Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  August’s gaze detached from the mash of bodies at the front to wander the walls. His eyes passed me without registering and, some distance later, fell on Candace, standing apart, hands in her jacket pockets. Her bearing was nervous, one foot itching at the back of her opposite leg. His body stiffened. He visibly settled on her, and from there, he looked back and forth, from the crowd to her, as if trying to gauge whether or not she was attached to someone, if his was a move worth making. If I’d approached her at this moment, I thought, even just walked up and stood there saying nothing, just moved my presence ten feet in one direction, without even opening my stupid mouth—if I’d imprinted on August’s initial read of her, I could have allayed everything that happened afterward: this is what I told myself. I didn’t consider that if I’d done it, if I’d intervened earlier, at that first show (where the band, I’m almost certain now, was called Secondhand Destruction), rather than wantonly, disastrously later on, that August would have simply returned, that he wasn’t so easily dissuaded; he knew what he wanted. This, in any event, is the moment I think of as I carry you down the crushed-jewel gravel path away from the mansion and into the forested property beyond, your angles digging into me, your arms around my neck like a new bride—this moment of scrutinizing yet opaque attention in a basement, this other fall.

  Instead, I didn’t move. Instead, I watched August stab out his cigarette on the brick, roll up his sleeves a bit more, and detach himself from the wall. He walked across the room toward her as the band recovered between songs, the feedback a lull as the singer returned to the front of the crowd. By the time August reached her, held his arm out and put his fingers on her shoulder, I was shaking at the blatant display of it, of his visual acquisition, the crudeness of this story.

  Candace startled when he touched her, took an evasive step away. He smiled apologetically, laughed, said something I couldn’t hear, and planted his entire hand on her back.

  She seemed to rock on her heels for a moment, and looked down, maybe took another tiny step forward. The hand followed, like an entitlement, taking, and keeping.

  Even then I knew that a part of my anger came from August’s assertiveness, that this was part of the way he preyed. Hidden beneath the projected hapless cool I saw something sinister and calculating, a fundamental assumption that in any person there was something to take, a use to be exploited, and in watching this assumption play out before me—and in the end, seeing the person taken—I was fueled. I cast myself opposite him: I saw myself taken in, shrugging off the signals, as if, even while it was happening, I knew that I was setting myself up for something I would one day try to forget, and every pair of hands that touched wanted the same thing, and there was no such thing as love.

  *

  You take your first steps anew on the fringes of the forest, while I stand before a full-length mirror in another borrowed master bedroom in a different mansion and try on bespoke suits tailored to the body of a man exactly my size. At first, I’d stood at the threshold of the walk-in closet with the same uncertainty that however long ago I’d once stood in a clothing store, felt the same pressure to decide amongst a series of variously colored and textured fabric objects that to me were all essentially the same, yet to which—by placing myself in this position—I began to assign arbitrary values.

  There was no decisive moment when we determined it was safe to separate. When we entered this second property (through another opened gate), I stopped running, as if we’d arrived home, crossed a perimeter through which further pursuit was impossible. I didn’t know how far we’d come to get there; the gate had appeared as the very last of my strength seeped out. I lowered you carefully to the asphalt, my arms and legs burning. I felt the accumulated grit under my bare feet. I found a gatehouse with a blank computer and pressed a button inside of it. We turned and, naked, watched the automatic gate swing shut against the wild like the most fundamental demonstration of humankind ever conceived.

  You could walk on your own again by the time we reached the door. A touchpad was mounted on the frame, and we took turns running our appendages in various combinations across its surface and listening to the interface reject us, but the door wasn’t locked to begin with. The foyer felt even more familiar.

  In some way, we were practicing a variation of the way we encountered the city: you traipsed alongside the treeline or through the labyrinthine gardens outside while I found security cameras installed in the fireplace and studied the texture of a room lined entirely with illustrated leather panels; I assumed that you would report back on whatever you found out there, and I would do the same.

  Later, you sit on the edge of the king-size bed and tell me, as I adjust my collar, that only cutthroats and philanderers wear suits like these.

  The second house is more modern than the first, younger, with rooms that light automatically when you enter them, a bathroom floor that’s always warm, flatscreen TVs flush with the walls in every room that run blue screens instead of static, brittle flora in narrow boxes, island bars stacked below with whisky and vodka. This is the kind of mansion where there’s a huge tropical aquarium in the living room, filled with rare and prehistoric creatures that cost thousands of dollars each but are fed the kind of shitty processed pellets you would give a goldfish.

  You rip my suit off and we do what’s expected of us on a bed of this caliber. I picture the noble octopus, propelling itself majestically across the tank, and the miniature bamboo shark, ramming repeatedly into the glass.

