The Man on the Ceiling Read online

  “Mama,” he kept saying. “Mama. Mama.” The girl ignored him. His prattle became increasingly louder and more shrill until everyone on the bus was looking at him, except his mother, who had her head turned as far away from him as she could. She was cracking her gum.

  The sunset was lovely, peach and purple and gray, made more lovely by the streaks of dirt on the bus windows and by the contrasting bright white dots of headlights and bright red dots of tail lights moving everywhere under it. When they passed slowly over the Valley Highway, Melanie saw that the lights were exquisite, and hardly moving at all.

  “Mama! Mama! Mama!” The child swiveled clumsily toward his mother and reached out both hands for her just as the driver hit the brakes. The little boy toppled sideways and hit his mouth on the metal bar. A small spot of blood appeared on his lower lip. There was a moment of stunned silence from the child; his mother—still staring off away from him, earphones over her ears, still popping her gum rhythmically—obviously hadn’t noticed what had happened.

  Then he shrieked. At last disturbed, she whirled on him furiously, an epithet halfway out of her child-vamp mouth, but when she saw the blood on her son’s face she collapsed into near-hysteria. Although she did hold him and wipe at his face with her long-nailed fingertips, it was clear she didn’t know what to do.

  Melanie considered handing her a tissue, lecturing her about child safety, even—ridiculously—calling social services. But here was her stop. Fuming, she followed the lady with the shoulder-length white hair down the steps and out into the evening, which was tinted peach and purple and gray from the sunset of however dubious origin and, no less prettily, red and white from the Safeway sign.

  The white-haired woman was always on this bus. Always wore the same ankle-length red coat when it was cold enough to wear any coat at all. Grim-faced and always frowning, but with that crystalline hair falling softly over her shoulders.

  They always got off at the same stop, waited at the intersection for the light to change, walked together a block and a half until the lady turned into the Spanish-style stucco apartment building that had once been a church—it still had “Jesus Is the Light of the World” inscribed in an arc over one doorway and a pretty enclosed courtyard overlooked by tall windows shaped as if to hold stained glass. At that point, Melanie’s house was still two blocks away, and she always just kept walking. She and the white-haired lady had never exchanged a word. Maybe someday she’d think how to start a conversation. Not tonight.

  Tonight, like most nights, she just wanted to be home. Safe and patently loved in the hubbub of her family. Often, disbelieving, she would count to herself the number of discrete living creatures whose lives she shared, and she loved the changing totals: tonight it was Steve, and five kids, four cats, three dogs, even twenty-three plants. Exhausted from work, she could almost always count on being revitalized when she went home.

  The man on the ceiling laughs at me as he remains always just out of the reach of my understanding, floating above me on his layered wings, telling me about how, someday, Melanie and my children and everyone I love is going to die and how, after I die, no one is going to remember me no matter how much I write, how much I shamelessly reveal, brushing his sharp fingers against the wallpaper and leaving deep gouges in the walls. He rakes back the curtains and shows me the sky: peach and purple and gray like the colors of his eyes when he opens them, like the colors of his mouth, the colors of his tongue when he laughs even more loudly and heads for the open door of one of my children’s rooms.

  The man on the ceiling opens his mouth and begins eating the wall by the staircase. First he has to taste it. He rests the dark holes that have been drilled into his face for nostrils against the brittle flocked wallpaper and sniffs out decades worth of noise, conversation, and prayers. Then he slips his teeth over the edges and pulls it away from the wall, shoveling the crackling paper into his dark maw with fingers curved into claws. Tiny trains of silverfish drift down the exposed wall before the man on the ceiling devours them as well, then his abrasive tongue scoops out the crumbling plaster from the wooden lath and minutes later he has started on the framing itself.

  Powerless to stop him, I watch as he sups on the dream of my life. Suddenly I am a sixteen-year-old boy again and this life I have written for myself is all ahead of me, and impossibly out of reach.

  The man on the ceiling turns and screams at me until I feel my flesh beginning to shred. The man on the ceiling puts his razor-sharp fingers into my joints and twists and I clench my fists and bite the insides of my lips trying not to scream. The man on the ceiling grins and grins and grins. He sticks both hands into my belly and pulls out my organs and offers to tell me how long I have to live.

  I tell him I don’t want to know, and then he offers to tell me how long Melanie is going to live, how long each of my children is going to live.

  The man on the ceiling crawls into my belly through the hole he has made and curls up inside himself to become a cancer resting against my spinal column. I can no longer walk and I fall to the ground.

  The man on the ceiling rises into my throat and I can no longer speak. The man on the ceiling floats into my skull and I can no longer dream.

  The man on the ceiling crawls out of my head, his sharp black heels piercing my tongue as he steps out of my mouth.

  The man on the ceiling starts devouring our furniture a piece at a time, beating his great conglomerate wings in orgasmic frenzy, releasing tiny gifts of decay into the air.

