CHAPTER 22

Michael’s Journal:

My earliest childhood is mostly a blur of acid colors, with unanchored emotions swerving between images of terror and beauty. Some of these times survive in photographs, and even in overexposed photographs that correctly match my recollection. In one picture I have stacked all my toys on top of my grandfather, who pretended to be asleep. I can remember the episode vividly, and the joy I shared with my grandfather that afternoon. Away from my toys, however, the world and the people in it fall away by steps.

I slept with my toy box on my bed for some years, and when I look back over places where I lived in boyhood I recall them by what toys I owned at the time. It is not so much a memory of play I remember as a memory of empathy: the bright colors of toys, their textures, parts, smells, and tastes. One by one they disappeared: the large ones before the smaller ones. Yet there came a point where they became so small—so precious—some part of me unconsciously held them back. I still possess game pieces of games long vanished, as well as every marble I ever owned. Even today the toys I miss most are the little ones that slipped through my net: plastic dinosaurs I found in a sock drawer and my grandmother let me keep; plastic pirates that topped a birthday cake one year, and which I treasured more than my other gifts.

THE DOPPELGÄNGER

Emma’s palatial hip rose somewhere beyond his knee, although her silhouette was so flat against the wall he could not tell in which direction she faced. His lover would never cease being something squeezed from an eyedropper: something that, in an act of dilation, curved inexplicably on the back of his optical lens. To the degree she existed as something out there, no canvas or bed would contain her. No anxious thought would keep her from straying into the dark woods.

Grazing her shoulder blade, he found her once again wearing his old sweater. He could not say he felt the draft that chilled her on either his face or in his veins, but he did hear it whistling through the keyhole and chiming in a snarl of clothes hangers in the closet. The doorknob rattled—yet the draft had no hand in it.

Michael braced himself.

Light from a flashlight seeped in around the jamb, preceding a groan of timbers. Clinking metal dropped to the floor in the hall. More wood whined under the claw end of a hammer before another nail fell. When the last one was removed, the wedged chair was left as a barrier. The glass doorknob rocked again, but the piece of furniture held. Seeking light dropped down the door face, though no gleam or crooked shaft passed through the keyhole. On reaching the gap at the floorboards, the illumination spread like a crepe-thin cloak, tossing the four legs of the chair high onto the facing wall. Inexplicably, the finger-like shadows began moving independently of one another. The fearful man watched the unlikely intruders tiptoe from corner to corner. Occasionally they overlapped, as if communicating, but directly resumed their rigid forms as chair legs. With the odd ballet completed, the light in the hallway shrank away with the tread of feet.

Michael shot up on the bed. “Martians!” he said aloud. He looked down at Emma still sleeping, and knew he had been sleeping, too.

Restless, he tossed off the sheets to climb into cooler air. The chair was unstuck from the door before he quietly—timorously—ventured out into the unexplored house. Creaking floorboards plumbed the long shadows like sonar, placing him within earshot of the neighbor’s dog still scratching at the backdoor. He glanced around the moonless room for clues, discerning by outline what could only be the most nondescript of furnishings. His hands fumbled over glass grapes in a bowl, and then over a rooster weathervane bolted to a wall, but his emotions were stunted in his fingertips, as if meeting with indecipherable Braille. He quietly opened the cupboard where Emma earlier removed a candle, and felt more candles inside. Only these were used-up candles set in a thoughtful row. He smelled one, and then another, and knew from their scent what they meant: knew from their flat, oblong shapes what each in turn chronicled at length. Starlight set off the whimpering pet in a doorframe of mesh and glass, and the surveyor abruptly found himself in an auxiliary room that was perhaps once a porch yet now served as a darkroom. A sheet of rubylith was taped over its one window, which illuminated scores of photographs tacked to a clapboard wall. The depicted figures at first resembled cadavers under pond ice, but as each nude body inched its way up to the surface of his perception, they were, like the candles, quickly getting under his skin. The images were all of the same couple engaged in various sexual positions, framed in the outline of a tenebrous keyhole. Michael compressed, shrinking under the pitiless view, for he could now see from outside what he could not see from inside. The shadow on the bedroom walls had not mirrored his lovemaking, but he, in suppliant manner, had mirrored the movements of another lover.

The dog pounced harder on the door. Michael looked over, seeing it turn off the stoop and disappear into the yard. He was leaning back on his heels when the creature reemerged seconds later for another assault; he was certain it was not the same dog. The animal reared with a whine before circling back into the pitch. It approached the stoop a third time without touching the door, and then a fourth, and then a fifth. With each dash by the screen it appeared larger and more menacing. The mongrel momentarily disappeared from view, but this was no cause for relief. Michael stepped away from the fetishistic photographs to examine the strange lock on the backdoor. It was made of wood and consisted of a dowel-like plunger set in a long grooved slot that ran parallel to the molding, though did not intersect the door. He thrust the sliding part down tight against the baseboard, but could not see how it functioned as a brace. Puzzling, he was slow to realize he stood nose-to-nose with something on the other side of the glass. It was no longer a dog, yet nothing like a man…

A light switched on behind him.

“Michael?” she called from the doorway. “Are you sleepwalking?”

He shot around in a fading mutter. “I thought I heard prowlers.”

“Are you sure you’re not sleepwalking?”

Nothing was at the backdoor; the photographs on the wall were simply commercial wedding portraits and baby pictures. “Maybe,” he confessed.

Emma turned back to the kitchen, flipping off the light. “Come to bed,” she said.

The night wanderer did not immediately follow, but lingered to compose himself. He retraced the noisy floorboards and crawled back into bed with his unshakable unease, as he would always need verbal permission to share this space with her.

Emma gave it to him in the form of a soft complaint. “There’s a chill on my back.” She reached around to find his wrist under the cover and drew him, limb for limb, into the attitude of her body.

The wee hours of the morning always found his defenses in disarray, with his mind scrambling to remarry his barely owned skin to a barely plausible myth of the world. In such moments, everything not immediately tactile was appreciated for what it truly was: utter and irredeemable absurdity. A hole in the elbow of her sweater readily accommodated several of his needful fingers, though the exposed, goosepimply arm inside was the one bearing the ring. Against it, and against the albescent windows, he endeavored to round her off under his touch, and to objectify with his mind’s eye what he could not objectify in any other way.

The photographs were remarkable only in being unremarkable; and Michael could not help but feel Emma’s slight embarrassment by them back at the kitchen door. Beyond a bed, there seemed to be nothing of this fiancé she wanted to share with him. She was heading down a new road, he sensed, but where was it leading? Was he being invited along for the journey? Or was he merely another pending embarrassment she would be quick to turn the light out on. The painter wanted to see the young woman as a misplaced valuable among such ordinariness in this rural house, but reflexively—defensively—, he was notorious for window-shopping. His thinking was as cowardly as it was convoluted in these matters. A braver, less complicated man would simply steal the woman outright, but he habitually acted by half-measures believing he could trick himself into commitment incrementally. Still, he trembled on the brink of annihilation in this wilderness, for an abyss of emotions threatened to swallow him whole. What he could say with conviction and sobriety was that something at the center of him was wound tightly around something else. He could not say what either thing was, or whether the force involved was one of resistance or a latch wanting to be released. This, in practical parlance, was, for him, love. As long as yesterday and tomorrow were held at arm’s length, what else could it be?

With prayerful, apologetic lips pressed to the base of Emma’s neck, he whispered to hear his own heart. “Without you, I am nothing.”