Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

Wolf reached under his chair, brought up a pack of cigarettes, and held it out to me with raised eyebrows. He shrugged, thrust one into his mouth, and lit up. “It all depends on how you define health,” he said. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and, raising his chin so that his face was nearly horizontal, blew a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling. When he was done he raised a shade, opened the window, and made little brushing motions with his hands toward the screen. He blew at the screen with short quick bursts of breath. Then he shut the window and jerked down the shade.

He turned to face me, leaning back against the window frame with his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” he asked.

It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “Yes and no,” I finally said.

“Brilliant answer,” Wolf said, with his slow lazy smile. He pushed with his shoulders against the window frame and stood up. “Shall we?” He nodded toward the door.

I followed him up the wooden steps into the sun-streaked dark attic. In the little hall he whispered, “She’s expecting you.” At the last door he knocked with his hand held sideways, using a single knuckle. He opened the door — in the dim light of the hall I caught sight of the edge of a bureau with a shadowy hairbrush on top — and a moment later I was in utter darkness. He led me to the high-backed chair, and as I sat upright against the stiff back and gripped the chair arms, I felt like the wooden carving of a king.

“Welcome, stranger,” the voice said. It seemed to be coming from a few feet away, as if from someone sitting up in bed. “What brings you to these parts?” I had the feeling that Wolf was staring at me in the dark.

“I was looking for the post office,” I said.

“This here’s the ’lectric company, mister,” Isabel said.

The black room, the stiff chair, the word “’lectric,” the sense that I was being tested in some way, all this made me break into a sharp, nervous laugh.

I could feel Wolf rising from his chair. “I’ll be in my room. Just ring if you need anything.” I heard his footsteps on the rug. The door opened and closed quickly.

“Did he say ‘ring’?”

“I’ve got a bell.”

“Oh — your Isa-bell.”

“Do you always make jokes?”

“Only in the dark.”

“And when it gets light?”

“Dead serious.”

“Lucky it’s dark. Let’s play a game.”

“In the dark?”

“You’ll see.”

I tried to imagine some mad game of Monopoly, in which you had to select your piece by touch, trying to distinguish the ship from the car, then rolled the dice across an invisible board and carefully felt their smooth sides to find the slightly recessed dots. I was wondering how I might contrive to move my piece along an unseen board when I felt something soft against my fingers and snatched my hand away.

“Here,” Isabel said. “Tell me what it is. You can only use one hand.”

I reached out my hand and felt a soft pressure against the palm. I closed my fingers over something furry or fuzzy and roundish, with a hardness under the fur. On one side the fur gave way to a smoothness of cloth. It felt familiar, this roundish furryish thing about the size of my palm, but though I kept turning it over and stroking it with my thumb, I couldn’t figure it out.

“Give up?” she said. “Actually, I should have told you — it’s part of something.”

“Is it part of a stuffed animal?”

“Well, no. Close. Actually — you’ll kill me — it’s an earmuff. It came off that metal thing that goes over your head.”

She next passed me an object that was hard and thin and cool, which immediately shaped itself against my fingers as a teaspoon.

“That was way too easy,” I said.

“Well, I felt guilty. Try this one.”

It was small and curved, with a clip of some sort attached to it, and suddenly I knew: a barrette. There followed a hard leathery object that was easy — an eyeglass case — and then a mysterious cloth strip with tassels that turned out to be a bookmark, and then a papery spongy object with a string attached that I triumphantly identified as a tea bag. Once, as she passed me a small glass object, I felt against the underside of my fingers the light pressure of her fingertips. And once, after a pause in which I heard sounds as of shifting cloth, she let fall into my outstretched hand a longish piece of fabric that she immediately snatched away, saying “That wasn’t fair,” bursting into a laugh at my protest, and refusing to identify it, even as I imagined her slipping back into a shirt or pajama top.

After the touching game she asked me to describe my room. I told her about my bookcase, my armchair with the sagging cushion, and my wall lamp that could be pulled out on a fold-up metal contraption, but she kept asking for more details. “I can’t see anything,” she said, sounding exasperated. I tried to make her see the X-shaped crosspieces of the unfolding wall lamp over my bed, and then I described, with fanatical care, the six-sided quartz crystal, the pale purple fluorite crystal in the shape of a tetrahedron, and the amethyst geode in my mineral collection. When it was her turn, she described a cherrywood box on her desk, with four compartments. One held a small pouch of blue felt tied with leather thongs and containing a silver dollar and an Indian-head penny, the second held a pair of short red-handled scissors, the third a set of tortoiseshell barrettes, and the fourth a small yellowish ivory figurine, a Chinese sage seated with his legs crossed and holding an open book in his lap. One of his hands was broken off at the wrist, he wore a broad-brimmed conical hat, the ivory pages of the book were wavy — and as she described the ivory man in the compartment of the cherrywood box, I seemed to see, taking shape in the darkness, a faint and tremulous Chinese sage, hovering at the height of my head.

We were playing Ghost when I was startled by a knock at the door. Quickly the door opened and closed; I was aware of a momentary change in the quality of blackness but saw nothing. “It’s nearly five-thirty,” Wolf said — he knew I was expected home by six. “See you, stranger,” Isabel said as Wolf led me toward the door. Downstairs I greeted his mother, who was standing in the living room with her arms reaching up to the top of a drooping curtain. When she turned to look at me, keeping one hand on the curtain and waving the fingers of her other hand, I saw that her mouth was full of safety pins.

I now began to visit Wolf’s house after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I was free of the library, and on weekend afternoons. I would climb the stairs to Wolf’s room, where we talked for a while, and then he would rise from the chair or bed very slowly, as if he were being tugged back by a tremendous force, and lead me up to the attic. At the door of Isabel’s room he knocked with one knuckle, lightly, twice. Without waiting for a reply, he held open the door and closed it quickly behind me before returning to his room. If he cared that I was spending less time with him than with his sister, he never showed it. If anything, he seemed eager for me to visit her — it was as if he thought I might cure her in some way. Exactly what it all meant I didn’t know, couldn’t care. I knew only that I needed to visit Isabel, to be with her in that room. The darkness excited me — I could feel it seize me and draw me in. Everything in me seemed to quicken there.

The darkness, the hidden face, the secret room, the unseeing of Isabel — it all soon came to feel as much a part of her as her voice. If I tried to picture her, I saw a wavering shadowy image that hardened gradually into a tall girl in Bermuda shorts, holding a trowel. Sometimes, before she faded away, I saw gray, amused eyes — Wolf’s eyes. She loved games, all sorts of games, and it occurred to me that one thing we were doing in that room was playing the game of darkness. She was like a child who closes her eyes, stretches out her arms, and pretends to be blind. For all I knew, she might really be blind — she might really be anything. Whatever she was, I had to go there, to the dark at the top of the house.