Part 9 (2/2)

Why had the metallobioforms decided to clear this s.p.a.ce? Or did they, in the tangle of fine copper wire which did for their brains, ”decide” to do anything? Dampness, the friend of organic forms, was their enemy, and this little knoll was the driest spot in the immediate vicinity. The trinkets were limited in their range by the parasitic nature of their energy; the ”spark-eating” pseudozoans had to cl.u.s.ter near electric wires or, in the cities, ma.s.s-transit third rails, and the ”oil-eaters” required an abundance of spilled petroleum they were likely to find, in a backwater like Haskells Crossing, around the Amoco station. After clearing such a circular patch, they must have had to scuttle or slither out across the railroad tracks (where they could snack on the drippings of diesel fuel and brake lubricant on the ties) into our little downtown,. to replenish their exhausted energies. Many trinkets, like carrier aircraft whose missions took them just beyond the possibility of return, didn't make it; their junky, rusting bodies-most no bigger than ladybugs, which they resembled in shape, without the playful spots-littered the underbrush. But the species seemed to be extending its range nevertheless, and to be penetrating woodlands when before the war only organic wildlife had been observed.

Even back on my own lawn, I kept nervously checking mi ankles and lifting my feet, imagining the remorseless, stinging bites gathering into a fiery buzz-saw force. Survivors describe, on television, an attack as like having one's feet and then legs plunged into a meat-grinder. Such must have been the experience of heavy, laconic Jose and voluble Ray and little inky-eyed Manolete with his droll propensity for jerky, ambitious gestures. They had been the last people on Earth who had hoped to learn something from me. Had I been here to counsel them, they might all still be alive.

A wild wet late September storm outside: trees tossing and tousling in the struggle with air gone mad. Leaves' pale undersides show in waves in the woods between my windows and the beach, and small fallen branches sodden with greenery litter the driveway at the front of the house, away from the sea, which Gloria calls the back. The oaks around the circle whistle and roar in their afflicted tops so that I expect to see one come cras.h.i.+ng down or drop a giant torn limb. But this is no hurricane, just a friendly New England nor'easter; the wind relents just enough, like a disease that declines to kill us, playing with us to pa.s.s the time.

My catheter was removed a few days ago: a relief, in that the scaffolding of impedimenta in which I have been enclosed is thus reduced, but also an embarra.s.sment, since it promoted me to diapers-Depends Adult Incontinence Pants. They get wet and heavy within an hour, and Gloria has tactfully set me up in the guest room with a rubber sheet over the mattress. I awake and change myself several times during the night; yet in the morning I am drowsily surprised by the transposition of our bedroom curtains and bookcase to the spa.r.s.er, bleaker furnis.h.i.+ngs of the guest room. Its ceiling over in one corner is broken into a set of broad prismatic angles, to accommodate a short flight of steps on the third floor above, and I gaze, half awake, at this architectural disturbance as if it is a thing in itself, a crouching angular high shape sharing my s.p.a.ce, malevolent but quiet, in lieu of a wife.

Gloria takes care of me but the house shakes with the irritable clicking and slamming of the part.i.tions she has put up between us. She wants to keep dry. In my impotence I have ceased to be of any use. From her angle our relations.h.i.+p is all sufferance, and a n.o.ble non-complaining; she is earning stars in Heaven, as people used to say, and her virtue afflicts me with its hardness and glitter so that I cringe. What I loved about her in comparison with Perdita was this: lovemaking with Perdita mixed us up, the two of us, like a dark batter of flesh and desire, and rarely in the exactly correct proportions, so that one or the other of us felt cheated, and the other guilty, as if our s.e.x should be a merger as precisely fair as the mixture of genes in our children; whereas with Gloria there was no confusion of responsibilities. I would use her, and she me, to achieve two distinct, unapologetic o.r.g.a.s.ms, sometimes simultaneous and sometimes not. This s.e.xual clarity seemed worth laying down my life for-my respectability, my financial security, my children's happiness. As it turned out, the price was less than I had feared; life went on, the world continued turning, as it would in the wake of this fierce September blow, broken limbs and all.

