He headed blindly across the hall toward the stairs. As he passed the living room he looked through the wide archway of it and saw that the room was lighter, lit gray-white by the long bay windows. On the couch was a long, dark shape that stirred slightly as Ben Joe watched, and to satisfy his own curiosity, he changed direction and headed toward the couch. At his feet there was a sharp ping; a saucepan full of what looked like popcorn had been in his path. But the figure on the couch didn’t move again, and after holding his breath for a minute, Ben Joe went on. He stopped at the head of the couch and stooped over, squinting his eyes in the attempt to see through the dusty dimness. It looked like Gary. His expression was hard to see, but Ben Joe could make out his pale face emerging from the depths of two feather pillows. His mouth was open but he was not snoring, only breathing gently and regularly in little even sighs. And his hair, drained of all its flaming color by the night, stuck out in sharp spikes against his pillows. Ben Joe watched him for a minute, considering the blandness of people asleep. Not even dreams or fits of restlessness seemed to bother Gary; he was peaceful and relaxed. Ben Joe shook his head and then, after putting away the thought of waking Gary up and asking him what had happened that evening, he turned back toward the hallway again.
Halfway up the stairs a sudden picture crossed his mind. He saw millions of houses, viewed from an airplane, and every couch in every tiny house was occupied by someone from yet another house. Everyone was shuffled around helter-skelter — Ben Joe on Shelley’s couch, Gary on Ben Joe’s couch, and God knew who on Gary’s couch. The picture came to him sharply and without his willing it, and before it faded, it had nearly made him smile.
The upstairs hall was almost black; no windows opened onto it. He felt his way past the circle of tall white doors, all of them closed and with only the murmuring sounds of sleep behind them. Then he was in his own room, where his bed was a welcoming white blur with the covers turned neatly down and waiting for him. From the bedside stand he picked up his alarm clock and tilted it toward the light from the window, frowning as he tried to see where the hands stood. Five-thirty. That gave him at least another hour, and maybe more if only the girls would rise quietly for a change. The shade on his window was raised and a square of pale white shone through it onto the rug; he pulled the shade down to the sill so that the sun wouldn’t waken him. Then he undressed, doing it slowly and methodically and hanging his clothes neatly in the closet so that he could go to sleep with the feeling that everything had been attended to in an orderly fashion. His socks he put in the small laundry hamper behind the door, making sure to lower the lid again without a sound. All his sisters slept lightly — downright night birds they were, and prone to wandering around at all hours — and right now there wasn’t a one of them he wanted to see. He tiptoed to his bed and lay down, still in his underwear, and reached for his blankets gingerly so as not to creak the springs. The top sheet against his skin was cold and smooth and he felt immediately protected, and more ready for sleep than he had been under the rough, mothball-smelling quilt at Shelley’s. He pulled the sheet up under his chin and closed his eyes, feeling them burn beneath the lids.
Wanting to be quiet kept him from changing his position. Gradually he grew stiff and tense, and his face muscles wouldn’t loosen up, but he was afraid to move around. Why hadn’t he got into bed on his stomach? He knew he couldn’t sleep on his back. Carefully he turned on his side, trying to make his body light on the mattress and tightening his jaw with the effort. Now he was facing the center of the room, away from the wall. He could see all the dim objects he had grown up with and a white rim of pillow case besides (his right eye was half hidden in the pillow), and he couldn’t not see them because his eyes wouldn’t close. They kept springing open again. They looked around the room continually and searched out the smallest thing to stare at, while the rest of his body ached with tiredness and a headache began just above the back of his neck.
His room seemed to be made up of layers, the more recent layers never completely obliterating the earlier ones. Of the first layer only the peeling decals on the closet door remained — rabbits and ducks in polka-dotted clothes, left over from that time when he had been a small child. Then the layer from his early boyhood: a small red shoe bag, still in use, with a different symbol of the Wild West on each pocket, a dusty collection of horse books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. And after that his later boyhood, most in evidence: a striped masculine wallpaper pattern, brown curtains, a microscope, the National Geographies. He tried closing his eyes again and thought about how each layer had become less distinct progressively; the top layer was flat and impersonal, consisting only of a grownup’s clothes in the closet and a grownup’s alarm clock on the stand, while the bottom layers were bright and vivid and always made him remember things, in striking detail, that had happened years and years before. He turned to the other side, grimacing at a creak in the springs, and faced the one picture on the walclass="underline" a black-and-white photograph of himself and Joanne on tricycles, in look-alike playsuits, with a younger, out-of-date mother between them in a mannish shoulder-padded suit and black lipstick. There had been another picture, with the cleaner square on the wall left to prove it, of his father in slacks on the mowed lawn with his hand on a teen-aged Ben Joe’s shoulder; but during the bad years Ben Joe had burned it, not knowing what else he was supposed to do.
He pushed his eyes shut; they popped open again. He turned on his back and looked at the ceiling and switched the room upside-down, picturing the furniture hanging from the ceiling and the light fixture sticking straight up from a bare and peeling plaster floor. To go out of the room, he must reach up an unusual height to the white china doorknob, and when the door was opened he must step over a two-foot threshold of striped wallpaper onto the chandeliered floor of the hallway …
The door opened. The crack of black at one side of it widened and widened until a girl’s face appeared in it, a small oval that could have been any of them except that a sort of space helmet of lace above it identified the face as Jenny’s. She didn’t speak out but crept very stealthily toward his bed without so much as creaking the floor. To Ben Joe, lying there watching her from under heavy, aching eyelids, she seemed very funny all of a sudden — cautious and bent forward like a nearsighted old woman.
“Ben Joe?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer.
“Ben Joe.”
Her whisper was piercing; she must have seen the slits of his half-open eyes. Ben Joe stirred slowly and then muttered something, making his voice purposely sleepy-sounding.
“Come on,” she said patiently. “You’re not asleep.”
She came to the foot of his bed, hugging her bathrobe around her, and sat down with a bounce that he was sure would wake up the whole household. He sighed and drew his knees up.
“I’m almost asleep,” he said.
“You’re not.”