Stefano Disappears

Kevin Spaide

The main problem was the scratching. A gang of rodents or squirrels or maybe even a family of birds had found its way into the wall during the winter and Stefano could hear them scratching. Every night he sat in his chair and thought, Now something is living in the wall.

And it was as if the creature (it quickly established itself as a singular presence) were scratching or gnawing a hole so that it could drop into his room. This was his most serious worry, but he also worried it would die in there - people were always poisoning things - and foul the air as it decomposed. Stefano had no sense of smell. The air in his room would stew and thicken, each breath a veritable whiff of death, until some polite guest finally told him about it. How would he know otherwise?

On a typical night the creature would arrive and take up its scratching, and after listening to the noise for a few minutes (he could withstand it for at least a few minutes) Stefano would rise from his chair and pound on the wall. Sometimes he would hear the patter of tiny-sounding feet carrying the thing away, whatever it was, but more often the creature would cease its scratching and sit right there at its station in the wall without making any noise, and the thought of something sitting in the wall was acutely unnerving, even crazing. It was as if the creature were suddenly everywhere, enveloping the room in its defiant presence. Stefano would storm around the room, knocking books off the shelves, banging the walls until the creature scuttled off.

But one night, no matter how loudly he threatened, the creature would not go away. It simply waited in the wall while Stefano stood like a statue in the center of the room, listening for its breath. He would hear a few scratches and then silence, a few more and then silence. It was as if the animal were testing its ground, trying out a new tactic - which could not be allowed to happen. Stefano could not allow matters to reach a new level of confrontation. So when the creature finally started again in earnest Stefano sprang forth and pounded mightily on the wall until a great riotous commotion erupted as if the animal had lost all patience and was raging around in hysteria. Appalled at the noise, Stefano leapt onto his bed, but the ceiling was so low he struck his head and fell unconscious.

As he was crumpling into a heap and the ceiling was rising away from him and the sudden liquid darkness was racing into his head like some terrible living material that had shot up through the floor, Stefano was thinking that things could not go on as they were. No, he could not go on sharing a wall with this creature - mouse, cat, bird, turtle or whatever it was. Even as he was dropping to the floor and the bookshelf was winking out of existence and one of his legs was collapsing under him at an unnatural angle, he was thinking that things would have to change when he came to. Things would have to change dramatically and without delay. Then there was nothing but darkness without memory.

Apart from the creature in the wall and the noises it made, Stefano was actually a very happy man. The previous year he had packed his belongings and moved to a new city. This was something he had dreamed of doing for several years and now he had done it. He was free of the old city and the house he’d lived in there, a large high-gabled house which originally had been the stable-house behind a mansion. For years, maybe even decades, this house had been falling over in extremely slow motion. Each year it leaned a little more to one side. Whenever Stefano crossed the floor the floor-boards creaked and groaned as if alive, as if they were old men rebuking him for walking across their backs. In places they sagged so badly he was always catching his socks on the exposed nailheads. More uncomfortable than anything else, however - the place had contained such profligacies of raw space that he felt like he was living in an empty house. People were always questioning him about it. Had he just moved in? Was he moving out? In the new city, however, he lived in a basement room that was just big enough for his bed, a bookshelf, a few of his more treasured possessions, and a stove. He had a canvas chair he folded up and stowed under the bed at night. What didn't fit in the room was left on a heap in the back yard. He told everyone he met about the heap. Friends from the old city called on the phone and asked him about the heap as if it were some sort of project he had undertaken. They asked him, "How's your heap coming along?" and it was as if they were saying, “How's your life coming along?"

There were things on his heap that had once seemed so important - the shoes he never wore but could not throw away, the maps of exotic cities he would never visit, the collection of famous paintings (reprints) he had gathered from galleries all over the world, the boxes of old letters from people he had long since written off, photographs of ex-girlfriends, etc. All of this junk was now rotting outside in the rain. His tiny bedroom (which cost twice as much as the whole house in the old city, with all its blue hovering space and high shivering corners) simply could not accommodate it. But Stefano was happy in his tiny bedroom. Claustrophobia had never been a problem. As a child he used to lock himself in broom closets. It had been a good decision to move.

At night, as he stared into the stove-coals glowing near his feet, he thought of the people he knew in the old city (their faces and names and events associated with them in his memory) who could have no idea how sweet life really was - as he knew it. There was the animal in the wall, of course. And there were other problems - like the high prices of certain fruits and vegetables which could be had for dirt cheap in the old city. (For some reason people were not so fussy or conscientious about what they ate back there.) But this was such a minor problem. It was easy enough to do without these luxuries. Stefano appreciated good food (had even enjoyed a reputation among his friends as something of a gourmet) but had never really considered himself a serious foodie.

