Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  We’ve somehow transitioned without realizing it from wooded mountain highway to quaint country road. The white fence goes picturesquely along.

  A very slight mist forms around our ankles.

  “Let’s get out of these wet clothes.” One of us says this after a while, or both of us say it in unison, or neither of us says it at all, but it exists, somewhere, a concrete part of our ongoing human dialogue.

  And then, as the clouds draw back, the light shines down, and we see the mansion before us.

  *

  You came from a family that seemed, comparatively, readily worth jettisoning. Your father was a fiery bishop at the Mormon church in Richmond four miles from the campus (and two miles from the house you grew up in, where your parents still lived), deeply conservative and yet the curator of an enormous personal collection of Prince memorabilia. You mostly stopped communicating with your parents when you started college, took out loans and moved out, though they lived five minutes away. To me, it seemed disturbingly, eerily close, and I was impressed by how thoroughly absent they were from your life despite the physical proximity, that there was willfulness to this absence. It felt like an accelerated path into adulthood, a daring and dramatic step.

  Your brother had been closer. I’d never met him, but I’d gone to the funeral last year, which was quasi-military grade, and at which his commander—also a native Midwesterner—had told some really charming stories about your brother’s casual heroism and infuriating-yet-noble dismissal of company groupthink in Iraq (chasing after kids’ stray soccer balls, etc). The circumstances of his death weren’t specifically discussed; the undercurrent I felt was that of a suicide, in which—for the purposes and dignities of the funeral—the fault lay abstractly elsewhere, undiscussed. He was widely missed. After the commander, your father gave an impassioned speech about civic duty and service that, bizarrely, made no direct mention of his son, as if he’d already been subsumed into larger causes. Your presence at the funeral was that of a casual acquaintance. When we entered for the viewing, you shook your father’s hand and he said, “Thank you for coming,” without noticeable affect. I shook his hand next—his eyes darted quickly between us, as if mentally drawing the connection—and then he repeated, “Thank you for coming,” in exactly the same tone. You hugged your mother; there were tears in her eyes. She paused for a second, and then hugged me too. You saw more of her than your father. She worked checkout at Walmart and so you encountered her incidentally; it wasn’t clear how intentional or planned these interactions were.

  The last time you were alone with your father, you told me, was a week after the funeral, when you’d been in the house to collect something and he’d grabbed you on your way out, crazy with grief, and tried to impart to you something like life advice but that sounded instead like a mangled sermon, free-wheeling and associatively insane, where he’d come close (not all the way) to claiming that homosexuality was to blame for his son’s death, and that seeing your father crying in front of you, so absurd and lost and hopelessly bereft, had perversely created a ferocious ire in you. You hadn’t spoken to him since—you were there in town, but not there—and, in time, you’d joined your brother in silence. My childhood, by contrast, had essentially lacked in nothing save siblings: both of my parents were doctors, had paid for my college education to leave me debt-free, had placed me here.

  *

  The sight is clearly one that you’re supposed to approach and appreciate from afar—the way you’d come upon the remains of an ancient civilization in a valley—but we don’t notice until we’re nearly on top of it, when looking up we don’t immediately see a house, but rather a series of barriers and overpowering, stark angles made from wide, blank surfaces, the whole thing too big to conceive, popped in front of us out of nowhere. We impulsively take a few steps backward; the first barrier becomes a spiked black iron fence. Moment by moment, we take in the structure in front of us, mapping it into our consciousness—where two white surfaces meet becomes a corner, a wall, columns draw up into other floors, strings of windows and ornamental borders unwind, balconies like the tiers of a cake. It’s assembled before us, shining beneath a film of rain, steaming up from the ground. The instant that we behold it—and there is a definite moment where what it is becomes clear to both of us, the biggest house we’ve ever seen—you grab my hand like a child seeing a theme park for the first time, without taking your eyes off of it, as if out of fear that it will vanish. “You have got to be kidding me with this shit.”

