Hesse Phillips
The Night Men
In sophomore English we talk about vampires, and for the first time in years, I think about the men who used to climb through my bedroom window at night, when I was young. I had forgotten all about them: faceless men who could get in even if the window was closed and locked, who would stand over my bed and watch me pretend to be asleep. Sometimes it was one man, sometimes two or three. I think once there were many, so many they stood wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder and several rows deep, eyes glittering, bodies swaying lightly as they breathed.
What a strange thing to forget. But people do that – block things out. My dad claims he can’t remember anything about his childhood other than a vague sense that it was terrible, or at least that’s what my mom always says. Don’t ask your father about the past; he doesn’t remember it anyway. He’d blocked it out, so he wouldn’t have to think about it, let alone talk about it. I must have done the same with the night men.
My English teacher Mr. Dooley is going on and on about the trope of vampires climbing into maidens’ bedroom windows: the violation of feminine intimacy, the theft of virgin innocence, the psychosexual drama of temptation and resistance, ending in a ritualistic spill of bodily fluids. This man loves the word “psychosexual.” He also loves pears, and sometimes eats them sloppily while he lectures, slurping the juices as they roll down his chin. There’s a campus legend that he’s paid for fifteen undergrad abortions, over the years. There’s another one that he had some sort of breakdown once and went running around the green yelling into a disconnected rotary telephone. I’m inclined to believe both, knowing him as well as I do, which is, to my embarrassment, pretty damn well.
Still, I feel sorry for Dooley. He’s harmless, I think, just undomesticated, the kind of sad-eyed, flea-bitten stray that humps your leg and bites you at the same time because he knows no better. No one ever taught him better. And I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve become that person who has to walk him and feed him and keep him from hurting himself, like I had no choice in the matter. Sometimes, the dog follows you home.
Currently, Dooley looms, hips forward, over a blonde girl from Michigan called Misty who’s always cleaning the dirt from under her fingernails with the gold cross around her neck. He asks whether she thinks Lucy from Dracula secretly seeks to be “devoured” by men, whether her ruse of being a “modern woman” isn’t simply misdirection, a clever mask for her shameful desires. I find myself wondering, reflexively, whether the night men might have been vampires, even though of course I don’t believe in vampires. I don’t even believe in the night men, which were obviously dreams. If I were to tell Dooley about them, I imagine he’d say it was only my adolescent, sexually-awakening brain cooking up phantom rapists to violate my inner sanctum, take my virginity and thus, make me a woman. Except I don’t remember anything sexual happening. I don’t even remember any of their faces, just odd details, simultaneously nondescript and specific, the kind you notice on movie extras: a baseball cap with a frayed brim, a gold graduation ring, a pair of work-boots with yellow laces; the smells of cinnamon gum and aftershave and stale pipe tobacco. And pear. But that might just be Dooley, now looming over me.
“And you?” he says, as if he’s holding back laughter. “What do you think about being ‘devoured’—” and addresses me by my last name, as is his custom. I hate it, to be honest. Because I know it’s his way of saying I have nothing to fear from him because I’m “not like the other girls”; as far as he’s concerned I’m just another boy at the all-boys boarding-school that exists only in his mind. This is because I’m gay, and therefore not exactly a woman, as he sees it. I don’t much like being seen as a “woman,” or only a “woman” either, to be honest – at least not by men, a fact which feels connected to the night men somehow, now that I’ve remembered them. Everything suddenly feels connected to them.
After class, I try to put the night men out of mind. Intermediate Acting is next, and I don’t want to lose the monologue I spent all night memorizing. It’s a long walk to the theatre building, at the opposite end of campus, and I don’t know why I chose to do Shakespeare. I have no business doing Shakespeare. I don’t even know why I keep signing up for acting classes when the truth is I hate being stared at, I hate the thought of eyes swarming all over my body like piranhas, taking little bites. Probably that, too, has something to do with the night men.
Somebody walking past me mutters, “Look out – it’s your stalker!”
Now I hear him, calling my name – my last name, of course. I stop and turn: there he is, Dooley, waving both arms as he barrels down the steep hill after me, tweed jacket flapping in the wind, as awkward as an albatross. I shrink, but it’s too late. People call him my “stalker” jokingly, because he only ever stalks me in broad daylight and with everyone watching. Like I said, he’s harmless – he’s embarrassing; he’s annoying; he’s a middle-aged man who seems to think his best friend is a twenty-two-year-old dyke who actually can’t stand him. And for that, God help me, I also feel sorry for him.
