Mr. X

‘That kind, for one.’ He swept his arm toward the forest. Imaginary blue fire flickered from branch to branch. My heart went cold and my mind became a stone.

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Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.

I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother’s possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I’d tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I have to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.

That is:

I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.

The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clotheslines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth. Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her black-olive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table and patting people on the back.

They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can’t remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember – the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday – is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.

It begins with a sudden awareness of the warmth and color of the light, as if I had never before really noticed how this rich, vibrant substance streamed from above to coat the world like a liquid. I saw the brightness gather in a shining skin on the backs of my mother’s hands. Then the earth opened beneath me, and I plummeted downward and away from the picnic table, too startled to be frightened. I came to rest and found myself in a large, untidy room. Books covered a table and stood in piles on the floor. In the distance, an embittered voice ranted about smoke and gold. My eyes fastened on the mantel, where a fern drooped beside a fox stepping delicately toward the edge of a glass dome. The weights of a brass clock swung this way – that way on the other side of the fox’s confinement. I had been pushed back: I was in the museum of the past.

It ended so quickly that I did not have time to react. In the space between two halves of a second I had traveled at enormous speed back to my chair at the picnic table, restored to the present. A fraction of a beat ahead of the moment when I had seen the sunlight glowing on my mother’s hands, Uncle James was still telling the same joke to Uncle Clark, Aunt May still smiling at compliments to her fried chicken – I’m inventing these details to suggest the normality of the scene, but all I remember is what I just described. By then, the sensations in my body would have built to an almost unbearable pitch.

‘You scrambled off the picnic bench,’ Star told me, not once but many times, retelling this story to help herself deal with it. ‘I asked if anything was wrong, but you just put your hands over your eyes and started running. Toby tried to grab you, but you scooted past him and ran right into that ladder. Down it went, I don’t know how a little thing like you had the strength, the ladder fell smash into the table, right next to my mother. Food went flying straight up in the air. Clarence was pouring Kool-Aid into his cup, and the jug got away from him and landed in the cake.

‘After you got past the top of the table, you fell down flat and stiffened up like a board. The spasms hit you so hard you bounced off the ground. Foam was coming out of your mouth. I heard Uncle Clark say something about rabies, and I clouted him on the side of his head without even breaking stride. Some of those people were so busy mopping at themselves and taking care of Momma, they didn’t know what was happening to you! I swear, I was so scared I thought I was going to faint. When I got my arms around you, I couldn’t even hold you still.

‘Then you went limp. I picked you up and put you to bed. After a while, Nettie and May came in to feel your forehead and tell me about everybody they ever knew who had fits. I put up with it as long as I could, and then I shooed them out.

‘The doctor said it could have been anything. Too much excitement. Dehydration. He picked you up and put you on his lap and said, “Neddie, your mommy says you put your hands over your eyes before all the trouble started. Was that because you saw something you didn’t like?”’

What age was I, when she slipped that in? Eight?

‘Now, that struck me, because I was wondering the same thing. You were too young to answer him, and besides, I don’t think you remembered anything that happened. But, honey, you covered your eyes the next year, too, and you did it again on your fifth birthday. Did you see something that made you unhappy?’

I never told Star what happened during my ‘attacks.’ For a long time, I would not have known how to describe those visions, and later on I was afraid of sounding crazy. It was bad enough that other people saw me thrashing on the ground – it would have been worse if they had known what was going on inside.

Even now, writing about this is like trying to reconstruct a half-destroyed mosaic. Many patterns and images seem possible, and even after you think you have identified the design, you cannot be certain that you have not merely imposed it. From the border, men and women attend or not to what is represented in the missing section. Some smile, some appear to be frozen in wonderment or shock. Others look away: have they chosen to ignore the enigmatic event or not yet noticed it?

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The internal story of my third birthday cannot ever be reconstructed. The people arranged around its borders, my aunts and uncles, my grandmother, Toby Kraft, are staring at a blankness. My mother holds me in her arms, but she has averted her head.

The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he’s a phony.

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It would have looked like this:

Through walls of blue fire I follow a being into the ordinary world, and we are standing before a house with a basketball hoop hung over the garage door and a bicycle canted over its kickstand at the edge of the driveway. The lighted windows glow a luminous turquoise, and the dark windows shine blue-black. There is a number on the front door and I can see a street sign, but since I am three and cannot read, these things are symbols without meanings. At once completely unknown and deeply familiar, the being beside me frightens me like Aunt Nettie’s stories of the Bogeyman. The brim of his black hat shades his face. His coat nearly touches the ground.

In my terror I turn away and see the dark shapes of mountains rising like animals into the sky. Blue starlight defines the jagged ridges and gleams from vertical snowfields. The air smells like Christmas trees.

The being moves forward, and a pressure like a tide urges me along in his wake. He turns to the front door and moves onto a welcome mat. Gleeful flames swarm around him. He reaches into his coat with one hand and pushes the doorbell with the other. He doesn’t have to use the bell, he could melt through the door if he felt like it, but ringing the bell amuses him. Then, as if because of my insight, I am within the being and looking horrified through his eyes. I see a blue-white hand pull a knife from the depths of the black coat. Flame moves along the blade. The unopened door is a blue tissue.

