As I banged on the house’s door, the buzzards twenty and thirty feet above me showed no reaction and continued their rondelle. I heard nothing from inside, peeked in the living room window—saw nobody—banged some more—still nothing—and was reaching out my hand to test the knob when the door came open and Darcy Miller stood before me. He wore a striped lab coat, and he was barefoot, if I recall, although it’s hard to recall, because the lab coat was hanging open, and beneath it Darcy seemed to be completely naked, and I didn’t know where to look. So I didn’t look anywhere.
Darcy made no greeting, only studied me until I re-introduced myself and asked him if he was doing okay. He said, “Perfectly okay.”
“Jerry Sizemore asked me to come out because he can’t get you on the phone. What have you been doing with yourself out here?”
“Thangdoodlin’.”
“Thangdoodlin’?”
He turned away and sat down on the couch without explaining the term—also, I’m afraid, without closing his robe—and I sat down beside him. I feel a natural impulse here, having just entered Darcy’s personal field, to stop and describe his face—the bloodshot, ice-blue eyes, the fishnet grapestains over his nose and cheeks—or his horny feet, or his crop of wispy hair once probably reddish, now translucent—but, as I say, I was blinded by my embarrassment, and I can now offer only the additional details that Darcy smelled like booze and that I heard the faint whistle of breath in his nose just the way I heard the breathing of grownups through their hairy, cavernous nostrils when I was a child. For a little bit, that was the only sound in the house, the whistling of Darcy’s nose…He said, “I think I can make you some tea. Is that what you want?”
“First,” I said, “can we talk a little about what’s going on with you? Jerry’s worried, I’m worried—”
“What’s got you so worried?”
I felt lost. “Well, I mean, for one thing, you’ve got your robe open there, and your package is just—hanging out.”
The lab coat closed with metal snaps. He fumbled with a couple to get it shut. “Maybe I’m expecting a young lady.”
(Now I noticed faint freckles on the backs of his hands and noted how pale were the little hairs. His lips were gray and blue, as if he were cold.)
“Jerry thinks you might be losing it out here.”
“Losing what?”
“Your mind.”
“Who wouldn’t? Let’s have a cup.”
He led me into a short passageway with the linoleum-era kitchen on the left, the door to a “spare room” across from it on the right, and the master bedroom and bath at the end. We sat at the wobbly Formica table in the kitchen while Darcy, with a fastidiousness arising, I would guess, from a sense his competence was under review, got out all the stuff and brewed us a pot of Lipton’s tea. I went right to the subject of the visitors—the ghosts—and he said, “No, they’re not ghosts. It’s them. They’re alive.”
“Even though they’re both dead and buried.”
“Yeah.”
“But Darcy, don’t you think that’s—crazy?”
“Certainly! It’s the craziest thing ever. Yesterday I saw Ovid walking out there by the stables,” Darcy said, much to my confusion, until I realized Ovid must be the brother, “and we sat over there on that big old cottonwood stump, side by side, and talked.”
“Can I ask what you were talking about?”
“Nothing too specific. Just this and that.”
“Did you ask Ovid to explain his presence? Did you remind him he’s supposed to be dead?”
“No! What would you think if I said to you right now—Hey, man, you’re supposed to be dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“How would that fit into any reasonable or polite conversation?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
“Darcy, when was the last time you had a checkup?”
“Oh. Hell. A checkup?”
“Do you have a doctor here in Austin?”
“No. But I have a nurse in San Francisco.”
“You have a nurse? What does that mean, you have a nurse?”
“She’s more of a girlfriend. But she’s a nurse at Cal Pacific. She’s a Native American. She’s Pomo Indian.”
“Do you two talk on the phone?”
“Sure. She’s very tuned in to this sort of business, the ethereal waves and the currents, or anyway she says she is—the spirits and the haunts and the songs of the mother Earth.”
“So, then, you’ve told her about all this—about your dead brother and dead sister-in-law visiting you?”
“Yeah.”
“And what does she say?”
“She says it means I’m dying.”
Well, I could see that as one possibility. But not as a result of illness, only as the inevitable outworking of the days of D. Hale Miller, and it was a lot like the destiny I’d pictured for myself when I was a criminally silly youth: a washed-up writer with books and movies and affairs and divorces behind him and nothing to show for it now, eking out a few last years—drinking, sinking. Of course in my youth it had seemed romantic because it was just a picture. It didn’t have an odor. It didn’t smell like urine and alcoholic vomit. And the way I’d been rushing at it, if I’d continued toward that kind of end it would have come a lot sooner, in my twenties, if I had to guess, preceded by not much.
“It doesn’t look like your car has moved.”
“It works fine, but I don’t like to drive it.”
“How do you get supplies?”
“They bring stuff. Bess and Ovid. They bring everything.”
