The Uncanny Reader (40 page)

*   *   *

OTHER TOWNS.
When we visit other towns, which have no phantoms, often we feel that a burden has lifted. Some of us make plans to move to such a town, a place that reminds us of tall picture books from childhood. There, you can walk at peace along the streets and in the public parks, without having to wonder whether a ripple will course through the skin of your forearms. We think of our children playing happily in green backyards, where sunflowers and honeysuckle bloom against white fences. But soon a restlessness comes. A town without phantoms seems to us a town without history, a town without shadows. The yards are empty, the streets stretch bleakly away. Back in our town, we wait impatiently for the ripple in our arms, we fear that our phantoms may no longer be there. When, sometimes after many weeks, we encounter one of them at last, in a corner of the yard or at the side of the car wash, where a look is flung at us before the phantom turns away, we think: now things are as they should be, now we can rest awhile. It's a feeling almost like gratitude.

*   *   *

EXPLANATION #5.
Some argue that all towns have phantoms, but that only we are able to see them. This way of thinking is especially attractive to those who cannot understand why our town should have phantoms and other towns none; why our town, in short, should be an exception. An objection to this explanation is that it accomplishes nothing but a shift of attention from the town itself to the people of our town: it's our ability to perceive phantoms that is now the riddle, instead of the phantoms themselves. A second objection, which some find decisive, is that the explanation relies entirely on an assumed world of invisible beings, whose existence can be neither proved nor disproved.

*   *   *

CASE STUDY #5.
Every afternoon after lunch, before I return to work in the upstairs study, I like to take a stroll along the familiar sidewalks of my neighborhood. Thoughts rise up in me, take odd turns, vanish like bits of smoke. At the same time I'm wide open to striking impressions—that ladder leaning against the side of a house, with its shadow hard and clean against the white shingles, which project a little, so that the shingle-bottoms break the straight shadow-lines into slight zigzags; that brilliant red umbrella lying at an angle in the recycling container on a front porch next to the door; that jogger with shaved head, black nylon shorts, and an orange sweatshirt that reads, in three lines of black capital letters: EAT WELL/KEEP FIT/DIE ANYWAY. A single blade of grass sticks up from a crack in a driveway. I come to a sprawling old house at the corner, not far from the sidewalk. Its dark red paint could use a little touching up. Under the high front porch, on both sides of the steps, are those crisscross lattice panels, painted white. Through the diamond-shaped openings come pricker branches and the tips of ferns. From the sidewalk I can see the handle of an old hand mower, back there among the dark weeds. I can see something else: a slight movement. I step up to the porch, bend to peer through the lattice: I see three of them, seated on the ground. They turn their heads toward me and look away, begin to rise. In an instant they're gone. My arms are rippling as I return to the sidewalk and continue on my way. They interest me, these creatures who are always vanishing. This time I was able to glimpse a man of about fifty and two younger women. One woman wore her hair up; the other had a sprig of small blue wildflowers in her hair. The man had a long straight nose and a long mouth. They rose slowly but without hesitation and stepped back into the dark. Even as a child I accepted phantoms as part of things, like spiders and rainbows. I saw them in the vacant lot on the other side of the backyard hedge, or behind garages and tool sheds. Once I saw one in the kitchen. I observe them carefully whenever I can, I try to see their faces. I want nothing from them. It's a sunny day in early September. As I continue my walk, I look about me with interest. At the side of a driveway, next to a stucco house, the yellow nozzle of a hose rests on top of a dark green garbage can. Farther back, I can see part of a swing set. A cushion is sitting on the grass beside a three-pronged weeder with a red handle.

*   *   *

THE DISBELIEVERS.
The disbelievers insist that every encounter is false. When I bend over and peer through the openings in the lattice, I see a slight movement, caused by a chipmunk or mouse in the dark weeds, and instantly my imagination is set in motion: I seem to see a man and two women, a long nose, the rising, the disappearance. The few details are suspiciously precise. How is it that the faces are difficult to remember, while the sprig of wildflowers stands out clearly? Such criticisms, even when delivered with a touch of disdain, never offend me. The reasoning is sound, the intention commendable: to establish the truth, to distinguish the real from the unreal. I try to experience it their way: the movement of a chipmunk behind the sun-lit lattice, the dim figures conjured from the dark leaves. It isn't impossible. I exercise my full powers of imagination: I take their side against me. There is nothing there, behind the lattice. It's all an illusion. Excellent! I defeat myself. I abolish myself. I rejoice in such exercise.

