The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Two months out of college and undecided on a career, Tom Hanauer answers an ad in the classifieds seeking a “night companion.” He discovers to his pleasant surprise that he will be more of a hired conversationalist and chess opponent than a caregiver and that his employer stays up all night and sleeps during the day.
As Tom adjusts to this nocturnal existence, he finds that his employer, the lady of the house, is in a kind of cold war with her estranged husband, a disgraced mycologist who, as a result of his ongoing experiments, has forced his wife and children to devise individual strategies to protect themselves. Tom gradually learns the reasons for the strange behavior of the Morhan family.
Chapter 3: The Hour of Obsession
part 1
Slowly, unwillingly, I adjusted to a nocturnal existence. My social life now flowed between narrower banks. Sometimes I had to excuse myself from parties that were just heating up and, on my days off, my friends dropped out by two a.m., leaving me with the limited options of a small town after hours: bottle club, all-night breakfast house, or most frequently, an alert and restless solitude.
To be awake in a sleeping world is to experience one’s singleness with the painful clarity of exile. I read, wrote letters, grazed the barren fields of late-night TV, but by now I’d learned that the undersea silence of four a.m. is more conducive to gnawing one’s nails than anything else. I paced my apartment, listening at the window for the first bird of morning, the thrown bottle and shouted curse, the snores of sleepers in nearby apartments, and also for the sounds beneath the silence: the inaudible crescendoes of other people’s dreams.
Intimate now with her loneliness, I thought of Carla, at first with the guilty sense of having deserted her by taking a day off and, later, with relief; I needed time away from her night-thriving personality. I could neither imagine nor dream of her apart from the house. She was embedded in it, like a queen termite. Once, in a lull between chess games, I forgot myself and suggested we go have a drink somewhere.
She stared hard at me for a second. “No, I can’t.”
Embarrassed, I persisted: “Can’t even watch me drink?”
“No.” After a pause, she said: “In some perverse way, Patrick seemed to approve of my drinking, even insisted on it, as if being always drunk was proof that the failure of our marriage was my fault: the red “A” of alcoholism stitched on my dress, to be displayed at all times before the children, so they would grow up knowing whom to blame.”
“And did they blame you?”
“I suppose so,” she replied, fingering her bishop thoughtfully, “for failing to protect them. The boys, I think, forgave me as they grew up. But when a ten-year old girl wakes up and sees her mother crawling past her doorway after a rolling bottle and then has to lie to her friends about it, she begins to feel less like a daughter than an accomplice. I lost my daughter’s respect long before I quit drinking. I have to live with that. What I can’t understand is how my husband lives with what he’s lost. All he has left is Catherine. And some day she won’t come back.”
Just as often, it was I who did the talking and, sometimes, it seemed that her gentle probing had picked my brains clean, that she’d learned all my secrets between midnight and dawn, and must soon discard me and hire another companion. I told her about my small-town childhood, of my parents’ divorce, my mother’s bitterness and my father’s guilt-tinged happiness with a younger woman, of my sister’s marriage and my ex-girlfriend.
I read books in order to talk about them, brought her things to read, told her about my friends, daily incidents, dreams. We talked, argued, ate together, played chess (I’d improved, though not dramatically), and became friends.
But it was always understood that certain topics were taboo, one of them being the death of her son. Having once glimpsed the fissure of grief my careless question had opened, I was determined from now on to let her broach the sensitive subjects. As Peter Fleming commented during one of our evenings at the pub, it was her talk show. I was just the sidekick.
The illusion of Carla and myself as the sole occupants of the house — I had no real sense of her son’s presence — continued for about a month. The change came abruptly. It was a night of thunder and rain. The air was unusually cool for August, and we had opened the sliding door of the living room while we played chess. She was silent, watchful and, though it was only two o’clock, had already consumed her evening quota of cigarettes and coffee.
I was watching her long fingertips stroke the hollow of her temple, when the figure of a man passed swiftly across the glass door behind her. Seeing me straighten up and, without lifting her eyes from the board, she said: “My husband.”
My impression of the man was fleeting: almost luminously pale and thin, sharp-profiled, a large head with long, flowing gray hair on a slender neck, moving with a kind of impatient skitter. I was sure of one thing: Professor Morhan had not even looked at me.
“So that’s him,” I said.
“Check.”
I began a series of futile escape maneuvers. “Why haven’t you divorced him?”
She looked up, and for a moment I thought I’d gotten too personal.
“When you’re at war, you like to know the whereabouts of the enemy.”
“You can’t be serious.”
She shrugged irritably. “All right. Let’s say he’s the kind of man incapable of believing that he’s ever been wrong about anything in his life and who’d fight a divorce to the last drop of his blood and mine. Let’s say I don’t have that kind of strength and leave it at that.”
