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“PHD”, I said, “y’know what that mean? Permanent Head Damage.”

“Fred,” said Edward, “that ain’t cool. What’s gotten into you?”

“Sorry.” It seemed, the past two years, I’d been saying that word a lot. “Just, there’s a lotta lines a black man can’t cross.” I knew that, probably far too well; for I’d attempted to cross that line, and been beaten back savagely. Two years, and the rage, the bitterness, the injustice of it all still seared through me. It made me resentful at anyone else’s attempts to break the glass ceiling. Apparently, it made me into a monster too, mocking my own brother when he achieved the ultimate success. “But you’re right. A PHD ain’t one of 'em.”

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Walter Elliot’s surround sound system hasn’t been maintained in years, but the sound is still sick, man.   Our kids won’t know any of the hardships we did, when we can spoil them silly with weekend cartoon nights in this crazy-ass tricked-out home movie theatre.

“Lilo and Stitch, again?” I ask. “Why don’t we switch things up a little?”

“That’s the kids’ favourite,” says Sophia. “They’re always asking for it.” Like real, I think to myself. It’s your favourite, is more like it.

“OK then,” I say, cool as a cat. “Tell me where to get Marshall a live pet alien for Christmas. Because that movie’s the reason why he won’t stop asking for one.” Actually, I have no idea why she likes that movie so much, when I absolutely hate it. Who wants to have the most painful moments of their childhood played out in all their Disney glory onscreen, time and time again?

After movie night is done, Sophia puts Tiffany to bed in the room that used to be Anne’s, under the pale blue sky Anne’s late mom painted for her when she was little. The one Anne painstakingly retouched, especially to hand down to Sophia’s little girl. Every single night, Sophia sings the same song to Tiffany at bedtime, her melodious voice filling the room; it's been this way ever since Tiffany was born while she and Croft were stationed in Hawaii.

“Aloha oe, aloha oe

E ke onaona noho i ka lipo

One fond embrace

A ho’i a’e au

Until we meet again.”

Sophia can sing this song without tears now, because this is the child that nobody will take away from her. “Sleep tight, darling,” she says, pulling the curtains shut on the shiny antique brass four-poster bed, the princess bed that used to belong to Anne.

She sees me lingering in the doorway, and our eyes meet; that’s when I know she remembers that day just as well as I do. The day when I started telling everyone on the street that I would always be lucky.

The day that I began boasting about my luck, annoying all and sundry with my cockiness, was the one when CPS decided Ed and I could stay with Sophia for good.

Chapter Text

Technically, I shouldn’t be living with enlisted men. They’d wanted to kick me out long ago, but nobody could figure out a way to do so when I stubbornly stayed put. In any case, a home meant nothing to me when I had no kin to fill it with, for Sophia and Edward were both removed from me by two separate oceans.

Profanity is a way of life in the military; it’s a way to vent off steam, the natural product of an environment with too many men living together in close quarters. No self-respecting man ever wants to be missish about a bunch of words, after all, if you boil it all down to its essence, that’s exactly what they are.

At least, that was true until the day I found a group of enlisted airmen blasting one particular song in the common room.

If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you son

I got ninety-nine problems but a bitch ain’t one

How dare they? I felt that song was taunting me personally, pinpointing the one thing that was missing in my life. After all, I had no problems – I had food, shelter, a good salary, a respectable rank – what more could I possibly ask for, except what I most yearned for but was yet denied?

“Musgrove!” I barked. “Turn that down now!”

“Yes, sir,” stammered Dick Musgrove, hastily reducing the volume. “You – you never seemed to mind before,” he added, with just a touch of impertinence.

Musgrove and his buddies gave me one more baleful look before turning away and continuing their idle chitchat. Even as I walked away, I couldn’t help overhearing little snippets of it.

“Why can’t he just mind his own business? If he lived off post like all the officers of his rank, we’d be able to have our fun.” I believed that might be Lieutenant Denny, the only other commissioned officer living in the dorm.

“He’s gone soft,” I could discern Musgrove’s voice above the rest, daring me to take him to task. “For a street nigga like him, this stuff ain’t nothin’. I betcha, it’s somethin’ personal.”

