The Man on the Ceiling Read online

  A long time later, someone who still lives in the area asked me jovially, “Hey, do you remember Wendell Brown?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He grew up near you somewhere.”

  “Really? How weird. I’m always sort of shocked to discover everybody in a small town doesn’t know everybody. I guess that means I’ve turned into a real city girl.”

  “He has like an indentation on the side of his head that sort of contorts his face?”

  “You mean Buddy? Buddy Brown?”

  “He goes by Wendell now.”

  “I don’t exactly remember him. I remember his sister better, but I don’t think Buddy and I had much interaction. He was a lot older than me, sort of a shadowy figure. My parents didn’t trust him, I think because he was slow and because of the way he looked. Talk about prejudice.”

  “Well, he sure remembers you.”

  “Being so much older, he might remember things I don’t.”

  “To hear him tell it, you two had quite a bit of—interaction.”

  “What does that mean? I don’t remember ever being anywhere near him.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “Too late.”

  “He said you were obsessed.”

  “With what?”

  “With him. With sex. With sex with him.”

  “You’re not serious. I was a little kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me what he said.”

  “Actually, what he said was you were a little slut.”

  One of the things I’m called to witness here is my own visceral reaction. My pulse has quickened. My skin crawls. My throat hurts and my mouth is dry.

  It’s not fear. I still have no sense of anything terrible. But there’s something here. Buddy Brown has something to do with the after-shadowing.

  “Where can I find him?”

  “I don’t know. He moved away.”

  “Is Judy still in town?”

  “Who?”

  “His sister.”

  “I didn’t know he had a sister.”

  I long to ask my parents about this. I’ve longed to ask my parents about a lot of things. But even if they hadn’t been dead for more than a decade, I wouldn’t have the nerve.

  I have no way of knowing the facts here, and I’m not claiming repressed memory. Buddy Brown is not his real name.

  But the images (woods, a little woods, just my size, thin trees and little animals, little singing bird, little snakes just my size) are careening all over the place. I need a shape for them, a receptacle, a (Daddy mowing the lawn right next to the woods, safe smell of cut grass, safe buzz of the lawnmower) story.

  So I’ll make something up. It may not be factual.

  It will be honest and true.

  Just Her Size

  She was playing right at the edge of the woods where Daddy could see her. There was a spider web with a spider in it. She liked how the web felt on her face. She liked knowing that the spider made it.

  He wasn’t exactly hiding in the woods. He spent a lot of time there, and he watched a lot of stuff, not just her. She was a pretty little thing, even if her eyes were funny-looking and she was a freak like him. Long braids. He bet she didn’t have hair anyplace else.

  She was looking for a good stick horse. It had to be up to about her shoulders and thick but not too thick and with a fork so you could put a rope on it.

  This was a little woods, just her size. It just went down to the end of the road. It had little rabbits and moles in it, little birds, little brown snakes, just her size. The trees were all close together. Light came through in fluttery pieces. It smelled wet.

  There was a stick. She picked it up and straddled it and galloped right along the edge of the woods. No, it was too long, it didn’t go fast enough. A stick horse had to go fast and it had to rear up and whinny. This one didn’t. She got off and tossed it into the yard, not a stick horse now, just a stick. Then she remembered Daddy didn’t want sticks in the way when he was mowing and she ran out to get it, squealing at the lawnmower pretend-monster, the only kind of monster she knew anything about.

  She bet she could find a good stick horse in the woods. She jumped over the line between the yard and the woods, even though there wasn’t really anything to jump over, and started along a little windy path just her size. He watched her coming. He’d seen her before, playing in her yard, playing in the woods, and a couple of times she’d said hi to him. She didn’t look at him like other people did. She wasn’t scared of him, didn’t seem to think he was ugly. She couldn’t see very well. He watched her coming toward him. She was a pretty little thing, and he knew she liked him.

  The path went every which way. You never got lost in the woods, you just went every which way. She was singing and galloping and making horse noises and tossing her braids. There was that boy. Buddy Brown. She knew who he was. He lived in that brown house. Daddy didn’t like him but he was nice.

  He said, “Hi.”

  She said hi back.

  He said, “What are you doing?” She said she was looking for a stick horse. He bent down and picked up a branch with a prong at the end of it, stood it on the ground and it came to his waist, her shoulders. “Here’s a good one,” he said. He was nice.

  She came right up to him and grabbed the end of the stick. He used it to pull her toward him, and she didn’t try to stop him, she liked him, she wanted what he wanted, little slut, pretty little funny-looking whore.

  He put his face down real close to hers and whispered, “I’ll give you the stick if you give me a kiss.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, just like that, and he let go of the stick and reached for her, but then her daddy was right there, right behind her, calling her name.

  She rode the stick horse away from him to her daddy, and he moved back into the trees and got really quiet, like he knew how to do. They walked right past him, holding hands. She was a pretty little thing.

  Is that it? Is that what happened, something like that?

