In a Glass House Read online

  “Well I guess we’d better go.”

  Around three we joined the flow of the crowd as it moved toward the grandstand for the show. A helicopter sat discordant in the far corner of the oval the grandstand’s track formed, distracting like an irritation. I had seen it circling above the town during the course of the fair on its twenty-minute expeditions, though now its station seemed deserted.

  “Dad said maybe he’ll let us ride in it if we come on Saturday night,” Rita said.

  But from the furtive look Elena gave her it seemed she’d lied, had simply pulled the thought from thin air.

  We threaded our way through the crowd into the bleachers, Rita leading. There seemed a kind of violence in the air, the shrill, amorphous energy of children. A stage had been set up across the track from the grandstand, its backdrop, propped up behind it like a false front, showing a yellow brick road winding toward a distant Emerald City, the image seeming to merge without division into the yellowing corn field that stretched out behind it beyond the edge of the fairground. In our seats Rita leaned back theatrically into Elena.

  “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

  A young woman sitting next to us with two small children, her thin knees exposed beneath the hem of her dress, smiled over at me at this as at another parent.

  The show was a spoof of The Wizard of Oz, beginning with a small brass band’s slow, out-of-key rendition of “Over the Rainbow” and then taking twisted shape around the original, with a moustached magician in coattails and top hat named Professor Marvellous and a Dorothy-like character named Dotty in a skin-tight dress and high heels. My attention wandered, to the crowd, to the pale awkward knees of the woman beside us. The day seemed wrecked for me somehow by her smile, its simple acceptance of Rita when all day I’d felt only my irritation with her, my disowning of her though I could see now her tangled need. It seemed I had looked all along for these signs in her of some sort of rebellion but now that I had them would have preferred simply to see her whole and well and in place, not to feel this residual lingering of responsibility for her like an accusation. In a few days I would be gone, the whole of me focused now on this escape as on some last desperate hope; and from all my years in Mersea it seemed I’d take away only this sourness in me, this sense that nothing that had ever happened there had been untainted or complete.

  For a few years we’d come to the fair as a family, watching the shows together from the twilight hum of the grandstand and then dispersing into the midway, lingering sometimes near a booth where a barrel-chested hawker made outrageous bargains with the passing crowd to draw them in. Once my father had taken up the hawker’s offer to pay fifty-five dollars for a fifty-dollar bill, poising himself for the inevitable joke as he handed the bill over and then laughing louder than the rest when it came.

  “Now I’m going to take your fifty-dollar bill,” the hawker said, slipping the bill into a pocket with a magician’s flourish, “and turn it into mine.”

  Though true to his word he then peeled off fifty-five dollars for my father from a wad of bills in his hand.

  “I used to see those same guys at the fairs in Trivento,” my father said when we’d moved on, seeming more knowing now than he had in his laughter. “Once they’ve got people taking their wallets out they can sell them anything.”

  And I’d had an image of him then, young and unburdened and canny, his life all potential, visiting the fairs in the high wind-swept towns around Castilucci in some life I’d never known him in. It had seemed the first time that I’d ever envied him anything, holding inside him this other unencumbered past, his memories of this mountain freedom I’d imagined for him.

  XVIII

  From the mass of calendars and forms and brochures my possible futures had been laid out for me in, I’d chosen a university in Toronto, Centennial. It sat on the outskirts of the city, the vast square of its campus hemmed in like an island by the sprawl of suburb that surrounded it, the long rows of highrise apartments, the strip malls and endless bungalows; though it shared with its surroundings a treeless brick-and-concrete newness, its outcrop of buildings seeming like some landscape of the future from a film or television show, a future where even the natural world had been stripped down and modernized, set out in its own careful symmetry like so much more concrete and steel. To the north, at Steeles Avenue, the city ended suddenly, the highrises on the south side of the road there walled up against the corn and wheat fields across from them as at a coast; and riding the bus along Steeles I’d get a sense what an arbitrary thing a city was, how imposed and artificial, though from the inside it gave the impression of a hard immutability and rightness, its stores and streets and office towers seeming the very meaning and soul of the space they filled.

