3:08 A.M. I lay in bed beside Hannah, unable to sleep. I was thinking of Paul, of writing something about him, a poem or novel, to exorcise his ghost. Chiseled in darkness, the red numbers on the clock, made from elongated hexagons, froze the endless minute, then blinked and froze another, as if proving that time has no substance. The only things visible in a room erased by night were those red numbers. The clock sat on the dresser, I knew, but the time of day floated in empty black space. This was the night I’d driven home in darkness, after Jud and his crew had emptied out my brother’s house and I’d bought a thermometer and built those front steps.
To exorcise his ghost. I’d arrived at 2 A.M. Our house was filled with things too, I noted, but they weren’t trash yet. Furniture, silverware in drawers, linen in closets, photos in boxes. Each thing, in its place, possessed its own history. Together they produced a cadence of sorts. I could walk through them blindfolded, threading the pattern. I felt safe at home. Such feelings are brittle. Would my life too end up in a dumpster?
At least the world seemed to weigh less now. When I’d entered our room, Hannah had switched on the lamp beside our bed and thrown off the covers, and we embraced. “You’re crazy for driving home this late,” she said.
“I was wide awake. I can’t believe it’s over.”
“I don’t see how you could do it.”
“I was lucky I found those guys.”
She watched me undress. “What happened to your thumb?”
“Banged it with a hammer.”
“Doing what?”
“Building front steps for the house.”
“You? Building steps?”
“It wasn’t too bad.”
“Which?”
“‘Which?’ ”
“The steps or the thumb?”
I told her. I sat beside her in pajamas. She had that unfolded quality of the newly awakened, still creased and soft. Hair flat on one side. Her breath smelled like bread. The room smelled of bed sheets, Tide, and dried sweat. “The place still stinks,” I said. “You should have seen it.”
“I’m glad I didn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have believed it.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t,” I said. I felt lighter than helium, yet plugged up, congested. The heaviness returned out of nowhere—it condensed—and I stood up as though in spreading slow motion, chained there by ripples trailing my silhouette. “I’m thirsty,” I said.
“I got some beer yesterday.”
I walked out of the room. Down the hallway in darkness. I checked the boys’ rooms, those explosions of books, clothes, rock collections, shells, pencils, candles, Walkmen, Bob Marley tapes, rulers and compasses, cups, plates and tissues, candy bar wrappers, folders and notebooks, day packs, shoes, Clearasil, paper clips. Somewhere in that confusion lay my sleeping sons.
In the kitchen, I found the beer and didn’t drink it. The silverware drawer, with the church key I didn’t use, held crumbs, trash stickers, bottle caps, twist ties, a peeler sans handle, lids of jars, corks. I pictured pots and pans breeding in the cupboards, the flow of charge back and forth inside objects, spores and mold exploding. Little pink mice the size of cashews born from piles of old clothes. Give me a bucket of mud, I thought—I’ll make my own world. Could we relearn to count with five fingers on one hand, six on the other?
Piles of tires catching fire. Coal mines smoldering for decades under towns in central Pennsylvania.
I walked through the house. We were not the best housekeepers. Threads of dust tended to collect behind doors or catch in rug fringes. Newspapers lay on the floor for days, books and magazines were always scattered on the couch. I had the reputation in our family of possessing the greatest mania for cleanliness. I regularly wiped counters. Washed the dishes. Put bowls away so they nested in each other. I did not, however, alphabetize the dry goods in our pantry or throw out the rotten celery in the fridge, not unless it smelled. Sometimes I dusted. I don’t do windows. From the time I was a child, I’d always loved to vacuum.
From closets and cupboards, from forgotten shelves and drawers, from boxes in the basement, in the space below the stairs, from old dressers, file cabinets, and utility shelves, from glove compartments in our cars, from trash cans and trunks, came the rattle of chains, flowed the cold grease of things, droned the machinery of ownership, the hoarse buzz of production—crawled the mortal rot of possessions.
To exorcise a ghost? One never exorcises ghosts. The world becomes a ghost when its familiar meanings die. When I made it back to bed, Hannah was asleep again, and I lay there in darkness, heart kicking in my neck.
