Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

You

You who have no phantoms in your town, you who mock or scorn our reports: are you not deluding yourselves? For say you are driving out to the mall, some pleasant afternoon. All of a sudden — it’s always sudden — you remember your dead father, sitting in the living room in the house of your childhood. He’s reading a newspaper in the armchair next to the lamp table. You can see his frown of concentration, the fold of the paper, the moccasin slipper half-hanging from his foot. The steering wheel is warm in the sun. Tomorrow you’re going to dinner at a friend’s house — you should bring a bottle of wine. You see your friend laughing at the table, his wife lifting something from the stove. The shadows of telephone wires lie in long curves on the street. Your mother lies in the nursing home, her eyes always closed. Her photograph on your bookcase: a young woman smiling under a tree. You are lying in bed with a cold, and she’s reading to you from a book you know by heart. Now she herself is a child and you read to her while she lies there. Your sister will be coming up for a visit in two weeks. Your daughter playing in the backyard, your wife at the window. Phantoms of memory, phantoms of desire. You pass through a world so thick with phantoms that there is barely enough room for anything else. The sun shines on a hydrant, casting a long shadow.

Explanation #6

One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms: they turn from us because they cannot bear to witness our self-delusion.

Forgetfulness

There are times when we forget our phantoms. On summer afternoons, the telephone wires glow in the sun like fire. Shadows of tree branches lie against our white shingles. Children shout in the street. The air is warm, the grass is green, we will never die. Then an uneasiness comes, in the blue air. Between shouts, we hear a silence. It’s as though something is about to happen, which we ought to know, if only we could remember.

How Things Are

For most of us, the phantoms are simply there. We don’t think about them continually, at times we forget them entirely, but when we encounter them we feel that something momentous has taken place, before we drift back into forgetfulness. Someone once said that our phantoms are like thoughts of death: they are always there, but appear only now and then. It’s difficult to know exactly what we feel about our phantoms, but I think it is fair to say that in the moment we see them, before we’re seized by a familiar emotion like fear, or anger, or curiosity, we are struck by a sense of strangeness, as if we’ve suddenly entered a room we have never seen before, a room that nevertheless feels familiar. Then the world shifts back into place and we continue on our way. For though we have our phantoms, our town is like your town: sun shines on the house fronts, we wake in the night with troubled hearts, cars back out of driveways and turn up the street. It’s true that a question runs through our town, because of the phantoms, but we don’t believe we are the only ones who live with unanswered questions. Most of us would say we’re no different from anyone else. When you come to think about us, from time to time, you’ll see we really are just like you.

I

I had not seen my mother in a while, a fairly long while, all things considered, so long a while, to be perfectly frank, that it was difficult to remember when I’d last been out that way. And this was strange, really, since we had always been close, my mother and I. I was therefore pleased, though a little anxious, to find myself in a nearby town, during a business trip to that part of the country. My schedule was full, meetings all day, impossible to catch my breath, but I was determined to drive out there, if only for a short visit, it’s the least you can do, I said to myself, after all this time.

The old neighborhood unsettled me. Things had changed everywhere, it was only to be expected, yet everything had remained the same, as though change were nothing but a new way of revealing sameness. An old maple had vanished and been replaced by a sapling. The trees I remembered had become taller and thicker, on the vacant lot where I’d once played King of the Mountain stood a yellow house with a green-shingled roof, in one yard the vegetable garden with its string-bean poles was now a lawn where you could see white wicker chairs and a birdbath with a stone bird on the rim. But there was the old willow tree on the corner, there the black roof followed by the red roof, there the creosoted telephone poles with the numbers screwed into the wood, there the stucco house with the glider on the porch followed by the brown house with the two mailboxes and the two front doors. My mother’s house, the house that kept appearing in my dreams, was still where it had always been, tucked between two larger houses near the end of the block, and I was shaken for a moment, not because I was approaching my old house, after all this time, but because it was there at all, as if I’d come to believe that it could no longer have a physical existence, out there in the undreamed world.

Even before I turned in to the drive I saw that the grass was high, the shingles dingy, the front walk partly hidden by overhanging lawn. Untrimmed bushes threw up branches higher than the windowsills. My mother had always taken good care of the place, and for a moment I had the sensation that the house had not been lived in for a long time. One of the small front steps was crumbling at the side, the glass shade of the porch light was dark with dust. I pressed the familiar bell, a yellowish button in a brown oval, and heard the two-note ring. It hadn’t occurred to me, until I heard that sound, that my mother might be out, on this pleasant afternoon, when the sun was shining and the sky was blue, the sort of summer day when a person might go to the beach, if she were so inclined, or drive into town, for one reason or another. It seemed to me that if my mother was out, as she appeared to be, it would be the best thing for both of us, for it had been a longish while, had it not, since I’d last come home, too long a while, really, for the kind of visit I was prepared to make. I pressed the bell again, jiggled the change in my pocket, looked over the side rail at an azalea bush. No one was home, it was just as well. I turned away, then swung back and opened the screen door, tried the wooden door. It pushed open easily. I hesitated, with my hand on the knob, before stepping inside.

In the front hall I stopped. There was the mahogany bookcase with the glass bowl on top. There was the old red dictionary I had used in high school, there the bookends carved like rearing horses, the ivory whale with its missing eye. On one shelf a book stood a little pulled out. I tried to remember whether it had always been that way.

From the hall I stepped into the dusky living room. Between the heavy curtains the shades were drawn. The old couch was still there, the old armchair where my father had liked to sit, the piano where I’d once learned to play Mozart sonatas and boogie-woogie blues. On one side of the piano was a space where a tall vase had stood, between the piano bench and the rocking chair. My mother was standing near that space, at the back of the room. I could not understand why she was standing there, in this darkened room, in the middle of a sunny day. Then I saw that she was moving very slowly in my direction. She was advancing over the flowered rug as though she were walking along the bottom of a lake. She wore a crisp dress, with sleeves that ended partway down her forearms, and she made no sound as she came stiffly forward through the twilight.