A Certain Slant of Light

  My Mr. Brown was a devoted student and wrote such passionate stories and listened so purely to all advice, I chose him in advance. I could tell months beforehand that my host was going to heaven without me. I cleaved to Mr. Brown when he came to say goodbye to my Poet. Mr. Brown was moving west to enter a university three thousand miles away. I chose him partly because he loved literature so very much, but I also chose him because he had a kind heart, an honest tongue, and a clear honor and yet seemed totally unaware of the fact that he was virtuous. This made him especially appealing. I had a half memory of being fooled by a handsome smile, but Mr. Brown’s face seemed a true mirror of his spirit. I felt even more attached to him than I had to the others. Perhaps that’s why I called him by his name.

  I had learned the rules of my survival well during those decades—stay close to your host or risk returning to the dungeon, take what small pleasure you can from a vicarious existence, and try to be helpful. And I do believe that I was helpful to Mr. Brown when he was writing his novel.

  From the time he was eighteen, he would spend at least an hour a day working on his book. He kept it in a box that once held blank paper. He would sit in a park or at a table in the library, composing one paragraph each day. He had more than two hundred carefully handwritten pages but was still on chapter five. I would sit beside him or pace around him, watching him think. Each page was as precious as a poem. When doubts or thoughts of mundane life stayed his hand, I would try grasping his pen to urge him on, but my fingers would only pass through. I discovered that the best way I could help him become unstuck in his writing was to place my finger on the last word he had written. This always brought his pen back to paper and a smile back to his lips. It was a tale of brothers fighting for opposing kings in a medieval setting as rich and mysterious as Xanadu.

  I longed so to talk to him about this character’s name or that character’s motives, about a phrase here that described a river and a word there that described a dying man’s eyes. I would fantasize, as he slept, long conversations we would have if he could see and hear me—the two of us sipping tea or walking in the country, laughing together over brilliant ideas. But that would never happen, of course. And so it went, my favorite hour of each day spent with him and his book, until the writing stopped the day he met his bride.

  They saw each other across a lecture hall and met in the doorway as they left. There was an uncomfortable familiarity about it all. The way she smiled at him, the way he was thrilled when she laughed at his joke, the little excuses each had for touching the other. Her hand on his arm as she asked a question, his knee touching hers as they drank coffee at a tiny table in a pub so noisy they left to take a walk. None of my hosts had lived with a lover. And I’m ashamed to say I felt jealous when this girl moved into his life. At first I pretended I disapproved because he’d stopped working on his novel, but I knew that wasn’t the only reason. An instability clutched me, and I found myself afraid of shadows and loud noises. I wanted to stop him, but although she had inadvertently halted his writing, she was undoubtedly making him happy. I wanted to warn her that a man might seem ideal and then turn cold and distant with no cause, but after all, it was Mr. Brown she was falling in love with. It would be a lie to argue that he wasn’t worth the risk.

  And so because I loved him, I let her be, and because I feared pain, I learned to follow at a distance when they were together. I felt lonelier than I had ever been with any host, but I tried to love her as if she were my daughter. She had no quality I could easily complain about. It would be a sin to whisper discouragement in his ear. And so they were wed when he was twenty-three and she twenty-one. I taught myself to ignore the pangs I felt when he would tickle her while driving in the car or when she would rest her feet in his lap during breakfast. The intimacy hurt because it wasn’t for me. I was Mr. Brown’s and he was mine, but not the way she was his. Not the way he was hers.

  I taught myself the new rules to survive. Move out of the room when they kiss, enter the bedroom only when it is silent, cherish my time with Mr. Brown when he is at work. I obeyed these rules, and one day I was rewarded. Mr. Brown brought out his old tattered box, put it in his briefcase, and drove us to work an hour early. For more than a year now, Mr. Brown had been spending an hour each day, before his first students arrived, working on his novel with me beside him. Feeling inspired by this gift, I had tried to warm myself to his bride by whispering recipes in her ear while she was baking cookies or a cake. I thought I was being as gracious as her own mother might be, until a package arrived from her grandfather, an album of photographs of Mrs. Brown as a baby. The cub-ear curls of her hair and the dimpled backs of her tender hands bit at me like sleet. I couldn’t look at them, coward that I was. I wasn’t her mother. I had chosen Mr. Brown. And he had chosen her.

  Now I was afraid that the rules of my world were changing again. I had been seen by a human. Sitting on the sloped roof of Mr. Brown’s small house while he and his wife slept and dreamed below, I studied a crescent moon hung crooked in a plum purple sky and thought about what it would be like to truly be seen. I imagined standing before the young man who seemed to see me and letting him look as long as he wished. How was he doing this? Had he somehow chosen me? I had two strong and seemingly contradictory sensations. One was a fear of being seen by a mortal—as if beheld naked when you know you are clothed. The other was an almost indescribable sensation of attraction—the vine curling toward the sun’s light in slow but single-minded longing. I wanted to see him again, to see whether he really was that rare human who saw what others could not. Nothing was more disturbing to me, and yet nothing compelled me more.

