Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser

Author:Steven Millhauser
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307268730
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-02-12T10:00:00+00:00

THE OTHER TOWN

THE OTHER TOWN, the one that exactly resembles our town, lies just beyond the north woods. To get there, we have only to walk through a stretch of shade, over a spongy layer of pine needles and brown-black leaves, and come out in any of the backyards that border the woods—the DeAngelo yard, say, with its flowered beach towels hanging over the back-porch rail and its coil of green hose next to the dented garbage cans, or the Altschuler yard with its tall sugar maple, its yellow Wiffle ball bat lying half in sun and half in shade, and its aluminum chaise longue with strips of orange and white vinyl on which a blue eyeglass case is resting, or the Langley yard with its grass-stained soccer ball, its red-handled jump rope, its tin pie-dish for home plate, and its bags of peat moss and fertilizer leaning up against the side of the detached garage. Those of us who prefer not to go on foot can drive up North Pine or Holbrook, both of which end at Linwood, the street that runs along the front of the houses whose backyards border the woods. From there we can go in any direction, all over the town. If we’re in the mood, we can stop wherever we like, walk up to any house, open the front door. We can step inside and explore every room. Later, if we wish, we can drive through the other town’s north woods, up the other North Pine or Holbrook. Then we’ll come out at the edge of a town that is different from ours, a town with its own style—as if, all along, our trip through the other town had been nothing but a trip through our town, which of course in some sense it always is.

Although we’re drawn to the other town because of its startling resemblance to ours—the morning papers lying at the same angles on the same porches, the doors and drawers opened to the identical distances, the same dishes in the dish racks and the same clothes in the laundry baskets—it’s also true that we’re struck by certain differences. We can hardly fail to notice the separate groups of people, often our own neighbors, crossing lawns, entering and leaving houses, stopping now and then to look about, like tourists visiting a famous spot. Then there are the town guards, in their dark green shirts with yellow armbands, who are visible everywhere—in every house and store, in the two parks, in the high school, in the picnic grounds by the stream before the woods. Here and there we also catch glimpses of the replicators, the ones who see to it that all changes in our town are repeated in the other town, and who do their best to keep out of our way. In addition, there’s a sense we all have, an elusive but still quite definite sense, which might be called an intuition of absence: the absence of people living in homes, working in stores, conducting the daily life of a town.

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