He read the local newspaper and listened to a local radio station and drank beer brewed in a small warehouse around the corner from his room. Sometimes (usually around four o'clock in the afternoon) he found himself doing these three things simultaneously, and it was at such moments that he was forced to stop and marvel at the amazing circumstances of his life. It was as if he had found some way of exiting the narrow channels that appeared to confine the lives of all too many. He was unharried. He had discovered a secret way of living in actual freedom. Some afternoons he would mosey over to the boulevard where a rickety old restaurant teetered over the vast and turbulent bay. There he would eat foods grown in window-boxes and backyard gardens and drink beer brewed in the warehouse around the corner while reading the local newspaper and listening to the local radio station whose studios were located in a series of rooms directly above the restaurant. Quite often - in fact, routinely - the radio personalities would excuse themselves from the air and appear together a few moments later in the restaurant where they would consume lunch ('eat' is simply not adequate in this context) and converse at their table, the one in the window, just as if they were still on the air, never cursing or laughing out of turn.

No, Stefano would think, you cannot hang a price on days like these.

Undoubtedly there were more fortunate people in the world. Yes, he knew this, but what did he care about them? They did not care about him, these supremely fortunate ones, so why should he care about them? But then there were the others, the ones who were much less fortunate. This he knew too well. It bothered him, but what could he do about it? What could he really do about anything? He knew about the unfortunates crawling on hands and knees through long tight sewer tunnels that stretched under the border, the men and women getting accosted by rats, swarming horrible thick packs of rats, seething, plague-ridden, rampaging in tandem as though all of one mind, gushing through the tunnel, going in and out of your shirt, getting tangled in your long hair - people who might find untold paradise in the old city; that is, as long as the police were not presiding over the outcome of this long tight hell with rifles and stunguns and plastic handcuffs and cursing radios and squadrons of marvelous helicopters equipped with infrared tracking devices and supersonic parabolic microphones and great roving objectifying spotlights, all of which is there to funnel as many unfortunates as possible into a spinning bureaucratic centrifuge. Stefano was well aware that such mad-dog extravaganzas of evil were always going on somewhere, and the creature in the wall, while a nuisance, was nothing next to those ratpacks in the tunnels. And the occasional bump on the noggin from a low ceiling was nothing when you thought about the millions of people locked up in cages, pacing back and forth all day or lying on their beds. And there were the children to contend with, the children who lived in the garbage dumps, foraging for discarded food (scraps of potato skin, soggy loaves of bread, gnawed at fruits) dodging the bulldozers, competing with the filthy oily birds and the mangy rotten-tempered dogs too downtrodden to organize themselves into packs. How to make sense of these elements was the question. How to reconcile the children in the garbage dumps with the bright mountains of fruits and vegetables you found in the supermarkets. The markets were heaped with fruits and vegetables, so artfully arranged. Little plastic spigots controlled by hidden computers sprayed water onto them to keep them looking fresh. Stefano always shuddered a little whenever the water sprayed like that. It just seemed so strange and inhuman, like something that might happen in a laboratory or even on an un-manned craft in outer space.

At the beginning of the summer, not long after cracking his head on the ceiling, Stefano noticed that the creature living in his wall was making a more concerted effort in its scratchings, or whatever it did in there, as though it had some sort of deadline. By now, however, the thing had grown so inured to Stefano’s raps and knocks that it could no longer be easily persuaded to move on. It kept at it no matter what he did. And the noise was intolerable. It was as if something had crawled into his head and was scratching at the inner walls of his skull. Sometimes he even banged his head against the bedpost in desperation. Fantasies of violent destruction welled up in his mind at all hours of the day and night. He wanted to rip a hole in the wall and snuff the life out of whatever he found there. Something decisive would have to be done. Thought would have to become action.

One evening he got out of his folding chair and pounded a great long nail into the wall and the creature scurried off over the ceiling. Who knows where it went. Maybe it had a lair in some more desirable section of the house and only came to Stefano’s wall to do its work. Stefano had no idea and really did not care. He just wanted the creature to stay out of his wall.

