A Dark Matter (2 page)

the way a snowfall had looked on a December night in 1960, the big flakes tumbling softly as feathers from a measureless black sky;

a lean hound coursing through the deep snow at the bottom of our sledding hill;

the shredding lacquer on the tops of our sleds, and the chips and dents in the long, cool runners;

a glass of water shining from within on my mother’s best white tablecloth.

Circling half blind with tears around the marble counter in my Chicago kitchen, I saw the stunning, inelegant west side of Madison, Wisconsin, the place where I had grown up and which I had escaped pretty much as soon as I could. My amazing girlfriend, now my wife, Lee Truax, had fled with me—we drove across the country to New York, where I went to NYU and she waited tables and tended bar until she could enroll at NYU, too, and cause a great fuss and commotion wherever she went. What was speaking to me, though, was not our college years and the East Village, but Madison’s west side, so different then and so much the same, the place where Lee Truax and I had met as children and gone to school with all of our troubled, gorgeous friends.

Then I saw them all, our friends, who had needed to be convinced I was not a jerk because my father was a professor at the University instead of being absent or being nothing, really nothing, like theirs. For a moment their faces shone as clearly as the glass of water that had burned itself into my memory atop my mother’s prize white tablecloth … their young faces tilted toward the Eel’s fine-tuned heart-stopping face. Although they called me Twin, meaning hers, I never really looked like that. And in the next moment, before I could fully take them in, a curtain slammed down like a prohibition. Bang!
No more of that for you, bud
.

“Please,” I said, then “What’s happening to me?” What a baffled moment, filled with what terrible pain—the pain
of what I had not done, of what I had lost because I had not done all of that which I had not done
. Whatever it was, I had no idea, I knew only that
I had not done it
.

Then, as if on a giant screen before me, I saw the moving lips, the unshaven face, the torn horrible feet, and I heard the ragged, almost mechanical voice sucking on the four syllables that represented safety to a ragged soul. At that moment, shut out from a realm I long ago had been happy to abandon, I wished I had a totem, to protect me from Madison—the peeling glaze on the Flexible Flyer; the coursing hound; the sound of lockers banging shut in a high-school hallway; the precise way light from the windows in Room 138 fell across the Eel’s face and Dill Olson’s at the beginning of our senior English class, giving them a gorgeous, washed-out glamour.

Looking for release, I switched on the radio, tuned as is generally the case to NPR. A man whose name I had temporarily blanked out even as I recognized his voice said, “The really unexpected thing is how melodious Hawthorne sounds when you read him aloud. We’ve lost that, I think, the idea that the sound of writing is important, too.”

And Nathaniel Hawthorne turned the key; Hawthorne gave me entry to the lost realm. Not the idea of reading him aloud, but that of hearing his words recited: the sound of his writing, as the man on NPR said. I knew exactly how the Hawthorne of
The Scarlet Letter
sounded, because I had once known a boy who had the ability to remember everything he read, and this boy often quoted long passages from the Hawthorne novel. He also liked to throw into ordinary conversation the crazy words he had discovered in a book called
Captain Leland Fountain’s Dictionary of Unknown, Strange, and Preposterous Words
. (He had once told me he found it extremely odd that while nostology was the study of senility, nostomania had nothing at all to do with old age but simply meant a serious case of homesickness.) His name was Howard Bly, but we, our little band, all called him “Hootie.” For some reason, all of us had silly nicknames. The kid couldn’t help memorizing everything he read. When a string of words entered through his eyes, it printed itself on some endless scroll in his brain. Although I certainly wish I had this capacity, I don’t have the faintest idea of how it works, nor did it seem particularly helpful to Hootie Bly, who was not at all literary.

When we were seniors at Madison West and he was seventeen, Hootie looked about thirteen or fourteen, small, blond, pink-cheeked, and cherubic. He had eyes the ceramic, cerulean blue of dolls’ eyes, and his hair flopped over his forehead like bangs. Think of Brandon De Wilde in
Shane
, put a few years on him, and that would be Hootie. People tended to love him, if only because he was so beautiful and didn’t say a lot. He wasn’t smart, like the Eel, my girlfriend, Lee Truax, but neither was he stupid or slow—it was just that Eel was
really
smart. Hootie was not aggressive or forward or pushy in any way. I guess he was born with natural modesty. That doesn’t mean he was passive or wishy-washy, because he was not.

