Stepmutti, and Mandy Blemm was sitting up very rigid and straight and staring with an intently concentrated expression at the back of Mr. Johnson’s head as it cocked further and further to the side until it was evidently almost touching his shoulder, with his left arm now straight out to the side and his hand forming a kind of almost claw. And while I was not conscious or attentive to any of this directly — except perhaps that the back of Unterbrunner’s freckled neck in the seat ahead of me at the left periphery of my vision had gone very white and bloodless and her large head was totally rigid and still — in retrospect, I believe that the atmosphere of the classroom may have subconsciously influenced the unhappy events of the period’s window’s mesh’s narrative fantasy, which was now more like a nightmare, and was now proceeding radially along several rows and diagonals of panels at once, which required tremendous energy and concentration to sustain. Both the Art class’s deaf children and the other blind children (the latter of whom could not see the statuette, but whose sense of touch was very acute, and could, in a manner of speaking, see with their hands, and had passed the malformed statuette hand to hand) were ridiculing the statuette of Cuffie and laughing at Ruth Simmons, the cruel blind students laughing in a normal way, while the cruel deaf students’ laughter was either an apish hooting (those deaf people who are not mute tend to produce a hooting sound — I do not know why this is, but when I was very small, one of the boys who lived on our street had been deaf, and had played with and sometimes gotten into terrible fistfights with my older brother, until eventually their home caught fire in the middle of the night, and several of the family suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation, and they moved away even though their insurance had covered all expenses and repairs, and this boy had often made the characteristic hooting noises) or the mute and uncanny mime of normal laughter’s gestures and expressions, while the school’s Art teacher, who was both deaf and blind, smiled idiotically from her desk at the front of the classroom, unaware that Ruth Simmons was at the weeping center of a laughing, mocking, hooting, cane-waving circle of deaf and blind children, one of whom was tossing Ruth’s figurine up into the air and swinging his slender white cane at it like an American Legion coach hitting fungoes for outfield practice (though with considerably less success); while, in another series of panels further down, Mrs. Marge Simmons’ idling car was now just a large, throbbing, and only vaguely car shaped mound of snow with a peculiar greyish cast to it, as a result of the snowstorm’s piling snow having clogged the worn old car’s exhaust outlet and diverted the exhaust to the car’s interior, where, in an interior view, sat the late Marjorie Simmons, still behind the steering wheel, with her mouth and chin smeared all red as she had been applying Avon Acapulco Sunset lipstick when the carbon monoxide of the vent began to attack, forcing her hand into the shape of a claw that smeared lipstick all over her lower face as she gasped and clawed at herself for air, sitting rigidly upright and blue and staring sightlessly into the auto’s rearview mirror while, outside the idling mound, women so bundled up that they could hardly bend over began shoveling easements for their returning husbands into their driveways, and distant sounds of emergency sirens and ambulances began to approach the scene. At the same time, a single, traumatically abrupt panel appeared to depict Scraps, the subordinate, piebald feral dog with the sore, being attacked in the industrial tunnel by swarms of what were either small, tailless rats or gigantic, atomically mutated cockroaches as Cuffie, nearby, stands frozen with his paws over his eyes in instinctual shock and terror, until the tougher, more experienced and dominant feral rottweiler mix saves Cuffie’s life by dragging him by the scruff of the neck into a smaller side tunnel that serves as an escape hatch and led more towards the area of R. B. Hayes Primary and the Fairhaven Knolls golf course that lay just beyond the copse of trees at the window’s rear right horizon. The tableau, complete with the unfortunate piebald dog’s mouth open in agony and a rat or mutated roach abdomen protruding from his eyesocket as the predator’s anterior half consumed his eye and inner brain, was so traumatic that this narrative line was immediately stopped and replaced with a neutral view of the pipe’s exterior. As a result, the lone, nightmarish panel appeared in the window as just a momentary peripheral snapshot or flash of a horrifying scene, much the way such single, horrible flashes often appear in bad dreams — somehow the speed with which they appear and disappear, and the lack of any time to get any perspective or digest what you are seeing or fit it into the narrative of the dream as a whole, makes it even worse, and often a rapid, peripheral flash of something contextless and awful could be the single worst part of a nightmare, and the part that stayed with you the most vividly and kept popping into your mind’s eye at odd moments while brushing your teeth or getting a box of cereal down out of the cereal cabinet for a snack, and unsettling you all over again, perhaps because its very instantaneousness in the dream meant that your mind had to keep subconsciously returning to it in order to work it out or incorporate it. As if the fragment were not done with you yet, in much the same way that now, so very much later, the most persistent memories of early childhood consist of these flashes, peripheral tableaux — my father slowly shaving as I pass my parents’ bathroom on the way downstairs, our mother on her knees in a kerchief and gloves by a rosebush out the kitchen’s east window as I fill a water glass, my brother breaking his wrist in a fall off of the jungle gym and the far-off sound of his cries as I drew in the sand with a stick. The piano’s casters in their small protective sleeves; his face in the foyer coming home. Later, when I was in my 20s and courting my wife, the traumatic film The Exorcist came out, a controversial film that both of us found