In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

  Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®

  You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to.

  When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly.

  “You were moving all night,” she says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake.”

  If you apologize profusely, go to this page.

  If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to this page.

  If you tell her to calm down, go to this page.

  “I’m so sorry,” you tell her. “I really didn’t mean to. I just move my arms around a lot in my sleep.” You try to be light about it. “Did you know my dad does the same thing, the sleeping damsel swoon? So weird. I must have—”

  “Are you really sorry?” she says. “I don’t think you are.”

  “I am,” you say. You want the first impression of the morning to return to you; its freshness, its light. “I really am.”

  “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Stop doing it.”

  “I told you, I can’t.”

  “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her all the way to the kitchen.

  Go to this page.

  “Baby, if this ever happens in the future, you can always wake me up and I’ll go to the couch, I promise. I really don’t mean to do it. I don’t have any memory of it. I can’t control how I move in my sleep.”

  “You’re such a fucking cunt,” she says. “You never take responsibility for anything.”

  “All you have to do is wake me up,” you say, a kind of incoherent desperation zipping through your skull. “That’s it. Wake me up and tell me to move or sleep on the couch and I will do it, I swear to you.”

  “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her to the kitchen.

  Go to this page.

  Here you are; a page where you shouldn’t be. It is impossible to find your way here naturally; you can only do so by cheating. Does that make you feel good, that you cheated to get here? What kind of a person are you? Are you a monster? You might be a monster.

  END. Go to this page.

  Are you kidding? You’d never do this. Don’t try to convince any of these people that you’d stand up for yourself for one second. Get out of here.

  END. Go to this page.

  You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me.

  Go to this page.

  Breakfast. You scramble some eggs, make some toast. She eats mechanically and leaves the plate on the table. “Clean that up,” she says as she goes to the bedroom to get dressed.

  If you do as you are told, go to this page.

  If you tell her to do it herself, go to this page.

  If you stare mutely at the dirty plate, and all you can think about is Clara Barton, the feminist icon of your youth who had to teach herself how to be a nurse and endured abuse from men telling her what to do at every turn, and you remember being so angry and running to your parents and asking them if women still got told what was right or proper, and your mom said “Yes” and your dad said “No,” and you, for the first time, had an inkling of how complicated and terrible the world was, go to this page.

  As you’re washing the dishes, you think to yourself: Maybe I could tie my arm down somehow? Maybe put a tack on my forehead? Maybe I should be a better person?

  Go to this page.

  You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. Did you think that by flipping through this chapter linearly you’d find some kind of relief? Don’t you get it? All of this shit already happened, and you can’t make it not happen, no matter what you do.

  Do you want a picture of a fawn? Will that help? Okay. Here’s a fawn. She is small and dappled and loose-legged. She hears a sound, freezes, and then bolts. She knows what to do. She knows there’s somewhere safer she can be.

  Go to this page.

  That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh; it reminds you of your first boyfriend who fucked you while watching porn—how he rutted and rutted and then every so often lifted the remote to rewind something you couldn’t see. (Once you turned your head over the lip of the bed and saw a tangle of upside-down limbs and your brain couldn’t make sense of them; you never looked again.) You would just lie there silently, watching his face move over you. It was like being unfolded beneath the yawn of the planetarium as a kid: the sped-up rotation of the earth, the movement of the stars over you, the constellations melting into and out of being as a distant, disembodied voice told some ancient story to help make sense of it all.

  You shudder and moan with precision. She turns off the lights. You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you; or you leave it.

  To sleep, go to this page.

  To dream about the past, go to this page.

  To dream about the present, go to this page.

  To dream about the future, go to this page.

  The first time it happened—the first time she yelled at you so much you were crying within thirty seconds from waking, a record—she said, “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe.

  Go to this page.

  It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to.

  Go to this page.

  You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t—

  Go to this page.

  You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to.

  When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly.

  “You were moving all night,” she says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake.”

  If you apologize profusely, go to this page.

  If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to this page.

  If you toss back the blankets from your body and hit the floor with both your feet and tear through the house like it’s Pamplona, and when you get to the driveway your car keys are already in your hand and you drive away with a theatrical squeal of the tires, never to return again, go to this page.

  That’s not how it happened, but okay. We can pretend. I’ll give it to you, just this once.