He catches up to me, red-faced and out of breath, which I think is partially an act. Everything with him is a bit of an act, I’ve come to realize. It’s the way a little kid will suddenly develop a limp just to make his mother pick him up. Like always, I miss the first thing he says to me because it’s something out of context, perhaps a reference to something we’d talked about days ago, which I’ve already forgotten about. I let out a neutral, non-committal laugh in response and keep walking because he keeps walking. The man never stands still, never shuts up, and I have to push myself to keep up with him, with my asthma and my stumpy little legs. I don’t know why I bother when I could just stop, watch him walk away ranting at himself. But I don’t want him to get mad. I don’t want him to ask me why I’m being “weird.” I just don’t want to do all this right now.
“Ooooh, Shakespeare!” he says derisively, and slips the book from the pile of books in my arms, turning it back and forth to – I assume – make sure the edition is up to his high standards. He teaches Victorian Lit but seems to know a little bit of everything that preceded the era, the Victorians being so insufferably self-referential. “I hate this play,” he says. “Why’d you choose this? Don’t you hate this play?” He doesn’t let me answer, just goes on for a while, and gradually, I take it he means that all women should hate Measure for Measure if they are to be considered “good feminists.” I find this oddly out of character for him, because he loathes the term feminism and everything associated with it; he calls it “That Unnatural Proposition,” which sounds like something he’d read in an anti-suffrage pamphlet in 1890, or whatever century he’s actually from.
So now – still trying to keep up with him – I’m wondering whether he’s testing me, or if he’s putting on another one of his acts, or if he’s trying to tell me he’s genuinely changed his opinion, or had never really had that other opinion to begin with, and his almost comically antiquated sexism was the real act all along, which I doubt. Probably he’s just making fun of me.
Cheerily, I say, “Are you headed for the dining-hall?” Because the dining-hall is at the base of the hill – a long, barn-shaped building with kids smoking on the porch – and I really hope he’ll say “yes” so I can ditch him there.
“I’m going to the ‘thee-ah-tah,’” he says, and it takes me a second to recognize the word “theatre,” at which my heart sinks. And then he says, “I’m driving over. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to say no – that’s how he gets you. This painfully awkward, clearly lonely, maladjusted man comes upon you like a tornado, all sound and fury, and leaves you with no choice but to just let the wind take you up. I suppose this is how I find myself sitting in his sad little two-door hatchback in the dining-hall parking lot just a minute later, momentarily alone with the sound of my own labored breathing, as he runs from my door to his own. He’d insisted on opening and closing the door for me. Such a gentleman. I look up and see my own eyes in the mirror on the back of the sun-visor, which is down, and become aware of how hard my heart is pounding, though I’m not sure why that is. I have a tattered, almost disheveled look about me, as if I’ve been dragged here by the hair.
He gets in messily, slamming his body sideways into the seat and slamming the door after him – always so needlessly violent with himself, in that way young boys often are, as if secretly hoping someone will notice the existential distress they’re drowning in but not supposed to talk about. If Dooley wasn’t so committed to his Oxbridge tweeds, he’d be in a leather jacket and black eyeliner, making prison-tattoos on his forearm with a dismantled safety-razor and a broken Bic pen; he’d also be bisexual, and his favorite band would be Death Cab for Cutie. At least I’ve always suspected this about him – that the act goes deeper than most people could even imagine. It’s extra sad, I suppose, if the only one who can see through it is me, of all people.
He jams the key into the ignition and backs out of the space with teenaged recklessness, almost clipping a couple of freshmen. I close my eyes until we are on the campus road, which thankfully is just a loop with no traffic. It’s only a quarter-mile or so to the theatre building, a ten-minute walk.
Only now do I have time to think: Why are we driving?
I ask him. He says he has some old books he wants to donate to the theatre’s little onsite library; the boxes are in the trunk. I wonder what else is in the trunk. I’ve been in this car before and am always struck by its untidiness: the years’ worth of disintegrated leaves ground into the upholstery, the smeary fingerprints on the dashboard and the inside of the windshield. It smells like food that’s been left sitting so long it’s finished rotting and moved onto the next stage in decomposition, a musty, rotten-tooth smell. I picture dozens of desiccated, half-eaten pears stacked under my seat, like skulls in an ossuary.