I walked on, turning the other cheek, pretending not to have heard. Everything Musgrove had said was true – I’d been born and bred in inner-city Detroit, a man of the streets, and by my normal standards, this would’ve been a kindergarten level of swearing. After all, it was Jay-Z, they had to be able to air it to ten-year-olds on mainstream television. But when it came to her, such a term could only be an abomination of the worst kind.

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“华姐最棒 (Hua-jie is the best)!” With a fist-pump, my younger sister Shuhua ended her latest video. In the past couple of years, she’s practically become a celebrity, amassing over one million subscribers even though she’s still in college.

“你这么年轻，怎么可能是华姐呢? (You’re so young, how could you possibly call yourself ‘Big Sister Hua’?)” I asked her.

“我的粉丝都是学生，对她们来说， 我当然是姐姐嘛 (My fans are all students, of course I am like a big sister to them),” came her reply.

Our family lives in what they call a “GCB” area. “GCB” stands for “Good Class Bungalow”, and it means our house needs to have at least fifteen thousand square feet of land. Singapore is only 280 square miles, so if our country only had houses like mine and nothing else, we’d have to put ten families in each house to give everybody a home. That’s how disproportionate our share of Singapore’s limited land area is. It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, that a girl from one of the richest families on the island knows exactly which Taobao deals to pitch to get the entire Singapore female population between the ages of fifteen and thirty (or maybe fifty, considering all the aunties who are crazy about her) practically eating out of her hand.

Whenever Mum goes to the wet market, all she needs to do is tell all the stall holders that Hua-jie is her daughter, and she’ll instantly get all the best prices. After I moved back and started doing the weekly grocery shopping rounds with her, we’ve been bombarded by the tagline, “华姐最棒 (Hua-jie is the best)” from left and right.

Mostly, nobody recognizes me, for the last time I lived here, I was an eighteen-year-old in school uniform. But one day when I went to Adam Road Hawker Centre to buy lunch for my family, I finally flew the white flag and went with the flow. It looks like, I can permanently say goodbye to my own independent identity for as long as I'm living in this country, at least while Shuhua's channel is active.

“你很面善 (You look very familiar),” said the auntie at the stall, “我们认识吗 (Do we know each other?)”

“或许你认得我妹妹吧 (Perhaps you recognize my sister),” I said. “我是华姐的姐姐 (I’m Hua-Jie’s big sister).”

Immediately, I got my discount.

Chapter Text

“Wentworth? Oh! ay, -- Mr Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common.” – Sir Walter Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Me and Sophia just knew, Edward was the one who would go to college. All the things he liked were the ones that didn’t belong in our world; even in elementary school, he was the puny, bookish kid who sat by the side studying his spelling words while the rest of us dribbled basketballs on the blacktop.  Even though nobody told us to, Sophia and I both worked, letting him focus on studying. And knowing we were making this sacrifice for his sake, Ed did his very best, all the way from getting into the National Spelling Bee, to skipping a grade so he could get himself through school as quickly as possible.

Still, everybody at school teased him mercilessly because he was weird. He liked history, but he didn’t care for the history they taught us in school, preferring instead to escape into another world, many centuries and an ocean away.

“Ed, you can’t get far enough away from here?” I said. I was fourteen and he’d just turned sixteen, finishing up junior year with an AP class in European history.

“I’m tired of learning about our history,” Ed explained. “Like, just ‘cause we’re black, the only thing that’s supposed to matter is the struggle. But this stuff, it tells you, if you go back long enough, those white people in Europe struggled like us too. Humans been poor, they done all kinds of crazy things to each other, and no matter what colour you are, it happened to your people at some time or other. Knowing that, it makes me feel better, gives me hope.”

Well, because Ed was into all this stuff, we found out we have the same name as some fancy rich family in England. He brought home his research for his final term project, a stack of printouts from the library with pictures of this enormous house, grander than anything we’d seen even in movies.

“Wentworth Woodhouse,” I read, skimming the caption underneath one of the pictures. “Dude, y’know you’ll be laughed out of the room when you present that thing, right? I mean, telling everyone a bunch of fancy rich folks got our name? Everyone knows how that happened, you might as well go air a commercial to say our granddaddy’s granddaddy was their slave.”

