A Dark Matter: A Novel Read online

  Looking for release, I switched on the radio, tuned as is generally the case to NPR. A man whose name I had temporarily blanked out even as I recognized his voice said, “The really unexpected thing is how melodious Hawthorne sounds when you read him aloud. We’ve lost that, I think, the idea that the sound of writing is important, too.”

  And Nathaniel Hawthorne turned the key; Hawthorne gave me entry to the lost realm. Not the idea of reading him aloud, but that of hearing his words recited: the sound of his writing, as the man on NPR said. I knew exactly how the Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter sounded, because I had once known a boy who had the ability to remember everything he read, and this boy often quoted long passages from the Hawthorne novel. He also liked to throw into ordinary conversation the crazy words he had discovered in a book called Captain Leland Fountain’s Dictionary of Unknown, Strange, and Preposterous Words. (He had once told me he found it extremely odd that while nostology was the study of senility, nostomania had nothing at all to do with old age but simply meant a serious case of homesickness.) His name was Howard Bly, but we, our little band, all called him “Hootie.” For some reason, all of us had silly nicknames. The kid couldn’t help memorizing everything he read. When a string of words entered through his eyes, it printed itself on some endless scroll in his brain. Although I certainly wish I had this capacity, I don’t have the faintest idea of how it works, nor did it seem particularly helpful to Hootie Bly, who was not at all literary.

  When we were seniors at Madison West and he was seventeen, Hootie looked about thirteen or fourteen, small, blond, pink-cheeked, and cherubic. He had eyes the ceramic, cerulean blue of dolls’ eyes, and his hair flopped over his forehead like bangs. Think of Brandon De Wilde in Shane, put a few years on him, and that would be Hootie. People tended to love him, if only because he was so beautiful and didn’t say a lot. He wasn’t smart, like the Eel, my girlfriend, Lee Truax, but neither was he stupid or slow—it was just that Eel was really smart. Hootie was not aggressive or forward or pushy in any way. I guess he was born with natural modesty. That doesn’t mean he was passive or wishy-washy, because he was not.

  This is what Hootie was like: When you look at a group photo, particularly a picture of a bunch of people doing something like hiking across a meadow or hanging out in a bar, you can always spot one person who stands mentally off to one side, enjoying the spectacle before him. Digging things, as Jack Kerouac would say. Sometimes Hootie liked to just lie back and, well, dig what was going on around him.

  I can say this about Hootie Bly, that he was good through and through. The guy didn’t have a mean-spirited or cruel cell, never mind a bone, in his body. Unfortunately, because of his size and the way he looked, people who were not as good-hearted—bullies, jerks—sometimes went after him. They enjoyed picking on him, teasing him in a way that went beyond teasing, sometimes actually shoving him around, and at times we who were his best friends felt we had to step in to protect him.

  Hootie could speak up for himself, though. The Eel told me that when a truly ugly and unpleasant fraternity boy insulted him in a grungy State Street coffee shop named the Tick-Tock Diner but called the Aluminum Room, Hootie gave the asshole a murky look and baffled him with a quote from The Scarlet Letter: “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?” Less than a minute later, the UW student widened his insult to include Hootie’s parents, who, the kid knew from having seen all of them in the place, owned Badger Foods, the little triangular grocery store two blocks down on State Street. Hootie came back at him with another bit of Hawthorne. “What a strange, sad man is he! In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder!”

  The fraternity boy, the same sick, twisted Keith Hayward I had recently been reading about in Detective Cooper’s unhappy memoir, apparently charged toward him, but was held back by his roommate and only friend, Brett Milstrap, who did not want them to be thrown out of the Aluminum Room before the (probable) arrival of this gorgeous blond girl they coveted so greatly that just the sight of her sipping a cup of coffee could keep them warm and happy for three or four days. Meredith Bright was her name, and like Hayward and Milstrap she played a huge role in the story I began trying to figure out over the next weeks and months. She must have been one of the most beautiful young women ever to appear on that campus. The same would have been true if she had gone to UCLA instead of UW. Meredith Bright detested Keith Hayward and thought nothing of Brett Milstrap, but the first time she laid eyes on Hootie Bly and Lee Truax, she was enchanted by them. For a number of reasons.

