The Teacher - Chapter 1

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good
—W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues”

When I was a boy, the job I wanted most when I grew up was The Prince in Sleeping Beauty. First, I wanted a job that came with a quest. A quest meant purpose. But a quest also meant peril, and it seemed to me that if I was going to face peril, if I was going to pick up my sword and stare down a dragon, if I was going to wade through thorns and climb a high tower, then I ought to do it in the name of love. Even at seven, nothing else seemed worth it. As I grew up, I continued to believe that I would make a good prince, but to give you an idea of how well I kept this ambition a secret and how hard it was for me to uphold those romantic ideals on a daily basis, by the time I reached high school my closest friends had nicknamed me King Gloom and Doom.

I suppose if I had only one story to tell in my life it would be this one, though I regret that it took place in the summer before I started college as it might be mistaken for a coming-of-age story. I have nothing against coming-of-age stories, but this isn’t one of them. I believe this could just as easily have happened when I was twenty-eight or sixty-eight. In retrospect, I’m glad it happened at the princely age of eighteen. The earlier the better, I say.

But I delay. Such is a problem of mine when no matter how glad I am for a story’s ending, a small part of me still rather dreads the actual telling. Yet tell it I must, and so to get things started, I have chosen a moment when, ironically, I thought to myself, “All right then—that’s the end of that.” Those were my exact words as I stepped out of the shower on the evening of June 15, 1983.

Because they knew what day it was, my good friends Ray, Ian, and Gus took me out that night. I had just finished toweling off when Gus called and said he would be by in ten minutes. I appreciated the urgency in Gus’s voice—I felt it was commensurate with my situation. My situation was that the only girl I had ever loved had just left town for good. As I said, I regret that this happened when I was eighteen. Even my mother, loyal romantic that she was, fell prey to the natural adult opinion that my “tragedy,” as I earnestly put it, was only so much teenage drama when I tried to explain to her the night before that I did not know if I would ever meet another girl like Amy again. How could you take your eighteen year-old son seriously when he tells you this? In my case, as the lawyer says, there were mitigating circumstances, or, more specifically, a mitigating circumstance—namely, The Teacher. Still, as I addressed my reflec-tion in the mirror that night, I wondered if I wouldn’t need his council any more.

I had just finished tying my sneakers when I heard the familiar chug-chug-thunk of Gus’ ’68 Volvo expiring in my driveway. Gus never wasted any time getting from one place to the next, and after the car door slam came the footsteps on our porch and his sharp, urgent knock. I could pick Gus’ knock out in a lineup. He was smiling beneath his great shaggy mop of black hair when I opened the door, and I welcomed him in with a handshake. Gus was a year older than I, and the first peer with whom I had ever shaken hands. In fact, I was not a hand-shaker at all until I met him, but he had inadvertently trained me through habit, and I had lived silently grateful for the education ever since.

“Hey, Tom.”

I still got a certain satisfaction hearing one of my friends say my name. It was because of Ray, Ian, and Gus that I was Tom instead of Tommy. When I met them I introduced myself as Tommy Wicker, because that was my name. I was young Tommy Wicker, fourteen years old and almost six feet tall. But they didn’t call me Tommy. They called me Tom. I have no mem-ory of any of them ever calling me Tommy. It was as if they had settled the matter in conference ahead of time. However they arrived at the decision, the first time one of them said my name, I thought to myself, “You know? I am a Tom.” And I have been one ever since.

“You ready to go?” This actually meant, “Let’s go—now.” With Gus, there was always the feeling that something exciting would be missed if we didn’t hurry.

“Yeah, let me just . . .” I was already headed back into the living room where I found my mother sitting on the couch reading a magazine. My mother was an attractive woman, tall with broad, swimmer’s shoulders, though she had a kind of natural masculinity to her born of a quiet-ness that people who didn’t know her well enough frequently mistook for stoicism. I, however, knew she was anything but stoic, that she was instead someone doing the best that she could, which, in 1983 in particular, sometimes required a great deal of concentration.

“I’m heading out with Gus.”