  How might I explain why supposedly good people could imagine such things? How might I explain how I could feel such passion for my wife and children, or for the simplest acts of living, when such creatures travel in packs through my dreams?

  It is because the man on the ceiling is a true story that I find life infinitely interesting. It is because of such dark, transcendent angels in each of our houses that we are able to love. Because we must. Because it is all there is.

  Penguins

  Daffodils were blooming around the porch of the little yellow house set down away from the sidewalk. Melanie stopped, amazed. They had not been there yesterday. Their scent lasted all the way to the corner.

  One year Steve had given her a five-foot-long, three-foot-high Valentine showing a huge flock of penguins, all of them alike, and out of the crowd two of them with pink hearts above their heads, and the caption: “I’m so glad we found each other.”

  It was, of course, a miracle.

  She crossed the street and entered her own block. The sunset was paling now, and the light was silvery down the street. A trick of the light made it look as though the hill on which her house sat was flattened. Melanie smiled and wondered what Matilda McCollum, who’d had the house built in 1898 and had the hill constructed so it would be grander than her sister’s otherwise identical house across the way, would say to that. A huge, solid, sprawling, red-brick Victorian rooted in Engelmann ivy so expansive as to be just this side of overgrown, the house was majestic on its hill. Grand. Unshakable. Matilda had been right.

  Melanie was looking left at the catalpa tree between the sidewalk and the street, worrying as she did every spring that this time it really would never leaf out and she would discover it was dead, had died over the winter and she hadn’t known, had in fact always been secretly dead, when she turned right to go up the steps to her house. Stumbled. Almost fell. There were no steps. There was no hill. She looked up. There was no house.

  And she knew there never had been.

  There never had been a family. She had never had children.

  She had somehow made up sweet troubled Christopher, Veronica of the magnificent chestnut hair and heart bursting painfully with love, Anthony whose laughter had been like seashells, Joe for whom the world was an endless adventure, Gabriella who knew how to go inside herself and knew to tell you what she was doing there: “I be calm.”

  She’d made up the golden cat Cinnabar, who would come to purr on her chest and ease the pain away. She’d m
ade up the hoya plant that sent out improbable white flowers off a leafless woody stem too far into the dining room. She’d made up the rainbows on the kitchen walls from the prisms she hung in the south window.

  She’d made up Steve.

  There had never been love.

  There had never been a miracle.

  Angels. Our lives are filled with angels.

  The man on the ceiling smiles in the midst of the emptiness, his wings beating heavily against the clouds, his teeth the color of the cold I am feeling now. Melanie used to worry so much when I went out late at night for milk, or ice cream for the both of us, that I’d need to call her from a phone booth if I thought I’d be longer than the forty-five minutes it took for her anxiety and her fantasies about all that can happen to people to kick in. Sometimes she fantasized about the police showing up at the door to let her know about the terrible accident I’d had, or sometimes I just didn’t come back—I got the milk or the ice cream and I just kept on going. I can’t say that I was always helpful. Sometimes I’d tell her I had to come home because the ice cream would melt if I didn’t get it into the freezer right away. I’m not sure that was very reassuring.

  What I tried not to think about was what if I never could find my way home, what if things weren’t as I’d left them. What if everything had changed? One night I got lost along the southern edge of the city after a late night movie and wandered for an hour or so convinced that my worst fantasies had come true.

  The man on the ceiling smiles and begins devouring my dream of the sky.

  A wise man asks me, when I’ve told him this story of my vanishing home again, “And then what?”

  I glare at him. He’s supposed to understand me. “What do you mean?”

  “And then what happens? After you discover that your house and your husband and your family have disappeared?”

  “Not disappeared,” I point out irritably. “Have never existed.”

  “Yes. Have never existed. And then what happens?”

  I’ve never thought of that. The never-having-existed seems final enough, awful enough. I can’t think of anything to say, so I don’t say anything, hoping he will. But he’s wise, and he knows how to use silence. He just sits there, being calm, until finally I say, “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it would be interesting to find out,” he suggests.

  So we try. He eases me into a light trance; I’m eager and highly suggestible, and I trust this man, so my consciousness alters easily. He guides me through the fantasy again and again, using my own words and some of his own. But every time I stop at the point where I come home and there isn’t any home. The point where I look up and my life, my love, isn’t there. Has never existed.

  I don’t know what happens next. I can’t imagine what happens next. Do I die? Does the man on the ceiling take me into his house? Does he fly away with me into an endless sky? Does he help me create another life, another miracle?

  That’s why I write. To find out what happens next.

  So what happens next? This might happen: After the man on the ceiling devours my life I imagine it back again: I fill in the walls, the doorways, the empty rooms with colors and furnishings different from, but similar to, the ones I imagine to have been there before. Our lives are full of angels of all kinds. So I call on some of those other angels to get my life back.

