Shadow Traffic (28 page)

The lesson I drew from what happened was: When you're doing a house visit, never lie down on a bed. They're too comfortable, too easy to fall deeply asleep on, whereas no one could sleep more than five or ten minutes on an attic chair. I sat down on it with that in mind and shut my eyes.

But the cab memory opened them. It was like the voices and visions were hiding in me waiting for the right chance to pounce and once I settled in the attic they saw their chance to come out.

“What's really the matter?” wolf/fox said, once more trying his kind tone with me. I was still on the highway, though he kept trying to persuade me to get onto the soft shoulder and talk there.

I didn't answer him. I was going fast—lights flashed by. Then I realized it was snowing—the snowflakes were huge too, some of them the size of eyes.

“Look how big the snowflakes are,” I said, or meant to. It was like I was on another planet, where it was snowing white eyes. But it was still earth, I knew that, it's more like sometimes this planet seems like another one.

“You can tell me about what's bothering you,” he said. “I'll really listen this time,” he said, still not talking about snow but about what he wanted to.

I said nothing. I couldn't understand why the snow made no impression on him. But that's often happened to me. The things that impressed me didn't impress others and vice versa. Another reason why I like to visit houses—there is no one there to impress but me, and I can always find something to be impressed by.

“What's the matter? You're speeding again. You said you'd slow down.”

Did I? I didn't remember saying that.

“Come on, slow down and tell me what happened. Can't you see I'm trying to help you?”

“You're trying to help yourself, I think.”

“What's wrong with trying to help both of us? Really, tell me what's wrong with that? Come on, it's the only way.”

“I did something bad to someone,” I finally said. “And now I don't know what to do about it,” I blurted.

“What do you mean, ‘what to do about it'?”

“Don't know if I have the right …”

“The right to what?”

“To live, I don't know that.”

I saw his face go extra white, like a field of snow.

“Listen, you don't want to kill me, do you? What would that accomplish? You know I had nothing to do with whatever you did, don't you? Huh? Don't you?”

“I hit him in the cellar from behind with a shovel,” I said. “He used to beat me there when I was young, but this time I came back and hid and then hit him 'til he fell down and then I ran out and left him there by the clothesline.”

“You said he fell down, didn't you? Well, falling down isn't dying, right?”

“I know that. I heard that he didn't die, just went to the hospital, but I think that's a trick to draw me out. I think that he did die. That's why I don't know what to do.”

“I didn't hear of anything like that. You would have known if he died.”

“How?”

“You would have been arrested. That's how you'd find out if someone died. Or, you would have heard it on TV. The TV would have told you what you did, or the Internet.”

“How do you know?” I said, I was slowing down a little and I could see him getting encouraged.

“That's why they're machines. They know these things. They don't get emotional and make mistakes like people do.”

I thought of my father chasing me around the house while I ran from him like a rabbit he was hunting. I thought of the sting of his belt on my bare back. His hot alcohol breath near me as he screamed. Then I pulled over and opened the door.

“OK, you can get out.”

He looked at me. He wanted to hit me with a shovel himself and then dig my grave. He was on my father's side. I could tell but I let him go. He ran off the soft shoulder into the woods like a dog or a wolf/fox as the cars whizzed by. I saw the woods swallow him. Later, in the first house I went to, I wondered if I'd planned the whole thing, driving fast and blabbing about my father, so I could get it off my chest to someone—just so I could confess. I wouldn't put it past me. Strange how we keep secrets from ourselves, like our mind is a house of endless rooms and the truth hides in just one of them.

Of course I didn't tell wolf/fox everything. Didn't tell him about my apartment—dishes rattling, like they were out in a hurricane, glasses singing the way a choir of lunatics would, meanwhile the phone waiting for me, always waiting like an assassin. I knew Sun Cabs would fire me, on the phone, knew the passenger would call and that would be the last straw, and my apartment knew it too. No time to pack even, just time to find my way to some houses (according to my information just two were available in the area, including the one on Silver Place, where I broke the blue horse then buried it in the attic and where I'm still sitting, trying to sleep).

My mother claimed she never slept. Said my father kept her from sleeping. There were a number of ways he could do that. I didn't like thinking about any of them. Somehow my mother had transferred her inability to sleep to me. It hid at first in the house in my mind—maybe in the attic, maybe in the cellar (I couldn't tell), until I got older and then it seeped into me. Yet sometimes I could sleep, even when I didn't want to. It's not as if our abilities are completely destroyed when we get older. They stay with us in diminished forms until we, ourselves, disappear.

I remember playing hide-and-seek with my father when I
was five. It's become my first memory. I remember him laughing and hugging me when he found me. I remember his holding my hand when we went in the ocean—one of the very few family vacations we ever took, so long ago. I remember him helping me fly a kite on the sand dunes. A few years later he burned the kite one time when he was chasing me. Did it with his cigarette lighter, screaming like a billy goat at first then like a dog left out in the cold. I remember these things …

Then I heard it—the door opening, like the sound of time ending. I came back to the present with a jolt. It was too late to run. Too late to even shift my weight. Since I could hear the sounds she was making I knew she could hear mine, if I made any.

I heard a toilet flush. I heard her walking—probably on the linoleum floor in the kitchen. I thought I even heard her sigh. What would I do if she climbed to the top floor? No sooner thought than it happened—heard her climbing to the second floor, one floor below me. What would happen if she went to her living room and saw the blue horse missing? Would she scream? Call the police? What if she walked into the attic? What would I do then? Put up a struggle or give myself up? It's the same question I always faced with my father whenever he was chasing me.

