Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

Sometimes at night I would wake up and think: I’ve got to get away, I’ve got to go somewhere, right now, soon, first thing tomorrow. Then an excitement would ripple through me, as if I were already packing my bags, already dropping my shoes into the airport basket. In the long hours of the night my excitement would gradually lessen, until by morning I no longer remembered what it was, exactly, that I’d made up my mind to do.

As if in response to the tunnelers, the roof-dwellers appeared. We all knew how it started. One morning David Lindquist, a retired handyman who lived in a two-story carriage house set back on a dead-end road, climbed onto his roof. There he built a simple shelter against the chimney and refused to come down. His wife delivered food through a trapdoor in the attic ceiling. Lindquist had contrived a system of pipes that connected to the plumbing, and he’d brought up a hose to flush down waste. He refused to talk to reporters, but his wife told them that her husband really liked it up there; he’d always been drawn to heights. What struck us wasn’t so much Lindquist’s eccentricity as his austerity. It was said that he lived on a diet of bread, water, and fruit, sat for long hours gazing out at the surrounding trees, and trained himself to sleep in the angle where two roof slopes met.

A few days later, in another part of town, Thomas Dombek, a college junior home for the summer, moved onto the roof of his parents’ house two blocks from the beach. Here and there a few more imitators appeared — it seemed inevitable. But we weren’t prepared for the sudden rush to the roof that now took place, in the middle of July. You could see them in every neighborhood, carrying long boards up ladders that leaned against the gutters. Soon we could see shelters springing from rooftops like the TV antennas we remembered from childhood. It was as if the houses of our town were no longer large enough to contain our desires. From our front porches, from folding chairs in our backyards, we watched the odd structures rising on roof crests. The art was to fasten a base over two slopes of roof and continue with walls or a protective rail. All over town you could hear a great ringing of hammers. At lunchtime, workmen in T-shirts sat on sunny roofs, tipping their heads back to drink from bottles of soda that caught the sun. Children looked up, shading their eyes.

Of course not everyone could follow the difficult example of David Lindquist. Most people simply flung themselves into the new fashion for recreational roof-dwelling without a thought of permanent residence. For them, a roof-house was a form of elevated porch. In the hot nights of July you could see them sleeping up there, under the stars.

But now and then a different kind of roof-dweller emerged. Highly disciplined, solitary and fervid, the lonely ones would sit motionless for long hours at a time, wrapped in silence. Sometimes one would rise slowly and address the streets. The roof-dweller would speak of the Way — by which was meant the way out of unhappiness and despair, the way into spiritual peace. People would gather in the street below, listen for a while, and pass on. One of these lay preachers, a tall woman named Verna Coombs, who wore overalls and work boots and a red bandanna, called herself a Transcensionist and quickly attracted followers. The Transcensionists rejected the world below, which was the realm of heaviness and dissatisfaction, and embraced the upper world, the true world beyond appearances.

At times it seemed to us that another place, an unknown place, was trying to emerge from within our town. It burrowed in the earth below our cellars, rose up silently in the corners of living rooms, trembled in the air above our rooftops.

I would come upon it sometimes, that other place. Turning a corner onto a familiar street, with its front porches and Norway maples, its yellow hydrant and brown telephone poles, I would feel a strangeness. The sunlight seemed not to strike the house sides directly but to fall in between. Shadows shifted, objects seemed liberated from the constrictions of light and were on the verge of becoming themselves, the sidewalks shook silently, everything glittered and trembled, while up above, the tight-stretched blue sky was being pulled from both sides until it was about to rip down the middle — then it all stopped, the street settled down, the sidewalks returned to their stillness, and I walked past white-painted downspouts with vertical grooves that stood out clearly, past dandelions thick with petals that, as I glanced at them, became sharp as knife blades.

Was it in the last weeks of July that we began to notice a change in the children? We knew of course that they’d already been affected in small ways by the events breaking out all around them. How could they have escaped untouched? But we had been preoccupied with rumor and speculation, we had grown a little careless, we’d failed to give the children our full attention. It was the Game that brought them back into our awareness. You would see them in their yards, walking slowly, too slowly, and suddenly stepping around something that seemed to be in their way. Sometimes they held out their arms as if they were walking in the dark, though the sun shone down from a cloudless sky and their shadows stood out sharply against the cut grass. Gradually we learned the nature of the Game. The children were summoning up imaginary places and walking around in them for hours at a time. The idea was to stay longer and longer there, to stay there forever. Backyards containing a swing set and a length of hose became dense forests teeming with dwarves and wolves. When the children opened the doors of their rooms, they entered the holds of sunken ships, towers with winding stairways, hollow mountains where white animals drank from black streams.

At dinner the children sat quietly, with dreamy stares. If parents interrupted their trances by hurling questions at them, they answered carefully, politely, with an air of faint distress.

One case that drew some attention was that of little Julie Goudreau. She was seven years old. One afternoon in August she was found sitting on the grass in the middle of her next-door neighbor’s backyard. When Mrs. Waters came out to see what was the matter, Julie told her that she was lost and could never find her way home. “But you live right over there, dear,” said Mrs. Waters, pointing at the next yard, separated from her own by a driveway and three azalea bushes. Julie turned her head to look in the direction toward which Mrs. Waters had pointed. What struck Catherine Waters was the expression on Julie’s face — she stared at her own yard with a little puzzled frown of concentration, as if she were gazing at something she’d never seen before. Then she turned back and looked down at her hand lying in the grass. Mrs. Waters bent over to help her up. At that moment, Julie turned to look at her. It was a look of such rage that Mrs. Waters stepped back. “I hate you,” Julie said, quietly and distinctly. She lowered her eyes and sat stubbornly there, refusing to say another word, until her mother came and dragged her home.

Even as we worried about our children, and blamed ourselves for neglecting them under the pressure of our own distractions, we found ourselves drawn to those trancelike stares, those dreamy gazes, and wondered what it would be like to burst open our days with inner voyages.

It may be that I’ve given a misleading impression. I don’t mean things were only that way. Even in the early days of the manifestations, when it seemed that every living room was about to erupt with mysterious life, we drove our cars to work, we sat down to dinner, we pushed our shopping carts along the frozen food aisles. On tree-shaded street corners, joggers with headbands ran in place, waiting for a car to turn. The sound of chain saws and wood chippers filled the suburban air. On a hot, shady porch, in the languor of a midsummer afternoon, a high school girl in jean cutoffs and a bikini top sipped lemonade from a tall straw, while she twirled a loop of reddish brown hair around and around and around her finger.