“Fred, tell me, who in this city wasn’t the descendant of a slave?” he replied nonchalantly. “It’d be the pot calling the kettle black.”

When a couple weeks passed, and I didn’t need to defend Ed from anyone, I thought maybe they’d forgotten all about it after all. Besides, when he was at the high school and I was still in junior high, there wasn’t much I could do anyway if kids roughed him up in school for having airs.

Surprisingly, the reaction Ed’s project got was the opposite of what I’d expected. Ever since my fourteenth birthday, I’d started working at McDonald’s after school, and while trudging down the street on the way there one day, some bigger boys from the high school called out to me.

“Yo, Wentworth!” one of them said. “Respect, man!”

“Huh?” I was completely puzzled. “For what?”

“We knew your mama was a ho, and your grandmama’s grandmama,” came the reply. “But they sure knew how to do it right. Who knows they picked one of the richest folks in England to do it with?”

I thought I’d figured out all the possibilities, but this had never occurred to my fourteen-year-old brain. With the heat of shame rising all the way to the tips of my ears, I shuffled on, looking straight ahead of me.

“I gotta work,” I said, and got out of there as quickly as possible.

Chapter Text

Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession, would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! – Jane Austen, Persuasion

With all three girls away from home for the first time – Elizabeth and Anne in college, and Mary in her first year at boarding school – the house had felt strangely empty all year long. I didn’t realize how much of my daily routine was built around the girls, until they all went away and left me with wide stretches of time looming in my days, bereft of purpose for the first time in decades. But never mind – the school year would be ending soon, and with the summer, they would all come flocking back underneath my wing again. I counted the days as each one grew longer, eagerly waiting for spring semester to end and my world to get back to rights.

“Anne, I’ve missed you most of all,” I said. Of all the girls, Anne was the only one who called me dutifully every week, and I told her not to worry about the expense, she could call collect and talk to me for as long as she wanted. She rarely hung up without talking to me for at least an hour, but she never took up my offer to cover the costs, insisting that she could afford it on her pay from her campus job. “Just think, three more weeks and you’ll be back. Don’t you miss Sarah and Jemima’s cooking? You must be terribly thin, having nothing but the residence hall food to eat, but we’ll fatten you up when you get home.”

“I’m so sorry to disappoint you, Grandma,” came Anne’s reply, “but I won’t be coming home just yet. I’ve enrolled in summer school, so I’ll be staying on campus till August.”

“Summer school?” I was appalled. Living in that dorm was a terrible privation, and she actually wanted to prolong it for almost the entire summer? “But that means you’ll hardly have any time at home before fall semester! You need to rest and recharge; nobody can live in that ascetic environment for so many months on end without burning out. At only nineteen, you’re far too young to throw away all your opportunities for summer enjoyment.”

“Nineteen is old enough for me to think about my future,” Anne came back with her usual calmness, but somehow it sounded ominous. “I’ve decided to do two majors in four years. You know my passion is for aeronautical engineering, but I want to add a major in mechanical so I can help Father out with the family business if I ever need to. And besides, if I clear my humanities requirements in the summer, I can pass all my books and notes on to Frederick next semester.”

Frederick. There it was again, the name of that boy she couldn’t stop talking about. It had been almost six months by now – wasn’t that a long enough time for any teenage infatuation to run its course?

“Well, if I recall correctly, you said he’d be going down to Texas for the summer,” I pointed out. “That’s a long time for a teenage boy, long enough for him to charm a hundred girls.” Never in my life had I stooped to hyperbole, and I wasn’t going to begin now. “All right, I exaggerate. But take my word for it, no nineteen-year-old boy is going to spend a summer away from home without sowing wild oats left and right; it’s convenient for them, after all.  Besides, isn’t that what he’s taking flying lessons for, to impress the girls? I wish you didn’t have to learn this lesson when you’re still so young, but you shouldn’t be surprised if he’s forgotten all about you by fall semester.”

“He won’t,” said Anne confidently. “We’ve agreed to be exclusive, and I know he’s going to keep his word; he’s a man of honour.”

A man? At nineteen? That’s preposterous. Even more so, after I found out where he came from.   Mere miles separate Grosse Pointe and Detroit, but that was the whole reason why the Pointe System was needed. It prevented people of his ilk, for the city of Detroit was full of such riffraff, from infiltrating our territory.

