Thirteen Phantasms (18 page)

It was my neighbor, Monroe. His chin, it seemed, was gone. It had never amounted to much and now it was even less a chin, more a row of teeth which his lower lip couldn’t quite conceal. Monroe seemed to be disappearing. He was consuming himself. His eyes had been drawn into his head in search, no doubt, for his chin. But his nose had been pulled out, like an armadillo’s, and his ears hung in a sheet like those of a ring-laden African princess. And he had shrunk by several inches. The spine, they say, although made of bone which should last as well as the rest of us, is the first to go. Monroe was becoming a dwarf. It was clear—and not unrelated, I suspect, to the shining, spheroid airstream thing in the weeds. In Monroe’s weeds. A thing Monroe used to tow about behind an automobile—an incredible Hudson of ludicrous make with an insect name and with great black balloons for tires. But during the years that the automobile has gone to bits (in much the same way as its master) the little star ship of an airstream waited in the weeds and was joined, in time, by what appeared at first to be a water tower sprung up in two days on great gangling stilts, jointed at the knees.

Monroe, a dwarf through no fault of his own, in gray flannel or what seemed, superficially, gray flannel, had always tottered past, morning after morning, his eyes sucking inward with his chin, his nose and ears succumbing to the forces of gravity and stretching, beaklike and flaplike, groundward. He pattered northward up the sidewalk to the market. It was his constitutional. Along went Monroe through years of shrinking until that one morning when I, having barely begun with armadillos, heard a tapping on the door. It was sharp, yet faint, so that I listened a moment in dread. It was a skeleton’s knock—hard knuckles but with no muscle left in the arm to wield them Just a sort of clack clack clack that bamboo wind chimes might make in a breeze muffled by gray morning mists.

But the clack clack clack came again, and I gave up my armadillos and opened the door a crack, anxious, as you can easily understand, to keep the fog and the smell of seaweed and tar outside. But that, too, was futile and the mists crept in with an eye to my shoes which I had, just that morning, wiped clean with newspaper.

There was Monroe, squinting, failing to recognize me. Failing even to recognize the very sidewalk beneath his feet. Across the road Monroe’s house was enveloped in fog—fog that swirled around the sphere in the weeds, in and out of the windows, blowing the tatters of ragged curtains, fossil curtains, outward into the air. Monroe couldn’t speak. Monroe couldn’t see well enough to recognize me. And if he could—see, that is—he wouldn’t have known me anyway. Monroe, it appeared, was lost. Lost just half a block from home and half a block from the market.

“Monroe,” I said, thinking to alert him in some telling way.

“What?” He looked about him.

Monroe was lost. He was befuddled. He blinked his eyes very slowly like a chameleon—as if giving the problem a really solid bit of thought. He took pause, as they say. Then he shuffled about in a little half circle, a slow and painstaking about-face, and with my finger as an indicator tottered south toward home, the market—the whole idea of markets—abandoned.

That was some time ago, and since then there has been no Monroe. His house, it seems, remains perpetually fog enshrouded, and I’m sure that from the vantage point of Monroe’s window, my own would seem the same. Monroe is still in there—dead, likely, as a doornail. And in twenty years, after the last of the armadillos has flown out of Texas, Monroe will still be dead in that gray house, a bit of dust and hair, shrunk beyond time and reason but no more dead than he is now.

The exact relation between the sphere in the weeds, the water tower, and the seaweed fog that enclosed Monroe’s house, not to mention Monroe himself, is puzzling. I admit that at one time I suspected the very nature of water towers, which I thought to be storage tanks. But now, in my research, I find that they have something to do with equalizing this and that—that they are essential. Most of our mechanisms are essential. Monroe’s sphere is somehow essential.

But the tower across the road is merely a silver cone atop stilts. It could house an army of aliens as easily as a hundred thousand gallons of water and no one, I fear, would care to know. It is attached to nothing at all. There are no pipes or hoses. You’ll say I’ve read too much Wells and am frightened of Tripods. And that may be so. You can say what you like. I know what I know. I mentioned having glimpsed the airstream across the mouth of an alley off Second Street not far, in fact, from the Vance Hotel. And you will agree, by now, that it could not have been Monroe who motored it about.

