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he prevailing sight in Grender’s apartment was that of shelves loaded with books, disks and assorted pieces of computer hardware. The prevailing sound was that of many commingled low hums. And beyond those features could be discerned none of any particular character unless a close scrutiny of many miscellaneous possessions, together with their condition and placement, gave evidence of a mind abnormally acquisitive and careless.
On a day in March, he was at his habitual business of trawling castoff hard drives for personal and financial information—names and addresses as well as social security and bank account numbers. The trade in private information was moderately lucrative and besides entailed the purely recreational interest of rummaging other people’s belongings. The work required no particular intelligence. He had software for the job. The usual method of erasing the hard drives of computers consisted in the erasure of directories but not of the whole disk. As such, the data on many computers sold or given away lay open to recovery by enterprising scavengers. His sole labor consisted in sifting the exposed files for what was valuable or of interest.
But on this day, when the sky outside was grey turning to black (although he barely noticed or remembered it afterward), he sifted material somewhat stranger than usual. The disk was not entirely lacking in the usual contents. He found the requisite personal information, although no bank account or social security number. He found a spreadsheet indicative of the relatively prosperous circumstance of the computer’s late owner. And he found evidence of a more than usually advanced interest in art. But nothing was so very unusual beyond a single directory of documents entitled Histories. Throughout the rest of the day and into the night, he read with increasing avidity the sometimes related accounts of many strangers’ lives. There was no drama in the manner of these accounts—the facts were conveyed with laconic precision and nothing more, except that there appeared in rare cases a parenthetical note that suggested some unstated knowledge on the part of the author.
The dates of the documents’ creation showed, or suggested, that they were written at widely separated periods, while the dry recitation of the histories’ facts forbade the idea that they had been intended as fiction, or at least as any kind of wholesome entertainment.
Each history was named according to the person it described. Grender’s attention was drawn first to those names that were familiar to him and it was those that occupied the first part of his reading. He was struck naturally enough by the more sensational episodes, but more and more as he progressed he could not help noticing the many minor descriptions of events that could not have been, or should not have been, susceptible to observation. In a circumstance where, by the history’s own account, the subject was alone and in the concealment of perfect privacy, there followed nonetheless a detailed description of his activities. In many cases, Grender was able to think that evidence had been found afterward from which the activities had been inferred; or he could imagine that miniature cameras had been placed at intervals throughout the subject’s home.
But so many were episodes of the kind that to imagine that they were all observed by similar means would have been to imagine that the author of the histories was not merely comfortably well-off but of nearly limitless resources and connections, had applied these resources over a considerable span of years, and had done so without once bringing his observations to public attention.
From the names that were known to him, he passed on to the rest. One of those was an exceedingly common name which had escaped his attention before for the very reason of its commonness. But as he read, he realized that it was someone of his acquaintance; one of a tight circle of associates who were in the habit of disclosing themselves freely to one another, not so much from closeness of friendship as from the mutual security they enjoyed in their confidences, to dispose in one another’s ears what they did not, or could not, tell others. It was by means of these profligate confidences that Grender was able to verify most of what he read in his acquaintance’s file.
The undeniable truth of this report gave him unease and special reason to pause. Knowledge of one man did not necessarily mean knowledge of all his friends. But Grender could not keep from running over in his mind all he had disclosed in the company of these friends. He had said many things, of course, but not many of grave importance. A minute’s thought reassured him that he had neither told nor hinted anything—even in drunkenness—that should give him concern. And he reminded himself that even if he had told the worst, the worst lay far within the past. It was extremely unlikely that he could be troubled by it at this late date. With a slow, easy breath and a shake of the head at his own misgiving, he passed on.
Among the other histories, he found so many that detailed horrible and violent acts that he could not believe they were true. That is, he could not believe that the historian had been so many times privy to scenes of similar character. Even a police detective would have been constrained to describe the acts according to their results—but the historian insisted on describing them as though he had been a witness.
Surely, he thought, no one had written these histories but a lunatic who had perversely confused facts with fantasy. Besides, a great deal of the histories dealt with nothing more than the thoughts of their subjects, and whatever kernel of truth they might be formed around, there was no doubt of the author’s ability to observe those.
When he was done reading, Grender wished more than usual that he had found an account number. He had developed a special dislike of the author of the histories, and wanted to serve him his own dish cold. Here was a man who imagined that he knew a great deal about the people he saw—a great collector of gossip, no doubt—and so arrogant that he believed he could even guess their thoughts. But here was the hard disk of his old computer open to prying eyes. Grender had the man’s name and address. It might yet be possible to get an account number. And, if not, there were other ways to trouble the self-styled historian.
With thoughts such as these, he disconnected the hard drive. A stack of others waited on the shelf. But for now, he let them be. After reading the histories, the rest could only be tedious and anticlimactic—video games, pornography and bad poems. He was in no mood for them.