  I’d chosen Centennial because it had offered a scholarship, and was new, and was in Toronto, though as it turned out the long trip downtown by bus and subway seemed to keep the city always at one remove, merely a distant place I visited from time to time; and I’d chosen it because I knew of no one else from Mersea who had, and going there seemed an escape from what I’d been, from what others had seen me to be. But in my first months there I felt as if I had stepped out suddenly into empty space: I had nothing, finally, that defined me, not even the dull routines that had made up my life in Mersea, what I’d thought of then as encumbrances, obstacles in the way of some freer, better self, but that seemed now all that had kept me from the brink of this emptiness I felt impelled into. Waking my first morning in residence to the clean, comfortable newness of my room, its seventh-storey view of the fields north of the campus, its privacy and self-containment, I felt a kind of awe at my sudden freedom, the whole day, my life, stretching before me to be filled as I wanted. But already at breakfast, sitting alone in the residence cafeteria, watching the other students sift into their groups and alliances, I felt the panic build in me at being thrown again into the strangeness of another beginning, at having nothing more to bring me through it finally than myself.

  Classes started. I waited for the time when I might enter the university’s world, when my own life there might begin; but there seemed some rhythm I couldn’t quite catch, some crucial moment I’d missed when a decisive action or word could have brought me suddenly inside of things. Everything about the university gave the impression of a fixed but impenetrable order, everywhere taken for granted and nowhere explained: people came and went, alone or in groups, purposeful, self-sufficient; in the lecture halls they whispered together, made notes, showed every sign of understanding and competence though the lectures were thick with names and references I knew nothing of. In the main complex’s large indoor square, groups of students formed daily around tables where people distributed pamphlets and flyers or in a small amphitheatre where musicians sometimes played or speakers held forth, the sense palpable there of what I’d imagined a university to be. Yet even these groups, continuing on in their places day after day without clear purpose or end, attracting every day the same crowds, the same long-haired young men in bandanas or pigtails, the same women in loose, flowered dresses or torn jeans, had an air of exclusion about them, of enclaves already complete and fully-formed.

  It might have taken so little to step out of my isolation: in my residence, in my classes, other students spoke to me, were friendly, seemed willing to take for granted my normalcy. But somehow I couldn’t strike the right tone with people, felt I’d lost myself, could only impersonate, had to make up instant by instant who it might be acceptable for me to be; and the people who were friendly with me were exactly the ones I afterwards avoided, afraid they’d finally see into this falseness in me. Day by day the world seemed to narrow, its possibilities falling away, tapering down to the litany of my small failures, what I added up to, the true word that hadn’t come to me, the people I hadn’t met. I began to eat at odd hours or not at all, to keep to my room, sought out always the back corners of classrooms to be close to the safety of exits; for whole days at a stretch I
spoke to no one, emerging from my room only for my two or three hours of class and my erratic meals. Yet the more I cut myself off the more conspicuous I seemed, felt eyes burrowing into me always. Every venture outside my room seemed to carry a threat: if I heard laughter near me, or whispers or shouts, my body tensed instinctively against some expected humiliation.

  I started sleeping incessantly, twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. My lethargy seemed to feed on itself, irresistible, taking me over like a kind of possession: I sat for hours reading over and over again the same paragraph or page, stumbling through the thickness of words, their dreamy fading into gibberish; I began to nod off in the middle of lectures. For the first few weeks I attended every class, so frightened by my own ignorance, by what might be required of me, that the idea of skipping one never occurred to me; but then one morning I slept through my alarm and missed a lecture. I felt so panicked by what had happened that for the next few days I awoke with my heart pounding at the sound of my alarm. But my panic seemed exactly the fear that I might lose the one imperative that still gave some shape to my life, that my lethargy had understood now that there was no final authority to stand in its way and would slowly overwhelm me.

