A Dark Matter (7 page)

hootie’s blues

Two or three years after everything happened, and I had learned all that I was ever going to know about what had befallen my friends out in the university’s agronomy meadow and was just about to start a new book that would have nothing to do with any of this, at that moment of odd psychic drifting when a hundred little notions wake up and start humming, the possibility of a story came to me. It only indirectly concerned the main story of Mallon and my friends, which had been given to me in a series of fragments. Even back at the beginning I knew that I never really wanted to turn all of that into either straightforward fiction or the kind of neither-this-nor-that called “creative nonfiction.” This would be a story poised right on the narrow wall between fiction and memoir, and based on a number of things confessed to me by Howard “Hootie” Bly during the period when he was living down the street from me in the formerly ratty Cedar Hotel. In the last months of his residence at the Cedar, Hootie met the love of his life and future partner, and together they moved to an affluent northern suburb. We had spent a good deal of time together, Hootie and my wife and I, as had Hootie and I separately, and eventually, in bits and pieces strung out over many of our private conversations, he told me what had happened on October 15, the day before the great event—the day of the “rehearsal.”
With only a few small changes, I thought, I could make something interesting of Hootie’s funny, unresolved tale. It was about preparing for something forever out of reach. For once, the idea of working so close to the literal truth excited me, so I set aside my new novel and spent about three weeks writing what I called “Tootie’s Blues.” “Tootie” was Hootie, of course, Spencer Mallon was “Dexter Fallon,” Dill Olson was “Tom Nelson,” and so on. When I had finished it, it did seem pretty good to me, but I had no idea what to do with it. I forwarded it as an attachment to David Garson, but he never said a word about it. I thought he was, in his way, being polite. The only alternative I saw was that it had vanished into deep cyberspace. Either way, the chances of the long story’s publication in The New Yorker seemed nonexistent. Then I dragged its folder from my desktop into my “Stories” file and forgot about it, mostly
.

At the time, I didn’t realize that I gave up on the story so easily because its publication had never been the point. Writing it was the point. I wanted to write it—I wanted to inhabit the seventeen-year-old Howard Bly’s point of view—because in that way and no other would it be possible for me to join Eel and the others for at least a part of the journey I had refused to take. Imagination gave me access to some of the experience the rest of them had shared. The hospital parts of the story were based on what I saw on my visits to the Lamont with Donald Olson, formerly the heroic Dill
.

When I got up the nerve to give Hootie a copy, he took two or three days to read it and came back with a little tucked-in smile that I did not know how to read. He sat down and said, “Man, and I thought Mallon was a magician. It’s like you were there, right there with me.”

So here Howard Bly is speaking, pretty much as he did to me, of the way the early part of his life kept penetrating his long second act, the decades he spent in that hospital. Even more than most people, Hootie was marinated in his own history. I think he knew that he had to wait until he caught up with himself before he could begin to catch up with the people he so lovingly thought of during his long days on the ward
.

The names have all been restored to their original forms. I trust I do not have to cite the provenance of the eccentric words in the first paragraph
.

| Hootie’s Blues |

Neither agomphious nor arctoid, neither creodont nor czigany, Howard Bly knew himself a lonely, imperfect being ever scrambling to imitate the manners and habits of those he loved and admired, not to mention worshipped, as was the case with Spencer Mallon. God knows, he needed the man, the more than man, the
heroic marvel
Mallon was.

Which was exactly how Captain Fountain’s book came in. Captain Fountain transformed Howard Bly’s life by the simple mechanism of demonstrating to him the existence of a secret code that if fully understood would surely reveal the unknown and hidden structure of the world, or at least of what was called reality.

He had come across the great tome while rooting through an old box in the store’s basement. By this time Troy and Roy, who would surely have ruined everything, were a problem no longer, having been drafted the previous year and sent to Vietnam, where all their top-secret games of soldiering and snipering no doubt came in handy, at least until Roy got killed.

The contents of the box made it clear that they belonged to Troy. A rusty knife, a squirrel’s tail, old arrowheads, a broken compass, pictures of naked women torn from glossy magazines. (Roy would have had more nudes and a couple of broken Zippo lighters.) Jammed up against one side of the box was a slim white hard-backed volume that Troy Bly had undoubtedly purchased in one of his rare bouts of self-improvement. He had wanted to expand his vocabulary, doubtless because an advertisement had convinced him that females were sexually aroused by big words. Hootie didn’t care about that. He didn’t believe it either, at least as it applied to the girls at Madison West. Anyhow, he did not want to make out with any of the popular girls at his school. Sometimes, although he could scarcely admit it to himself, he thought about holding the Eel in his arms, about lying down in the grass with the Eel. Holding and being held. The Eel’s lips on his. It was shameful, yes, he knew that, his friends would find him disgusting, and Eel’s “Twin” would be enraged; hurt, too, which was much worse.

Howard never imagined that the words in Captain Fountain’s book would cause the Eel to desire him. He thought the Captain’s book greater by far than a sex potion. The flat, flinty shimmer of the words on the page caused him to fall in love, for he had stumbled upon a kind of ultimate security blanket: a vocabulary known only, he imagined, to priests of an unknown and secret order.

