by Lydia Netzer
When I first dreamed into Dark House I was very young, dreaming of exploring an old house, opening room after room. At the center of it, between all the rooms, with a rim of broken beams and torn wires around it, I came upon a whistling chasm in the floor. I almost fell in, and it scared me, sent me skittering backward, a cold wind in my face. I could not even look into it. That was the first time.
After that I ended up in Dark House again and again in my dreams, always coming in from a different direction but headed for the same sinking center, back to the same bad place. Putting it inside the Hinterland, giving it walls and some exterior structure, let me have some control over that awful hole. I have never been sucked into the center of Dark House. Monsters, grief, immolation are there. Always right there at the edge. Sometimes I dream I am clever and free, but I wind up in the Dark House anyway, teetering on the edge of the blackness. A good dream is when I can get out without falling into the black. So they are all good dreams, so far.
When I was six, my mother burned our house down. Not a dream house; a real house. Down to the ground. I don’t remember anything before that. She wants to rebuild the house in the Hinterland, keep it forever, but I won’t let her.
“You make something then,” mother once told me.
“I did,” I said. “I made this.” This is a horror. But she doesn’t mention it.
I hurry now through all of the safe rooms until I am out of breath and I am still absolutely alone. I am out of places to look. “Mother!” I scream. She has to be here. I point my face into the center of the house and call again, “Mother!”
A bit of movement pulls at the corner of my eye. Is it she? I quickly turn to see a tall form step away and then recede behind a broken wall. That is not my mother. That is someone else. My mother is a small person with long hair. This stranger is a tall person and the hair is short. Someone else inside the Hinterland. Looking for me, for my mother, for the center of Dark House? My nightmare: someone’s come to push me in.
4
George had seen a picture of himself when he was two. He was a fat baby with a bubble pipe clutched in one hand. The camera captured him in the act of running, with a free hand up to catch the bubbles. What interested George in this picture was not himself. It was his mother and father in the background of the shot, which must have been taken by a friend or a neighbor, because it showed the whole family. His mother was young, with her blond hair down and long. His father looked happy, and his face was shaved. His mother was sitting on his father’s knee and grabbing his neck with her elbow, pulling him into her chest, and his father had a goofy look on his face. His mother’s teeth were incredibly wonky. They were all showing.
George’s mother was a tall person with smooth long limbs, like a model’s. In her youth, she’d had long blond hair, and her teeth had been horsey and huge. When she got some money, she had them fixed, and now they were normal, and she was a perfect-looking fifty-year-old woman. Wise, sure, with ashy short hair and dove-gray scarves to tie around her throat. For George, looking at his mother with these awful teeth was touching. Especially the fact that she was grinning like an ape, and clearly didn’t care.
*
George drove down I-75 toward Bowling Green, a college town just south of Toledo. He was going to retrieve his mother from the courthouse there. She had punched a client and broken his nose.
On the phone, his mother had said, “He was being an idiot. Had you done the same, I would have punched you, too. Everyone knows he deserved it. They’re just being careful because he’s a student. They all need punching.”
“Mom,” George said. “Please don’t punch anyone else.”
“I’m not making any promises,” she said.
“Do you want me to tell Dad?” George wanted to know.
“Don’t tell your father anything. In fact, go and lock my house so he can’t get in there until I get back.”
“Mom, I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Don’t rush. I pick up clients when I have to stay in jail.”
Then someone had said, “Come on, lady. Let’s go.” And the phone went dead.
*
If George had to pin down the moment when his mother changed from the carefree woman with long hair and snaggle teeth to the woman she was now, so firm and sensible, brusque and put together, he would have to say it began when he was about six years old.
When he was very small, he remembered his mother walking with him through the woods, her huge long legs making whishing tracks through the brush and bramble, with him on her shoulders, and she’d sing “I got a brand new pair of roller skates,” and George could touch the treetops, he felt like. The mother of his youngest days was a beautiful, sweet, idyllic mother. He remembered a striped poncho she used to wear, and how they would eat peanuts in the car and throw the shells into the backseat, laughing.
She read to him from a book of Irish poetry every night. His favorite was written by Yeats, “The Stolen Child.” It was a song about the faeries enticing a small child away from the world he knew. Which seemed a bit sinister, at the end, but also beautiful. The faeries came, young George understood, and transported this lucky golden child to a land of enchantment, where there was magic and singing.
Sometimes he was allowed out of the house by himself, and he would run around out in a small dark wood, near where they lived out west of the city, by Lake Sawyer. George could remember sitting in a clearing in the woods, hypnotically entranced, to the point where he could hear the flapping herons and the drowsy water rats from the poem, and feel his lips upon the ears of sleeping trout, and know that he was sitting on that leafy island, leaving his mother and father behind. If he concentrated, George could remember a time when he had played with a faery, and he wanted to get back to that good feeling. He felt sure that the faery would come for him again out of the woods, and take him by the hand to lead him off. He could see the strange shape of her faery face from his memory. It was beautiful.