He slows down somewhat on the campus road, but jerkily, as if unsure whether he’s missed a turn. Not far from the theatre I hear him murmur something, and only realize afterwards that it was the words, “I think we have time, don’t you?” And I think Time for what? But I don’t say it. Why don’t I say it? Then I notice that he’s sped up again, at which I think At least we’ll get there sooner, but before I can finish the thought I’m watching the theatre building slip out of sight over my right shoulder, behind a scrim of spring trees.
I feel gravity grasp me deep down – I would say I feel it in my stomach but it’s even deeper than that, like a fist around the neck of my vagina, a sudden urge to pee. As if I’ve been shoved off a cliff.
“Uh, you missed it,” I say. We’re on the long, narrow road that winds and dips through the woods for two miles before it joins with the state route which is the college’s only connection to the nearest town, where all the professors live and we students go to buy cigarettes and beer. I scan for a place to turn around and start to point at what must be the entrance to an old logging-trail, thinking in this same moment that no, I don’t actually want him to pull off the road; I don’t want him to drive up into the bracken and yank the parking-brake and turn to me and make me choose what to do next.
“Chill out,” he says, even though I’m being calm, very calm.
“I’m gonna be late for class,” I say, lightly whining. I want to panic, but not in front of him, not in front of the thing that scares me. I want to panic as if in hope that it’ll make God pay attention.
“Hang on, hang on,” Dooley says, peeling straight across the left lane and onto the overgrown trailhead where they’ll find my body someday, ferns growing up through my ribs. “You were distracting me,” he says, cranking the gear-stick into reverse. “You’re very distracting, do you know that” – and calls me by my last name.
We don’t move. I notice that he’s sweating, even though it’s not hot out, a shine on his forehead and upper-lip. His foot stays firm on the brake pedal, his eyes fixed on whatever he can see of me in the rearview mirror, which I suppose is just a sliver of my left thigh, naked and pudgy in denim shorts. I clamp my legs together.
“Have you ever been raped before?” he says.
The insects buzzing outside go loud, the loudest sound in the world. I’m looking at myself in the side-mirror with lowered eyes, the way you look at someone far above you in worth or class or authority, one hand to my forehead. I look like a dowager who’s grown weary with all this nonsense, who’s about to say, ’Tis all a bit much too much, don’t you think?
“It’s just,” he says, wiping his lip, “you radiate ‘rape victim.’”
I bristle. The indignation makes me temporarily less afraid, for I’m used to this. He enjoys offending my “liberal sensibilities.” But then I wonder what he sees in me that I can’t see. Because maybe, if I could see it, I might finally make sense to myself. Which I realize is stupid, but it doesn’t matter if it’s stupid – I can’t help wanting someone to look me up and down and diagnose me, definitively, as this or that, so I can just get on with my life. The stupid thing is that his opinion interests me, because I know he’ll tell me the things no one else will tell me; everyone else is too nice. Only he could say something like you radiate “rape victim.”
“Well?” he says. “Are you gonna answer the question?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, thinking about the night men.
He turns to me. “You don’t think so?”
I don’t want to look at him; I turn away from him the way you turn away from a needle in a nurse’s hand. I pick out a patch of ferns outside, zero-in on their lacy, needlepoint leaves, and let myself be hypnotized by the gnats that zip in and out of the sunlight like high-speed dust motes. I think, Get on with it. If you’re gonna do it, do it. I regret the thought immediately.
He waits a long time for me to say something. I feel rude, not answering. I feel stupid, being so frightened. Probably nothing is going to happen; nothing was ever going to happen. He only asked because he cares about me in his twisted, homophobic, misogynistic way, and doesn’t know how to ask if I’m all right except bluntly.
I could tell him about the night men.
I would start by saying, “Nothing really happened” – because that’s how I remember it. It’s important to be as factual as possible, I think, when you’re telling someone about something you dreamed, as if you’re talking to a judge. Probably this is why listening to people talk about their dreams is so boring. We try to be exact in every detail because we believe there’s an answer there, a code, if only we could crack it. Perhaps in the night men, there’s an answer to the question of why I let him do this to me – why I indulge him – why I don’t tell him to fuck off and leave me alone: because he’s lonely and warped and missing something, and so am I. But maybe what I’m really missing is only an excuse, a reason to be the way I am. Nothing bad has ever happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to me at all.
