RED NIGHTS
He stood for a moment without answering.
"Please, Guy."
577
"O.K. Suit yourself. I've got to make the rounds." He started
out, then looked back.
"If
it gets too cold out there you'd better come
back in."
"I will. Yes. Thanks." Quickly I began to strip the blankets
from the cot. Then, remembering, I rushed after him. "Guy! The
lock! How do you work the lock?"
So for the rest of the winter I stayed in the cabin at night. I
never got used to it, but in some ways the nights were better than
the days. The nights were warm fantasies of terror, technicolor night–
mares. I recognized somehow that everything happening to me alone
at night in the cabin was of a low order of reality. My hallucinations,
the fear itself, the entire drama came from inside my own head. I
was
making
it all, and although it was terrifying, it was not, as were
the days, philosophically threatening.
The days were emptiness, a vast, spacious emptiness in which the
fact of being alive became almost meaningless. The first fragile
beginnings of a personality starting to collect in my twelve-year-old
soul were immediately sucked up into the silence and the featureless
winter sky. The overbearing, undeniable reality of those empty days!
The inescapable fact that everything around me was non-human, that
in terms of snow and sky and rocks and dormant trees I didn't exist,
these things rendered me invisible even to myself. I wasn't conscious
of what was happening, I lived it. I became invisible. I lost myself.
At night I materialized. The outlines of my body were hot,
flushed, sharply defined. My senses were heightened. I knew I was
real as I populated the darkness with extensions of myself.
If
the sky
was more real than I was, then I was more real than my phantoms.
But the days predominated. The flat sky.
As
the winter passed
a unique sense of desolation crept deeper and deeper into my mind.
I wasn't afraid, it was too nebulous for that, but I was profoundly
uneasy. Perhaps in the back of my mind was the fear that everything
would go blank, that I would become the sky, without a body, with–
out thought. I remembered the peculiarly impersonal quality of some
of the screams in cottage eight.
In
the spring I started going down to the school just to hang
around, walking the four miles with a quarter in my pocket to get
