong room, the wrong place; I was the wrong man. It must be the way a young soldier feels when after he has enlisted out of a glorious mish-mash of ideals, adventurousness and boredom, he finds himself cold, hungry, shouted at and on the verge of battle. I simply could not think of what to do. I had been going to tell Polar Bears what I knew about Zack — but did I really know it? (Yes. I did. Anyway, I thought I did.) But my relation to Polar Bears had irrevocably changed. I could remember all too clearly his telling me that rape was normal. Had he been telling himself that for twenty years?

I saw that both Duane and Polar Bears must have hated my coming back to Arden. I was the last person they wanted to see again. Especially since I had begun speaking about Alison Greening almost from the moment I arrived in the valley.

And then I thought of the slight vulpine figure I had seen last night, leveling her face toward the farmhouse like a loaded gun, and thought too of the vision I’d had when the gas had almost killed me. And of the lights in my grandmother’s house flashing on, all at once, making the place look like a boat floating out of its harbor. I was unforgiven.

I wondered how well I knew — had known — my cousin Alison. Again I saw that face of sewn. leaves coming toward me, and I hurriedly left the bed, threw on my robe, and went downstairs.

I thought: now you are almost afraid of it.

And thought: no. You have always been afraid of it.

My bare feet were very cold.

When the telephone rang, I hesitated a moment before lifting the receiver from its hook. Polar Bears, up early from another sleepless night. Do birds cough ?, that ardent high electric voice in my ears. But I smelled blubber, and knew that I did not yet have to solve the problem of what to say to Galen Hovre. She said, “Mr. Teagarden? Miles?”

“Present.”

“I can’t come to work today. I won’t be there this morning. I’m sick.”

“Well,” I began, and realized that she had already hung up. Stupidly, I stared at the receiver, is if it could explain Tuta Sunderson’s behavior.

The explanation came about an hour later, after I had dressed and was seated upstairs, trying to smother thought by the familiar tactic of concentration on work. I had succeeded in this of enough during my marriage. Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking. Yet I had more problems fighting for mental space than Joan’s infidelity with various Dribbles had given me, and I had writ less than half a page of my record before I put my head down on the desk, my face damp with sweat and the desolation back in full strength. I groaned. The admission that I might — did — feel unease, disquiet, fear, all of those, at the enactment of the vow between my cousin and myself had opened up a vast psychic hole. I remembered Rinn’s harsh words — I felt as though I were thrust back into the world of the “blue horror” dream, as though mere wakefulness could not separate me from it. I was still a guilt expert; that was a vocation which outlasted the academic.

Alison Greening was my life; her death had thrown me forever out of significance, out of happiness; but suppose Rinn was right, and that significance and happiness had been flawed and illusory from the beginning. Suppose that by returning to the valley I had brought death with me? Or if not death, its taint? The terror I had felt in the woods flicked at me again, and I pushed myself away from the desk and left the study. All the way down the stairs I felt pursued by that slight figure, that atom of the woods.