But just yesterday evening, upstairs in the library, I sat reading. It was late, very late, and there was a good fog coming in off the ocean. The curtains on the windows are lace, rather sad lace I fear, gone from white to gray with the years. A pink thread of neon shone along the sill and the night outside was cold and dim and a deep resonant lowing sound muttered in from the bay—a foghorn, I hope. I nodded there in front of the electric fire, something entitled
The Story of Our Earth
open in my hand, when I heard that faint but sharp tap tap tapping. That skeletal rapping somewhere out in the night. Noises in the night tend to make one start more violently, I suppose, than the same noises would in the light of day. My book tumbled to the floor and I rose, thinking first of horrors, then of Monroe. But I recalled quickly that I was in among the shadows of bookcases on the second floor and that the tap—there it was again—was at the window. “Could Monroe … ?” I thought. But no; Monroe was a dwarf. Monroe was gone altogether. And I peered out into the dim night air aswirl with mist. In the pink of neon there glinted for the briefest of moments an arc of silver—the bent joint of a single stilt leg wobbling momentarily, clacking once more against the window pane, then disappearing in the fog, away toward the sea.

I squinted out at Monroe’s house. The little airstream sphere glowed in the moonlight or perhaps through fog-filtered neon which had mysteriously pierced the thick mists. And the mist swirled deeper, obscuring the field of fuchsia and dandelion, fading telephone poles. The airstream shuddered and, it seemed to me then, rose from its nesting place and followed in the wake of the striding tower toward the bay.

It sounds (I know) very much like a madness. But so what? What do I care for madness? What struck me as insidious was the fact that, next morning in the dim sun of coastal autumn, both had returned and sat placid as herons among their respective weeds.

And what is true about mechanisms is that as we move from the Jurassic age of technology toward some ultimate goal, relentlessly like armadillos (and all, one day, likely to be made into preposterous hats or scaled croquet balls), all our devices become simpler and grayer and their function becomes less clear. They become primitive and bestial and even prehistoric in the most roundabout way. What must it have been like when the earth was all ocean? When there was nothing but monsters? Imagine yourself another Professor Hardwigg afloat on gray Paleozoic seas where, twenty feet beneath the surface, unbelievable whales and amphibious beasts tear at each other and then disappear into the mouths of dim primordial caves. Chambered cephalopods and trilobites and sea snails as great as Monroe’s airstream creep sluggishly about dim reefs amid the rubbery stalks and bladders of seaweeds. Imagine yourself afloat on a pitching wooden raft in a prehistoric age a million years before the first armadillos would decide among themselves to wander north out of Mayan jungles toward sunlight and open spaces.

That same gray atmosphere, trust me, born again of seaweed and oceans, washes in night by night, drawn by the moon as surely as the tides. And amid fuchsias and dandelions, monsters lie humped and waiting, striding off by night in the mists. And each morning gray mold covers my shoes and sprouts from the walls along with, doubtless, the germinating seeds of tiny trilobites and nautili.

My clothing, as well as my shoes, is becoming gray felt, just as Monroe’s did. All this is not madness. The armadillos have turned back, to the grand amazement of
science,
and so, I fear, has everything else. And the airstream, the tower, and the pink of fading neon—what are they up to? That is what is unclear. That they come and go in the night along fog-enshrouded avenues and beneath pale lunar rays is a certainty. But I’m not an impatient man. If the thing has knocked once on the windowpane, it will knock again.

The trip down from Seattle in the rattling old Mercury wagon took most of two days. Jimmerson tried to sleep for a few hours somewhere south of Mendocino along Highway I, the Mercury parked on a turnout and Jimmerson wedged in between the spare tire, his old luggage, and some cardboard boxes full of what amounted to his possessions. None of it was worth any real money. It was just trinkets, souvenirs of his forty years married to Edna: some salt and pepper shakers from what had been their collection, dusty agates and geodes from a couple of trips to the desert back in ’56, old postcards and photographs, a pair of clipper ship bookends they’d bought down in New Orleans at the Jean Lafitte Hotel, and a few books, including the Popular Science Library set that Edna had given him for Christmas a hell of a long time ago. Most of the rest of what he owned he had left in Seattle, and every mile of highway that spun away behind him made it less and less likely that he would ever return for it.

