4

Our old house stood four doors up the block, a foursquare rectangular wooden building with two concrete steps up to the front door, windows on both sides of the door, two windows in line with these on the second floor, and a small patchy front lawn. It looked like a child's drawing. During my childhood, the top floor had been painted brown and the bottom one yellow. Later, my father had painted the entire house a sad, terrible shade of green, but the new owners had restored it to the original colors.

The old house hardly affected me. It was like a shell I had grown out of and left behind. I'd been more moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery—just driving into Pigtown on Livermore Avenue had affected me more deeply. I tried to let the deep currents, the currents that connect you to the rest of life, run through me, but I felt like a stone. What I remembered about the old house had to do with an old Underwood upright on a pine desk in a bedroom where blue roses climbed up the wallpaper, with onionskin paper and typewriter ribbons, and with telling stories to charm the darkness: a memory of frustration and concentration, and of time disappearing into a bright elastic eternity.

Then there was one more place I had to see, and I walked back down South Sixth, crossed Livermore, and turned south.

From two blocks away I saw the marquee sagging toward the sidewalk, and my heart moved in my chest. The Beldame Oriental had not survived the last three decades as well as the Royal. Sliding glass panels crusty with stains had once protected the letters that spelled out the titles of the films. Nothing remained of the ornate detail I thought I remembered.

Two narrow glass doors opened off the sidewalk. Behind them, before a set of black lacquered doors, the glass cubicle of the ticket booth was only dimly visible through the smudgy glass. Jagged pieces of cement and smoke-colored grit littered the black-and-white tile floor between the two sets of doors. The paltriness, the meanness of this distance—the stingy littleness of the entire theater—gave me a shock so deep that at the moment I was scarcely aware of it.

I stepped back and looked down the street for the real Beldame Oriental. Then I went up to the two narrow glass doors and tried either to push myself inside the old theater or simply to see better—I didn't know which. My reflection moved forward to meet me, and we touched.

An enormous block of feeling loosed itself from its secret moorings and moved up into my chest. My throat tightened and my breathing stopped. My eyes sparkled. I drew in a ragged breath, for a moment uncertain if I were going to stay on my feet. I could not even tell if it were joy or anguish. It was just naked feeling, straight from the heart of my childhood. It even tasted like childhood. I pushed myself away from the old theater and wobbled over the sidewalk to lean on a parking meter.

Warmth on my head and shoulders brought me a little way back to myself, and I blew my nose into my handkerchief and straightened up. I stuffed the handkerchief back into my pocket. I moved away from the parking meter and pressed my hands over my eyes.

Across the street, a little old man in a baggy double-breasted suit and a white T-shirt was staring at me. He turned to look at some friends inside a diner and made a circular motion at his temple with his forefinger.

I uttered some noise halfway between a sigh and a groan. It was no wonder that I had been afraid to come back to Millhaven, if things like this were going to happen to me. All that saved me from another spell was the sudden memory of what I'd read in the gnostic gospel while I waited for John to come back from the hospital: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I was trying to bring it forth—had been trying to bring it forth since I stood in front of the graves in Pine Knoll cemetery —but what in the world was it?