rno Barclay’s father died of heart failure when he was forty-nine. His grandfather died of heart failure when he was forty-nine as well. It was a genetic heart defect. Not one that suddenly burst into being at the age of forty-nine, of course, but it felt that way. Forty-nine, the square of seven. Arno counted his life out in sevens. At fourteen years old, the age Arno was when his father died, he figured it out. He was two-sevenths of the way toward death. Two-sevenths through his life. Somewhere, hidden in his cells, was a code that told his heart to malform just a little bit. Just enough to make a time bomb in his chest, and two-sevenths of the clock had ticked away without him even thinking of it. So he kicked into high gear.
Arno was a bright kid. All his teachers saw it. If he was asleep in the back row of the classroom, they let him sleep. He knew the answers already. In the normal course of events, Arno would have coasted through high school, underachieving his potential but easily finding his way into the college of his choice. Though what that choice would have been based on, who knew?
Instead, Arno suddenly got direction. Like a religious epiphany. He received a mission from outside himself, but one that resonated with the deepest core of his being. In science class, in math class, he was no longer slouching in a chair in the back.
“Mr. Welsh, how do we know what different genes do?” “What’s gene therapy?” “What does it mean, exactly, to map a genome? I mean, how do they do it?”
He read books. He did reports. He knew more than his science teacher about genetics by the time he graduated. He needed to know, to find out, and maybe even to solve.
His second year in college, he was at the library with his nose in a book when she came up to him.
“You’re in Carson’s class, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m Gillian.”
“Arno.”
“Arno? What a funny name.”
“It’s a family name.” His father’s name, in fact.
“You seem to know what Carson’s talking about all the time.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fundamental stuff.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just a poor English Lit major, but I’ve got to get my GE credits somewhere. You know, so I’m well-rounded.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you explain some of this stuff to me? Maybe we can study together.”
“I don’t know. What’s a poor English Lit major going to do for me?”
“Well, I could help you understand MacBeth or Euripides or Chaucer.”
“No soap. My English GE’s over and done with.”
“A snap for you, I bet.”
“Like you said, a snap.”
“Well, then, I guess I’ll just have to buy you dinner.”
“And a bottle of wine?”
“My, you’re good at bargaining, too. And a bottle of wine. Deal?” She stuck out her hand, and he took it.
“Deal.”
Gillian was a distraction, for a semester, a wild and passionate distraction filled with soaring highs of emotion that he hadn’t thought were possible. Then they settled down to a smooth and comfortable rhythm of life. She was there on his 21st birthday.
He got very drunk.
“Three-sevenths of the way,” he told her. “Almost half way there. You don’t want to be with me. You don’t want to get happy and settled in life and have me pop off on you one day. I saw what it did to my mother.”
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why we’re celebrating at three-sevenths of the way. Why, that’s just silly. In another—what—three and a half years, you’ll be halfway there. Oh, we’ve got to have a giant party. Arno Barklay’s 24-and-a-half-year grand middle age, over the hill bash. I can see it now.”
She made him laugh. She made him cry. And when he turned twenty-four (and a half), she threw a huge party for him, with music and champagne and food.
He was in graduate school, then. He was searching for it, the gene, the one that was responsible for his ticker-time-bomb.
He married her after he earned his Ph.D. He was teaching, then, and working on his research. The more he worked, the more the years that went by, the more he realized that he was finding out why but he knew no way to stop it or to fix it. The die was cast. His heart was grown. And he could take aspirin and drugs and exercise and diet and drink red wine or eat chocolate and pomegranates, but ultimately, that string of genetic code had been formed at his conception. His heart had grown from it before he knew what a heart was. The die was cast. More of life was predetermined than mankind could possibly know. As he grew older, and drew closer to forty-nine, he drew into himself. Thirty-five was hard. Five-sevenths of the way there. Closer with every heartbeat. Forty-two was harder. Six-sevenths. One short seventh away. He didn’t even know, didn’t even have a clue in the first two-sevenths of his life. Now, he was losing hope, resigning himself to ever-nearing death.
“You’re not your father,” Gillian told him. “Or your grandfather. You’re a different man, in a different place, and a different time. You need to live your life, but you’re too busy living out your death.”
Still, he drifted farther away. He had trouble hearing her, hearing anything, as forty-nine ticked closer and closer. He could only hear the beating of his own heart, counting down.
On his forty-ninth birthday, his wife threw him a huge birthday bash. She invited all their friends, all his colleagues. She had champagne and shrimp cocktails and streamers and banners. But it seemed to him like a shoddy echo of his 24-and-a-half party, a dim echo, an old joke told too many times.
