Acquainted with the Night (29 page)

Charlotte leaped to him and grabbed the glass out of his hand. It was sloshing liquor all over the rug with every jerk of his body. “Fred, stop it. It’s not funny. What are you laughing at?”

She saw Gloria and Arthur exchange a shocked look. Arthur’s formerly bland eyes were alarmed.

“Ha ha! Not funny!” Fred gasped. “It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!” He slapped his thighs and threw his head back. Old gold shone from his wide-open mouth. Subsiding, he wiped his eyes, and then his shoulders began quivering with another swell of savage laughter.

“Fred!” cried Charlotte. “Don’t laugh like that!”

Gloria Harris put down her brandy glass and stood up.

Charlotte, sobbing, a fire streaking through her chest, ran downstairs, outside, and buried her face in the dark of the honeysuckle. She wanted to forget the last half hour, forget the dreadful story about the man, forget the years with Fred that had thickened around her like a dense layer of fat. She wanted to be transported back to the time before she ever knew Fred, even before her father had died, when life had stretched before her full of possibility. It was hopeless, she knew, and yet she took deep gasping breaths and dug her teeth into the leaves, trying to bite off and swallow the deadening sweetness.

A
LEXANDER SMITH WOKE TO
find himself sitting up in bed. The bedside wall lamp was on. His glasses were still on, and a book lay open on the blanket, two middle pages peculiarly upright, swaying in the faint fall breeze from the nearby window. The digital clock said the time was 2:47. Odd how the last two numbers were his age, a reminder in the dead of night. “Shit,” he muttered. He hated to doze off reading, which had been happening to him about twice a week lately. He had trouble getting back to sleep, and mornings after, felt jolted out of sequence, as if two days had passed instead of one. A small click sounded; it was 2:48. There, he had aged. Staring at the straight-edged, unfriendly numbers, he vaguely recalled a Robert Frost poem that said a solitary clock proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. Yes. That was exactly how it felt in the middle of the night. The time was just a meaningless number with no attachment to events. Alexander felt stranded and forlorn.

He put aside his glasses, switched off the lamp, and got down under the covers. He felt the warm back of his wife, Linda, turned away from him, her contours familiar and soothing. He hadn’t thought to look, when the light was on, to see if she was there. But where else would she be at two forty-eight? A click; he made the correction, forty-nine. Just so, it went by.

Sleep eluded him. To make matters worse, he discovered something quite strange nagging at him. A small shape, dark, yet standing out against the deeper dark, danced behind his closed lids. It looked like a bacillus. Alexander’s eyes had been strained lately, since he used them constantly in his work as an architect. Perhaps he needed stronger glasses. Perhaps he was getting old. Undoubtedly he was getting old. He watched the bacillus dance about, and found that if he rolled his eyes from left to right the spot moved with them. If he rolled them up and down the spot went along too, but the up-and-down motion hurt.

Minutes clicked by, and it would not go away. It made his skin tingly and restless, as if his insides were struggling to escape from their container. He knew what it was, though, and knowledge was reassuring. The spot was an aftereffect of sleeping for two hours with the light on and then waking up to the dim glow and going abruptly back into darkness. It was some optical phenomenon he couldn’t explain precisely, but whose broad outlines he felt he understood. As a matter of fact, he felt that general imprecise understanding about a great many things, he realized: the tides, rocket ships, airplanes, rainbows. Maybe he really didn’t know anything thoroughly. What the hell, though. He managed, didn’t he? Now sleep.

Alexander opened his eyes in the dark. He could see nothing. It was too soon. You had to lie awake for a while in the dark before you could see everything. He saw only the spot, dark against dark, floating through the void like a flying saucer. No longer shaped like a bacillus, it was a small circle with undefined edges, rather like a planet seen through a telescope, with a halo around it. Or a gray star with a gray glow. He closed his eyes; it remained, spinning, creating a haze, a wake of its motion. Horrible. He opened them. He could begin to distinguish the furniture now. The room was spacious. There was his armchair against the far wall. Then his bureau drawer on the right; Linda’s was on the left. Above Linda’s was a mirror, illumined in places where moonlight glimmered in through the window. The spot went everywhere Alexander’s eyes went, relentless. It flickered in the jagged beams in the mirror. He couldn’t get rid of it. A UFO with a message. Glaucoma. Retinitis pigmentosa. Impending death, beckoning. To ease the panic he moved closer to the warm body of Linda. She was wearing a thin silky nightgown that excited him mildly as its smoothness brushed against his chest and thighs.