I keep getting out of bed to paddle from window to window, seeing the world drenched, feeling my diaper sag toward another changing. In my days of young fatherhood with Perdita we had a diaper service, which would take away each Monday an ammonia-rich, water-laden sack, and give us square bundles of fresh, dry, folded diapers instead. No such service now exists. What I remove now I put in a greer garbage bag that each Wednesday Gloria in the back of her station wagon carts down to the side of the road to take its place in some far-off landfill, for the delectation of future archaeologists. They will see us as faithful newspaper-readers and revellers in absorptive pads.

If I can no longer give her an o.r.g.a.s.m with my stiff p.r.i.c.k, my only use to Gloria is as a stiff corpse bequeathing to her liquid capital. In our feverish, catch-as-catch-can courts.h.i.+p, I more than once gave her an o.r.g.a.s.m with my hand (in the movies) or foot (under a restaurant table) or with my mouth as she kneeled on a bed looking down like a mounded snow-woman with my head held firm between her melting thighs. But I fear that now she would find such resorts impossibly undignified for a woman of over sixty. I myself turned sixty-seven in the hospital, a quantum jump un.o.bserved except by a touching shower of cartoony cards from my ten grandchildren, whose signatures ranged from Kevin's maturely subdued ballpoint italic to a crayon scribble from Jennifer, her little s...o...b..ry hand no doubt bunchily held within Roberta's.

I read a lot, in my ignominious, tender, doze-p.r.o.ne state, avoiding the emotional stresses of fiction-that clacking, crudely carpentered old roller coaster, every up and down mocked by the triviality, when all is said and done, of human experience, its Sisyphean repet.i.tiveness-and sticking to the alternative lives, in time and s.p.a.ce, of history and the National Geographic National Geographic. This splendid magazine almost alone continued to print right through the Sino-American Conflict, bringing us beautiful photographic spreads, miles removed from the hateful clamor of propaganda, on the picturesque yak-herders in the yurt-dotted sandy backlands of the very empire we were striving to annihilate. Somewhere amid the nuclear blasts they found the ink, the clay-coated stock, and the innocent text to sustain that march of yellow spines continuous from the days of-explorer, writer, statesman-Teddy Roosevelt.

The overlooked corners of the maps and time charts fascinate me-the so-called Dark Ages, for instance, from the fall of Rome to the year 1000. Not only do these centuries contain the unconscious (to its citizens) permutation of Roman inst.i.tutions into pre-medieval simulacra, and the incongruous sunburst of Irish monasticism while the Saracens and Vikings were squeezing Europe to a terrified sliver, but in humble anonymous farmsteads and workshops technological leaps never dared by the theorizing, slave-bound ancients were at last executed-the crank and the horseshoe, the horse collar and the stirrup all first appear in, of all apparently G.o.dforsaken centuries, the ninth. By the year 1000 the wheeled Saxon plow, wind and water mills, and three-field crop rotation were extending a carpet of tillage the sages of Greece and tyrants of Rome had never imagined. Perhaps now, in the decadent and half-destroyed world that spreads below my hilltop, similar technological seeds are germinating. Decadence, like destruction, has this to be said for it: it frees men up. Men die, but mankind is as tough and resilient as the living wood that groans and sighs outside my window.

A big white truck roars in the driveway, splas.h.i.+ng to a stop. Gloria, her clogs swiftly clacking, goes to the door and there is a surprisingly long, even an intimate, exchange. Stiffly pus.h.i.+ng out of bed, whose wrinkled, odorous sheets have become my loathsome second skin, I move to the window and look down, in time to see the FedEx man-or woman; the hair is intermediate-turn away and get back into the driver's seat. He or she is tucking some sepia scrip into a leather billfold, and there is a thick leather triangle belted beneath the dark-blue s.h.i.+rt. I call for Gloria to come upstairs; she finally obliges. Her radiant, intelligent, mature face, framed by cleverly tinted ash-blond hair, is as painful to look at as the sun.

”Was that something for me?” I croak.

”No, dear. For me me, believe it or not.”

”What was it?”

”It was a transaction.”

”Obviously. What sort of transaction?”

”Well, I didn't want to tell you, but FedEx collects a monthly fee now.”

”For what?”

Her already bright face brightened further. ”For everything. For the utilities, and road maintenance, and our protection. FedEx is taking over a lot of what the government used to do but can't. It's like the Pony Express, taming the West.”

”Or Mussolini making the trains run on time.” The allusion went by her; the last war had made World War II as dim as a post-office mural. I asked, ”What about the nice people I used to pay protection to? Spin and Phil, and then the boys from Lynn.”