disturbing — and not disturbing in an artistic or thought-provoking way, but simply offensive — and walked out of together at just the point where the little girl was mutilating her private areas with a crucifix similar in size and design to the one that Miranda’s parents had on the wall of their front sitting room. In fact, the first moment of what I would consider true affinity and concord that Miranda and I experienced was, as I recall it, in the car on the way home from walking out of this film, which we had done mutually, with one quick glance between us in the theatre confirming that our distaste and rejection of the film were in perfect concordance, with an odd thrill in that moment of mutuality that was itself not wholly unsexual, although in the context of the film’s themes the sexuality of the response was both disturbing and unforgettable. Suffice to say we have not seen it since. And yet the lone moment of The Exorcist that has stayed so emphatically with me over the years consisted only of a few frames, and had precisely this rapid, peripheral quality, and has obtruded at odd moments into my mind’s eye ever since. In the film, Father Karras’ mother has died, and he has drunk a bit too much out of grief and guilt (‘I should have been there, I should have been there,’ is his refrain to the other Jesuit, Father Dyer, who is removing his shoes and helping him into bed), and has a bad dream, which the film’s director depicts with frightening intensity and skill. It was one of our first unaccompanied dates, not long after I had started at the firm where I still work — and yet, even now, the interval of this dream sequence remains vivid to me in nearly every detail. Father Karras’ mother, pale and dressed in funereal black, ascends from an urban subway stop while Father Karras waves desperately at her from across the street, trying to get her attention, but she does not see or acknowledge him and instead turns — moving with the terrible, implacable quality that other people in dreams often have — and descends back down the subway station’s stairway, sinking implacably from view. There is no sound, despite its being a busy street, and the absence of sound is both frightening and realistic — many people’s recollected nightmares are often soundless, with suggestions of thick glass or deep water and these media’s effect on sound. Father Karras is an actor seen in no other film of the time, so far as I know, with a brooding, Mediterranean cast to his features, whom another character in the film compares to Sal Mineo. The dream sequence also includes a lengthy, slow motion view of a Roman Catholic medal falling through the air, as if from a great height, with its thin silver chain undulating in complex shapes as the coin rotates as it slowly falls. The iconography of the falling coin is not complicated, as Miranda pointed out when we discussed the film and our reasons for leaving before the exorcism proper. It symbolizes Father Karras’ feelings of impotence and guilt at his mother’s death (she had died alone in her apartment, and it had been three days before someone found her; this type of scenario would make anyone feel guilty), and the blow to Father Karras’ faith in himself as a son and a priest, a blow to his vocation, which must be rooted not only in faith in a god but a belief that the person with the vocation could make some kind of difference and help alleviate suffering and human loneliness, which now, in this case, he has blatantly failed to do with his own mother. Not to mention the classic problem of how a supposedly loving god could permit this terrible outcome, a problem that always arises when people to whom we are connected suffer or die (as well as the secondary backlash of guilt over the buried hostility we often feel towards the memory of parents who have died — an interval of backstory had shown Father Karras’ mother forcing some kind of unpleasant medicine down his throat with a steel spoon as a child, as well as berating him in Italian for causing her to worry, and once walking silently past the window when he had fallen on rollerskates and skinned his knees and was crying out for her to come out to the sidewalk and help him). Such reactions are common to the point of being nearly universal, and all of this is symbolized by the dream’s slowly falling medallion, which at the sequence’s end lands upon a flat stone in either a cemetery or untended garden, full of moss and spiky undergrowth. Despite the bucolic setting, the air through which the coin falls has been airless and black, the extreme black of nothingness, even as the medallion and chain come to rest on the stone; just as there is no sound, there is no background. But spliced very quickly into the sequence is a brief flash of Father Karras’ face, terribly transformed. The face’s white, reptilian eyes and extrudent cheekbones and root-white pallor are plainly demonic — it is the face of evil. This flash of face is extremely brief, probably just enough frames to register on the human eye, and devoid of sound or background, and is gone again and immediately replaced with the Catholic medal’s continued fall. Its very brevity serves to stamp it on the viewer’s consciousness. My wife, it turned out, did not even see the rapid splice of the face — she may have sneezed, or looked away from the screen for a moment. Her interpretation was that even if the rapid, peripheral image truly had been in the film and not my imagination, it too could be readily interpreted as a symbol of Father Karras subconsciously seeing himself as evil or bad for having allowed his mother to (as he saw it) die alone. I have never forgotten these frames, though — and yet, although I privately disagreed with Miranda’s quick dismissal, I am still far from being certain of what the rapid flash of the Father’s transfigured face was meant to mean, nor why it remains so vivid in my memory of our courtship. I think it can only be the incongruous, near instantaneous quality of its appearance, the utter peripheralness of it. For it is true that the most vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur at the periphery of our awareness. Its significance for the story of how those of us who did not flee the Civics classroom in panic became known as the