We drank our tea, which wasn’t bad. Darcy had puffy red hands, the flesh extremely wrinkled, and as I studied his fingers they began to look like eight dancer’s legs clothed in droopy stockings of flesh, marching and kicking around the tabletop in front of him, pushing his china cup and saucer around, leaping onto and wrestling with a crisp clean orange-and-white University of Texas baseball cap, which he never placed on his head. My plunge into despair felt vividly physical. If I’d closed my eyes I’d have been sure a colossal savage was dragging my chair through the floor and down through mile after mile of the dirt below. If I’d had control of my senses, my awareness, which I did not, I’d have noticed the afternoon had turned toward evening, and I’d have looked around for a light switch. We sat in a deepening gloom.
“Darcy, these visitors, Bess and Ovid—where are they right now?”
One of his fingers fluttered upward from the table, dragging the rest of the hand with it, to point across the hallway. He said, “Look”—and I looked, terrified my gaze might follow this indication right into the faces of two ghosts, but he concluded—“in that room.” He meant the spare room.
I stood up and entered the hallway. I won’t pretend I had any thoughts at all, only sensations, a coppery taste in my mouth, a pervading weakness, mostly in the legs, a buzzing around my temples and behind my eyes. I put my hand on the door’s old-fashioned tongue latch, but for several seconds I couldn’t operate my own fingers. I remembered this spare room from my first visit to the U of Texas a few years earlier, long before Darcy ever came there. The room lay in the center of the house and may originally have been some sort of pantry, I don’t know. It lacked windows and amounted to a twelve-by-twelve-foot box constructed of yellowing whitewashed planks. Over the years the seams between the planks had opened to finger-wide gaps which had been stopped with spray-foam insulation that congealed in grotesque, snotty rivulets reminiscent of limestone cave formations, hard to look at but impermeable to scorpions. Mrs. Exroy, who’d given me the tour, had told me about the scorpions and said the foam insulation was there to keep them out—that is, to imprison them in the darkness behind the walls—while an image of them poured through the cracks into the impressionable mind, teeming there with their stinger-tipped venom sacs waving at the ends of their segmented tails and their pincers clacking like castanets on the ends of their loathsome pedipalps.
I now felt convinced that something real, something horrid was happening to this man in this house, and the bizarre shrinking sensation I’d experienced earlier was now explained (despite remaining utterly mysterious) as the result of my having passed through a succession of ever smaller perimeters whose entries I’d breached as if in my sleep, blind to their significance—each of the four gates; then the creek; then the constellation of the vultures at this moment still wheeling above the roof; and finally the bounds of the house itself—toward the pair of entities, Bess and Ovid, waiting behind this door.
I depressed the latch and pushed the door wide, and the twilight from the hallway fell across the only things in the space, a single-size metal bedframe and its bare, grayed, filthy mattress—only these two objects, twisted invisibly by the several concentric gales of power whirling around them for a radius of twenty miles. A bit of light touched the walls, enough to reveal that they were undisturbed, and still disturbing. The disfiguring goop had the sandy pallor and plasticine shine of a scorpion’s exoskeleton, so that to me it appeared multiple tons of scorpions were being mashed against the wall’s other side and extruding from the cracks. I shut the door fast, like a frightened child.
To be clear, I hadn’t seen any scorpions or any people or any ghosts.
I joined Darcy in the kitchen. Fear had eaten up my patience. Sitting down I was rough with my chair. “Somebody’s bullshitting somebody.”
“Maybe they’re on a walk.”
“Where did these visitors come from in the first place? The underworld?”
“Oklahoma.”
“How’d they get here, Darcy? Where’s their car?”
“I don’t know. In one of the stables, maybe.”
“I can look right out this window and tell you the stables are empty.”
“Or maybe they’re on a drive.”
“When was the last time you saw these two people?”
“I don’t know—an hour ago?”
I think the change in my manner sobered Darcy. He became instantly cooperative and peered into my face and nodded his head as we agreed that come Monday I’d make calls and get him the soonest possible date with a doctor. More disturbing than the idea he was trafficking with hallucinations was his blank-faced toleration of the circumstance. This weird placidity seemed to be his chief symptom—that, and failing to shut his robe—but symptomizing what?
Before saying goodbye I went through the house and turned on all the lights, leaving the spare room closed and dark. For this operation I got Darcy’s permission first, naturally, and a bright interior seemed to cheer him up. When we shook hands on parting, he gripped mine firmly and cracked it like a whip.
I drove from gate to gate across the pastureland with the sunset on my left. Along the way I passed a scene of carnage: half a dozen redheaded vultures on the ground, beleaguering a carcass too small to be seen in their midst. When we catch sight of one of these birds balanced and steering on the currents, its five-pound body effortlessly carried by the six-foot span of its wings and therefore not quite constituting a material fact, the earthbound soul forgets itself and follows after, suddenly airborne, but when they’re down here with the rest of us, desecrating a corpse, brandishing their wings like the overlong arms of chimpanzees, bouncing on the dead thing, tearing at it, their nude red heads looking imbecilically minuscule and also, to a degree, obscene—isn’t it sad? By the way, the ones circling above the house were gone by the time I left the place, and no explanation for them has ever suggested itself. I’d left after only an hour’s visit, and had an hour of daylight before the evening overtook me on the freeway into Austin and bathed the city in a purple dusk in which the lights floated and we assume everyone is happy.
