Джойс Оутс: Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars

It hurts! Heart hurts.

Some kind of shunt or clamp in the heart or (maybe) where the heart used to be, now there’s a pump.

Iridescent-silver wire threaded through—(what is it?)—(an artery?)—and through the artery and into his brain strangely shaped and textured like a walnut.

Smell of burning flesh, hair. Sizzle-smell.

Skull-bone. Skin-flap.

NOT WONDERING WHY IT’S SO NUMBin this place where he finds himself in a kind of tight-wrapped body-bandage, so dark, and why so silent, tremulous reverberating silence with a quick-pulse like falling water beneath—not wondering, yet.

Not wanting to think that once you’ve been struck by lightning you are finished.

Point he’s trying to make: a blunder should be fixable, not lethal, fatal.

God damn blunder not the last thing Whitey McClaren will ever do on this earth.

“Oh. Oh no .”

Passing by an upstairs window of her house on Stone Ridge Drive and happening to glance out, and down.

Seeing—what was it?—a shiny-yellow-clad figure on a bicycle frantically pedaling up the long gravel driveway to the house. Shiny safety helmet and jutting elbows and knees like a large insect awkwardly riding a bicycle and the bicycle itself singularly ugly, rusted and mended with black tape.

Something so urgent about this creature, something so desperate, you did not want to know what urgency so propelled it, what desperation, you wanted only to shrink back against the wall to hide, not to hear footsteps on the front porch, a loud rapping at the door and a faint cry— Beverly? It’s me…

Could it be?—(quickly Beverly had stepped away from the window hoping not to be seen)—her brother Virgil?

Her younger brother, by five years. Her vagabond-brother, she thought him. Whom she had not seen in—how many months? A year? Virgil McClaren who had no cell phone, no computer, no car—with whom she had no way to communicate except through their parents, unless she wanted to write him a letter and put a stamp on it which no one ever did anymore.

Of course, it was Virgil. On the bicycle he’d boasted was too old, too ugly for anyone to steal. Who else!

That silly slick-yellow raincoat. Wouldn’t it be awkward, riding a bicycle while wearing an actual coat?

Had to be bad news. Why else would Virgil bicycle so frantically to see her ?

Now he was knocking at the door below. Rude, loud. Not taking time to ring the doorbell as a polite visitor would. Bev’ly? H’lo— expecting her to drop everything she was doing, or might conceivably be doing, run downstairs to see what on earth he wanted.

Beverly’s heart beat rapidly in opposition. No I will not. God damn I will not run downstairs to you.

If Virgil had had any sense or good manners—(which, being Virgil, he did not)—he’d have found a phone to use, to call her. To call first. Oh why couldn’t Virgil behave like other people ?

Beverly stood very still, listening in disbelief. Was Virgil trying the door? Actually turning the doorknob, to see if the door was locked?

Of course, the door was locked. All doors, windows. Locked.

However Virgil lived—(Beverly had an impression of a slovenly commune, persons like himself sharing a ramshackle old farm property that never had to be locked or secured since there was nothing worth stealing from it)—Beverly and her family lived very differently in Stone Ridge Acres where no property was smaller than two acres and all of the houses were four- or five-bedroom Colonials with landscaped lawns.

Not a gated community, it was not. Not a “segregated” community. Virgil was always saying it was, and that was why he wasn’t comfortable there amid myriad yellow signs and warnings—SLOW 15 MPH, PRIVATE ROAD, NO WAY OUT.

Virgil must have known that Beverly was home, he continued to call to her, and rattle the door.

(But—how could he be certain? To see Beverly’s SUV behind the garage he’d have had to bicycle back there. Or maybe he’d seen her at the upstairs window, peering down at him ?)

It was too much like a child’s game. Hide-and-seek. One of their games, that had left them excited and sweaty.

If the door hadn’t been locked, Beverly wondered if Virgil would have dared to enter the house. Probably yes. He had no respect for boundaries. He had no private life, he often said, whether boastfully or simply truthfully, and didn’t think that others should have “private” lives, too.

Beverly recalled how, if Virgil hadn’t been able to find his big sister, he would cry for her plaintively— Bev’ly! Bev’ly! —until she couldn’t bear it any longer, the child’s fear and yearning, and stepped out of hiding to run to him.— Here I am, Silly-Billy! I was here all along.

How happy it had made her, to be so wanted. And to so easily placate the frightened child.

But not now. The hell with Virgil, now. Too late by too many years.

She didn’t want his bad news. She didn’t want his agitation, his emotion. Too late.

The more Beverly hardened her heart against Virgil, the more adamant she was he had wronged her.

And she was not going to bail Virgil out if he was in debt, or desperate. Not her!

Making her way to the guest room at the rear of the house, and into the bathroom beneath the slanted roof. Quickly—door shut and latched behind her as if there was a serious possibility that Virgil might come looking for her.

What is wrong with you? What has happened to you? Hiding from your own brother?

Actually it felt good to be hiding from Virgil. Felt good to be behaving as selfishly as Virgil behaved, and without apology.

But why was she panting? Was she panicked ? As if this really was a game of hide-and-seek played with their old ferocity.

In the bathroom mirror a flushed face like a blowsy peony. Was that her ?

The toilet lid, not plastic but wooden, covered in soft fuzzy pastel-pink, was down. Feeling weak, Beverly sat.

She was thirty-six. Her legs had grown fleshy, like her thighs, belly. Not that she was an overweight woman, she was not. Steve still called her my gorgeous wife . My Olympia. (Sometimes, meaning to be exotic, he’d called her my odalisque —but Beverly wasn’t sure she wanted to be one of those.) Standing too long, especially when she was tense, made her legs ache.

Hearing him—where, now?—at the side door, that led into the kitchen?

Beverly? It’s Virgil… But really his voice was too faint, she couldn’t hear.

The wild thought came to her: maybe Virgil had “snapped”—there was a good deal of “snapping” in the U.S. today—and had come to the house with a firearm, to slaughter her… Maybe the Zen Buddhist peace-lover had imploded, and was revealed as murderous.

Bev’ly? Hello…

A few more seconds and the knocking ceased.

Intensely she listened, hearing only the blood beating in her ears.

Was it safe? To emerge from the bathroom?

Her brother hadn’t forced his way into the house, had he?—hadn’t crept up the stairs, and was approaching her hiding place with the intent to—accost her?

What relief: no one.

At a front window she saw Virgil in shiny yellow bicycling away, out the driveway and along Stone Ridge Drive. As suddenly as the threat had appeared, it was disappearing.

Trembling! Her hands! Why on earth was she…

Why hidden from her brother when he’d needed her. Had something crucial to tell her.

“Oh, why !”

QUICKLY THEN,downstairs to check if Virgil had left a note stuck into the door. Front door, side door. Nothing.