Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

1

It was known as the Place. Even as children we knew there was something wrong with a name like that — you couldn’t get a grip on it, the way you could get a grip on JoAnn’s Diner, or Indian Lake, or the Palace Cinema out on South Main. It was as if whoever had named it hadn’t thought very much about it, or hadn’t been able to make up his mind. Later, as we grew older, we thought the very wrongness of the name was what was right about it. It was like an empty room you could put things in. Still later, we no longer thought about the name at all. It was part of what was, like summer and night.

2

It’s easy to get there: just head north toward the hill at the end of town. As you get closer, the houses thin out and give way to car dealerships, a retirement community, and an enclosed mall next to an outdoor shopping plaza, before you reach a stretch of fields and woods. On the other side of the woods the hill begins. You can drive a short way up, but you have to leave your car in one of the paved lots and continue on foot. Half a dozen dirt trails start from the lots and wind to the top. It takes most people no more than twenty or thirty minutes to get there, though some like to rest on wooden benches scattered along the sides of the paths. If you don’t want to walk, a minibus will take you most of the way up, leaving from the main trailhead every half hour, nine to five during the week, ten to six on weekends. Everything’s shut down during the bad weather, first of November through the first of March. Radios and cell phones are strictly forbidden, but no one seems to miss them. You know it’s not like a trip to the shore of Indian Lake, two towns over, or to the picnic tables in Burrows Park. You know you haven’t come for that.

3

I remember my first visit, at the age of six or seven. I see myself holding my mother’s hand as we walk along an upward-sloping path, between fields of knee-high grass stretching away. I could feel the sun, warm on my arms. More and more sky kept appearing, as if we were pushing something aside that had been covering it up. I felt a familiar excitement, the kind I felt when we were on our way to the amusement park, with its wooden horses moving up and down on silver poles and its pink cotton candy shaking on paper cones, or the summer circus in the field by the river. I wondered whether the Place was a park with rides, or maybe a castle with a shop selling swords. “Here we are,” my mother said, when we reached the end of the path. I remember standing still and turning my head from side to side, with a kind of desperation, thinking: There’s nothing here. The other thing I remember is the change in my mother’s face. In those days I always had my mother’s complete attention. Even when I was apart from her I knew she was thinking about me, worrying about me, taking pleasure in my existence. But up there, at the Place, something had shifted. It wasn’t that she had let go of my hand, because she often let go when she knew I was safe. It was that she somehow wasn’t there with me. I thought she must be looking at something, but when I tried to follow her gaze I could tell that she wasn’t looking at anything at all. Later, when she drew me to her side and pointed to the little town far below, I gave it a harsh glance and looked away. After a while I began kicking at a stone in the grass.

4

Sometimes a feeling comes. You’re walking along a sidewalk, some Saturday afternoon in summer. You’re passing through the sun and shade of maples and old oaks, past the familiar yards and porches of your neighborhood. Mrs. Witowski is kneeling on her cushion at the side of the hollyhock bush, jabbing at the soil with her weeder. The Anderson kid is lifting a two-pane cellar window from the back of his Honda; he’s going to fit it into the wood-framed space in the concrete strip at the base of the house, where you can see two wing nuts that he will turn to hold the frame in place. The lawn mowers are out; in the warm air there’s a smell of cut grass, lilac, and fresh tar. The sun feels good on your arms. All at once the feeling comes. It isn’t restlessness, exactly. It’s the unmistakable feeling, precise as a knife-cut, that you need to be elsewhere. The street is hemming you in, pressing against you, making it impossible to breathe. This is the feeling that tells you to return to your house, get in your car, and head out to the Place.

