Free Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser Page A

tried to find the words that were lying deep within me, like blood. But already my mother had sat back against the couch, as if she had been pulled backward by a pair of hands. In the dissolving room a weariness came over me, like the tiredness of childhood, and I sank down for a moment into the armchair in order to gain the strength to rise.
III
    When I opened my eyes the room had sunk deeper into darkness, it might have been sunset or midnight or winter or some other time, and I had the feeling that if I didn’t get up at once from my father’s chair and return to the outside world, I would become part of the dying room, like Old Man Blue or the faded woman on the lampshade. On the barely visible couch I could make out a crumple of afghan. My mother seemed not to be there. I pushed myself to my feet and made my way through the dark over to the couch, where I began patting the afghan as though my mother might have slipped under it, like a cat. Then I lifted it up, to make sure. Under the afghan I felt something smooth and hard. I could not understand what it was, under the afghan, my fingers kept pressing here and there, then suddenly it revealed itself to be an eyeglass case. For a moment I had the odd sensation that the eyeglass case was my mother, who had grown smaller and taken on a new form. And I felt a surge of guilty relief to think that my mother had become an eyeglass case, since then I might be able to take my leave without worry, knowing it was unlikely she would come to harm.
    Even as I pursued this thought I began to look about. Maybe shehad strayed over to the piano, or maybe she was sitting quietly in the kitchen, waiting for her water to boil. As I stepped through the room, which seemed to be nothing but an expanse of darkness, I saw a figure standing not far from the rocking chair. I wondered where she was trying to go, in that all but motionless way of hers, but when I came close to her I saw that she was facing the corner where the vase had once stood. She was standing between the rocking chair and the piano, as if she were considering whether to advance into the wall.
    “Do you want to sit down?” I said, in a voice that might have been a whisper or a yell, but she stood fixed and immobile there. “I really have to be on my way,” I said, angry at the impatience in my voice, for what right did I have to be impatient, I who had not been out this way for longer than I cared to remember. Then I reached out to touch my mother, who was like someone lying on a couch, though she was standing upright before me. My hand came to rest on the lower part of her upper arm. It felt stiff as a stick. My mother seemed to be hardening, here in the dark. In the black air, her wisps of hair seemed pressed to her skull, the skin of her face wax-pale. “What do you want me to do?” I said, and I heard in my voice a petulance, as if I had been deprived of something.
    “Can you hear me?” I asked. “I’m right here,” I said. My mother said nothing. I stood there like a man in a wide field, standing by a tree. She was so still that it was as if she had come to the end of motion. I tried to look at my watch, but most of my arm had vanished. In the dark I began to pace tensely up and down, with a kind of ferocious wariness, fearful of crashing into an edge of furniture. The restraint of my furious pacing made me feel that I was fighting my way through a soft obstruction, as though the flowers in the rug had sprung up to the height of my thighs. I imagined the bushes outside, rising over the tops of the windows, bursting through the glass. In the cracked streets, weed-spears were springing up. Bony cats roamed the deserted houses. It seemed to me that if only I could get mymother to settle in one place, instead of drifting through the house like someone driven by a terrible restlessness, if only I could know that she was calm and still, then I might be able to take my leave with some measure of peace. For though I had