It did not return the next night or the next but of course it was there the night after that, and Stefano told himself it could not have been otherwise. Actually, he had anticipated its return. He knew it would not be able to stay away. And as soon as it took up its scratching he strode over to the wall, head slightly cocked so it wouldn’t knock against the obscenely low ceiling, and drove in another great nail with such mighty force and mad accuracy (he had been practicing) that it passed right in up to the head on the first blow. Bwam! The scratching ceased concurrent with this action. No noise whatsoever could be heard coming from behind the wall.

The hammer hung in his hand. The cords and veins in his arm throbbed with murderous energy. He thought, I have done it!

Now he could forget about the creature, whatever it was. He could lie on his little bed and think about other things without interruption.

But that was not the end of it. No. Lying languorously on his bed, he found that he could not stop looking at the two nailheads shining in the wall. There they were. There they would always be.

One night he slipped out of bed and picked up the old-fashioned hand-drill he’d purchased earlier that week from a small home-arboretum supply shop. Why such a place should exist and why it should sell such an item as this handsome hand-drill he could not fathom, but for some reason he’d bought the thing and now he held it in his hand. He placed the point of the drill next to the second nailhead and breathed in deeply. He thought about how good it felt to hold the heavy drill in his hand. Surely, then, this was the right thing to be doing. Drawing in another great breath and letting it slide out, he began cranking away at the drill just as if he were winding a gigantic old-fashioned gothic clock, a clock (as he imagined it) covered in baroque etchings and populated with tiny masterfully crafted figurines that emerged from tunnels on the registering of each hour and engaged themselves in diverse activity on ledges all around the face of the thing, a grand old clock the likes of which may never have existed. He could not resist the temptation to whistle a work-song while he was at it, a simple mannerly honest tune he had learnt as a lad in the old city, and it went something like this: !

Just as the wall was giving way to the furious rotations of the drillpoint, Stefano was struck with, as though from an external source, a troubling thought. What if the creature in the wall was a man? What if the creature in the wall had been a tiny mythological man? The thought froze him and the squeak of the drill stopped. If there are men at all, a miracle no matter how one chooses to look at it, why not then tiny men too? What if the creature in the wall had been a little myth-man, and the second nail, driven in blood-boiling anger, had slain him? That was a categorical felony. He set the drill down on a stack of old LP’s and stared at his hands like a murderer in a movie. There was no blood on them. His hands looked large and fine. They looked clean and strong - and suddenly the whole idea of the little man struck him as so absurd that he guffawed and went back to churning at the wall with his handy tool, again singing: !

Soon there was a perfect breach, a neat hole in the wall. Its diameter was more or less the length of the foremost joint of his index finger. There was no noise in the wall. He looked at the hole. Apprehensive at the prospect of placing his unshielded eye against the dark circle he contemplated it from afar as if it were a puzzle in need of an adroit solution. He sniffed at the air near the hole and, despite his congenital debility, was reminded of certain barn-like airs he knew from childhood. Briefly he imagined a finger, a normal-sized one, protruding from the hole. "And then what would you do?" he asked himself. This silly idea, however, departed from his mind without leaving any traces of itself to color successive thoughts. Because as he peered into the dark region which he glimpsed now through the little hole, he was thinking of the unfortunate ones, the men and women crawling at that very moment through tight abandoned sewer tunnels, filthy yellow-teethed rats surging around them, seething en masse, scratching at their eyes, getting into their shirts and long hair. Yes, this kind of thing was always happening somewhere. He felt a rush of shame.

For reasons not altogether approachable with the tools of logic, Stefano drilled another hole and then another, (imagining all the while he was winding the large gothic clock with the little figurines in it), cranking and drilling with a speed and intensity of purpose that astonished him even as he was doing it. Sweat ran into his eyes and stung the pimples on his forehead. Soon the wall was littered with little holes. He set the drill on the stack of LPs and wiped his sweating forehead on his sleeve. Then he stood and gave the wall a few vigorous kicks.

Events had seized him now. He was no longer thinking of the unfortunate ones, the men and women on hands and knees. He kicked and kicked until the plaster caved and crumbled to the floor and there was a large hole in the wall through which he could see tangles of colorful mysterious wires, the nervous system of the house. Rough pieces of wall lay on the carpet. Dust covered the stack of LPs. In a kind of dreamy adrenal hysteria, Stefano tore at the wall with his hands until it was large enough to accommodate passage of a man.

