I was on the covered front porch, having a smoke and a beer, when I noticed a small silver and orange U-Haul van parked in front of Mr Ennis’s house. The cargo hold was bare save for a pile of gray moving blankets and a wooden rocking chair resting on its side. The metal gangplank was up, jutting from the truck’s tail like a bladed tongue, suggesting the movers were done for the day. Or the new owner, since U-Haul implied you were not sipping martinis while a paid crew took another year off their backs. The sun was setting tiredly. There were no lights on inside the house. If the new residents were unpacking boxes or hooking up the television and dialing for that moving day pizza, I couldn’t see them.
I blew a stream of blue smoke at a fly and swallowed the last of my beer. I was turning to go spend the rest of the night on the couch when I heard a screen door creak and then spring back into place with an obnoxious clang. On the heels of this racket, a woman’s voice -
‘Ow, watch it. For fuck’s sake.’
Ooh, an angry one.
I waited, expecting her husband or some kid in tow to trot back to the truck and retrieve her rocking chair. But the woman who materialized on the small porch only stood and stared at the quiet street. Her chest, shoulders and hair were just a shape above the ragged juniper bushes until she listed to one side and twirled slowly into the porch light. When she stretched her arms above her head, I was able to make out a loose tank top over her snug t-shirt, one breast in the shirt bulging from the tank. Though covered, the breast gave the impression of an accidental spill that had yet to be noticed by its owner. It was a purposeful wardrobe malfunction, designed to attract attention. This was very Los Angeles, like the whale tail thong that ‘accidentally’ rides above the waist of the pants.
She bent over and raised a bottle of wine, pulling a respectable measure down and wiping her lips with her forearm. She hiccuped in silence and looked down as if just now realizing it had come to this. I could not see her hands. With the slightest quiver of her arm, the wine bottle shot into view, arcing high over the porch railing and into the polluted pink sky before falling back to earth where it disappeared into the juniper bushes. A damn good-looking broad, littering like it was the seventies.
Oh baby, feeling my buzz, I just fell right the fuck in love with you.
Her need came at me in a warm pulse. Somehow I knew she was alone and not thrilled to be here. Someone had driven her from her last home and this was the last stop before things went from bad to beyond redemption. I imagined a boyfriend with four motorcycles and a fierce left jab.
She turned, facing me across the expanse of grass and driveway between us. I waved my beer can at her halfheartedly. ‘Hello,’ I said too quietly for her to hear. My porch light was not turned on, so I guessed she had no way to know I was smiling.
She slumped and turned away. Her screen door creaked and slammed itself home for the night.
Nice roll, Hastings. Another gutter ball.
Inside I flicked on every light as I floated through the main floor: dining room, living room, gallery, sun room, laundry, both first-floor bathrooms and kitchen. Light was good, light was essential. The house was too large to live in alone, and the downstairs had become my domain. The bathroom had a shower, I kept a basket of clothes in the laundry room, and the living room lived up to its name spectacularly. I made my bed on the couch and dozed off.
The home phone trilled, startling me awake. I don’t answer the phone most days, but I arose with the hope it might be Lucy Arnold calling to chat about the arrival of our new neighbor. I was hoping to draw out some gossip on the son from Barstow, why he had cleaned the house out so quickly, and who this new tenant might be. I marched over and stared at the cordless cradle on the end table. The time was 1.28 a.m. and the small gray screen read CALLER UNKNOWN. On the fifth ring I picked up.
‘Hello.’
The connection was there, but no one spoke. I thought it might be one of those automated bank reminders that dials through a database of customers and patches a service representative through only after the machine has recognized a voice. Were the computers calling in the middle of the night now?
‘Hello?’ I repeated.
Normally I would have clicked off after three or four seconds, but something told me to wait. I sensed a person there, listening, huddled in a darkened room.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I want her back,’ a man said. The voice was as thin and lifeless as any I had heard, the voice of a disgraced violin tutor after three glasses of Chardonnay.
‘Who is this?’
‘I want her back.’
‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who’s calling?’
‘I want her baaa-aaack.’ The voice cracked, on the verge of tears. ‘Please bring her back to me, please. I’ll do anything you want.’
One of Lucy’s cast-off suitors? The rejected masher or some other nut job who’d been stalking her? Had some psychotic lover seen us together again and decided to turn his aggression on me? Was he even now watching her, me, the house?
‘Oh, Stacey,’ the man wailed. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t there, please come back—’
I slammed the phone down, jamming the OFF button with my thumb until the handset skittered off the cradle and fell to the living room’s hardwood floor. I was shaking, and almost regurgitated the dregs of my Mexican beer dinner. I recognized the voice on the other end of the line.
It belonged to James Hastings.
I stared at the machine that had just reproduced my voice as if it were a small vessel sent to earth, designed to deliver an organic evil that was even now waiting to hatch in my living room. Black molded plastic, some microchips and wires, a fibrous speaker pad and microphone. It was only a cluster of dead matter, chemicals and compounds, things dug from the ground and brewed in a lab. I knew this, and yet it might as well have been a giant black spider with gleaming red eyes. I felt . . . invaded.
