A TIDAL WAVE EMERGED from between two hills, reared up, and fell down on top of our town. It happened at night, and many people drowned in their sleep. The lake on top of the mountain above the town had never been much in people’s minds. They had been warned about trouble up there; but they’d been warned so many times that perhaps they’d grown tired of waiting for a disaster that never happened—until it rained so much the earthen dam broke and the lake came pouring down the valley. Growing up, I sometimes felt I was living among watery ghosts. I sought reassurance from my mother that the flood was in the past, long before I was born, and could never happen again.
My mother had three miscarriages before me. When I was a little boy, she and my father took me on a picnic up the mountain to the place where the lake had been. There was nothing but a wide depression in the ground. A solitary house, with a front porch and steps that led down to a field of grass, stood on the hill facing the depression. My father, a happy man who liked jokes and stories, said, “That was a lakefront house. And there were sailboats on that lake. Sailboats on the mountain! Imagine such a thing. It seems impossible.”
The house was empty. A man called Colonel Unger had lived there during the flood. When he saw there was nothing he could do to save the dam from breaking apart, he sent a message to the town saying Notify the people to prepare for the worst. Then he took to his bed, as though he were ill. He never recovered. Meanwhile, the workmen who had been waiting for the colonel’s next orders climbed down to where the lake had drained away, and saw the fish twitching and gasping in the muck, and not knowing what else to do began scooping them up with their hands.
In my dreams I saw the ghostly sails, gliding pale against the dark forest, across a glassy lake with sky and clouds in it. My father had told me what a flood survivor had written, many years later: “It just seemed like a mountain coming.” The thought of a mountain falling down a mountain, a mountain tumbling over itself, gave me a queasy feeling, like the aftertaste of a fever. I imagined the people paralyzed before their fate, unable or unwilling to move. It’s coming, they would have thought; this time it is real. Why didn’t they climb, get up high to safety? Because it still seemed impossible. Unger had sent the message, and a mountain was coming.
WE LIVED IN A HIGH NARROW GRAY HOUSE up on Strayer Avenue, a street cut into the hillside on the north end of town. From our front porch you could see across the rooftops of the houses in the street below us, out into the misty blue basin of the town, cupped by a ring of steep hills. From our back door it was a short walk up through the woods to the ridgeline; from there the town looked even deeper, shrouded in mists or dissolving in its watery depths, the church spires sticking up narrow and brittle like points of deep-sea coral.
When I was eight, my father was hit by an automobile on the highway behind the mattress factory. He lived for a couple of days—sleeping, I was told—before he died. My mother grew silent; she began to consult doctors, complaining of noises in her head.
I was a shy, friendly, nervous, good-humored, independent boy. I spent idle days, in the summer after my father died, exploring half-forbidden parts of the city with Wilkerson, a boy with whom I had developed a kind of friendship. We would ride the funicular railway (the steepest of its kind in the world) up the mountainside to the platform where you could look through a telescope into every crevice and corner of the city; or throw stones in the culvert behind the I. X. M. Creamery; or walk on the train tracks behind the factories on the west side of town. Sometimes we went to a place called the Penn Hotel. It was a narrow four-story building at the end of a block in the far corner of town, past the YMCA swimming pool and the Coney Island Hot Dog cafeteria, across the train tracks from the Iron Works. It was a sad, quiet, empty block, and I liked it there because it was lonely and strange, and a queer feeling came over me as I lingered there with Wilkerson in the afternoons before the time when I would have to go home for supper. The Penn Hotel had a saloon on the ground floor, with a broken clock over the door. A legend in the brickwork between the third and fourth stories read 1890, which meant it was built in the year after the Flood, so that the building itself had no memory of that catastrophe.
The Penn wasn’t really a commercial hotel, but more of an irregular boarding-house. Looking from the street you could see men sitting in chairs or staring out of the upper windows with blank expressions on their faces. These tired, solitary men came and went on vague business. Other men who lingered around the Penn were drifters. They arrived with the railroad on their way west, knocking at people’s back doors for something to eat. The ones who couldn’t afford a room for the night slept, I think, in the woods above the train tracks. Now and then alarming stories appeared in the Tribune:
TRIED TO FORCE BABE TO DRINK WHISKEY, CHARGE
Elijah Jenkins and Charles Wilson were sentenced by Mayor Franke today to pay a fine of $100 and costs or spend 20 days in jail. They were unable to pay their fines and were locked up. The men are alleged to have attempted to force a small child to drink whiskey.
The child was sitting on a door step on Franklin Street, near Washington Street, when the men came by, it is said. One of them held the child while the other attempted to pour the liquor down its throat. The child’s screams attracted pedestrians. One of the men had a large razor.
