Come About
The living room was dusky despite the bright morning outside. Mr. Prescott settled himself in the saggy cushions of his recliner. The springs groaned as they accepted his weight. He sat, eyes open, for a while, trying to enjoy the stillness around him. A bit of sunlight timidly crept in below the front door, but otherwise the room was dark, diminished, like the sky after sunset. Far up in the rafters above his head, Mr. Prescott could see the fluttering strands of a cobweb blowing free. The web was dusty and must have been moored up there for a while, but somehow it had been loosened, set adrift. He watched it, flapping raggedly, and marveled that he, sitting below, didn’t feel any thread of breeze. For the first decade or so after he had bought this cabin, Mr. Prescott had been meticulous in his pruning of the trees around the house, fearful of a snow-laden limb crushing the roof. But recently, he had given up his maintenance of the grounds and now white pines grew close to the cabin, their needles brushing against the windows, a comforting sound; he could pretend he was outside. He thought, though he couldn’t be bothered to check, that it was nearing eleven o’clock. The sun would be blindingly bright on the water, and his wife would be squinting into it. By now she would have sailed past Fitch’s point and be out into the heart of the lake. And soon, at some incalculable moment unknown to any, or only to God as she’d say, the wind would drop. It was like magic that it happened. When he used to bother to go fishing, trailing after her in his skiff, keeping her carefully in sight, the doting but not over-protective husband, he’d found the sensation, the sudden cessation, profound. It was often accompanied by a change in pressure that made his ears pop. As he’d never lived on any lake but this one, he had no idea whether the wind dropped everywhere like this, without notice but somewhat reliably between the hours of ten and noon, or whether this lake was peculiar in its habits. He had no idea what controlled the wind, where it came from, where it went, what made it do anything. It was, like so much, completely unknown to him, a force not to be revered but mystified by. The breeze would simply stop. He thought it might have stopped now, and that out on the water, his wife’s sails had just collapsed, flaccid and frustrating, bringing her to a standstill. Even now she’d be raising the whistle to her lips.
He was just letting his eyes close, with delicious heaviness and slowness, when he heard the whistle. Shrill, like a teakettle that has reached its boiling point, piercing. At one time, the sound had made him jump—he’d come close to capsizing his fishing boat on a couple of occasions. But now it was just another noise, a distraction, something that he could, almost, ignore.
It did not take long for Mr. Prescott to fall asleep. It never did. Sleep, it seemed, was always waiting for him. Not to hold him—there was no sense of embrace—but to swallow him, possess him. Sometimes, he wished he could exert more control, as if sleep owed him that: he was a good customer and should get some reward. He wanted to choose his dreams, not get whatever his subconscious spat up. He wanted to dream of himself, comfortably shipwrecked and deserted on some tropical island, or to return to the summer when he was seventeen and had worked as a night watchman, alert when no one was around, then permitted to sleep all day. But the dreams given to him that morning were sudden and terrifying; they slipped through his mind, almost imageless, but dragging long tails of emotions. Dreams full of movement, the sensation of falling, fragmentary scenes that dredged up deep-seated terror, so that he woke with his heart racing together with an odd feeling of arousal that did not fit at all. The whistle was sounding again and in the half-dark of the living room, he could not be sure that his wife hadn’t been blowing it for the whole time that he had napped, one long whistle that had invaded his mind and sent these terrors twisting through. Then the shrill sound ceased and the cabin was quiet. His heart stopped pounding so much, and he felt his rational mind returning.