”A bunch of pathetic thugs, darling. They've all gone out of business. FedEx is nationwide; they have a network that can put New England into touch with Chicago and California again. It's a G.o.dsend, really.”

”You sound like a commercial.”

”When something is an improvement, I'm not afraid to say so, unlike some grumpy old cynics I know. You just concentrate on keeping your diapers changed, and do your exercises.”

Kegel exercises-mental exercises designed to reactivate the traumatized urethral sphincter. It was frustratingly difficult to locate with the mind those cl.u.s.ters of tiny muscles (there are two, one around the r.e.c.t.u.m and the other around the base of the p.e.n.i.s) which we learn to manage not long after we learn to walk and talk, thus obtaining our ticket of admission to respectable human society. Well, I had fallen out of the club. And I had never known that Gloria regarded me as a cynic. In relation to what sunny philosophy of her own? In a marriage, as our flesh matters less, our opinions matter more. But I didn't want to argue, I didn't have the strength. I said, ”It looked from the window as though he was packing a gun.”

”She. A very nice, competent young woman was driving the truck, Mr. Chauvinist. And yes, they do have to carry guns, with their new responsibilities. They need to defend themselves, and us, against anti-social elements. Those voices I kept hearing in the woods-I told FedEx about them, and sure enough they stopped.”

”They were children's voices,” I said, her revelation touching some other muscles in me I didn't know I had.

”They were trespa.s.sing voices,” Gloria said, irresistible in her clarity of purpose and conscience.

”Did it ever occur to you,” I asked her, ”that I I might be an anti-social element?” might be an anti-social element?”

”What you are is a very sick man who will get better if you do your exercises.”

”My trouble is,” I confessed, ”I don't even know if I'm doing them. I may be just tightening my stomach muscles.”

”Think p.r.i.c.k,” she said. My fall has brought a new frankness to our relations.h.i.+p, a tonic simplicity as in those far off days when we knew upon meeting that, if we had smidgeon of privacy and ten minutes of time, we would f.u.c.k, cementing our bond, nailing down our hotly contested stake in each other. Think p.r.i.c.k: Think p.r.i.c.k: nothing cynical about that. nothing cynical about that.

The house is cold now in the mornings and evenings, but Gloria won't let me turn on the furnace. Her father, a rigid, pipe-puffing Connecticut squire, never touched the thermostat until All Saints' Day, she says. By the same calendar he switched from whiskey-and-soda to gin-and-tonic on Memorial Day, and back again on Labor Day. Seersucker suits and tweeds moved in and out of his closet as systematically as changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, and he never took his Mercedes out of the garage without checking the oil. He was a saint of proper procedures. On the coldest days before All Saints' Day, he would set a log fire in the Wilton living room, and they would all have tea, little Gloria's chamomile in a flowered cup, Mommy and Daddy's smoky Darjeeling poured from the blue-green pot with evil-looking long-tailed birds on it, and little cakes served on a tray by their faithful maid Mary, named after the mother of G.o.d. She had a pointed nose red at the tip, from the master's love of a cold house, perhaps. When Gloria touches me her hands feel icy. I wonder if I am running a permanent fever, my body furious at how it has been invaded.

Opening the kitchen cabinet to get down a mug for my morning tea (common Lipton's, in a tagged bag), I am blinded by sunlight and fear I might clumsily break something. The slant of sun is different, lower, now. We are past the equinox. The Earth is like a s.h.i.+p that has slightly changed course; we would not notice but that the sun warms the panelled wood of our cabin at a slightly different spot in the grain as we dress for dinner. Last night, getting up to change my diaper, I saw the half-moon tipped halfway onto its back, and I made myself realize, in my drowsy gut, that the moon's illumined half was turned toward the sun, which had plunged out of sight behind the Kellys' trees hours ago, but in the slant direction from which the moon was lit. Two b.a.l.l.s in the sky, one bright, one reflective: it's that simple. We live among their orbits like dust mites in the works of a clock.

The storm gone northeast to Newfoundland, the weather is clear and calm. The sea has milky stripes of extra calm in it, and even the lobster boats on the far side of Cat Island look sharp and white and close. Twenty miles away, the sh.o.r.e of Hingham and Hull-where last July I could see fireworks go off, fuzzy and faint as comets-floats a sharp, detailed blue above a mirroring width of what seems sheer air.