That year, the year 2000, our small family—mom and dad, son and daughter, dog and cat—had wintered comfortably in Austin, and now the others had flown north to our home in Idaho and left me, during Finals Week, on my own and accountable to nobody for my evenings. After that baffling afternoon at Darcy’s I drove back to the Writers’ Center, where I could park, and walked through the muggy southern evening to the arid oasis of the University’s undergraduate library. At a table in an alcove on the third floor I opened a blue-bound, musty copy of The Reason I’m Lost and read about Gabe Smith and Danny Osgood, two San Francisco jazz men who live far from the recording studios and deep in the sorrow and glory of artistic struggle.
I turned first to a five-page passage late in the book—an argument between Osgood and his girlfriend Maureen, the first bit of dialogue I’d ever scrutinized for its ups and downs, the turns and turns-about, the strategies of the combatants. These long years later I could still recite the lines along with the characters, yet they sounded new.
I looked back at the novel’s opening paragraph, and by midnight I’d read the whole thing again and found myself just as moved as I’d been the first time—the first dozen times—every time. The Reason I’m Lost wasn’t just an exercise in exemplary prose. Ultimately this book, and my envy of it, were about the friendship between Danny Osgood and Gabriel Smith. A private and a corporal, they meet as members of the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio military fort in San Francisco, spending time, often while AWOL, in such jazz clubs as the Black Hawk in the Tenderloin and Bop City in the Fillmore district (both clubs really existed), and graduating into a civilian life fraught with glamor and ugliness and every kind of love—thwarted love, and crazy love, and victorious love—above all, the love between these two friends.
Darcy was on the University’s insurance plan, and after a journey through a delicate labyrinth of abysses, of blind corners and dead ends, switcheroos and doublecrosses, but with Mrs. Exroy to guide me step by step through the dark, we’d landed Darcy Miller an appointment at the South Austin Medical Associates on Friday, a week following my visit with him. In the meantime, Jerry Sizemore made arrangements to come down for a probably lengthy stay. My former melodramatic mood, the morbid fear and the helpless pity, had given way to a strange giddiness. The truth is that I wondered if out of all this might come three friends—I might be added—I know it’s stupid—am I the only grown man who still longs to be friends with other boys?
In the book the two friends Gabriel and Danny refer to each other as “Gee” and “Dee.” I noticed that Jerry and Darcy had the same habit—this over the telephone during the course of that week, one conversation with Darcy, and several with Jerry, who called me nightly delivering the good news that again today Darcy had been reachable and happy to chat as he looked forward to meeting his new physician.
The morning of the doctor’s appointment I called Darcy three times and got no answer. Each time I left a brief reminder of the appointment along with the assurance I’d be turning up there by 10 a.m. Each time the beep got longer, and each time, as I hung up, the thud in my belly felt a tiny bit more dreadful.
Taking the ranch roads a little too fast I kicked up a storm of dust that pursued me across the plains and overran me when I stopped to unlock and relock each of the gates. I saw no buzzards floating above the Campesino Place, only random cumulus formations that made the morning sky look like a large, comfortable bed. As I eased my vehicle over the creek, I noted that Darcy’s Chrysler seemed to have settled more exactly into its place a bit too far from the house, its burgundy hood and convertible top drifted with white seed-fluff from the female cottonwoods.
I knocked on the door while working the knob. It wasn’t locked, so I opened it, and although I believed I’d heard a faint shout from somewhere inside, I entered a large, unfilled silence.
“Darcy,” I called, “Darcy—are you here?”
“Yeah!” came from the rear of the house.
I followed the sound down the hall past the kitchen and toward the bedroom at the back, which was the master, more or less—the only genuine bedroom—and just inside this bedroom’s door lay Darcy Miller on the wooden floor, flat on his back with his head in the hallway, staring out of his watery blue eyes in what I read, upside-down
, as bitterness. A mess of dried blood covered the floor around his head like a corona, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding now. I knelt beside him and could think only of swear words to say, so I said them, and Darcy said, “You got that right.”
After a quick run-through of everything I possessed in the way of remedies and responses, after checking for a pulse and finding none—although Darcy’s chest rose and fell and I could hear the breath in his throat—after establishing that he could tell me the date and his name and asking him to take each of my hands and give a squeeze, which he managed all right with equal strength in the right and the left, I abandoned him and called 911 from the phone in the living room. While the emergency dispatcher and I very carefully went over the digits of each gate combination, I noticed that the living room lamp, the overhead light, the one in the hallway—all the lights in the house—were burning, just as I’d left them seven days previous.