My mother showed me this article, buried in the back of the newspaper among other stories: a child in Cresson who was dead of spinal meningitis, a miner who had lost his eyes in a dynamite explosion. I was meant to understand it as a caution.
As the summer wore on into hazy August days, I became aware that I preferred to go to the Penn Hotel without the company of Wilkerson. I began to make excuses so that I could have my adventures alone. Because it was remote, and because it was forbidden, I went there as if in a dream; or as if by straying from the bounds of the life that was meant to contain me, I became someone else, a ghostlike personage, invisible and oddly free. In the saloon I was permitted to buy a fruit drink from the bar. There was a man there who noticed my presence; he invited me to sit with him while I finished my fruit drink. He said that his name was foreign but that I should call him Jack. I didn’t know whether he rented a room in the hotel, but he was usually in the saloon, sitting by himself at a table, drinking a glass of beer and idly stirring the sawdust with the heel of his boot.
I knew that I should not be spending time with Jack. I could see from his clothing, which was tidy but not clean, and from his face, which was cheerful and inquisitive but also not clean, that Jack was what people might have called a tramp; but his manner of speech and oddly elegant comportment suggested a man who aspired to a certain measure of respectability. He asked unusual questions, and alluded to movies and theatrical performances he’d seen or heard about, and recounted stories about trains and mining accidents and places he had visited in states in the West. He had a book that he carried with him at all times. He called it a “dream book.” I was given to understand that Jack’s dream book was filled with mysterious and extraordinary information. The book was more like a thick pamphlet. It was filled with messages and codes, legends and numbers; its full title was The Original Lucky Three Wise Men Dream Book: The Science of Numbers Revealed. I understood that Jack used the book for gambling.
“Do you remember your first dream?” he asked me.
I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Once I dreamed it was Christmas.”
“Christmas, Christmas . . .” He looked up the dream in his book. “If you dream of Christmas, then your lucky numbers are 15, 25, and 35.”
“What’s lucky about those numbers?”
Jack shrugged. “It all depends on you.” He consulted the book. “If you dream of seeing a ghost, for instance, then your numbers are 14, 56, and 65.”
“What other dreams are in there?”
“All of them.”
“Like what?”
Jack smiled. “If you dream that your left eye jumps, your luck comes with 6, 16, and 18. If you dream about stealing, then you want 10, 16, and 45.”
“And a train wreck?”
“5, 14, and 41.”
“And a volcano?”
“21, 69, and 70.”
I wanted more. Jack indulged my curiosity, wetting a finger on his tongue with a grin and flipping through the worn newsprint pages of his book. He told me that making whoopee was 7, 11, and 44, while a funeral procession was 9, 17, and 36. A bell ringing in your ears was 2, 43, and 66, and a drunk woman was 3, 13, 18, and 20. A strange city was 10, 20, and 22; a colored baby was 13, 32, and 50; and a dog howling in the night was 5, 14, and 24.
“A hunch of death,” he said, “will be signified by 24—37—and 42.”
This information seemed thrilling and urgent; I wandered the streets in a reverie, thinking about the hidden significance of my dreams. But when school began in September, the world of the Penn Hotel and the tramp Jack grew distant in my mind. My mother seemed to know that I’d been going to places where I wasn’t supposed to go, and in the house she looked at me askance. She’d been spending time with a new friend, a cigar salesman named Mr. Schrock, who came to our house two or three times a week for supper. Mr. Schrock also looked at me askance. And I found that I saw very little of Wilkerson. My absence during the latter part of the summer must have hurt his feelings; I noticed he had drifted away from me, involving himself with a new group of friends.
It became clear that it was going to be an unusual school year. At the end of September, Mayor Franke ordered the theaters, saloons, dance halls, and moving-picture houses closed. There were rumors that some people in nearby towns had fallen sick. No one I knew at home or at school seemed ill. Mr. Schrock declared firmly, “That doesn’t have anything to do with us,” and my mother agreed with him. But a few days later, the ice-cream parlors were closed, and then the churches. Public funerals were banned. Stories in the newspaper used the word quarantine. Others referred to an “epidemic wave.”
There was a cartoon in the newspaper called “Petey Dink,” and in one strip Petey was reading the newspaper in his overstuffed chair, smoking a cigar, and saying, “Oh, well—best thing to do is not to be afraid of it—I’m not afraid of anything like that.”
