“Iwasn’tabletopassonyourmessage,” said the Sheep Man.
I nodded.
“That’sallIcametosay.”
I glanced over at the calendar on the wall. Only three more days until the time limit, the date marked in red. But what did that mean anymore?
“Things have changed,” I spoke up. “I’m very, very angry. Never in my entire life have I been angry like this.”
The Sheep Man sat there, snifter in hand, and said nothing.
I picked up the guitar by the neck and smashed it back against the bricks of the fireplace. With the crash came a loud, cacophonous twang of strings. The Sheep Man flew out of the sofa, his ears trembling.
“I’ve got a right to be angry,” I said, addressing this fact rather to my own attention. Well, I did have the right to be angry.
“IfeelbadthatIcouldn’tcomeacrossforyou.
Butyoumustunderstand. Wereallydolikeyou.”
The two of us stood there. We looked at the snow. The snow was fluffy, like stuffing spilling out of a torn cloud.
I went into the kitchen for another beer. Each time I walked past the stairs, there was the mirror. The other me had apparently gone for another beer too. We looked each other in the face and sighed. Living in two separate worlds, we still thought about the same things. Just like Groucho and Harpo in Duck Soup.
Behind me the living room was reflected in the mirror. Or else it was his living room behind him. The living room behind me and the living room behind him were the same living room. Same sofa, same carpet, same clock and painting and bookcase, every last thing the same. Not particularly uncomfortable as living rooms go, if not in the finest taste. Yet something was different. Or maybe it was simply that I felt that something was different.
I grabbed another blue Löwenbrau and on the way back to the living room, can in hand, I looked once more at the living room in the mirror, then looked over at the living room. The Sheep Man was on the sofa, lazily gazing out at the snow.
I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine.
“Youlookpale,” said the Sheep Man.
I plopped down on the sofa and, saying nothing, pulled the ring off the beer can and took a sip.
“Probablycaughtcold.Winterinthesepartscangettoyou
ifyou’re notusedtoit.Air’sdamptoo.Youshouldgettobedearlytoday.”
“Nope,” I said. “Today I’m not going to sleep. I’m going to wait up for my friend here.”
“Youknowhe’scomingtoday?”
“I know,” I said. “He’ll be here tonight at ten o’clock.”
The Sheep Man looked up at me. The eyes peering through his mask had literally no expression.
“Tonight I’ll pack, tomorrow I’ll be gone. If you see him, tell him that. I don’t think it’ll be necessary, though.”
The Sheep Man nodded comprehendingly. “Surewillbelonely whenyougo.Can’tbehelpedthoughIguess.
BythewaycanIhavethat cheesesandwich?”
“Sure.”
The Sheep Man wrapped the sandwich in a paper napkin, slipped it into his pocket, then put on his gloves.
“Hopewemeetagain,” said the Sheep Man as he was leaving.
“We will,” I said.
The Sheep Man left across the pasture to the east. Eventually, the veil of snow took him in. Afterward all was silent.
I poured an inch of brandy into the Sheep Man’s snifter and downed it in one swallow. My throat burned, and gradually my stomach burned, but after thirty seconds my body stopped trembling. Only the ticking of the grandfather clock pounding inside my head.
Probably I did need to get some sleep.
I fetched a blanket from upstairs and slept on the sofa. I felt totally exhausted, like a child who’d been wandering around in the woods for three days. I closed my eyes and the next instant I was asleep.
I had a terrifying dream. A dream too terrifying to recall.
And So Time Passes
Darkness crept in through my ear like oil. Someone was trying to break up the frozen globe of the earth with a massive hammer. The hammer struck the earth precisely eight times. But the earth failed to break up. It only cracked a little.
Eight o’clock, eight at night.
I woke with a shake of the head. My body was numb, my head ached. Had someone put me in a cocktail shaker with cracked ice and like a madman shaken me up?
There’s nothing worse than waking up in total darkness. It’s like having to go back and live life all over from the beginning. When I first opened my eyes, it was as if I were living someone else’s life. After an extremely long time, this began to match up with my own life. A curious overlap this, my own life as someone else’s. It was improbable that such a person as myself could even be living.
I went to the kitchen sink and splashed water on my face, then drank down a couple of glasses quickly. The water was as cold as ice, but still my face was burning hot. I sat back down on the sofa amid the darkness and silence and began gradually to gather up the pieces of my life. I couldn’t manage to grasp too much, but at least it was my life. Slowly I returned to myself. It’s hard to explain what it is to get there, and it’d undoubtedly try your interest.
I had the feeling that someone was watching me, but I didn’t pay it any mind. It’s a feeling you get when you’re all alone in a big room.
I thought about cells. Like my ex-wife had said, ultimately every last cell of you is lost. Lost even to yourself. I pressed the palm of my hand against my cheek. The face my hand felt in the dark wasn’t my own, I didn’t think. It was the face of another that had taken the shape of my face. But I couldn’t remember the details. Everything—names, sensations, places—dissolved and was swallowed into the darkness.