O morigerous [obsequious],
morology [nonsense],
morpheme [a word reduced to its basic element],
morphology [dealing with the structure of plants and animals],

O nabla [ancient Hebrew harp],
nacelle [small boat],
O nacket [tennis ball]!

Meredith Bright … Meredith Bright loved him because he looked like an angel. She had whispered this information into his blushing ear at the finish of the Gorham Street assembly, placed one long cool hand against each side of his face, leaned smiling in so that her own face became a billboard golden and lavish, and in a soft voice that sank trembling into the pit of his stomach and flew out to the endings of his nerves, told him,
Hootie, you look just like a beautiful porcelain angel, and that’s why I love you
.

No one would understand his feelings for the Eel, not even the Eel, but being totally in love with Meredith Bright made sense to everyone. Also, they all knew that she liked him. Along with the Eel, Hootie was one of her favorites. Of course Spencer Mallon was Meredith Bright’s special favorite, he was the man she had chosen in the way she would choose a movie star like Tab Hunter or a famous singer like Paul McCartney, and the two of them got in bed together and did sex things—over Hootie’s heart crept a certain secret picture that made him feel as though he were melting like a snowman on a warm day. In the secret picture, Howard Bly lay on a narrow bed squeezed between Spencer Mallon and Meredith Bright. As they clasped each other, their arms wrapped him in a double embrace. His face pressed against Meredith Bright’s ripe and blossoming bosom, and Spencer Mallon’s flat, muscular chest pressed against the back of his head. Down below, something was happening that he could not define or describe but came wrapped in images of great storms and blowing curtains.

In rushed:

lallation [baby talk]

lalochergia [use of obscenity to decrease tension]

murrey [dark red]

Closely followed by:

mugient [bellowing]

mymy [bed]

prushun [boy who desires to have sex with an adult male]

And:

pruritic [causing hysterical itching]

This, too, became a part of the secret hidden behind the obscurest of words, not to mention at the heart of sacred texts. And within Spencer Mallon, whom Hootie loved as he had never loved before. Which was one reason his “story” about following him down a hotel corridor to two doors and having to guess which one was his had been so unsettling. If you were right, there was Spencer Mallon, right in front of you—taking care of things. But if you picked wrong … had he ever told them what happened if they picked the wrong door?

(You were eaten by a tiger.)

Long ago, Howard Bly had seen someone eaten by a tiger. He needed to see no more. One of them was to inhabit the country of the blind, Spencer had said, and it should have been him, Howard Bly. In the place he lived, there was nothing to look at anyway.

Because of Spencer Mallon, Howard Bly had a special hatred of doors. For hours on end, the attendant named Ant-Ant Antonio Argudin crouched hidden behind a door marked
PERSONNEL ONLY
where he smoked his stinky cigarettes, only guess what, Howard never once knocked on it. And guess what again? Howard Bly had lived in the hospital for forty years, he knew what was behind the
PERSONNEL
door, and it didn’t scare him. A dull green room with broken-down furniture and an ashtray nobody was supposed to use … an ugly table with a coffeemaker, magazines lying on another old table. Men’s magazines. Magazines for men. Howard had seen them, but he hadn’t looked. That was where they went, the attendants—Ant-Ant, Robert C. (for Crushwell), Ferdinand Czardo, Robert G. (for Gurnee), and Max Byway—when they wanted to be by themselves.

On the sixteenth of October in the year 1966, Mallon had succeeded in opening his door, and what happened after that was so terrible that Howard had encircled himself with the sacred stones of his words, and they had kept him safe in the midst of the reeking-storming-down-pink-orange light. Until a huge and fatal orb made of sentences had knocked everything out of Howard Bly’s head and sent him spinning cock-a-hoop through a hundred stories that comforted him, mocked him, tortured him, babied him, and showed him the only way he could continue.

Now. Enter Spencer Mallon, seated on a carton in the store’s basement, swinging his legs beneath him and leaning forward on an arm so ropey the muscles cast shadows. Wiping a sleeve across his eyes as he muddled unseeing into the Game Room, fat old Howard Bly had no problem at all in seeing them as they had been on that day. Tall, athletic-looking Dilly-O on the floor, leaning against a low wall of boxed canned goods, his knees hugged to his chest, his head drooping over. Dill’s dark hair, longer than that of the others, swung forward over his ears to frame his young tough’s face. Between his lips, a cigarette from a pack of Viceroys lately stashed behind the cash register sent up a straight, unruffled column of white smoke.

Dilly-O, you were like a god! You were!

In a UW rowing team T-shirt, dirty white painters’ pants, and tennis shoes, Boats squatted on the floor, staring at Mallon, hoping for some indication of what they were to do that day. With his newly awakened senses, little Howard was painfully aware of how greatly Boats wished to become Spencer Mallon’s favorite disciple.

Spencer Mallon leaning over, staring at his legs moving back and forth like pistons … He wiped a hand over his face, then ran it through his perfect hair.

“Okay,” he said. “Things are getting intense. Meredith drew up a chart, and it tells us that the optimal time and date are only two days away. Seven-twenty p.m., Sunday, the sixteenth of October. We’ll still have the light, but no one else should be around.”

“Around where?” asked Boats. “You found a place?”

“The university agronomy meadow, on the far end of Glasshouse Road. Good site, excellent site. Tomorrow afternoon I want us to go out there for a rehearsal.”