I dreamed of the restless dead. Everyone I knew, walking down the street as if in a trance. I ran among them, trying to get their attention, but their eyes were lost to some unknown distance. I tried to speak to them, but they did not respond. I screamed in their ears—my voice was hoarse. Everything was so quiet. I was even deaf to the shuffle of their feet. The only sound was the trickle of water over stone. I looked around to find the source of the sound, but there was nothing to be seen. I closed my eyes and listened harder, trying to recognize it because it sounded so familiar. And then I knew. It was the rivulet that led into the abandoned mine, miles away in the woods. Standing there among the silent zombies of everyone I knew, I could hear it. I could hear the sound of that tiny waterfall, the baby stream of melted ice. What does it mean for something to be inside your skull and miles distant at the same time? I didn’t like it. I swallowed, and there was dread in my throat.
When I woke, light was flickering against the wall of my bedroom. I rose and went to the window and saw that the street lamp outside was dying. It stuttered on and off, strobing the street with black and shadowed light.
Parked beneath the street lamp was the faded Camaro, and inside it I could see Blackhat Roy staring right at me, as though he had expected me to come to the window at that very moment.
I froze in place.
While I watched, he brought a hand up in front of his face, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into the meaty heel of his palm. His head lashed back and forth as though he were a coyote trying to tear away a piece of flesh from its fallen prey—and I could see his face go red from the effort. Finally he stopped and held his hand before his tearing eyes. Then he extended his arm out the car window and held it up for me to see. He had bitten through the skin, and blood ran from the wounds down his wrist and dripped onto the street. In the flickering light, the blood looked black as crude leaked from the earth.
There we were, insomniacs on a moonless night, a pestilent little Rapunzel in her cotton nightdress and her barbarous prince, calling to her with his blood.
*
We were in the living room watching a Glenn Ford movie, Blackboard Jungle, when Margot Simons inadvertently revealed to me a great secret.
She was huddled against my father, and even though there was room for me on the couch with them, I sat cross-legged in the easy chair. The movie is about a rough urban high school, and Margot Simons kept making sly, joking comments to me through the whole thing—about how this school wasn’t nearly as wild as our own. I smiled politely in response.
Then, at the end of the film, when the credits rolled, she said, “Huh, that’s funny.”
“What?” asked my father.
She pointed at the name of the writer whose book the movie was based upon: Evan Hunter.
“Mr. Hunter from school,” she said. “His first name is Evan, too.”
I thought about all the possible meanings of this connection. I didn’t much believe in coincidence. In my experience, harmonies existed everywhere if you were willing to hear them.
You sometimes want answers, and you sometimes go looking for them.
The next day I went to the auditorium after school, even though I knew it was a play rehearsal day. I sat in the back row and watched.
Peter found me there and tried to get me to leave with him, but I wouldn’t.
“What do you want to stay here for?” he said. “You’re not even in the play. You’ve got nothing to do with it.”
Mr. Hunter could see me talking with Peter, and our eyes met while he directed the students on stage and I shooed Peter away.
“Go on,” I told Peter. “I’ll talk to you later.”
The auditorium emptied out, the students hopping down from the stage, walking past me up the aisles, chatting and ignoring me. I shifted against the hard back of the seat, my skin feeling itchy, as I heard their laughter die out behind the closing doors until all sound had been drained from the auditorium and a great deafness took over. The air was dead still, and I felt flushed. Mr. Hunter stood on the stage at the opposite end of the empty hall, but I didn’t make a move toward him. Instead I waited for him to come to the back row, where I sat. Eventually he did.
“Lumen?” he said.
“Everybody lies,” I said. “That’s what you told me.”
“Lumen, are you all right?”
“I think I found out something,” I said.
“What did you find out?”
“Are you really—your name, is it really Evan Hunter?” I asked.
He looked confused.
“Evan Hunter,” I said. “Born in 1926. He wrote Blackboard Jungle. You know what else? He changed his name, too, to write cop books.”
“Lumen, there are lots of people with the name—”
“Liar.” My hand jumped to my mouth. I had surprised myself with my impudence.
Then he laughed, but it was a terminal kind of laugh, a laugh that meant the end of something.
“Okay,” he said and started walking back down the aisle toward the stage. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Come on if you’re coming.”
He led me behind the stage to the drama office, a little closet of a room with exposed pipes overhead and tall, gray metal cabinets with a fine coating of dust on the tops of them. He sat at the desk and pulled a bottle from a drawer and poured some into a plastic cup. It smelled strong.
“You want?” he said.
I shook my head. Then he downed it in one gulp and poured himself another, then capped the bottle.
“All right,” he said with a heavy breath. “You want to talk about the truth of things? Is that what we’re doing?”
I said nothing. An awful moment passed, and then another. Finally he shifted and took out his wallet, removed something from it, and slapped it on the desk in front of me. It was a faded photograph showing a skinny teenage boy standing outside the doors of a school. The school I recognized—it was my own.