Excerpt
preludes
The man — me, this pale being, no one else, it seems — wakes in fright,tangled up in the sheets.
The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slenderpine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don't recognize them. On the oppositeside of the room, the streetlight's distant luminance coating the window shadehas an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have anyfamiliarity now. What's worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit upin bed — actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward the vertical. There's ademon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. Ican't manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn't working, andbecause it, the flesh in which I'm housed, hasn't yet become me.
Looking into the darkness, I have optical floaters: there, on the opposite wall,are gears turning separately and then moving closer to one another until theircogs start to mesh and rotate in unison.
Then I feel her hand on my back. She's accustomed by now to my night amnesias,and with what has become an almost automatic response, she reaches up sleepilyfrom her side of the bed and touches me between the shoulder blades. In thismanner the world's objects slip back into their fixed positions.
"Charlie," she says. Although I have not recognized myself, apparently Irecognize her: her hand, her voice, even the slight saltine-cracker scent of herbody as it rises out of sleep. I turn toward her and hold her in my arms, tryingto get my heart rate under control. She puts her hand to my chest. "You've beendreaming," she says. "It's only a bad dream." Then she says, half-asleep again,"You have bad dreams," she yawns, "because you don't . . ." Before she canfinish the sentence, she descends back into sleep.
I get up and walk to the study. I have been advised to take a set of steps as aremedy. I have "identity lapses," as the doctor is pleased to call them. I havenot found this clinical phrase in any book. I think he made it up. Whatever theyare called, these lapses lead to physical side effects: my heart is stillthumping, and I can hardly sit or lie still.
I write my name, Charles Baxter, my address, the county, and the state in whichI live. I concoct a word that doesn't exist in our language but still might havea meaning or should have one: glimmerless. I am glimmerless. I write down theword next to my name.
On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall anantique mirror so old that it can't reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worndown to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. Like me, it'sglimmerless. You can't see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replaced bytexture. This mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim uponanyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn tolive with what it refuses to do. That's its beauty.
I have put on jeans, a shirt, shoes. I will take a walk. I glide past thenonmirroring mirror, unseen, thinking myself a vampire who soaks up essencesother than blood. I go outside to Woodland Drive and saunter to the end of theblock onto a large vacant lot. Here I am, a mere neighbor, somnambulating,harmless, no longer a menace to myself or to anyone else, and, stage by stage,feeling calmer now that I am outside.
As all the neighbors know, no house will ever be built on the ground where I amstanding because of subsurface problems with water drainage. In the flatlands ofMichigan the water stays put. The storm sewers have proven to be inadequate,with the result that this property, at the base of the hill on which our streetwas laid, always floods following thunderstorms and stays wet for weeks. Theneighborhood kids love it. After rains they shriek their way to the puddles.
Above me in the clear night sky, the moon, Earth's mad companion, is belting outshow tunes. A Rodgers and Hart medley, this is, including "Where or When." Themoon has a good baritone voice. No: someone from down the block has an audiosystem on. Apparently I am still quite sleepy and disoriented. The moon, itseems, is not singing after all.
I turn away from the vacant lot and head east along its edge, taking thesidewalk that leads to the path into what is called Pioneer Woods. These woodsborder the houses on my street. I know the path by heart. I have taken walks onthis path almost every day for the last twenty years. Our dog, Tasha, walksthrough here as mechanically as I do except when she sees a squirrel. In themoonlight the path that I am following has the appearance of the tunnel thatBeauty walks through to get to the Beast, and though I cannot see what lies atthe other end of the tunnel, I do not need to see it. I could walk it blind.
On the path now, urged leftward toward a stand of maples, I hear the sound ofdroplets falling through the leaves. It can't be raining. There are still starsvisible intermittently overhead. No: here are the gypsy moths, still in theircaterpillar form, chewing at the maple and serviceberry leaves, devouring ourneighborhood forest leaf by leaf. Night gives them no rest. The woods have beeninfested with them, and during the day the sun shines through these trees as ifspring were here, bare stunned nubs of gnawed and nibbled leaves casting almostno shade on the ground, where the altered soil chemistry, thanks to thecaterpillars' leavings, has killed most of the seedlings, leaving onlydisagreeably enlarged thorny and deep-rooted thistles, horror-movie phantasmvegetation with deep root systems. The trees are coated, studded, withcaterpillars, their bare trunks hairy and squirming. I can barely see them butcan hear their every scrape and crawl.