This is what Hootie was like: When you look at a group photo, particularly a picture of a bunch of people doing something like hiking across a meadow or hanging out in a bar, you can always spot one person who stands mentally off to one side, enjoying the spectacle before him. Digging things, as Jack Kerouac would say. Sometimes Hootie liked to just lie back and, well,
dig
what was going on around him.

I can say this about Hootie Bly, that he was good through and through. The guy didn’t have a mean-spirited or cruel cell, never mind a bone, in his body. Unfortunately, because of his size and the way he looked, people who were not as good-hearted—bullies, jerks—sometimes went after him. They enjoyed picking on him, teasing him in a way that went beyond teasing, sometimes actually shoving him around, and at times we who were his best friends felt we had to step in to protect him.

Hootie could speak up for himself, though. The Eel told me that when a truly ugly and unpleasant fraternity boy insulted him in a grungy State Street coffee shop named the Tick-Tock Diner but called the Aluminum Room, Hootie gave the asshole a murky look and baffled him with a quote from
The Scarlet Letter:
“Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?” Less than a minute later, the UW student widened his insult to include Hootie’s parents, who, the kid knew from having seen all of them in the place, owned Badger Foods, the little triangular grocery store two blocks down on State Street. Hootie came back at him with another bit of Hawthorne. “What a strange, sad man is he! In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder!”

The fraternity boy, the same sick, twisted Keith Hayward I had recently been reading about in Detective Cooper’s unhappy memoir, apparently charged toward him, but was held back by his roommate and only friend, Brett Milstrap, who did not want them to be thrown out of the Aluminum Room before the (probable) arrival of this gorgeous blond girl they coveted so greatly that just the sight of her sipping a cup of coffee could keep them warm and happy for three or four days. Meredith Bright was her name, and like Hayward and Milstrap she played a huge role in the story I began trying to figure out over the next weeks and months. She must have been one of the most beautiful young women ever to appear on that campus. The same would have been true if she had gone to UCLA instead of UW. Meredith Bright detested Keith Hayward and thought nothing of Brett Milstrap, but the first time she laid eyes on Hootie Bly and Lee Truax, she was enchanted by them. For a number of reasons.

It would be fair to say that the whole long, crazy story I wound up trying to unearth began when Meredith Bright, seated alone in the Aluminum Room’s last booth, lifted her eyes from her copy of
Love’s Body
, gazed down the length of the counter to spot Hootie and the Eel, and rocked them both by smiling at them. But before I get even farther ahead of myself, I have to go back to where I was and explain a few more things about Hootie and our little group of friends.

I said that hearing one of those comfortable NPR voices talk about the experience of hearing Hawthorne read aloud was all I needed—all I needed, that is, to understand the intense, unexpected deluge of emotions that had been chasing me around the room since I had looked into the bloodshot eyes of Mr. Obstreperous as two fullbacks from Carbondale toted him by on his way to the exit. I had fought so tenaciously against the sudden sense of recognition that unmediated images and passages from my childhood had streamed back to me in a painful flood. The reason for my doomed tenacity was that Obstreperous reminded me of Hootie, who had spent four decades in a Wisconsin mental hospital, communicating entirely in individual words from Captain Fountain and, maybe when feeling particularly nostomaniacal, sentences like “Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?”
The Scarlet Letter
and the Captain’s obscure gewgaws: that isn’t craziness, it’s fear, the same kind of absolute terror that turned Obstreperous into a muttering statue.

I wanted to know more about that fear. Now that I had opened up this seam, it came to me, I wanted to follow it right to the end. Once I understood the causes of Hootie’s paralysis, I thought, a layer of reality that had been closed to me for nearly forty years would at last become visible.

But it wasn’t all about me, not by a long shot.