School remained open. The mayor proclaimed that children in well-ventilated schoolrooms are reasonably safe, certainly much safer than in moving picture halls and other places badly ventilated. I tried to imagine why the moving-picture halls were so dangerous. I thought of rows of silent people closing their eyes and quietly dying in their seats while the light from the screen flickered on their faces and the waves of music rose and fell in the dark theater. I told my mother that I wanted to stay home from school, but she pointed to the newspaper and said that it was safe. She said that I had to go. I’m not afraid of anything like that, said Petey Dink in his chair.
I was daydreaming at my desk with my red geography spread open before me. I was thinking of a hotel at the edge of a continent, looking out from an upper window at a sailboat tiny in the distance, and the tiny people in the boat peering over the edge, wondering how deep it was. Then I sneezed. Mrs. Miller looked up from her desk. Other children had turned to look at me. When I sneezed again, the teacher called me to her desk. She had a strange expression on her face. I stood with my back to the class; I felt eyes on the back of my head, eyes from the corners of the room. She said, “William, you are dismissed. Go right home to your momma.” A boy giggled from the back of the room. In the silence I took my cap and left. When I shut the door behind me, I could hear the muffled voice of Mrs. Miller speaking to the class, and I wondered what she was saying. My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway. When I opened the door into the blinding sunshine, it felt strange to be walking freely forth into the outside world in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the school day which had suddenly come to an end for me. I thought of the hours that lay ahead, when all the other children would still be confined to the classroom, moving through the prescribed motions of the day without even thinking about it—but I would not be there. I would be somewhere else. I felt like a thief, a secretive person stepping into danger.
I walked north across town, past the cigar shop where Mr. Schrock was bent over his counter working. I saw him through the window, but he didn’t look up. I passed the YMCA; the side door was open and I could see elderly men in bathing costumes groping their way feebly along the watery lanes like blind people or sleepwalkers. I bought a hot dog at the Coney Island Hot Dog cafeteria and ate it at the counter. I felt fine. But I also thought of how I’d been sent home by Mrs. Miller, and wondered why this was so. Perhaps I had done something bad that I couldn’t remember, or hadn’t even noticed. Perhaps the whole thing was a mistake.
My mother had remarked on a story in the Tribune about saloon keepers getting in trouble for remaining open and serving liquor to men despite the mayor’s ban. I wondered if the Penn Hotel would be closed. When I got there, I looked up at the top floor. In the window directly above the 1890 legend was a man in a blue work shirt, with a white surgical mask over his mouth. He stared at me; then he disappeared into the room.
The saloon was open. Through the grimy window I saw men sitting at the tables. But Jack wasn’t there. I ordered a fruit drink from the bar. The saloon keeper eyed me suspiciously, as though he didn’t recognize me from before, but served me without a word. I sat at a table, and after I’d finished my drink I began to feel tired. The afternoon wore on. I must have sat at the table for a long time, feeling sleepy and comfortable as murmuring men shuffled past amid clouds of cigar smoke and the sour smell of beer spilled on the floor.
When the late-afternoon shadows were gathering in the street outside, Jack the tramp appeared before me.
“Hello, friend.” He smiled; his teeth were stained from tobacco, and his eyes looked reddish and dreamy.
“I got to leave school today,” I said.
“You must be a lucky boy,” said the tramp.
I said I supposed I was. “They closed the school,” I lied. “Because some boy in the class got sick.”
Jack said nothing. I asked him if he had his dream book. He nodded, dipping his hand into a hidden pocket in his coat.
“Getting sick, getting sick,” he spoke, licking his thumb and paging through the pamphlet. “If you dream of getting sick, you would be wise to choose 10, 20, and 30.”
I nodded.
“This boy who took ill,” said Jack. “He is your friend?”
I said that I didn’t know the boy; he was just a boy from class.
“Do you have a good friend?” Jack asked. “When I was your age I had a friend.”
I told him I did, and gave the name Wilkerson, though as soon as I did I wished I hadn’t.
“If you dream about your friend,” he said, peering into the book, “you can tell him to keep an eye on 5, 45, and 54.”
As the tramp continued to read to me from his book, I felt I had fallen back into an old rhythm. The time since school began seemed to dry up and blow away, and I was back inside the dream of a humid summer afternoon. He spoke in a measured, soothing tone, which caused me to fall into a kind of empty, unfocused gaze, forgetting about the supper that would be waiting for me at home, forgetting about the strange day and what had happened at school. He told me the numbers for dreams about needles and onions, freckles and candy and measles. He told me the numbers for a black pussy cat, and a hunch of bad news, and a knife, and muddy water, and a pretty girl. He told me all the lucky numbers for grave diggers, gravy and gold teeth; a glass eye, good luck, and a giant; a gift, a guest, and a gallows.