A full day passed without an improvement in his mood. He could not tell what it was, but something irked him. He knew it concerned the histories but could not tell what about them bothered him so much. In an effort to shake off this mood, he went out to eat, visited a strip club and stayed at a bar far longer than he wished to. While he sat on a stool, desultorily watching one of the innumerable televisions bracketed to the walls, he called his friends in the hope that familiar companionship might comfort him. But after calling several and finding them otherwise occupied, he stopped trying. He detected something in his calls that reeked of desperation and he disliked that trait more than the mood that held him.
When it was late, he left the bar and drove, aimlessly at first, along the main thoroughfares at the edge of the city. At a stop light, he remembered that the name and address of the historian were written on a paper in his wallet. He looked at it and decided to pay a visit. The address was unfamiliar to him and he was forced to stop in a parking lot while he consulted a map. As it happened, he was already in the near vicinity and a drive of two miles brought him to his destination.
It was a large building (20 stories, although he did not trouble to count) enclosed by a wrought iron fence, near the gate of which stood a guard shack. This aggravated more than satisfied his curiosity. The gate defied him and lent, as he thought, a specious credence to the historian’s arrogance. There was nothing to do but gaze up at the place where he felt the man must even then be sleeping—or writing another of his wretched histories.
He had had it half in mind to search the stranger’s trash for bank statements or receipts. That was now obviously out of the question and he went away more angry than before. At home, amid the shelves of hardware and the omnipresent commingled hum of his computers, he enjoyed only a restless sleep but one that served to efface the obsessive emotion of the night.
In the morning, he opened the blinds of his apartment to the sunlight and fixed his breakfast. As he ate, he smiled and felt foolish about the day before. What had it all been about but some sordid little stories left on someone’s computer?—the work of a man too rich or too cultivated for ordinary pleasures and devolved to sick fantasies—nothing else. With the light streaming through the windows and the reassuring smell of bacon and eggs, it was impossible to think otherwise.
He disposed of the rest of the morning in the usual way. He had a legitimate job in servicing computers, much of which he was able to do in the comfort of his own home. But around noon, he went out to answer a call. Stepping from the relative darkness of the foyer of his apartment building into the sunlight of midday, he noticed a man standing nearby. Even as he noticed him, the man began to walk, smiling and nodding in a neighborly manner as he did so. Grender returned the greeting in a mechanical way and continued to his car, thinking only that some people were more neighborly than he liked.
He did not pay any particular attention to the appearance of the stranger, although he recognized him later when they met again. In general attributes, it would have been difficult to conjure a more ordinary form. He stood six foot, was of medium build, his hair a blond darkened with age. The forehead was high and broad, the lips somewhat thin, the nose straight and narrow. The eyes were of that adulterated shade of blue that resembles emerald, although a very close inspection would have revealed that the irises were marked with a few small but distinct streaks of red.
A prolonged examination would have seen in the eyes something more to pause over than their color. It would be difficult to say what it was. Their owner might know the origin of the look without being able to trace the cause to the effect. It was perhaps the rounded arch of each eyebrow combined with the circles beneath that gave the vague impression of inwardness, as though each eye lay within the involute windings of a spiral. But beyond these, which Grender did not stay to attend, he was an ordinary, perhaps colorless, figure among the multitudes of ordinary people.
When Grender returned, he resumed his other work. The hard drives opened to him one by one and spilled their contents to be read, as the clouds themselves thinned and spread to expose the sky. And throughout the rest of the day, to the close of the next, nothing untoward happened to disturb him.
But on the afternoon following, he received a letter bearing a familiar return address. Within was a note that read |
| See me. |
and was signed with the historian’s name. There was nothing else.
He stood by his mailbox staring at the note, although there was little enough to scrutinize, and even turned the envelope this way and that as though it might conceal a clue to the note’s meaning. He first thought it must refer to the histories; why else would it be this man who inquired? But if that were the case, then how did he know about it? These and other thoughts moved in Grender’s mind as he walked back to his apartment.
He saw no reason to take chances. If he could not fully interpret the note or gauge the danger, he could at least render himself immune to accusation so far as concerned his own property. All the extracted private information was stored on a single computer; and this he now proceeded to erase by overwriting the drive once with zeroes, once with ones, and once with randomly generated zeroes and ones. Besides this, he set about erasing all the castoff hard drives in his possession. There was a message on his phone from a longtime buyer of information; he erased the message, then opened the phone, and removed and broke several important-looking parts (he wasn’t sure how the phone worked) before screwing it all back together and throwing it in the trash. As for the drive that contained the histories, he examined it thoroughly for a camera (the computer it had come from was already discarded) but finding none, contented himself with erasing it and smashing it to bits with a hammer.
When he was done with all this and had conducted a thorough visual and mental review, he relaxed, sat and looked at the note once more. In a calmer frame of mind, there seemed less to worry about. His adversary could not be very intelligent. Grender had his name and address, and the note’s author had only a veiled accusation. Perhaps not even that. Perhaps he had merely remembered something important left behind on his computer, and having discovered the current owner, wished now to recover it. But then, he thought, why not simply say so? After all, there was an accusation. There must be.