“Oh, good old Gus.” She raised her chin in a little cheer for Gus.

“Yeah. So anyway . . .”

I paused, offering her an opportunity to say something that would make it all better. I had not spoken with her since I had returned from saying good-bye to Amy, so this was her chance. Whether or not she knew this to be her chance, all I got was a rather perfunctory, “Have a good time.” I suspected that what I had been hoping for was unfair. The problem with mo-ments like these is that saying the wrong thing somehow strengthens the case for hopelessness, and certainly no one knew that better than my mom. Still, I lingered there a moment by the couch, dragging my finger along the armrest, to see if she had one more thing to offer. Apparently she didn’t.

But as I turned to go, she called, “Oh, but tomorrow . . .”

I poked my head back in the living room. Her face was at once stern and conflicted. “We’re going to see Calvin.” Her voice lowered with authority and resolve as she said her father’s name.

“I know,” I grumped. I had begged out of the last trip to see my grandfather.

“Okay, but all of us.”

Now I was annoyed. And embarrassed. My mother was attempting to parent me. If she was not going to do this on a regular basis, she really had no right to pull it out when it suited her. But worse, she was hinting that I might try to beg out again, which I had secretly been planning to do.

“I know.”

She glowered at me. I had been caught. I was not, however, one to admit any culpabil-ity, and so I pressed on. “I know.”
“I just don’t want to be pulling you out of bed. We’re leaving a 10:00.”

This was a warning—not that she didn’t want to wake me at 10:00, but that she could smell an argument on the wind and that everyone needed to stay alert and steer this conversa-tional ship to safe waters. If someone had told Franny Wicker that there was a pill she could take to avoid all arguments until she died, she would have swallowed it without water. There was no satisfaction in arguing with her, anyway, and it was nearly impossible to do. If you went looking for a fight, she’d heard you coming and packed up camp. If you did surprise her, she immediately assumed a stance of moral indignity: Arguments were brutal, so why were you dragging her into one?

“Ten?”

I’d done it. I’d pushed back. But I hadn’t meant to sound so worked up over the time; the time had nothing to do with it. The problem was that someone in this family somehow or other had to admit that going to see Calvin—our favorite, no-discussion-about-it grandparent—had now become a chore, if for no other reason than it was impossible to look forward to. Yet it wasn’t the chore part that bothered me so much, it was all the dishonesty surrounding it. The Wickers were honest people overall, but when it came to death, apparently we preferred to look the other way.

She turned away from me and snapped her magazine open. “That’s right.”

End of argument. She had successfully framed the debate: On her side, her dying father; on mine, mere sleep.

I mumbled my acquiescence, feeling a vague deprivation at having not said what I had meant to say, and found Gus pacing in a circle by the front door. That night Gus wore what was more or less his uniform from May until September—shorts, rock T-shirt, and sneakers. He be-lieved this is what a teenager should wear. Gus seemed to have a rule for everything from hair-styles to music to movies to fast food. Question a rule and you were in for some vociferous de-bate, which gave Gus, despite his dedication to atheism, a kind of fervent religiosity. Plus, eve-rything for Gus was brilliant or idiotic, the best or the worst. It was a Heaven or Hell world he lived in, which could be a little exhausting sometimes. I wouldn’t have wanted him for a room-mate, but all in all I liked Gus’ company because he was not about to let life lack purpose on his watch.

I followed him out to the car and climbed into the passenger seat. Gus had inherited the Volvo the day he turned sixteen, and as he was the only one of my friends who owned his own car, it felt like our car. That the seats were torn, that one of the back windows wouldn’t open, that it had a vague, musty, old-beer smell was irrelevant. It’s advancing state of dereliction felt like our handprint upon it, and every flaw was another detail of familiarity we could lay claim to.

He fumbled with his keys, pumped the gas once, twice, and started the engine. “I’m tak-ing you to Burger King,” he announced with the weight of a connoisseur’s authority. Nothing for this evening would be below careful consideration.

