A Collapse of Horses Read online

  He went online and found that Wilson and his family hadn’t gone far. They’d relocated just a few towns away. Wilson had remained there and, years later, had started some sort of tech business that had gone public and left him inordinately wealthy. With some of this money he had established a foundation, the Wilson Group, focused on education. One of their projects was back here in Wilson’s hometown, a new school to replace not the school Wilson had gone to—which had remained well funded and supported—but the school Willem had gone to. There would be a groundbreaking the next day, and Wilson would be there.

  That was the first time in years that the words “The Punish” came back to him. At first he couldn’t believe they had called it that—it didn’t make any sense as a phrase, just sounded wrong: a verb used as a noun, apparently deliberately. But The Punishment and The Punisher didn’t sound right either. Sounded even less right, in fact. So maybe they had called it The Punish after all.

  He’ll be in town, he thought idly. Why not ask him?

  He thought about it all through dinner, which he made for himself by opening a can and warming up the contents in a saucepan. He had learned to eat directly out of the saucepan, placing a hot pad on the table under it so that it wouldn’t melt the vinyl tablecloth. He could save washing a dish that way. No, he thought, The Punish, it must have been that. But he wasn’t sure. Since Wilson was coming into town, why not ask him?

  But would Wilson even remember him? It had been so many years ago, and though he remembered Wilson, why would Wilson remember him?

  He chewed his food slowly, thoroughly. It was a game he played with himself: try not to look at the labels when opening the cans, then guess what the food is when eating it. Usually he couldn’t guess.

  But of course Wilson would remember him, he thought. Or at the very least, Wilson would remember taking his finger.

  He didn’t remember what the early dares had been. He did think—though he wasn’t completely certain—that Wilson had been the one to start The Punish, had maybe even been the one to choose the name. Yes, that sounded right: Wilson was from the better part of town, the better house—he would have been running the show. Willem would have let him. He didn’t remember the order of the dares or why they had seemed to build so smoothly and easily that both he and Wilson had always been willing to undergo them. He remembered a few of them: Wilson stubbing out a match against the flesh on the back of Willem’s knee, Wilson having him hyperventilate and then locking his elbow quickly around his neck to black him out, Wilson putting a thumbtack on a chair and daring him to sit on it. There had been other things he remembered less completely, most of them minor—little, simple transgressions—but a few worse. And there had been things too that Wilson had had to do, certainly. The fact that Willem was having trouble remembering any of them now didn’t mean there hadn’t been.

  The final Punish, they had been at Wilson’s house, both of his parents out. They had been idling in the basement, half-watching television, paging through a large atlas spread out flat on the floor, when he noticed Wilson staring at him.

  “What?” Willem said.

  “Whose turn is it?”

  “Whose turn for what?” he asked, although he knew what Wilson meant.

  “It’s your turn, right?” said Wilson.

  He started to nod and then stopped. Was it his turn? No, he would have sworn it was Wilson’s. But Wilson, looking at him steadily, seemed so sure. So he nodded.

  “Good,” said Wilson. “Yes. Let’s go upstairs.”

  They climbed the stairs from the basement. Willem, his mind already moving forward to meet whatever was going to happen, tripped a few times. They came to the top of the stairs and into the hallway leading to the kitchen. Then, instead of staying on that main floor as they’d always done in the past, Wilson led him around the corner to a circular metal stairway leading to the top floor.

  Willem followed him up, holding to the center pole and trying not to look over the edge as he climbed. He had never been to the top floor before. The stairs were open on the outside, the treads thin metal rectangles connected to nothing apart from the center pole. He had a hard time understanding what supported them, why they didn’t bend under his weight. By the time he got to the top, he was crawling on his hands and knees like a dog, trying to spread his weight over as many treads as possible.

  He clambered out onto a carpeted floor, but the carpet was rough and scratchy, almost like rope. Wilson was already there, watching him with a curious expression that Willem didn’t quite understand at the time and that he would think about for months afterwards, still without understanding it. Then Wilson moved forward and, with a steady hand, helped him stand.

  It had been all of that: Wilson taking charge, and his crawling up the stairs like an animal and then being in a part of the house he hadn’t been in before. Alone each thing was very little, but together they added up to something that made him even more receptive to this particular manifestation of The Punish. Perhaps Wilson had been setting this up the whole way along, through every dare he issued within every manifestation of The Punish. In any case, it was all of that taken together that made him not even hesitate before sticking his little finger to the first knuckle into what Wilson informed him was not his father’s cigar cutter, but a finger guillotine.

