Holding Wonder

Her feet slowed as she approached the landing. She hesitated, then she unlocked her door. She stepped in quickly and closed the door behind her. The feeling in her chest was an expanding balloon now, tight, hurting. She stood rigidly against the door until the pressure suddenly released and let her sag. She groped for her bed and slumped down on the edge of it. She stared around her, not needing a light to see the familiar room.
"It's empty, too!" Her mouth shaped the words in anguish. "Not even a refuge any more. There's nothing here –nothing at all!" Tears bit at the backs of her eyes then scalded thinly down. She got up and stumbled to her one window. It looked out on the length of her narrow, shadowy street.
"And now that's all empty, too-empty and neutral! And that's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way I'm supposed to keep it!"
The room and the street were much darker when she turned away, heavy-shouldered, pulling down the blind and groping to flick the lights on.
Bedtime ritual you can go through untroubled, because it's normal to have a bedtime ritual.
After she had turned out the light, Tella slid to her knees beside her bed. She clasped her hands tensely and began, "Oh, God-" She groped for words but no words came. She twisted around in troubled frustration and huddled on the floor, drawing her knees up tight to her chest and pressing her face into them fiercely. "Empty of prayers, even!" she mourned. "Nothing to pray about any more!" She hugged her knees convulsively, then stumbled up and over to the window. She stared past the edge of the awkward fold of the shade out into the darkness, to the dim glow of lights behind closed blinds and curtains. She saw the street-dead-empty.
She squeezed her eyes shut despairingly as the vast void inside her began to expand to gulp her down into eternal emptiness, to make her a cipher and then erase that symbol of nothing so that nothing-
Something! she screamed silently, her knuckles white on the corner of the blind. I have to have something somewhere!
Then, behind her flattened lids she saw herself, running down the stairs, her
white gown ghosty in the darkness, her bare feet hardly pausing for the door. She was in the street, running so swiftly, so lightly, that her gown was only a flick in the shadows, a flutter in the thin leakings of light from the buildings.
She saw herself at the bus stop. She turned and, starting back home, began to kindle the street.
The Darkness, the breath-clutching terror that rolled like smoke, darkly invisible, from the basement areaway.
All the cracks in the broken pavement, coiling and kinking, winding and snaring. She snatched her chilling angle from a noose of terror and plunged past Mr. Favella's door.
Oh, door, door! Be here for me if ever again I must scream me back from destruction!
The window-the eyes-the eyes that never blinked, only pulsed and dimmed like cigarettes in the dark as they watched and watched until you felt them like blunt hot metal pressed against you, never quite hot enough for blistering.
The muffled scream from the narrow crack between two buildings. The scream that beat itself silently against the brick walls that were forever narrowing, narrowing on whatever was in there-maybe me? Maybe me?-in the crack too narrow to live in but not narrow enough to kill.
The patterns-oh, the familiar engrossing steps, the secret, careful posturings no one would notice, but how else could you pass this spot and that spot unscathed, at least this once more!
The intersection-the roaring lift of flame to the right, scorching her cheek, the gurgling splash of waters reaching from the left, their forward misting beading in cold sweat along her hair line-but safely passed, safely past-this time.
No child from the sleeping houses to say `hi' to, only a child's hand that walked itself on its fingers, back and forth, back and forth with all the other hands, quietly parading, all, all the same-except that the child's fingerprints on the paving were blood.
The picket pattern. Oh quickly, touch each dark smudge her fingers had deepened over the years. The grating. The numbers. Five, seven, thirteen, eleven, eleven, thirteen. Over, safely-at least this time. Mrs. Larson! It was the eleven twice I kept forgetting that time!
Then the Terror, broadening and lifting, rolling in like choking fog around her building, the horror unnamed and unnamable, that some day, someday, might not part before her fear-tightened steps, her pointing brass key, that led her up to her front door.
And finally the stairs, and the gurgling gasp, the snatching of hands unseen that never came quite quickly enough from beneath the steps, but someday might! Someday might.
Then sanctuary. How wonderful, now, the emptiness of her room! How good the nothingness-the un-struggle! How home!
At the window, Tella, afraid to look and afraid not to look, willed her eyes to open. She clutched the blind so tightly that one fingernail cut a half moos
in the dusty fabric. And a new terror made her hastily change her hold. Always after this, hold only with little finger and thumb, or who knows what might happen-
The street was alive! Oh, the street was horribly alive! And crowded and boiling with all its old terrifying possibilities, all its menace! Not this time, perhaps, but maybe next!
Her bones were again familiarly waxen with dread. Her heart was shaking her white gown with its terrified-fugitive pounding. Tella stumbled to her bed, feeling behind her the quieting, infolding of the street, since she was no longer looking at it. She slumped to her knees, her tense face in her icy hands.
Oh God, give me the courage to face the terror of tomorrow. Help me to get to the bus without anyone noticing my fear. Strengthen me to meet whatever menace I may have to meet. Help me to be brave, O Lord, help me to be brave!
ONE OF THEM
I'M AFRAID! I'm afraid! I'm afraid! My fear has come on tiptoe many times before or peered around some corner or glinted through some crack, but this afternoon it came into the office, big and heavy-footed and breathed cold, unpleasant breath down the back of my neck. I could feel the starchiness of fear across my face and I blinked to clear my eyes of it. My hand slowed almost imperceptibly, waiting for my eyes to feed it more figures from the endless papers stacked by my machine. Then it clattered away busily again at the keys, independent of my fear, independent of me.
Me? I'm afraid! I'm afraid! I'm afraid! I don't know who I am. Oh, it's no amnesia-no sudden losing of my total self. I just don't know who I am. But I'm not lost entirely. There are five of us-and I am one of them.
That's hardly close enough, though. There in the office, I held myself, waiting and secret inside, not daring to take my eyes off my work, afraid to look up for fear I'd find myself someone I couldn't bear to be. Then Jimmy slid another sheaf of papers under the pile I'd nearly finished and I smiled at him and knew again who I was. But now I'm lying on a bed in a room alone-all alone-and I'm lost again.
Look-did you ever wake up in the dark not knowing where you were or which way you were facing or which way the windows were, with a lovely-or frightening-feeling of not being anywhere-or anyone? Nor needing to be anywhere-or anyone? It's like that-a little like that.
I think I know what has happened. All my life I haven't particularly wanted to be. I got born and some day I'll die, but meanwhile-I like to watch though, to watch and listen. I'm not in the cast of this play, but by some quirk of stage management I'm sitting on stage. I'd rather be in the audience.
It's pleasant to come home in the evenings, back to the big Dorm behind the hospital, and slip into my room without turning on the lights, and slip out of my work clothes and curl up on the end of the bed in the shadowiness of the room and listen to all the comings and goings in the hall. The calls and answers-the hurried feet-the water hissing down in the shower room, and to know that no one knows I'm here-no one in all the world knows where I am-and if no one knows, then maybe I'm not here at all!