*
George’s car was a Volvo wagon. His mother had bought it for him when he graduated from college, hoping he would stay in New England or move to California, or anywhere really, the hell away from Toledo.
“I miss Toledo,” George had said. “I want to study at the institute.”
“Don’t come back,” his mother had said. But George had come back anyway. What happened to turn that laughing mother into the mother he had now? George often wondered. What happened, what happened? Now his mother was always certain of everything, and often angry. She referred to his childhood faery dreams as “that crazy crap.” She was hard on George’s father, hard on George.
The wagon rolled down the long flat stretch between Toledo and Bowling Green. It was late, late summer, and the sky was deeper blue than it had been all year, the rows of corn tall and brittle. The roadside swaths of grass were brown and the wildflowers waved on dry stalks. Northwest Ohio crunched under the foot of an encroaching fall. As an academic, George was disconnected from the planting and harvest cycles on earth, but he knew how to look up and tell what time it was at night. In the late summer he could see Sagittarius, the archer, Babylonian god of war, his bow cocked and arrow aimed straight for the heart of the scorpion twenty-eight degrees northeast.
*
By the age of nine, George became gangly, not so fat around the wrists and ankles anymore. He knew the faeries would no longer see him as some great prize to be lured away. Frustrated and crying in his room one night, with the lights off, he saw his mother and father both come to the door. She was working her way through the ranks at her firm at this time, trying to make partner, trying to make money. His father was painting, having art shows, traveling. He wanted to tell them, very privately, that he was sorry the faeries hadn’t stolen him away yet, and he was becoming afraid that it would never happen.
But when he opened his mouth to say it, he did not. Instead these words came out: “I miss her.” And when he said them, he knew that it was what he meant to say in t
he first place.
“I miss her,” he said again, more firmly, and then he began to cry. “I want her back.”
His mother came over and climbed into the bed with him, kicking off her shoes and pulling her long legs in nylons under the quilts. She held his arms close to his sides while he cried to her. His father sat at the bedside, silent.
“Who do you miss, baby?” she said. “Who is it that you miss?”
“There was a faery I knew,” he sobbed. “I knew her. I miss her.”
“You were dreaming,” said his mother. “There was no one. No one. It was a dream.”
“Oh, Mommy,” he cried, “What if I’ve been badful, badful, and she never comes back?”
“George, are you looking for lost faeries?” said his father. George nodded.
“Stop it, Dean,” said his mother. “How could he possibly? Miss her? How?”
His father raised a long arm to point to the window, where the night sky was stretched.
“There are faeries up there, George,” he said, “Look, you can see them.”
*
George pulled off the interstate and onto the highway. His mother would be waiting, netbook case under her arm, toe tapping. As he turned on his signal to get in the left lane, he glanced into the backseat and saw another goddess.
She was sitting behind the passenger seat on the leather backseat. Her legs were splayed open and her arms were crossed loosely across her chest. She wore white running shorts, a tank top, a pair of Nikes with ankle socks, and a terry cloth headband. Her taut mouth worked a stick of gum, and George could smell it. Spearmint? Eucalyptus? Ambrosia? When he saw her he immediately slowed, pulled off the road, stopped on the shoulder. The goddess looked out the window, eyes squinting, chin sharp. She uncrossed her arms and drummed her fingers on the armrest.
“Go, go, go,” she said.
“Nah, it’s kinda bad to drive when you’re around,” said George. He tapped on the side of his head, as if to explain.
“I’m not a hallucination,” said the goddess. “I’m a goddess. Go. Go fast.”
“You’re the goddess of—” George squinted and peered off into the fields.
“The race, the race!” she said. “America, present tense, you, me. Hurry. Go. They’re beating you. They’re winning. I’m here to tell you. You need to hurry. You don’t have a lot of time.”
Her eyes flashed silver and steel, and when they met his, he felt his head go cold inside, felt his brain contract.
“Who’s winning and beating me?”
“All those other physicists, George. They’re winning! We gave you a vision. Can you not bring it to the world?”
She waved her hand around fiercely, punctuating her questions with hard gestures while the other hand kept drumming, drumming on the armrest, like a cantering horse.
“I’m capable. I’m capable,” said George. He rubbed his hand across his eyes. He turned in his seat so that he could look at her better, see her. “I’m just having a problem defining the axis of the gate. Every time I begin to map it, something doesn’t fit. I’ve got computers working on it right now. Eventually—”
“The gate was explained to you already,” snapped the goddess. She chewed her gum with her mouth open, the lines around her jaw jerking in and out of relief. Her skin was flawless. The veins popped out across the muscles of her arms and legs, rippled across her when she moved.
“Explained by the goddess of love, though,” he pointed out. “So, yes, but she’s so vague on the actual numbers, the figures, you know, the physicists like to see data. It’s kind of their thing.”
