On the wall over my bed there was a mismatched seam in the wallpaper, and tonight, for some reason, it bothered me. I picked at it without thinking, digging my fingernails underneath it until I had ripped away a whole flap. My hands wanted something to do. I made myself stop and reaffix the flap with white glue. But then I found myself winding my fingers around strands of hair and tugging them out of my scalp.
To keep my hands occupied, I opened my sketch pad and started to draw a map. It was a map of a place I didn’t know. Sometimes those were the best ones. You started with a river and grew a town up around it. You discovered the place as you created it. Sometimes there were surprises.
But tonight, for the first time, I was irritated by my little fictional operettas. The music in my ears seemed mechanical and false. The map emerging under my artless hands seemed flat, predictable. I began to wish I knew how to paint scenes rather than just maps. I wanted to paint like Edward Hopper. I wanted to show the depth of the dark by delivering just a small, broken segment of light. I wanted to look into windows from the outside.
I was hot, and there was nothing the fan could do about it. My skin itched, the kind of itch that made diving into a thorny shrub sound like a delicious dream.
It was only nine o’clock. I went to the window. It was safe, I imagined, just to look. I renewed my resolution not to set even one foot outside. The moon was still low. I could see it superimposed over my reflection on the pane of glass, yet still very far away. I pressed my forehead to the glass and used my hands as a visor in order to see more, to get closer, but my breath quickly fogged the view.
I unlocked the window and slid it upward. It was just something I did. It required no thought or bargaining.
I knew a rhyme that had always seemed powerful to me. If I spoke it aloud, maybe I could still be saved, even with the window open. So I leaned as far as I could out the window into the night and repeated the rhyme over and over.
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
I leaned out the window, and the air sighed upon my itchy skin.
Were these, then, the pathways to damnation—and was this why they were so difficult for people to resist?
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
My window was in a dormer, and I crawled through until half of me was lying on the downward slope of the roof.
But my legs were still inside the house. Inside the little crooked house. No walking a crooked mile tonight—not without those little crooked legs.
You could breathe the night. I never knew that before. The air tasted different when it was uninfused with light. It went deeper in you. You could want it—just that.
And it was cold. There was a high-contrast sharpness to everything. It was a wakeful night—so wakeful that daytime consciousness seemed a blur.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
Yes, the crookedness of things. I could see it now.
You could get sick to death of delicate symmetry. You could want other things, and that wanting could be ambrosial all on its own.
You could even become angry at your own prohibitions—you could begin to suspect the origins of all the tinny moralities that point you in all the directions of your life.
It occurred to me that I would like to feel the moonlight on my bare skin. The thought occurred to me, and I studied it in the cool, rational part of my brain—but while I was studying it, I noticed that my fingers had already begun the process of undoing the buttons on my pajama top. I watched them, curiously, from the rational distance of my brain—I wondered who they thought they were, those fingers that had spent so much time doing my bidding in the past.
Those little crooked fingers, they run their crooked way.
You could sometimes want to run. You could sometimes want to run out your window, off your roof, down the street, deep, deep into the unlit heart of an emptied town.
*
I darted from yard to yard, looking in windows. Squares of light. Actions playing out in them. Like television screens hung randomly along the street. Sometimes you could see a television screen inside the television screen of the window. Layers of lit life in the distance. And here was I—shrouded behind the curtains of night, lost in the muffled dullness of a noiseless winter. And it was okay. It was better than okay. It was glorious.
I could leap. Fences were nothing to me. Rules were for those small enough to live inside them. I was large.
It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.
Now it made sense—why monsters came out at night.
Chapter 6
I scrubbed myself clean in the morning, coating my skin with lotion that smelled of lemons.
I didn’t tell my father. I decided to keep it from him as long as I could. I dreaded being found by him curled naked on the back porch or befouled with mud.
The second night was more lucid than the first. I stayed by myself for a long time. In the distance I could hear the others, roaming the streets in packs. When their voices got louder, I hid. I watched them pass by, tangled around each other and caught up in their passions. I did not want to be joined with them.
In front of the church, I watched from a copse of trees as a group of breachers knocked apart a manger scene left over from Christmas. I waited until they were gone, then I put everything back aright.
As I put the baby Jesus back in his little nest, I stood back and looked at it.
It had nothing to do with God. It was just glowy and sweet, and it spoke of aching desire and a longing for peacefulness.
I wished the scene had been baked in an oven so I could eat it.
*
Attack the night.
I was hungry for things I didn’t know the names of, and the full moon was a strange kind of manna. It emptied you of yourself, and you were relieved.