Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

We sat there in silence for a long time, each of us only a vague form to the other. “It didn’t start that way, you know. It didn’t matter that I was less, shall we say robust, when we were all little kids. In grade school. Grade school was paradise — when I think about it, it was paradise. It got bad only in high school. I wasn’t cute . I wasn’t like Polar Bears. No athlete. I didn’t chase the girls. So they started to talk about me. I noticed that people didn’t want me around their kids about the time I had to leave school.” He bent, and felt for something on the floor. “Would you mind if I had another drink?”

“It’s right on the floor beside your chair.”

“So now when this admirable character goes around ripping up little girls, they assume it’s me. Oh yes, Paul Kant. He’s never been quite right, has he? A momma’s boy. Not quite normal, in a society that makes being normal the most virtuous quality of them all. And then there was another thing — some trouble I had. Stupid scum. They put me in a police station. They hit me. For doing nothing. Did they tell you about that?”

“No,” I lied. “Not a word.”

“I had to go to a hospital. Seven months. Little pills every day. For doing nothing. Stares when I got out. Only job I could get at Zumgo’s. With those leering women. Jesus. Do you know how I got here tonight? Had to sneak out of my own house. Wind through the streets like a dog. Know about my dog, Miles? They killed him. One of them. He came up at night and strangled my dog. I could hear him crying. The dog.” I could imagine the little monkey face contorting. The smell of gin and cigarettes drifted through the dark room. “Jesus.” I thought he might have been crying again.

Then: “So what do you say, Miles Teagarden? Or do you just sit and listen? What do you say?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“You were rich. You could come here in the summers and then go back to one of your private schools and then go to some expensive university and smoke pipes and join a fraternity and get married and get a Ph.D. and live in apartments in New York and go to Europe and wreck cars and buy Brooks Brothers suits and, I don’t know, do whatever you do. Teach English in a college. I’m going to have some more of your gin.” He bent, and I heard the bottle clinking against the glass. “Oh. I spilled some.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It wouldn’t to you, would it? I’m getting drunk. Is it you, Miles? Is it you? Come on.”

“Is what me?” But I knew.

“Are you the admirable character? Did you take time off from your Atlantic Monthly life to come out here and rip up a few little girls?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s not me either. So who is it?”

I looked down at the floor. Before I had decided to tell him about Zack, he was speaking again.

“No, it’s not me.”

“I know that,” I said. “I think—”

“It’s not me, no way is it me. They just want it to be me. Or you. But I don’t know about you. Still, you’re being nice to me, aren’t you, Miles? Being so nice. Probably never had someone strangle your dog. Or do people like you have dogs? Borzois, wolfhounds. Or a cute little cheetah on a leash.”

“Paul, I’m trying to help you.” I said, “You have a ludicrous misconception of my life.”

“Oops, sorry, oops, mustn’t be offensive. Just a poor country boy, I know. Poor dumb pitiable country schunuck. I’ll tell you why no way it’s me. This is it, boy. I’d never go after a girl. That’s why. You hear what I’m saying?”

I did, and hoped he would not torture himself by going further.

“You heard that?”

“I heard.”

“You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Because I’d do it to boys, not girls. Isn’t that funny? That’s why it isn’t me. That’s what I’ve always wanted, but I never did that either. Never even touched one. I wouldn’t hurt any of them, though. Never hurt them.”

He sat there, slumped in the rocking chair, the cigarette glowing in his mouth. “Miles?”

“Yes.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Is it important to you to be alone now?”

“Get the hell out of here, Miles.” He was crying again.

Instead of leaving the room, I got up and walked past his chair and looked through the window facing the porch and the road. I could see nothing but the darker square mass of my own face reflected in the glass and the torn meshes of the screen beyond it. Beyond that, everything was black. his mouth made noises on his glass. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll leave you alone, Paul. I’ll be back though.”

I went upstairs in the dark and sat at my desk. It was three-fifteen. There was the morning to worry about. If the men from Arden broke into Paul’s house and found that he had gone, the news, I was certain, would reach Polar Bears almost immediately. And if they were going to break into his house, it could only mean that they had been persuaded somehow that he and not I was responsible for the girls’ deaths. But then they might think of looking for Paul at my house — and I could see nothing but disaster for both of us if a gang of Arden hooligans stormed into the house and found the two of us. A shotgun from Duane’s basement would not rescue me again. I heard the sound of a car starting up outside, and I jumped. It faded.

Fifteen minutes passed. Time enough, I thought, for Paul to have recovered. I stood up, and recognized how weary I was.

I came down the stairs into the dark room. I saw the tip of a cigarette glowing at the edge of the ashtray. The odors of gin and smoke seemed very thick in the air of the cold small room. “Paul?” I said, going toward the rocking chair. “Paul, let me get you a blanket. I have a plan for tomorrow.”

And then I stopped. I could see the top of the rocker against the window, and it was unbroken by the silhouette of his head. The rocker was empty. He was no longer in the room.

Immediately I knew what had happened, but I switched on one of the lights anyway, and confirmed it. The glass and three-fourths empty bottle sat on the floor beside his chair, the cigarette had burned nearly to the rim of the ashtray. I went into the kitchen, and then opened the door to the bathroom. He had left the house shortly after I had gone upstairs. I swore out loud, half in anger at myself for leaving him, half in despair.

I went through the porch and out onto the lawn. He could not have gone far. And I remembered the sound of the car that I thought I’d heard upstairs, and began to run across the lawn.

When I got to the road, I turned right by reflex and pounded down toward the Sunderson farm, in the direction of Arden for perhaps forty seconds. But he could have gone the other way, deeper into the valley — I didn’t even know what lay in that direction; and I recognized that he could also have gone into the fields, as he had done on the way from Arden earlier that night. I thought of him hiding behind a building; or crouching in a field, riven by fear and self-loathing, and told myself that he had nowhere, really nowhere to go. He would come back before daylight.

I turned around on the dark road and began to trudge home. When I reached the drive to my grandmother’s house I hesitated, and then walked a bit further up the road in that direction. It was hopeless. I could see nothing. I could find him only if he allowed me to. I turned back and went up the drive and sat on the porch swing to wait. An hour, I told myself: it won’t be as much as an hour. I would sit and wait. As tired as I was, it was unthinkable that I could fall asleep.

But an hour later I was jerked awake by a sound I could not at first identify. A high agitated wailing, the sound of mechanical fury, mechanical panic, it came from somewhere off to my right, but was loud and near enough to distort my sense of place: for a moment I thought I was in New York, awake before dawn in New York. It was a New York sound, and as I gradually located my surroundings I located this sound too. It was the siren of a fire engine.