Good old Gus, I thought. I don’t think I have given Gus enough credit yet for being the one to pick me up. That was not by chance. He was always at his best during moments like these. Gus lived for drama, and while a lot of it had to be drummed up, when confronted with the real thing, he was right there, unafraid. He was like a soldier always looking for a battle, and while it was easy to get tired of him wanting to fire his gun all the time, who better to call when the enemy was on the hill?

Finally in possession of a firm destination, Gus flipped the gearshift into first, grabbed the wheel—and stalled the car. “God, this car sucks,” he barked. “The clutch is loose, it’s got zero acceleration . . ..”

I wasn’t listening. We were stalled beneath an oak tree that shaded the street in front of our house, and I was reminded of sitting in Amy’s car in this very spot one night when I should have been kissing her. That night I managed to stretch saying good-bye out to a full fifteen min-utes without kissing her. As I remembered this, a thought came into my head. It was a very par-ticular thought, a thought to which I had been hoping I was immune but which it appeared now I was not because I was thinking it and it was this: “Why didn’t I tell her?” The thought was like a stray dog that had appeared at my heels. “Don’t you start following me around,” I said to it. But the dog just panted back at me, tongue over teeth, waiting for me show him his new home.

This triggered a series of wishful thoughts, such as that I had met her when I was junior instead of senior so we would have had another year together, and that I had kissed her on our first date as she later confessed she would have been happy to have had me do, and . . . and—and that Gus would stop talking about skiing! We were driving now, and lovely summer Providence rolled by, all evening shadow and green grass. I had never skied in my life, but Gus was explain-ing that given the opportunity he believed I would be an awesome skier. The problem with talk-ing to me about skiing was that I might have wanted to talk about skiing at a different time, but now where my interest in talking about skiing might have been there was only an empty hole, which made me feel as if I’d never want to talk about anything, which reminded me of one of The Teacher’s favorite aphorisms: “No one understands anything.”

“Oh God, Gus.”

Gus stopped talking about skiing.

“You see the problem is it didn’t end with her because we argued,” I began, because if he was going to be a good friend then I needed to explain myself. “Or because we didn’t like each other anymore, or because of anything other than her father decided he had to open a goddamned bed & breakfast in Hastings fricking Maine. You see? That’s the problem. It’s that she just left. You know what it was like, Gus? It was like we had an appointment with a guillotine. You know it’s coming, and then it comes, and then there you are—and then what? I mean then what the hell are you supposed to do? I don’t get it. I don’t get how that works.”

Gus shook his head meaningfully. “It’s a damn shame.”

He was aiming for a kind of world-weary sympathy, but he wasn’t anywhere near weary of the world yet. It’s impossible, I thought. It’s going to be impossible to make anyone else un-derstand. Only The Teacher, I decided with some regret. Only he would understand. This reali-zation had all the durable earmarks of inevitability, which would have pleased The Teacher mightily. The Teacher was very big into inevitability. I should point out that The Teacher was not your ordinary instructor. He had not been hired, for instance; he had arrived on his own and stayed because there was simply no one else around capable of doing the job. Say what you want about him, but in his own way The Teacher was always looking out for me. That’s cer-tainly something. I had not, however, heard much from him since I’d met Amy. After all, The Teacher was, first and foremost, company, and even when she and I were apart, Amy had been a kind of constant company for me. But now, of course, Amy was gone.

That past summer I had read T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock for the first time. I thought it was great, and eventually memorized the entire poem so I could recite it the same way I would learn and sing songs to myself. My favorite lines were these:

Do I dare
Disturb the Universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I so loved this stanza that I read it to my mother. It was evening, and she was sitting up in bed. “Mom, listen to this.” I read the lines. “Isn’t that great?”

She nodded and shrugged. What’s this? I thought. Usually my mother delighted in my sharing a line of poetry with her. Yet this is all I get? I pressed on. “It’s just so great. I mean—what do you think of it?”