“’Leave,’” I repeated, more nettled than I had any right to be. “There’s an idea: you could leave him.”
“I think we should drop this, Tom,” she said, staring at the chessboard.
“Someday, when I know you better, I’m going to ask you why you haven’t left him,” I said, gazing steadily at her.
“You’re still in check.”
Making what I knew was a futile move, I said, “So are you,” then added: “O White Queen.”
“No I’m...” she began, and then, seeing my expression, smiled and nodded. “You’re right. By a black-hearted Rook, for many years now. But it’s my choice, isn’t it? Stalemate.”
“You could resign the game. Your children are grown. Why stay here?”
“And where would I go? A home for crippled alcoholics?”
I toppled my king and shrugged. “Well, I’d better not pursue the chess analogy any further. I might find myself somewhere on the board. As what, though? Your white knight? Or just a throwaway pawn?”
“One sacrifices — never throws away — a pawn,” she said, and then wheeled herself toward the door. “Excuse me.”
When she had left the room, I got up and perused the bookcase. Though dusty and mildewed, the books seemed to represent, in their randomness, something provisional, unfinished, as if they’d been shelved years before by someone who intended to order them at a later date.
Reader’s Digest condensed books stood alongside dictionaries in several languages, scientific works moldered next to the collected works of Henry James and Kipling, Winnie the Pooh reposed uneasily beside Justine.
I took down a book of fantastic short stories by Giovanni Papini. On the flyleaf was the inscription: “For Catherine, Christmas, 1968. Dreams will never betray you. Your forever-loving Daddy.” In the right-hand corner she had written her name in a precise and elegant script.
Replacing the book, I noticed another title: Psychoactive Mushrooms of the Amazon River Basin, by Patrick Morhan, Ph.D. I leafed through it, attracted by the author’s hand-drawn illustrations, and was carrying it back to my chair when I heard the bristling, expectant silence of an open intercom channel. I put my ear to the tiny speaker set into the wall. Someone had opened the connection on his end and was listening.
I was tempted to say something. Instead, I went outside and looked up at the Professor’s room above the garage. The window was shuttered, and there was no light behind it. The rain had stopped, and the intercom was off when I went back inside. If the act had been symbolic — assuming, of course, that it was the Professor’s — how was I to interpret it? As a subtle threat or, perhaps, as the cowardice of a man who preferred to convey his displeasure from a distance? He had, then, seen a young man playing chess with his wife and, if so, was his indifference feigned or genuine?
Some minutes later, when Carla had still not called me to dinner, I went looking for her. She always insisted on heating up Hettie’s leftovers and setting the table herself. As I neared the kitchen, I heard angry voices and stopped in the long hallway, listening. One was Carla’s, the other a female voice I didn’t recognize.
Deciding that I didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping, I quickly retraced my steps back to the living room, wondering if the voice I’d heard was Catherine’s. My heart was beating faster, and I realized that for some weeks now I’d been hoping to meet Carla’s “nomadic” daughter.
Pacing around the room, I noticed unfaded rectangles on the wallpaper where pictures had hung, and it rather belatedly occurred to me that there wasn’t a single family photograph on display. I sat down again, opened the professor’s book and read from the introduction: “I collected the mushrooms identified below during a six-month sabbatical in Brazil in the fall and winter of 1966. They should be taken as the merest sampling of the astonishing variety of psychoactive fungi in that region, which is home to perhaps the largest number of unidentified species on Earth.”
I hoped to find some first-person narratives of visionary experience, but the professor’s prose was impenetrable. Labored, Latinate descriptions of taxonomy alternated with molecular diagrams, and every paragraph was extensively footnoted, the only grace notes being the delicate line drawings on every other page. I closed the book and leaned back in my chair, listening for approaching footsteps and hearing only the dripping trees, crickets, and an aggressive duet of frogs. I was more tired than usual this evening, and at some point I must have fallen asleep.
I’m in an abandoned behavioral science laboratory, the walls stacked with rusted cages filled with bones and black feathers. Decayed monkey heads protrude from holes in a long table. Then it seems as if the rotting monkey faces are cameos set into tiny coins of glass, multiplying in my vision like the combs of a beehive.
The laboratory is now a “torture chamber.” I am being shown around by a thin, gray-haired man in dark glasses and a guyabara shirt, whose brisk, professional descriptions of each apparatus seem to lack conviction, as if he’s an actor miscast as a torturer.
Apparently sensing my skepticism and wanting to prove both to me and himself how ruthless he is, the man lays a baby on the table — suddenly there’s a baby in the dream — and, as I watch, unable to move or speak, he crushes its skull with a pistol butt.
I turn away in horrified disgust, and the “torturer,” no less shocked, exclaims in a thick Spanish accent: “Oh Jesus!”
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
