“No,” he said. “You have to look harder.”
Just then the street lamps came on overhead with a little click and a buzz. Consecutive pools of light appeared in a bracelet of illumination that fronted all the houses, each of which domiciled any number of lives and dramas and passions and catastrophes. There it was, the way the street arrowed on to the horizon, the way the housefronts glowed rich, organic sepia into the night, the way the parceled land shivered with the deep harmonics of order and structure. I looked, and what I saw was the story of the place, the crystalline symmetry of the houses on their identical plots of land, the swooping curve of the curb and the wispy fans of the sprinklers that came on in the summer with timed precision. I saw the bones and the blood of the town, the infrastructure of copper pipes and PVC and electrical conduits and sump pumps and telephone wires suspended in elegant laurels overhead. I saw everything it took to make this one street, and I saw that street multiplied into a neighborhood and that neighborhood multiplied into a town and that town multiplied into a city and a country and a whole world.
I saw it. He made me see it, and I saw it.
“Think about it,” he said. “People built this. There used to be nothing here, and now there’s this. And the people who built it, were they pure? It doesn’t matter. Whatever they were, they overcame it to make something bigger than themselves. Look harder. It’s beautiful.”
It’s become popular for people to talk about suburban dread, the cardboard sprawl that cheapens life, reduces life down to lawn ornaments, manicured shrubs, televisions with extra-large screens, quaint and degraded notions of family life. It’s easy to say that life should be grander, more meaningful, heartier—like a meat stew.
But what Peter showed me I’ll never forget. It was the land brought to life, the earth made conscious. And it was beautiful. It really was.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It means that it doesn’t matter what it means,” he said. “It means that it’ll be okay, Lumen.”
*
The third night I went into the woods because I was finished with other people and their capricious ways. I wanted my freedom to be mine alone. A wind blew through the trees, and the moonlight lit up all the icy branches, and it was like I was surrounded by stars.
The next morning, when I woke, my body was covered in crystals of ice. I was in the backyard of my house, on the lawn, in a little concavity my hot body had made in the snow. Sitting up, I saw a ghost of myself on the ground.
The sun was up, just visible on the horizon. I guessed it must have been five o’clock. My father would still be in bed.
“You sleep nice.”
The voice came from behind me. My body, still moon-driven and instinctive, shot rigid into a crouch. Flee or defend.
Blackhat Roy, still naked, too, sat on the stoop of my back porch. He looked haggard and somehow raw. He was raked with dirt, his hair caked with dry, frozen mud. He scratched at himself casually.
“Your eyelids,” he said. “They flutter when you’re asleep. You remember what you were dreaming about?”
“You’re supposed to be going to Chicago.”
“Leaving tonight.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Now, me,” he went on, “I remember all my dreams. I wish I didn’t. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. I wake up in the middle of some fucking fantasyland campfire story, and it takes me a while to get my bearings. You know, what’s true and what isn’t. Where are you really? In the middle of some horror show with smiling dogs, or maybe an orgy of alien women, or maybe just tucked safe away in your bed. It’s a goddamn nuisance is what it is. You ever have that problem? Not knowing for sure what’s real?” He scratched behind his ear and picked something from his hair—a bug of some kind—then crushed it between his fingers. “Or have you got it all figured out?”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“How come?”
“Why are you here? What do you want?”
“You really want to know?”
Suddenly I didn’t like being naked around him. It was too personal, too intimate. Now that the sun was rising over the horizon, it was no longer just nature and breaching. Now there was something else involved—the shame of day. I stood and turned sideways, folding my arms over myself as best I could.
He chuckled, and I was embarrassed about my paltry modesty.
“Let me go inside,” I said.
“Who’s stopping you?”
I was keenly aware that I would have to pass close by him to go up the porch steps into the house. Taking two steps forward, I watched him to see what he would do—but he made no move. His eyes followed me as I got closer, and, as I put my foot on the first step, I thought his arm might shoot out and he might grab me by the ankle. And what then? Where would he drag me? What dirtiness would he scrape onto me? How would it feel on my skin? Would I hate it?
I bolted, running up the rest of the steps until I had my hand on the knob of the back door. Only then did I turn around to find he had not moved at all—he hadn’t even turned around. I looked at his back. There were scars all over it, little white and pink indentations highlighted by dirt and grime.
He had not seized me. He had not dragged me off somewhere, and now I didn’t know how I felt about that.
“You shouldn’t have attacked those people,” I said.
“Is that what you think happened?”
“You attacked them. I saw you.”
“If you saw it, then you know better. Sometimes you get tired of being the town garbage. And sometimes, when you’re tired like that, you realize that the only way to keep from being the prey”—he turned to look at me—“is to put someone else in your place. Besides, the whole town loves a slaughter. How come I don’t get to enjoy myself in the same way once in a while?”
I knew what he said was true, but I had no answer for him.
“You should go home,” I said.