A distant bell tolling from the Methodist church roused me. The saloon keeper, wiping out a glass, glanced over at us. I thought maybe he assumed we were father and son.
“If you dream of the sea, you get 17, 34, and 42. But if you dream of drowning in the sea, then 8, 32, and 60 are your numbers.”
Jack must have sensed my distraction. He looked worried—concerned, perhaps, that I was growing bored with our game.
“You know this was all underwater.” He leaned forward, close to my face; his breath smelled faintly rotten. “The very place we are sitting.”
Of course I’d known that; everyone knew about the flood. But I didn’t like him saying it; for some reason the way he said it annoyed me.
Still he tried to hold my attention. “If you dream of a boy,” he said, flashing his ugly yellow teeth, “your very best luck comes with 1, 12, and 40.”
“I have to go.”
I rose unsteadily from the table (my right leg must have fallen asleep), mumbled a thanks and a good-bye to Jack and left the saloon. When I had crossed the street I stopped and looked back at the Penn Hotel. In an instant every detail of the building seemed to leap forth in the twilight and imprint itself on my mind—the broken clock over the door, the white window shade half-closed on the third floor, the 1890 legend carved in its lozenge of pale mortar, the chipping green-painted cornice—and it occurred to me that everything seems most real at the moment it is about to, indeed has already begun to, dissolve.
My mother was furious. She asked me was it true that my school had been ordered closed for fumigation that very morning, because a case had been discovered there. She asked, if it was true, where I had gone all day instead of coming home. After a bout of questioning, to which I could give only vague, halfhearted replies, she sent me to bed without supper. I had no appetite anyway. I tossed in the sheets in my hot room, imagining a coal furnace glowing and smoldering under my bed. I was plunged into dreams that swamped me like waves, rolling over and under themselves in endless repetitions, churning me downward, their force black and mindless and insupportably heavy. Then clear vistas opened before me: I saw a funeral procession marching into the sea, and Christmas bells howling in the night, and a girl with freckles dangling limp from a gallows, and a black cat with glass eyes scratching away in a grave. I dreamt of a giant shoving an avalanche down onto a train, and a boy with a gold tooth and measles lying faceup in a pool of muddy water, whispering Good-luck, good-luck, good-luck, the words bubbling up through the filth. And all the while strings of numbers reeking of mustard chugged on like angry machines, like a train of infinite length and energy spinning its wheels on a track that could lead nowhere. Good-luck, good-luck, good-luck, good-luck, good-luck . . .
Someone pressed a cool wet cloth to my forehead. I could hear my mother breathing loudly through her nostrils. When I opened my eyes, three faces with ghostly surgical masks hovered there: my mother, and Mr. Schrock, and a man I didn’t recognize. “You can see the one pupil is larger than the other,” said this man. “It is a symptom of the ailment I was explaining to you.” Mr. Schrock said, “Don’t go back to sleep, William. You can stay awake now, can’t you?”
But I couldn’t stay awake. I felt myself sinking through the deeps until I came to rest at bottom. My body was as dead as a stone, but my mind was strangely lucid—and this sensation was vaguely familiar, as though I had met it before in a dream. I felt as though I had returned to a home I had once known but forgotten.
Against my will I was called back to the world. Tears streamed down my mother’s face. There was something, I saw, that she needed to tell me but couldn’t. I watched her face impassively; she wore an expression of beseeching, but I didn’t know what it was she wanted from me. She seemed to be saying there was some bad news. My friend had been in an accident. But who was my friend? Wilkerson, or Jack? I tried to ask what was wrong but couldn’t understand her reply. I was slipping back into sleep, and in my dreams the notion got mixed up, so that it seemed to me it was I, and not my friend, who had been in the accident. The whole town was talking about it. I felt thousands of eyes from the hundreds of homes in the valley, and the homes nestled in the hills that ringed the town, all turned in my direction, waiting to hear the news. I saw families watching through their curtains and shutters as the floodwaters came down the street and rose to their doorsteps, and kept rising, until the water was level with their parlor windows. They looked out into the underwater world, and asked, What is going to happen to that boy, the boy who had the accident? What is going to happen?
I slept through the fall while the quarantine was lifted and the town came back to life. The sourwoods blazed red against the pines, men and boys went hunting in the mountains, and deer meat hung in the butcher shops. Winter was coming, when people would take sleigh rides to Gallitzin, and join in tobogganing parties, and ice-skate at Von Lunen Pond, where the silhouettes of skaters would glide against a pink sunset, their blades describing slow arabesques on the powdered sheet of ice.