  Thrilled by our discovery, blanketed in a kind of visceral relief, we spring toward the house (the arabesqued gate is already opened as wide as it can go), and follow a gravel path distinct from the driveway around the corner and up to the front door, which appears to be set on a throne, but is in fact two very deep stone steps. I trail behind, at arm’s length, looking up at the windows—innumerable, towering, arched, occasionally stained glass—scanning for movement. They reflect blankly back, curtains drawn inside.

  We pull ourselves up to the landing; we almost have to use our arms.

  You’re about to sail through the door but I pull you back at the periphery, my caution finally catching up with the rest of my body, our gestures suddenly too big for me. You give a dramatic kick in the air as you wheel around. “Wait. There could be someone in there,” I say.

  “There’s no one in there.”

  I stare dubiously at the knocker, molded out of bronze in the shape of a bullish horned beast, probably a minotaur. There’s no doorbell—either there was a speaker back at the gate or you’re supposed to knock with the ring hanging from the snout. It’s tacky as fuck. The door is slightly ajar.

  You’re wearing an eager, open-mouthed grin. I detect traces of cologne in the still air around us, and I think to point this out, vestigial remnants of another living organism, recently present, its aroma lingering behind, and then I realize that it’s me. I flex the toes of my left foot; the rubber and fabric of my shoe separate, mouthing silently. The mansion and the gas station seem to occupy two completely separate worlds. I imagine some kind of invisible, filtered border between them—now, I can’t hear anything beyond us, no matter how hard I try.

  The door pushes open with barely the intimation of effort. You don’t even have to touch the knocker. Of course, it’s empty. We enter, our bearing wide, our bodies heedless and embracing.

  *

  An early part of our refusal: before we found the apartment in the city, we were camped for an afternoon on a busy street midway up the island—prime commuter zone—when a man, ostensibly walking by, stopped in front of us. We had our blanket beneath us, cardboard beneath that. Your feet were bare, you were “airing out,” which gives the memory an unusual color.

  The man held a white plastic bag out to me, stamped with a smiley face. “Do you want this? I can’t finish it.”

  I looked up at him. He was dressed in a suit, the collar crisp and snug, his tie purple, and was built like a mannequin in a department store. His hair was groomed in carefully trimmed spikes, and he seemed to demonstratively maintain about five days’ worth of facial hair; he couldn’t have been more than thirty. He carried a gym bag over his shoulder, a model for the flawless balance of work and play.

  We didn’t have a sign. We didn’t ask. We were just there. But I said, in the moment, out of an automatic politeness fostered over my entire Ohio life, “Are you sure?”

  He ran his thumb and index finger down from the corners of his lips, connecting them at his chin. It looked like a gesture he performed often, like a trademark. His hand offered again. “Yeah, man. It’s too much for me.”

  I extended mine to take the bag from the air where it dangled between us, as if by reflex, to prevent it from falling. I replied “Thanks,” in kind.

  “No problem,” he said, seeming to de-stiffen, suddenly looking off into the distance, away from us. “Take care, man.” He restarted and moved quickly forward into the passing pedestrian traffic. My eyes were drawn to the
white sneakers he wore beneath the dark suit, bouncing along the sidewalk as if to prevent real contact.

  I untied and picked open the plastic bundle at my feet, laying out its components on the ground before us like a surgeon. Inside the bag, alongside a packet of plastic utensils and a sheaf of napkins (one used), a falafel pita was wrapped in wax paper wrapped in foil, one obvious bite missing. Its juices were nearly soaked through. The sight, the smell of the food alone seemed to take the edge off my hunger. I looked from my lap to you.

  “Did you ever expect to live off charity?” you said.

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “He was going to throw it out,” I said. “People act like the moment something leaves your hand or goes into a public container it crosses some kind of magical barrier and becomes trash. It hasn’t mingled with anything else.”

  “It looks like trash.”