  Turn to this page.

  Dream House as L’appel du Vide

  In the pit of it, you fantasize about dying. Tripping on a sidewalk and stumbling into the path of an oncoming car. A gas leak silently offing you in your sleep. A machete-wielding madman on public transit. Falling down the stairs, but drunk, so you flop limb over limb like a marionette and feel no pain. Anything to make it stop. You have forgotten that leaving is an option.

  Dream House as Libretto

  My middle school music teacher showed a film
version of Carmen to the class, the really famous one with Julia Migenes where she keeps hiking up her skirt during the Habanera. He was probably just trying to give you all a bit of culture, but all my classmates took away from the screening and the ensuing discussion was that Carmen was a prostitute who didn’t shave under her arms, and by extension, by thirteen-year-old logic, I must also be a prostitute who doesn’t shave under her arms. They asked me about both of these things over and over again. Already smarting after a decade of Carmen Sandiego jokes, I was ready to abandon my name altogether.

  When Carmen sings, she tells the men who surround her that love is a fickle thing, and they need to beware. Don José gives himself over to her, loses himself in her. When she leaves at the end, he begs her not to go. She tells him that she was born free and she will die free.

  Then he stabs her, and she dies.

  Confessing his crime to the gathering crowd, he throws his body on Carmen’s corpse and howls, “Ah, Carmen! Carmen, my adored one!” As though he hadn’t just killed her with his own hands.

  Dream House as Sci-Fi Thriller

  One night, John and Laura ask if you want to watch a movie with them: Flatliners. Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon: all med students playing with the edge of death. You are so excited; you remember seeing this movie on TV as a teenager, and you are ready for the shot of nostalgia. You all make drinks, sit down together.

  As soon as the movie starts, you fall asleep, your legs slung over the arm of the couch.

  You are tired. You are tired and the room is warm and dark and John and Laura are there, breathing gently next to you. You remember the opening—silhouetted statues in the half-light of sunset and a sweeping, dramatic choral arrangement, and Kiefer Sutherland announcing that it is a good day to die. And then you are out. You do not dream. When you wake up, the movie is over; you’ve missed the entire thing. And yet you feel so content there, in that space, in the moment after waking, and before you remember your cell phone.

  When you crash into your bedroom, it is lying there at the end of its charger. Still and traitorous. When you pick it up, there are missed calls, text messages. You call her back, shaking, your pectoral muscles twisting into fists of anxiety.

  “Hello.” You can hear the smolder of rage in her voice.

  “I’m so sorry,” you begin to explain, breathlessly. “We just—”

  “Who were you fucking?”

  You feel your chest pulling inward.

  “No one,” you say. Then, “Wait, wait, I can—”

  You run into the living room, where John and Laura are sprawled content as cats. John sees your face, stands up.

  “I can prove it to you,” you say to her. “John and Laura are here, I can give them the phone, they can tell you, they can prove I wasn’t with anyone else, we were just watching a movie—”

  If you live into eternity, if you live until the sun crashes into the earth, you will never forget the expression on John’s face, the way he slumps forward and looks flattened with grief. He shakes his head very slightly, though it’s not clear if he’s refusing the task or refusing the reality where the task is being offered to him.

  “No,” she says. The smoke in her voice clears immediately. “No, no need.”

  You talk to her after that, almost certainly, but you have no memory of the conversation. The moment when you woke up on that couch—before you remembered the phone, remembered your entire life—was one of the sweetest from that year. That tiny pocket of safety and oblivion. Whiskey, breath, bodies. Credits crawling up the dark.

  Dream House as Déjà Vu

  She says she loves you, sometimes. She sees your qualities, and you should be ashamed of them. If only you were the only one for her. She’d keep you safe, she’d grow old with you, if she could trust you. You’re not sexy, but she will have sex with you. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something stunningly cruel, and there is a kick of fear between your shoulder blades. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like she’s determining the best way to take you apart.

  Dream House as Murder Mystery

  Lightning flashes, the power dies, and when the electricity comes back on again a dinner guest is folded over the dessert course with a dagger in her back. The handle of the blade is inlaid with precious gems, but her tiara is missing. When the undercover detective reveals herself—the plucky reporter, of course!—the mystery deepens: the cost of the gems in the handle of the knife far outweighs the value of the stolen tiara, whose diamonds were merely glass. Who among them would give up a tool of such immeasurable value to take something so worthless? And so boldly, in front of so many people?