But the man must be naïve. He could not know what sort of person Grender was—he could not gauge the danger. Given this foolishness, the note might be ignored.
But the hard drives were already overwritten and the stock of personal information was lost. Grender had panicked. Something (reasonable or unreasonable, he could not decide which) had caused him to associate the note, the descriptions of violence and the implication of omniprevalent knowledge in such a confused way that he had been harassed into a fear that even the worst of his crimes had overtaken him. And the mere fact that he had been reminded of it redoubled the sense that he had been raked and taunted.
What good did it do this man to accuse if he could not call the police? Or what was the character of one who spied another man’s hand and then showed his own? He might be a lunatic, but Grender was not afraid of that. He had an invitation, which to accept would not compromise him—he might pick up something of use while in the apartment. Besides, to ignore the invitation would place him under the shadow of guilt by the evidence of his own timidity.
He smiled. Accusers hector most when they most lack evidence—and threats are commonly made from the fear to act. So he inferred the timidity of the historian. There was no reason he should not see the man. It might, if nothing else, prove an entertaining spectacle to observe a person whose stupidity was so childish that he sent notes to criminals to warn them of their acts.
He would have gone to meet him immediately but a second thought counseled him to make him wait a while, to let him sweat and worry the effect of his note.
There were several computers in his rooms and he now passed the time at one of them, searching the historian’s name on the internet to see whether he had any public connection. When he was satisfied that there was none, he turned his thoughts to other details of the histories. There had been descriptions of murders. Even now, as he thought of it, the only copy of those descriptions was being steadily effaced by his computer, and he glanced in its direction to see the progress-bar as it advanced in its snail’s pace across the screen.
In spite of that, a minute’s concentration brought back the names of a few supposed murderers and their victims. He searched them on the internet employing every species of word-combination that he thought was likely to find them. It was only when he added the name of the city and state that the results narrowed and brought the appropriate items to the top.
The murder victims had really been so, it seemed, and died by all accounts the very deaths described. The news articles were not as particular in their descriptions as those of the histories, but it was to be expected that the histories had been embellished.
He next proceeded to the supposed murderers. He remembered the names of two. And one of them was not mentioned at all in any online source. Only references to the second disclosed anything of interest. Timothy Gardner, a 27-year-old short order cook, had driven his car into a tree a little more than two years after the murder attributed to him. But searching Gardner’s name in conjunction with that of his supposed victim brought no results, and no details in the case of the suicide or murder shadowed forth the least connection between them.
Grender could imagine what had happened. The historian had made a game of associating one news story with another and then wrote his histories in such a manner that the falsehoods could be fitted into the framework of the facts. This seemed to him a reasonable explanation. It was true that Gardner’s history had made no mention of his suicide but no doubt it had been left out for dramatic effect to be disclosed conversationally to acquaintances after the history had been read.
The sanitization of the drives was not yet complete. But everything incriminating had undoubtedly been erased. And besides he began to feel restless and eager to meet his mysterious historian—all the more now that he had the advantage of further knowledge. He paused only (he could not have said why) to pick up the note with the envelope it came in. He did not need it, but he put it in his pocket. And having put it there, he was too much the enemy of indecision to attempt removing it.
Without another delay, he drove once more to the building indicated by the address and this time presented himself at the gate. The guard called up to verify that he was expected, and then admitted him. Grender had not been able to hear the answering voice, and began to feel unaccountably uneasy. Nevertheless, he parked his car and entered the building.
He found the elevator, entered and the doors shut him in. There was nothing useful for him to think while he rode up. What lay before him was nothing more than a blank space, waiting to be filled by the sight of the man himself and the rooms where he lived. But his mind felt agitated and restless, and there was a ringing in his ears that annoyed him. He associated it with the hum of the elevator and remarked silently to himself how slowly the elevator seemed to move—how an illimitable time seemed to pass while the plastic circle with the number of a floor kept its light before reluctantly darkening and passing the light to the circle next in ascent. Then, too, by the creeping slowness of the climb and the restlessness he felt, there came to his mind the unconjured image of a spider—a harvestman—pale yellow as though it belonged in the depth of a cave and borne on impossibly long legs that moved with delicate intricacy as it walked.
But he shook away this image and consulted once more the light of the elevator panel. He saw that it was only now passing the third floor, and he chided himself for his impatience. He had only just stepped into the elevator and pressed the button; the building was evidently somewhat old and the elevator would no doubt take a full minute in its ascent. And meanwhile, the ringing persisted, while the harvestmen of his imagination seemed to multiply and jostle one another with such a slow confusion of threadlike weaving legs that their image disjoined itself from any concrete association.