One of the few things Stefano kept at his bedside was a penlight in case the electricity went out. He snatched up the penlight from its customary place on the nightstand and switched it on. A cone of yellow light shone out of the tip of the pen into the rough hole. He waved it around. The creature, whatever it was - or had been - was certainly not there, nor had it left any obvious clues as to its nature such as pellets of shit, clumps of hair or a miniature hat or work-tool (a monstrous notion!)

Stefano crawdaddied his way into the hole, unmindful of the filth and the inevitability of spiders and other creepy-crawly denizens of the dark. (There had been a high ratio of such creepiness in the big high-gabled house in the old city.) He flashed the penlight around and noticed that an unlikely distance separated his own wall and another wall made of red brick. On hands and knees, Stefano advanced a short way into the interior spaces of the house’s exterior, maneuvering the little penlight with skillful repositionings of his deft jaw. It was not that he expected to find answers to any of his questions by searching around inside the wall. The creature, it seemed, was gone, but a sense of adventure compelled him, beckoning him onward to explore this spooky nether-region of his own home, and Stefano had always been one to believe that perseverance holds its own rewards.

As he turned into a passage which led away from his wall - to where? - he noticed a thin crack of light, like a hair shining electrically in the dark. He rolled the pen around in his teeth until it shone on a small round hatchway in the outer wall. There was no easy way to explain this door. Maybe it led into a chamber connected to the sewer system? With some difficulty he twisted himself around so he could get his fingernails into the crack and he prized the little door open. At once a long arm reached through the hatchway and dragged him into blazing light. He was like a snail being pulled from its shell on the end of a needle, and he was surprised at the guttural animalistic noises that burbled up out of his throat as two large naked men with white wings grappled him into a restraining hold that would have immobilized a kangaroo.

He craned his neck around to get a look at his captors. Yes, these men did have large white wings. They certainly did. An odd unshakeable sense of normality reigned in his head as the winged man on his left swatted the penlight out of his mouth. Stefano stood there serenely, defiantly. He said hello, because what else was there to do? Without a word, the winged men tossed him to the ground which was soft and white like some sort of mushroom. It absorbed his blood with terrible unconcern. One of the men stood with his boot on Stefano's neck while the other bound his hands, expertly, with plastic handcuffs. The two of them riffled through his pockets, finding nothing.

Plastic handcuffs! thought Stefano.

"I'm so goddamned tired of these people," complained one of the winged men as he slammed shut the little door to the passageway that led back to Stefano’s room.

"If you ask me, we're going to have to tighten security around here," said the other.

"What a nuisance."

With that, the two winged men grabbed hold of Stefano, lifted him from the ground, and the three of them flew off.

A few weeks later, Stefano's landlord came snooping around, peeping through keyholes, and saw the passageway Stefano had kicked through the wall. He called the police. The police measured the hole with a tape measure like the kind tailors use. They confiscated the hand-drill, dropping it into a plastic bag as if it were an artifact from an alien world. A pile of junk-mail had accumulated under the slot in the door. According to the other tenants it had been quite a long while since Stefano was seen coming or going, and no one had noticed him in any of his usual haunts. He had simply vanished. He'd never said much to anyone anyway. Strange sort of chap, said another tenant. Always looked a little down in the mouth. The landlord told the police that Stefano was eight weeks behind on the rent. One of the younger policemen scratched this information into his notepad.

That afternoon the landlord drafted his teenage son in to repair the wall and clean out Stefano's room. The kid was not happy to spend his Saturday afternoon doing the work of someone else, but he did as he was told, he kept out of trouble, and he was thorough. With an almost menacing air of non-curiosity about what lay inside the wall, he patched up the hole with plywood and plaster. It didn't look great but it would do to rent the room. Then he dumped Stefano's smelly clothes and moldering books onto the heap in the yard behind the house and doused everything with lighter fluid from somebody's barbecue set. He chuckled as he squirted the lighter fluid from the little yellow bottle. Then he lit a cigarette and threw the match onto the heap and it whooshed into flame. As he sucked on his cigarette he watched the dark smoke slip over the roof of the house.

The stack of LP's, however, the landlord dusted off and carted down to the corner junk-shop where he was a fairly regular customer. They gave him a good price, a much higher price than he had expected for a few crappy old records, and every cent of it went straight into the bank. Over the years the landlord had squirreled away a considerable sum of money selling the stuff his tenants left behind – exercise bikes, stereo speakers, kitchen appliances and all sorts of other odds and ends. All had gone down to the corner. The junk vendor was always happy to see him. Another trip or two and he would have enough money to buy himself a brand new jet-ski - the dream, of course, of all established home-owners.