Time goes in a circle, I said to myself, over and over as I heard her walking just a floor below me. The past never leaves us—only hides for a while until it reappears. The odd thing is, we cling to it as to our fathers, and even call it Father Time.

How many deaths did I die awaiting my fate with him while I hid? And now I'm hiding again. My flesh ached but I was still afraid to even shift my weight. Like most intruders I'm a coward, or rather a coward who takes outrageous chances at times and then suffers.

… I grew hungry, I kept imagining what food she had in her kitchen and then imagined feeding myself with it. I had to urinate too but held it in.

It was hellish to stay so still. Like our planet, we're meant to be in motion, I think. Maybe I'm an alien—the one the Internet is preparing people to meet. I've certainly behaved like one. My home had even banished me it seems. So why not just run for it?

Still I waited like a nervous hornet guarding its nest, forcing itself not to fly 'til the dark finally came, when, holding my shoes and praying there were no alarms I didn't know about, I finally snuck out into the night thinking, “I must move to another town, I must move on to other houses.”

It wasn't until he'd finished coloring his hair that he realized he really was going to the group's latest party. Throughout the afternoon, and for days before that, Summers had thought of various excuses he could make to Morton, who at this point hosted more parties per year than he wrote stories, yet he didn't make the call. But why? Was he simply a glutton for punishment? Did he want to once more return to his apartment after the party feeling his mediocrity again confirmed in a public setting (though his career and overall life was no more mediocre than most of the group's)? Perhaps it was a kind of programmed curiosity unconsciously motivating him. The fear that if he didn't go, this would be the one party where something noteworthy would really happen, something along the lines of meeting a smart, successful literary agent who would take a sudden interest in him, ask him to send his few books, and eventually take him on and radically turn around his floundering career. Rationally he knew it wouldn't happen, but apparently the irrational part of him was stronger. It was disappointing to have to once more realize this about himself, that he'd go to something like this party on a raw,
rainy November night, having to take a cab from West Philly to Center City and then having to take another cab back when it was over (his soon to be ex-wife now had possession of their car), unless he could bring himself to ride back with someone from the group, probably Aaron—who would be self-promoting the whole ride or worse still, Lucas, the biggest, most self-deluded braggart in the group.

What contempt he felt for the group, albeit mixed with pity, as he pictured them “networking” at their latest party. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and finished applying a few dabs of cologne, realizing that he also harbored the secret hope of meeting an appealing woman there as well—something even more unlikely than his agent fantasy.

Another deep breath, followed by another closing and opening of his heavily lidded eyes. He felt calmer now. There was no point in thinking at all if he wasn't going to be honest with himself, and to be honest he had to admit he also somewhat liked the group as well, or some of the members, though at the same time he found them unbearable, of course.

There was Emir, who could be warm and witty, sometimes even generous in praising the work of his peers. But once he turned to the subject of his thwarted career he quickly became obnoxious. How he'd hold forth with his exasperating, elevated eyebrows, which always rose paternalistically as he'd expound on his latest theory about how a country's (by which he meant the United States) literary influence reflects its political influence and so dominates less powerful countries (by which he meant his native Argentina) in the literary marketplace. In reality, Summers thought, Emir's theory was but the most recent explanation to account for his lack of success. That was the only literary/political issue that really interested Emir—though he never considered
any purely aesthetic reasons for it, such as the arcane, precious, tediously academic quality of his prose. As Emir grew older and his failure (though he'd published a few novels with second-rate university presses) became more solidified, his theories became more grand, comprehensive, and conspiratorial. For some years now Emir's true art form had, in fact, become his theories, always cloaked in international intrigue, not his writing, which he rarely attempted now.

With his pitifully transparent self-love and ill-disguised disappointment in his life, Emir was reason enough not to attend the party, Summers thought, but there were even more compelling reasons.

There would be at least five to ten other blowhards there, who were even more exasperating than Emir (Emir was capable, at least, in the midst of one of his tirades, of being intermittently amusing). There was, for instance, Aaron, the self-proclaimed literary avant-gardist, who would tell you with a straight face that his writing had forever altered human consciousness. He'd published only with tiny presses that Summers suspected were partially or wholly financed by Aaron himself. “I wear my rejection by the New York publishing houses as a badge of honor,” Aaron would repeatedly say. “If they ever slipped up and accepted my work I'd know immediately that I'd lost it, that I was no longer cutting edge.”

Aaron recently celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday by throwing a party for the group at his loft in South Philly. With great ambivalence, Summers attended, not quite ready to leave the group but vowing to do so to himself in the immediate, or at least near, future. Yet here he was, three months later, getting dressed for yet another group affair, this time celebrating the unlikely, indeed shocking, Pulitzer Prize for music criticism his former
schoolmate, Howard Pike, had just won. Pike had actually left Philadelphia and the group for New York twenty years ago, to seek his fortune, which he'd clearly found as music critic for the
Times
. The fact that he'd consented to take a train to Philadelphia and attend a party in his honor was regarded as an act of great generosity on Pike's part. Yes, the news about the prize was like suddenly being mugged. “I won't forget it,” Summers said to himself, “It will always go on hurting me, and yet I'll have to shake Pike's hand and congratulate him if I go to the party.” But still he went.