He realized he was trembling with fear. Maybe he ought to make love to Linda. That would at least be something to do while he couldn’t sleep. She was still turned away from him. He put his arm around her and pulled her closer, testing the strength of his desire. It was nice making love to Linda. He pressed against her. She was usually an eager partner, and if not always totally eager, if some vague, ancient tug seemed to hold her back, she was at least amenable. He put a hand on Linda’s breast and eased a knee between her thighs. The spot in his eye throbbed, zoomed forward and back to tease him, taunt him, like the cavorting spot at the end of an invisible laser beam. Did he want to make love to Linda? He queried his body. Actually not very much. He was tired and distressed by the frustrating day and longed to sleep.

But maybe he should do it anyway. It might make him forget about the thing in his eye. Once he started he would want to. He moved his palm around Linda’s nipple but she did not stir. God, what a deep sleep! He envied her. His eyes rolled involuntarily with the motion of his hand, and he noticed that the speck rolled too. It was terrifying. Trembling, he turned over on his other side, leaving Linda. The clock said 3:04. The right-hand numbers of the clock stopped at sixty. Maybe he would die at sixty. Or the next sixty. Actually they stopped at fifty-nine. There was no 3:60. The spot was on the clock, on the upper-left-hand tip of the four. Five.

Alexander began to experiment with the spot. If he could not get rid of it he could at least play with it, tease it back. He stretched out flat and looked up at the ceiling. He blinked. The spot disappeared for the fraction of an instant that his lids fluttered down and up, but immediately reappeared to jiggle on the ceiling. He began to blink to the rhythm of the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the speck obediently danced. But the fast pace made his eyes ache, so he lowered his lids to rest them. He didn’t feel like playing with it. He was exhausted. There was no comfortable way to arrange his body; his pores seemed about to burst open. The speck was an intrusion, undeserved, unbearable. He wanted to cry out in protest, as he would protest to the police if a thief entered his house, but there was no one to protest to. It was his very own speck. He thrashed around in the bed, viciously kicking the covers about him. Then he pressed his fists hard to his eyes and for a moment found relief. Gone! But when he released them it was back, surrounded by colored flashing dots. They went away gradually but the spot remained. Alexander started to sweat. He hated the spot savagely. It was not in his body—it seemed located in distant space, yet it controlled his existence like a vital organ, heart or lungs. Then he quieted in surprise, for the way he had just described the spot, distant yet part of him and controlling, sounded like the idea of God that was taught to children. The speck was God. God was paying him a nocturnal visit. A vision.

Alexander couldn’t believe it was himself having such alien thoughts. His brain was softening. Premature senility. He ought to laugh; he must be delirious. But it was not funny. Very possibly this was the way people went insane. God. Shit, he thought. He would never read in bed again. His forehead was cold with damp sweat. He went into the bathroom for a drink of water and looked in the mirror, but couldn’t really see himself because of the mote in his eye. There was only a haggard, generalized familiar face: anyone’s, a good-looking model for expensive Scotch in the pages of a slick magazine, caught unawares in his pajamas, with a hangover. The mote was in the mirror, on the pupil of his right eye. It was a gross distortion of figure and ground. He was the ground and the mote was the figure. Blood surged through him. Furious, he lifted his fist in a violent gesture to smash the mirror, but stopped himself in time. He really must get hold. Maybe he ought to read for a while. But he knew that the speck would move along the words of the page; he knew exactly how it would look, gray, bouncing along the white page, a replica of his eye’s movements, and he didn’t want to try.

Back in bed, he pressed the pillow hard over his eyes. Thank God! It was gone. Maybe now he could sleep, if he could find the right position. Soon it would be morning. He peered out: 3:58. The hour was aging. Linda lay calm; she hadn’t stirred. Linda was forty-one. He experimented with the pillow; at last, lying on his stomach with his face pressed into it but turned slightly to one side, he could keep the mote away and still breathe.

