Versailles

by Yannick Hill

  He remembered in kaleidoscope. Missy’s favorite constel­lation. River’s favorite dinosaur. Missy’s unexplained funeral for Barbie. River’s tunnels in the sand, not a castle in sight, always shoulder-deep in beach. Their tortoises with the monster truck wheels out back, still going strong some-where. The week River built a space rocket, the explosion at 200 feet bringing a dozen fire trucks, a special task force and local news crews. Missy & River. His two gorgeous children. They came from him, they came from her. Fatherhood. This thing was animal. The loss of control. The perfect gain. He remembered their birth, he had the whole thing on file. But he remembered everything he felt. Real time. These creatures came from him, their little hands and dark, dark eyes. His children. A truth as clear as daylight over ocean waves. The darkness coming soon, they called it twilight. His fatherhood a line of trees set back from the water, way back from the beach, a buffer between his children and the rest of the world, an ugly inland empire of danger and unpredictability. His role as father. To build his family a house. A fortress for his family. Versailles. One hundred rooms. A world unto itself. Where they could have everything. Sleep safe. Sweet dreams. Bad dreams but nothing more. Like Disney World with no Mickey Mouse. When all he ever wanted was to see them happy, healthy, still alive at twenty, bear-tough and ready to face the outside world, live their American lives. Versailles, the ocean seems to say, Versailles.

  Casey steps to the edge of the pontoon and looks down into the water, the surface too disturbed to serve as mirror, but he knows himself, he knows that face. He sees it in his kids. Missy’s eyes. River’s mouth. His fatherhood a line of trees set back. He is one of a tribe. A group of people who know you even if they don’t know what you do, what you’re thinking. He is Casey Baer, American King, father of the online social network, a sum of all their parts. More than human, and so much less. A man playing God with porn on the other screen. He is Casey Baer, father of two. Now that they are gone. Now that they are gone, he’s never had a clearer sense of being. When all he ever wanted was to love and be loved. When all he ever—

  The water only pink with blood.

  appendix

  THE ROOMS

  A love story

  Room 7

  The money room. A place Casey would come to experience his wealth in the form of a kind of permanent, interactive conceptual art installation. A gigantic animatronic dragon guards a cavern filled with actual gold and treasure. Gold bullion, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, various precious arti­facts, large chests brimming over with shiny coins. It’s the real deal, the dragon so convincing Casey has to hold his breath on entering.

  A sleeping dragon. It dominates the space, its long, finned tail encircling much of the sparkling riches. There is a routine, a primitive AI at work under the hood, the thousands of iridescent scales that make up its fantastic hide. There are certain things Casey can do to trigger the robotics. If he makes a sound, even the smallest sound, the dragon will wake, raise its monstrous head and look from side to side, scanning the room for intruders. Its emerald green eyes are ultra-sensitive light sensors that can detect even the slightest movement. If the dragon senses there is someone there it will fairly quickly rearrange itself into a terrifying upright position – hydraulic wings spread as wide as the room ­– and give a ground-shaking roar that in reality is the pitched-up, heavily amplified roar of a Bengal tiger combined with the bellow of a wounded African forest elephant.

  Casey has only triggered the sequence once, and once was enough, so harrowing was the spectacle. Since then he has taken the greatest care not to wake the dragon, entering the room in soft-soled shoes, his movements almost balletic in his efforts to remain undetected. He is genuinely scared, a fear woven tightly together with his greed, a desire to have something in his hands, take something in his hands, just one of those brilliant diamonds between his index finger and thumb, to hold it up against the light and let it sparkle, sparkle just for him.

  One day recently. The night before Missy ran away, as a matter of fact. He did it. He entered the dragon’s lair. A sleeping dragon. A cave filled to its borders with gold and treasure, his treasure. He moved into the room like a panther cat, almost on all fours, eyes always trained on the dragon, those heavy eyelids like theater drapes, the dim light reflect­ing off its iridescent scales. Quiet yet confident, he made his way into the room and straight for a stray diamond, a brilliant diamond that seemed to have rolled a short way from the shoreline of shining gold coins. One last glance up at the sleeping dragon and – he closed his hand on the stone, felt its brilliant edges digging into the soft tissue of his palm. There, he had it. And the dragon still asleep. All he had to do now was retrace his steps. Get out of here. He could feel his heart beating hard in his chest. He got it.

