We all know Shirley Jackson’s ‘man in the light hat’
From Shirley Jackson and Ed Harris to my high-school biology class and the London Underground. It’s all connected. It follows.
Sometimes a strange story rekindles a stranger memory in a reader. Shirley Jackson’s “Paranoia” (2013), a cat-and-mouse thriller, did that for me.1
Jackson’s premise is evocatively simple. Mr. Beresford has finished his workday in downtown New York. After buying a gift for his wife’s birthday, he tries to figure out the fastest way home so they can celebrate. Go by taxi? Bus? He tries many routes, but each time he’s thwarted by “the man in the light hat,” who steals his ride or pushes him aside or torments him. This tenacious villain is everywhere Mr. Beresford turns: inescapable and unshakeable.
But why? What does the man in the light hat want? We don’t get a motive. Jackson doesn’t ascribe the villain many other attributes beyond headwear, either. By holding back details and not providing clear reasons for the chase, Jackson creates an every-villain, one that every reader has run into at one point in their life. We generate pleasure in reading “Paranoid” by filling in the details Jackson leaves out. We imagine our own reasons for being chased.
Because you’ve been followed by someone at some point, haven’t you? Of course you have.
Once upon a time, I was a paper boy in small-town Minnesota. (Well, sorta: my mom relieved me of my inability to keep a morning schedule pretty early into that gig.)
Anyway, most houses in my neighborhood got the paper, and there was this guy from the house with the stained-glass door who was always, well, curious. Always retrieving the paper from the driveway when my mom, who was usually driving me because I was too lazy to walk, looped back home.
This guy from the house with the stained-glass door? He didn’t seem to fit in our town. His yard was a verdant green that was deeper, richer, and longer-lasting than other yards. He always looked the same, too: a button-down short-sleeve shirt and khaki shorts. He had a full head of white hair, old-guy metal glasses, a slight paunch, and legs that looked like they belonged to an NFL running back.
What was his deal? How’d he get his lawn so green? Where’d he get those super legs? That guy from the house with the stained-glass door was into super-secret science stuff, probably.
Well, a few years later when I was in high school, I did the only brazen thing I ever did in my brazen-less life. I was researching underwater breathing technology for a biology class paper on deep-water diving, because I was certain after seeing Ed Harris in The Abyss barf up oxygenated pseudo-amniotic fluid from his lungs that this sci-fi movie’s underwater breathing technology was, in fact, not fiction. It was real, because it looked … so very real, you know?
I had found some library book that talked about advances in scuba technology. Scientists were trying to figure out how deep humans could dive under the ocean’s surface. (The liquid oxygen in The Abyss prevented divers who inhaled it from being crushed by the weight of sea water above them, so they could dive like way deep, like down-to-alien-lifeforms deep. You know, plausible super-secret science stuff.) I didn’t understand a word of that library book, but it surmised sci-fi wonder stuff was on the verge of becoming reality.
So, like any curious teenage boy from small-town Minnesota would do, I called the Pentagon to uncover the truth. (I was in a hurry and hated research.)
The operator put me through to an undersecretary of this and then this undersecretary put me through to a first-class diver of that. I asked a lot of questions. I didn’t get any answers other than, “There has been research on pulling oxygen directly from salt water, but that doesn’t really work.”
“Yet, right? It doesn’t work yet but it will soon?”
Silence.
“But what about liquid oxygen, you know, like in The Abyss?” I pressed.
Silence. (Or was that laughter?)
I got nothing from the undersecretary of this or the diver of that. Yet I distinctly remember giving my name and hometown to everybody on the phone call.
Fast-forward to like five years later. I was spending a college quarter in London “studying abroad” (a.k.a. drinking beer and sleeping in late). As part of the coursework there, students were encouraged to go on literary-themed walks. Go find the docks featured in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Go find the offending tree root in the park below Greenwich Observatory in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I loved those quests. I made it my mission to go everywhere the assigned books led me. My paper street map of London traced my daily walks in orange highlights. I covered a lot of literary ground.
Get to the point, Alex? Yeah. Okay, so here’s the thing. That guy from the house with the stained-glass door? On one of my excursions, I saw him on the elevator at Angel tube station. I was going down, and his white hair, those glasses, that slight paunch, most definitely those legs … they were going up. Did he look at me? No. Did I at him? Oh, yeah. I got a good, long look.
And it was that guy from the house with the stained-glass door, I swear to Conrad.
And then a few weeks later I went to Bath in way western England to chase down some Jane Austen story setting. After I found that, I toured the Roman Baths, and yes, there the white-haired man was, parading around a restaurant lobby on those legs: that guy from the house with the stain glassed door! No doubt he was following me, but why? What had I ever done to arouse suspicion from this super-secret science guy?
I had once called the Pentagon, that’s what. I asked hard questions. I had given everyone on that hourlong call my name. My hometown. And they must have told that guy from the house with the stained-glass door to keep an eye on me. Because you know: super-secret science stuff.
So yeah, Shirley Jackson reminded me that a government agent once followed me from small-town Minnesota to London and Bath.
I was definitely on to something, right? To clear this up, I should call Ed Harris. He’s the one who barfed up the liquid oxygen after a deep-water dive, after all. I bet he’s read Shirley Jackson. He seems kinda sorta paranoid. He’ll get it. He’s played at being at being a spy before, like me. He’ll know know the truth, right?
Wait, what if that guy from the house with the stained-glass door was wearing a disguise, like putting on a fake paunch and wearing glasses and a sporting white wig every day to blend in, just so I wouldn’t notice him. What if he took off that disguise?
Oh my Conrad. … Ed Freakin’ Harris is the guy from the house with the stained-glass door!
I’m so dead.
Posthumously published by The New Yorker in 2013. Collected in The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows, ed. Majorie Sandor, St. Martins Press, 2015.