In the Dream House
Page 12
Traumhaus as Lipogram
It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part. Thinking you can say what you want as you want to, but with a singular constraint. Loss of the function of a particular orthographic symbol—it’s a situation, hmm? A critical loss. Not just a car with bad paint, a lamp with a crack, sour milk. A car that can’t stop. A lamp that sparks. Milk cut with shit. A woman hid my thing and I can’t find it again. That’s just how it is. I cannot find what’s missing. I am trying and trying, and I cannot; as I fail, I shrink. I shrink down into dirt, wood, worms.
It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know. Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin. Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say?
(Also: Why did you stay?)
I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison.
Dream House as Hypochondria
You tell her she has to go to therapy or else you’re going to leave her. Sullen, she agrees.
She does go, for a while. The first morning, you make her coffee and breakfast, so that she’s ready to head out into the world. You feel like a mother on her child’s first day of school. You sit there in your underwear and robe, contemplating the winter morning from the plate-glass window in her kitchen.
She returns in a cheery mood, holding a second coffee; her nose and the tops of her ears blushing with winter.
“What did the therapist say?” you ask. “I know I shouldn’t be asking, I just think—”
“We’re still getting to know each other,” she says. “It’s too early to say.”
Things get better for a little bit. They really do. She is attentive, kind, patient. She brings you treats—little foods, dips and things, your favorite—and leaves them for you to find when you wake up. A few weeks later, she tells you over the phone that she’s not going to continue therapy. “It’s too much time,” she says. “I’m really fucking busy.”
“It’s one hour a week,” you say, gutted.
“Besides, he says I’m totally fine,” she says. “He says I don’t need therapy.”37
“You threw things at me,” you say. “You chased me. You destroyed everything around me. You have no memory of any of it. Doesn’t that alarm you?”38
She is silent. Then she says, “I’ve got lots of things to do. You don’t understand how hard I work.”
You remember your promise, to leave her if she doesn’t get help. But you don’t push the issue. You will never talk about it ever again.
37. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type X905.4, The liar: “I have no time to lie today”; lies nevertheless.
38. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C411.1, Taboo: Asking for reason of an unusual action.
Dream House as Dirty Laundry
One day she asks, Who knows about us? It becomes a refrain. It’s strange—in some past generation this could have meant so many things. Who knows we’re together? Who knows we’re lovers? Who knows we’re queer? But when she asks, the unspoken reason is awful, deflated of nobility or romance: Who knows that I yell at you like this? Who’s heard about the incident over Christmas?
She never says exactly that, of course; she just wants to know who you’re talking to, who she should be avoiding, who she shouldn’t bother to try to charm. Every answer enrages her. When you tell her, “No one,” she calls you a liar. When you say, “Just my roommates,” her eyes go flat and hard as flint.
Dream House as Five Lights
In the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the Cardassians during a secret mission to Celtris III. Early on in the second episode of the two-episode arc, the Cardassians use a truth serum to interrogate Picard on the details of his mission.
Gul Madred ostensibly wants cooperation; information about the defense strategy for the Minos Korva planetary system. When the serum does not give him the results he desires, he implants a device in Picard’s body that, when activated, produces excruciating pain. “From now on, I will refer to you only as ‘human,’” Madred tells him. “You have no other identity.” They strip Picard naked, hang him from his wrists, and leave him there overnight.
In the morning, Madred is unctuous, measured, unflaggingly polite. He drinks from a thermos like a weary bureaucrat. He turns on a string of lights above him, flooding Picard with illumination. Picard flinches; holds his arm like a wounded velociraptor. Madred asks him how many lights he can see.
“Four,” Picard says.
“No,” Madred replies. “There are five.”
“Are you quite sure?” Picard asks.
Madred presses the button on the device in his hand; Picard buckles, staggers, and drops to the ground in agony. The scene is a pastiche of one from 1984, but there are also some beats lifted, very lightly, from The Princess Bride. Madred is inordinately fond of his machine. That was the lowest possible setting.
“I know nothing about Minos Korva,” Picard says.
“But I’ve told you that I believe you. I didn’t ask you about Minos Korva. I asked how many lights you see.”
Picard squints upward. “There are four lights.”
Gul Madred sighs like a disappointed parent. “I don’t understand how you can be so mistaken.”
Picard squints against them and says, “What lights?” He spasms so hard his body leaps from the chair, strikes the floor.
Lying on the floor, Picard mumble-sings a French folk song from his childhood. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.” On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing.
“Where were you?” Madred asks.
“At home. Sunday dinner. We would all sing afterward.”
Madred opens the door and tells Picard he may go. But as Picard prepares to leave, Madred tells him he’ll torture Dr. Crusher instead. Picard returns to his chair.
“Are you choosing to stay with me?” Madred asks.
Picard is silent.
“Excellent,” Madred says. “I can’t tell you how pleased this makes me.”