  By the next school day, when the same group of students entered Mr. Brown’s classroom, I deliberately stood in the back corner of the room. I wanted to know whether the boy could see me and not have to wonder whether he was looking through me at a map of the world or a grammar lesson. I stood still as marble in the far corner between the window frame and the cupboard door. I remained calm so that nothing, not even a speck of dust on the floor, would shift from my presence. And I watched the students enter, one by one, dragging their feet, pushing each other and laughing, listening to private music with wires in their ears, and then, finally, the boy with the pale face, moving, almost gliding to the desk he always sat in, near the back, in the middle.

  I moved not an inch and waited. The shuffling died down, the murmurs ceased as Mr. Brown began to speak. The boy sat leaning back, his long legs in denim stuck out in the aisle, his white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, shirttail out, his dark green bag of books lying under the chair. I waited.

  And then he moved. He let the paper that had just been passed back to him slip off the desktop on purpose; I was sure it was on purpose. And when he sat up and bent to retrieve it from the floor, he turned his head and looked back into the corner of the room where I stood. His eyes met mine for one moment, and he smiled. I was shocked, shocked again though I had longed for it. He sat back up and pretended to read the page, just as the others were doing.

  How is this happening? I thought. He couldn’t be as I was, Light. I had never seen another like myself. I felt that it was impossible—an instinct told me so. I had never truly believed in mediums, but perhaps this strange boy was some sort of seer. He seemed to have no interest at all in sharing his knowledge of my presence with his fellow classmates or Mr. Brown. It made no sense, and although I was still nervous and full of longing about him, now I was also angry. How dare this chimney sweep of a boy shatter my privacy so matter-of-factly and so completely? What made it worse was that in that moment when he smiled at me, his face flushed. He looked alive and healthy for the first time. It was as if he’d stolen something from me. I felt humiliated, for some reason, and I stormed straight out of the room, without looking back, making a flock of papers flutter off the front row of desks.

  Two

  I WANTED TO BE FAR AWAY from everything, but that was a lie. It was only that I felt confused. I had taught myse
lf so carefully how to be the contented voyeur, and now there was this person watching me.

  I stayed close to the classroom, by the trunk of the pepper tree not five yards from the door, waiting. When, and it seemed like a year, the door opened at last, and disheveled boys and girls crowded out of the classroom and away down the path toward other buildings, I hid behind the trunk. Finally he appeared, his bag over one shoulder, his hair falling over his brow on one side. My core jittered with inexplicable excitement. The young man walked alone, head down, toward my tree. He stopped when he was as close to the trunk as the path would allow, but five feet from me. He didn’t look. He smiled, eyes still on the ground, and after one blushing moment, he began to walk again. I had no power to stop myself—I followed.

  As I did, I could feel Mr. Brown behind us, walking, as he often did at this time of day, to the administration building. I felt an unpleasant tug. A thread snapped, the threat of a tear in my universe. It was my Familiar pulling at me from one side and my Mystery from the other. The path forked between school buildings, and I let Mr. Brown go his way alone. The boy annoyed me by ducking between the cafeteria and the gymnasium where a small space was set aside for bins of cans and bottles that would be recycled. I followed, but I was not happy about it. I halted as he made to walk directly into the dead end. I was filled with wonder at the idea that perhaps he was going to walk through the wall, but he didn’t—he stopped, three feet short of it, and just stood there.

  To my own amazement, I marched right up behind him and spoke. “Can you hear me?”

  “I have ears, don’t I?”

  I started. What had I expected? “And you see me?” I said.

  He kept his head low, turning slowly at the shoulders, peering at me from under a lock of brown hair. He smiled. “Of course.”

  I backed away a step. “What are you?”

  “Don’t you mean, who am I?” He carefully pivoted his body toward me. An icicle of fear slid down my throat.

  “Why do you see me?” I hissed. I couldn’t help myself. Any semblance of manners had dissolved in my alarm.

  “Don’t be afraid.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked quite concerned.

  “No!” I felt like scolding him, reminding him that we hadn’t been properly introduced. My middle was tingling, as if my Mr. Brown were traveling out of range. A deep bone pain began to form in my joints.

  “Don’t speak to me.” I looked around me, somehow certain that every mortal could see me now, but no one else was there. When I turned back, the boy’s eyes held such empathy, I couldn’t bear it. I pushed through the cold and ran from him like a child spooked by an owl in the night.

  I’m ashamed to tell the tale now, of how frightened I was at being spoken to—seemingly pitied. I could hear Hamlet moan, “Poor ghost.” I stayed right by Mr. Brown’s side the next day, except when he was in the bed or bath. But when he was teaching that class I stayed in the tiny school library, reading over the shoulders of students, counting the minutes.

  The next morning, when Mr. Brown had risen early to go running, he returned to find his wife in the kitchen making coffee and wearing nothing but one of his ragged T-shirts. He discovered that he had a little extra time to spend with her in one of the armless kitchen chairs, so I chose to pass into the garden. On any other day, I would have been annoyed that we might not have a full hour’s writing time before the first class of the day. But today, as I stood staring into the empty birdbath in their tiny back yard, I wondered what the one who had spoken to me was doing at that moment. I didn’t mean to, but I imagined him with a girl, evoking the same sounds from her that came from the kitchen window. I was immediately sorry I had, because a terrible, scalding jealousy flooded me.

