Side Life

by Steve Toutonghi

  “You always say that.” Vin found the red plastic lighter and flipped it at Bill. It bounced off Bill’s wrist but he managed a flailing catch before it hit the floor.

  Vin said, “I don’t even know what Nerdean looks like. I can’t find a picture of her.”

  “Instagram?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I always say it because it’s always true. You only have one mode with women. You’re like, ah, ah, ah.” Bill rocked his head and body in a parody of wide-eyed lustful panic that was kind of funny, but only because Bill was funny. “So, what do you mean, she’s under the house? Do you mean, like, in a bunker?”

  “No, forget it. I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Really? It sounded like something.”

  “It wasn’t.” Vin didn’t want to explain, but still, the angry way he barked at Bill surprised him. Bill made a face and raised a hand in mock defense.

  “Okay. Don’t mind me. I’m just here to visit a friend.”

  AFTER BILL LEFT, VIN’S MIND was buzzing. He slept a little but woke up stoned and ate two slices of cold pizza. He wanted to flip a crust into the garbage disposal rather than reach across the counter to lift the lid off the aluminum champagne bucket he was using for compost, but his stoned brain was stopping him. His stoned brain preferred that he follow the rules: food waste should go into the champagne bucket. He stared, trying to remember which task his other hand, the empty one, could get started on. He remembered that it should be flicking the switch that turned on the garbage disposal, but doing that wouldn’t help him with the compost. He was stymied.

  Then he imagined—saw in his mind’s eye—one hand flicking on the disposal while the other was in it, getting shredded. He winced and felt a flood of fear and adrenaline that made his eyes water. Then a sentence appeared in huge, silver, 3-D letters inside his brain. The letters said, “It’s in an appliance.” Even though the letters hovered in non-space inside his brain, they cast a shadow.

  He lowered himself to a squat, turned, and leaned back on the counter, the pizza crust forgotten. Slowly he folded over and lay on his side. He felt as though all of space and all of time were expanding out from where he was lying and at the epicenter of everything there stood a being that made his own existence irrelevant. He closed his eyes and tried to slow his juddering pulse. Eventually, he fell asleep.

  HE DECIDED TO SEARCH INSIDE every electrical device, and began by unplugging and disassembling each of the boxes clustered around the TV, unscrewing or prying them open while sitting amid a technician’s debris field of Phillips and flat-head and Torx screwdrivers, pliers, hex keys and spudgers, all of various sizes and shapes. As he worked, he set out the internals of each gutted object until neat rows of tiny screws, plastic clips, black plastic boards, and foam heat pads striped the warm floor. Any of the devices could be hiding a wireless connection, which might control a switch.

  He had stopped considering whether or not Nerdean might want this done. He told himself that it was important to find her. She might be in trouble.

  After the first day of pulling things apart, he’d discovered nothing of note and everything in the master bedroom was dismantled. He slept fitfully but woke at a reasonable hour feeling refreshed. He decided to find what he was looking for before spending too much time reassembling devices. He removed the panels of fuse boxes, thermostats, and external metering boxes, opened and disassembled air exchangers, air quality detectors, and curtain automation engines.

  He finished at around eight, and then spent a couple of hours putting some of the equipment back together. It was a warm night and with the air exchanger in pieces the bedroom sweltered.

  The next morning, tired but still enthusiastic, he brewed a pot of coffee and got back to work. He dug into the doorbell, which had a particularly maddening security plate that snapped closed on his fingertips several times in a row. He finally defeated it with a rubber mallet, leaving it permanently bruised. He used the same mallet to pop open a panel that granted entry to plumbing and electronic control for the jetted bath attached to the master bedroom. He stripped portions of the baseboard to find and pull apart the hidden speakers for the built-in audio system. To be thorough, he removed all the rest of the baseboards throughout the house.

  Late in the evening of the third day of his project, he began to pay attention to a gnawing worry that he might have gone too far. There were now many pieces of many things scattered about the house. Despite a devotion to organization and systematic disassembly, he had begun to lose track of the fussy bits of devices, and even the location of some tools. He had also created a few inconvenient artifacts, such as a doorbell that remained mysteriously non-functional after reassembly. (He had killed the chickadee.)

  He descended to the largest room in the basement, the only place in the house that wasn’t too hot, and lay on the carpet in that dark, open space. He closed his eyes and considered the mess he’d made of the house.

  This was how things had been with him since he was a kid. He could be productive, and very creative in the first flush of a project. He could imagine great things and see himself doing the nitty-gritty labor required to achieve them in vivid detail. But something always went wrong. It was as if a seam of chaos were part of the very substance of his ideas, present at the moment he conceived them. It grew within his plans, a tiny malevolent uncertainty that became a critical but unnoticed gap in logic and then spread into a network of cracks, expanding fissures of risk and negative consequence. Each of those crevices grew until they all became things in their own right, distractions that eventually overwhelmed him.

  It was as if what was really wrong was something in him, as if he himself were the flaw in an otherwise functional system. He was a destructive self-reference, his life a liar’s paradox of flesh and free will. Three days earlier he had had a perfectly good situation as a house sitter in a custom mansion. And now he had destroyed the house.