So I just sit and listen to the buzz of insects, and wait.
Eventually, he says, “If you’re gonna do that speech, I think you ought to have been raped before.” He stretches out his right arm, puts his hand on the back of my headrest. “But what do I know? I’m not an actor.”
Pressure on the back of my head, the breath from his nostrils on my temple. I close my eyes. But then I feel it: the brake release. We’re backing out; we’re turning around.
I’m so grateful to him for sparing me that I shiver, and can’t stop shivering. But then, as we drive back up towards campus through a tunnel of trees, I start to count the seconds. Each one feels like an hour. By the time we get to the theatre parking-lot the impulse to leap out of the car even before it comes to a halt is so strong I have to picture my ankles tied together just to keep myself still. If I ran, he might stop liking me, and then who knows what he’ll do next time.
I push through the glass doors at the theatre building. The lobby’s deserted; everyone’s inside. I stop and wait for my heart to slow down, my hands to stop shaking. Nothing happened, I tell myself. It’s okay, it’s okay, nothing actually happened.
Then the theatre doors bang open, startling me. Out comes Shelley Kovacz, headed for the bathroom. Shelley Kovacz is petite and slender, dark-haired and large-eyed, wears chipped nail-polish and smells like Earl Grey tea, and is probably my best friend. Straight, of course. Sometimes I want to kiss her. Sometimes I want to be her. “Thought you weren’t coming,” she says. “What happened to you?”
I dart my eyes through the glass doors because he’s still out there, sitting in the driver’s seat with the engine running.
“Oh my God,” Shelley whispers histrionically, grabbing my wrist. “Your stalker!”
Dooley has his elbow on the windowsill and the tip of his thumb clenched between his teeth, gazing through the windshield with hooded eyes. I wonder if it’s me he’s gazing at. And then I remember, suddenly, about the books he’d said were in the trunk – his whole reason for driving here. I wonder if there ever were any books.
In the bathroom, I stand with my butt against the sinks while Shelley pees in the stall across from me – an everyday intimacy between girls, if you think about it, but I feel a charge at her closeness. I don’t want her to leave me, ever. I tell her about Dooley following me after class and offering a ride and missing the turn, though I don’t tell her anything else. From behind the stall door, Shelley laughs and says, “Oh my God,” and “What a fucking creep!” a bunch of times. “Total creep,” I pile on, because I want Shelley to stay focused on him, not me; I don’t want her to ask me what he said when we were parked on the trailhead or what I said or what I was thinking, because if I start down that road eventually it’ll lead to the night men, and I can’t tell Shelley about the night men. Then I’ll be the creep, fantasizing about men climbing through her windows at night. It would serve me right then: all the rest of it.
“Keep your voice down!” Shelley says, coming out of the stall and pulling me away from the bathroom door. “Maybe he’s out there listening!”
I don’t want to think about that. The door, an ordinary, institutional thing of grey metal, hums as if electricity were running through it. But her hands are gripping my arms, tightly, just above the elbows, and her gaze is playful in its performance of fear.
So I play along. “Oh my God, he’s probably waiting for us to come out so he rape and murder us!” Shelley lets out a little shriek and so do I, like children who’ve managed to frighten themselves. But only one of us is really afraid. I’m not even sure why I’m afraid, because after all, nothing happened. He didn’t hurt me; he wouldn’t hurt me. Next time I see him, I’ll have to apologize for my behavior, and I’ll have to blithely accept it when he tells me I’ve been “hysterical,” and I’ll have to put up with him another week, another month, another semester, to make up for it. Me and Dooley. Dooley and me.
Of course, when Shelley and I finally poke our heads outside, he’s nowhere to be seen. We don’t even stop to look out into the parking lot, just head for the theatre-entrance in a giggly huddle, my heart galloping, Shelley’s shoulder close to mine. When we tug open the heavy doors, angry shushes greet us out of the darkness. A cluster of faces briefly appear in the light from the lobby, vanishing as the doors close behind us.
