A Pilgrim’s Digression

Last night, I was awakened at 3:00 AM by the moaning of my roommate, Harvey. He has the bedroom across the hall from me, and even with both our doors closed, I can still hear him in there moaning, laughing, talking to himself.

This happens, more or less, every night. Sometimes I wake up, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I don’t. Last night, I did not go back to sleep. I finally got up to get ready for work around 4:30.

In the meantime, I lay there listening to these disturbing moans coming from the next room. I could not tell if his moans were from pleasure or pain, but I suspect pain. Bad dreams. Or a bad waking life. His elderly mother, Edele–my landlady–says he is depressed. He sleeps all day, she says, and either stays up all night or goes out.

“I worry about him,” Edele says.

I don’t tell her what I hear at night.

When Harvey goes out, he says he is going to give pool lessons. He gives lessons and plays in pool tournaments, and he calls this his “job.” Sometimes when he goes out, he will instead say, “I’m going to deal some cards.” This, too, he calls his job. He is nearly sixty years old.

He was married once, three or four years ago, but his wife divorced him after a year. It was all that woman’s fault, his mother says. He moved back home with his mother. Once, long ago, his father got him a job with the Post Office and offered to pay his way to Georgetown University, if he would just keep the job. He quit after a week or two.

He has good reasons to be depressed, I guess.

The moaning is like the sound a person would make when dying, a kind of keening, “Ohhhhhhhhhhh.” Sometimes it is a short, strangled, “Arggghhh,” however. Or it could be the sound of orgasm.

That’s the odd thing: through tone, inflection, and pitch the human voice is capable of expressing the subtlest of emotion, but pleasure and pain sound curiously alike.

I remember as a small child awaking in fear, one night, because I heard my mother moaning. Was she injured? Was she sick? What was going on?

I lay in bed, my heart pounding, listening to the moans coming from my parents’ bedroom. I thought about getting up and going to see what was wrong, but the horror in those moans kept me fixed in my bed. Eventually, the moaning stopped, and I went back to sleep. The next morning, Mom woke me up to get ready for school as usual. I wondered if I had dreamed what I’d heard the night before.

I read somewhere that the impulse of writers to title horror stories beginning with the article “The” began with one novel by Stephen King: The Shining.

From that novel resulted literary and film titles such as The Howling, The Taking, etc.

King’s brilliance was always in his ability to make the mundane horrific. An automobile, a Saint Bernard, the flu, a clown. His character’s, too, were always mundane. Their ordinariness made his books appealing to me, a young teenager when I discovered his novels. His child characters always seemed especially real, especially ordinary…but they often had special powers underestimated or ignored by adults.

Harvey is mundanely congenial, in a Norman Bates sort of way. He smiles when I see him, and he asks me how I’m doing. I don’t see him much, though. I see his mother more than I see him. She is 93, and I sit up with her from six until eight in the evening, watching the ABC Nightly News, then Wheel of Fortune, then Jeopardy. She loves Wheel of Fortune, and she tells me stories about her life, all of which I have heard at least three times previously but do not mind hearing again. How many people do we meet in life who can still remember the parade through the streets of Philadelphia when the troops came home from World War I?

I watch Wheel of Fortune, and I wonder how many bodies Edele’s son has buried beneath the basement floor?

Edele can’t go down those steps anymore. I don’t go down there. I’m afraid of the dark, especially dark basements. Just this past Christmas, my Grandpa reminded me how he and I would play hide and seek when I was very small. One of us would count while the other took a flashlight and hid downstairs in the dark basement. Then the seeker would come with a flashlight and look for the hider. I always hid in an obvious place so Grandpa would find me quickly.

Anyway, my roommate seems like the type. The moaning at night…the odd “black sheep” quality to his relationship to his family…his seclusion in his room during normal daylight hours…the general creepiness.

Did I mention he smells bad? And the bathroom hasn’t been cleaned since I left for vacation on Thursday the 21 of December. Actually, it probably hasn’t been cleaned since his sister briefly stayed at the house back in October. This morning, the shower smelled like a musty, mildewed boot, even after I rinsed out his hair and filth.

I imagine Harvey sawing up a corpse in the bathtub, then rinsing out the tub with the flexible shower nozzle. The watery blood and bits of flesh and gristle drain into the pipes where they decay and give off exactly the sort of stench I smelled this morning.

Suddenly, my life has become a trope of the literary horror genre. Luckily, Harvey probably won’t murder me. I would be missed too quickly. And I keep his mother company while he’s out “working.” He would probably miss his cut of my rent money, as well.