Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“Here,” James said to the man as he picked up the telephone, which he had wrapped up in its cords and placed at the foot of the stairs a week before, “I imagine you’ve come for this.”

THAT EVENING, AS the light faded over the common, he wrote:

Dear Father,

We are well past the summer solstice now and the days are getting shorter. I suppose it’s with this sort of observation a letter should begin, in the safety of neutral facts. Since I’ve stopped working, time has slowed. I think a lot about the past, and the memories tend to make the present less real, like the memory of you standing at the back door in your blue suit, leaning your head against the stone as dusk encompassed the yard. Some days I feel as though I am still in that yard, watching you, wondering what you’re thinking. Do you see me there? Do you remember?

You will be glad to know I’ve been responsible about my money. Everything’s been drawn up and signed. Mum should have no problem with it. I find you now and again here on the common, bits and pieces of you scattered in the woods, but as the days go by, so the need lessens. I’ll be coming home soon.

He remained seated at the end of the bench, listening to the trees and the music from the flat behind. His breath was shallow, though not from excitement. In the vestibule, his hands shook as he held his key to the lock, and he had to steady himself against the wall. On the stairs, he made good use of the banister.

IT WAS A rainy morning later that week when the doorbell rang again. Wary of the bill collectors, James looked through the curtain to identify the visitor. It was Patrick, his colleague from Shipley’s. James was supposed to have returned to work five days ago, but by that time he’d unplugged the phone. If they had been trying to call, he knew nothing of it.

He considered letting the doorbell ring, pretending to be away, but his nerve gave out and he went round to the hall.

Patrick stood in the doorway in a raincoat, his red hair clustered into dark strands by the rain.

“James! You’re here!” he bellowed. “What’s the story, mate? We thought you were dead down a ditch somewhere.”

James stood staring at this young man over whom he had fretted so during his year at the office, catering, invisibly, to his whims and preferences, whims and preferences James had likely imagined to begin with—an elaborate set of spinning wheels, attached to nothing.

He hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a week and found himself caught off guard by Patrick’s presence, as though this person ought to have moved on by now, the way a thought passes from the mind. But there he was, dripping rain, a dopey half smile playing across his face.

“Come in,” James said.

Patrick hesitated, glancing at James in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, sensing, it appeared, that he’d wandered into something larger than expected. “Simon was worried,” he said. In the twilight of the hall, he narrowed his eyes. “You don’t look so great. Have you been sick?”

“Yeah. This rash, I… It won’t go away. I’ve had a head cold too. I was going to call but there was some problem with the phones—in the building, I mean.”

Patrick was looking through to the living room, taking in the clothes strewn on the furniture, the mantel cluttered with jars of ointment and old prescription bottles.

“As a matter of fact, I won’t be coming back to the office. I’m moving.”

“What’s this, then? Does Simon know?”

“No. I should tell him. You see, I’ve decided I need to spend some time with my family, so I’m not going to stay on here.

It’s a bit sudden, I know.” He felt himself balking at the ruse and yet beneath that feeling was a relief, an unsentimental farewell to the bond of simple honesty, to the assumptions they might ever have shared. He had occupied himself with the idea of this man’s happiness and now he could cast at him a distant glance, fiddling with the truth.

“Pardon me, I should have taken your coat,” James said, suddenly all politeness. “Won’t you come in and sit down?”

“I should be getting back.” His expression grew confused, the expression of a man who has wandered into the wrong cinema and finds himself in the dark with strange or disturbing images.

Before he knew what he had done, James had his hand on Patrick’s cheek and was passing his thumb over the soft, freckled skin beneath his eye. “Thank you,” he said, “thank you for everything.”

Blushing, Patrick turned his head away and reached back for the handle of the door. “I must go.”

He stepped down the walk to the gate and didn’t turn back on the street but kept moving until he had disappeared behind the bus shelter and was gone.

JAMES DIDN’T CALL Simon. At first, he harbored a feeling of guilt, a worry he had let someone down, but as the weeks went by, his sense of the world became ever more abstract. He began to doubt that if he went to the office there would be anyone there he recognized, or who would recognize him. The doctors had said this could happen, one’s memory might go, confusions could overtake you as the virus entered the brain.

Slowly, time began to evaporate, the process swallowing whole periods of his life. He forgot Simon and the office, Patrick and the year he had spent worrying over his affections. One morning he no longer recognized the flat he was occupying and began to imagine that the real occupant might return and send him onto the street. He wandered about the unfamiliar rooms, thinking at times that he was in the yard of his childhood, crouched by the birdbath, where he would wait as dusk fell.

There was a common nearby and he would walk there in the evening. Often, as he approached the far corner, where a bench sat empty in lamplight, he would feel nonplussed.

From somewhere would come a barely audible whisper, one that vanished as soon as he stopped to listen, as a dream vanishes beneath the effort of recollection. Returning from his walk one evening he was accosted by a young woman. It was by the pedestrian crossing. She had just come over the road and was about to pass by when she came to a halt before him and looked intently at his face. She had the overlarge eyes of a lizard and a gaunt face that matched the color of her hair. She began to speak to James, asking him questions about his health, exclaiming how much weight he had lost. Did he need money? she asked. He smiled and answered the questions as best he could, hoping she would continue on her way. He had seen her at a bad time, she said, riffling through her bag to find a cigarette; things were different now, she was out of all that racket. He nodded in agreement, and this seemed to comfort her, for her hands ceased to move so rapidly, and she placed one briefly on his arm. She was sorry about everything, she said, she hadn’t meant to bother him about herself. Was there nothing she could do? Politely, he declined, imagining she had mistaken him for someone else.

JAMES SAT IN a room by a window trying to read a book. It was afternoon, and outside a steady rain fell. The novel was about an old man who captivated his grandson with stories of his ancestors, drawing closer and closer to the present, until finally he was telling the boy the story of the boy’s own life, and the narrative became a prophecy that frightened the listener. He read a few pages at a time, resting his eyes now and again, or just staring out onto the street. There, shawled women queued for the bus and old men with their caps pulled down hung in doorways, waiting for the rain to pass.

Their silhouettes appeared fuzzy, blurred by the weather, their dark shoes blending with the wet pavement until it seemed to James as though they were sinking in mud. He shook his head a bit and returned his attention to the page.