The man returned, by inexplicable routes, to the white frame house where he had lived as a boy--the house with its bannistered porch curving around front and side; its gables carved and adorned with small Victorian gingerbread; the house on the treelined, brick-paved midwestern street; the same melancholy house with its shadowy rooms, narrow halls, narrow stairs.

He was dressed as in his youth, in his khaki housers, tweed jacket, dark brown loafers. And he seemed to enter so easily the vacant house, moving past familiar woodwork with its bead and scroll decorations, all of it once painted in glossy white enamel, now yellowed and fading; moving past the few forgotten pieces of dark, squatting, overstuffed Franklin D. Roosevelt furniture that sat meaninglessly, randomly in the house; moving back into the musty depths, toward the large high-ceiling kitchen where he could sit, if he placed the chair in just the right spot, and stare up the narow center hall, all the way to the front door, the porch, the world beyond.

A summer's evening and only the suggestion of illumination, the dim light burning vaguely saffron from the front porch, in the vacant world. He sat far back in the kitchen's darkness, seeing but unseen. The front door of the house, with its frosty glass panel, was actually open, but the screen door itself was hooked shut. No one could just walk into the house. They would have to knock.

Then he could see the man walk hesitatingly up on the porch, hear the man trying to get in. He stayed back in the kitchen, being very quiet, invisible.

The man was his older cousin, Roger, who had died in World War II, in Europe, died, and rotted in conflict, so long ago. He remembered the day Roger had left, they had all gone down to the train station, Roger with the other draftees getting on board and leaning out the train windows. Roger had never cared for Latin verbs or "all those big books," but Roger nevertheless had, in his own strong masculinity, been very close,very understanding, and had gone with him out in the country, for long summer walks, scouting for arrowheads where Indians had once hunted and migrated across the prairies.

And when Roger had left for the war, he felt, remaining behind, something painful inside his chest, something he had not even thought about calling love, some tightness that wanted to burst. Roger, tall, rough, tender, young, who died somewhere far away and faded like a dream. And now was standing at the screen door, Roger, decomposed in the violence of fading history, Roger beneath the porchlight, lean, in a ragged bloody uniform, putrid, a necklace of hand grenades hanging around his neck. And Roger was peering, with dead haunted eyes, through the screen door into the house, whispering, "Hey, are you in there? It's me. Roger. I said I'd come back..."

Cautiously, he got up from the kitchen chair, circled from the kitchen through the dining room, still in a darkness, but closer now to the front door, standing in the dining room, looking through the door that led into the hall, a clear view of the spill of pale light on the porch. When he looked this time he saw that it wasn't Roger at all but the boy he'd known thirty years ago, one summer vacation, during the college years, when he'd come home to stay with his parents, this boy who'd worked at the drugstore and who wrote poems and wanted to know if he'd read some of the poems sometime...

The boy's name was Carleton, Carleton Lake, and he signed his name with a great flourish at the bottom of each poem, and Carleton had sent him a poem nearly every day, all that summer long, and he'd take the poems back to Carleton at the drugstore and they'd sit in a booth, late in the evening, beneath blue fluorescent lights, when most of the customers were gone, and Carleton would stare, with wide dark eyes and faint smile, "cherishing your criticism of my work."

Carleton once asked him to go to a movie and he went, and they sat up in the balcony and Carelton touched him in the dark. "Oh, for God's sake!" And the adolescent small-town homosexual finally committed suicide, one August night, just before summer vacation ended, drinking poison, and now it was the dark-eyed boy, holding a bouquet of summer lilacs in his hands, his face all flushed with fever and death, reaching out, proffering "the poetry of flowers..." Carleton was saying, "I said I'd never really go away. I'd always be here..."

Then carefully he slipped from the darkness of the dining room into the darkness of the hall itself, still very close to the door, but still unseen, invisible, his back pressed against the side of the staircase, and he could see, with a terrible, almost unbearable clarity, those strange parental figures, the father and the mother standing outside the door, the mother who had died in her senility at the nursing home twelve years ago and the father who had died, long before that, at daybreak, one Sunday morning, on the basement stairs in this very house, died clutching his exploding heart, calling for "God! God!"

The two of them standing there, like some 'American Gothic' imitation, in their worn coats and hats, each with a battered cardboard valise in hand, having arrived from some distant place, standing now outside the door, holding their suitcases in broken arthritic hands, both aging and gray and confused, with their eternal middle-class perspective, and he wanted to cry out to them that they had committed suicide, too, had killed themselves by living, by surviving, that simply by existing they had taken their lives; that all their hard work and morality and responsibility had only been some long, prolonged way of dying...

And his father was tapping lightly on the screen door, whispering, "We've come... we've come... Are you in there, son? Anybody home?"

He wanted to wake up. Wanted to scream, thrash out, be somewhere else. But he couldn't escape the dream. And absurdly, as in so many dreams, he was no longer inside the house, but outside the house, on the front walk, and it was sunset, the evening was coming on, he was walking up to the house, up on the porch, and he was the man outside the door. He was the man who was looking at some shadowy figure through the crisscross of the dirty sagging barricade. Who was there? Who was hiding there inside the house? Who was moving, furtively, in the shadows? Was it man? Or woman? Some woman he should have met a long time ago? The woman he never loved or married? Or was it really anybody at all? Was it just light and shadow and fiction and lie?

O, but it called to him in some silent way! The figure within. He yearned for it, grew weak and cold in his body wanting to embrace it. As though it were the only reality. As though to embrace it would be the one and only valid moment he would ever have--

O yes, yes, he was the man outside the house, pressing his face against the wire mesh, his arms pressed against the screen door, whispering to the divine and darkened figure on the other side, sobbing out his final plea, "For the sake of the dead, let me in!"

SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.5, no.3/4, 1988, p.166-7)