The ringing was persistent but he had by now passed the fifth floor. He had a slight headache and felt his pockets for aspirin without finding any. He passed a hand over his face. As he did so, the image came unbidden of a railroad bridge seen from a distance and a small dark figure stepping off—stepping off with the blithe confidence of one who had expected the first tread of a staircase to meet his foot and, finding none, fell resistlessly down, turning as he fell and meeting the surface of the river with his shoulder. Raising his eyes to meet the lights of the panel, he realized that hardly a second had passed and the light was unchanged. A very long time seemed to pass before the elevator stopped and opened its doors, so much so that he hesitated to step forth. Maybe, he thought, it would be better to go back. Obviously he wasn’t feeling well; it could not be to his advantage to go to this meeting when he was sick. But then he remembered that he had already called up; he was expected; it was impossible to back out. As the doors threatened to reclose, he caught them with his hands and stepped into the hallway.
It was broad and softly lit. The lights were at wide intervals, their shades throwing the rays toward the ceiling and diffusing them in fanlike forms. Near at hand and directly opposite the elevator stood a small end table flanked by two cushioned chairs that seemed weak and impalpable in the mellow light that reflected from the ceiling. But a man waited for him in a room along this hall, and so he tore his eyes from the table and chairs and began to walk. In doing so, he made no sound. The floor was thickly carpeted and absorbed even the small sound he ordinarily heard, when it was quiet, of the flex and reflex of his shoes. And he thought, while he took the slow, inexorable steps toward the door, that it must be the most silent of corridors, the loneliest and most ghostly. In his progress, he seemed not so much to step as drift, like one carried on the tide. Even the door to the apartment lost tenacity in the hallway’s soft light. When he tapped it with his fist to knock, it made a small sound, revolved back into the apartment, and disclosed his host within.
He saw the face again, half-shrouded by the light of a lamp, in a room certainly spacious but hardly more substantial than the hallway. He saw the same ordinary form but with eyes now so darkened that, it seemed to him, they expressed an inhuman passivity and tonelessness. Yet when he heard his host’s voice, it should have dispelled that impression. It was only the voice of a man—merely one who had seen more than he meant to see, been driven to do more than he meant to do, and lived a life so far from his wishes that in his slow acquiescence to it time had branded it upon his eyes.
The room in which the historian stood was simply furnished, even sparse. There was a single bookcase containing, to judge by appearance, a motley assortment of volumes, few of them new and all excessively worn. There were two wing chairs turned toward each other at an obtuse angle. Behind one of these stood a lamp which, like the lights that pursued the hallway, threw its rays only toward the ceiling and upper walls. There was a sofa, a coffee table and a large tessellated rug of unfamiliar pattern. But the room was dominated by the paintings that hung upon the walls. And here at least, although it might not have been suspected from the histories, there was no violence, no people whatever—instead there were streams, trees, moss-covered stones, or tenantless houses, rooms and streets. Nor could any emotion whatever have been inferred from them unless one read it from their colors and their lights.
His host invited him to sit and he sat; he could do no more. Then the historian seated himself under the lamp in his customary chair and explained, for the habit of courtesy, why he had invited his guest. Grender had stumbled upon some personal information. The hard drive was destroyed—that much was good. The invitation that had been sent was with him in his pocket—that was necessary. But it was not for these things that he had been brought.
Grender’s host spoke now for the satisfaction of hearing his words aloud and knowing that they were heard. It stilled the sense that his own history was lodged in silence, that the very objects of his apartment groaned with it, and that the horror of his soul was of no consequence.
He was, he said, the son of educated parents; his mother, a psychologist; his father, a teacher of art history. The latter had over the years steadily inculcated his son with the idea that, although art was a noble calling, nothing could be more useless to pursue. He fed his son with talk of the chaotic wilderness of styles and schools competing unproductively in the aftermath of modernism—of the prevailing feebleness of technique—of the absence of any great commercial outlet comparable to movies and music—of the indifference of the public—and so on, so persistently dogmatizing that by the law of opposition, combined with his mother’s marked tendency to anatomize life into unspiritual elements, it was only a matter of time before the boy requested canvas and paint. This was permitted—his parents were both of a liberal temperament—but only as long as his new avocation produced no lapse in his studies. Thus, at the age of fifteen, he set himself to become an artist.
But the same quickening of youth that had awakened the artist also awakened something more troubling. He began to have strange dreams at night, dreams in which he often played no part but that others acted out obscurely before him. Even during the day, these visions irregularly intruded, not merely with visual force but with the impression of every sense and pungency of emotion. In the effort to drive away these visions or frame them within rational boundaries, he painted more frequently, minding hardly at all the subject or technique but working with a militant concentration that conformed all his studies to the emotional purpose.
If the determined endeavors of fledgling art satisfied him or gave him relief, the effect of his canvases on others was far less predictable. All agreed that his skill had considerably advanced; and some even praised the subjects, however obscure and inconsistent. But there were those who viewed the pictures with more unease, who found in one or a few scenes something unnatural or offensive, although the impression was one they hardly mentioned and about which they refused to elaborate.