  The rest of it was a blur. That same strange expression on Wilson’s face. A surprising lack of pain, but a feeling rather of heat, followed very quickly by an intense, buzzing throb, and then finally pain unlike anything he’d experienced before. Someone was screaming, and only later did he realize it must be him. There was blood everywhere. Then suddenly Wilson’s mother was there, her face very white, and she was gathering Willem to her and running out to the car, driving him to the emergency room.

  III.

  He arrived early at the groundbreaking. Nobody else was there except for a couple of construction workers who were busy cordoning off the area with yellow tape. They kept looking at him strangely. He felt conspicuous. But he just stayed there and waited, trying not to worry about it, and eventually people started showing up and he began to blend in. Then, all at once, a whole crowd of people flooded in and then stood around talking in a tight cluster while the television cameras were set up. Wilson was there among them. If I just stand here, will he notice me? wondered Willem. But Wilson didn’t seem to.

  The ceremony was over almost as quickly as it began, then Wilson and the officials with him were striding back to their cars. Willem had to almost run to catch up with them. When he grabbed hold of Wilson’s coat, the man gave a little jerk of surprise, the movement rippling through the people around them.

  “Wilson?” Willem said.

  “Yes?” said Wilson, his eyes cautious.

  “It’s Willem,” he said, extending his hand to shake. “Don’t you remember me?”

  Wilson had started to shake his head no, but by then Willem had slipped his hand into Wilson’s own, pressing it so that Wilson would feel the missing finger. He watched the puzzlement in Wilson’s eyes quickly change to recognition, and watched too the blood drain from his face. Then the same expression came over his face that Willem remembered from the last session of The Punish, the one he still didn’t quite know how to read.

  “Ah,” said Wilson, freeing his hand. “Of course.”

  “I know you’re busy,” said Willem. “But perhaps you’ve got a few minutes later to stop by? To catch up?”

  “Ah, well,” said Wilson, “I’ve a limited amount of time . . . I don’t think—”

  “I had a question for you,” said Willem, ignoring whatever Wilson was trying to say. “What was that game we used to play called?”

  And though he could see from his face that Wilson knew what he was talking about, Wilson pretended in front of the others that he didn’t.

  Willem reached into his pocket and took out the scrap of paper on which he had penciled his address. He pressed it into Wilson’s hand. “I’m sure you have a punishing schedule.�
� He smiled. “Well, if you do get time, stop by. And if not this trip, maybe the next.” And then, feigning nonchalance, he left.

  A few minutes later he was back at his house. He bustled around, made sure the porch light was on, the drinks were chilling, a bowl of nuts was set on the coffee table with a stack of paper napkins within easy reach. He did not know if Wilson would come because he wanted to come, because he was intrigued, because he remembered what The Punish had felt like, or if he would come because he was ashamed, or worried that Willem would tell someone that Wilson had cut off his finger. But either way, he was sure, Wilson would come.

  And indeed he did. He came very late and came alone. He stayed standing at the door for some time before finally allowing Willem to coax him in.

  At first Willem didn’t push him, just made idle small talk, though quickly he discovered that they had very little in common, knew very few of the same people. They had lived two hundred yards away from one another, but they might as well have been in different worlds. So they shared what little gossip they could share, then fell silent.

  For a moment, Willem let the silence build, watching Wilson squirm. Wilson, he realized after a time, wasn’t exactly sure why he had come. If Willem wasn’t careful, he might try to leave.

  A little nudge, thought Willem. Just a little one.

  “Do you remember that game—” he started.

  “The Punish,” Wilson said. “We called it The Punish. But that was a long time ago,” he said. “We were just kids.”

  “Do you remember some of the things we used to do as part of it?” asked Willem. “Besides my finger, I mean?”

  For a moment Wilson did not respond. “I don’t know that I want to talk about it,” he said slowly, trying not to look at Willem’s hand.

  “Come on,” Willem said. “It’s what we have in common. It was so long ago. What possible harm could there be?”

  But there was harm, a great deal of it, as Willem himself rightly knew. And as Wilson himself would soon find out. For unlike Wilson, Willem wasn’t content to stop with a finger. No, with a finger, Willem was just getting started.

  Wilson did not undergo The Punish willingly. But in the end, he did undergo it. It was a long time before anybody apart from Willem realized what had become of him.