News of Edna’s death had reached him yesterday in the form of a letter from the county, identifying Doyle Jimmerson as “responsible for the costs incurred by Edna Jimmerson’s burial.” And of course he
was
responsible—for more than just the costs. They were married, even if he hadn’t seen her for nearly a year, and she had no other kin. He would have thought that Mrs. Crandle, the next-door neighbor, would have sent him the news of Edna’s death sooner, but Mrs. Crandle was a terrible old shrew, and probably she hated him for how he had left, how he had stayed away. …

He had never felt more married to Edna than now that she was dead. His long-cherished anger and all his tired principles had fallen to dust on the instant of his reading the letter, and as he lay listening to the slow dripping of the branches and the shifting of the dark ocean beyond the car windows, he knew that he had simply been wrong—about Edna’s fling with the Frenchman, Mr. des Laumes, about his own self-righteous staying-away, about his looking down on Edna from the self-satisfied height of a second-story hotel room along the waterfront in Seattle where he had lived alone these past twelve months.

There was a fog in off the ocean, and as he lay in the back of the Mercury he could hear waves sighing in the distance. The eucalyptus trees along the roadside were ghostly dark through the mists, the ocean an invisible presence below. There was the smell of dust and cardboard and old leather on the air, and water dripped onto the roof of the car from overhanging branches. Now and then a truck passed, gunning south toward San Francisco, and the Mercury swayed on its springs and the fog whirled and eddied around the misty windows.

•

Before dawn he was on the road again, driving south along the nearly deserted highway. Fog gave way to rain, and the rugged Pacific coast was black and emerald under a sky the color of weathered iron. It was late afternoon when he pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, which dieseled for another twenty seconds before coughing itself silent. He sat there in the quiet car, utterly unsure of himself—unsure even why he had come. He could far easier have sent a check. And he was helpless now, worthless, no good to poor Edna, who was already dead and buried. …

Of
course
Mrs. Crandle hadn’t sent him a letter. He wasn’t worth a letter. He wondered if the old woman was watching him through the window right now, and he bent over and looked at the front of her house. There she was, a shadow behind the drapery, peering out at him. He could picture her face, pruned up like one of those dolls they make out of dried fruit. He waved at her, and then, before he got out of the car, he opened the glove compartment and looked for a moment at the blue steel .38 that lay atop the road maps and insurance papers and old registrations. The gun appeared to him to be monumentally heavy, like a black hole in the heart of the old Mercury.

He shut the glove compartment door, climbed stiffly out of the car, and took a look at the house and yard. The dichondra lawn was up in dandelions and devil grass, and the hibiscus were badly overgrown, dropping orange blossoms onto the grass and walkway. The house needed paint. He had been meaning to paint it when he’d left, but he hadn’t. Things had happened too fast that morning. Let the Frenchy paint it, he had told Edna before he had walked out.

He headed up along the side of the house, where a litter of throwaway newspapers and front-porch advertisements lay sodden with rain, hidden in front of Edna’s Dodge. Someone, probably Mrs. Crandle, had been tossing them there. The right front tire of the Dodge was flat, and it looked like it had been for a long time. Instantly it occurred to him that Edna must have been sick for some time, that she hadn’t been able to get around, but he pushed it out of his mind and continued toward the back door, only then spotting the box springs and mattress tilted against the fence by the garage. Someone had covered it with a plastic dropcloth to save it from the weather, but the sight of it there behind the cloudy plastic was disorienting, and he felt as if he had been away forever.

The house was closed up now, the curtains drawn, and he had to jiggle his key in the lock to turn the bolt. The door creaked open slowly, and he stepped in onto the linoleum floor after wiping his feet carefully on the mat. At once he felt the emptiness of the house, as if it were hollow, reverberating with his footsteps. He walked as silently as he could through the service porch and into the kitchen, where the tile counter was empty of anything but a glass tumbler still partly full of water. He reached for it in order to pour it into the sink, but then let it alone and went out into the dining room, straightening a chair that was out of place at the table. The old oriental carpet was nearly threadbare outside the bedroom door (Edna had always wanted him to step past it, so as not to wear it out before its time) and seeing it now, that footworn patch of rug, he felt the sorrow in the house like a weight.