  The plucky reporter paces on the Persian carpet in front of the suspects. Was it Heathcliff, the brawny dockworker turned mob boss? Ethan, the foppish social climber with eyes like the distant radiance of Mars? Samson, the experimental artist with a murky and enigmatic past? The reporter crosses dozens of times in front of a slight, blonde woman sitting in the corner, but never includes her on the list. The blonde woman is leaning back with flinty cool, following the action. She nods and listens, and every so often tilts her chin in the direction of the plucky reporter and lets loose a dazzling smile.

  The plucky reporter turns to Samson with a trembling, gloved finger. Samson stands to defend himself. Ethan begins shouting, Heathcliff glowers. And no one pays attention to the blonde woman, who stands and walks toward the corpse of the dinner guest. She grips the blade with both hands and pulls it out like King Arthur deflowering the stone.

  The body of the dinner guest, whose eyes are wide and wet with betrayal, lifts with the movement and then slams back down on the place setting, lemon cake squashed against her bosom. The blonde woman wipes the blood off the blade onto the dinner guest’s dress and replaces it in her purse. Everyone continues to argue as she walks out the front door and into the night.

  IV

  The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.

  —Sarah Manguso

  Dream House as Stopgap Measure

  She gets into your MFA program and will leave the Dream House to come to Iowa City. She talks about moving in with you. You coo with excitement over the phone, but when you hang up you feel like you did when you were a kid and your brother launched a baseball into your nose: warm blood down the back of your throat; milk, and metal.

  Dream House as the Apocalypse

  According to some students of eschatology, 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world. And it was, in a way.

  But the end did not come as fire or flood. No glittering comet struck our planet. No virus leapt from continent to continent until bodies lay strewn in the streets. The flora of the world did not grow to overtake our buildings. We did not run out of oxygen. We did not vanish or burst into dust. We did not all wake up with blood soaked into our pillows. We did not watch a beam from an alien ship carving trenches into the earth’s crust. We did not turn into animals. We did not starve or use up all of our potable water. We did not trigger a new ice age and freeze to death. We did not choke to death in a self-induced smog. We didn’t get sucked through a wormhole. The sun did not overtake us.

  At the end of the world, the park was beautiful, hot. The grass was a little long. The trees were punctuated with birds.

  Dream House as Surprise Ending

  “I’m in love with someone else,” she says. The two of you are sitting in an Iowa City park next to a baseball diamond after a friend’s baby shower, and you don’t understand how the conversation even arrived at this point. The grass is crowded with dandelions, and you remember, suddenly, that game you played as a kid, yellow-chinned, in love.

  “What?” you say.

  “With Amber,” she says. You think of Amber—a classmate of hers at Indiana, willow-thin and redheaded, with a soft, mousy voice. “We kissed once, drunkenly, and I realized that I loved her.”

  You st
are at her, fast-forwarding through a mental film of every time she’d accused you of merely looking at other people the wrong way. She meets your gaze for a moment and then looks away. She slings her arm over the back of the bench, like she’s going to bring you in close. She doesn’t.

  You get in your car, drive to a distant street, and pull over. You don’t have the space in your brain to cry. You pick up your phone and see that, on Freecycle, someone is giving away catalog cards from a defunct library. You drive to a local Panera, take a stack of cards from a very nice woman who is probably wondering why you look like you’ve been forced to eat dog shit at gunpoint. Back at your house you calmly add the pile of cards to your scrap collection because you think you’d like to make a collage.

  Very late, your girlfriend—or is she?—appears at your house and says she has to get back to Bloomington. Where has she been this whole time? She doesn’t say, but she kisses you. “I think we’re meant to get through this,” she says. “Don’t worry. Promise me you won’t worry.”

  Dream House as Natural Disaster

  I get bad heartburn. It’s the Zoloft, which takes the edge off my anxiety but brings along a bunch of awful side effects, like a good friend who can’t shed a bad lover. Every so often, I take my nightly meds and within a few minutes feel as though a hot poker has been shoved down my esophagus. I chew antacids and walk to the bathroom. Often the pain, or the force of the neutralization, makes me vomit. I become, functionally, everyone’s favorite science fair project.