  He rolled onto his side, but that hurt his shoulder. The concrete under the carpet was inflexible, unforgiving, and the carpet was not thick. He rolled back and threw his arm forward in exasperation. His fingertip smashed into something.

  He gasped and pulled back his hand and curled up around it, sucking in breath and waiting for the pain to ease, amazed at how much a single finger could generate. As he recovered, he sat up and slowly gathered himself and then stood, a rising excitement lifting him.

  He found the room’s light switch—he hadn’t pulled apart the light switches in the basement yet—and turned on the light. He was looking for the thing that had hurt his finger, a small thing on the floor near the wall. But there was nothing on the floor of the room. He stared at the area where his finger had hit something. He might have been misremembering the sensation. His finger could have hit the wall.

  But it hadn’t. He turned the light back off and waited impatiently for his eyes to adjust. When they did, the dark carpet gave away nothing. He slowly walked into the room and then squatted and placed his palms near the wall and began to move his hands over the coarse carpet. Almost immediately he bumped into an elevated square, right at the edge of the wall. He couldn’t see it, but it felt as though it was raised about two inches and was roughly an inch on each side. Its sides were metallic, smooth and cool. He was sure that it wasn’t there when the light was on. He pressed on it but it didn’t respond. Nothing happened.

  He turned the light back on and traced the carpet along the edge of the wall. No sign of the elevated square. He turned the light off again and confirmed that the square had reappeared.

  He sat cross-legged beside the wall, staring at the point where the square stood two inches above everything else, invisible in the darkness, and he laughed. He fell to his side laughing and stretched out again on the dark carpet in the cool room. He had found her. He was right. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

  HE STILL DIDN’T KNOW HOW to reach her. The house had only begun to whisper to him, the floor had divulged one single secret; there was m
ore to do; he would have to listen closely to hear what the house was saying. So—start from the beginning: anything worth defending was worth defending carefully. And any single mechanism that Nerdean used might be found accidentally. What if someone happened to walk into that dark room and, despite its size and inconvenient location, happened to hit that one raised piece of floor, just stumble on it? It wasn’t enough to just hide it in the dark. There would also have to be a lock. To reduce the possibility of an accidental activation, Nerdean would have to install a second trigger.

  He began to work through possibilities until he felt himself following a thing that felt like truth. She had used electricity to raise the tiny bit of carpet, so the easiest answer would be a switch inside the fuse box, which was in another room in the basement. The last two fuses in the box were both very large and not labeled, which seemed odd in a house of this caliber, but not too odd. People can get sloppy toward the end of large construction projects. And there was a tiny bit of residue on the plastic beside both of the switches, which might imply that labels had been peeled away.

  He didn’t want to flip unlabeled fuses. Nerdean had made an effort to mislead Joaquin about how the house was using electricity. Flipping fuses might cut a critical connection and, if she was doing what he suspected, it might actually endanger her.

  Of the two fuses, the top one was probably installed first. It would power equipment. The bottom one was probably installed after everything was already working. He’d been pacing as he considered the situation. He walked over to the box and before he was really sure what he was planning to do, he flipped off the bottom fuse.

  He waited, frozen in the wake of what he had just done. It was possible—within the realm of possibility—that he had just killed her. But anyone could flip a fuse at any time. Would it really be his fault if her system were so poorly designed?

  He walked into the large empty room where the light was off and stepped on the raised square of carpet, adrenaline making his foot shake. As he touched the square it retracted smoothly, sinking quickly until it was flush with the floor.

  A moment later, there was a soft rustle from the center of the room as the edges of two pieces of carpet rubbed together. A square of floor about two-and-a-half-feet on each side rose with steady precision and light breathed up from below. Then one side swiveled higher until the panel was on edge. An open door. Vin stepped to the center of the room and looked down a long, bright, human-sized rabbit hole.

  Several dull thuds sounded from upstairs, and a muffled shout. Vin had broken the doorbell and someone was battering on the door. He took a step away from the hole and stumbled back another step. He walked out of the room and looked up the stairs that led to portions of the house whose existential integrity hadn’t been compromised.

  Then he walked back into the room and stared down the hole. Metal rungs lined one side of the chute. He could see the bottom, maybe fifteen feet below. What most concerned him was that the hole and the hatch that capped it were real.

  Even though he had considered the possibility of something like this happening, he could not have prepared himself for its reality. A double-secret passage into the heart of Queen Anne Hill had quietly opened up in his basement. A thing that never happens had happened in his life.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Notebook and the Crèche

  “What happened to your doorbell?”

  It was late evening, the air darkening. Vin tried to answer but no words came out. Bill’s face wrinkled with concern. “You actually look worse. Where were you, man? Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I have a lot of work to do.” Bill was interrupting him again, this time at a critical step in what could be a turning point in history. In the history of the world.

  Bill shouldered him aside, pushing into the house. “You might not have time to get high, but you have time.” He took the short flight of stairs to the first floor in two long strides and then stopped. His head swiveled slowly left to right, absorbing the changes.

  “You finally moved in.”

  “You have to leave. I don’t have time for this.”