He went through the year in a daze. He didn’t even see the days, the months moving by, the calendar pages being stripped away. He was frozen, just waiting.
One night, he came home, and the lights were off. A fire in the fireplace filled the living room with a dim and flickering glow. On the table were candles, a bottle of wine, roses. The smell of fresh roses, it was something he hadn’t smelled in a long time. It came to him as a new smell.
Gillian appeared in the kitchen doorway, and it was as if he had traveled back in time. He was hit right in his most vulnerable place, in his heart. The wind left his lungs. She smiled.
“What’s all this?” he said.
She looked at him, puzzled.
“Don’t you even know?”
He shook his head.
“Happy birthday, sweety,” she said, and gave him a kiss on the tip of his nose.
Fifty. He had turned fifty.
Three years later, Gillian died of a sudden heart attack, and he killed himself a month later. Life can have a twisted sense of humor. Speaking for myself, death didn’t find it very funny.
fter reading the garbled account of her mother Nora’s
death, Eileen-Virginia-Marion-Crystal, mother of Marilyn, put down her father’s journal or story or ramblings. She turned the papers over in her hands, gently. Violet pen strokes on now crackling yellowed paper. There was no heading or title, no byline or information. Just papers, just chickenscratch, just violet markings. They did not reveal what Crystal needed to know.
Crystal had read some of what her father had written. It was dry, preachy stuff, lacking substance, lacking connection to life. It lacked passion and warmth.
She knew that this was her father’s writing, but it was nothing like the stories he had written before she was born, before her mother’s death. As far as she knew, he had stopped writing then, after her mother died. He had concentrated on the farm and on raising his small, motherless child.
Was this some attempt at a story or novel, a weird departure for her traditional father, a foray into the supernatural inspired by her mother’s death? It seemed like a sick joke to her, taking her mother’s death and turning it into a cheap monster movie. It didn’t seem like her father.
But who was her father, anyhow? What did she know of him, but an adolescent view of an oppressor, an enemy. She knew his writing from before her consciousness, a somewhat smug and self-satisfied voice. He seemed like a narrow man. Repressed. With an idea underlying every story that the solution was really quite simple. That the reason no one saw it was a lack of rational thought. The idea that there was one clear, right path that would work for everyone and everything, if only people would follow it. The idea that everything that human beings needed to discover about themselves and their world in order to be happy and live right had already been discovered. The idea that he knew the answers, had no doubts. That the solutions were all very simple, if only people would pay attention and not be misled by what was clearly stupidity and fantasy and immorality.
All of these ideas fit familiarly into the father that Crystal knew, although they had grown and changed tones. His stories had a sense of humor, of laughing at the silly, childish, wrongheaded world. Somehow the laughter and gentle chiding had turned into anger and fear. The world was not misled. It was malicious.
A monster.
Maybe this vampire was something very real to him, some personification of what had taken away her mother, but it was clumsily written in the hand of a man who’d shunned popular fiction and pulp tales. That was what the story (or whatever it was) was really about, her mother. The mother that she had never known and that her father had never talked about.
Her mother Nora was gone, dead, and if Crystal (then Eileen) ever asked about her, her father’s face went chalk gray and his mouth became a grim, red line.
Crystal had a photograph of her mother somewhere.
It was a photo in the hospital, right after Crystal-Eileen’s birth. A happy woman and a bundle of joy. Mother and child. A rival to any Madonna of Raphael’s.
The photograph had been true for a moment, but somewhere the happy family had been lost. Crystal had wondered sometimes if her mother hadn’t really died but had run away, like her, from the oppressive house. The woman in the story ran away, ran away and died. Perhaps Crystal-Eileen’s mother had run away with a man, become sexually awakened. And that was then the vampire of her father’s story, the sensual other man demonized and vilified.
Still, it wasn’t like her father somehow.
Did anyone really know anyone else? Her father and mother’s personal relationship and deepest feelings were hidden from her, stuff that was written once and then dissolved in the air.
Once, Crystal had gone on an airplane from Los Angeles to New York.
“I got the part,” she recited to herself. “I got the part.”
Out in the sky, clouds formed a cushioning barrier between the plane and the Earth. She sat in a window seat because she wanted to look out and see how small the Earth was from here. Somewhere during the cross-country flight, she would pass over her old home, her father’s farm, down there somewhere, a little bit of dirt among all the cities and rivers and lakes and towns and churches and world that she was flying blithely over.
“I got the part.”