On Halloween my fever was gone. From my bed I looked out the window at the children parading through the street below. They all wore white gauze surgical masks no matter what their costume, laughing and shouting and setting off firecrackers in the street. I watched until the parade was past, then lay back on my pillow in the lamplight.
In the middle of November I returned to school. Mrs. Miller said how wonderful it was to have me back. She asked me how did I feel. I said I didn’t know how I felt. My reply seemed to perplex her. I felt like a ghost in the presence of the other children. I limped toward my old desk, thinking of how it had been empty during the many weeks, and how perhaps the children had avoided that desk, as though the residue of a frightful sickness lingered on it. Seated again with my red geography open, I remembered the day I had sneezed. I tried to think of the time that had passed between then and now, and a wave of dizziness washed over me. I tried to concentrate on my lessons, but the words jittered on the page and the numbers looked bent as though refracted through liquid. I squinted, and felt the others watching me strain over the page. Before recess I asked the teacher why Wilkerson wasn’t there. She said that he had the flu but would be back soon. On the playground I heard a girl say, He looks funny, and her friend say, He’s cock-eyed, isn’t he?; and I understood they were talking about me. A boy named Franco asked what had happened to me; I lied and said I had been run over by an automobile.
But more than anything I no longer understood why I was there in the school. I remembered how I’d felt the day I was sent home, when I’d walked down the silent hallway and opened the door into the bright sunshine—how strange it was that I could be anywhere at all. I sensed that this displaced feeling, this anxious shiver of a vague, indeterminate thrill had grown inside me, had made some irrevocable claim on my being. And so, in my first week back, I began to wander out the doors of the school, in the middle of the day, during recess or after I had asked permission to go to the bathroom. I walked through the park in the town square, past the gazebo and the stone monument to the Great Flood, where in the warm months a Venetian fountain sent jets of water pluming into the air, creating a mist under the oak trees, which gave the place a dreamy, underwater feeling. I faced the monument and thought of the sailboats on the mountain lake, expecting the terrible falling sensation I used to get whenever I imagined the tidal wave appearing from between the two hills, the impossible feeling of a mountain tumbling over itself. But instead I felt nothing. It was all in the past; everything was in the past; the wave had come and covered everything, and everything had already drowned before I was born.
What remained was only this: new snowflakes flurrying through the bare branches—the first snow of autumn. People in the park looked at me, noticing my limp and my squinty eye, but they didn’t know who I was.
The theaters and ice-cream parlors and saloons and moving-picture houses had reopened by decree of Mayor Franke. I went to the Penn Hotel, where the saloon’s front window was fogged up from the heat inside. The saloon was crowded with men drinking and talking. I looked around at the faces of the men; Jack wasn’t among them. A man I hadn’t seen before was tending the bar. I described to him Jack’s appearance, to see if he knew where the tramp was, if he still lived at the Penn Hotel. The man gave me a dark look; he asked me how I knew this person, what my relation was. I lied and said he was a friend of my uncle’s. Then he brought up a week-old newspaper and pointed to an article. I told the man I couldn’t read because my head had been injured at birth; I asked him if he would read to me what it said in the paper. He sighed and read it.
DESTROYED SELF WITH BELT, COAT HOOK, AND A BED
Mr. Jacnin’s body was found this morning by fellow boarders in his room in the Penn Hotel. Circumstances attendant upon the supposed suicide are so suspicious in the minds of police authorities that a rigid inquiry is being conducted.
I interrupted him: “Jack’s name was Jacnin?” A giggle erupted from my mouth. The bartender looked horrified; then he became angry. I tried to explain that I hadn’t meant to laugh, that I hadn’t meant anything—but he told me to get out.
I seldom went to school. I walked past the Penn Hotel but never went inside. I threw my schoolbooks down a grating in Washington Street. Sometimes I wandered up into the hills above the train tracks to see the tramps who lived there, but it was winter now and they were all gone. One time I saw a woman standing in the water in Stony Creek, holding up her dress around her knees. She said the hospital had tried to keep her there against the law but that she had escaped. She said she knew Mayor Franke personally, and warned me not to tell anyone about this, and if I did, something awful would happen to me that she knew about but couldn’t say.
At home I had spells. Something came alive inside of me, and I would shout or kick or slap at my mother, but never at Mr. Schrock. I couldn’t sleep at night. Lying in my bed I would whistle or sing to myself; Mr. Schrock said he had never heard of such behavior in a child. “He’s different from the first day out of bed,” I heard him say. My mother said, “I fear the illness may have touched him.”
Once I was crying in the night and my mother came into the room. She asked me what was wrong, and I complained of a pain about my heart. She asked me when had it started; I said after someone had thrown a frozen snowball at my head.