Other optical illusions: 1. Shaving the other morning, I saw what seemed a giant bright-amber b.u.t.terfly flapping frantically at my bathroom window, and only slowly realized that it was my stirred-up shaving water, into which I kept dipping my razor, reflecting electric light back into the window, semi-opaque at that newly shadowy 7:00 a.m. hour.

2. On the first day that I felt I had strength to walk down to the mailbox, I saw, as I shuffled (”One small step for a man ...”) through the turn in the driveway, a long dark silhouette of something perched crookedly on the mailbox lid. My first thought was that a great bird, a crane or buzzard or pterodactyl, had alighted there; my next, that a package toe big to fit inside had been attached to the outside catch with rubber bands at a weird angle. Then, as I fearfully advanced I saw the shadow to be a piece of low hemlock limb intervening in my field of out-of-practice vision. It was always there. I had not taken this walk for seven weeks.

The vines in the woods-poison ivy and Virginia creeper- are beginning to redden, and the maples, each in its way. The tall red maple, so called, gradually turns a sober burgundy, while the more impulsive, larger-leaved sugar maple flashes into swathes of orange and a neon pink. The Norway maples planted downtown in the village will yield a clear yellow a bit duller than the hickories'. I saw from the car window as Gloria drove me to the Lahey Clinic in Danvers for some blood tests a splendid tall hickory whose outer leaves, basking in the mellow September sunlight, were still green, while the shaded inner leaves were already golden- a core of gold, a flickering inner life sheathed in seemly decorum; it gave the impression, as we sped by in the Infiniti, of a captive girlish soul, a twirling dryad.

Roberta brought Keith and Jennifer to visit me-my children have become solicitous, fluttering bothersomely, albeit loyally, about the wreck of my progenitive apparatus, whereby they came to be. In their adult, wrinkling faces I still see the plump cheeks and candid trusting gaze of ten-year-olds looking to me for protection and guidance and, most difficult to provide, entertainment. How can I explain that I must be left alone, without any pulling and hauling from loving kin, if I am to heal? That I have had my use of the world and my only salvation lies within, in tending the altar of my wound and waiting for nature or the force beyond it to slide me subtly away from my own disaster, by an invisible series of steps, into another world?

We fed Jennifer lunch. She kept taking the silver porringer, which cost a fistful of scrip at Firestone & Parson, and dumping its contents on the high-chair tray and then deliberately dropping the already much-dented porringer to the floor. The fourth time she did it, with her challenging slate-blue stare directly on me, I exploded. ”Stop it ”Stop it,” I said to Jennifer, and to Roberta, whiningly, ”Why does she keep doing doing that?” that?”

The baby, who had recently had her first birthday, was not used to being shouted at; her mouth formed a tiny circlet, with a bubble in it, before her lips downturned and she began to cry, to howl, and then to sob and sniffle.

Roberta comforted her. ”Oh, Precious,” she said, ”Grampy didn't mean it; he's just forgotten what little girls are like.” To me she explained, ”Daddy, it's just her way of getting used to s.p.a.ce.” to s.p.a.ce.”

My daughter's remark, derived no doubt from some digitized handbook of child development, was helpful: I saw an affinity between the infant and myself, beyond our both being clad in diapers. With gestures and perceptions as fumbling as hers, I was getting used to time time.

It is a curious ent.i.ty. It doesn't exist, I have read, at the particle level: the basic laws of physics are time-symmetric, but for one tiny exception, the particle called the neutral kaon. Were it not for the neutral kaon, perhaps, buildings would self-a.s.semble as frequently as they collapse, and old men would become young in more than their dreams.

In my dreams, I seem to roam a long harvest table heaped with the past eras of my life. One night, I am back in Hammond Falls High School, swinging down the locker-lined halls in my penny loafers and frayed blue jeans-frayed and torn up to the limit the school dress code allows, for beneath the anti-social pose I am a conscientious student, with a college career and lifelong escape from Hammond Falls my sneaking ambition. I chestily inhale effluvia of hair oil and cheap perfume and hormonal overproduction; I eye the knockout girls in their rounded sweaters and pleated skirts and antic.i.p.ate a Sat.u.r.day-night sally into Pittsfield with my pals-dinner at the Dalton Avenue McDonald's or Teo's and a movie at the Showplace or the Capitol on North Street, followed by apple pie at Rosa's or the Popcorn Wagon. City streets, illegal beers, lamplight reflected in black puddles, freedom and sin around the corner. The tender heat and latent violence of high school, its fast cra.s.s glamour, are all around me, along with the quaint orderliness of its hourly bells and scheduled migrations from room to room. Killers in our walks, we of the Cla.s.s of 71 are yet as docile as concentration-camp inmates. Though the ”system” is widely mocked and deplored, no better has materialized to rescue us from these locker-lined halls, with their hopeful, rebellious clatter.