With the increase of the intensity of his work in painting came an increase in visions. In order to obtain the same relief as before, greater immersion and concentration became necessary. He no longer paused as before to read passages of art history or study the photographs of paintings in his father’s books, but worked with a morbid fervor that prostrated him to headaches and exhaustion. He was able to conceal his deterioration for a time, working especially while his parents were out, or taking his materials to the woods and painting there—blind to the trees, hills and multi-colored sky—the images that so constantly intruded and oppressed him. But his work in school inevitably suffered; the alteration in his physical condition was noticed; and he was soon forbidden to paint.
With the end of painting, his suffering did not end. And to call them visions now was to mistake them entirely. They were disembodied voices; emotions without context; tactile and olfactory ravings with a myriad visceral suggestions that he could not distinguish. He thought he might be losing his mind, but he dared not speak of it. Nor could he dispel to canvas what invisibly haunted him. Instead, he took long walks, hoping vainly to exhaust what he could not at will subdue. Among the neighborhoods of the hills, he rested his eyes on the simple architectural features of the houses while he resisted the thoughts of those who resided within. The houses, all of recent, inexpensive and more or less uniform construction, were of no particular interest. But to tame his thoughts by the rhythm of mere form, he counted and mentally subdivided the foursquare window of nine panes per square which was surmounted by the inevitable fanlight; ran his eyes over the inexpressive gable penetrated only by the octagonal vent at the apex; and he imagined the descent of a shed dormer as though it were the blinking of an eye.
When these sights exhausted themselves in his imagination, he went heedlessly into the older and more remote neighborhoods—went further, anywhere, as long as it refreshed the superficial objects of meditation necessary to blockade all others. And it was on one of these rambles, while passing along a street of untended and dilapidated houses, that he met a girl. He had been examining the decorative shutters found at many of the house’s windows, marking their number and condition, and amusing himself with the observation that they did not always make up the full dimensions of the windows they were ostensibly meant to cover. In the midst of this frivolous exercise, he was arrested, as sometimes happened, by the intrusion of a vision of particular force and vividness. So much did it command his attention with its brutality that he stopped on the sidewalk and gazed into vacancy while it passed before him.
The images were broken, stuttering one into another but steadily dominated by a man’s face as he raged over the eyes that watched. In his hectic coloring, the lips that writhed back from the teeth and the unvarying stare of the eyes, he looked a perfect demon of fierce cruelty. And wherever hands were thrown up in defensive gesture against him, he instantly brought down the swift bat of his arm to strike them away—as if more than anything the fear itself enraged him. This and similar scenes replayed themselves obstinately, interrupted only by intervals of positive darkness during which the boy seemed still to observe the movement of another’s mind but in exhausted abeyance from the memories that tormented it.
It was now, if ever, that the first understanding of his visions settled on him. And he could not deny the feeling that he could detect the vision’s source in one house among the others that stood nearby. Yet while he stood and waited, no sound succeeded except the dim susurration of a television, and no one came out. After several minutes, he passed on; and when he had walked another mile, retraced his steps but without a recurrence of the vision. Nor, though he waited several minutes in vague hope, did a face appear at a window of the house.
Now that his suspicion was more definite, his days became restless with the eager exercise of the talent he possessed. What before had been accidental and intermittent became deliberate and constant. He listened to the inner voices of students as he passed them in the halls and correlated their thoughts with the small expressions that sometimes crept across their lips. Not content merely to read and suspect that what he read was true, he entered many times into conversation with those he read, touching points that he knew would animate their secret enthusiasms, and was satisfied when that enthusiasm bubbled to the surface. Nor did he more than feel himself in command of this faculty before he returned after school to the same dilapidated street, where he paced slowly in approaching the house and searched out the mind of that formerly hidden observer.
But when he found and entered her thoughts, he saw by her eyes that she sat on a stoop at the far side of the house. Her father was gone, and she had taken the opportunity to sit in silence, thinking nothing but staring now at the tops of trees that waved the smallest of their uppermost branches at the sky and now at the sparrow that skipped along the gravel drive and pecked inscrutably at the dirt. Then too, in the recess of inactive memory, he caught myriad glimpses of her life—the many scenes of her father, the paler images of school, the coarse though orderly rooms of the house, and her own image in a mirror.
For reasons he did not stop to analyze, he withdrew immediately from her mind but continued slowly up the sidewalk before the house, straining with his ears as though without her thoughts it had become imperative to hear her slightest sound. As he crossed to the other side, he saw her there, sitting very still, her face turned half away as she followed the perambulation of a squirrel in the back yard. But she must have heard his steps because she turned toward him then. He waved and smiled; and when she returned his greeting, he returned his attention to the sidewalk and continued on.
The street was long and he continued to think of her as the sidewalk sloped downhill. His thoughts were of nothing definite but her face returned to his mind’s eye—now as he had seen her sitting on the back steps and now as he had seen her in the mirror. It changed with the alteration of her expression, and as one appeared in the place of the other, they blurred into an indefinite form, ghostly and shifting but for the constant look of her eyes. With no better thoughts than these and a stubborn refusal to imagine what he would do next, he stopped and retraced his steps. He found her sitting as she sat before; to judge from a distance, she was not surprised by his return. So he approached her, slowly and along a diagonal path through a neighbor’s yard, looking sometimes at the ground and sometimes at the waving tops of trees.