I stared at the caller ID screen. It was blank now, of course, because no one was calling. But there were two little plastic arrows next to the gray screen, one pointing up and the other down. I pressed the down button and stared at the number. 310-822—
‘Bullshit,’ I heard myself say. It was our home number, my home number.
The time stamp was 1.28 a.m., precisely one minute ago.
How do you dial yourself? I remembered playing that game as a teenager. You did a sort of double click thing with the hang-up tab, waited for the second dial tone, then dialed your own number and hung up. No, that wasn’t it. You didn’t even have to dial your number. Back then, all you had to do was double-tap the hang-up tab and then leave it depressed and after about three seconds your own phone would ring. Could phones still do that?
I picked the handset off the floor and set it on the cradle and waited for ten seconds. I lifted the handset and pressed TALK twice, heard the pause and the second dial tone, then hung up. Thirty seconds passed, then a full minute, then two. The phone did not ring. I tried it again. The phone did not ring. Maybe cordless phones didn’t work that way, or maybe the phone company had discontinued the feature due to too many pranks. I was considering calling the phone company to ask how I could call myself when the phone rang again.
I rocked back on my heels and reached for it, but hesitated. I checked the caller ID screen again. It was my number. I picked up the handset and pressed TALK. I held the phone to my ear. I did not speak.
There was a connection. I could not hear anyone.
After half a minute or so, my mouth unglued. ‘Hello?’
No one replied.
‘Hello?’
You were only imagining it. You’re still drunk.
‘Who is this?’ I said. ‘Are you recording me? Listen—’
A woman sighed heavily, and for a long time. ‘AAAAaaaaaaahhhhhhh . . .’
It was not a sigh of pleasure or distress. She sounded as though she were being forced to make some ill-defined vowel sound for an instructor, or a doctor holding a wooden depressor on her tongue, shi
ning a light down to her tonsils - and it made the skin of my arm crawl.
The line went dead, and immediately following the barely perceptible click there was a single thunk above my head. Something had just fallen to the floor. Or been dropped. Something that might have been a phone, my phone, the one I never used any more and which had been charging in the darkness of the master bedroom for almost half a year.
Someone was in the house.
I took four steps with the phone in my hand, then realized I was a coward and was not going to march up the stairs and confront anyone. I did not own a baseball bat or any other weapon. The police. Call the police, I thought. Call Lucy Arnold and tell her to round up her brethren, we have a situation.
I pressed the TALK button again. There was no dial tone. I pressed it twice, waited and tried the line again. It was flat, dead. I was frightened, and then angry as well as frightened. Angry for being such a coward. Ghost wouldn’t stand here like a little bitch. Ghost would march up there with a butcher knife and shred anyone who dared to trespass in his castle.
I went to the kitchen and yanked open the utensil drawer. I found a long meat fork with a thick black handle. I shoved the phone into my back pocket and walked to the stairs. I went up at a steady pace, determined not to slow down or panic. I made it to the landing and flipped on the hall light. I listened for any movement and heard nothing. I squeezed the meat fork handle and began my circuit of the halls, which formed a rectangle around the ballroom - a space smaller than it sounds and might once have been a library or large study of some sort, but which Stacey had decided would become the ballroom - at the house’s center.
The first longer leg of this rectangle, immediately off the stairs, was flanked by a linen closet, then the main bathroom, followed by another closet and finally the master bedroom at the end. I checked the bathroom and the closets, opening and closing the doors with delicate precision. None contained a person. I continued to the master bedroom and found the door closed. Had I left it open or closed? I could not remember, and it didn’t matter much because Olivia, the woman who cleaned the house every two weeks, might have shut it after her dusting or whatever she did in there nowadays. She could have left it open, too, and the fact was I had no way of knowing. The master bedroom was maybe halfway across the house from the living room. It might have been the bedroom phone that had been dropped, but the noise I heard had sounded closer than that, toward the center of the house.
I decided to check the other rooms first and finish my inspection in the master. I walked around the ballroom’s doors, into the second long hallway. I checked the three smaller bedrooms, the second half-bathroom and the wider closet where we stored the Christmas tree decorations and other boxed junk we rarely used.
All of the rooms were empty. I backtracked, passing the ballroom’s double doors again, and suddenly wanted to be in the master bedroom and done with this distraction. I twisted the knob and barged in, the meat fork at my side. I flipped the light on.
The bed was made. Everything was neat, ordered, just as I had left it. Olivia had kept it clean, ready for my return. It was like a hotel room, the sheets folded back, the pillows plumped. The walk-in closet harbored no trespasser.
On the nightstand was a square lamp with a clear glass base, the clock radio and the telephone. The handset was standing appropriately erect on the cradle. No one was here. No one had used the phone. No one was in the house. The thunk sound was just one of those random old house sounds.