  I ripped open the plastic knife and shaved off the bitten end of the wrap. The soggy bread peeled away in a toothmarked strip while the falafel crumbled into bits like dredged-up earwax. The sauce, the mush of diced tomato and onion pooled in the creases of the wrapper, torn. “You believe in guilt by association,” I said.

  “He’s laughing at us.”

  I raised the package to my mouth with both hands.

  You pointed to a halal stand on the corner a block north. “He bought it just so he could take one bite and then give it to us. Just to put his mouth on it and see if we would still take it.”

  A gap in the wrapper opened and the faintly orange sauce spilled onto my fingers, down my wrist, encircling it like a bracelet. He was long gone, but I turned to look at the man’s retreating back, the brand of his sneakers carrying him across, above, beyond the street.

  “It was a test,” you said. “Do you understand?”

  I watched the food wither in front of me. I noticed my teeth moving up and down inside my mouth, repeating an action that had once proved sustainable, now rendered meaningless. I swallowed spit. My hands smelled like onions for days, a pollutant.

  *

  Quickly, within a single flight of stairs, we find ourselves in the most gratuitous marble bathroom either of us has ever seen, a room bigger than the apartment we had in Indiana, with grossly oversized artwork and an ostentatious stone bathtub in the corner, complete with gold faucet—the whole thing is clearly the product of some ’70s millionaire with more money than he knew what to do with.

  Of course we fuck in the tub, with the bubbles on full blast. Afterward, we sit there in the tepid water, our dirt haloes merging, too many cosmetics mixed, and speculate on everything this bathroom has seen over the years, up until us. You suggest that the reason everything’s so spotless is because somebody made a bloody mess and had to scrub away every last bit of evidence. You point to a miniature African nude posed on a pedestal and say it was probably used to bash someone’s brains all across the marble floor. They probably had to hire someone to come in and clean it with a toothbrush.

  Money-murders, you call them. “Like, you have so much wealth that the only thing you have left to achieve is killing someone. Where else would you do it?”

  I dunk my head and bring it back up. I have to agree—the place is bright and ripe for nasty falls, and the bathtub is built like a sacrificial pool. It’s not hard to imagine entering the room and finding someone reposed in red water, one knee breaking the surface. When we’ve finished, we wrap ourselves in the purest white towels—they must have replaced them daily—and head downstairs, leaving our own evidence: wet footprints on the tile, our hairs in the drain.

  Naturally, the entryway has an enormous art deco chandelier ripped straight out of the roaring ’20s, and an ornate wraparound staircase from another century. You sit on the towel and slide down the banister with perfect grace, and halfway down I notice you starting to topple outward at the same second that I see the wolf standing in the foyer.

  Nothing in the world prepares me for your clipped shriek or the smack of your body hitting luxury tile—such brief and horrible sounds.

  I’ve bolted down the stairs before the wolf has time to react to our breach of his habitat, or, ridiculous, we to his. You’re lying on the floor with your legs crumpled the wrong way and the towel riding up between them.

  I make for you first. The foyer is strewn with priceless objets d’art, and I send a few of them crashing to the floor to distract the wolf.

  I scoop you up as gently as I can—the little splatter of blood on the tile is, as suspected, almost beautifully stark—and I hear the wolf snarling at my heels, while you don’t make any sound at all. For a hot second I think you’ve been mauled, that the wolf somehow got to your shoulder, until I remember that it’s permanent, that’s a design you chose.

  We stumble out of there on two legs, a pile of opulence and savagery behind us, as naked as beasts.