When he had come to within several paces, he stopped. He spoke of trivial things—the squirrels, the sparrows, the weather—with a casual pertinacity. They at length came to names, and when that was satisfied, continued with their trivialities. The infrequent looks directed to one another inquired more than was distinctly answered, but still they chatted as the sun declined to the fourth quarter of the sky and the early evening.
Their conversation insensibly relaxed. He suggested a walk and she consented. But they had not gone a few yards before he regretted that they were not on the road. The sidewalk was narrow and dropped away precipitously on each side into ditches so that it was impossible to walk two abreast. And as she happened to fall in behind him, and while the sidewalk sloped downhill as before, he could not help thinking vaguely of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—of the long descent of the one for the dead beloved other—and of the adjuration of the netherworld that, in reascending, they should not look behind them. In his excited and uncertain state of mind, this superstitious thought had a strange power over him. He heard her steps—heard an audible breath in accompaniment to her secret thoughts—heard miscellaneous small sounds of her proximity—but he kept his gaze before him. In silence, they passed down the sidewalk to the road it met at the bottom of the hill, and when he looked at her again, she smiled as though something had changed during the interval.
The road continued further on, still steadily downhill, passing behind the last of the neighborhood through a section of wood that divided the suburbs from the river. At the road’s end, they stood watching the water, the occasional house that dotted the far shore and some barges that crept slowly toward them. They exchanged a few words and decided to follow the path along the shore—a long outcropping of rock that looked down several feet to the water and was littered with the shells of mussels.
The evening was warm and when they had walked for a time they stopped to rest. The sun deepened over the river in the west. The water murmured at the foot of the rock and the low rush of the river tranquilized them, so that they spoke no more but sat and watched while the barges disappeared and lights appeared in the houses of the far shore. All along the water and the woods, myriad creatures arose with night cries in concert to the river. And there were no visions between them but the vision of memory in recalling each moment just passed, no thoughts but of the moment, and no dreams but of eyes before the cloak of darkness.
The moon stood high over the river when they made their return. They spoke little but at her house she told him to be careful in his visits. Her father would not like it and would return the day after tomorrow.
The months passed and they were separated for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Nor did he question her judgment in this respect since, although he had entered her thoughts at no time after their meeting, he knew well enough the danger she risked. She spoke openly of her father’s violence and the furious unreasoning episodes he gave way to, even at so little cause as suspicion—a suspicion that need be of no particular act but of the least perceived slight in manner, undue humor or gravity, or anything that violated his sense of propriety.
The boy tried to convince her that she should leave his house and call the authorities to have him arrested, but she would not hear of it. Her own observation had taught her to distrust both the police and the courts, and she counseled him in return that less than two years separated her from legal adulthood, when she would be free to go and would enter happily into poverty as long as she led an independent existence.
But those early days were fortunate. They were relatively free of concern and she told him that she had found her father remarkably easy to live with from the time of their meeting. And the boy, for his part, enjoyed a peace that brought with it an improvement in his schoolwork. His paints and canvases were returned by his parents and he resumed his practice with more pleasure.
The visions did not altogether cease—or did not cease at once. He knew by now that they came from other minds, and the inevitability of their occurrence forced him to the discipline of experimentation. Without malice or even great interest, he entered into the thoughts of others, especially those of strangers, whom he would not see again and so could not compromise. But even this drove him to a responsibility that he would not have faced otherwise.
He read the minds of two boys who had vandalized a home only three days earlier. They had been seen by the homeowner but not picked up by police. As such, he passed them without a glance and sought out the house. He did not approach the owner directly but learned his name which, with the address, allowed him to find the telephone number in the directory. In a brief, uncomfortable and anonymous call, he let the man know the names and addresses of the vandals. The rest, he felt, could be decently left to grown men to dispose of. Such as these were the small troubles he was called to attend throughout the spring and summer while his ambitions and plans for the future revolved around the girl who had so easily and powerfully displaced the ghosts of the world of other minds.
He went as far as to think of marriage. He thought of the job he would take, the long hours that no doubt would be necessary to support them on the small wage he could expect in starting out. But he thought too of his return home each evening when the sky was already deep blue to the light of their home—of affection, of children, of all the dreams that youth so easily conjures.
It was in anticipation of that fantasy’s fulfillment that he saved money from odd jobs to buy her a necklace. It was a very simple thing of gold with a heart-shaped pendant. But from the day he bought it until the next day they met, more than a week later, he was restless with the frustrated desire to give it to her and see her put it on. Let her father be what he would, he would carry it with him and put it around her neck himself at every meeting—and this was his thought until the day arrived.
On the night her father next went away, she called him, and without saying a word of his gift he set out for her house. The day had been exceedingly hot and the air remained thick and sultry, defeating every attempt at relief and throwing a languorous pall over thought.
