J. Lennon - Castle

And then another sound gradually impressed itself upon my consciousness, so faint at first against the ambient roar of the air in my ears that I wasn’t even certain I was hearing it. It was a whine, as of air escaping through a narrow opening, a kind of keening, which gradually resolved itself into an intermittent animal cry. It was the sound of solitary despair, a high, drawn-out weeping, a noise made by a creature, man or beast, not to draw attention but to console the hopeless self.

I had heard this sound before, in the place I had worked before I came here, the sound of men without hope crushing their misery into a tiny space in the throat, from where they could not prevent it escaping, even in sleep. It chilled me, brought me fully back to wakefulness, and I sat up in bed, the covers falling from my bruised body. Where was it coming from? I held my breath, strained at the sound, but now, as if in response to my motion, it had seemed to stop.

A few moments later, I again lay down, and as the minutes passed, I became convinced that the sound was a product of my imagination. My eyes closed, my breathing slowed, and I felt myself pulled toward sleep. And then I heard it again.

I was certain it was there. I could feel a sympathetic cry gathering at the back of my own throat. It was human, this sound. It was real. I tried to isolate it in my mind, to shut out everything else, my heartbeat, the sheets against my flesh, the ringing in my ears. There was only the sound, and my perception of it. Where was it coming from?

Outside, I thought at first. Something, or someone, was outside, perhaps in the woods, suffering. I got out of bed, willing lightness out of my heavy body, slowing myself nearly to motionlessness. Five minutes until one foot touched the floor, five more for the other. Five minutes to cross the room and another five to open the window. I thanked myself for having sanded down the frame and replaced the sash: the pane slid up smoothly, without rattling or creaking. I leaned forward, poking my head out into the cool air, and listened.

Nothing but the slow and heavy wind, flowing through the trees. Had the crying stopped? I carefully pulled my head back in: no, there it was. It was in the house.

I paced across the room like a glacier, my bare feet sticking to the boards, then peeling off again. I reached the door, turned the knob, and pulled.

There. I could hear it more clearly now. A long, high, mournful wail, followed by a pause, as if to draw breath. I opened the door far enough to admit my body, then lifted my left foot and took a single step into the hall. In the deep quiet of the house, the creak the floorboards made was like a rifle shot. The crying stopped. I froze.

I remained frozen for five, ten, fifteen minutes. The sound did not resume. I let out breath. Where on earth had it come from? It was in the house, to be sure. I repeated my room-to-room search and again found nothing. The house was empty, and against all reason, I was more awake than I had been in days. What was more, I felt dirty again, my mouth sour and sticky, my underarms redolent of sweat. I went to the bathroom and took another bath, then brushed my teeth a second time. Afterward I returned to my bed, anticipating a sleepless night, and even reached out to turn on the bedside lamp. But my hand never made it. My body, evidently, had overruled my mind, and I dropped off to sleep without difficulty, and dreamed of nothing all night long.

The first thing I found when I came downstairs the next morning was yesterday’s mail, scattered on the floor in the hallway. I remembered now that, frightened by the furnace, I had dropped it there the night before. Raising my eyebrows at my own foolishness, I gathered it up, then went to the thermostat and turned the heat back on. The furnace clanked to life. The sound was identical to the one that had so terrified me, but now of course it was no more alarming than the birds singing outside. I went to the kitchen, put a pot of coffee on to brew, and sat down at the table with my letters.

My credit card bill had arrived, bearing the costs of my home renovation. I was pleased to find them to be below my budgeted estimate. There were some papers from the bank, and tucked with them into the envelope, a promotional refrigerator magnet. I was surprised to see an official-looking letter from out of town, and after examining it for a moment, I chose to set it aside for the time being. There was also what appeared to be a card from my sister, and though I felt my face tense up as I took it in hand, I went ahead and tore it open.

The card bore a fairly innocuous reproduction of a painting of a twelve-point buck, backlit by a rising run, perched on a rock outcropping, majestic mountain terrain all around. As far as I knew, deer did not tend to stand high upon rocks — this was the purview of mountain goats and bighorn sheep, I thought — but the image was pleasant enough and enabled me to take a neutral stance to the card’s contents.

Interestingly, though, it was not the substance of my sister’s message that struck me most powerfully. The message itself was not noteworthy — she apologized for her cavalier attitude during her brief visit to my house and offered her emotional support and friendship for “dealing with your troubles,” whatever that was supposed to mean — but the handwriting made me sit up and pay attention.

With the coffee maker burbling quietly behind me, I remembered the last time I had seen my sister’s rushed, angular scrawl. It had been in her diary, which I had read when I was thirteen. There was a period of time when Jill had seemed to be sleeping somewhere different every night — at the homes of friends, no doubt so that she could have free access to the boys and men she was known to be having relations with at the time. I admit that I would often snoop in her bedroom when she was gone, in the precise hope that I would find her diary there. But until this particular night, she had always taken it with her to her sleepovers.

This time, however, she had forgotten, and I sat on the edge of her un-slept-in bed, reading as quickly as I could. And I had been right to rush, because she actually came home to get it, launching herself from the back of a car out of which loud rock music was blaring, and stomped up the stairs to snatch it from my hands as I read. She actually struck me, as I remember, and I struck back, and it took my exhausted mother to pull us apart. In fact I seem to recall my mother ending up on the floor, weeping, and me helping her up and leading her to bed.

But it was the diary itself that truly rankled, as it contained all manner of lascivious fantasy about my father, horrible desires and distasteful proclivities that she had invented for him, clearly to satisfy some deep, childish need to blame others for her own failings. Even at thirteen I understood this — Jill was always rather transparent, pathetically so, and God forbid that someone close to her should suggest that her actions were motivated by self-deception, or a need to relieve herself of responsibility for unfortunate things she had done. Of which, as I have said, there were many.

This is not to suggest that I regarded my father as a paragon of virtue. He was not — indeed, I would be the first to admit that he was deeply flawed, emotionally stunted, and of course extremely careless. But to make the insinuations my sister did in her diary was simply wrong, even if they were, ultimately, for her own private consumption.

Sitting there at my kitchen table, I was not especially happy to revisit these memories. I have already established that I am not one to live in the past, and I feel that the anger which results from recalling past injustices is among the most impure of emotions, and damaging to heart and soul. But it was not my sister’s fault that her handwriting happened to bring these recollections to mind, and I had to admit that, misguided as they may have been, the words of her apology and offer of friendship were sweet, almost touching. And so I took the unusual step of affixing the card to the refrigerator with the magnet from the bank, if for no other reason than to inoculate myself against the effect her handwriting imposed upon my mind.