"What was he wearing?" I asked. It was just a stray thought.
"Wearing? I don't recall… Ricky, did you look at his clothing?"
Hawthorne nodded. "I had to throw it out. It was the most astounding assortment of things-his evening jacket, a pajama shirt, the trousers to another suit. No socks."
"That's what John put on when he got up the morning he died?" Lewis asked, astonished. "Why didn't you tell us before?"
"At first I was shocked by it, and then I forgot. Too much was happening."
"But he was usually such a fastidious man," Lewis said. "Damn it, if John jumbled his clothes up like that, his mind must have been jumbled too."
"Precisely," Sears said, and smiled at me. "Don, that was a perceptive question. None of us thought of it."
I could see him beginning to snatch up all the available rationalizations. "It doesn't simplify things to point out that his mind was jumbled," I pointed out. "In the case I had in mind when I did my book, a man killed himself, and I'm damn sure his mind was shaken, but I never found out what really happened to him."
"You're talking about your brother, aren't you?" asked Ricky Hawthorne cleverly. Naturally. So they all knew, after all; my uncle had told them about David. "And that was the 'case' you alluded to?"
I nodded.
"Uh oh," Lewis said.
I said, "I just turned it into a ghost story. I don't know what really happened."
For a moment all three of them looked embarrassed.
"Well," Sears James said, "even if you are not accustomed to doing research, I'm sure that you're capable of it."
Ricky Hawthorne leaned back into his eccentric couch; his bow tie was still immaculate, but his nose was red and his eyes bleary. He looked small and lost, in the midst of his giant furniture. "It will obviously make my two friends happier if you stay with us for a while, Mr. Wanderley."
"Don."
"Don, then. Since you seem prepared to do that, and since I am exhausted, I suggest we all say good night. You'll spend the night at Lewis's?"
Lewis Benedikt said, "That's fine," and stood up.
"I have one question," I said. "Are you asking me to think about the supernatural-or whatever you want to call it-because that absolves you from thinking about it?"
"Perceptive, but inaccurate," Sears James said, looking at me with his rifle shot's blue eyes. "We think about it all the time."
"That reminds me," Lewis said. "Are you going to stop the Chowder Society meetings? Does anyone think we should?"
"No," Ricky said with an odd defiance. "For heaven's sake let's not. For our sakes, let's continue to meet Don will be included."
So here I am. Each of the three men, my uncle's friends, seems admirable in his own way: but are they losing their minds? I can't even be sure they have told me everything. They are frightened, and two of them have died; and I wrote earlier in this journal that Milburn feels like the sort of town where Dr. Rabbitfoot would go to work. I can feel reality slithering away from me, if I start to imagine that one of my own books is happening around me.
The trouble is, I could almost start to imagine that. Those two suicides-David's and Dr. Jaffrey's-that's the problem, that simple coincidence. (And the Chowder Society shows no signs of recognizing that this coincidence is the main reason I am interested in their problem.) What am I involved in here? A ghost story? Or something worse, something not just a story? The three old men have only the sketchiest knowledge of the events of two years ago-and they can't possibly know that they've asked me to enter the strangest part of my life again, to roll myself back through the calendar to the worst, most destructive days: or to roll myself up again in the pages of a book which was my attempt to reconcile myself with them. But can there really be any connection, even if it is just the connection of one ghost story leading to another, as it did with the Chowder Society? And can there truly be any factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to my brother?
II - Alma
Everything that has beauty has a body, and is a body;
everything that has being has being in the flesh:
and dreams are only drawn from the bodies that are.
"Bodiless God,"
-D. H. Lawrence
From the journals of Don Wanderley
1
There is only one way to answer that question. I have to spend a little time, over the next week or two, in writing out in some detail the facts as I remember them about myself and David and Alma Mobley. When I fictionalized them in the book I inevitably sensationalized them, and doing so falsified my own memories. If I were satisfied with that, I would never have considered writing the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel-he's no more than Alma in blackface, Alma with horns, tail and a soundtrack. Just as "Rachel Varney" in The Nightwatcher was no more than Alma in fancy dress. Alma was far stranger than "Rachel." What I want to do now is not invent fictional situations and fictional peculiarities, but look at the peculiarities that existed. In The Nightwatcher everything was solved, everything came out even; in life nothing came out even and nothing was solved.
I met Alma not as "Saul Malkin" met "Rachel Varney," in a Paris dining room, but in surroundings utterly banal. It was at Berkeley, where good notices for my first book had obtained me a year's teaching job. The post was a coup for a first-book writer, and I took it seriously. I taught one section of Creative Writing and two sections of an undergraduate course in American literature. It was the second of these that caused most of my work. I had to do so much reading of work which I didn't know well and so much theme-grading that I had little time to write. And if I had barely read Howells or Cooper, I had never looked at the criticism about them which the structure of the course demanded I know. I found myself falling into a routine of teaching my courses, taking the creative writing work home to read before I ate dinner at a bar or cafe, and then spending my evenings at the library going through bibliographies and hunting up copies of PMLA. Sometimes I was able to work on a story of my own when I got back to my apartment; more often, my eyes burned and my stomach was in an uproar from English Department coffee and my instincts for prose were deadened by scholarly waffle. From time to time I took out a girl in the department, an instructor with a mint-condition PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Her name was Helen Kayos, and our desks, along with twelve others, were next to one another in a communal office. She had read my first book, but it had not impressed her.
She was stern about literature, frightened of teaching, careless about her appearance, hopeless about men.
Her interests were in Scots contemporaries of Chaucer and linguistic analysis; at twenty-three, she already had something of the feather impracticality of the old scholar-spinster. "My father changed his name from Kayinski, and I'm just a hard-headed Pole," she said, but it was a classic self-deception; she was hard-headed about Scots Chaucerians and nothing else. Helen was a large girl with big glasses and loose hair which always seemed on its way from one style to another; it was hair with unfulfilled intentions. She had decided some time before that what she had to offer the university, the planet, men was her intelligence. It was the only thing about herself that she trusted. I asked her out for lunch the third time I saw her in the office. She was revising an article, and she nearly jumped out of her chair. I think I was the first man at Berkeley to ask her to lunch.