I must not have been paying close attention to my mother up until that moment. I must have just been reading my poems and asking my questions to the unsinkable ship that was Mom. But it was too late to pay attention by the time I looked up from my poem. As I looked up, I fi-nally saw the expression on her face, and even as I was thinking with a shudder that I’d never seen it before, I knew that it was not the first time she had worn it.

Staring straight into the void of her oncoming question, she said, “I think it means: What’s the fucking point?”

I don’t remember what I said before I backed quickly out of her room and retreated to my own. And there was The Teacher, coiled around my bedpost. Like I said, I hadn’t invited him. He came when he was needed. I was not, however, particularly surprised to see him, nor was I surprised when he told me he’d been eyeing me for a while now and thought I had great poten-tial. He said he thought I was just the sort of person worthy of his advice, and that he rarely chose someone as young as I. I was flattered. He made me feel all grown up. He said he would always be close by to answer every question; he said he would always tell me how everything worked. I wasn’t sure at first. It seemed too simple. “You have to trust me, Thomas,” he said. “I’ve been a companion of your mother’s for years now, you know. Don’t you respect your mother?” “Oh, yes,” I said. “More than anyone.” “Well then,” he concluded, “I guess we can be-gin our lessons.”

Fathers and Demons

Like a lot of East Coast liberals I was raised what I like to call PBS, Protestant But Secular. That is, my family never went to church, but if we had it would have been with the Congregationalists or the Unitarians. At one time, I am told, my parents were pillars of the church; my father even graduated from Harvard Divinity School. But one thing led to another, and by the time I was born, the Kenowers’ church-going days were done.

Things change, however, and if they change enough you sometimes end up back where you started. Shortly after my father married his fourth wife, he had a spiritual awakening, and before long he was driving to Barrington, Rhode Island every Sunday to attend Barrington Presbyterian. This was less of a seismic shake-up than one might imagine. In between losing and finding God, my father was always searching for the book, the philosophy, the way that would guide him through the uncertain waters of life. It only made sense that he should eventually return to the first and maybe greatest self-help book of them all, The Bible.

At this same time, my younger brother, John, and I had begun a great adventure of our own. Having dreamed all our childhood of fame, we decided at the ages of 23 and 21 that it was time to get on with the business of achieving the sort of incredible artistic success of which all our enemies would be jealous. To that end, we had written, and with much diligence and a little luck, had managed to find venues in and around Providence to perform a two-man comedy review. It was hard work, we were young, we still had our day jobs, and theater, especially small theater, especially small theater in Rhode Island, is not the quickest way to “the top.”

Still, we were doing it. We started with the proverbial nothing, just an idea, and in a year we were performing to audiences of laughing strangers. I said to my brother once, “If I had known at the beginning what was actually going to be required to do this, I don’t know if I ever would have started.” Fortunately, I didn’t know. All I did know, which is all one ever gets to know, was that I was in one place and wanted to get to another place. We called our show From Here to There.

That summer my father was invited to deliver a Sunday sermon to his congregation, and my brother and I decided to attend. The worshipers at Barrington Presbyterian were a fairly conservative bunch, though not in any bible-thumping kind of way. Rather they were uniformly white, tended to be 40 and older (with the emphasis on the older), the men drank scotch and the women drank Chablis, they liked to sail, belonged, if possible, to a country club, and by and large went to church because, firstly, that’s what you did; secondly, because it was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning; and thirdly, to cover their bases, because if this stuff wasn’t all clap-trap they were not the sort who got turned away at gates, be they pearly or otherwise.

So, naturally, for his sermon’s topic, my father chose demons.

My father had always been rather socially tone deaf. Trips to the bank or a restaurant with him often resulted in some odd exchange with a puzzled teller or waitress—he was always trying a little too hard, talking a little too loud, asking questions that were just a little too personal. I think the world of strangers at times must have seemed as disorienting as a hall of mirrors to him, but he struggled through as best he could, and learned over the years to endure the awkward silences.