When he found her waiting for him on the front porch, he raised and turned her near the light so she could see it as he put it on her, which he did without a word. That night, they walked down to the coolness of the river and stayed in their accustomed place for the last time. The next day, they went elsewhere and on the day after that, her father returned. So it was understood that, once more, some days would pass before another meeting.
As the days lengthened into weeks, he took strolls past her house in the hope of catching sight of her and sharing at least a glance until they were free to meet again. Every day, he was disappointed in his rounds. He became more persistent, walking past repeatedly in the evenings and haunting the neighborhood on weekends. When a month had passed without hearing from her or even seeing her, he became frantic. Some rumor of his comings and goings might have reached her father, and he might have sent her away where she could not be found. But if that had been the case, where could she have gone? She would not have gone without seeing the one person who most had reason to miss her.
The possibilities revolved in his mind while the days passed and finally provoked him to do what he had refrained from doing for so long. He could not be faulted for reading her thoughts when her own welfare was at stake. He went immediately to her house. Even before it came in view, he reached out to it to find her. But she was not there. He came nearer the house. Only her father was inside. With a fear mounting to dread, he entered the man and read him.
He knew nothing. It had been some time since he had raised a hand against her. And to the last day he had seen her, nothing had been wrong. His job took him out of town with a certain regularity and all had been well at his departure. Only she had not been home when he returned. The afternoon had passed into night and morning without sign of her. The next day, he had called relatives and visited neighbors. Only after two days’ uneasy delay, he had reported her absence to the police, so far without discovery.
And now, weeks had gone by. Where was she? Her father himself did not know. And the boy, standing before the house, could not think where he should go to look.
After a few minutes, he moved down the street. As he went, he cast his mind into the minds of the houses he passed. He walked very slowly, taking his time to scan their memories for some glimpse of her. All that evening, and on many to come, he passed along the streets of her neighborhood and those of his own. But there was no sign that she had either lingered by her home or come to visit him. He watched for some mention of her on the news but there was none. He thought of making posters to advertise her disappearance but he had no photograph to use. He had only a mental image of her that—although he tried not to think of it—seemed already to be blurring at the edges, becoming indefinite and ghostly like the first he had taken through the walls of her father’s house.
With the exhaustion of his search, he returned to their spot by the river. He pursued the downward sloping sidewalk as they had done together, met the end of the road and, turning to the east, walked along the shell-strewn outcropping of rock. He sat where they had once sat and watched the barges in the distance—listened to the water murmuring below the rock—watched the barges disappear and the lights wink on at the opposite shore. What he felt during that time altered and intensified according to the work of his imagination. He saw her under every variety of circumstance—walking the streets at night, under cover of darkness hoping that he would see her as she passed—in another town, unable or unwilling to return—or coming now and then to this spot in the hope that here, where they had always been safe together, she might meet with him.
The last thought reassured him, and it must have lulled him as he sat, because in a while he dozed. It was at best a half-sleep. The lights of the river seemed never to leave his eyes. And yet he undoubtedly slept, since there came to him that alternate sight and hearing that is, when the sleeper wakes, so clearly distinguishable from the real world.
He seemed to see her, although where she stood was not clear. Like the backgrounds of some portraits, her surroundings seemed no more than a hazy screen. Her face at least was vivid, more distinctly remembered than when awake. And her eyes, more than all, seemed to gather his to hers while saying in a quiet, somehow remote voice that he should meet her at this spot.
What spot she meant, he could only suppose on waking. He stood and looked around him. He was alone. Beyond the river, the lights of the far shore still shone, while at his back the trunks of trees retreated into darkness. He rose, walked along the strip of rock and returned home.
The next day, his attention was more particular. For no reason that he could name, he felt a restlessness. He arrived at the strip of rock shortly after dawn. The air was cool with the coming of fall and a sparse fog hung over the water, obscuring the far shore, now dim since all the lights were out. He paced back and forth along the strip of rock and looked all around him. He returned back the way he came and stood at the end of the road for several minutes with the vague feeling that she would appear shortly. But the feeling passed or transformed itself, and soon he was standing back in their accustomed place.
He looked back into the trees. They retreated along level ground for twenty yards before climbing precipitously upward. He gazed all along the face of the ground and slope. They had never gone into the woods. She would not be waiting for him there. And thinking these things, he turned his eyes away once more and sat on the rock, watching the river as it passed.
These actions were repeated several times in differing combinations before something like impatience took hold of him. She might, after all, be camping in the woods. The air was not so cold. She might be waiting there, out of sight of the shore, where she would not be noticeable to casual passersby. And if she was not there, then it was very little trouble to look. He had looked everywhere else.
The ground was thick with dry twigs, limbs, dying weeds. As he moved noisily along, the birds flew from the trees and the squirrels scolded him from the refuge of their dens. He would think of it later: the noise of walking through the trees at that season and the alarm of the animals with his approach. He would think of it objectlessly and without end. It would be, for many years, the last place his thoughts would rest.