  I write myself a life, and it is very different from the one I had before, and yet very much the same. I make mistakes different from the ones I made with my children before. I love Melanie the same way I did before. Different wonderful things happen. The same sad, wonderful events recur.

  The man on the ceiling just smiles at me and makes of these new imaginings his dessert. So what happens next? In a different kind of story I might take out a machete and chop him into little bits of shadow. Or I might blast him into daylight with a machine gun. I might douse him with lighter fluid and set him on fire.

  But I don’t write those kinds of stories.

  And besides, the man on the ceiling is a necessary angel.

  There are so many truths to tell. There are so many different lives I could dream for myself.

  What happens next?

  There are so many stories to tell. I could tell this story:

  The man on the ceiling was waiting for Melanie behind the fence (an ugly, bare, chain link and chicken wire fence, not the black wrought iron fence plaited with rosebushes that she’d made up), where her home had never existed. He beckoned to her. He called her by name, his own special name for her, a name she never got used to no matter how often he said it, which was often. He reached for her, trying to touch her but not quite touching.

  She could have turned and run away from him. He wouldn’t have chased her down. His arms wouldn’t have telescoped long and impossibly jointed to capture her at the end of the block. His teeth wouldn’t have pushed themselves out of his mouth in gigantic segmented fangs to cut her off at the knees, to bite her head off. He wouldn’t have sucked her blood.

  But he’d have kept calling her, using his special name for her. And he’d have scaled her windows, dropped from her roof, crawled across her ceiling again that night, and every night for the rest of her life.

  So Melanie went toward him. Held out her arms.

  There are so many different dreams. That one was Steve’s. This one is mine:

  I sit down at the kitchen table. The man on the ceiling lies on my plate, collapsed and folded up neatly in the center. I slice him into hundreds of oily little pieces which I put into my mouth one morsel at a time. I bite through his patchwork wings. I gnaw on his inky heart. I chew his long, narrow fingers well. I make of him my daily meal of darkness.

  There are so many stories to tell.

  And all of the stories are true.

  We wait for whatever happens next.

  We stay available.

  We name it to make it real.

  It was hard for us to write this piece.

  For one thing, we write differently. Melanie’s stories tend more toward magical realism, Steve’s more toward surrealism. Realism, in both cases, but we argued over form: “This isn’t a story! It doesn’t have a plot!”

  “What do you want from a plot? Important things happen, and it does move from A to B.”

  In our fiction, Melanie’s monsters usually are ultimately either vanquished or accepted, while at the end of Steve’s stories you often find out that the darkness in one form or another lives on and on. There’s no escaping it, and the question is whether you should try to escape it in the first place.

  Since words can only approximate both the monsters and the vanquishment, we wrote each other worried notes in the margins of this story.

  “I don’t know if we can really use the word ‘divine.’ “

  “If someone looked inside your dreams, would they really see only darkness?”

  It was hard for us to write this piece.

  “This upsets me,” Melanie would say.

  Steve would nod. “Maybe we can’t do this.”

  “Oh, we have to.” Melanie would insist. “We’ve gone too far to stop now. I want to see what happens.”

  This piece is about writing and horror and fear and about love. We’re utterly separate from each other, of course, yet there’s a country we share, a rich and wonderful place, a divine place, and we create it by naming all of its parts, all of the angels and all of the demons who live there with us.

  What happens next?

  There are so many stories to tell.

  We could tell another story:

  Chapter 4

  Sense of Place

  I’ve been accused of worrying too much, of seeing layers of darkness other people could not see, of perceiving horrors the way dogs hear sounds imperceptible to humans. I’ve been too quick at times, I’m told, to lose faith in the safety of a place, a time, or another human being.

  But then I hear a story like Melanie’s story of Buddy, and it rings so true, it jibes so closely with
other stories I’ve heard or sifted out of all the messy details that fall between the lines.

  There are bad people out there—sometimes there are bad people living next door. You must understand this. And there’s not always something you can do about it. It’s tempting to fantasize about fixing the bad things that have already happened, might have happened, such as going back in time and pulling the little girl Melanie out of harm’s way, and telling her father, because this is just the sort of information fathers need to know. However much they might try, fathers do not always know. Or, as in her father’s case, perhaps don’t know they know.

  My daughters have started telling me that I stare. This is a change, I think, which is why they bring it up. For most of my life I’ve been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.

  Later I learned there were stories in people’s everyday conversations, and if you intended to be a storyteller you had to listen. Sometimes the stories were about other people they knew, or had heard about, friends of friends. But most of the stories, even about friends of friends, were mostly about themselves, some aspect of them, some hope or fear or unspoken longing. That’s where characters come from.

  So I listened. I listened as carefully as I could even when I appeared to be going about my own business. I listened so hard that my head ached from the dense overlay of voices.

  For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to look at their faces, afraid they would catch me listening.