And so—the sermon. Demons, it turns out, were other people. Not all of them, but some, and the way you knew for sure that they were demons was if they made you feel bad. He discussed the pragmatic uses of exorcism. And then, to be sure these polite, scotch-sipping Baringtonians who were waiting to get back to their rose bushes and tee times understood just what a demon sounded like, my father imitated one. There on the pulpit, he raised his hands up in two claws, and rasped a wicked feline hissing snarl into the microphone.

Of all the awkward silences I’d heard echoed back to my father in department stores and post offices, none echoed longer or louder than after he hissed across the church like a demon. And yet, in his own strange way, my dad was trying to help the congregation across the divide that everyone must eventually find the wherewithal to navigate, a divide that can seem quite strewn with dangers, snares, and yes, on very dark nights, maybe even demons.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t working, and the hiss was merely the worst of it. The crowd fussed and coughed and checked their watches. And I, as son and actor, thought how I wasn’t my father, and how I would never make such a mistake, and how I had gotten good reviews, and how once, as my brother and I took our final bows, an old man in the front row had clapped and clapped and could be heard above all the other clapping saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I would become famous, and I would be fine.

After the service, my dad wanted us by his side while he stood at the doors of the church and was showered in gratitude and praise, and so John and I got to watch as one by one the congregants tried to think of something polite to say to our father. It was all very familiar to me. I looked at my shoe tops and thought how no one in our family was ever a success. Success was the heaven toward which all ambitions strove, a lovely mountaintop where you got to rest at last secure in the certainty of achievement.

It always sounded like a lovely place, especially compared to the flames of failure, that unmarked grave into which all bad ideas, bad jobs, and bad marriages eventually disappear. Somewhere, I knew, there was a path that led from the idea to the fruition, from the desire to the experience. But where, I wondered, and how did you ever know for sure if you were on it? I’m sure the sermon had seemed like a good idea to my father at the time he wrote it.

Once the awkward procession was over, we learned that none other than Kenny Walhberg was downstairs in the “Playroom.” Kenny had been a friend of my family’s growing up, and the closest thing to a successful artist our mom and dad had ever known. He had run the Rhode Island Puppet Workshop, which toured around the state to schools and fairs and wherever else he could, putting on puppet shows for children and “children at heart.” He was like our own Jim Henson. Whenever he performed in my school I felt special because he would come up to me afterward and say hello.

Kenny, my brother and I were told, wanted to see us. This would be good, I decided. The acrid taste of failure, albeit my father’s, still sat on palate. I had not seen Kenny since I was a boy, and now, all grown up with a show of my own, we could talk shop, receive his professional blessing, and I could feel certain of my future once again.

John and I found him in a small room in the church’s basement, picking up abandoned toys now that the tots had rejoined their parents. Kenny didn’t look so good. He had put on weight, his mustache, which I remembered as a happy, bushy caterpillar, looked heavy and droopy under his nose, and his signature mop of curly brown hair, which had once seemed so wild and interesting, now merely appeared in need of a trim.

John and I skipped quickly over my father’s sermon and got right down to how great our show was doing. We told him about the theaters where we’d performed, about the good reviews we’d gotten, about our talented piano player and the lighting manager we’d just picked up.

Kenny nodded and picked up more toys.

“So you making any money at it?”

“Money? Not much yet,” I began defensively. “But we’re going to try and do the colleges, you know—maybe take it to Boston.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s real hard. I mean—there’s just very little money in it. I did it, and did it, and did it for fifteen years. And I tried everything, believe me: Schools, colleges, fairs—everything. But there was never any money in it. Maybe you get a grant here or there or whatever. It’s never enough. I finally had to give it up. It’s just so hard. It’s great to do it and everything—I mean it’s satisfying or whatever—but there’s just no money in it at all.”

We got out of the church as quickly as possible. Before we were off the front steps my brother and I were already reminding each other how we’d never much cared for the Puppet Workshop, that it had been a rinky-dink operation, that there was a big difference between puppets and theater, and that we had no intention of staying in Rhode Island.

