Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

“Welcome to Wolfland,” he said — and raising his right arm, he moved his long hand in a slow, graceful flourish, shaped like a tilde.

He opened the front door with a key and I followed him into a living room so gloomy that it felt as if heavy curtains had been closed across the windows. In fact the curtains were open and the windows held upward-slanted blinds that gave a broken view of sun-mottled branches. In the sunnier kitchen he tossed his books onto a table on which sat a gardening glove and an orange box of Wheaties, picked up a note that he read aloud—“Back later. Love, M”—and led me back into the living room, where a stairpost stood at the foot of a carpeted stairway. Upstairs we walked along a dusky hall with closed doors. Wolf stopped at the last one, which he opened by turning the knob and pushing with the toe of his loafer. Repeating his flourish, and adding a little bow, as if he were acting the part of a courtier paying homage to his lord, he waited for me to enter.

I stepped into a dark brown sunless room with drawn shades. One of the shades was torn at the side, letting in a line of light. “Watch out,” Wolf said, “don’t move,” as he crossed the room to an old brass floor lamp with a fringed yellowish shade and pulled the chain. The light, dark as butterscotch, shone on an old armchair that sat in a corner and looked wrong in some way. But what struck me was the book-madness of the place — books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

“Have a seat,” Wolf said, indicating the armchair, which I now saw was without legs. I sat down carefully in the low chair, afraid I might knock over the book piles that lay on the floor against each arm. Wolf yanked back the spread with its load of books, which went tumbling against the wall, and lay down on his back with his head against a pillow, one arm behind his neck and his ankles crossed. That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said that the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness, which was why the people who selected books for high school English classes were careful to choose only false books that were discussable, boring, and sane, or else, if they chose a real book by mistake, they presented it in a way that ignored everything great and mad about it. He said that high school was for morons and mediocrities. He said that his mother had agreed never to enter his room so long as he changed his sheets once a week. He said that books weren’t made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. There were two kinds of people, he said, wakers and dreamers. Wakers had once had the ability to dream but had lost it, and so they hated dreamers and persecuted them in every way. He said that teachers were wakers. He spoke of writers I’d never heard of, writers such as William Prescott Pearson, A. E. Jacobs, and John Sharp, his favorite, who wrote terrific stories like “The Elevator,” about a man who one day enters an elevator in a fifty-six-story office building and never comes out except to use the public bathrooms and the food machines, and “The Infernal Roller Coaster,” about a roller coaster that goes up and up and never reaches the top, but whose masterpiece was a five-hundred-page novel that takes place entirely during the blink of an eye. Compared with these works, things like Silas Marner and The Mayor of Disasterbridge were about as interesting as newspaper supplements advertising vacuum cleaners.

“Care to see the attic?” he said suddenly. In the warm cave of books I had half closed my eyes, but Wolf had risen from the bed and was already standing at the door. I followed him out into the dusk of the hall, past the top of the stairway, to an unpainted door that looked like the door of a linen closet. It opened to reveal a flight of wooden steps. Up we went into that hot attic, where tawny sunlight streamed through a small round window, fell against bare floorboards and splintery rafters, and weakened into a brown darkness. As we passed along, I made out old couches and bureaus and armchairs, as if we’d broken into the furniture department of a big-city store. Then we came to a high old-fashioned record cabinet, which rose up to my chest; Wolf opened the top to reveal a dim turntable, on which lay a ghostly white bear with outstretched arms. He next led me to a wooden wall with a door; it opened onto a short hall, with a door on each side. He stopped at the left-hand one, knocked lightly with a single knuckle, and bent forward as if to listen.

“My sister’s room,” he then said, and ushered me in.

When he closed the door behind us I found myself in total darkness. I had the sensation that Wolf was standing close to me, but I could not see him there. Then I felt something on my upper arm and jerked away, but it was only Wolf’s hand, guiding me. Slowly he moved me forward through the blackness, as I held up an arm as if to protect my face from branches in a forest. “Sit here,” he whispered. He placed my hand on what seemed to be the high back of an upholstered chair, with a row of metal buttons running across the top.

I felt my way around the chair and sat down, while I sensed Wolf settling into another seat nearby. I was sitting in a straight-backed stiff chair with hard, upholstered arms, the sort of chair you might find in the ornate parlor of an aging actress in a black-and-white movie. “Isabel,” he said quietly, “are you awake?” I strained my eyes in that thick darkness, but I could see nothing at all. It struck me that it was all a hoax, an audacious joke meant to ridicule me in some way. At the same time I listened for the slightest sound and narrowed my eyes until they trembled with the effort to see. Anything could have been in that room.

“She’s asleep,” Wolf said, and I thought: Perfect, a perfect trick. I imagined him looking at me with a superior smile.

“Wolf?” a voice whispered, but so lightly that I wondered whether I had imagined it.

“Isabel,” Wolf’s voice said. “Are you up? I brought a visitor.”

Something stirred. I heard a sound as of bedclothes, and what seemed like a faint sigh, and somewhere in that darkness I heard the word “Hello.”

“Say hello to Isabel,” Wolf said.

“Hello,” I said, feeling irritable and absurd.

“Tell her your name,” Wolf said quietly, as if I were a shy six-year-old child, and I would have said nothing, but who knew what was going on, there in the dark.

“David,” I said. “Dave.”

“Two names,” the voice said; there was more rustling. “Two are better than one.” I wondered whether Wolf had learned the trick of throwing his voice.

“Do you like my name, David Dave?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Uh-uh-uh,” she said playfully, and I imagined a finger wagging in the dark. “You had to think about it.”

“But I do,” I said, thinking quickly. “I was listening to the sound of it, in my mind.”

“Oh, that was a good answer, David Dave, a very good answer. I don’t believe you, not for a second, but I won’t make you pay a penalty, this time. So hey, how do you like my room? No no, don’t worry, just kidding. What’s Wolfie been telling you about me?”