She loved being on the plane, the feeling of being suspended above and beyond everything. She had left Los Angeles behind her with a giddy rush of being lifted up in the air, and at the peak of rising impossibly off the ever-binding ground, there had been a moment of freefall as the plane steadied off on its course across the 3,000 miles of the continent.
And now she was flying, effortlessly, above the clouds with their white peaks like real whipped cream dolloped on an ice cream sundae, and the far-away, imaginary Earth peeking through every now and then, little squares of land in a patchwork pattern, and her father’s farm where she grew up was only another of the little squares, part of the quilt spread across the land.
Finally, Crystal (but she was Virginia then) moved her head away from the small, porthole-window and flipped open the first page of the script that she held tightly in her hands.
“Excuse me, are you a writer?”
Virginia looked up and saw the man sitting next to her, a skinny guy in a floppy sort of hat but with a twinkle in his eyes that was appealing.
“Why, yes,” she said.
“You write movies?”
“Well, I write them, but they haven’t made any yet.”
“Oh, is that your script?”
“No,” she said, looking down at the street-wise drama with its dry and bitter ending. “I write comedies.”
“That’s great,” he said. “That takes a lot of talent, making people laugh.”
“Oh, if it takes talent, maybe that’s what I’m doing wrong. That would explain why no one makes them.”
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Veronica,” she said on the spur of the moment. “Ronnie Lark.”
“Ronnie Lark,” he said. “I like it.”
“Do you? It’s a pen name. ‘Veronica Lark.’ My real name is Verity Larkin.”
“Verity. I like that even better.”
“I don’t know. It seems so old-fashioned and prim.”
“It means ‘truth.’ I guess there’s not too much truth in what you write.”
“I don’t know. There’s always truth. It’s just all wrapped up in lies.”
They talked all the way to New York. His name was Charlie Williams, and he was just flying back from a business trip. Veronica was clever, deep, interesting, knowledgeable about stories and movies. By the time the plane was ready to land, she was afraid of going back to being Virginia-Eileen, farm girl turned actress whose big part was a six-line scene in a diner. Make or break.
He wanted her to come see him while she was in New York, but she didn’t. She disappeared when the plane landed. She existed only in the air.
So who knew what was inside any one of us. Somewhere in Eileen-Virginia-Ginny-Jeany-Marion-Crystal was also a writer named Veronica-Ronnie-Verity who wrote wry, clever comedies that no one made into movies.
Perhaps inside her father somewhere was a horror writer who processed the world through dark incarnations of evil. Something had compelled him to write these sheets of chickenscratch.
“What’re you reading?” I asked, and Crystal turned to see me standing in the doorway.
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Just something my father left behind.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” I said.
“I didn’t really know him that well.”
“Can I help you out with anything?”
“No,” she said. “No, I guess I’d better go through these papers by myself.”
didn’t really know what I was doing there. Here I was, watching this woman, waiting for what I knew would happen because it had happened to her mother before her and her mother’s mother, and you get the idea. But I couldn’t stop it or interfere with it, nor did I really want to. After all, I’m only an observer, a recorder of sorts. A supernatural journalist, let’s say. The truth is that I didn’t know what I wanted out of being there. I felt compelled to be present, to watch and listen and record. For whom? For what purpose?
I don’t have answers like that.
Maybe I wanted the story to turn out differently this time, wanted Bogart and Bacall to go off together and live happily ever after. Whatever that would mean.
But I stayed, and I watched.
hat night, Crystal had trouble sleeping. She lay in her bed, thinking about her father and about the house and the farm. She thought about her mother in the photograph holding her, when she was just a little lump of flesh. She thought about her own daughter, so far away now, waiting for her mom to come home, perhaps. Waiting for the next time they’d play together, dress up together, go to the park together.
She didn’t know what she was doing back here, at this farm, at this place she’d left so long ago, this little patch in the ground that really, when you stood back and looked at the big picture, meant nothing.
Crystal decided that she’d head back the next day, back to her little girl and the life she’d built for herself on a coast so many miles away from this place. Maybe she’d had to come back here to realize that all she needed to do was go home.
Then, the window to her room slid open. Crystal was lying in the bed looking at the window, and it slid open with silent surety. She was suddenly aware that she was asleep. She had drifted off into a dream world, eerily similar to the real world she had fallen out of. That explained the smooth, certain, definite, unmistakable action of the second story window, suspended fifteen feet over the ground. It explained the fact that she was now paralyzed in her bed. Not just afraid, but physically unable to move or to lift herself. She was psychically strapped down, wrapped in invisible swaddling clothes, a heavy weight pushing into her chest.
She tried to call out, but her voice was gone.