All of this seemed true, yet it couldn’t settle the matter completely. As we pulled away, and as we tried to find one more difference between the Kenower brothers and Kenny Walhberg, the church bell called out the hour behind us, wishing all the congregants well for the rest of their Sunday. It was a sweet sounding bell, so full of hope. Just the sort of bell you’d want ringing to begin a wedding or end a funeral.

Alone At Last

I went to summer camp exactly once as a boy—between sixth and seventh grade—and then only because my best friend Palmer had extolled the boyhood paradise that was Camp Fuller By the Sea. Palmer painted a vivid picture filled with BB guns and bows and arrows, as well as swimming, Capture the Flag, and canoes. It sounded like Pinocchio’s Boy Island, but without the hassle of turning into a donkey. I pestered my poor mother until she agreed to pay what I’m sure was a budget-killing sum on her secretary’s salary to send me to Camp Fuller for two weeks.

I spent an entire school year anticipating the non-stop fun that would be life at camp. I had decided that if there was anything my life needed more of, it was fun. It wasn’t that my day-to-day life lacked fun—it had its normal childhood dose—but I was nagged by the feeling that something was lacking, and I complained often of being bored. Fun seemed a natural remedy for boredom, and yet I frequently found myself drawn—against the better instincts of a fun-seeker—to the quiet corners of my house and backyard.

I liked to be alone. Not all the time, but often. Life’s hustle-bustle was all very well and good, but until I was alone, I didn’t feel complete. Or very nearly complete, anyway, for even then something was still lacking, and so I would turn to my imagination to fill in what seemed so stubbornly absent. Someday, however, I was certain that what I was always imagining would become real, and then I would never again have to be alone to feel whole.

And so off to camp I went where there was company a-plenty. Boys, boys, boys. Boys everywhere being boys. As advertised I got all the swimming, BB gun shooting, canoe paddling and Capture the Flag playing I could stomach, and always, always, always with lots of other boys. Boys to the left and right. Boys above me when I slept; boys beside me when I ate. I lived in a tent with eight or ten other boys where farting was encouraged and hygiene optional. I could have lived without the farting, but I was not great fan of showers and I liked shooting BB guns and Capture the Flag.

The problem with Camp Fuller by the Sea was you were never allowed to be alone. This was no accident. Camp Fuller was conceived, built, and run to keep boys busy and active. If given the option, what normal boy, Camp Fuller’s founders must have wondered, wanted to be alone? Where was the fun in that? I understood the reasoning, but it didn’t help the problem. No sooner would I sit out on the steps of my tent and turn my mind inward then some counselor was in my ear asking me what I wanted to do next. “Nothing” was not an acceptable answer, just as “nowhere” was not an acceptable direction when asked exactly where I was headed by myself in between basketball and archery. Once during a massive game of hide-and-seek I discovered a secluded spot where I sat and sat far longer than any game could have reasonably lasted. There I drank myself full of thought. Yet like all my time alone, my solitude was flavored by the distant fires of other homes—I may have been on an island, but I had a boat, and I knew how to reach the mainland.

Then one moonless night the boys from my tent were brought to a small clearing in the woods where a campfire was burning. There by firelight our counselor told us a story about the Granger House, a derelict home that stood like a vacant sentry at the head of the road that led to Camp Fuller. We’d all driven past the Granger House on our way to camp, and even in the day-light the leaning frame, the shattered windows, and the rusted gate gave it a haunted look—it wasn’t just empty, it was abandoned, and the house seemed to know it and resent it.

The house had once belonged to Mr. Granger, a man who had lived alone at the edge of the camp for sixty years. No one ever saw him leave, but occasionally, if the light was right, you would see him standing in a window, and every Saturday evening he could be heard chopping wood behind the house. He must have been very strong, because he chopped wood once a week for sixty years. Chop, chop, chop. You could hear the chopping if you wandered by at the right hour. Chop, chop, chop.

And then one day—he was gone. Just gone. No chopping, no figure in the window. Nothing. A year past, and nothing. Two years. Still nothing. In the summer of the third year, three boys from Camp Fuller decided to investigate. They crept off from their tents—why, it was our tent, in fact! Tent three. The counselor had only just remembered this detail. In any case, they crept off alone one night and made their way by flashlight down the road and to the house. The door was locked, but with some effort they forced it open.

