A Dark Matter by Peter Straub Page B
Authors: Peter Straub
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers, Suspense fiction, Horror, Good and Evil, Psychic trauma, Nineteen sixties, High school students, Rites and ceremonies, Horror Fiction, Madison (Wis.)
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just being released from jail in a day or two and would undoubtedly be grateful for a place to stay on his first few nights of freedom. If I liked, I could meet him for lunch somewhere in Chicago, and if he passed muster, invite him to use our guest room. It would be all right with her, she assured me.
I e-mailed back, thanking her for the information about our long-ago friend, and said that if she truly would not mind, I would probably do as she suggested. How, if I dare ask, had she learned of Olson’s situation? And how could I get in touch with him?
You know I have my sources , she wrote back. But don’t worry about writing to Don. I gather that he prefers to get in touch with people rather than the other way around .
I’ll wait to hear from him then , I told her. How are things going, anyhow? Are you enjoying yourself?
Busy busy busy , she wrote back. Meetings meetings meetings. Sometimes the mills grind exceeding small, but I have a lot of ACB friends in the DC area who seem willing to listen to me complain. Please let me know what happens with Don Olson, will you?
I typed, o.c. o.c. , using our ancient code that meant of course, of course.
Then for a couple of days I read, watched movies, took walks, and waited for the phone to ring. One day it did.
hootie’s blues
Two or three years after everything happened, and I had learned all that I was ever going to know about what had befallen my friends out in the university’s agronomy meadow and was just about to start a new book that would have nothing to do with any of this, at that moment of odd psychic drifting when a hundred little notions wake up and start humming, the possibility of a story came to me. It only indirectly concerned the main story of Mallon and my friends, which had been given to me in a series of fragments. Even back at the beginning I knew that I never really wanted to turn all of that into either straightforward fiction or the kind of neither-this-nor-that called “creative nonfiction.” This would be a story poised right on the narrow wall between fiction and memoir, and based on a number of things confessed to me by Howard “Hootie” Bly during the period when he was living down the street from me in the formerly ratty Cedar Hotel. In the last months of his residence at the Cedar, Hootie met the love of his life and future partner, and together they moved to an affluent northern suburb. We had spent a good deal of time together, Hootie and my wife and I, as had Hootie and I separately, and eventually, in bits and pieces strung out over many of our private conversations, he told me what had happened on October 15, the day before the great event—the day of the “rehearsal.” With only a few small changes, I thought, I could make something interesting of Hootie’s funny, unresolved tale. It was about preparing for something forever out of reach. For once, the idea of working so close to the literal truth excited me, so I set aside my new novel and spent about three weeks writing what I called “Tootie’s Blues.” “Tootie” was Hootie, of course, Spencer Mallon was “Dexter Fallon,” Dill Olson was “Tom Nelson,” and so on. When I had finished it, it did seem pretty good to me, but I had no idea what to do with it. I forwarded it as an attachment to David Garson, but he never said a word about it. I thought he was, in his way, being polite. The only alternative I saw was that it had vanished into deep cyberspace. Either way, the chances of the long story’s publication in The New Yorker seemed nonexistent. Then I dragged its folder from my desktop into my “Stories” file and forgot about it, mostly .
At the time, I didn’t realize that I gave up on the story so easily because its publication had never been the point. Writing it was the point. I wanted to write it—I wanted to inhabit the seventeen-year-old Howard Bly’s point of view—because in that way and no other would it be possible for me to join Eel
I e-mailed back, thanking her for the information about our long-ago friend, and said that if she truly would not mind, I would probably do as she suggested. How, if I dare ask, had she learned of Olson’s situation? And how could I get in touch with him?
You know I have my sources , she wrote back. But don’t worry about writing to Don. I gather that he prefers to get in touch with people rather than the other way around .
I’ll wait to hear from him then , I told her. How are things going, anyhow? Are you enjoying yourself?
Busy busy busy , she wrote back. Meetings meetings meetings. Sometimes the mills grind exceeding small, but I have a lot of ACB friends in the DC area who seem willing to listen to me complain. Please let me know what happens with Don Olson, will you?
I typed, o.c. o.c. , using our ancient code that meant of course, of course.
Then for a couple of days I read, watched movies, took walks, and waited for the phone to ring. One day it did.
hootie’s blues
Two or three years after everything happened, and I had learned all that I was ever going to know about what had befallen my friends out in the university’s agronomy meadow and was just about to start a new book that would have nothing to do with any of this, at that moment of odd psychic drifting when a hundred little notions wake up and start humming, the possibility of a story came to me. It only indirectly concerned the main story of Mallon and my friends, which had been given to me in a series of fragments. Even back at the beginning I knew that I never really wanted to turn all of that into either straightforward fiction or the kind of neither-this-nor-that called “creative nonfiction.” This would be a story poised right on the narrow wall between fiction and memoir, and based on a number of things confessed to me by Howard “Hootie” Bly during the period when he was living down the street from me in the formerly ratty Cedar Hotel. In the last months of his residence at the Cedar, Hootie met the love of his life and future partner, and together they moved to an affluent northern suburb. We had spent a good deal of time together, Hootie and my wife and I, as had Hootie and I separately, and eventually, in bits and pieces strung out over many of our private conversations, he told me what had happened on October 15, the day before the great event—the day of the “rehearsal.” With only a few small changes, I thought, I could make something interesting of Hootie’s funny, unresolved tale. It was about preparing for something forever out of reach. For once, the idea of working so close to the literal truth excited me, so I set aside my new novel and spent about three weeks writing what I called “Tootie’s Blues.” “Tootie” was Hootie, of course, Spencer Mallon was “Dexter Fallon,” Dill Olson was “Tom Nelson,” and so on. When I had finished it, it did seem pretty good to me, but I had no idea what to do with it. I forwarded it as an attachment to David Garson, but he never said a word about it. I thought he was, in his way, being polite. The only alternative I saw was that it had vanished into deep cyberspace. Either way, the chances of the long story’s publication in The New Yorker seemed nonexistent. Then I dragged its folder from my desktop into my “Stories” file and forgot about it, mostly .
At the time, I didn’t realize that I gave up on the story so easily because its publication had never been the point. Writing it was the point. I wanted to write it—I wanted to inhabit the seventeen-year-old Howard Bly’s point of view—because in that way and no other would it be possible for me to join Eel
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