She tried to lift her arm, but it was bound to her side.
She was dreaming.
A breeze blew in the open window, pushed back the curtain in a billow.
It died down, and the curtain fell flaccid against the wall.
A second breeze followed, like the waves that follow each other into the shore, bringing the tide ever higher.
The curtain billowed out, the night’s breath chilling the room.
Again, the curtains fell silent against the walls. They paused there, silently. A little flutter. Another moment ticked by.
Then the curtains began to expand outwards again, growing into the room, but there did not seem to be an accompanying breeze. The curtains parted and held themselves outward, opening for the show. Center stage was unlit, waiting perhaps for the spotlight to illuminate the star. But no. The darkness was the show, seeping in, until the whole wall was gone, was only a gaping hold in reality. You couldn’t look at it, the void.
The dream made her heart beat in her chest.
Crystal floated up out of her bed and toward the window. Her sheets draped around her, and she clutched them to her chest.
At the window, at the edge of the darkness, she paused, her feet dangling down toward a gaping void, the darkness stretching out in front of her, the world of reality behind her, out of her view.
She closed her eyes, and there was no change, no difference. Her senses had deserted her. The darkness could not become any darkness. Crystal opened her eyes again. Nothing.
She was asleep, she was dreaming, and that meant that something would soon appear out of the depths of her mind. Perhaps if she willed it, she could control the thing that appeared, the mental guide that would lead her to her unconscious wishes and desires. A bird from the darkness, a phoenix alight in flame.
But nothing appeared. She floated, and the feeling of weightlessness became something pleasant, relaxing, lulling, like floating in a deep, dark pool.
The voice spoke.
“I know all your names.”
She nodded. Her names spread out around her, an integral part of her, ticking off the phases of her life. The voice from deep inside her mind knew everything about her.
“You know me.”
“I know you. I know where you’ve come from, and I know where you are going, where you are fated to go.”
“Yes,” she said. She believed that the voice came from inside her, knew what she knew, was a force embodying herself, was the reflection of her own mind in the mirror of her dream.
“Will you tell me my future?” she asked, because she believed that somewhere in the bottom of her own mind, she knew her future.
“Your future is with me.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“You own this house,” the voice said.
“Yes,” she said. She did own this house now, this farm. There was no father controlling her anymore. She had become the one in charge and the one responsible. She felt a rush of power moving through her, a wave of her own self-determination.
“Invite me in,” said the voice.
Crystal paused. She was, she had decided, self-determined. She was the owner of this house, she was the owner of herself. She needed no invitation.
Something clashed in her mind.
“I own this house,” she said again, carefully, tasting the freedom in those words.
“Invite me,” echoed the voice. “Be with me.”
Crystal was dreaming. She shook herself out of her floating reverie, shook her head and felt her hair brush mildly against her cheek.
That story of her father’s, that voice of her father’s words on the paper, it was hanging on to the corners of her mind, inserting itself into her affirmation dreams. Instead of being free in this void, she was becoming trapped in it, trapped by the fantasies of her father before her. She could not leave him behind her, but she did not have to let him in.
Crystal had learned some things as a second-rate actor in Hollywood, and one of them was that you do not invite vampires into your house, whether they are literal vampires or the ghost of your dead father haunting your dreams.
“No,” Crystal said. “I do not invite you. This is my house. I own my house,” she said. “I am my house. I own my house.”
The wind blew suddenly, violently. Crystal blew backward against the wall, crumpled on the bed.
I was at her side.
The wall began to crack and sway. The window glass shattered, as the storm blew inward, and she lay on the bed, sobbing and laughing at the same time. She looked up and saw me standing there.
“Oh,” she said.
I was not that boy, though, I was not Jack. I was not meant to be seen by her. Like her mother Nora before her, Eileen-Virginia-Marion-Crystal, whoever she ultimately was, was looking at me. She was seeing me.
“Are you the one I was waiting for?” she asked, and I suppose she meant the guide from inside herself.
“No,” I said. “I’m someone else you’re waiting for.”
She reached up her hand to my cheek. “Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.”
Maybe she had been, I don’t know.
The wind wracked around us, and she lost consciousness there on the floor.
eez, Crystal, what happened?”
Crystal was at work with a dustpan and broom.
“Honestly, I could barely tell you. It must have been a tornado.” The sky was rumbling, darkening, and crackling with thunder. Tornado weather.
“Geez. Do you need some help? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she had a cut on her cheek. “I slept all the way through it, I guess, but I had the weirdest dream.”
“I bet,” I said.
Yeah, I bet.
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