Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

I left them there, but not so that I might disappear into the attic like another broken doll. No, the entire house now seemed to me a place of misery — I was eager to escape into the night. Exactly what I thought I might do, out there in the night, was as uncertain as my larger fate, but I found myself drifting from yard to yard, as on that first, fatal morning. After a while I saw that I’d come to a familiar neighborhood. I crossed a street, made my way through hedges and fences, and entered the Delvecchio backyard, with its flagstone patio shaded by a canvas top. The sprinkler and the soccer ball were gone, replaced by a leaf rake standing against the side of the garage. I passed through the tall hedge and stopped.

Nothing had changed. There stood my small back porch, with the four wooden steps and the white posts under the gabled roof. There was the cellar window with the taped pane. I wondered whether Paul Steinbach, M.D., was inside, asleep in his bed. I wondered whether he’d remembered to return that book.

In the kitchen I was startled by the refrigerator. It had become much larger in my absence. In the dish rack I saw a plate with a solid band of color along the rim, instead of the apples and leaves that ought to have been there. Somehow the old stove with its four burners had been replaced by one of those glass-topped ones. It was as if the house, in my absence, had decided to dress up in some way, like a child left alone in its parents’ bedroom. Upstairs in the hall I lingered before a familiar door — his door. What, it occurred to me to ask myself, was I doing in this house, which had abandoned me long ago? But it was too late, already I was in the bedroom, where an alien chest of drawers stood against the wrong wall. In a bed with no headboard a man lay on his side. He had a straight sharp nose, with a raw pinkness at the bridge, where his eyeglasses must have rubbed. The rimless glasses rested on their wire temples on a book at the base of a new lamp. On the cover of the book was a photograph of a woman with a boa and a feather hat. Perhaps, I thought, I had fallen asleep many years ago and lay dreaming there. In my dream I had come to this place. And if I should wake?

The sleeper stirred. He muttered something, moved a shoulder, and lay still. An eye began to open. It fell languidly shut. It opened again. Now the man began a scramble, a sideways tangled sluggish rush among the bedclothes as he tried to twist away from me. One arm, caught in the sheets, beat about like a broken wing. I had the feeling that I was watching the antics of an amateur actor who exaggerated his effects. Something shattered against the wall behind me. I looked at the floor and saw the scattered pieces of a clock. Had he thrown it at me? “It’s mine!” I wanted to shout, meaning the room, the house, his life. He was glaring at me with a mixture of wildness and wariness — a man in striped pajamas, rudely awakened in the middle of the night. In the morning he would recall his dream with bewilderment, with interest. There was nothing for me in this place.

Out in the yard I hesitated. I had fled from one home, only to be driven from another. I imagined searching for a new attic, in a new town, where I would start a new — but at this thought I could feel something stirring deep within me, and all at once I burst into a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh, that laugh. But then, ours are not pleasant laughs. I turned and made my way through the hedge.

As I approached Maureen’s neighborhood I became aware of a glow over the dark trees. I crossed a lawn, passed through the stand of spruce, and stopped in her backyard.

The house was ablaze with light. At any moment I expected to see flames bursting through the windows, leaping up toward the roof. By which I mean: all the lights were on — the kitchen overhead light, the sink light, the dining room light, the floor lamp and the table lamps in the living room, the stair light, the hall light, the bedroom lights, the bathroom lights. Even the back-porch light flung its harsh brightness across the lawn. Were they trying to drive me out by light? Like a crazed lover or father I stumbled across the brilliant grass into the blazing house. I rushed up the fiery stairway into the hall. The sharp light cut into me like splinters of glass. Behind the bedroom door I could hear them breathing quietly. I would never let them drive me from my attic. Even up there, the light was on — a single bare bulb that gave off a garish glow. Where there is light, there is dark. I made my way blindly toward a dark corner and threw myself down on the floor behind a row of peeling suitcases. A rag doll lay facedown beside me. Her yellow string hair streamed out like the rays of a child’s sun. I tried to think what to do.

I was in the midst of imagining myself on the move, passing from attic to attic, across alien lawns, through unknown towns, in remote lands, as strangers in beds rolled wildly in their sheets and clocks shattered against walls, when the attic light went out. In the sudden darkness I heard the closing of a door. Footsteps shuffled in the hall below. It struck me that I had sunk so deeply into my thoughts that I hadn’t heard the attic door open or the switch click off. Through the attic window the sky was black. For a while I lay there trying to make sense of it all. Was it still the same night? We are careless about time. We have too much of it. With a wary kind of suddenness I rose and passed across the attic and down the wooden stairs.

In the hall it was dark. I could hear the sound of breathing in Maureen’s room and the sound of movement down below.

When I reached the bottom of the carpeted stairs I saw that all the lights were out. At one end of the couch, Andrea sat tensely upright in her bathrobe.

I entered the room and started to walk behind the couch, thought better of it, and passed in front of her. Without incident I reached my armchair and sat down.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” she said quietly.

She glanced over at me and looked away. “I was afraid before,” she said. “But I decided not to be.” A pause. “I want to get to know you.” She continued to sit upright, like a student in a principal’s office.

Something about her awkwardness put me — I was going to say: at ease. But we are never at ease. It’s more accurate to say that the unease which is my nature became a little less uneasy, like a fist relaxing slightly — the knuckles are no longer white, but the fist remains closed.

“I turned on all the lights,” she said. “But later I went back and turned them all off.” She raised a hand to her hair, wound a strand round and round a finger, then removed her finger and lowered her hand. She turned her head toward me and held it there.

She continued to hold it there as I began to speak. My voice sounded to me like the rustle of dry leaves. Even in my past life I was a man of few words, but on this night I told my story: the unbreathing figure in the bed, the dawn flight, the wooden steps to the attic, the visits to her aunt. It occurred to me, with surprise, that I really did have a story to tell.

When I came to the end I waited for her to pour out her own story, but she said simply, “Thank you.” A sudden yawn, deep and shuddering, seized her. She thrust a hand across her mouth as if she were trying to stifle a laugh. “Oh god,” she said. “That had nothing to do with — it’s just so late. Look! It’s practically morning.” Through the drawn drapes I could see a faint lightness.

She stood up. “She’ll worry about me.” She looked at me. “I hope we can be friends now.” At once she turned away, walking with great strides, swinging out of sight and thrusting herself heavily up the stairs.

Above, a door shut. I remained alone in the empty room. I imagined Andrea striding fiercely through the house, turning on light after light, faster and faster. When all the lights are on, she returns to Maureen’s room. She lies down on the bed with her eyes open. She says nothing. After a while she gets up. She looks around. Then she walks back through the house, turning each light off, one after the other.