Then I wake to my soaked diapers, the patter of squirrels on the roof, and the odd construction, like a crazy-angled coffin, buried in the far corner of the guest-room ceiling. With a deadly lurch in my stomach I realize I will never attend high school again, not unless time reverses. Another night, I am still married to Perdita, in our colonial house on East Main Street in Coverdale; we are vaguely surrounded by children in all sizes, but the real seethe is between us and our peers, the other young couples, all closeted in their homes yet dying to burst out, each marital partner helplessly seeking, as in a beaker of jiggled chemicals, to bond with another. A thrilling, tragic tangle of illicit alliances past and future is spread beneath us like a net beneath the flying bodies of trapeze artists; we are still lithe, though in our thirties. Our houses and gardens are neglected; our children signal for our attention in the corners of our eyes. The melting walls of domesticity, the too-many points of contact-with spouses, lovers, would-be lovers, still-living parents, children daily growing more complicated and knowing, cats and dogs whose sudden deaths underline the terror of it all-engulf my sleeping mind, steeped in its liquorous essence of Turnbull. Perdita, gorgeously and pitiably naked, is sobbing her eyes out in the pantry while a party we are giving is still going on; I am conscious of the social impropriety of her smooth, mythic costume, and awake, dawningly grateful that I need not any more unravel the reason for her grief.

What a prodigy of storage it is that all the stages of my life are coiled in my brain, with their stresses and stimulations. My present abject condition is another dish on the harvest table, a s.h.i.+pboard buffet heaped up backwards between the fluorescent soup of life at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise and the plum pudding of the childhood Christmas when I got my first set of skis-wooden ones, and secondhand, I could see from the nicks of wear. Time in my brain has become a kind of s.p.a.ce-areas of coiled cerebrum across which enlivening electricity idly sizzles in my sleep.

And yet the dominant atmosphere of my dreams is one of dread, of atrocity. Where does it come from? Mine has been a happy life, as these things go: war and plague have veered around me. New England was the most lightly bombed sector of the former United States. The Sino-American Conflict as a whole lasted four months, and was mostly a matter of highly trained young men and women in sealed chambers of safety reading 3-D computer graphics and pus.h.i.+ng b.u.t.tons, thus obliterating quant.i.ties of civilians who never knew what hit them. Millions more Chinese than Americans died. The poisonous fallout chiefly sickened the world's dark majority in their ghettos and unsanitary villages. And yet I terrifyingly dreamed, just last night, of a pond surrounded by boys with flexible sticks, like bamboo whips, who flayed the pale broad fish as they came to the surface for air. An earlier dream had been cobwebbed with a grimy wealth of mechanical struts and lattices, infernal machinery of some local or global conspiracy or witchcraft was closing in on me, thickening like digestive juices around a swallowed gnat; I escaped only by awaking. All this terror must be history-der Weltgeist. Nan.o.bolts of cerebral electricity swarm across that part of my brain which stores racial memories, from Neanderthal butcheries on.

The post-equinoctial sunlight comes at me from unexpected angles, as if liberated. It lies, flecked with dirt from the windowpanes, on the page I am polluting with these scribbles, and blinds me as I rinse my cereal bowl at the kitchen sink, so that I nearly drop it, as if slapped. Squirrels frantic with the mult.i.tude of acorns needing to be buried scrabble heavily across the roof overhead. Geese in their endearingly imperfect Vs honk very loudly. Everything outdoors is brilliant and ready to topple. The tilted sunlight glitters in the poplars and s.h.i.+nes through the leaves; though they are still mainly green, they are thinning, losing substance. The dogwood in the circle reddens. Gloria has set Jeremy to pulling up brown hosta, while I in my infirmity cower indoors. Jeremy never did get to Mexico. We shed our dreams one by one.