The city has sprayed this forest with Bacillus thuringiensis, two words I loveto say to myself, and the bacillus has killed some of these pests; their bodieslie on the path, where my seemingly adhesive shoes pick them up. I can feel themunder my soles in the dark as I walk, squirming semiliquid life. Squish,squoosh. And in my night confusion it is as if I can hear the leaves beinggnawed, the forest being eaten alive, shred by shred. I cannot bear it. They arenot mild, these moths. Their appetites are blindingly voracious, obsessive. Anacquaintance has told me that the Navahos refer to someone with an emotionalillness as "moth crazy."
On the other side of the woods I come out onto the edge of a street, StadiumBoulevard, and walk down a slope toward the corner, where a stoplight isblinking red in two directions. I turn east and head toward the University ofMichigan football stadium, the largest college football stadium in the country.The greater part of it was excavated below ground; only a small part of itssteel and concrete structure is visible from here, the corner of Stadium andMain, just east of Pioneer High School. Cars pass occasionally on the street,their drivers hunched over, occasionally glancing at me in a fearful orpredatory manner. Two teenagers out here are skateboarding in the dark,clattering over the pavement, doing their risky and amazing ankle-busting curbjumping. They grunt and holler. Both white, they have fashioned Rasta-wear forthemselves, dreads and oversized unbuttoned vests over bare skin. I check mywatch. It is 1:30. I stop to make sure that no patrol cars are passing and thenmake my way through the turnstiles. The university has planned to build anenormous iron fence around this place, but it's not here yet. I am trespassingnow and subject to arrest. After entering the tunneled walkway of Gate 19, Ifind myself at the south end zone, in the kingdom of football.
Inside the stadium, I feel the hushed moonlight on my back and sit down on ametal bench. The August meteor shower now seems to be part of this show. I amtwo thirds of the way up. These seats are too high for visibility and too coldlymetallic for comfort, but the place is so massive that it makes most individualjudgments irrelevant. Like any coliseum, it defeats privacy and solitude throughsheer size. Carved out of the earth, sized for hordes and giants, bloodyinjuries and shouting, and so massive that no glance can take it all in, thestadium can be considered the staging ground for epic events, and not justfootball: in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced his Great Societyprogram here.
On every home-game Saturday in the fall, blimps and biplanes pulling advertisingbanners putter in semicircles overhead. Starting about three hours beforekickoff, our street begins to be clogged with parked cars and RVs driven bymidwesterners in various states of happy pre-inebriation, and when I rake theleaves in my back yard I hear the tidal clamor of the crowd in the distance,half a mile away. The crowd at the game is loudly traditional and antiphonal:one side of the stadium roars GO and the other side roars BLUE. The sounds riseto the sky, also blue, but nonpartisan.
The moonlight reflects off the rows of stands. I look down at the field, now, at1:45 in the morning. A midsummer night's dream is being enacted down there.
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires and those of a solitary nakedcouple, barely visible down there right now on the fifty-yard line, making love,on this midsummer night.
They are making soft distant audibles.
Back out on the sidewalk, I turn west and walk toward Allmendinger Park. I seethe park's basketball hoops and tennis courts and monkey bars illuminated dimlyby the streetlight. Near the merry-go-round, the city planners have boltedseveral benches into the ground for sedentary parents watching their children. Iused to watch my son from that very spot. As I stroll by on the sidewalk, Ithink I see someone, some shadowy figure in a jacket, emerging as if out of afog or mist, sitting on a bench accompanied by a dog, but certainly not watchingany children, this man, not at this time of night, and as I draw closer, helooks up, and so does the dog, a somewhat nondescript collie-Labrador-shepherdmix. I know this dog. I also know the man sitting next to him. I have known himfor years. His arms are flung out on both sides of the bench, and his legs arecrossed, and in addition to the jacket (a dark blue Chicago Bulls windbreaker),he's wearing a baseball hat, as if he were not quite adult, as if he had notquite given up the dreams of youth and athletic grace and skill. His name isBradley W. Smith.
His chinos are one size too large for him — they bag around his hips and hisknees — and he's wearing a shirt with a curious design that I cannot quite makeout, an interlocking M. C. Escher giraffe pattern, giraffes linked to giraffes,but it can't be that, it can't be what I think it is. In the dark my friendlooks like an exceptionally handsome toad. The dog snaps at a moth, then putshis head on his owner's leg. I might be hallucinating the giraffes on the man'sshirt, or I might simply be mistaken. He glances at me in the dark as I sit downnext to him on the bench.
"Hey," he says, "Charlie. What the hell are you doing out here? What's up?"
Continues...
Excerpted from The Feast of Loveby Charles Baxter Copyright © 2001 by Charles Baxter. Excerpted by permission.
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