  I began to think seriously of killing myself. It was my first thought now when I awoke every morning, my last before I slept; it was the shadow behind all my other thoughts during the day. I’d often thought of my suicide before, had a thousand times planned out its every detail, taking a strange solace then from the idea of it; but there was something different in me now, a sick sense of its inevitability. I didn’t will myself to think of it, merely found the idea present in my mind at the end of every train of thought, forcing itself on me with what seemed a clear and inescapable logic; I didn’t plan for it, only cast around each time the thought formed for the most immediate execution of it, a passing car, the window in my room; I felt no pleasure in imagining what others might think of it, felt only the shame of it, wished instead that I might simply vanish into thin air like some character in a science-fiction film, all history silently shifting like water to efface every memory of me.

  The world began to take on the strangeness of a place that I would soon be leaving. Every quality of it seemed a mystery suddenly, the shapes of things, the colours, the odd liveliness of people, continuing in their ways as if some secret energy propelled them, as tireless and as certain as machines. But already a dozen times when I felt close to the thing, went so far once as to remove the screen from the window in my room, stood for a moment, my heart pounding, against the window’s square of empty space, it was the thought of my family that seemed to keep me from it, of the monstrousness of it for them, so far from anything that would make sense to them – they were what I’d wanted so much to escape and yet all that seemed to connect me now to the world, resurfacing out of the murk into which I’d tried to consign them to hold over me this final tyranny, the slender grip of home.

  I’d go into the common room sometimes late at night to watch TV, furtive like an intruder, sitting there in the dark through endless late movies trying to lull myself into self-forgetting. Coming in once, I found a group of other people from my floor just lighting up a joint; and before I could withdraw, one of them, Verne, his knees spread with a newspaper bearing a tangle of browning stems and leaves, had pulled to the side of the couch he was on and motioned me to sit beside him.

  “Do you toke at all, Vic?”

  In the inevitable crossing of paths on our floor in the washroom and halls Verne had always been oddly, reassuringly friendly toward me, seemed with his ragged clothes and his long centre-parted crimp of blond hair to have the benign, distracted look of a prophet or saint. But now his earnestness made me fear he was setting me up for an insult.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Not into it?”

  The first joint was still passing from hand to hand; Verne had begun to roll another one, casually intent, some small part of him precisely focused on the work while the rest of him floated free, still attentive to me, still awaiting a response.

  “I guess I’ve never really tried,” I said, flushing.

  “A virgin,” someone said, and laughed. But Verne was still all sincerity and respect.

  “You should try a hit,” he said. “Anyway you don’t get much off it the first few times.”

  He lit the second joint, the twist of paper at the end of it flaring for an instant as he drew in, then fluttering into ash. Keeping back his first long draw he held the joint a little away from his lips and drew in several more quick bullets of smoke, unthinkingly expert, then still holding his breath offered the joint to me, his eyebrows raised in question and his head nodding to answer, reassuring.

  I took a long drag as Verne had done, tried to hold it, coughed it up. Verne finally let out a long thin shaft of smoke.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said. “Give it another pull.”

  I drew in again, more gently, then again.

  The others had begun to talk. I followed the thread of what they were saying, drifted, came back, the joint passing from hand to hand and then to me again. The conversation had somehow come around to Verne’s dog.

  “Between my dog and a person I’d shoot the person, no second thoughts.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious. My dog never hurt anyone.”

  The joint continued to pass. My head seemed to have taken on the inflated hollowness of a balloon.

  “How does it feel?” Verne said.

  “It feels pretty good,” I said, and laughed, strangely, not certain why I’d laughed at all. But some of the others were laughing as well.

  “I guess he’s getting the hang of it,” one of them said.