In the dark the clock struck eight-thirty. The snow had stopped, but thick clouds still covered the sky. No light anywhere. For a long time, I lay buried in the sofa, fingers in my mouth. I couldn’t see my hand. The heater was off, so the room was cold. Curled up under the blanket, I stared blankly out. I was crouching in the bottom of a deep well.
Time. Particles of darkness configured mysterious patterns on my retina. Patterns that degenerated without a sound, only to be replaced by new patterns. Darkness but darkness alone was shifting, like mercury in motionless space.
I put a stop to my thoughts and let time pass. Let time carry me along. Carry me to where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns.
The clock struck nine. As the ninth chime faded away, silence slipped in to fill its place.
“May I say my piece?” said the Rat.
“Fine by me,” said I.
Dwellers in Darkness
“Fine by me,” said I.
“I came an hour earlier than the appointed time,” said the Rat apologetically.
“That’s okay. As you can see, I wasn’t doing anything.”
The Rat laughed quietly. He was behind me. Almost as if we were back-to-back.
“Seems like the old days,” said the Rat.
“I guess we can never get down to a good honest talk unless we’ve got time on our hands,” I said.
“It sure seems that way.” The Rat smiled.
Even in absolute lacquer-black darkness, seated back-to-back, I could tell he was smiling. You can tell a lot just by the tiniest change in the air. We used to be friends. So long ago, though I could hardly remember when.
“Didn’t someone once say, ‘A friend to kill time is a friend sublime’?”
“That was you who said that, no?”
“Sixth sense, sharp as ever. Right you are.”
I sighed. “But this time around, with all this happening, my sixth sense has been way off. So far off it’s embarrassing. And despite the number of hints you all have been giving me.”
“Can’t be helped. You did better than most.”
We fell silent. The Rat seemed
to be looking at his hand.
“I really made you go through a lot, didn’t I?” said the Rat. “I was a real pain. But it was the only way. There wasn’t another soul I could depend on. Like I wrote in those letters.”
“That’s what I want to ask you about. Because I can’t accept everything just like that.”
“Of course not,” said the Rat, “not without my setting the record straight. But before that, let’s have a beer.”
The Rat stopped me before I could stand up.
“I’ll get it,” said the Rat. “This is my house, after all.”
I heard the Rat walk his regular path to the kitchen in total darkness and take an armful of beer out of the refrigerator, me opening and closing my eyes the whole while. The darkness of the room was only a bit different in hue from the darkness of my eyes shut.
The Rat returned with his beer, which he set on the table. I felt around for a can, removed the pull ring, and drank half.
“It hardly seems like beer if you can’t see it,” I said.
“You have to forgive me, but it has to be dark.”
We said nothing while we drank.
“Well then,” said the Rat, clearing his throat. I set my empty back on the table and kept still, wrapped in my blanket. I waited for him to start talking, but no words followed. All I could hear was the Rat shaking his can to check how much was left. Old habit of his.
“Well then,” said the Rat a second time. Then downing the last of his beer in one chug, he set the can back on the table with a dry clank. “First of all, let’s begin with why I came here. Is that all right?”
I didn’t answer. The Rat continued to speak.
“My father bought this place when I was five. Just why he went out of his way to buy property up here I don’t know. Probably he got a good deal through some American military route. As you can see, the place is terribly inconvenient to get to and, aside from summer, the road is useless once the snow sets in. The Occupation Forces had planned on improving the road and using the place for a radar station or something, but the time and expense involved apparently changed their mind. And with the town being so poor, they can’t afford to do anything about the road. It wouldn’t help them to upgrade the road either. Which all makes this property a losing proposition, long since forgotten.”
“How about the Sheep Professor? Wouldn’t he be thinking to come back home here?”
“The Sheep Professor is living in his memories. He’s got nowhere to go home to.”
“Maybe not.”
“Have some more beer,” said the Rat.
“Fine for now,” I said. With the heater off, I was nearly frozen through. The Rat opened another can and drank by himself.
“My father took a liking to this property, carried out some road improvements on his own, fixed up the house. He put a lot of money into it, I believe. Thanks to which, if you had a car, you could lead a fairly good life here, at least during the summer. Heat, flush toilet, shower, telephone, emergency electrical generator. How on earth the Sheep Professor lived here before that, I don’t know.”
The Rat made a noise that was neither belch nor sigh.
“Until I was fifteen, we came here every summer. My folks, my sister and me, and the maid who did the chores. When I think of it, those were probably the best years of my life. We leased the pasture to the town—still do, in fact—so when summer rolled around, the place was full of the town’s sheep. Sheep up to your ears. That’s why my memories of summer are always tied up with sheep.
“After that, the family almost never came up here. We got another vacation house closer to home for one thing, and my sister got married for another. I wasn’t counting myself in the family much anymore, my father’s company was going through hard times, and well, all sorts of things were going on. Whatever, the property was abandoned. The last time I came up here was eleven years ago. And that time I came alone. By myself for a month.”
The Rat lingered for a second, as if he were remembering.
“Were you lonely?” I asked.