My eyes adjust. Nearly the whole class is gathered in a clump up by the tech-booth window, about as far from the spotlighted stage as you can get. It can only mean that our acting teacher has decided to spring one of his dreaded vocal projection tests on us, which I’m pretty sure he does whenever he’s just a little too tipsy to run a focused class. The point of the projection tests is to teach us how to be heard by every member of an audience, all the way to the back row. “It’s not about being loud,” our teacher always says. “It’s about being big!” I don’t see the point, frankly: the theatre is tiny anyway; we could seat maybe two hundred people, if they sat on each other’s laps. There’s a sunken stage, painted black and surrounded on three sides by raked bleachers, like a small impact crater. Just now, a fuzzy-haired girl stands on that stage within a single, stark spotlight, moaning and panting her way through an uncomfortably explicit speech by Caryl Churchill. She keeps lifting her skirt, putting her hands under it. When she looks up, the light bleaches her face into a featureless white blob, and I have the strange feeling as if our scrutiny is taking something from her, as if it’s our eyes that are making her faceless.
Every time the girl on stage lets her voice drop even a tiny bit, the rest of us have to yell, “Pro-ject! Can’t hear you!” even though we can hear her. It’s a kind of sacrilege to yell at an actor when they’re trying to perform. Even a bad one. The constant interruptions leave the girl scrambling to stay in scene, spluttering in and out of crescendo like a car that won’t start. The speech is about how she’d used to think she stopped existing whenever her boyfriend was not around to look at her, and how she overcame this feeling by learning how to masturbate. The rest of us used to snigger childishly the whole way through this speech, but we’ve heard it about a thousand times now and the awkwardness has worn off. Mostly. At some point the girl thrusts her fists between her legs and starts humping herself, and Shelley leans close to me, whispering, “She’s such a slut!”
I blush at the warmth of her breath, pretend to stifle a laugh. But I can’t laugh at the girl. I find her almost terrifyingly brave, doing a speech like this with everyone watching her, judging her. She’s at the part where she says that when she jerks off, she no longer feels alone – she’s realized that there is someone with her, always, and that someone is herself. I feel a strange emptiness settle through me. I’m alone – it hits me – I’m alone, more alone than I’ve ever been in all my life, and in this aloneness there is nothing with me, not even myself. I’m alone in plain sight, in broad daylight, with everyone watching. The only one with me, I suppose, is Dooley, fucking Dooley, who is himself just a big black hole of Nothing.
I’m just about to cry. But I can’t be the weirdo lesbian crying at some dumb speech about fingering yourself to feel alive, so I’m not going to think like that anymore, whatever I was thinking about. Nothing bad is happening. Nothing is happening. The only bad thing that ever happened to me happened in my own head.
Soon, it’s my turn to be yelled at while I butcher Measure for Measure. With the spotlight aimed directly at my face, I can’t see beyond the first two rows of bleachers, just a mist of light condensed over blackness, blinding at the top. Out of everyone in class, I might be the worst at projecting; I couldn’t find my diaphragm if you held a gun to my head. I try and try and try to make my voice “big and wide and deep,” as our teacher says, but all I can ever do is scream.
“‘To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me?’”
“You’ll break your voice!” our teacher scolds me. “Remember: big, not loud. Big, like the ocean!”
I hate this, I hate it. I feel myself turning brittle, turning inwards, becoming so small I’m a black pinprick in the white light, like a blood-blister under a fingernail. If I brim my hand above my eyes, I can just make out a twilit glow from the tech-booth window and the dozen or so heads and shoulders silhouetted against it, facing me. I don’t know why I put myself on display like this, why I ask to be looked at. I want what any actor wants, I suppose: to be believed. I just don’t want to have to stand here in a spotlight, shouting and sweating and making a fool of myself, to be believed.
“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this
Who would believe me? O perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the self-same tongue,
Either of condemnation or approof—”
“Big, not loud!” our teacher says. “Again!”
END
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Hesse Phillips' debut novel, Lightborne, was a Historical Fiction Pick of the Year for 2024 in The Times (UK). Hesse's poetry and short fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. They have appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 3's The Essay, and have written for NPR. Hesse was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania but now lives in Spain. They have a PhD in Drama from Tufts University. Web: HessePhillips.com, Insta: @hesse.phillips, Bluesky: @hessephillips.com