Sleep did not come, but he was more peaceful. He tried to think of nothing, but events of the day, blueprints, drawings, the faces of his associates, ran through his mind. It had been a troubled day: a contract they believed they were sure to get was at the last moment given to a younger, rival firm. Alexander had been ruthless, shouting at his staff and threatening to fire people for not working hard enough. He had felt weighed down with the burden of the business pressing on the front of his head. He thought of women he had seen in Caribbean islands moving gracefully down dirt roads with huge, heavy baskets on their heads. They sailed along, proud and erect. He staggered, clumsy and in pain, beneath the burden. Now he could see that the contract was less important than it had seemed. Perspective. The firm was in no real danger. He shouldn’t have carried on so. All right, so he had made a mistake. So he had behaved like a bastard; more like a frustrated child, actually. Was that a reason to be punished so harshly by this ... thing? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He was a reasonable man, after all. But at least now he had it under control. He thought, in a while, that he might try a little test. Maybe the whole horrid episode was over, gone as mysteriously as it had come, and there was no longer any need to remain uncomfortably in this absurd position. So very gradually, as if afraid of being noticed, he raised his head from the pillow. Christ, it was still there! In a rage, he pounded his fist into the mattress. He wasn’t going to get any sleep at all and he would be a wreck in the morning.

How could Linda lie there sleeping so calmly while he tossed in agony? It wasn’t fair. She was his wife. She was supposed to share his pain.

“Linda.” He shook her. “Linda,” he called loudly in a hoarse voice. “Please,” he added more softly.

“What?” She was still sleeping, he could tell. The word was a reflex.

“I can’t sleep. ... I have this ...”

She rolled towards him. “What is it?”

“I have something in my eye.”

“Go to sleep. It will go away.”

“Linda, this is terrible. It’s this thing. I can’t stop seeing it. I can’t sleep.”

“Murine.” Her eyes never opened.

“What?”

“Put in Murine. Drops. Bottom shelf.”

Could she do all that in her sleep? Women were amazing.

“Listen to me. Wake up. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s something I keep seeing. I can’t stand it.”

There was no answer. She was sleeping. Alexander was enraged, but when he looked at the pretty curve of her shoulder he relented. What did he want from her? She hadn’t sent the mote, and she certainly couldn’t make it disappear. The mote rested on the peak of her shoulder’s curve. He put his hand there; the mote was on the back of his hand.

“Alex,” she murmured unexpectedly.

“What?”

“Hold me. I’m cold. And close the window.”

Grumbling, he rose, shut the window, returned to bed and held her. The spot was still now. His eyes were tired and not moving, and so the spot was still. It obeyed his eyes, a marionette of his eyes. Perhaps he was making a kind of peace with it. Perhaps he would have to live with it for the rest of his life. How would he manage that? He could spend the rest of his life staring directly in front of him, never moving his eyes, only his head. People would certainly think him odd. But seriously, he could get used to it. People got used to worse things. His brother wore a hearing aid. One of the junior partners at the office had had a toe amputated. A friend of theirs had had a breast and a large part of her upper arm removed and had to wear her arm in a sling for the rest of her life. That must be very annoying. Of course, much worse than annoying, but for the purposes of this survey, annoying. Linda had a slight stammer when she got nervous. She knew just when it was going to happen, she told him. But she lived with it. It was a small thing, when you put it in perspective.

Thinking of all these things, Alexander was more wide awake than before. He, detached himself from Linda, tucked the blanket around her and rolled over, hugging himself tight. The mote was acting up again, bouncing back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball. He wasn’t getting used to it at all. A person could get used to a sling—of course it was terrible to have cancer, but a sling was something you could accept after a while. You would be grateful simply to be alive. He would willingly wear his arm in a sling for the rest of his life if only this torment would go away and he could get some sleep. But that happened to women. Most likely he would have cancer of the prostate one of these days, he was nearing that age. Would he be so willing to give that up? Your mote or your balls? Wait a minute, I’ll have to think that over. He remembered Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Ah, he understood now how men could make these foolish bargains. The speck winked at him; it was tiny, infinitesimal, a molecule. Maybe he was the only man on earth to have seen a molecule with the naked eye. It darted about wildly, flickered, floated, vibrated. He broke out in a sweat again, and yearned to die suddenly, right here, with no pain. He pushed his face in the pillow, but it stayed, even with the pillow. His last resort was gone. He wanted to cry from hopelessness. Maybe if he cried, some chemical reaction would take place in his eyes and it would go away. He rarely cried; all he could manage now were a few weak tears that had no effect.