They shone their lights around the great entry room. Cobwebs everywhere, furniture overturned, broken lamps, fallen paintings. “Hey,” said one. “I just realized—it’s Saturday. Mr. Granger’s chopping day.” A chill silence settled over them. “I say we split up,” said the same boy. The other two balked at first, but the dare had been laid, and no one wanted to be called chicken, and so they dispersed. But one boy, the youngest of the three, had a funny feeling. The house had never felt entirely empty to him. Once the other two were out of sight, he slipped out-side.

Good thing. As soon as he reached the road, he heard a scream from inside the house. He called his friends’ names. Nothing. Then there was another scream. He called their names once more. Again nothing. They had to be joking, he thought. This was just some prank. They were always pulling pranks. That was when from somewhere behind the house he heard it—chop, chop, chop. He ran back to camp. The other two boys were never seen again.

His story concluded, the counselor asked us if we knew what day it was. Saturday, we said. He then gathered us up and told us it was time to take a walk. I shared a look with the other boys from tent three, but no, he couldn’t possibly be taking us . . . By the time we reached the road that led from the camp to the Granger House, we knew in fact he could. As I said, there was no moon, and some high summer clouds had even blacked out the stars. Walking on a for-ested road, far from the street lamps and headlights, the night was a shade of black a city boy like myself could only find locked in a closet with a winter coat over his head. When we reached the house, the Counselor swept his flashlight’s beam over the its sagging and derelict frame—it was perfectly still and perfectly dark.

“Okay. In we go.”

We didn’t protest. We couldn’t. On the road we had been told about how we were get-ting older, how boyhood as we knew it would soon be coming to an end, and that the difference between boys and men was who was afraid and who was not. We entered the house. In the company of the other boys and the counselor and his flashlight it wasn’t so bad. It was an old house with broken windows and doors off their hinges. But then the counselor led us from room to room, and at each room, he left one boy by himself. I was left in the third. I could hear the counselor depositing the other boys in their rooms, and then his solitary footsteps, and then the front door close, and then nothing.

I was alone. I could hear my heart beating as I told myself it was just a story he had made up and that he would never put us in harms way. The silence did not last long, however—there was a cough here, a sniff there, and then soon I heard other boys chattering between rooms. In a moment, the counselor returned.

“You weren’t supposed to talk to each other,” he admonished once we were outside. He shook his head gravely. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t want to do this. Kenower. Come here.”

He pulled a candle from his pocket and lit it with his cigarette lighter and handed it to me. “In you go. I’ll give a shout when you can come out again.”

I took the candle and faced the house. The counselor’s flashlight illuminated the door. Cupping the flame with my hand, I walked steadily away from the others and up the steps and into the house. “Close the door,” called the counselor. I did. For a moment the flashlight’s beam lit the window, and then the outside world went black.

My small candle was little use against the depth of night, but there was nowhere else to look; beyond it was a void. I was here, I knew, to choose not to believe in ghost stories, but that seemed a feeble threat. The darkness, the house, the candle—these were all too familiar to my solitary self. The distant company of others is always a vague comfort in the solitude of imagi-nation. Just as in sleeping dreams, imagination always begets a question, a question composed just for you, and so you turn and turn to it, the way you must when someone calls your name, until life pulls you back to her circus, and you leave off, knowing you will hear your name again and wondering if perhaps that’s enough and all one ever gets. Unless, of course, you decide one day to not just turn but to actually walk towards what you have heard—the circus will be no comfort then, for it was only your name you heard in the darkness.

Eventually the counselor gave the call, and I found my way to the front door, fumbling against the blackness, and then stepped outside. The face of the next camper appeared before me, and I handed him the candle.

One by one they went in after me, and we stood and watched their tiny flame consumed by the house. Alone they entered, and alone they reemerged, relieved and unharmed. After-wards, there was much congratulating and then a short and happy walk home. It was good to be alive. Of that we were all certain.