  A Collapse of Horses

  I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me.

  Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: Walking through the countryside one day, you come across a paddock. Lying there on their sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened?

  If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead.

  And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you?

  I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her, had children with her—three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement on that score—and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of love.

  Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down. It seemed to me—I will admit this too—it seemed for some time, hours at least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a mental facility.

  But my wife, faithful and ever present, slowly soothed me into a different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted, were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything would return to normal.

  In some ways, I suppose everything did. Or at least tried to. After the accident, I received some minor compensation from my employer and was put out to pasture. Such was the situation: myself, my wife, my children, at the beginning of a hot and sweltering summer, crammed in the house together with nowhere to go.

  I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice.

  In the beginning, I tried to point these changes out to my wife. She seemed puzzled at first, then she became somewhat evasive in her responses. For a time, part of me believed her responsible: perhaps she had developed some deft technique for quickly changing and modifying the house. But another part of me felt certain, or nearly so, that this was impossible. And as time went on, my wife’s evasiveness took on a certain wariness, even fear. This convinced me that not only was she not changing the house, but that daily her mind simply adjusted to the changed world and dubbed it the same. She literally could not see the differences I saw.

  Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four. No, she could only ever see three. Or perhaps four. To be honest, I don’t remember how many she saw. But the point was, as long as we were in the house, there were sometimes three children and sometimes four. But that was due to the idiosyncrasies of the house as well. I would not know how many children there would be until I went from room to room. Sometimes the room at the end of the hall was narrow and had one bed in it, other times it had grown large in the night and had two. I would count the number of beds each morning when I woke up, and sometimes there would be three, sometimes four. From there, I could extrapolate how many children I had, and I found this a more reliable method than trying to count the children themselves. I would never know how much of a father I was until I counted beds.

  I could not discuss this with my wife. When I tried to display my proofs for her, she thought I was joking. Quickly, however, she decided it was an indication of a troubled mental state and insisted I seek treatment—which, under duress, I did. To little avail. The only thing the treatment convinced me of was that there were certain things one shouldn’t say even to one’s spouse, things they are just not ready—and may never be ready—to hear.

  My children were not ready for it either. The few times I tried to fulfill my duties as a father and sit them down to tell them the sobering truth, that sometimes one of them didn’t exist, unless it was that sometimes one of them existed twice, I got nowhere. Or less than nowhere: confusion, tears, panic. And, after they reported back to my wife, more threats of treatment.

  What, then, was the truth of the situation? Why was I the only one who could see the house changing? What were my obligations to my family in terms of helping them see and understand? How was I to help them if they did not desire to be helped?

  Since I am a sensible man, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what I was experiencing had any relation to reality at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps, I tried to believe, the accident had changed me. I did try my
level best, or nearly so, to see things their way. I tried to ignore the lurch reality took each morning, the way the house was not exactly the house it had been the night before, as if someone had moved us to a similar but not quite identical house as we slept. Perhaps they had. I tried to believe I had three, not four, children. And when that did not work, that I had four, not three, children. And when that didn’t work, that there was no correlation between children and beds, to turn a blind eye to that room at the end of the hall and the way it kept expanding out or collapsing in like a lung. But nothing seemed to work. I could not believe.

  Perhaps if we moved, things would be different. Perhaps the house was, in some manner or other, alive. Or haunted maybe. Or just wrong. But when I raised the idea of moving with my wife, she coughed out a strange barking laugh before enumerating all the reasons this was a bad idea. There was no money and little prospect of any coming in now that I’d had my accident and lost my job. We’d bought the house recently enough that we would take a substantial loss if we sold it. We simply could not afford to move. And besides, what was wrong with the house? It was a perfectly good house.

  How could I argue with this? From her perspective, of course, she was right, there was no reason to leave. For her there was nothing wrong with the house—how could there be? Houses don’t change on their own, she told me indignantly; this was not something that reason could allow.

  But for me, that was exactly the problem. The house, for reasons I didn’t understand, wasn’t acting like a house.

  I spent days thinking, mulling over what to do. To get away from the house, I wandered alone in the countryside. If I walked long enough, I could return home sufficiently exhausted to sleep rather than spending much of the night on watch, trying to capture the moment when parts of the house changed. For a long time I thought that might be enough. That if I spent as little time in the house as possible and returned only when exhausted, I could bring myself not to think about how unsound it was. That I would wake up sufficiently hazy to no longer care what was where and how the house differed from before.