  It would be fair to say that the whole long, crazy story I wound up trying to unearth began when Meredith Bright, seated alone in the Aluminum Room’s last booth, lifted her eyes from her copy of Love’s Body, gazed down the length of the counter to spot Hootie and the Eel, and rocked them both by smiling at them. But before I get even farther ahead of myself, I have to go back to where I was and explain a few more things about Hootie and our little group of friends.

  I said that hearing one of those comfortable NPR voices talk about the experience of hearing Hawthorne read aloud was all I needed—all I needed, that is, to understand the intense, unexpected deluge of emotions that had been chasing me around the room since I had looked into the bloodshot eyes of Mr. Obstreperous as two fullbacks from Carbondale toted him by on his way to the exit. I had fought so tenaciously against the sudden sense of recognition that unmediated images and passages from my childhood had streamed back to me in a painful flood. The reason for my doomed tenacity was that Obstreperous reminded me of Hootie, who had spent four decades in a Wisconsin mental hospital, communicating entirely in individual words from Captain Fountain and, maybe when feeling particularly nostomaniacal, sentences like “Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?” The Scarlet Letter and the Captain’s obscure gewgaws: that isn’t craziness, it’s fear, the same kind of absolute terror that turned Obstreperous into a muttering statue.

  I wanted to know more about that fear. Now that I had opened up this seam, it came to me, I wanted to follow it right to the end. Once I understood the causes of Hootie’s paralysis, I thought, a layer of reality that had been closed to me for nearly forty years would at last become visible.

  But it wasn’t all about me, not by a long shot.

  Off and on, over the decades since the mid-sixties, this hidden world—the whole question of the wandering guru named Spencer Mallon, what he had accomplished, what he had not, what he still meant to those who had loved and admired him—had troubled me, more than troubled me, aroused an ongoing doubt and misery that stuck to me like a shadow whenever the whole issue swung back into view. Part of this continuous disorder was rooted in the silence of a single human being. She wouldn’t talk to me about it, and neither would the others. They shut me out. I mean, I don’t want to go overboard about something that happened so long ago, but was that really fair? Everything was fine, everything was chummy, and just because I didn’t want anything to do with this Mallon faker, they closed ranks against me. Even my girlfriend, who was supposed to look like my twin!

  You know what happened? Like a dumb kid, I thought I was, I told myself I was, sticking to my principles, when actually the whole business of this amazing man who had been to Tibet and seen someone cut off someone else’s hand in a bar, who talked about the Tibetan Book of the Dead and a philosopher named Norman O. Brown, who was besides that tied in to ancient magic, all this stuff kind of scared me. It sounded like total bullshit, but it also seemed far out of my league—because, who knows, there might have been some reality in it, after all. I think I was afraid that if I met this guy, I might have to believe in him, too.

  The Eel knew exactly how I felt, that’s how smart she was. She understood that my reaction was a lot more complex than I was willing to accept, and that I was backing away from a fear she found second rate
to begin with made her lose a crucial degree of respect for me. Given that I had no interest in pretending to be a college student and had therefore stayed at home the first time my friends all went to the Aluminum Room, I had two chances to make things right: I could have come along to the Italian restaurant where they first heard Mallon’s spiel, and I could have made up for my lapses by joining everyone at the second Mallon-séance, in the Henry Street apartment that turned out to be where Keith Hayward and Brett Milstrap lived. Those were my two chances. But after I said no the second time, the door slammed shut, and I was left alone outside, where I had deliberately gone and placed myself.