  Afterwards Verne seemed to adopt me in some way, taking me on like a novitiate, stopping by my room now whenever he and his friends got together to smoke to invite me to join them. Everything in me resisted at first taking any pleasure from this new friendliness – it seemed too paltry a thing, too tenuous, to abandon all my hopelessness for. But despite myself a small feeling of well-being began to take shape in me. I kept waiting for Verne to turn against me in some way yet he merely continued on in his unquestioning inclusion of me in his world, seeming to require nothing more of me than that I be myself; and somehow this little thing was enough to pull me back, day by day the darkness I’d been in growing more distant till it began to seem a memory of some younger, more troubled self.

  Verne smoked up almost daily, a changing assortment of his male friends from the residence gathering in his room late at night and stretching out there on his bed or floor while he rolled joints under the fluorescent hum of his desk lamp; and though I spoke little during these sessions, retreating into the high, mellow hollowness of my stone, the conversation of the others then seeming to swell and die in odd fits like a kind of code, still I felt comforted by being there in the cluttered intimacy of Verne’s room, by his own mute acceptance of me, the sense of having entered somehow into the residence’s secret life. Verne liked to talk about dope, guilelessly erudite in his arcane knowledge, how it was grown, how its different products were harvested. But I’d think then of the countries it came from, the fields of it slung over jungled mountainsides or tended in the desert like gardens, the greening rows of it, of the sandalled workers who harvested it like coffee or grapes knowing nothing of us or our rituals, only doing a job every day like any other.

  In a matter of weeks I’d become a regular at Verne’s sessions. Slowly I began to take on the look of a smoker, let my hair grow, then my beard, started to keep my own supply which I’d steal a few quick hits off in the mornings to get the first subtle luminousness of a high before class. Yet it seemed that what kept me smoking wasn’t pleasure but a failure, the unrealized promise of its first newness, some cataclysm of vision I’d expected that hadn’t come; and more and more the time I spent stoned appeared simply lost to me, with no aftermath but the dull lethargy it left in me the next day. I began to h
ave the sense that weeks of my life had passed as if they’d been lived by somebody else: once, returning stoned to my room from Verne’s, I stared into my mirror and for an instant couldn’t recognize the image I saw there, saw someone who looked like Verne and his friends but who seemed to bear no relation to the person I thought of as myself.

  Then as we approached the end of fall term our smoking sessions dwindled in the face of impending deadlines and exams. A slow panic began to build in me at all the work I’d deferred. But when I tried to sit down to it my thoughts refused to focus, humming in my head like droning insects. I started to smoke up alone in my room, hoping at first to simply quell the roil of my thoughts but then inventing a thousand different excuses, though once I’d smoked I’d merely lie on my bed in a kind of paralysis, unable to work, to go out, to do anything. Finally I bought a dozen bennies from one of the residence dealers, the drug seeming to clear my mind like sun lifting a fog; and afterwards I began to sleep days and work nights, bringing myself up at night with the bennies and then down in the morning with a hit of pot or hash. The world seemed to fall away: there was only my work, the dead calm of the residence at night, the adrenalin rush of the drug coursing through me. One night we had our first snowfall, the snow swirling like a mess of phantoms outside my window and then laid out unbroken in the grey of dawn as if in forgiveness, the campus and the fields north of it stretching white and placid and still to the horizon.

  But when I’d finished, my body raw with the memory of its overexertion, I felt only drained and despondent. I spent long hours in the common room watching TV in a kind of daze, its flow of images mesmerizing after my isolation. The news from the Buffalo stations was full of the Watergate hearings, of Chile, of the oil embargo, of Spiro Agnew and Gerald Ford; the stories seemed to follow the same logic as television shows, had heroes and villains, aroused the same sense of an impending climax. Coming into them like that out of nothing I felt a strange disorientation, surfacing to them as from the mind-emptied clarity after a fever. The previous months seemed a dream I’d been through now: I’d come out to discover the world and yet still it eluded me, remote as these flickerings I watched in the common room’s late-night dark.