In Iowa City one year I spent Christmas Eve alone reading Absalom, Absalom. I was on the couch already half asleep. Quentin was still listening as Mrs. Coldfield, in her parlor, talks and talks and talks, and out of nowhere my front door bangs open and there’s a guy standing there in a Santa hat, a wasted holiday reveler out of the night—and behind him it’s snowing, big meaty flakes. There’s snow on his hat, snow on his eyelashes—and he looks at me stretched out on my couch and says What the fuck are you doing here? And I leap up. How fast we become a stranger in our own house. All someone has to do is open the door while you’re half asleep.
I apologize, wordlessly, for my own presence, not only on the couch but on the face of the earth. And I hold up the book like Faulkner is some kind of passport. To where?
Sometimes it isn’t the book itself but what happens to you while you’re reading it.
December 1999. It shouldn’t sound so long ago.
In Absalom, Absalom, Mrs. Coldfield talks. Close the book. She goes on talking. She needs to talk as a way to explain what Thomas Sutpen’s insanity did to her sister and everybody else in the foredoomed family. (Foredoom, there’s a Faulknerian word. Is it even a word?) If only to tell another living soul before she dies. She talks in that stifling hot room (maybe it wasn’t the parlor) and even with the shades pulled tight the dust is visible.
There’s dust in the light and Quentin watches it. All the insanity, hundreds of pages of it, I forget. It’s the dust in the light. How as Quentin listened, he watched the particles of dust shine in the slant of afternoon light.
Who’s got a right to be anywhere?
We looked at each other, me holding my book, a finger marking the spot where my eyes had wandered off, this guy in his Santa hat and festive sweater. When it finally occurred to him that he had the wrong address, he made a drunken bow. Would you please excuse me. It was weirdly elegant. The snow fell off his hat onto the carpet with a little plop. To this day I see him bowing. He withdrew back out into the snow and gently shut the door. The next morning, I called my father, a man I never called, and told him this story and he laughed. A few days later he called back, my dead father, and asked me to tell him about the guy who came in out of the snow, again. What I want to know is why you didn't throw that book straight at his face?
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well as chair of the English and Creative Writing department at Dartmouth. His most recent book, Still No Word from You, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.