Later, Madred feeds Picard. Boiled taspar egg, “a delicacy,” he says. When cracked open, it is an undulating, gelatinous mass with an eye at its center. Picard sucks the contents from the shell. Madred has his own meal; shares a story of his own childhood as a street urchin in Lakat, on the Cardassian homeworld.
“In spite of all you have done to me,” Picard says with clarity, “I find you a pitiable man.”
Madred’s cordial attitude vanishes. “What are the Federation’s defense plans for Minos Korva?” he shouts.
“There are four lights!” Picard says.
Gul Madred turns on the device, and Picard begins writhing. “How many do you see now?”
Picard screams, weeps, sings. On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing.
Back on the Enterprise, the crew has negotiated Picard’s release. In the final scene between Picard and Madred, Picard grabs the device that controls the pain, smashes it against a table. Madred calmly tells him it doesn’t matter; he has many more.
“Still,” Picard says, “it felt good.”
“Enjoy your good feelings while you can. There may not be many more of them.” Madred goes on to explain that a battle has commenced, and the Enterprise is “burning in space.” Everyone will assume you’ve died with them, Madred says, and so you will stay here forever. “You do, however, have a choice. You can live out your life in misery, held here, subject to my whims. Or you can live in comfort with good food and warm clothing, women as you desire them, allowed to pursue your study of philosophy and history. I would enjoy debating with you; you have a keen mind. It’s up to you. A life of ease, of reflection and intellectual challenge. Or this.”
“What must I do?” Picard says.
“Nothing, really,” M
adred says. He glances upward, like he’s looking for rain before stepping out from under an awning. “Tell me … how many lights do you see?”
Picard looks up. He is unshaven, unkempt, covered in a glaze of sweat. His face is a rapidly shifting picture of bafflement and denial, of confusion and agony.
“How many? How many lights?” Madred repeats. Off-screen, a door opens, and Madred’s face gets a little frantic. “This is your last chance. The guards are coming. Don’t be a stubborn fool. How many?” It is the first time he’s seemed weak; exhibited a real need.
Something in Picard’s face shatters. He screams: “There—are—four—lights!”
Every time I watch this climax, something inside me grinds a little, like the unglazed edges of a broken mug being shoved together. It is not a triumphant scream. It is broken, humiliating. It cracks like a boy’s. The final word, lights, is practically oatmeal in his mouth.
Later, safe on the Enterprise, Picard talks with Counselor Troi about his experience. “What I didn’t put in the report,” he tells her, “was that, at the end, he gave me a choice between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights when, in fact, there were only four.”
“You didn’t say it?” Troi asks.
“No. No,” he says. “But I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.” His gaze rests, lost, in the middle distance.
Dream House as Cosmic Horror
Evil is a powerful word. You use it once, and it tastes bad: metallic, false. But what other word can you use for a person who makes you feel so powerless?
Lots of people in the world have made you feel powerless. Run-of-the-mill bullies; both of your parents, and most adults, when you were a child; unflinching bureaucrats at the DMV, the post office. A doctor who didn’t believe you were sick, approximately two minutes before you projectile vomited against the wall. A cadre of nurses who pried your arms away from your body to take your blood when they thought you had cancer. (You didn’t have cancer, but they never did figure out why you spent so much of your childhood cramping with agony.)
But did any of them seem to enjoy it? Did any of them make you feel complicit in your own suffering? You’ve outgrown parents and bullies. You’ve railed against the everyday tyrants to friends; you chastised the doctor while dropping a long line of sour saliva down to the floor; you fought those nurses as hard as if they were trying to murder you.
Sick seems more appropriate, but it too tastes bad. It feels too close to disordered, which is a word your oldest and dearest friend, who had become very religious after childhood, used when you came out to her. It was over email but you flinched anyway, and before the end of the next paragraph—which explained that she was sort of relieved you hadn’t said you had a crush on her—you were already crying.
Dream House as Barn in Upstate New York
Many years later, I wrote part of this book in a barn on the property of the late Edna St. Vincent Millay. I didn’t know I was writing the book yet; it would take two more summers to realize it was a book about a house that was not a house and a dream that was no dream at all. But I sketched out scenes and jotted down notes and did a lot of mental excavation staring at the wall of the barn.
A few weeks in, while hiking out in the woods, I came upon what looked like a mound of garbage. When I got closer, I realized what it was: a huge pile of broken and discarded bottles of gin and morphine, where Edna’s erstwhile housekeeper had taken the empties and left them.
There was something horrifying about the mountain of glass. I had just finished Edna’s biography, wherein I’d learned that weeks after her husband died, she fell to her own death in her house, on the stairs, likely in a haze of intoxication. Was it a terrible accident? Suicide? Everybody has a theory. The biography made me angry. Edna treated her lovers, male and female alike, with no small amount of cruelty. She was talented but arrogant; brilliant but profoundly selfish.
And yet, there among the trees, seeing the measure of her pain, the proportions of her problems, I felt a stab of sympathy. It couldn’t have been easy to be married to her, but it couldn’t have been easy to be her, either.