5

It’s difficult to describe what’s there. Unlike Burrows Park or the South Side Rec Field, the Place has no boundary, though it’s true enough that the Place is located at the top of the hill. The hill slopes up to a flattish top that might be thought of as a plateau, with dips and rises of its own. Just where the top of the hill begins or ends, who can say? Up there, you have a good view in all directions. At one end you can see the woods and fields at the base of the hill, then the little red-roofed buildings of the retirement community, the country road, and, farther off, the town itself — Main Street with its shops and tiny cars, the roof of the Van Buren Hotel, the residential section, the pond, the park, all so small that it takes you by surprise. Beyond the town you can see other towns, a village with a white church steeple, twisting roads, a ribbon of highway, patches of farmland, a band of low hills. On all sides of the plateau you can see far-off places. The plateau is grassy, with stretches of bare rock, a scattering of wildflowers, small stands of oak and pine, a few blueberry bushes. Here and there you can find benches, the old-fashioned kind with wooden slats, which the town has seen fit to provide for tired travelers. The most striking feature of the Place is the dozen or so crumbling stone walls, about the height of your waist, that run for twenty or thirty feet, in different directions, along the grass of the plateau. The Historical Society says that they’re old property walls, erected by farmers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, though opinion is divided about whether crops were grown and whether any buildings once stood on the plateau. One historian claims that the walls are not farmers’ walls at all, but the remains of a Native American settlement dating back to the mid-sixteenth century. You can walk along the low walls, sit down on them, or ignore them, as you please. Sometimes you see praying mantises, field mice, a red-tailed hawk. The plateau doesn’t drop off sharply, but slopes gently down on all sides, so that, as I have said, it’s difficult to know where anything begins and ends. The appearance of the Place is what I’ve attempted to describe, but the attempt itself is questionable. It isn’t so much what the Place looks like, after all, as what it does to you.

6

Just as stories collect around old, abandoned mansions, so rumors swirl about the Place. Sometimes the rumors gather so thickly that you have to push your way through them, in order to find the Place at all. Some say the Place was once the site of an ancient monument to the Great Spirit, erected by the ancestral branch of a little-known tribe. Some claim that the Place has life-enhancing powers that cure disease, increase longevity, and reverse memory loss. The Place, some say, contains energy fields that allow you to perceive past events and to communicate with the dead. Although most of us scorn such rumors, which cheapen the Place and threaten to turn it into a psychic parlor, we understand that in some way the rumors are part of what the Place is: the Place summons them, calls them into being, as surely as it gives rise to yellow violets, prickly milkweed pods, and tall, nubbly spikes of mullein.

7

In the spring of junior year in high school I began spending time with Dan Rivers. He had moved to our town in December from somewhere in Colorado, and he was the kind of guy I had always avoided — handsome, sure of himself, easy in his body, easy with girls. Everyone liked Dan Rivers. Maybe because I made a point of being polite and distant, he began to seek me out. One day he walked home from school with me. He started coming to the house, where we played chess and talked books; on the sunny back porch he’d sit on one of the wicker chairs and tell my mother stories about small-town Colorado and listen to her tales of the Lower East Side. In the living room he’d sit in the armchair by the piano and talk to my father about the problem of free will or the correspondence theory of truth. I felt in him a readiness for friendship, a desire to penetrate to the core of another temperament. We spoke about our ambitions, our dreams. One Saturday morning he drove over and said he wanted to see the Place. I hadn’t been there since the time with my mother. We drove out past the car dealerships, the cluster of attached retirement homes, past the mall and the shopping plaza, entered the woods, and came to the hill. We parked in a paved lot bordered by wooden posts and began our way up a curving trail. Field grass stretched away on both sides; the sun warmed my arms. I remembered walking with my mother, remembered the leather purse slung over her shoulder, the shadow of her hat on the upper part of her face. At the top of the path Dan Rivers and I turned to look at the view. Far off, in the little town, I could see our high school, the roof of the Equity Trust on Main, a corner of Burrows Park. I turned to Dan Rivers, who was looking at the same view, but I could feel something else in him, something that reminded me of the change in my mother’s face. I went off and sat on one of the walls. I could feel the warm stone pressing against the calves of my jeans. After a while I walked to the far end of the plateau, where I looked out at a brown river, a factory smokestack, blue hills. A few other people were strolling around. It was quiet up there; I was a talker, but this was no place for talk. Dan Rivers came over to me, sat down, got up, walked around. An hour later we headed back down to the car. The next day he went back to the Place alone. On Monday he didn’t come over to the house. He began driving out to the Place, day after day; he withdrew from his clubs, stopped going to parties, seemed preoccupied. He rarely came over to the house anymore, said he was busy. Once or twice, when we passed each other in the halls, he invited me to drive out there with him. Some other time, I said. When we did get together, now and then, he wanted only to talk about the Place, but at the same time he didn’t really want to talk about it. He said that it cleared his mind, helped him get rid of things. What things, I wanted to know. Mind-junk, he said, and gave that one-shoulder shrug of his. I could feel a new hiddenness in him; he had stepped into himself and closed the door, shut the blinds. When I learned in June that he was moving with his family to Austin, Texas, in July, I felt that we had already said our goodbyes. The day after he left for Texas, I decided to visit the Place alone.