A week has gone by. Time in my sense of it is fragmented and thrusts this way and that, like the ice jam around the North Pole. Some of it rushes by; the darkness of morning slips through a choppy, brilliant interval into the darkness of evening; sometimes an hour sticks straight up, unmoving. A number of trees have turned a blatant yellow. The tenderest maples, with small, scarcely indented leaves, approach the sensational salmon pink inside a whelk sh.e.l.l. The Bradford pears downtown, I saw through the car windows as Gloria took me on a ride to the bank and the post office, are as blandly green as in June. There is an odd variousness to it all; here in mid-October one beech is all golden jangle and glitter while its mate nearby hasn't turned a leaf. The burning bush that began to blush in August is still half green, while its smaller companion has quickly a.s.sumed a luminous magenta unreal to see. One of our dogwoods is a subdued brownish burgundy, while the leaves of the other are mottled, no two alike, each individually dipped in a saffron dye that skips dark curdled spots like freckles of rot on a pear's skin. A scrubby sumac, with f.l.a.n.g.ed stems, that mingles with the wild roses shows an inky red, almost an eggplant color, while its leaves keep a pale mint green on their undersides. And, on their spindly, p.r.i.c.kly trees, apples and pears-unbidden, uneaten, gnarled-and berries-white on the big cedar along the drive, black on the stalks of goose-foot maple-add to the visual harvest, along with Gloria's gallantly persisting roses and her thriving many-branched dahlia. Sunlight takes on a supernal value, reflected back from all this varicolored warmth of tinge; the broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter.

I awake at night because of my wet diaper and, changed into a dry one, still cannot get back to sleep. The house creaks around me like a galleon s.h.i.+fting sails; from the third story come distinct b.u.mping sounds, but the steady green lights of our alarm system indicate no corporeal trespa.s.ser. Wind whistles outside in the soon-to-be-naked trees. It is time to lower the storm windows. For reasons of thrift and coziness I like to do it early; Gloria, who loves fresh air, puts it off a long as possible, to a day in November so bitter my frozen fingers smart as they manipulate the little corroded catches I return to the guest bed and wait for morning. The wind counterfeits the sound of the first train. I yearn for the first stir of traffic in the village. Though I will them to close, my ears open wide to drink the new day. The tense black surface of expectancy at last parts and the five-thirty train telescopes its onrush of metal wheels out from the amorphous sighing of the woods: the sound enlarges, arches into a volume that makes the house shudder on its rigid underlay of granite, and then swiftly sinks in pitch and volume as the train slows to a pause at the Haskells Crossing Station. Who can be getting on it? Who can be getting off? There is no going back into sleep; within a half-hour, the car that brings Gloria The New York Times The New York Times will rush up the driveway and circle by the porch. I listen with every nerve for the sound of its approach, but it comes upon me with an unexpected closeness, suddenly next to the house, filling the silence with its automotive pomp-the wet slur of tires, the crackle of crushed twigs, the creak of the springs as the car swerves toward the porch, a groan of brakes lightly applied, the rapid ticking of the engine in the pause, and then, in one chord, the b.u.mp of the folded paper hitting the porch and the car's dismissive acceleration down the driveway. A c.o.c.ky, synchronized performance, nicely perfected since the snowy winter mornings when the driver ignominiously parked short of the steep curve beyond the drying yard and walked the rest of the way up. To him, as he sails past, the house must look as oblivious as a white mausoleum in the half-light. Little does he know it has a consciousness: I am awake, a painfully alert ghost. All over the dark Northeast men and women are awake in that stir of mild misery we call life. will rush up the driveway and circle by the porch. I listen with every nerve for the sound of its approach, but it comes upon me with an unexpected closeness, suddenly next to the house, filling the silence with its automotive pomp-the wet slur of tires, the crackle of crushed twigs, the creak of the springs as the car swerves toward the porch, a groan of brakes lightly applied, the rapid ticking of the engine in the pause, and then, in one chord, the b.u.mp of the folded paper hitting the porch and the car's dismissive acceleration down the driveway. A c.o.c.ky, synchronized performance, nicely perfected since the snowy winter mornings when the driver ignominiously parked short of the steep curve beyond the drying yard and walked the rest of the way up. To him, as he sails past, the house must look as oblivious as a white mausoleum in the half-light. Little does he know it has a consciousness: I am awake, a painfully alert ghost. All over the dark Northeast men and women are awake in that stir of mild misery we call life.

<script>