My life had changed. When? When I saw my brother’s house? I doubt it. Change does not occur when the catalyst appears. Even when the chemical reaction begins, when the atoms pop and the molecules fountain, one clings to old shapes as though holding on for dear life to a tent in a sandstorm. It wasn’t when I saw Paul’s house but when I phoned Hannah and doubled up in tears and told her what I’d seen that I became a different person. Changes don’t occur until you tell the story.
Now she lay asleep beside me. Hannah could always sleep with nose whistle, but I never could. I could not simultaneously produce body sounds and achieve oblivion. Anyway, I wasn’t sleepy. I’d passed beyond sleep, to that realm of humming consciousness and glow-in-the-dark voltage where all your vital circuits have absorbed a power surge. I did not have a body but an electric appliance. I was happy to be home, cozy and wide-eyed. But I felt sore all over and knew I’d never sleep again. I was a stranger, I thought—to my home, to my family.
And Paul was my brother. Was it fortune or accident that gave him the life I didn’t lead, the one I’d escaped? The necessity of history, hardwiring in the brain, a chance whim of the gods? We’d shared the same parents, had a common flesh and blood. What made his life so different from mine?
Then I thought, It wasn’t different, and started dropping through space. I’m part of his life, I thought, he’s part of mine. The contents of life from nursery to nursing home may be wishes and dreams, sadness and waste, hopes and disappointments, all punctuated by shining beads, like spilled mercury—by luminous moments and gusts of generosity, each a sputtering universe—but they are never the exclusive property of any of us, from CEO to abject solitary. Life itself leaks. It leaks into one’s possessions, one’s neighbors and kin, the cars driven, the houses lived in. It leaks into the memories and souls of survivors, and leaks into history and the vastness of space. If each of us is connected to history, then each of us is plural, and we’re connected to each other. This is not a consolation. It does not solve or even diminish the mystery of other people’s lives. It simply means that even the least of human beings also leaves his mark upon others, and so upon the universe.
I could write something about him, I thought. I could link his life to the past, to the history of small and large things—of commonplace objects, planets and stars, and biological life as well, our blunt and sudden bubble. How could a timid and small life, I wondered, proceed from that extravagance, from that delirious profusion, from that upstart of the universe, life itself? They call it a miracle. Yet life is more or less the saturated state of something instead of nothing; its glow comes from engines fueled by history’s litter. Maybe history instead is the miracle—the largesse of space and time. That and the connection between time on the one hand and our own little pinpricks of subjectivity on the other.
Or maybe the true miracle is consciousness, which feels somehow endlessly extended, though thick with inclusion. What happens to such a finely tuned instrument when its labyrinthine circuits fail? This is like asking where the potential energy goes when a tightly wound mainspring gets thrown into the sun. Did Paul’s consciousness vaporize? Did it take another form? Pass into other bodies?
Had it passed into mine?
I lay there nearly tipsy with fatigue, beside my sleeping wife, and attempted to imagine what being Paul would feel like. If the greatest mystery is other people’s lives, what it felt like to be Paul could have been what it feels like to be any of a million forgotten and diminished ones, the nameless in our midst. It could also have been its own forty-watt glory. Paul often seemed depressed. The usual culprits came to mind: unrelieved tedium, quiet desperation, loneliness, soothing wafers of denial, as well as, in the intervals, consumerist distractions, which are stuffing for the emptiness.
I saw him now through a darkened mirror, and almost understood. I remembered him lighting up in Hannah’s warmth, touched by a voice of animated interest, and for an hour or two called into existence like a blossom in autumn, when everything goes moribund. Would his life have changed if he’d told it to someone? Now was too late, and instead I’d do the telling. As far as I knew, Paul had never had someone. Hannah may have come closest. I pictured her, from his perspective, as the single representative of a new race of beings full of contradictions—exotic and down to earth, strange and ordinary, beautiful and engrossed. Engrossed in him. Lying there, I saw him hunched in his chair and, jowls aflutter, slowly shaking his head while waving one hand, theatrically rejecting some advice she’d just proffered—to get exercise, maybe. “Me? Not me. I’m an old man.” He must have been sixty, sixty-one at the time. I could even hear his laugh, a deep mulish chuckle, and the way it diminished to a low sputter before he withdrew as though running out of fuel, or worse, as though suddenly remembering himself.
What self did he remember? What inner being? He was nothing like you or me, be assured. Yet he was—he was the stranger in our souls.