  *

  Before we knew each other, peripheral to the community my second and third years of college there was August, who sold cocaine and prescription drugs to the students there and at the local high school; as I saw it, this was his primary function. He’d attended the college as a freshman an indeterminate number of years prior, then dropped out but never left Richmond, didn’t return to wherever he’d come from (which I only knew as somewhere to the west, somewhere urban and moneyed). Instead, after officially cutting ties with the school, he’d nestled in, attached himself to the campus and, over the last two or five or eight or fifteen years, reinvented himself as a local. Most shows in Richmond, and he would be there, leaned against a wall in the back (as I would be leaned against a wall), his age—upper twenties? low thirties?—carefully masked in beard, arms crossed in broadcast detachment with the sleeves rolled up to reveal crude tattoos of big-eyed robots underneath, his style in artlessness. His insistent presence implied that he had always been here and always would be, his claim to this turf longer established and thus more genuine than anyone else’s. He seemed to know everybody, to be welcome everywhere—it was impossible, on an incestuous campus like this one, in a subculture socially and musically fed by the neighboring high school, to be much more than two degrees separated, before you knew him and he knew you. He prided himself on his lack of physical boundaries; he pretended intimacy and touched wherever he could—it was hugs, hands on shoulders and skimming down arms, calculated leans, it was him breathing into your ear. The game seemed to be based on contact—if he touched you, he won you. His supply chain worked the same way: he bought from other, less friendly Richmond dealers and dealt to gentle high school punks and college kids afraid to cross the bridge; he made the community his currency, and via the threads of capital, tenuously held it together. The first two or three times I found myself around him my sophomore year—when I first started going to shows, my only steps out into Richmond, really—I’d sensed his stature, and I’d felt myself trying half-consciously to impress him, pitching my voice louder so that he could overhear, hypothetically admire my way of speaking or my patter, as if the reassurance of this longstanding person would somehow cement my own presence there, validate it in some way. It’s a dynamic that hinges easily on hatred, which when it arrived, arrived indiscriminately. It was a time when all I could get was angrier, and when my anger, lacking a larger form, took root in specific people. He insinuated himself, he had a mushy swagger. He looked like he wanted to have followers; basically, he was too cool.

  He had a type, and that was punk rock girls. This one was Candace, a pink-haired freshman from Gainesville, two years younger than me, who started attending the Richmond shows a month after she arrived, when I was in my third year. In this way, she entered both August’s picture and mine. I was there when he spotted her for the first time, at a basement show in a house near the college. I don’t remember who the bands were—generic Indiana hardcore, I couldn’t keep up with the name changes.

  I’d seen Candace on campus before she showed up there, enough to absorb some bas
ic details and develop a crush. Our college was tiny, with most of its facilities distributed around a grassy, circular lawn, and the freshmen all lived in two dorms on its east side. The setup was constructive to people-watching, and this was how I’d spent much of my time in college thus far, purposely isolated, on a bench just apart from this central area. Over the first month of the fall semester my junior year, I’d watched Candace adjust to the campus, a pattern I’d seen many times: she spent the first weeks moving alone, shyly across the grounds—mostly shuttling between her dorm, the dining hall, and the two buildings where humanities classes were held—until one day she emerged with a pocket of other freshmen, five or six of them, and thereafter traveled with them almost everywhere (the two of us had never interacted). In the Richmond basement that night in September, I noticed that she had come alone. She stood uncertainly toward the back wall without leaning against it, as if to avoid bonding with the environment. She looked anxiously back at the steps. I was on the wall adjacent, arms crossed, trying to look tough and indifferent, my hair—in a mohawk then—as if I’d just been electrified. A small mob of people crowded the band at the front, throwing themselves over one another to the soundtrack of something choppy and indistinguishable.

  I turned my attention from the band to August, where he stood in the far corner, as always, his sleeves rolled up, smoking and scanning the crowd. I considered his casual breach of house rules by smoking inside, though he wasn’t the only one. A feeling like dread pushed into my gut. My reaction to him had become instinctive, a physical repulsion. I counted on his presence as a trigger the same way I counted on the effect of the music—his character seemed to contextualize what I was feeling, to hone my spite and rage and angst into an identifiable form. Hormonal levels spiked somewhere, and I felt on the verge of joining the crowd.