  Reversing my steps around the truncated bend in the road, I’m possessed by a spirit of place that I may at last be understanding: danger and protection from danger, all of a piece; several forms of fierce love; things happening before there were words to tell about them. Up at the highway where there are no mailboxes anymore, my ride is waiting. I’m driven to the airport and transported home, to a city neighborhood where all the houses and all the stories are taller than they are wide. Warned by repeated experience that it would be profoundly unsettling, I set it up carefully for both safety and receptivity: I went in the company of a friend who’d long ago escorted me out of that place, someone who lately has been answering the calls of ghosts of his own in order to make a place for himself in a world that once seemed to hold none.

  A mile north of town, just past the building that had once been the gift shop with the “Goat’s Milk Fudge” sign, we parked just off Route 19 to walk down the road, so I was assured we could escape anytime and stay as long as necessary. My friend stayed close and kept his distance, which may be the very definition of bearing witness.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I kept saying.

  Urgent iconic monologue—about Mrs. Sandbach, about the foreshortened bend in the road and the poplars that all died the same year, about dancing to Elvis in the Rogers’ kitchen, about Buddy Brown—alternated with urgent, vigilant silence. I marveled at things that had changed and things that had stayed the same and things I didn’t remember one way or another. There were a great many of each.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I kept reporting. “Nothing’s trying to break through.”

  The house I grew up in was still the only house on its side of the road. Passing it in both directions, we stopped to stare at it. A car was parked in the reconfigured driveway and the front door off the rebuilt little porch was open, so someone must be home, and I felt like the trespasser I was, standing there looking at someone else�
��s house.

  For this was not, of course, the house I grew up in. The place where I grew up is entirely imaginary now.

  “I don’t exactly know why,” I ventured to say, “but I’m at peace with this place now.”

  I do know why, though. It’s because of the story I’ve told about Buddy Brown. The story has put my childhood home back in its place. The after-shadowing has all but stopped.

  The sense of place is a force to be reckoned with. But, as has just been brought home to me again, it’s no match for the power of story.

  Chapter 3

  The Man on the Ceiling

  Everything we’re about to tell you is true.

  Don’t ask me if I mean that “literally.” I know about the literal. The literal has failed miserably to explain the things I’ve really needed explanations for. The things in your dreams, the things in your head, don’t know from literal. And yet that’s where most of us live: in our dreams, in our heads. The stories there, those fables and fairytales, are our lives.

  Ever since I was a little boy I wanted to find out the names of the mysterious characters who lived in those stories. The heroes, the demons, and the angels. Once I named them, I would be one step closer to understanding them. Once I named them, they would be real.

  When Melanie and I got married, we chose this name, TEM. A gypsy word meaning “country,” and also the name of an ancient Egyptian deity who created the world and everything in it by naming the world and everything in it, who created its own divine self by naming itself, part by part. Tem became the name for our relationship, that undiscovered country which had always existed inside us both, but had never been real until we met.

  Much of our life together has been concerned with this naming. Naming of things, places, and mysterious, shadowy characters. Naming of each other and of what is between us. Making it real.

  The most disturbing thing about the figures of horror fiction for me is a particular kind of vagueness in their form. However clearly an author might paint some terrifying figure, if this character truly resonates, if it reflects some essential terror within the human animal, then our minds refuse to fix it into a form. The faces of our real terrors shift and warp the closer they come to us: the werewolf becomes an elderly man on our block becomes the local butcher becomes an uncle we remember coming down for the Christmas holidays when we were five. The face of horror freezes but briefly, and as quickly as we jot down its details, it is something else again.

  Melanie used to wake me in the middle of the night to tell me there was a man in our bedroom window, or a man on the ceiling.

  I had my doubts, but being a good husband I checked the windows and I checked the ceiling and I attempted to reassure. We had been through this enough times that I had plenty of reason to believe she would not be reassured no matter what I said. Still I made the attempt each time, giving her overly reasonable explanations concerning the way the light had been broken up by windblown branches outside, or how the ceiling light fixture might be mistaken for a man’s head by a person waking suddenly from a restless sleep or an intense dream. Sometimes my careful explanations irritated her enormously. Still mostly asleep, she would wonder aloud why I couldn’t see the man on the ceiling. Was I playing games with her? Trying to placate her when I knew the awful truth?

  In fact, despite my attempts at reason, I believed in the man on the ceiling. I always had.

  As a child I was a persistent liar. I lied slyly, I lied innocently, and I lied enthusiastically. I lied out of confusion and I lied out of a profound disappointment. One of my more elaborate lies took shape during the 1960 presidential election. While the rest of the country was debating the relative merits of Kennedy and Nixon, I was explaining to my friends how I had been half of a pair of Siamese twins, and how my brother had tragically died during the separation.

  This was, perhaps, my most heartfelt lie to date, because in telling this tale I found myself grieving over the loss of my brother, my twin. I had created my first believable character, and my character had hurt me.