He ascended the slope. From this point, it was possible to see the roofs of the nearest houses. Low ridges followed other horizons and below, formed by the surrounding slopes, was a bowl-shaped depression. She was nowhere in sight but, he thought, she might lie beyond any one of the ridges that pursued the depression. So he walked along them, one to another, following the circumference of the bowl. It was as he did so that a small glint caught his eye from below. He turned his head and looked down but there was nothing to be seen. The bottom was choked with dead leaves and limbs, while the only living things seemed a few straggling ferns. Nonetheless, he turned back and slowly retraced his steps. Very shortly, the glint reappeared in reflection of the sun that penetrated the depth. When he stood still in a single spot, it shone distinctly in his eyes although it was a light and no more.
He descended the slope. The light was gone but he kept his eyes fixed on the place of its concealment. He arrived at the bottom and soon found her. She was not, he now saw, much concealed, but the decay of her clothes and body had been so great as to leave little recognizable as a person from a distance. The glint had been that of her necklace pendant. But there was nothing else familiar. Her eyes were gone. And crawling on her face and nearly skeletonized hands was a crowd of harvestmen who had made her remains their incidental habitation. One picked his way along the line of her jaw and stepped delicately over her teeth.
He turned away from her and clambered up from the depression. He would not later remember doing more than that—he would only remember coming once more to the outcropping of rock, looking around him, staring out at the river and a passing boat, and looking back into the woods. Some scraps of refuse lay on the ground—a paper bag, a red plastic cup—and with these he marked the spot of the body. He tied strips of paper to branches and threw the cup down the slope to where the body lay.
Then there were disconnected scenes. He made his way to a pay phone and called the police. What he said he did not later remember except telling them where to look and that he would watch the news to see that they did not ignore him. How an anonymous call might seem in the eyes of homicide detectives or what report neighbors might give of his coming and going from the house of the victim were thoughts that would only enter his mind later, when they would arouse confused nightmares of guilt, as though he were somehow culpable in her death because he had seen the absence of her eyes.
Nor did he remember how, when in his long walk home he saw it clutched in his fingers, he had taken the necklace. It must have lain by her side. He was sure he had not taken it from her neck, had not leaned so close, had not mixed his fingers with the paths of the creeping harvestmen. He would later think it better had he left it behind. It might have borne the fingerprint of her murderer (he could not doubt that she was murdered). Only much later would he learn that the murderer’s fingerprints were nowhere on file. And in the meanwhile, it added itself in his dreams to a nebulous feeling of guilt.
But the murderer was far away, on the other side of the river and not soon to return. He had been visiting with relations, wandered off and found the girl sitting by the river. She was alone; he spoke to her. She would have gone back the way she came, but he stopped her. He was bored and here was his diversion leaving him. He grabbed her arm and asked where she had gotten the necklace. They struggled. He dragged her to the ground and, when she screamed, he beat her head against the rock. And he was surprised when he saw that she was dead. He dragged her body into the woods, up the ridge and watched it tumble down the hill.
And he might have gone on to much of the same, except that early misadventures caused him to suffer a beating of his own and two terms in juvenile detention led him to cultivate more timid violations. He committed petty crimes for petty gains. And if he did not forget his murder, he excused it from his conscience.
But the historian did not forget. The first days after he found her body, he spent in sickness, confined to bed and feverish. Those days are lost, drowned in an aftermath of sleep and disturbed sensations. In dreams, he wandered abroad in his disembodied reach of mind, searching for the girl’s murderer—searching sometimes for the girl herself—and finding neither.
These were the salient facts of his adolescence. They were that which, in hours of work or idleness, echoed and re-echoed through the chambers of his mind, giving shape and direction to all other faculties and instincts of his personality and forming him slowly into what he would become.
There would be other murderers, other crimes. While he slowly sifted the city for the one he wanted, he found a multitude of others, and dealt with each in turn according to the case. Some crashed their cars, some overdosed on drugs. One man fell down the stairs at least half a dozen times. But Grender would not die that way.
It was a convenient thing, his first coming. Good luck and force of habit had found the historian at home, awake and alert when Grender sat in his car below. He had seen Grender’s mind briefly, and to be sure of himself had paid a visit. In the interval, he had occupied himself only with the sentence of death.
It was good, too, that murderer should die near the scene of his crime. (The historian said this, and Grender neither spoke nor moved, but remained still as he had throughout.) There was a disused railroad bridge that crossed the river. The historian would take him there. Death would not be requisite at the first plunge. If he survived the fall, his limbs would be set at liberty. He would swim, if he could. Then he would try again. He would try as many times as necessary. Eventually, he would succeed.
Grender went out to his car and drove to the river. It was not very far from the historian’s home. He could see the bridge from his window, and watched as Grender stepped off with the confidence of one expecting the first tread of a staircase. Finding none, he fell resistlessly down and met the river with his shoulder. |
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