  While they were all trailing after Mallon, I took long walks by myself and wound up, some of the time, shooting lonely hoops at a grade-school playground. Or trying to. I remember missing fifteen free throws in a row, one after the other. On the big day itself, Sunday, the sixteenth of October, 1966, I just stayed in my room and reread Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, a novel I loved to distraction because it seemed to describe me, Lee Harwell, exactly, a sensitive, lonely, brilliant young fellow obviously destined for literary success, or if not me exactly, at least the person I’d be if I’d gone to Harvard and traveled around Europe, O lost, O soulful, word-crammed wanderer on this earth, a stone a leaf an unfound door.

  For two whole days, I had no idea where she was. When I did get some information, it was infuriatingly circumscribed. This was, precisely, all that I was allowed to understand: in one way or another, under circumstances forever closed to me, things had exploded. There had been a gathering, a meeting, perhaps some sort of ceremony, and at this event everything had gone spectacularly to hell. A boy had not only been killed, he had been hideously mutilated, ripped to shreds. One of the inevitable rumors about this cataclysm had been that the dead boy seemed to have been torn apart by enormous teeth. During the months that followed, over in fact the next four decades, the one person I still knew from those days who had been part of Mallon’s ill-fated entourage, my wife, had refused even to try to explain what had happened to them all.

  For a week or so, she just clammed up. The only details she was willing to share with me had to do with the conduct of the police during the subsequent investigations, the confusion and rage of her useless father, her impatience with our teachers and fellow students, her despair about poor Hootie. After things had calmed down a bit and the mystery of Hootie’s location had finally been clarified, Eel tried on at least two occasions to visit him at the Lamont Hospital, where it turned out he had been all along. The first time she spoke to someone there, whoever it was (apparently, descending to such details was a waste of time) forbade her to come out: Mr. Bly’s condition was too grave, too precarious. A month later, she tried again. This time, the gatekeeper invited her to visit the hospital, and it was Hootie Bly who turned her down. Using words borrowed from Hawthorne, he refused even to see her. Ever. His refusal stayed firm throughout our senior year, and I guess finally Lee gave up. After we took off for New York, she never mentioned him again.

  From time to time I thought of that smiling, blue-eyed kid and wondered what had become of him. He was still important to me, and I knew that he must still have meant a great deal to my wife, who eventually ceased to be the Eel and became widely known, in certain circles, under the name she was born with. I wished him well. After six months, I thought, eight months, he must have left the hospital and picked up his life again. He probably moved back in with his parents. On their retirement, he would take over Badger Foods, maybe liven it up a little. Or get out of Madison, marry a girl who looked a lot like him, work in an office, and raise two or three blond, cherubic children. People like Hootie Bly were supposed to have uneventful, essentially unexamined, but deeply appreciated, truly lived-in lives. If the world didn’t turn out well for them, the rest of us didn’t have a chance.

  Hootie’s true fate remained a mystery to me until the summer of 2000, when on a rare vacation together my wife and I went to Bermuda. I tend not to take vacations, and my wife prefers to visit places that she already knows, where she has both friends and something to do. She spends a lot of time at conferences and board meetings, and she has a busy, useful, completely admirable life. Marriage to a novelist can be as lonely as being one yourself, without even the companionship of imaginary people. I am happy that Lee has created such a fulfilling life for herself, and I enjoy those few times when we go somewhere together for no reason other than to relax and walk around. (Of course I always bring my work, and Lee travels with her own gadgets.) So we were having a nice lunch at a place in Hamilton called Tom Moore’s Tavern, and across the room I saw a man of about my age with blond hair going gray, a good tanned face full of character, seated at a table with a very appealing woman who looked a good deal like him. If my wife were not present, despite her age the blond lady would have easily been the best-looking woman in the room. The former Eel remains completely unaware of this, and she gets irritated if someone points it out, but no matter where she happens to be, Lee Truax is always the most beautiful woman in the room. I mean that. Always.

  The well-off, affable man across the room could have been the grownup, prosperous Howard Bly, if Hootie had made all the right choices and enjoyed a fair bit of good luck. “Honey,” I said, “Hootie Bly could be sitting across the room from us, and he looks great.”

  “It’s not Hootie,” she said. “Sorry. I wish it were, though.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked.