Then she, too, began to cry. “I thought it was all over,” she whispered. “I thought you were going to be better now.” I said that I felt fine and that nothing was wrong with me, except that I couldn’t see right because I had been hit in the head by a westbound train. I said all the fast trains had accidents and only the slow trains were safe. I said the people on the train were escaping from the hospital because they knew a flood was coming and nobody else believed them. I said the mayor was driving the train, and he had hit me on purpose because I was cockeyed. I said that each person on board had dreamt of their lucky number, but everyone kept it a secret.
My mother asked me why I was lying, why I told so many lies; I said that I didn’t know.
When the doctor was summoned to our house, I watched through the keyhole. They whispered in the kitchen. It was difficult to hear—there was a rushing, crackling noise in my ears, like water flowing under the surface of a frozen creek.
“. . . you would hardly expect a child to think of . . .”
“. . . that certain—moral—defects have been noted in cases where . . .”
“. . . ate a piece of candy he found in the gutter . . .”
“. . . masklike condition, a ‘smoothing’ effect . . .”
“. . . insomnia and . . .”
“. . . colony for the feebleminded in Ebensburg, where formerly incurables . . .”
I went to my room and began to hiccup. I couldn’t stop hiccupping, and my stomach began to hurt, but still I couldn’t stop, even when my mother came into the room with the doctor and Mr. Schrock and told me they had decided it would be best if I took a trip to the seashore, to a place on the East Coast that Mr. Schrock’s aunt knew about, a rest home where people and children suffering from nervousness could benefit from the fresh sea air and the hot baths. I was told that I would take a train there. Mr. Schrock would accompany me on the journey, while my mother would remain at home. A trunk would be packed tonight.
MR. SCHROCK SAT STIFFLY IN THE TRAIN COMPARTMENT, wearing his white gauze mask. He wore it even though the ice-cream shops had reopened. His wearing it made me feel ashamed, but he gestured vaguely out the window and said, “We just don’t know what’s going on out there.” Mr. Schrock and I had the compartment to ourselves, except for a man in shabby brown suit and a brown hat who slouched on the bench opposite. This man looked like a traveling salesman, with his leather-bound sample cases loaded on the rack. His hat shaded his face as he slept. From time to time he opened an eye and seemed to regard me and my older masked companion.
My mother had packed a hamper with pieces of chicken wrapped in tea towels. Once the train was flying across the valley where the smooth barren hills rolled softly, brown and gold and white, Mr. Schrock lowered his mask and we helped ourselves to the chicken, gazing out at the fields and licking the grease from our fingers. Then I fell asleep. Once I heard Mr. Schrock say the word nervous—he might have been speaking to the traveling salesman, or to himself. When I woke up it was dark. The compartment door was open and I heard people dragging luggage in the passageway. I heard a woman’s voice: “My older brother is retarded . . . What? . . . An institution in Delaware.” A second woman, with a European accent, said something I couldn’t understand; the first woman replied, “Meningitis. He never . . .” A bell clanged. Mr. Schrock whispered in my ear: “Newport. We’re not there yet.” I heard his breathing through the mask. I fell back asleep. The train’s monotonous rhythm lulled me; its vibrations enclosed me like a womb. I dreamt of the world’s smallest train striving up a steep mountainside, grinding and struggling on the narrow-gauge switchbacks, to deliver vaccine to the people in a town at the top.
When Mr. Schrock shook me awake the sky outside was pink. The man in the brown suit was gone. As we unloaded my trunk onto the station platform, a salty, putrid odor in the cold air tingled my nostrils. There was snow on the platform. My trunk and I were loaded onto a boat waiting at a dock next to the depot—a ferry, said Mr. Schrock, to take me across the bay to the rest home. Someone, he said, would meet me there. The ferryman stood silent; gulls cried in the air; and the few other passengers looked like statues against the fiery dawn light, which rippled in bands on the glassy dark water. The boat was untied, and slipped away from the dock toward a flat horizon with fire burning below it; and the last thing I saw was Mr. Schrock, waving from land, his face unreadable behind the white gauze mask.
THE BOAT PULLED IN AT THE PIER. Men were pushing broad shovels across the boardwalk, heaping up snow and shoving it off the edge onto the beach. I was approached by a gaunt elderly man in a long wool apron, pushing before him a white wicker chair on wheels. He had large moist eyes and a melancholy smile and a worried brow; he introduced himself as Mr. McCord, and coaxed me into the chair. He pushed me in silence, as the sun’s disk broke the horizon, up the boardwalk toward our destination.