*   *   *

YOU.
You who have no phantoms in your town, you who mock or scorn our reports: are you not deluding yourselves? For say you are driving out to the mall, some pleasant afternoon. All of a sudden—it's always sudden—you remember your dead father, sitting in the living room in the house of your childhood. He's reading a newspaper in the armchair next to the lamp table. You can see his frown of concentration, the fold of the paper, the moccasin slipper half-hanging from his foot. The steering wheel is warm in the sun. Tomorrow you're going to dinner at a friend's house—you should bring a bottle of wine. You see your friend laughing at the table, his wife lifting something from the stove. The shadows of telephone wires lie in long curves on the street. Your mother lies in the nursing home, her eyes always closed. Her photograph on your bookcase: a young woman smiling under a tree. You are lying in bed with a cold, and she's reading to you from a book you know by heart. Now she herself is a child and you read to her while she lies there. Your sister will be coming up for a visit in two weeks. Your daughter playing in the backyard, your wife at the window. Phantoms of memory, phantoms of desire. You pass through a world so thick with phantoms that there is barely enough room for anything else. The sun shines on a hydrant, casting a long shadow.

*   *   *

EXPLANATION #6.
One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms: they turn from us because they cannot bear to witness our self-delusion.

*   *   *

FORGETFULNESS.
There are times when we forget our phantoms. On summer afternoons, the telephone wires glow in the sun like fire. Shadows of tree branches lie against our white shingles. Children shout in the street. The air is warm, the grass is green, we will never die. Then an uneasiness comes, in the blue air. Between shouts, we hear a silence. It's as though something is about to happen, which we ought to know, if only we could remember.

*   *   *

HOW THINGS ARE.
For most of us, the phantoms are simply there. We don't think about them continually, at times we forget them entirely, but when we encounter them we feel that something momentous has taken place, before we drift back into forgetfulness. Someone once said that our phantoms are like thoughts of death: they are always there, but appear only now and then. It's difficult to know exactly what we feel about our phantoms, but I think it is fair to say that in the moment we see them, before we're seized by a familiar emotion like fear, or anger, or curiosity, we are struck by a sense of strangeness, as if we've suddenly entered a room we have never seen before, a room that nevertheless feels familiar. Then the world shifts back into place and we continue on our way. For though we have our phantoms, our town is like your town: sun shines on the house fronts, we wake in the night with troubled hearts, cars back out of driveways and turn up the street. It's true that a question runs through our town, because of the phantoms, but we don't believe we are the only ones who live with unanswered questions. Most of us would say we're no different from anyone else. When you come to think about us, from time to time, you'll see we really are just like you.

 

ON JACOB'S LADDER

Steve Stern

“Spin, little spider, spin,” the corporal called down in his guttural singsong. He was attempting—to no effect whatever—to twirl the rope with which he'd lowered Toyti into the chimney. Braced against the warm walls of the flue, the boy ignored Corporal Luther's efforts at sabotage; he was after all harmless, the corporal, a laughingstock among his fellows, and his lame jokes and taunts were merely the way he tried to disguise his fear of scaling the smokestack. It was on account of his cowardice and generally unfit condition that Untersturmführer Stroop had assigned him repeatedly to this exercise in humiliation. Then other guards and even kapos would gather to observe his fat rump toiling up the iron rungs behind his charge, whose nimbleness was a torment that the tub-of-guts Luther took as a personal offense.

The little yid should by all rights have been dead already—hadn't the corporal lost a small fortune in wagers on that score? The shelf life, so to speak, of climbing boys in the camp was ordinarily measured in minutes, but this one had survived, even thrived at the task; which was why Luther, smug in his use of a Jewish locution, had christened him Toyti. And Toyti—since he was no longer able to remember his real name—was who he'd become. There was in fact a whole world he no longer remembered, though bits of it sometimes came back to him like objects under water that never surface far enough to recognize. The guards called him Toyti as well, as did the other prisoners, who viewed him as a creature whose intimacy with the machinery of death gave him the status of an honorary corpse. He took a peculiar pride in his status, which endured long after so many of his fellow inmates had disappeared. Generations of them had joined the ranks of the officially dead, their torched bones pulverized and sprinkled over the gardens and orchards beyond the high-voltage fence, while Toyti continued to master the game of survival.