  I burned with frustration, and even a little anger, as Mr. Brown drove us to school. We would have only half an hour for writing. He was beaming and relaxed, still wet from a hasty shower. His happiness was so vexing. That morning, I wished that Mrs. Brown were far away, visiting her family, anything, just away, at least for a while. I could still hear her sounds of pleasure, or perhaps it was Mr. Brown’s mind wandering as he drove, one elbow out the window, the wind blowing his hair.

  My mind turned a corner then. I needed to talk to the one who’d seen me. Even if what I found out was dreadful or terrifying. What could be worse than hiding and not knowing? That afternoon, I stayed in the classroom, though I stood behind the flag stand. It felt safer. Mr. Brown wrote a series of page numbers on the blackboard, and finally the young men and women began to enter. I felt my being flutter. Each tousled head that came through the door I wanted to be his, but on and on, a dozen boys entered, yet not the one.

  I was appalled. The bell rang, the students whispered and laughed and tugged books out of their bags, Mr. Brown began to speak, and still the one who had seen me wasn’t there. I watched that desk, near the back in the middle, imagining him, but he would not materialize. I crossed in front of Mr. Brown and stood in the open doorway, scanning the path in both directions. Only a squirrel and a gardener with a rake. I wouldn’t accept it. I crossed back in front of Mr. Brown again and went this time to the windows on the far side of the room. They looked out onto the playing fields. A group of boys in gray ran over the grass, but the one who had spoken to me was not one of them. I looked beyond the field to the pavement just outside the fence, but he was not there either. And he was not sitting on the benches or standing at the water fountain. He’s doing this on purpose, I thought. He is punishing me because I stayed away.

  I could not be still. I crossed again and looked out the open door once more. A bird’s shadow passed, nothing more. I was on the glass edge of panic, when I turned back toward the classroom and saw him, the one, standing beside his empty desk. He was watching me and when our eyes met, I had no fan to cover my face, no way to hide my feelings. I was desperate for him, and he could see it, all the way in me.

  “You’re late enough, Mr. Blake,” said Mr. Brown. “Hop to.”

  He must’ve entered the room when I had been at the window. I think I would’ve been completely done in by my embarrassment except that he, too, looked taken aback. Perhaps it was something in the sight of me searching for him. He sat down, his cheeks flushed, and put his book bag on the floor. I looked away and moved slowly back to the flag stand and quieted myself. After many moments, I saw that he was sitting with his open book before him and a sheet of lined paper on top of it. He was eyeing me, not unkindly, but most gently. And when I felt an anxiety at the length of our gaze, he politely dropped his attention with a slight nod, almost a bow. This gave me the courage to move slowly along the windowed wall until I rested in a vacant desk next to his.

  With the stub of a pencil, he wrote something on the paper he had over his book and slid it a few inches closer to me. I looked across the aisle and saw that he had written the words “Where have you been?”

  However improper, I was amused. And, I admit, a little flattered. It made me nervous, though, that there was now something tangible that referred to me. I thought of retreating to the flag stand. He pulled the paper back and wrote again, this time letting the page hang over the desk edge like a banner so I could see it easily. It read: “Please don’t be afraid. I would be a friend to you.”

  I can’t tell a lie; the fact that he didn’t speak or write like the other students in the room intrigued me. I surveyed him, but he kept his eyes on the blackboard. The brown paper cover of his English book was filled with little drawings of what appeared to be mythological beasts.

  “I was hiding from you,” I said finally.

  He wrote on the paper again. My whole self was quivering as I waited for the page to be slipped my way. It read, “Follow me after class. I long to speak with you again.”

  Someone longed to speak with me.

  I was startled when the girl who usually sat in the desk I was occupying walked in late, handed a note to Mr. Brown, and made her way toward us. I rushed to stand against the wall. I watched the boy slip th
e paper on which he’d been writing into the pages of his book. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real. It pleased me that he seemed to take no notice of the young lady who now sat across the aisle from him. He shifted in his chair, pretended to listen to Mr. Brown, and then my cherished preserver glanced over at me, without turning his head, and winked.

  When the bell rang, he slowly closed his book. The other students had already slung their bags onto their backs and were migrating toward the door. The young man gathered his belongings and turned halfway back toward me. With a flick of his head, he beckoned. I followed him closely up the aisle, out the door, down the pathway. He kept his eyes straight ahead of him. When he came to the recycling bins where we had stopped before, there were a boy and a girl there, holding hands and talking. He paused for only half a moment and then kept walking. He came around the side of the library and stopped suddenly, stepping into the phone booth beside the caged vending machine. The booth was the older style that stood like an upright glass coffin. He dropped his bag at his feet and looked me in the eyes as he picked up the receiver.

  “What’s your name?” he said. I was breathless. “What should I call you?” he asked.