Set back from the boardwalk on a sandy lawn was a white three-story house with a gabled roof and steps leading up to a broad front porch which girded the house. A middle-aged woman in a black dress and tinted spectacles came out and stood with her hands folded. Her gray hair was pulled severely back in a bun, and she smiled warmly. She introduced herself as Mrs. Gritman, and took me inside while Mr. McCord hauled my trunk up the steps. She asked me how my journey was; I said I couldn’t remember. She asked me if I knew why I was here.
Because of a flood, I meant to say. Because the train’s gone. Because everything was underwater.
I said that I was very sleepy; that sometimes I couldn’t go to sleep at all.
“But I think you will be able to sleep here,” she said. She took me up the stairs to my room at the end of the hallway. I asked how long I would have to stay at this house. She shrugged, smiling. “It could be a few weeks,” she said. “Or a few months, or a few years. It all depends on you.”
A few years, I thought, stepping across the threshold. The meaning of the phrase, so far away and opaque, was bound up with the sensation of being in this new room. I tried to stretch myself out over that span of time, to see what it looked like on the other side, but I couldn’t think that far. A few years. It was impossible. I would be someone else by then; it would be someone else in this room.
I thought of the solitary man in the window on the third floor of the Penn Hotel, the man with the mask who watched me, then disappeared. If I dreamed of getting sick, my lucky numbers were 11, and 25, and 40. But if I dreamed about a strange city, they were 20, and 33, and 47. Anything could happen to anybody—the secrets were all printed in a little book. And maybe it wasn’t good to know them. Maybe knowing them could somehow make them come true.
“I’ll leave you for a short time,” said Mrs. Gritman, shutting the door.
I stood at the window looking out at the ocean. I hadn’t realized, during the short boat ride, how truly enormous it was. How boundless and immovable, how unlike the floods I had dreamed, bursting their dams and tumbling forth with a thunderous smashing down into the valley. The ocean rippled and frothed in countless little white peaks, and the waves crumbled softly on shore, smoothed themselves out, withdrew, and curled up into new waves. This ocean gave me a peaceful feeling deep in my bones; it seemed the place that was the end of all floods.
TWICE DAILY, AS PART OF MY REST CURE, I got bundled up in blankets and mufflers and Mr. McCord pushed me up and down the boardwalk in the rolling chair. Gaily painted placards along the storefronts lured passersby to amusements that wouldn’t be open till summer: Kipple & McCann’s Sea Baths, the Alhambra Dancing Rooms, the Gigantic Sea Elephant, the Haunted Swing, the Whirlpool. At the very end of the pier was the Deep-Sea Net Haul, where, Mr. McCord told me, twice daily in summer the net was raised from “The Living Gulfs of Doom,” and whatever cold-blooded monstrosities chanced to have been trapped in that abysmal region were dumped on the planks in the light of day, displayed for all to see.
Although the shore was mostly deserted, we occasionally passed winter visitors strolling on the boardwalk. Some of them still wore the white gauze masks. They must have looked at the elderly man pushing the bundled child in the rolling chair, and wondered who we were. Once we passed a dressed-up young man and lady in a bicycle rickshaw, a JUST MARRIED—‘HONEYMOON CLUB’ sign attached to the back of their seat. Their eyes looked happy; both of them wore masks.
Mr. McCord walked behind me. He liked to speak; his voice was disembodied, monotonous, soothing. I couldn’t see his face, and often I imagined my father floating behind me, his ghostly arms propelling my chair into the windy afternoon. He told me things I couldn’t have imagined. He said the epidemic swept over the whole country, into every city and town, every village and valley. A lot of people didn’t want to know about it, he said. They tried to pretend that nothing was happening.
Sometimes we stopped at a bench and I sat next to Mr. McCord while he read me headlines from the newspaper, picking out the most gruesome ones, which he knew were my favorites. “DEATH SHIP: ENTIRE CREW FELL ILL: No survivors in Labrador village where sick mail boat docked. . . .” “THE MYSTERY MALADY: ALARMING SPREAD OF SLEEPY SICKNESS. Children among the victims . . .” The news was scary and thrilling, but I wasn’t afraid because I huddled close to Mr. McCord.
“You ought to consider yourself one of the lucky ones,” he said.
One night I awoke suddenly; Mr. McCord stood over me with a candle. With a finger at his lips he signaled quiet. He had come to take me for the special treat he had promised. My heart raced with excitement as I got out from the blankets and he assisted me in getting dressed. He bundled me up in mufflers. Out on the sanitarium porch, the wind blew fierce off the ocean. I told Mr. McCord I could walk, but he insisted I get in the rolling chair.