“Exclusive,” I said. “That’s a very adult word to use for a teenage infatuation. How exclusive are you going to be, if he drops out and fails to graduate? Have you researched the nationwide black college graduation rates? Or thought about how poorly inner-city schools prepare their students for college? When he drops out and goes back to the street life, are you still going to be ‘exclusive’ and follow him there?”

“I beg your pardon, but I don’t think ‘infatuation’ is the right word to use, when you get to know a person well and then you decide you love him. One semester isn’t a short time, and I dare say I know him better than any of the boys I got to meet in high school, because we’re all on the same campus day and night. And I don’t just believe he’s going to graduate, I know it. How could anyone who beats me hollow in all my math classes possibly not graduate? Especially when, as you pointed out, he’s doing it even in spite of not getting the kind of training we did in prep school. He told me all about how he skated out of Math Olympiad class in tenth grade because he got fed up with combinatorics, but that makes him even more determined to conquer that barrier now.”

Well, I was accustomed to Elizabeth thinking she knew better than me, but Anne had always been properly respectful of my considerable experience with the real world. College was corrupting her, more than I had realized.

“Even if that is so,” I pointed out, “you must remember you have a future beyond college. I know you probably aren’t thinking about marriage yet, you still have three more years of school ahead of you. But someday when you graduate, you’ll need to find someone suitable to build a life with.”

“Three years,” said Anne. “That’s still a long time more, and all I want to think about now is to study hard, have fun, and graduate. And then, to come out into the world and be useful to society. Nothing about that is going to change, it’ll all still happen anyway.”

“Are you sure? You say you love that boy. Well, what do you think happens when young people think they are in love? Do you think your father will pay for diapers if you’re saddled with a baby before you graduate? That’s why we sent you to an all-girls boarding school, to keep you from being tempted into things you shouldn’t be doing at that age.”

“We know what our responsibilities are,” Anne argued, “and we’ve been absolutely careful and disciplined. After all, graduating and getting commissioned is his only way out of the ‘hood, and he doesn’t want to mess up his chances either.  I don’t think the military is such a terrible future, when it’s an honest profession that will pay him well, and everyone on campus thinks it’s really prestigious to get a full ride on ROTC.”

We. There it was again, for Anne only ever used that word for her and me before, but now she had transferred her allegiance to this unknown stranger from a completely different race and social strata.

“Anne, the military is romanticized in all the books you read. I might have been the one who stocked your bookshelf with historical novels about the Age of Sail, but all literature paints things in a rosier way than they really are.  Think about all those troops who come back, missing an arm or a leg or haunted with PTSD.   That’s why we won’t let you ride the subway when we go to New York, because the one time I took it, I was approached by a homeless vet asking for money. You shouldn’t throw away your life on someone who could end up like that, when you’re such a pretty and smart girl, from such a good family, too.”

“I suppose,” said Anne, mollified. “But maybe that vet became homeless precisely because he didn’t have anyone to love him and care for him when he came back. It’s appalling, how little our country does for its servicemen who are willing to sacrifice so much.”

“Well, think on it,” I told her. “You know how much of a degradation your father would consider it if you were to end up penniless, living with a decrepit husband and a brood of biracial children. He’d hardly wish to recognize you as a member of the family, even though you would always be my dear girl. And wouldn’t it be a miserable life for you both, if your only family refused to acknowledge you? It isn’t only you who would be unhappy – so would he, being isolated and shunned for trying to enter a level of society he wasn’t meant for.”

“Society is flat these days.” I thought Anne had acknowledged my point, but now it didn’t seem so. “We have friends, though my family will always remain dear to me. And I need to go now, I’m terribly behind on my project work and my team members are calling me.”

A decidedly male voice was calling Anne’s name in the background, and she hollered, “Be right there!” to him, before bidding me a hasty goodbye.  I took my duty to my dearly departed daughter, my Elizabeth, very seriously, devoting my entire life to raising these girls to the life that was their birthright. And Anne had always taken my instruction, and her responsibilities, in absolute earnestness, until she met the boy who taught her how to throw away all the values that I’d imparted to her.