  “Because Hootie’s still in that hospital. The only thing that’s different about him is that he got older, just like us.”

  “He’s still there?” I asked, aghast. “In the Lamont?”

  “That’s where he is, the poor guy.”

  “How do you know?”

  I watched her measuring her fish with her fork, then severing a morsel she moved carefully onto its tines. Other people seldom notice this, but my wife eats in a very particular way. I always enjoy watching her go through the necessary rituals.

  “I have my ways,” she told me. “From time to time, people communicate with me.”

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me, isn’t it?”

  “This conversation is about Hootie, not who told me about him.”

  And that was that. Her refusal to speak returned us to the familiar ancient silence, where I had no right to ask for information because I had chosen first not to prowl around the university campus, then, more condemningly, not even to meet, much less adore, Spencer Mallon. My friends, even the Eel, they all but worshipped this guy. I should say, especially the Eel. Who do you think she thought she was protecting by refusing to name her source?

  That’s enough of Mallon, at least for a while.

  Of the five people in our little band from Madison West, three had serious problems with their fathers. At the time, I thought this explained a lot about their attraction to Mallon, and I still do. Going by what my friends told me, Spencer Mallon might have been designed by committee to be hypnotically appealing to a bunch of adventurous seventeen-and eighteen-year-old kids who had, one way or another, been wounded by their bad-news dads. He certainly spoke straight to my friends, he roped them right in. He seduced them—that’s what it comes down to. And because they had been hypnotized and seduced, they followed this character out into an obscure meadow owned by the university’s agronomy department and cheerfully went along with whatever it was that proved to be so ruinous to them, every one.

  The Eel’s dad was no prize to begin with, but after crib death took her little brother in his sixth or seventh month, I don’t remember, he fell apart, spectacularly. Carl Truax had earned a few patents that proved he had been an inventor once, and most days he dragged himself out of his foul-smelling bed to put in a few hours in the backyard shed he called his “workshop.” By the time his daughter was in her senior year, he had stopped pretending to do anything out there but drink. When the day’s first bottle became no more than a fond memory, he took off on his round
of crummy taverns and bars, scrounging for a couple of dollars he could spend on more alcohol. How guys like that manage to get money is utterly mysterious to me, but good old Carl almost always managed to raise enough to see him through his day’s drinking and still have a few bucks left over. Sometimes he brought home a present to appease the only other person who lived in his hovel, his amazing daughter, the person who, when he was home to eat dinner, cooked it for him and did her best to keep the hovel clean and sanitary. Her attitude toward her father generally vacillated between a dry rage and a furious contempt.

  Just before Dilly Olson came up with the brilliant idea of hanging out in places like the Tick-Tock to pose as UW students and get invited to fraternity parties, the ploy that led them straight to Keith Hayward, Meredith Bright, and Mallon, Carl rolled in with a poster he had won in a poker game at the scuzziest dive in all of Madison. It was of a famous Cassius Marcellus Coolidge painting called A Friend in Need, depicting half a dozen dogs dressed like humans playing poker. He was sure she’d love it. A cigar-smoking bulldog was using a rear paw to pass the ace of spades under the table to a yellow mongrel, wasn’t that the cutest damn thing you ever saw? The Eel detested this sentimental piece of shit, but three of the boys, who were reminded of themselves, fell in love with A Friend in Need and talked about it nonstop for days. They had the run of the hovel and therefore constant access to the masterpiece because about a week after the death of her infant son, Carl’s wife and Eel’s mother, Lurleen Henderson Truax, took off without softening the shock of her absence with advance warning or a farewell note. Four days after the baby’s burial, when her husband was on his rounds and her nine-year-old daughter at school, the Eel’s mom crammed some stuff into a cheap suitcase from St. Vincent de Paul, ducked out of the hovel, and disappeared. Lurleen had her own problems, plenty of them, and the Eel missed her in the complicated way you’d miss a hive of bees that produced great honey but seemed intent on stinging you to death one day.