From the boardwalk we slipped underneath an archway, through a door, down a narrow hall glowing with gaslight, and into a large dim room. It was a moving-picture hall, where a midnight clam supper was taking place. Men and women sat at long bench tables eating plates of steamers and drinking mugs of beer, while the pictures flickered onscreen and the organ music rose and fell. The film was about a group of picnickers in bathing costumes, who were so amused with themselves they didn’t see a tidal wave was coming. They kept rebuffing an exasperated lifeguard who was trying to warn them, waving his semaphore flags and pointing at the sea and comically running up and down. Even when the wall of water was towering above them, like it could wipe out the whole city, the picnickers still couldn’t be bothered about it. But when the wave reached the shore and the lifeguard had given up and run for cover, cowering under an umbrella, it turned out to be no more than a little spout, and splashed over the picnickers, who jumped about indignantly as if their picnic had been spoiled. The people in the hall roared with laughter as the picnickers shook their fists and chased after the poor lifeguard, who clambered up the lifeguard chair to safety.
I started to laugh. It came out of me like a convulsion, I shook and sobbed with laughter—the people at their suppers turned to look—and Mr. McCord rolled me down the corridor and out the door onto the boardwalk. The wind was wild; Mr. McCord was laughing too, gulping and hacking. We raced to the end of the pier where the Deep-Sea Net Haul was drawn. The wind ripped the clouds apart, revealing the moon, a ceiling of stars above the black ocean.
“I’ll be in the newspaper,” I cried, catching my breath. “How about ‘A DROWNING ACCIDENT THIS DAY. One boy, attempting to bathe in sea during winter season, unfortunately drowned. . . .’”
Mr. McCord, invoking a lofty, sober tone, suggested “‘INVALID CHILD IN ROLLING CHAIR PUSHED OFF END OF OCEAN PIER. Suspects questioned . . .’”
“‘SEASIDE MOURNS. Body unclaimed . . .’”
“‘MYSTERIOUS ROLLING CHAIR FOUND WASHED ASHORE NEAR LEWES. Nearby sanitarium astir . . .’”
“‘INLAND BOY FLEES FLOOD. Came to land’s end and plunged himself headlong into Atlantic Ocean. . . .’”
We went on like this, trading headlines and choking back laughter and tears until it was too cold to stay. We fell silent as Mr. McCord pushed me back to the house. Warm in my bed again, I thought of other headlines, other news. BOY BRAVES ILLNESS. CHILD’S MIRACULOUS RECOVERY: ESCAPE FROM THE JAWS OF DEATH . . . MAYOR’S PROCLAMATION: NEVER BEFORE HAS SUCH COURAGE BEEN SEEN IN A BOY.
NEWS DID COME THE FOLLOWING WEEK. In the evening, Mrs. Gritman brought the letter to my room. I asked her to open it for me.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing to you about this but I thought you must know. The epidemic has returned in a second wave. No one can believe it. We all thought it was over for good. Mr. Schrock is gravely ill. He has been taken to a hospital they have set up in the town hall and of course I am forbidden to visit him. It is much worse this time. Everyone is very much frightened. You cannot go into anyone’s home, or speak to anyone since we are under full quarantine. Children are forbidden to go in the streets. No one can board a train without a special certificate. Even if you came home, William, I fear you wouldn’t be allowed off the train. Although it is sad, I am glad that you are so far away from here. I am glad you are far away where it is safe.
Even if you came home . . . The strangeness of those words haunted me into sleep.
I dreamt of a train carrying me by night away from the shore, back into the mountains. Nothing moved in the hillsides; even the forests were silent. Nobody was in the streets; crepe hung on every door, black and white and gray; and I wondered if I was even in the same place. But then I saw: they were all watching from behind windows. In the windows of every house and hotel and shop I saw the faces looking out, wearing the white masks over their mouths.
“I am returned!” I cried. My voice echoed and died in the street. “I am strong again!” But the people just watched. They had been weakened by the illness; their fear had diminished them to ghosts.
And then night fell; the rains came; I was in the little house up on the mountain by the lake, where Colonel Unger lived. He lay in the bed, unable to move, conceptions of horror stirring in his mind. His face was my father’s face. “There is nothing I can do,” he said. “The dam will go; the wave will fall.” He wanted me to a deliver a message—Notify the people to prepare for the worst—though he knew it was too late. He had tried to tell them. He had tried, and it had not been enough. The colonel turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. In the last light he saw the future crushing in, monstrous and blind.
“You are far away, where it is safe,” I told him. “It can never happen again.”