Free Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser Page B

the bed or across the room or just behind me or who knew where. She would say, “Welcome, stranger,” or “Lo, the traveler returns,” or nothing at all. Then I would make my way over to the bed and pat my way along the side and lie down, hoping for a fleeting touch, hoping she would be there.
    I visited her every day. When I wasn’t working at the library, I rode my bike to her house at three in the afternoon; in Isabel’s room I would forget the other world so completely that sometimes when I came downstairs I was startled to see the lamps in the living room glowing bright yellow. Through the front window I could see the porch light shining on black leaves. Then I would phone my parents with apologies and ride my bike home to a reheated dinner, while my mother looked at me with her worried expression and my father asked if I’d ever happened to hear of a clever little invention called the wristwatch. At night I could hear my mother and father talking about me in low voices, as if there were something wrong with me.
    On the three afternoons a week I worked at the library, I would ride over to Wolf’s house after dinner and not return until after midnight. Sometimes Wolf’s mother, who liked to stay up late watching old movies on a little ten-inch television in the darkened living room, offered to drive me home. I would sit with her on the couch for a while, watching a snippet of black-and-white movie: an unshaven man in a rumpled suit stumbling along a dusty street in a Mexican town, a woman in a phone booth frantically dialing as she looked about in terror. Then I would load my bike into the trunk of the car and sit with Wolf’s mother in front. On the way to my house, along dark streets that glowed now and then under the yellow light of a streetlamp, she would talk about Wolf: he’d failed three subjects, could you believe it, he was smart as a whip but had always hated school, she was worried about him, I was a good influence. Then with her long fingers she would light up a cigarette, and in the dark car streaked with passing lights I would see her eyes—Wolf’s eyes—narrow against the upstreaming smoke.
    At times it seemed to me that I inhabited two worlds: a sunny and boring day-world that had nothing to do with Isabel, and a rich night-world that was all Isabel. I soon saw that this division was false. The summer night itself, compared with Isabel’s world, was a place of light: the yellow windows of houses, the glow of streetlamps, the porch lights, the headlights of passing cars, the ruby taillights, the white summer moon in the deep blue sky. No, the real division was between the visible world and that other world, where Isabel waited for me like a dark dream.
    One afternoon as I stood by the chair I felt something press against my foot. “Isabel, is that you?” In the blackness I listened, then bent over the bed. I patted the covers and began crawling across, all the way to the pillows, but Isabel wasn’t there. I heard a small laugh, which seemed to come from the floor. Carefully stepping from the bed I kneeled on the carpet, lifted the spread, and peered into blackness, as if I were looking for a cat. “Come on, Isabel,” I said, “I know you’re there,” and reached my hand under. I felt something furry against my fingers and snatched my hand away. I heard a dim sound, the furry thing pressed into my arm—and closing my hand over it, I drew out from under the bed an object that wasn’t a kitten. From the top of the bed Isabel said, “Did you find what you were looking for, David Dave?” but ignoring her I pressed the thick, furry slipper against my face.
    Sometimes I tried to imagine her in the world of light. She lay next to me on the beach, on her own towel, with a thin line of sand in between—and though I could see, in my mind, that thin line of sand, and the ribbed white towel with a blue eyeglass case in one corner and a bottle of suntan lotion in another, though I could see a