Off and on, over the decades since the mid-sixties, this hidden world—the whole question of the wandering guru named Spencer Mallon, what he had accomplished, what he had not, what he still meant to those who had loved and admired him—had troubled me, more than troubled me, aroused an ongoing doubt and misery that stuck to me like a shadow whenever the whole issue swung back into view. Part of this continuous disorder was rooted in the silence of a single human being. She wouldn’t talk to me about it, and neither would the others. They shut me out. I mean, I don’t want to go overboard about something that happened so long ago, but was that really
fair?
Everything was fine, everything was chummy, and just because I didn’t want anything to do with this Mallon faker, they closed ranks against me. Even my girlfriend, who was supposed to look like my twin!

You know what happened? Like a dumb kid, I thought I was, I
told
myself I was, sticking to my principles, when actually the whole business of this amazing man who had been to Tibet and seen someone cut off someone else’s hand in a bar, who talked about the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
and a philosopher named Norman O. Brown, who was besides that tied in to ancient magic, all this stuff kind of scared me. It sounded like total bullshit, but it also seemed far out of my league—because, who knows, there might have been some reality in it, after all. I think I was afraid that if I met this guy, I might have to believe in him, too.

The Eel knew exactly how I felt, that’s how smart she was. She understood that my reaction was a lot more complex than I was willing to accept, and that I was backing away from a fear she found second rate to begin with made her lose a crucial degree of respect for me. Given that I had no interest in pretending to be a college student and had therefore stayed at home the first time my friends all went to the Aluminum Room, I had two chances to make things right: I could have come along to the Italian restaurant where they first heard Mallon’s spiel, and I could have made up for my lapses by joining everyone at the second Mallon-séance, in the Henry Street apartment that turned out to be where Keith Hayward and Brett Milstrap lived. Those were my two chances. But after I said no the second time, the door slammed shut, and I was left alone outside, where I had deliberately gone and placed myself.

While they were all trailing after Mallon, I took long walks by myself and wound up, some of the time, shooting lonely hoops at a grade-school playground. Or trying to. I remember missing fifteen free throws in a row, one after the other. On the big day itself, Sunday, the sixteenth of October, 1966, I just stayed in my room and reread Thomas Wolfe’s
Of Time and the River
, a novel I loved to distraction because it seemed to describe me, Lee Harwell, exactly, a sensitive, lonely, brilliant young fellow obviously destined for literary success, or if not me
exactly
, at least the person I’d be if I’d gone to Harvard and traveled around Europe, O lost, O soulful, word-crammed wanderer on this earth, a stone a leaf an unfound door.

For two whole days, I had no idea where she was. When I did get some information, it was infuriatingly circumscribed. This was, precisely, all that I was allowed to understand: in one way or another, under circumstances forever closed to me, things had exploded. There had been a gathering, a meeting, perhaps some sort of ceremony, and at this event everything had gone spectacularly to hell. A boy had not only been killed, he had been hideously mutilated, ripped to shreds. One of the inevitable rumors about this cataclysm had been that the dead boy seemed to have been torn apart by enormous teeth. During the months that followed, over in fact the next four decades, the one person I still knew from those days who had been part of Mallon’s ill-fated entourage, my wife, had refused even to try to explain what had happened to them all.

For a week or so, she just clammed up. The only details she was willing to share with me had to do with the conduct of the police during the subsequent investigations, the confusion and rage of her useless father, her impatience with our teachers and fellow students, her despair about poor Hootie. After things had calmed down a bit and the mystery of Hootie’s location had finally been clarified, Eel tried on at least two occasions to visit him at the Lamont Hospital, where it turned out he had been all along. The first time she spoke to someone there, whoever it was (apparently, descending to such details was a waste of time) forbade her to come out: Mr. Bly’s condition was too grave, too precarious. A month later, she tried again. This time, the gatekeeper invited her to visit the hospital, and it was Hootie Bly who turned her down. Using words borrowed from Hawthorne, he refused even to see her. Ever. His refusal stayed firm throughout our senior year, and I guess finally Lee gave up. After we took off for New York, she never mentioned him again.