“Hey, little spider,” shouted Luther, still asthmatically panting, “you know how the sausage-makers of Rott—
hunh
—they claim to use every part of the pig but the oink? Well, here we use every part of the yid—
hunh—
but the oy.” His wheezy laugh like a trodden concertina reverberated in the square chimney shaft.

Toyti had heard the joke before ad nauseam, to say nothing of the endless threats and complaints that accompanied their climbing excursions. He knew that Luther looked forward to the day when the stunted sweep would be overcome by the heat and fumes, and instead of hauling up a spider he would reel in a dead fish. That was after all the purpose of the rope, not to protect the boy but to prevent his becoming an obstruction. Hence the wire ruff like a ballerina's skirt that encircled his chest along with the rope, so that in the event he was no longer capable of scraping residue from the tiles, his very body could still serve as a cleaning instrument. It was another example of the efficiency for which Luther and his kind had such affection, but Toyti had cheated them all by making the chimneys his element.

By now he'd descended far enough into the flue that Luther's barbs were barely audible anymore. The bloated corporal was in any case an amateur at abuse compared to the death's head soldiers that supervised the work details to which Toyti had been attached before his transfer to the crematoria. His back still bore the stripes from their quirts, his head the ache from the heels of their patent leather boots grinding his face into the mud. Their dogs had sunk their fangs into his ankles as he shoveled drek from a latrine overflowing from a thousand cases of dysentery; they snapped at him as he dragged stumps and lugged stones to no purpose other than breaking a body in which the spirit no longer resided. For these endeavors he was rewarded each evening with a bowl of soup abob with drowning vermin and a mealy potato from which even his empty gut revolted. His eyes drooled a murky sap, his limbs brittle as twigs, and during that notable morning selection when the oberführer called his number, he groaned in relief that he would soon be delivered from the onus of his days. But rather than sent to the gas he was dispatched (owing no doubt to his pint size and advanced puniness) to sweep the chimney of one of the incineration centers. At the time he would have preferred to lie down and die. But when he was hoisted by the disgruntled corporal onto the rusted rungs that protruded from the smokestack wall, something happened; because his spent limbs, never athletic or especially strong, seemed to welcome the opportunity to clamber up the ladder. In no time at all he had risen to an altitude at which the poison stench of the camp was dispersed by crisp breezes, and the jaunty marches the slave orchestra played were no longer a mockery. He could see beyond the barbed wire and the towers to the woods and cultivated fields, the feather-soft rolling hills, but even more pleasing than the view from the crown of the chimney was the sense of safety he felt once he was lowered into the shaft.

So it seemed that Toyti had a vocation. The work was of course no less taxing than the drudgery he had previously endured, but it was essential. If the flues were not regularly scoured of the crust of chemical condensation that the burning bodies deposited on the ceramic tiles, the chimneys were in danger of catching fire, and such an event could have devastating consequences for the otherwise seamless operation of the camp. Therefore, diminutive boys saddled with an ungainly utility belt—from which depended a whisk broom, putty knife, and hammer—boys wearing the ridiculous wire collar and the rope wound beneath their arms were dangled like plumb bobs into the smoky conduits. There they had to chip, scrape, and dust with a feverish activity in order to complete the job before succumbing to the heat and the choking atmosphere. It was true that the furnaces were extinguished during the cleaning, but the work of the crematoria was a twenty-four-hour-a-day enterprise, so the Reich could not afford to take a building out of commission for very long. As a result, the flues were never given time to cool. Such conditions had caused the asphyxiation if not the roasting alive of his predecessors, and Toyti himself was scalded head to toe; his charbroiled flesh—where it wasn't uniformly coated in soot—had turned the color of coral, and only vestigial patches remained of his ocher hair. (It was a startling countenance that had the virtue of discouraging the kapos from using him as they did the other boys.) But Toyti's aptitude for sweeping chimneys, and his peculiar habit of outliving the task, had earned him a semi-permanent situation in the lager.