Unless the thing that made the random old house sound is in the ballroom. Go on, you big pussy.
No, I wasn’t going in there tonight. There wasn’t a phone in the ballroom, and this inspection was about the phone, the caller. Nothing more.
So, who had called me? And how did they manage to replay my voice? My voice, repeating things I said months ago, back when I spent a good portion of the evenings drunk and bawling and talking to myself so that I didn’t have to listen to her voice in my head - or worse, the vacuum of silence when she refused to talk to me? Had I used the phone then? Had I called someone in my misery? Could they have recorded me and played it back to taunt me? Who would do such a thing?
No one called me these days, except for Lucy. Everyone else had stopped calling months ago, when they realized I wasn’t going to leave Los Angeles until I was good and ready. It’s better to leave him alone, they said, though they couldn’t understand how I could stay in that house.
This house. This bedroom, our bedroom, the room I could no longer sleep in. I went to the dresser and opened a drawer. Stacey’s socks. Little balls of pink and yellow and white. And then her ‘winter’ socks, the plain athletic socks that used to bunch up in piles at her ankles as she padded around the house when January subjected us to fifty degree mornings. I closed the drawer. The next was packed tightly with what I had come to think of as house shirts, old t-shirts that began their life as mine, were adopted by Stacey, and eventually belonged to both of us. The kind of shirts you put on to paint a chair on the patio. I unrolled a black one featuring a cheesy airbrush-type painting of a nude woman standing on a tree limb in a mystical forest, her back to me as the full moon swelled yellow in a faery sky. Wolfmother, it said. One of Stacey’s favorite bands. I pressed it to my face and inhaled. It smelled like dust.
I dropped it and closed the drawer, opening another to the top right. Here was a collection of my underwear. I stared at them, trying to make sense of the order, the neat way they had been folded and stacked. Did a certain portion of women in the world fold boxers in thirds, sides in, and then in half, top to bottom, until they were a perfect square? I always thought Stacey wasted her time folding my underwear this way.
‘Just wad them into a ball and shove them into my dresser,’ I had told her on at least a dozen occasions. ‘I don’t care how they look, save yourself the trouble.’
And she would always frown at me as she continued folding, her movements growing more graceful and yet somehow robotic as if she were defying me by playing the role of laundry geisha. ‘It’s nicer this way, James,’ she would say.
That was another of her Stacey-isms I had forgotten about.
It’s nicer this way.
Stace, why do you always put the same Otis Redding CD on when we have company over for dinner? It’s nicer this way. I would catch her using her special bottle of lemon polish on the wooden coffee table-trunk despite the fact that Olivia had sponge-cleaned it earlier that day. Why don’t you just tell Olivia to do that next time? And Stacey, my wife, my little imperfect, white-haired wife would double-wrap the cloth around her middle and pointer fingers and massage the oil into the dark knots and, almost beneath her breath, say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’ I made fun of her for the way she misted the bedspread with her pouch of jasmine water right before we crawled in to have the sex (that one was a James-ism, ‘the sex’), treating our ordinary, Crate & Barrel bedroom like some boudoir, and she would lift her chin and look away from me and say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’
I realized that I was holding a pair of my boxer shorts, the orange paisley one that only days ago I had worn and left in the plastic basket that served as my downstairs hamper, and I realized that I was crying again. Somehow, in the past three days, they had made the trek from the laundry room to this dresser, where they were folded into thirds, then in half, a perfect square. That was some kind of magic, a trick that broke my heart even as I began to shake with fear.
She had been right. Always.
It was nicer this way.
5
Saturday I bought a gun.
Actually, I didn’t buy it. My neighbor, Hermes, gave it to me. He worked out of his Navigator at the end of the block, on the corner in front of his green shingle. The house was in his mother’s name, but it belonged to Hermes. A man named Jaysun kept an office with a view out the third-story turret, where he could spot po-po coming from six blocks in any direction. The rest of the crew usually clustered in a circle, dealing, texting, chilling, waitin
g for the action, soaking up the heat and arguing about sports.
Before our driveway was repaved and the garage rebuilt, Stacey and I had to park on the street. This meant that when we came home from late dinners or clubs, back when we still went out on Sunset and pretended we were somebody, we often had to park two or three blocks from our front door. We had noticed Hermes and his crew, and the cars that slowed, the handshakes through the window before they sped off.
‘Do you think they’re dealing?’ Stacey had asked.
‘They’re not waiting for the school bell to ring,’ I answered.
We were two frightened white kids from Tulsa, progressive but still essentially Middle American. But the idea of crossing the street, in our own neighborhood, to avoid threading our way through a pack of six black men blocking the sidewalk, seemed wrong. The first time we met them, it was after midnight and the block was dead silent. Dew on the lawns, a gritty mist in the air. When we were ten feet away, I cleared my throat.
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 4