  “Really?” Bill stepped out of sight.

  “Yes, really,” Vin shouted. He ran up the steps, his feet almost slipping on the smooth treads. When he reached the living room he stopped.

  Beyond the dominating picture window, the waters and islands of Puget Sound were dark and glittering. A distant cargo ship and a state ferry towed the white scars of their wakes through a field of liquid scree and small, colored pricks of brightness on a far shore billowed hazily under haloing mist, all of it spread out beneath the entirety of naked space, an endless hollow sky scored by the few stars resolute enough to shine through both an endless abyss and the building light of human endeavor that rose to meet it.

  “You’re making a mess,” Bill said. “What are you doing? You’re pulling this place apart.”

  Bill sounded as if he were talking to a puppy, a creature incapable of self-reflection. Vin flushed with embarrassment. Bill had caught him metaphorically chewing the furniture.

  “I don’t have to explain.” Vin glanced around the room. The damage was worse than he thought it should be. He didn’t remember being that violent with the baseboards.

  “Well, wow, that’s a strange thing to say. Of course you don’t have to. I’m not the ganja squad of the Spanish Inquisition. Are you worried about something?”

  “I’m in the middle of a project”—Vin was speaking quickly—“and, it’s not all that important, but . . .” He didn’t know how to end the sentence. He swallowed.

  “Okay. No sweat. But you’re acting a little bit like evil already won and the world’s now a place where people just eat each other. Did you find something?”

  Vin became aware of the distance between himself and Bill. Bill, watching him closely.

  “You did,” Bill laughed. “You did, didn’t you? What is it? What did you find?”

  Vin’s eyes widened. He was trapped.

  “C’mon, man, what . . .” but Bill’s voice trailed off. Then he said, “Wow, you’re freaking out.” He took a step toward Vin, then slowly turned and walked to the island. “You know, okay. Maybe you don’t have to tell me.”

  Bill glanced at Vin and moved into the kitchen, stepping close to the refrigerator, he glanced at Vin again, then he moved to the pantry door and glanced back. He said, “It’s not on this floor, is it?” And then he was heading to the second floor.

  Vin walked around the island to the far counter and the cheap, slotted wood block that bristled with the handles of kitchen knives. He stared at them as he heard Bill knocking around upstairs.

  “What the hell?” Bill yelled down.

  Vin saw his own hand resting on the counter beside the knives. He heard Bill scrambling up to the third floor. Bill was Vin’s oldest friend. Vin loved him, no matter how exasperating he could be.

  And Vin knew that he was not a person who would do what his own hand was telling him he might do. No matter what he imagined or saw in his mind’s eye, no matter how angry his occasional ranting or how violent his dreams, no matter how often he woke from a wrenching nightmare into this world of physical laws and normal time, this world in which he drew warm air into delicate lungs and in which his blood circulated through tender extensions of veins, arteries, and branching capillaries; in the real world he simply could not do the kind of thing that his hand—by resting so close to a solid thicket of slim and tapering knives—was implying he might. It wasn’t possible. Vin tried to see himself from outside his own form, to see how unimportant this moment really was in the long body of eternity.

  Bill came banging back down the stairs. “Alright, I give up. What’s the secret?”

  Vin lifted his hand off the counter and ran his palm over the stubby ends of the knife handles. “I pulled everything apart because I was trying to figure out what was going on with the electricity.” He turned away from the knives and walked toward Bill. “Joaquin, Nerdean’s atto
rney, said that the house is using more electricity than it should.”

  “Did you check in the basement? Where I presume the fuse panels would be?”

  The warmth went out of Vin, a cold wave falling through his legs and into the floor. Bill couldn’t go downstairs.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’m only asking.”

  Bill headed into the dining room, slumped in the farthest of the folding chairs. “Tough project,” he said. Vin leaned against the counter, completely uninterested in what Bill might say.

  “Anyway, you want to smoke up?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it? Well, what you don’t know yet is that I have brought us a bonus, my lucky friend. I brought us some glass.”

  Bill had only mentioned meth a few times, but had never offered it before. Vin glanced over his shoulder toward the knives. He pushed off the counter and walked into the dining room, sat in the folding chair across from Bill, who dropped a small, yellowing plastic bag filled with white powder onto the table in front of him. Bill’s smile was forced mischief. A weighted and dark feeling of distance spread outward from Vin’s center until it surrounded him. In his current state, body exhausted, mind buzzing, he wasn’t capable of really understanding where the feeling came from, but through it he could see that Bill had crossed to a place where he didn’t want to follow.

  “This will put some awesome between you and daylight,” Bill said.

  “What the hell, Bill? You can’t do that.”

  Bill nodded and his lip curled up. “Alright. I see then. Too busy?”

  “Yeah.” After a pause, “If you’re going to kill yourself, you should leave.”

  “Okay.” Bill cocked his head and stared out the picture window. He said, “I don’t know why I bother.”

  In the many years they’d known each other, they’d had two physical fights, one in elementary school and one in high school. They both knew Vin was no match for Bill, but they pretended he might be. Vin tried to calm himself. He felt breath passing through his nose, muscle lifting his gut.