Joyce Oates - Sourland

The door wasn’t locked. I’d been eleven at the time. I did not tell my father that I’d dared to walk on the roof of the Brewer Building that day and I never walked on the roof again.

Don’t come looking for me , my father had said. I would wait for him in the car, reading my book. I’d opened the passenger’s door so that I could sit sideways, with my legs dangling. Close by the river where there were no buildings obscuring the setting sun it was still light enough for me to read and I had only the vaguest awareness of my surroundings. In the near distance waves lapped against the wharf and from farther away came muffled sounds of music. At the periphery of my vision I might have been aware of another car turning onto the street behind the Brewer Building and parking a short distance away but this awareness was scarcely conscious and failed to register. Did you see — anyone? Must’ve seen! Try to remember. I was captivated by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine , which was the first of Wells’s Seven Scientific Romances that I’d discovered in the public library. I was captivated by the brashness of the Time Traveller — flinging himself onto the “saddle” of his home made time machine into not the near future but the distant future, with none of the provisions you would take on an overnight camping trip. You could foresee that the unnamed Time Traveller would return from his journey to the year 802,701, since he was telling his one story, but the way would not be easy for he’d discovered that humankind had evolved into two distinct subspecies: the “graceful children” of the Upper World and the “obscene, nocturnal Things” that dwelled like humanoid spiders underground. In much of my reading at this time in my early adolescence there was a terrible logic: something virulent and vengeful prepared to rise up in the night, beneath us as we slept, like an animated earthquake, to punish us. Why we were to be punished was not explained. Punishment was something that happened, and could not be averted. Punishment suggests a crime: but what is the crime? Born bad , it was said of some people. Born bad , it was said even of some individuals in Sparta. Yet I could not understand how an infant could be born bad , for no infant in my experience could plausibly be described in such a way.

Out on the river, men’s voices lifted in shouts of laughter, muffled by a motor’s roar. The sun was starting to set; I was losing the light at last. I left the car and took up a position nearer the river, leaning against a great cracked slab of concrete. If at this time the vehicle that might — or might not — have been parked behind the Brewer Building was driven away — if someone had hurriedly exited the building, gone to the car, and driven away — I had no awareness of it. I was in no position to see. Didn’t see. Don’t know. Leave me alone!

Another powerboat passed by, trailing drunken laughter. Vaguely it seemed to me that my name had been called — Madelyn! Madelyn! At the blues festival there had been several boys whom I knew from school, older boys at the high school, they’d called to me Madelyn! Madelyn Fleet! But I’d only just waved to them, I’d been standing with my father listening to a black jazz quartet playing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” Now I seemed to hear my name in a faint, failing voice, my father’s voice, but unlike my father’s voice as I had ever heard it. Quickly I closed The Time Machine, and returned to the car.

My father had been inside the building for more than a half hour, I thought. A ripple of pain pulsed in my eyes. How garish the Cadillac Eldorado looked, the cream-colored luxury car with Spanish red leather interior, parked amid rubble. I tossed The Time Machine onto the passenger’s seat and entered the building, into dim, humid heat and despite the heat I began to shiver. There was the elevator in the foyer: I could not bring myself to take it up to the eighth floor. What if the power failed, what if I was stuck between floors? Instead I took the stairs. Only dimly was the stairwell lighted by naked lightbulbs at each landing. The heat in the stairwell was stifling and by the time I reached the eighth floor I was panting and sweating. My Rangers T-shirt clung to my sticky skin. My hair stuck to the nape of my neck. On the eighth floor I struggled with the heavy door and another time the cruel taunt came to me Now the door will be locked against you, this is your punishment. But another time the door wasn’t locked against me, I ran down the corridor to my father’s office where the door was open….

At first I thought that my father had fallen somehow, struck his head against the sharp edge of a desk. He was bleeding from a head wound and from cuts to his face. His white cotton shirt was dappled with blood, and torn. His melon-colored seersucker trousers were dappled with blood, and torn. One of his sporty white shoes had been wrenched off. He was conscious, trying to sit up. I could hear his terrible labored breathing and his grunting with the effort of maneuvering himself into a sitting position. “Daddy —,” I called, and ran to him, and his glassy eyes fixed on me without seeming to recognize me: “Get away, get out of here” — “Don’t touch me.” Drawers had been yanked out of his desk and out of the green filing cabinet against the wall. There was a sharp, rank animal sweat of panic, male sweat. And a prevailing smell of cigarette smoke. By the time my father managed to stand shakily, he was calling me “Madelyn” — “honey.” He assured me he was all right — “Nothing to worry about, honey.” He was wiping at his dazed and bloody face with the front of his ruined shirt. When I asked him what had happened, had someone hurt him, he seemed not to hear. I asked if I should call an ambulance or the police and quickly he said no. In his stricken and disheveled state my father hovered over me. I could feel the heat of his skin. He was trying to explain through swollen lips that someone whose face he hadn’t seen had forced his way into the office and tried to rob him, he had not seen who it was because he’d been attacked from behind. Yet then my father said whoever it was had been waiting for him in his office when he’d unlocked the door, surprised him with a blow to the head. And maybe there was more than one of them, he hadn’t seen. I asked him what had been taken from the office and he said nothing had been taken because he’d surprised the thieves. I asked him if I should call the police and he said, with an angry laugh: “Didn’t I say no police?”

Now he would wash up, he said. As if his injuries could be washed away! Like a drunken man he leaned heavily on me, making his way to the men’s restroom outside in the corridor. “Stay out here. I’ll be all right. Don’t look so scared, your old man isn’t going to die.” My father spoke disdainfully, dripping blood. And in the restroom he remained for what seemed like a long time. I could hear water rushing from faucets, a groaning of aged pipes. I heard a toilet flush several times. I stood at the door calling, Daddy? Daddy? in a plaintive voice until he staggered back out. His face was washed, his hair dampened though not combed; he’d removed the torn and bloodstained shirt, and was in his sleeveless undershirt of ribbed cotton, which was also bloodstained. Fistfuls of wiry dark hair bristled on his chest, covering his forearms like pelt. He was walking lopsided because he’d left his left shoe back in his office, where I fetched it for him. I also shut the door, and locked it. Afterward I would realize that my father hadn’t seemed to be afraid that his assailant or assailants would return, and do more injury to him. He’d seemed to know that his daughter wasn’t endangered. The beating was finished, and would not be repeated.