  Later I came to recognize that about that time (I was ten), the self I had been was dying, and that I was slowly becoming the twin who had died and gone off to some other, better fiction.

  Many of my lies since then, the ones I have been paid for, have been about such secret, tragic twins and their other lives. The lives we dream about, and only half-remember after the first shock of day.

  So how could I, of all people, doubt the existence of the man on the ceiling?

  My first husband did not believe in the man on the ceiling.

  At least, he said he didn’t. He said he never saw him. Never had night terrors. Never saw the molecules moving in the trunks of trees and felt the distances among the pieces of himself.

  I think he did, though, and was too afraid to name what he saw. I think he believed that if he didn’t name it, it wouldn’t be real. And so, I think, the man on the ceiling got him a long time ago.

  Back then, it was usually a snake I’d see, crawling across the ceiling, dropping to loop around my bed. I’d wake up and there would still be a snake—huge, vivid, sinuous, utterly mesmerizing. I’d cry out. I’d call for help. After my first husband had grudgingly come in a few times and hadn’t been able to reassure me that there was no snake on the ceiling, he just quit coming.

  Steve always comes. Usually, he’s already there beside me.

  One night a man really did climb in my bedroom window. Really did sit on the edge of my bed, really did mutter incoherently and fumble in the bedclothes, really did look surprised and confused when I sat up and screamed. I guess he thought I was someone else. He left, stumbling, by the same second-story window. I chased him across the room, had the tail of his denim jacket in my hands. But I let him go because I couldn’t imagine what I’d do next if I caught him.

  By the time I went downstairs and told my first husband, there was no sign of the intruder. By the time the police came, there was no evidence, and I certainly could never have identified him. I couldn’t even describe him in any useful way: dark, featureless. Muttering nonsense. As confused as I was. Clearly not meaning me any harm, or any good, either. Not meaning me anything. He thought I was someone else. I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t change my life. He wasn’t the man on the ceiling.

  I don’t think anybody then believed that a man had come in my window in the middle of the night and gone away again. Steve would have believed me.

  Yes, I would have believed her. I’ve come to believe in the reality of all of Melanie’s characters.

  And I believe in the man on the ceiling with all my heart.

  For one evening this man on the ceiling climbed slowly down out of the darkness and out of the dream of our marriage and took one of our children away. And changed our lives forever.

  But we’ve made it our job, Melanie and I, to open our eyes and see who’s there. To find who’s there and to name who’s there.

  In our life together, we seem to seek it out. Our children, when they become our children, already know the man on the ceiling. Maybe all children do, at some primal level, but ours know him consciously, have already faced him down, and teach us how to do that, too.

  We go toward the voice by the door, the shape in the room. Not so much to find the vampires and the werewolves who have been seen so many times before—who are safe to find because no one really believes in them anymore anyway—but to find the hidden figures who lurk in our house and other houses like ours: the boy with the head vigorously shaking nonono, the boy who appears and disappears in the midst of a cluttered bedroom, the little dead girl who controls her family with her wishes and lies, the little boy driven by his dad on a hunting trip down into the darkest heart of the city, and the man who hangs suspended from the ceiling waiting for just the right opportunity to climb down like a message from the eternal. To find the demons. To find the angels.

  Sometimes we find these figures right in our own home, infiltrating our life together, standing
over the beds of our children.

  “Mom?”

  A child. My child. Calling me, “Mom.” A name so precious I never get used to it, emblematic of the joy and terror of this impossible relationship every time one of them says it. Which is often.

  “Mom? I had a bad dream.”

  It’s Joe. Who came to us a year and a half ago an unruly, intensely imaginative child so terrified of being abandoned again that he’s only very recently been willing to say he loves me. He called me “Mom” right away, but he wouldn’t say he loved me.

  If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don’t love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn’t between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.

  This is the first time Joe has ever come for me in the middle of the night, the first time he’s been willing to test our insistence that that’s what parents are here for, although I think he has nightmares a lot.

  I slide out of bed and pick him up. He’s so small. He holds himself upright, won’t snuggle against me, and his wide blue eyes are staring off somewhere, not at me. But his hand is on my shoulder and he lets me put him in my lap in the rocking chair, and he tells me about his dream. About a dog that died and came back to life. Joe loves animals. About Dad and me dying. Himself dying. Anthony dying.

  Joe, who never knew Anthony, dreams about Anthony dying. Mourns Anthony. This connection seems wonderful to me, and a little frightening.

  Joe’s man on the ceiling already has a name, for Joe’s dream is also about how his birth parents hurt him. Left him. He doesn’t say it, maybe he’s not old enough to name it, but when I suggest he must have felt then that he was going to die, that they were going to kill him, he nods vigorously, thumb in his mouth. And when I point out that he didn’t die, that he’s still alive and he can play with the cats and dogs and dig in the mud hole and learn to read chapter books and go to the moon someday, his eyes get very big and he nods vigorously and then he snuggles against my shoulder. I hold my breath for this transcendent moment. Joe falls asleep in my lap.