All the times she called me from college, Anne was never the first one to hang up before. But this time, she was.

Chapter Text

November 2001

When I was eight, I got the stupidest school assignment in the world. We were supposed to dress up as what we wanted to be when we grew up, and how dumb was that? Who had money for costumes, when we were already lucky to have enough to eat every day?

I showed up in the same oversize T-shirts and Bermuda shorts I always wore. “If I grow up,” I said rebelliously, “I dunno what I wanna be. I only want three things. No guns. No gangs. No drugs.”

That got me into detention for talking back, even though everything I said was true. And of all the older boys in the neighbourhood, there was one who shared my dream, who made me believe it could become real someday. AJ Croft was a gentle giant; if I was Sprewell, he was Shaq. He never made fun of Ed for being a nerd, and when nobody took me seriously because I was a smart-talking little runt, he always treated me like a regular person instead of a pesky little kid.

“So many problems here, ‘cause all the kids grow up without their daddies,” he once said. “But I wanna change that. Someday, I’m gettin’ outta this place. I wanna get a nice house, have kids, make good honest money and show ya what it means to be a good daddy.”

Before Croft got to have any kids of his own, he ended up becoming pretty much the only daddy I ever had. By enlisting in the Navy right after high school, he showed me a way out of the ‘hood, and when he came back to go to college, he had made enough money to get a mobile home for us out in Westland, a half-hour commute away from UMich Ann Arbor.

Because the Navy paid for Croft to go to college and gave him pay while he was there, they got to dictate every aspect of his life. If letting the Navy choose his major wasn’t bad enough, he got really stressed out because if he screwed up on any of his classes or failed to graduate in three and a half years, he’d get booted out. When we started out in that mobile home, me and Ed complained about hearing every single sound coming from the curtained alcove that served as Croft and Sophia’s bedroom, but by the time he was an upperclassman, he was so tired he had no time or energy left even for his Sophy. I knew just how stressed he was when he stopped playing his guitar, because his R&B band was the one thing that kept him going when he was in high school.

“Go do ROTC, don’t enlist like I did,” he said. “You’ll know the reason why when you come to my commissioning ceremony.”

I chose ROTC because I wanted to be a pilot, for a life of getting air was the only life I wanted by the time I was in high school. And when I went to Croft’s commissioning, I realized how high the odds were stacked against him – there were maybe around fifty people graduating and becoming officers from ROTC, but I could count the number of NESEP graduates on just one hand.

Well, without ROTC I would never have met Anne. Without ROTC, I might not have the money to get out of the ‘hood. But without ROTC, I also wouldn’t be heading out to do my duty for our country just before Christmas, the first one after I'd sealed my engagement to Anne with a ring.

There would be no way for me to be with Anne at Christmas except through pen on paper, but I couldn’t complain when Anne and I would hardly be the only people missing loved ones this holiday, and so many people had family whom they’d never see again.

Dear Anne,

As I write this, I haven’t even left our home shores yet, and already I can no longer keep silent. My biggest wish would be to spend this Christmas together, yet the only means within my reach to speak to you is to send my words through Harville, so I can be sure they will get to you in time for Christmas Day.

I wish there was more I could do to set your mind at ease, but the only thing I can say is: this is not World War II, or even Vietnam; I believe the probability of my returning intact to you at the end of this deployment is about as high as it has ever been in history. Still, it weighs heavily on me that I’m adding to your many burdens when all I want to do is to alleviate them.

You pierce my soul with your quiet devotion to all the people you hold dear in your life. After all the hardships and sacrifices you have gone through this year, many of which were on my account, I can only offer you a heart even more your own than in the days when we were at college together, maybe more so even than when I offered the rest of my life to you on the day I received my commission, the most unforgettable day I’ve ever known.

You were the one who brought me hope at a time when I felt I was all alone in the world, by giving me a song. And now in reciprocation, I’m giving you this song for Christmas, the one that Tupac gave us to hang onto hope even beyond his grave, the one I never thought I would ever get from him during those days after his death. That was the time when I first met you, while I was still trying to make sense of my direction in life and find a sign that I’d be able to make it.

