William sat on the side of his bed, his eyes half closed. He didn’t dare shut them entirely, for fear that something would appear, that there lurked deep within him a black marble of chaos and darkness, waiting for an ancient door to open onto a shadow path along which it would roll up into his throat. But he had to know whose face it was. The bits and pieces of decaying dream flitted across the stage before his eyes. Dark lines danced and fluttered and froze for an instant, first into the leggy shape of a beetle, then into the face of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, which hung there like the negative afterimage of a lighted window on the back of his eyelids, like the floating, manufactured head of the great and terrible Oz. The face paled, shifting, the black lines metamorphosing into the grays of a winter ocean and then into the white of fish skin or tainted snow, and just for a moment, before it winked out utterly, there floated before him the visage of Hilario Frosticos, impassive, almost asleep, but with the faint trace of a leer weighting the corners of his mouth.
William shuddered. He ran his hand through his hair. It was unimaginably cold. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and lit a pipe with trembling fingers. His bare feet looked as if they were made of pale, wet clay, and his calves seemed to be almost fleshless. It was impossible that they’d support his weight.
He stood up to test them, feeling rubbery. His toes were enormous, and for a moment seemed to have too many joints. He counted to make sure, shaking his head at the little useless tufts of hair that sprouted atop than. Toes were ugly things — like ears and noses. One couldn’t afford to pay any attention to them or they’d call into question the entirety of human self-importance and dignity.
The thought occurred to him suddenly that he’d write a short story. It would be about a poet who was given over to fits of inspiration. Like certain drags, though, such fits would have unfortunate side effects. They’d swell his sense of self worth shamelessly. He’d become a conceited buffoon. And somehow, midway through a particularly inflating verse, he’d catch sight of himself in a mirror or a shaded window or the polished metal swerve of a sauce pan, and with a wild, puncturing shock, realize that he had the face of an ape.
William routed out a stack of lined paper and a pen, waiting for the first droplets of what would become a flood of words. The late hour had lent a seriousness of purpose to the endeavor. He’d rarely been so inspired — seen things so clearly. Nothing, however, happened. He started a paragraph, then lined it out. It was foolish. He began another, paused, relit his pipe, then abruptly stood up and looked into the little framed mirror that hung over the dresser. Relieved, he put the pen and paper on the nightstand, promising himself he’d have another go at it in the sober light of morning. He pulled his blanket around him, shoved his pipe into his mouth, and trudged down the dark hallway. He could hear Edward turning fitfully in his room as he passed it. He opened the half-closed door of Jim’s bedroom and sidled in, clutching the blanket closed at his neck.
His son lay asleep, his mouth slightly open on the pillow. William envied him his dreams, which, from the look on his face, had little to do with horrors. William had long harbored suspicions that children were somehow more closely attuned to the vagaries and marvels of creation than were their elders, that age was like some airy bleach fading and paling those sensations that in childhood matter most, but that in later years we’re indifferent to, or have simply forgotten.
The smell of the thin night air leaking beneath the window was cool and sweet, carrying on it just the slightest odor of fog on concrete, of musty, late winter vegetation. William breathed deeply, trying to surprise it before it evaporated, to catch it and savor it. But almost as soon as he did, the smell disappeared, and empty, mundane air filled the room. Jim, William knew, was still washed in the swirl of the fragrant night air, which he didn’t have to hurry after as if it were the last train leaving an empty station. William had read only the past week that mere were not nearly so many visible stars in the heavens as one might think, that they were easily countable, a mere sprinkling, a handful tossed out into a far-flung corner of the void in a prodigiously distant age. He wondered how old the astronomer was who’d said such a thing. The number of stars in the heavens quite likely diminished with an observer’s increasing age.
His pipe was smoldering out. He’d been ignoring it. He sucked sharply on the stem until the tobacco in the bowl glowed like a little beacon in the dark room. Gray smoke curled toward the ceiling. The night breeze ruffled the curtains, blowing them in for a moment, then falling off, the curtains collapsing abruptly. Jim stirred and rolled over onto his back before settling once again into his pillow.
On the low oak dresser, dark brown with age, was a clutter of stuff, some of it commonplace — loose change, a penknife, a rumpled handkerchief, a torn theater ticket — and some of it almost magical — a rainbow colored aquatic moon garden in a corked jar; a little cluster of pastel fishbowl castles; a carved wooden pirate that propped an illustrated copy of Treasure Island; a Japanese lantern with paper walls, across each of which was painted a single delicate shoot of apple blossom; and a handful of bottle caps arranged in a neat circle.
William stood up and walked to the dresser, bending to have a closer look at the bottle caps. He was certain he knew where they’d come from, that he understood most of their strange odyssey which had begun in Griffith Park years before. And one, he knew, had been lost two months past during his unfortunate war with the neighbor’s garden hose.
He picked it up and turned it over. There was the cork washer, plucked out of the grass, pushed carefully inside. The cap seemed to him to be warm, almost alive, as if it had been recently clutched in someone’s hand. He closed his fist over it, seeing the bottle cap in his mind as if it were a little circular window that opened onto a sunlit garden, or a tiny green landscape glimpsed distantly through the wrong end of a telescope.
There was a stirring behind him. He turned to find Jim propped on his elbows, regarding him sleepily. William grinned, at a momentary loss for words. He puffed on his pipe to fill the void, but it had gone cold. He pulled it out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. “You’ve kept them too?”
Jim nodded, sitting up. “I had another one that I wore on my jacket, but I lost it when it fell off. So now I keep them on the dresser.”
“Wise move,” said his father. “I’ve lost more than I care to think about. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I wouldn’t be better off losing them all.”