On the other side of the shimmering tissue a heavyset man in jeans and a sweatshirt approaches. His pulled-down mouth tells me that he is annoyed. He engulfs the doorknob in his free hand, and as he turns it steps forward to block the doorway. This takes place in seconds. When the man opens the door and thrusts himself forward, I try to wrench free of the being. A force clamps down to hold me still. Before me, the man’s eyes flare and darken. I try to scream, but my mouth is not mine and will not obey. We follow the man through the door, and the blue fire surges in with us. For a second that is like a dance the man’s right leg glides back and our left leg glides forward and we move together in unison. He bends to get away, and we bend with him. His teeth shine milky blue.

The knife slides into the band of flesh between the bottom of his sweatshirt and the waist of his jeans. The man breaks the dance by going still. We lean into him so closely that our chin rubs his cheek. He makes a sound and puts his hands on our shoulders and straightens up, and then we are back in the dance. We move behind him and pull up on the knife. His knees dip. Black in the trembling blue light, a sheet of blood cascades over his jeans. A silver rope emerges. Another rope slides out. I feel a relaxation around me and break free.

Then I am standing behind the being, and I can do nothing but witness what I cannot understand.

The man lowers his hands to the ropes and holds them as if making an offering. Slowly, he tries to move the ropes back inside his body.

The being says, ‘Mr Anscombe, I presume?’ His voice tells me that this, too, amuses him.

Down the side of the room, blue flames swarm across the wall and form a glowing transparency through which I can see a woman in a nightdress sitting on a bed with a little girl on her lap. She holds a book but has stopped reading to look at the place in the wall where the door must be.

She can’t see how the man is trying to stay on his feet, stepping a little bit forward, then a little bit back, or how his knees sag until he sinks all the way to the floor, all the time staring at the fat loops falling out of his hands. The being leans down, sets the knife hard against the side of the man’s neck and jerks it across. Black fluid streams over the sweatshirt, and in the center of the stream a bump rises and falls, bump bump bump. The man tilts over his knees and keeps on tilting with the same amazing slowness until his forehead meets the carpet. The being steps back. Beneath the shadow of his hat, a blank pane of darkness ends in a strip of jaw.

I understand: He is Mr X.

Luxuriantly, Mr X turns to gaze through the blue veils at the woman and the little girl on the side of the bed.

The dying man makes an airy sound. The woman pats her little girl’s head.

In delight, the being moves forward, and the veils reshape themselves into a bright tunnel. Without warning, the wind presses me forward in his wake. A mild, almost weightless resistance like that of a spiderweb yields instantly as I pass through the invisible wall. On all sides, the blue tunnel hums like electricity. Mr X strides ahead, and he, too, hums with his own electricity, which is joy. His next stride carries him into the bedroom, and although his body conceals the woman and child from me I hear a woman’s gasp. The child begins whimpering. They have seen a man in a black coat and hat walk straight through the bedroom wall. The woman scrambles across the bed, and I see bare legs flashing blue-white.

Clamping the little girl to her chest, the woman spins off the far side of the bed and hits the dresser. They have shiny, dark brown, just-washed hair and immense dark eyes. I step back, and the little girl’s eyes glance in my direction, more as if looking for than at me. When I try to retreat into the tunnel, the pressure slides against my back.

The girl buries her face in her mother’s chest, and the mother hoists her up. She is as pretty as a movie star. ‘I want you to get out of here right now, whoever you are,’ she says.

Concealing the knife in the folds of his coat, he moves along the bottom of the bed. She backs against the wall and shouts, ‘Mike!’

‘No help from that quarter, Mrs Anscombe,’ he says. ‘Tell me, don’t you find it awfully dull out here in the sticks?’

‘My name isn’t Anscombe,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anyone named Anscombe. You’re making a terrible mistake.’

He comes toward her. ‘Someone did, anyhow.’

She springs onto the bed. Her legs churn. Mr X wraps a hand around her ankle. The nightdress slides up over her hips when he pulls her toward him. She releases the little girl and shouts, ‘Run, baby! Run outside and hide!’

He yanks the woman off the bed and kicks her in the stomach. The little girl stares at him. He flicks a hand at her, and she shuffles an inch forward on her knees. ‘Too cold outside for a nice baby,’ he says. ‘Dangerous. Baby might meet a big, bad bear.’

The woman struggles to her feet and stands with her hands pressed against her stomach. Her eyes are like water. ‘Run, Lisa!’ she hisses. ‘Run away!’

He waves the knife at the woman, playfully. His teeth glint. ‘Baby Lisa doesn’t like bears,’ he says. ‘Does she, Lisa?’

Baby Lisa shakes her head.

‘Do anything you like to me,’ the woman says. ‘Just don’t hurt my baby. No matter who you are, she doesn’t have anything to do with why you’re here. Please.’

‘Oh,’ he says with what sounds like real curiosity, ‘why am I here?’