I must go, uncertain of my fate, but in the words of Tupac, ‘we must remember that tomorrow comes after the dark’, and come what may, a part of me will always remain with you. As in this song, you will always have my unconditional love, and for you alone I think and plan.

F.W.

Picking the song I wanted to give Anne for Christmas was easy, when she had been the balm to my extreme loneliness during my rudderless freshman year. Sophia and Ed were gone to Guam and the UK respectively, and I was dealing with much harder work than I had in high school, struggling to concentrate in a noisy frat house. On top of that, Tupac died right after freshman year started, giving the lie to all the hope he had professed in his lyrics. Anne gave me a safe place, both in practical and emotional terms, and even then, I knew she would be the making of me. This song, Unconditional Love, was not only named after what I felt for her, but also it was the song they discovered two years after Tupac had died, almost as if he could reach out from beyond the grave to tell us to keep on hoping.

I knew what song I would send to Anne, but I also knew which song was now singing about my life. All these years, I’d looked for a way to have a good life within the law, and I thought I had it. Yet I might still die young, even younger than Tupac, for I was only twenty-three, and I’d thought twenty-five was already too young to go.  In terms of my possible life expectancy, I might not do much better than I could have in the street life after all, despite the glory of graduating college with honours and becoming a commissioned military officer.

The one thing from my childhood that I hadn’t put in storage was my old Walkman and a small collection of my favourite mix-tapes; I knew this one almost by heart, but put it on to play anyway, as the last remaining vestige of my youth before I would head out into the big unknown. At least, when I proposed to Anne, I made sure she had that piece of me no matter what might come next; even though I didn’t have a cent in my pocket when I asked her to marry me, I had to make sure she knew exactly how serious I was about her, especially when I wouldn’t have any other chance before going out there.  Still, in the words of Tupac, life has to go on.

How many brothers fell victim to the streets?

Rest in peace young nigga, there’s a heaven for a G

Be a lie if I told you that I never thought of death

My nigga, we the last ones left, but life goes on

Chapter Text

Nobody heard the bump when the rat landed from the ceiling onto the table. But upon spying a seemingly bar-top-dancing rodent waving its tail perilously near the plastic serviette dispenser, Tom Bertram immediately fainted with a much more audible bump. In the flurry of 995 calls and CPR, the forgotten rat vanished, leaving nobody with any inkling of its existence except for the residents of Mansfield Park.

Tom woke up in a ‘C’ Class ward at the Singapore General Hospital, because the Singapore healthcare system determined that all A&E patients would be treated as subsidized patients.

“D-dad, t-this is the l-last time we’ll ever eat in a food court again,” were the first words he sputtered when he came to.

Sir Thomas could hardly not acquiesce, so anxious he had been – for the second time – that his son might expire before his very eyes. His hands were still shaking, and far from being his usual sprightly self, he was beginning to feel like a doddering old man.  Furthermore, it disillusioned him that it was Edmund, normally his favourite child, who had landed them into this predicament by convincing them that a food court in an upscale shopping mall that served sake and izakaya dishes would suffice in the place of the $400 omakase dinner that Tom had been anticipating.

“Are you sure you want to eat rare Japanese seafood so soon after the radioactive water was released?” he had said. “Something more commonly sourced might be safer, and the ambiance of the sake bar is pretty decent, if you ask me.”

Well, in the dark of the night, Edmund rued his decision, too. The jiggling of the rodent as it danced reminded him of the sway of Mary Crawford’s hips – and what a fool he had been, to allow pure physical attraction to get the better of his moral judgement. Regardless of whether this had been a ghost rat or a real one – for none of the diners seemed to have seen it but them – it was still haunting him with no reprieve in sight.

Faye could only be relieved that they would be heading back to Mansfield the very next day. Thus far, they had scored two rats in two food courts, which were possibly amongst the two most expensive ones on the island. She had no desire to sample the 98 other food courts there possibly were in Singapore (arbitrarily, she had determined there were about 100 food courts or thereabouts) and find 98 more rats in existence.

With the morning dawn, Tom was released from hospital, and the Bertram family was free to make their way to the airport. And in the basement of Orchard Central food court, the cleaners mopped and wiped their way to the start of another day where they would welcome another batch of happy diners, nobody any wiser to what had gone bump in the night.