“Me, lonely? You got to be kidding. If it was possible, I would have stayed on up here. But no way that could have happened. It’s my father’s house, after all. You wouldn’t have caught me doing my old man the service.”
“But what about now?”
“The same goes,” said the Rat. “I got to say that this was the last place I wanted to come back to. Yet when I came across the photograph of this place in the Dolphin Hotel, I wanted to see it one more time. For sentimental reasons. Even you get that way at times, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. There was my shoreline that got filled in.
“That’s when I heard the Sheep Professor’s story. About the dream sheep with a star on its back. You know about that, I take it?”
“Indeed I do.”
“So to put it simply,” said the Rat, “I heard that story and hurried up here wanting to spend the whole winter. I couldn’t shake the urge. Father or not, it didn’t matter to me anymore. I pulled together my kit and came up. Like I was being drawn up here.”
“That’s when you ran into the sheep?”
“That’s right,” said the Rat.
“What happened after that is difficult to talk about,” said the Rat.
The Rat took his second empty can and squeezed a dent into it.
“Maybe you could ask me questions? You already know pretty much what there is to know, right?”
“Okay, but if it makes no difference to you, let’s not start at the beginning.”
“Fire away.”
“You’re already dead, aren’t you?”
I don’t know how long it took the Rat to reply. Could have been a few seconds, could have been … It was a long silence. My mouth was all dry inside.
“That’s right,” said the Rat finally. “I’m dead.”
The Rat Who Wound the Clock
“I hanged myself from a beam in the kitchen,” said the Rat. “The Sheep Man buried me next to the garage. Dying itself wasn’t all that painful, if you worry about that sort of thing. But really, that hardly matters.”
“When?”
“A week before you got here.”
“You wound the clock then, didn’t you?”
The Rat laughed. “Damn, if that’s not a mystery. I mean the very, very last thing I did in my thirty-year life was to wind a clock. Now why should anyone who’s about to die wind a clock? Makes no sense.”
The Rat stopped speaking, and everything was still, except for the ticking of the clock. The snow absorbed all other sound. We were like two castaways in outer space.
“What if …”
“Stop it,” the Rat cut me short. “There are no more ifs. You know that, right?”
I shook my head. No, I didn’t.
“If you had come here a week earlier, I still would have died. Maybe we could’ve met under warmer, brighter circumstances. But it’s all the same. I would have had to die. Otherwise things would have only gotten harder. And I guess I didn’t want to bear that kind of hardship.”
“So why did you have to die?”
There was the sound of his rubbing the palms of his hands together.
“I don’t want to talk too much about that. It would only turn into a self-acquittal. And there’s nothing more inappropriate than a dead man coming to his own defense, don’t you think?”
“But if you don’t tell me, I’ll never know.”
“Have some more beer.”
“I’m cold,” I said.
“It’s not that cold.”
With trembling hands, I opened another beer and drank a sip. And with the drink in me, it really didn’t seem as cold.
“Okay, if you promise not to tell this to anyone.”
“Even if I did tell someone, who’d believe me?”
“You got me there,” said the Rat with a chuckle. “I doubt anyone would believe it. It’s so crazy.”
The clock struck nine-thirty.
“Mind
if I stop the clock?” asked the Rat. “It makes such a racket.”
“Help yourself. It’s your clock.”
The Rat stood up, opened the door to the grandfather clock, and grabbed the pendulum. All sound, all time, vanished.
“What happened was this,” said the Rat. “I died with the sheep in me. I waited until the sheep was fast asleep, then I tied a rope over the beam in the kitchen and hanged myself. There wasn’t enough time for the sucker to escape.”
“Did you have to go that far?”
“Yes, I had to go that far. If I waited, the sheep would have controlled me absolutely. It was my last chance.”
The Rat rubbed his palms together again. “I wanted to meet you when I was myself, with everything squared away. My own self with my own memories and my own weaknesses. That’s why I sent you that photograph as a kind of code. If by some accident it steered you this way, I thought I would be saved in the end.”
“And have you been saved?”
“Yeah, I’ve been saved all right,” said the Rat, quietly.
“The key point here is weakness,” said the Rat. “Everything begins from there. Can you understand what I’m getting at?”
“People are weak.”
“As a general rule,” said the Rat, snapping his fingers a couple of times. “But line up all the generalities you like and you still won’t get anywhere. What I’m talking about now is a very individual thing. Weakness is something that rots in the body. Like gangrene. I’ve felt that ever since I was a teenager. That’s why I was always on edge. There’s this something inside you that’s rotting away and you feel it all along. Can you understand what that’s like?”
I sat silent, wrapped up in the blanket.
“Probably not,” the Rat continued. “There isn’t that side to you. But, well, anyway, that’s weakness. It’s the same as a hereditary disease, weakness. No matter how much you understand it, there’s nothing you can do to cure yourself. It’s not going to go away with a clap of the hand. It just keeps getting worse and worse.”
“Weakness toward what?”
“Everything. Moral weakness, weakness of consciousness, then there’s the weakness of existence itself.”