  He’d been planning this for some time, gathering the courage. He wanted this diamond for a ring. A ring for Synthea as reward for sticking to the program, for continuing to take the medication as he’d asked. For months now she had done as she was told, seemed to understand that this was the only way. A suicide attempt must be taken seriously. She seemed to see that now. The pills a necessary evil. And this diamond in his hand was the reward. He would have it set into a gold band for her ring finger, replace the one she said she lost in the swimming pool.

  This diamond in his hand, and all he has to do is retrace his steps. So that’s exactly what he does. He moves slowly back across the space, stealthy as a panther cat, brilliant diamond gripped tightly in one hand, his other finding the handle to the white door. And the dragon sleeps, a dreamless sleep.

  Room 17

  Every Wednesday, under cover of darkness, a black minibus with tinted windows and no license plates pulls into Versailles’ staff car park out back of the compound. Twelve young men, all varsity athletes in peak physical condition, climb out of the vehicle and enter the mansion in silence. They walk through the empty kitchens in solemn single file, heads down like they’re entering a stadium for the big game.

  They assemble in Room 17, a large, square, windowless space with a rough, concrete floor and no furnishings. Each of these young men has been generously compensated for their attendance at this weekly event because in participating they may well incur serious injury, in some unfortunate cases, career-ending. For these men have to fight each other.

  Not one-on-one. This is no fight club. There are no rules down here. Room 17 is a controlled free-for-all. Controlled in the sense that there is a time limit. It’s every man for himself. Any style. No style. They’re there to kick the living shit out of each other till Casey sees fit to put a stop to proceedings. Bare fists and open wounds.

  Casey sits back in an original Eames armchair constructed of stainless steel and black Italian leather, watching a small, old-fashioned monitor, one deeper than it is wide to accommodate the sizeable cathode ray tube relaying the images of men doing their best to take one another apart.

  These sessions have produced several stars, the men who walk away more or less in one piece, their clothes soaked with sweat instead of blood. Once a season Casey will invite this all-star group back to the mansion and take his turn in the ring, rolling up the sleeves of his designer hoodie and going in hard. Both times this has happened he has won the bout, won in the sense that he has made at least one of the other participants cry quietly as a lost child. Casey fights dirty. He fights cruel, vicious as a cornered animal, no rhyme, no thought for the consequences of his actions. After the fight they can all enjoy a cold beer together, maybe sit around and watch reruns of famous moments in American sporting history on a large, flat-panel television screen. But Casey’s dilettante appreciation for the various sporting disciplines does not go unnoticed, and fairly soon he will be subjected to a subtle form of psychological bullying by the other guys, to the point where, on the last occasion, Casey made his excuses and walked along the empty corridor to his bedroom, to where his lovely wife was quietly sleeping. He slipped under the sheets, careful not to wake her.

  Hours later,
Casey woke from a bad dream and didn’t know where he was. The silver shaft of light from between the black curtains told him it was early morning and he was next to his wife in their bed in the master bedroom of Versailles, the mansion he built for his family, set back from the Pacific Ocean. Versailles. The house he built for her, his beloved Synthea. He saw now she had turned in her sleep to face him. He wanted to take her hand, make sure she was really here, the bad dream pulling at him still. He wanted to take her hand, make sure he was really here, but she needed this sleep. She needed this sleep.

  Room 27

  Room 27 is a plane crash on repeat. A faithful reconstruction of a Boeing 767 cabin and cockpit, complete with full crew and passengers, all professional actors on Casey’s payroll. They might go for months without hearing from his people and then suddenly it’s every day for a fortnight.

  Sometimes Casey takes on the role of drunken captain, but mostly he is a member of the public, taking his seat like everyone else at the beginning of the flight, asking for a glass of iced water before take-off. He looks out of the window at the landscape beyond the edge of the runway, high-resolution footage of a real airport somewhere in America, played back in Cinerama outside the plane.

