All the screens in the various rooms of the second floor of the Fosters’ house were tuned to horror films. From the sacred to the profane: Bride of Frankenstein juxtaposed with The Fly, Plan Nine from Outer Space with Night of the Living Dead. In every room, a huddle of teens, as if born there, each in his or her Platonic cave, taking in the broadcast fuzz of UHF stations. Gerry and his sheets swept past one of the guest rooms, where the mirror over the vanity captured in reverse the image on the screen, Raymond Burr, from the original Godzilla, rumbling in monotone about destruction and waste, This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which, up until a few days ago, was entirely beyond the scope of mans imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this moment still prevails. In the deep space of the mirror image, featureless backs of teenaged heads. For a second it seemed that these were the faces of his acquaintances, each a blank mask. In each of the six bedrooms, this stultified tableau. In each, Gerry stopped and inquired after the story:
— I was a Teenage Werewolf, said Margaret Nagle, stirring from anesthesia.
— The part where he’s in front of the bathroom mirror? Gerry said. — You know, sprouting fresh growth on his —
— Didn’t get there yet.
— Want to kiss me, Margaret?
And so on. From one tomb of lethargy to the next. The sheets, in his arms, grew heavy. Wherever he paused he leaned against a wall with this burden. As with any kid of his age, he avoided the master bedroom. Everyone knew that the beds of parents had been protected with hexes of witchcraft and if you glimpsed them, especially unmade beds of parents, you’d be turned into a pedophile or a foot fetishist or one of those guys who could tell you the weather on the day of Lincoln’s inaugural but couldn’t hold a job. According to blueprints of the second floor, the master bedroom was immediately to his left, here, at the top of the main staircase, where Danny Henderson and Pete Mars, the harlequins of his school, were engaged in a sinister prank. They were attempting to roll an enormous fire extinguisher down the main staircase of the Fosters’ house. A chemical fire extinguisher. As Gerry came upon them at the summit of the staircase, Henderson, practical joker, tried anew to lift the extinguisher. This should have been feasible, since Mars was captain of the wrestling team. But no. There was a danger of herniated disks. They dropped the extinguisher again, narrowly avoiding crushing metatarsals. The thud of the cylinder on ancient beams rippled along the main staircase.
— Can I get by? Gerry said.
— Don’t help us or anything, Abramowitz. What if we had an emergency? Sheets might come in handy in an emergency like this. You never know.
— I promised to get these sheets to Polly Firestone.
They twisted the extinguisher around, another revolution, and its penile hose swiveled and whacked Gerry on the back of his thighs as he passed. Henderson giggled, and then, in a heroic attempt to keep the rusted bottom of the extinguisher from fouling the maroon carpeting that ran the length of the main staircase, he put another tremendous effort into lifting it up. But, having failed to warn Pete Mars, he dropped it altogether and only Pete’s body block kept them, Danny and Pete and the fire extinguisher, from plunging down the staircase.
— Make sure the pin is still in the handle, Gerry volunteered from higher ground. — Or you’ll discharge chemical foam all over the house.
— Shut up, Abramowitz, Mars said. — What are you, fire safety commissioner or something?
— Yeah, Henderson said, — buzz off. This fire extinguisher’s been in this house longer than you’ve been in this town. You jerk. If we wanted your opinions, we’d torture you.
Their remarks emboldened him to push by, to descend. His relatives had been oppressed in every country in Europe. His suffering was immemorial. And there was no time to dwell on slights, because Polly Firestone was waiting by the screen door that led to the porch, and, beyond the porch, into the woods. She’d disposed of her sheets.
— You’re still late.
The forest beyond her, beyond the porch. Remember it? There used to be forest in Fairfield County. A little forest anyhow. Woodpeckers, foxes, turkeys, muskrats, skunk cabbage, trees thickly competing, trees for climbing. The idea of tree-climbing outlasted the moment when it was age-appropriate to climb trees, well into your teens, you were alone in the woods, in the density of woods, you had one eye out for the right arrangement of boughs that would reward your nimbleness. Conifers were better than decid uous trees. They dropped their mattress of needles below. Here was one, on this very spot, and before you could get too panicky about the heights involved, you were halfway up the tree, never mind stories you heard, that kid in the wheelchair, that one who fell to his death, you were halfway up the tree, with a view. Just like all those real estate people were always saying. You had a view. I’m what I see, lord of what I see, I’ll give it back sometime, I’ll be a kid again, later, a kid who cant do anything right, cant say the right thing, cant put a sentence together or sing in tune, a kid cutting through the woods, on the way home, but for now I’m surveying the expanse of my empire. That forest you remembered with a catch in your throat was itself a falling off from a prior forest, a primeval forest that was more grand, more impenetrable, more wild than the forest you remembered. The moment you sentimentalized, therefore, was a watered down conception of something more genuine that preceded your nostalgia by centuries. Thus, any true account of a suburban forest should feature a neglectful hunter grinding down a home-rolled cigarette in a bed of pine needles, underneath the very tree you once climbed, this after he has drunkenly fired thirteen times into a white-tailed deer fawn, to make sure it won’t move anymore, after which he vomits during disembowelment of the animal. Its for the best that we’re out here pruning the weaker individuals of this herd today because otherwise these animals will get into your gardens and eat your landscaping. The hunter grinds out the stub of the cigarette in the bed of pine needles, and the woods burn.
In the case of the Fosters’ Halloween party, the ignition was different.
Polly led him out, down the steps, and then they were at the bank of the creek. All the time Gerry had spent in the house, in the consideration of its interiors, turned out to be time squandered. If the elusive center of the party could be said to be anywhere, according to the barometers like median chatter decibels, recycling potential, egg fertilization percentages, and so forth, it had to be here at the bank of the Fosters’ creek. The waterfall — a dozen feet of glacial moraine with a froth overspilling it — emptied here, into the creek, which in turn went meandering into town, under the Boston Post Road, over by the Good Wives’ Shopping Center (where they filmed The Stepford Wives), down into the Five Mile River, which emptied into the Sound, which emptied into the Atlantic. A host of the invitees from Nick Fosters Halloween extravaganza were gathered in this vicinity. On the banks. In a window upstairs, an LP skipped in its last groove. No one made an effort to correct it. Carnival dynamism was the eminent force: The center of the party was wherever the greatest amount of intoxicants was located, and therefore here was the missing keg, in the shallows of the river, where it was cool, and one of the girls who had come with Polly Firestone, Nancy Van Ingen, was knee-deep in the creek, handing effervescences of beer back to the celebrants on dry land. Nancy’s beige corduroys were wet up above her knees. Her carelessness seemed oddly seductive. There was an expectation in the air, Gerry recognized, and it had to do with more than beer. Polly Firestone accepted his pile of sheets.