Sometimes an uneasiness came over me. Lying on my bed with one arm bent behind my neck, I would stare at my dark piles of books, my desolate desk, my disastrous life. Then when I pushed aside the blinds, the lustrous moon in the dark blue summer night would turn to cigarette ash, the velvety night sky would be the color of bruises and decay, my trafficking in forbidden creations would be a knifeblade twisting in my temple: and as if nourished by hopelessness, invigorated by despair, all the more fervently Olivia and I would hurl ourselves into the pathways of the unchanging summer night. Have I discussed my headaches?
By headache I do not mean the sharp pain at the side or back of the head, or perhaps behind an eye, the banal consequence of conventional stress. No, I have in mind the headache that is a band of metal tightening around the bones of the skull. I have in mind the inner blossom of fire, leaving behind charred and smoking places. And let us not forget the ratlike nibbling headache that gnaws its way slowly through the soft white sweet matter of the brain until it presses its furred back against the inside of the cranium, nor the fabulous winged headache with brilliant red and green feathers and gold-black claws that clutch and squeeze while the heavy wings beat faster and faster, nor the many-branched headache, the thornbush headache that swells and swells to fill the entire skull, pushing its glistening thorns against the soft backs of the eyes until the branches burst through the bloody eye sockets — such are the headaches that must be distinguished from those others, for these are creation’s dark sisters, shadows of the brilliant dream. Shall we continue?
One night Olivia was lingering in town before a display of soup cans in a variety-store window that glowed now red, now green, now red, now green, to the rhythm of a desperately bored stoplight. My headache glowed now red, now green, and as I urged her to come away, please come away, away from all this, I was startled to see a figure emerge from a nearby doorway and approach us. This had never happened before and I felt a constriction in my chest as if some vital organ were being squeezed by a malign hand. Olivia turned without surprise. She introduced us. I disliked him immediately, but really, dislike is too gentle a term for that inner quivering, that intimate raw red tickle of revulsion as if all one’s nerve endings were trembling in the stream of an unwholesome effluence. This Orville — Orville! — came smiling up to us. I saw at once that it was a mocking smile. The very set of his slouched shoulders was insolent. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said, with deliberate falseness. He was tall and thin and paper-pale, and would have been gaunt were it not for a disturbing fleshiness about him: plumpish soft hands, a softness about his chin, even a little potbelly that pressed through his shirt. He wore faded bluejeans and old running shoes and a soiled white dress-shirt. He reminded me of a soft white tuber growing secretly in moist soil. “Olivia has told me so much about you,” he continued. “Actually she’s never mentioned you. What did you say your name was? Harold?”
“We were just going,” I remarked.
“Then I’ll join you,” he said and walked alongside Olivia, standing too close to her. “Ah, the night! What would we do without it? It’s a wonderful invention. Youth, clair de lune, dreamlike distortion, spiritual transfiguration — even death. They start you off with ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star’ and before you know it you’re crooning ‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe!’ Match?” He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out half a cigarette.
He was, Olivia informed me when he had left (abruptly, with mocking bow), the son of a friend of a friend of her mother’s. He had driven his mother and her friend to Olivia’s mother’s house one night, in order to have use of the family car, and on his return he had seen Olivia on the stairs. “Nice painting,” he had remarked, jerking his thumb at her. “Is it an original?” Since then he had shown up a few times, asking for Olivia; she had spoken to him once, indifferently. This brief, unsatisfactory history, the episode of our meeting, his disagreeable name, in fact everything about him filled me with irritable unease. My instinctive, brutal revulsion wasn’t simply a response to his physical person, his mockery, his air of knowing some unsavory secret he was itching to reveal, his whole spiritual bag of tricks, but to something else that I found difficult to define but that revealed itself more clearly on later occasions.
Later occasions, did I say? Yes, later occasions — there were plenty of those. Night after night he would pop out at us from behind some maple trunk or lamppost and join us in our wanderings. Under the pressure of his presence the nights changed shape, became sadly deformed. Orville was by nature an intruder, a violator, and it showed in his slightest gestures: he leaped up to rip down handfuls of maple leaves, leaned over moonlit fences to break off flowers that he sniffed and tossed away. One night he pointed to the open door of an attached garage and began slinking along the driveway, beckoning. I was outraged but saw that Olivia wanted to follow. We crept into the dark garage and made our way along a narrow path between a station wagon on one side and on the other a pair of garbage cans, a basket of lawn tools, two bicycles, a hot-water heater wrapped in insulation. The black inner door opened to a moonlit porch. Orville sat on a chaise longue and smoked a cigarette, leaving the smoking butt in a bouquet of ceramic flowers. I saw that he was bent on goading me and in response I assumed an expression of intense boredom. Leaping suddenly to his feet he opened the porch door and beckoned us into the moonlit back yard. He led us under a taut badminton net, past a wicker armchair on which a badminton birdie lay on its side, and through a tall hedge into another back yard, where a yellow toy dump-truck sat beside a gardening glove, and then along a driveway bordered with zinnias until we came out on a leafy street.
“Night’s dreamlike freedom,” Orville said, sweeping out an arm. “Existence as dream. Eh, Robert? Dare me to climb that roof over there and sit smoking on the chimney. Dare me to enter that window and bring back a bunch of grapes from the icebox. No? And yet, on such a night, when the moon resembles a beautiful head of cauliflower, one feels, ho hum, that anything might happen. Here, watch this. See that pole?” He lowered his head and began running hard toward a nearby telephone pole. “Stop!” Olivia cried, but he kept plunging forward. At the last moment I snapped my head away. When I turned I saw the moonlit telephone pole. Its long shadow stretched across a neatly trimmed lawn, stood up against the bright white side of a house, bent across the pale roof. Orville, with mocking smile, stepped out from behind the pole. He placed a hand on his stomach and bowed. I glanced at Olivia, who was looking down at her hands.
Minor intrusions, you say, trivial violations; and yet they oppressed me. Those melodramatic entrances, those mocking innuendos, those little monologues on the dreamlike nature of existence — and once, removing half a cigarette from his pocket, he placed it on his thumbnail and said, “Here’s an interesting trick.” He flipped the cigarette into the blue darkness, shaded his eyes, and cupped an ear, listening intently. At last he turned up his palms with a look of exaggerated bewilderment. “Vanished,” he said. “Kaput. An illusion — like life itself, one is tempted to add.” Bitterly I resented his influence over Olivia. True, she treated him with indifference, even contempt, yet I noticed that she accepted his presence as if it were as natural as the night itself. He for his part had a subtly disturbing effect on her, for in his presence she seemed to me less vital, less richly particular, as if her full nature were being constricted by his mockery into a faded, wooden version of itself.
As for me, I could not understand his poisonous presence each night. Whatever route I took, however hard I tried, sooner or later he would step out to greet us with a look of false surprise; and a nervousness came over me as I tried to account for him, tried to interpret his obscure hints.