  Casey actually loves to fly, has since he was a kid. He loves take-off, he loves landing, he loves everything about it. Airplane food. He’s a sucker for airplane food. These days he has a personal chef prepare him his heart’s desire at 35,000 feet in the network jet, but in the old days he would take anything that was put in front of him and devour every morsel. Something about traveling great distances. Gets him hungry as ten bears put together.

  But Room 27 is a simulated plane crash, designed to feel just like the real thing. Sometimes the actors don’t come back a second time because they find it too upsetting. The reason for the crash varies from one performance to the next. Human error. Mechanical error. Weather. Sabotage. Whatever the variable, the plane will end up crashing to the earth, killing everyone onboard.

  A violent death. Things start going wrong about an hour into the flight. A member of the cabin crew or captain will make an announcement over the public address system, the tone pitched somewhere between innocuous and pragmatic. Casey likes to act out at this point. Sometimes he will play the hero, gently reassuring those around him that there is nothing to worry about, he’s a frequent flier and it’s just a little turbulence. Other times he’ll go the other way and lose his shit completely, demanding the cabin crew give them more information, removing his seatbelt with a flourish and getting to his feet in the aisle, generally making a dangerous nuisance of himself. When Casey gets like this, the actors have been instructed to treat him as a genuine threat, restrain and handcuff him, if necessary, for the remainder of the simulation.

  Casey likes the cuffs. Even under these make-believe con­ditions they seem to have a sobering effect. But it’s more than that. He’s dreamed up some of his best new features for the website while apprehended like this, sitting near the back of the plane next to the actor playing the air marshal (Florian, a regular player, he loves his job), the plane continuing to lose altitude. Something about being taken prisoner amidst the chaos, the inevitability of the crash, the appalling shudder of the cabin walls and the screams of his fellow passengers ­– it really gets Casey’s creative juices flowing.

  The crash itself. This simulator is designed to take everyone on board to the very brink of feeling like they are going to die. When Casey is playing the captain – a rare treat – it’s the way the landscape fills the cockpit windows that really captures his imagination: no sky, only land, everything down there growing bigger and then bigger still, as though God himself were zooming in.

  Room 30

  The quietest room in the world. Its 99.99 per cent acoustic absorbency is achieved through a system of fiberglass acoustic fins and double walls of insulated steel and thick concrete. It smells ancient, and that’s because Casey had a notable Paris perfumer work with illegal samples from King Tut’s underground tomb in Luxor, Egypt, to create a scent for his beloved quiet room in Versailles, USA.

  Casey comes here every day, strips down to just his dirty white socks and listens. To his heartbeat. His lungs. Stomach. The click and crunch of bones inside his skin. And he does so in the pitch black. The sounds his body makes. A hymn to only him. Casey Baer. Just Casey on his own. The room so quiet his thoughts take on a viscous quality, mingling with the flow of blood throughout his body, until he isn’t thinking anymore, just being, the way a monitor might bask in the midday sun, but Casey’s blood is warm, his lion heart, all the love for his family, his family the only thing. He’d die, he’d kill. He’d die, he’d kill, his thoughts becoming viscous, the flow of blood, his heart, his heart, this time alone is who he is now, his thoughts giving way to impulse, he’d die, he’d kill.

  Room 30 is a test chamber. Casey brings in members of the public now and then, has them sit for him in darkness, then pays them in bananas. After forty-five minutes of close to utter silence, most humans will hallucinate, hear voices, even wish to strike up conversation. And some do. Our need for narrative, structure, interaction. After forty-five minutes in the chamber most test subjects will ask to leave, they cannot stand it any longer.

  Not Casey. After seventy minutes in the quiet room, Casey has been hallucinating for some time, but these are not voices in his head, at least not human. Animal. Animals. Hundreds, thousands. A jungle-wide spectrum and he is lion king, his lion heart, the flow of blood, he’d die, he’d kill, his family the only thing. Missy, River and Synthea.