One day, a bird slammed into my studio window. I was sitting on a yoga ball and tumbled backward in terror. Almost every residency I’ve had since, I’ve found at least one stunned bird sprawled on the ground outside my workspace. I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.
Dream House as Shipwreck
In New York that winter, when you walk too slowly for her taste, she abandons you at a storage container craft fair in Brooklyn. You stand there with your suitcase and your puffy down coat, and she tells you as she walks away that maybe you should go back to your parents’ house in Allentown if you can’t take the city.
(This is, you will recognize later, a pattern: she loves to walk away from you in places where you know no one, where you have no power, where you can’t simply get up and go somewhere. Over the course of your relationship she will walk away from you in New York a total of seven times.)
You sit down on a bench and numbly try to buy a bus ticket on your phone, but your phone’s storage is full and your screen does not respond properly to your finger. When you look up she is actually gone, and you panic, because you don’t know New York, and not only do you not know New York, you hate New York, and you have too many bags and no money for a taxi and you don’t even know the difference between uptown and downtown. In every direction walk New Yorkers: so confident, so cosmopolitan. You think, they are not the kind of people who get abandoned by their girlfriends at twee craft fairs.
You cry so hard that a tall woman with dreadlocks gets up from her storage container and comes over to you. She sits on the bench and puts her arm around your shoulder, and asks if she can do anything to help. You hiccup and wipe your nose with your hand, and tell her no, no, you’re just having a bad day, and she crosses back to her container to fetch something.
When she returns, she hands you a tiny box of cone incense and a carved wooden incense holder. “For your new year,” she says, and you want to believe she’s right—that even though your suffering feels eternal, unrelenting, the new year is full of promise, and it is coming fast.
Dream House as Mystical Pregnancy
Every television show you watched in your twenties included some kind of mystical pregnancy. Every interesting female character needs one, or so the showrunners seem to think. Vampires get pregnant with magical mortals; comatose women give birth to gods and empathic starfleet officers to mystic energy; time-traveling companions discover they’ve been flesh avatars for months, and their actual body is somewhere far away and about to give birth. One woman wakes up on her wedding day to discover herself massively pregnant, courtesy of an alien.
You are thinking of these episodes when you begin to experience pregnancy symptoms in the Dream House. You vomit into the toilet, you feel swollen and out of sorts. The two of you have talked about a child for so long—a little girl, Clementine, hair poufy like a Q-Tip, like hers—that you abandon all reason and wonder if you could be pregnant. You have had so much sex, and the intensity between you feels as real as anything. You consider saying to her, “Ha! I’m sick like I’m pregnant, isn’t that weird?” But you are terrified—of the radical body modification that is pregnancy, the dangers of childbirth, the unforgiving nature of motherhood, and—most importantly—of what she’ll accuse you of. What she’ll do afterward.
You drink ginger ale, you lie down for a long time, you forgo food for an evening under the pretense of having snacked, which you definitely did not do. You cannot be pregnant, you cannot be pregnant, you literally absolutely could not be pregnant under any circumstances.39 You take a pregnancy test anyway, like an idiot, and of course it’s negative because you haven’t had a penis anywhere near your body in years. You are afraid she’ll find the test, so you put it in a Ziploc b
ag and throw it out in someone’s trash can on the street after she’s gone to class.
39. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types T511.1.3, Conception from eating mango; T511.1.5, Conception from eating lemon; T511.2.1, Conception from eating mandrake; T511.2.2, Conception from eating watercress; T511.3.1, Conception from eating peppercorn; T511.3.2, Conception from eating spinach; T511.4.1, Conception from eating rose; T511.5.2, Conception from swallowing worm (in drink of water); T511.5.3, Conception from eating louse; T511.6.1, Conception from eating woman’s heart; T511.6.2, Conception from eating finger-bones; T511.7.1, Conception after eating honey given by lover; T511.8.6, Conception from swallowing a pearl; T512.4, Conception from drinking saint’s tears; T512.7, Conception from drinking dew; T513.1, Conception through another’s wish; T514, Conception after reciprocal desire for each other; T515.1, Impregnation through lustful glance; T516, Conception through dream; T517, Conception from extraordinary intercourse; T521, Conception from sunlight; T521.1, Conception from moonlight; T521.2, Conception from rainbow; T522, Conception from falling rain; T523, Conception from bathing; T524, Conception from wind; T525, Conception from falling star; T525.2, Impregnation by a comet; T528, Impregnation by thunder (lightning); T532.1.3, Impregnation by leaf of lettuce; T532.1.4, Conception by smell of cooked dragon heart; T532.1.4.1, Conception after smelling ground bone-dust; T532.2, Conception from stepping on an animal; T532.3, Conception from fruit thrown against breast; T532.5, Conception from putting on another’s girdle; T532.10, Conception from hiss of cobra; T533, Conception from spittle; T534, Conception from blood; T535, Conception from fire; T536, Conception from feathers falling on woman; T539.2, Conception by a cry.