*
George had begun to have visions of gods when he was entering puberty. As soon as his mother had money enough, she moved to the city and bought a condo. They kept the house in the woods for his father, but his mother never went out there much. She had gone from loving it to hating it in a nanosecond, leaving George’s head spinning. He felt unmoored. “But I still love you, baby,” she said. “Come to the city with me.” George liked to sit quietly in the clearing, just as in the old days but now occasionally smoking pot, having visitations from what he first thought were the promised “faeries in the stars.” They told him they were gods and goddesses, and introduced each other to him, told him about themselves. He liked that.
When the old gods spoke to him it was with mist and fire. But when the new gods came and spoke they appeared in person, wearing clothes, sometimes earbuds, carrying diaper bags or modern weapons, sometimes preoccupied with their phones. They helped him understand the history of space, the things Pythagoras had seen, the movement of the crystal spheres, and how things on earth decay and in heaven they don’t. When they showed him, finally, a plane of symmetry on which the universe could fold and duplicate itself, they said, “This is important. This is something that no one else knows.”
“OK,” George said. He heard their voices layered over each other, and when he looked into the sky he could see the stars, static, unforgiving, speaking to him.
“There is a gate on which the universe can bend, one side to another, an axis on which it is replicated, transformed.”
“Transformed,” said George.
“Bring this message to the world,” said the gods.
“It’s there,” said the goddess of love, suddenly next to him on the grass, looking like a movie star, in a silk dress. “Believe it. On this side, one thing. On the other side, the same thing. Everything passes through the gate. Tell them. The answer isn’t symmetry. It’s asymmetry.” He knew that it was insane for him to see gods or hear them or be aware of them at all, so he must never ever talk about it. But he didn’t want to stop seeing them. They kept him from being so unendurably alone.
“The Gateway of God” became George’s research project. It was a sexy concept: There exists somewhere in the universe a plane of symmetry, so that galaxies and nebulae can be mapped back and forth across it in predictable measures. The reason this plane of symmetry had never been noticed, George now posited, was that it was not actually a plane of symmetry but a plane of asymmetry, and the relationship between the stars on one side and the stars on the other could be defined not by a simple equality but by an equation of some complexity. There was a relationship of one side to the other that was not simply one to one. Maybe a constant was involved. Maybe an exponent. He would figure it out, given enough time.
He told everyone about the gate. It exploded his career as a physicist. The only person he ever told about seeing the gods was his father, and then only once. George was a teenager, and Dean was in between trips to New York City, meeting with clients and gallery curators, and he and George were out for a hike in the woods.
“I had a chat with Athena,” George said casually, stomping along.
“Ticks out here,” said Dean. “Keep an eye.”
“I had a chat with Athena, Dad, and I’m pretty sure it was her. Really her.”
Dean stopped walking and put his hand up against a tree, wiped his forehead off on his rolled-up sleeve.
“I think I understand you, George,” said Dean. “I think I understand what you mean when you say this, but don’t go totally fucking nuts on me, son. I love you. Don’t want them to put you in an asylum.”
“I’m not nuts,” George said.
Dean got the look on his face like when he stood considering a painting, brush dripping paint onto the floor, jaw locked, breath coming fast.
“Don’t talk about this to anyone else,” his father finally said. “It sounds too crazy.”
“I’m your son,” said George, trying to laugh off the moment. “Right?”
“Don’t forget it,” said Dean.
So George kept on seeing gods, but through the visitations and the messages, he never told anyone. And he also never forgot about that one first visitor he still thought of as a faery, the one he felt he was always missing, that he had known and then lost.
He had her as a haunting memory, like a remembered dream. He felt a presence, lik
e a shadow on the other side of the plane of symmetry, a shadow not replicated but the same. He knew it was she. If he was a star on one side of the gate, then she was a star on the other side, her position determined by the application of an equation he had not yet written. He knew that once she had been there, that he had known her, touched her, felt her, and now she was not. In his sleep, in his imagination, he would often find himself saying, “I miss her, I miss her, I miss her.” There was another side to his equation. There was another hand reaching out to his, from beyond.
George’s mother became a successful attorney and had money, and his father became a successful painter and had fame. George had access to every privilege and every advantage. He was handsome, and life was easy. As a teen, he began to have sex with pretty girls who wrapped their limbs around him in a way that was comforting. They would smile and guide him straight into themselves, and that was very inviting. None of them were the one—how could they be?
In George’s mind, the faery grew up, as he did. And in the midst of sex, with the rhythm of going in and out quite overcoming any other thoughts in his head, he felt he was always pushing through to her, to the one he was missing. Each dewy sternum under his chest, each firm pair of legs tucked around his waist, each hot envelope he pushed himself into, a little better, a little better. Sometimes he bit at them with his teeth, sometimes he pushed himself in so slow and so deep that the girls would cry, Don’t stop, don’t ever ever stop. But he was always trying to make these bodies fall away, trying to pin that one transcendent spot.
And when it eluded him, he began to pursue another girl, a different girl. All he had to say was “Mom, I miss her,” and any obstacle that could be toppled with money immediately vanished. His mother gave him everything she could give him. He became the most eligible bachelor in Toledo. Yet he was always scraping away, chafing against the lack, against the wanting, and never quite sinking in.