  Synthea. She would like it here in the quiet room. It might help her focus. Like her swims out into the ocean. He remembers watching her from his own office in the mansion, swimming out, way out into the deeper waters. He never liked it, her all the way out there with the strong ocean currents, beyond calling distance. She would like it here, in the quiet room, with him. Just the two of them.

  Room 39

  In Room 39, Casey can be a woman. It is not so much a need as a very pleasurable bimonthly indulgence, like smoking a single, secret cigarette by a French window opening out onto an impossible desert palace garden. Bethany has been part of his life for some years now, or is it the other way round? He is never quite sure.

  There is a small, adjoining walk-in wardrobe. This time before entering the main space is precious. There is no rush. No nerves. His audience is very patient, more than prepared to wait. A black-sequined backless evening gown designed for his body. He stands in front of the full-length mirror and turns to check out his shapely ass, the arch of his spine framed by the glittering fabric. Were Synthea to see this. He doesn’t know what would happen. He applies the make-up last, already in character, he has his brief routine down to a fine art. Nothing too crazy, just a little mascara and a touch of red lipstick that complements his cool skin tone.

  When Casey feels ready, he steps through a black curtain and onto a raised stage area where a grand piano stands ready. The light is silver, tuned to resemble moonlight as seen through a wisp of cloud. Casey cannot play the piano. He has never been musical in that sense, but that is not what this is about. The ­performance takes place in complete silence. Casey begins by climbing up on the instrument and lying down on his side, arms stretched out above his head. His movements are languid, controlled, like a professional dancer.

  Casey proceeds to vogue slowly yet deliberately for the camera, a routine vaguely suggestive of a captive panther cat, stretching out lazily in the sun, and under the watchful gaze of those members of the public that happen to be passing by. But this live feed is far from public. Casey’s audience are a highly select group. Subscription to the webcam is invitation only, and the price of entry would make all but the wealthiest individuals on the planet blush from head to toe.

  Room 44

  Casey’s childhood bedroom. The same dimensions, wallpaper, curtains, a false window onto a neighborhood that no longer exists. Every object, all the furniture taken from the original
room and transplanted here. The mood is undisturbed crime scene. And yet when Casey visits, he acts as though he were returning from playing out on the street, or spending Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house. He takes up a comic book and flops down on the bed. The bedclothes have a repeating pattern of grizzly bears with friendly cartoon eyes. Casey slept under this duvet when he was a boy, and more besides. When he’s bored with the book, he gets down from the bed on his knees and reaches underneath for the shallow wooden box hidden there towards the wall. He lifts off the lid. An unsmoked cigarette. A matchbox. Flick knife. Catapult. Playboy. Hand mirror. Potato gun. The matchbox contains nothing but a woodlouse. A reminder.

  The woodlouse is alive at the moment. It is not the first to live inside this box. The woodlouse does not have a name because it is not a pet as such. The woodlouse is a reminder of something Casey did when he was six years old, he might even have been five, he can’t remember now. What he does remember is finding a great many woodlice under a rock at the bottom of the drive of his childhood home in the suburbs of the city. He never told his wife this story. The rock was heavy, its underbelly caked with damp soil. He rolled the rock on its side and found the teeming creatures, not only woodlice, but the woodlice were the easiest to catch, and they didn’t hurt him when he did, picking them up between his thumb and forefinger and watching as they moved their tiny, tiny legs, trying to gain traction in the thin air. Yikes. Casey remembers thinking what would happen if . . . Casey remembers thinking: how come these little creatures can live right under this big rock and not get squished like bugs? No space between. How come they can move around under this big rock when there’s no space. Well, Casey thinks, if they can live under this big rock then they can do the same under a red brick. Right? He never told his wife this story. He remembers taking a wiggling woodlouse between his thumb and forefinger and walking around the dark side of the house to the back yard. No adults around just now. He remembers sitting cross-legged on the warm paving stones and getting hold of a red brick and placing it flat-end first on the scurrying woodlouse. A little red tower. The little red tower.