  You deny that you ever saw the wolf, that your fall was anything other than a combination of poor balance and reckless speed.

  *

  I don’t know why it was Candace, of anyone, who propelled me toward the path I chose to follow. Ultimately, when it came down to it, I knew nothing firsthand about her and August’s relationship, less than nothing—by any estimation I had no connection with either of them beyond maybe a few people in common. After that first night, I only saw them together a handful of times, and there was nothing threatening in their interactions, nothing to suggest it was anything beyond what it appeared to be. They were two people onto whom I had foisted a history, an insidious narrative. Maybe it was because I watched their beginnings play out so plainly in front of me, that the obviousness of the relationship (whatever kind of relationship it was)—its implanting, its growth and acceleration—made me sick, or jealous. The assumptions were mine, too: I wanted to find the poison, and so I found it. Candace had been primed for my attention since she arrived here; how much did it take before I interfered, before I was going to interfere anyway? I was waiting for a trigger to pull.

  Thus, I watched Candace flicker from college life and, in my way, I traced this to larger systems in the community. Her presence in the group of freshmen to which I’d watched her grow attached dwindled and then ended; they moved to meals, classes, lounged on the grounds without her as the weather cooled. I saw her less around campus, and when I did she was always alone, and seemed less present, isolated in an indistinct, shapeless way. I put probably too much stock in her pink hair, which began to grow out and lose its color, exposing the brunette roots, and wasn’t dyed again. I told myself that once you know someone, it starts to matter—a drug habit, an abusive boyfriend—these things start to make a difference, to affect you, these changes signify evidence. I saw Candace at a few more shows—some-times August was there with her, sometimes not. Sometimes they spoke, and sometimes they didn’t. I remember thinking to myself that it felt like I was watching her turn into a ghost. I imagined telling this story of a girl I’d known who fell in with the wrong people and who I watched waste away before me. I don’t trust my readings of these days.

  Mid-October, I went to a show inaugurating a punkhouse in Richmond called Villa Scum. The show—whose bill included something like eight bands—was set up by one of the house’s official tenants, Cole, who fronted Scum Artist, the house’s namesake. He said he wanted to keep the proceedings “one step away from being evicted.” He
had clout in the community and had played in bands all over for the last ten years, so the place was packed with kids from Richmond, Dayton, and Indy. I kicked aside PBR empties as I entered through the sloping front porch. The place was recently inhabited and already filthy, its cheap two-story frame trembling with the music inside.

  The living room—emptied of furniture, where the bands performed—was too packed for my usual kind of hanging back, and people leaned on the windowsills and bunched together in the corners. I didn’t see August. I shouldered my way in, feeling the carpet sink beneath my feet from some unidentified wetness. The air smelled like sweat and stale alcohol. The bands were uniformly loud, and enough of them shared members that I quickly lost track of who was playing. I let myself zone out, the contact reassuring, a means of keeping upright, the noise like earmuffs, masking the detail. Somewhere in the din, three or four bands in, Candace appeared close to where I was standing. I saw her peripherally, her shoulder near mine, and a raw, sweating panic came over me, as if I’d been exposed. I smiled in her direction (we didn’t make eye contact), and then, pulling myself from the trance, I drifted toward the far side of the living room, where during the course of the show four or five people had elbowed out a standing place just apart from the crowd. I put my back to the wall and found her faintly pink hair again—like, I will not be moved. She was as invested as anyone else, but I felt violently protective, as if I knew better; I wanted to wade in and rip away every person around her, as if her presence in this house, in this mass of people, was a performance she’d been coerced into giving.

  I didn’t notice specifically when Candace left the living room. Only at some later point did I try to reorient my bearings around her presence and find her gone from the crowd, and then dimly recalled (or fake-recalled) her head moving outward, toward the hallway. When I noticed her absence, I started counting the minutes by checking my phone, at first unconscious of what I was doing, that I was adding minutes every time I looked. At ten, I began to get that feeling, new sweat forming, because I figured this was ten plus however long before I’d noticed, at least ten minutes. The idea that she might have just left the house, left of her own free will, did not occur to me. I checked again at sixteen, then twenty. At twenty-eight, I decided to go after her. At thirty-three, I went. I told myself I wanted to get out of the room, wander the house and see what I saw. As I edged around the wall toward the hallway, my focus singular, the others ebbing away, I told myself to just leave, that this was as far from my place as possible, get the fuck out, let this stranger lead her life.

  The walls in the hallway stamped with sound. They had been recently painted, probably by whoever owned the building, prior to Cole’s move-in; I felt indefinably angry at the inevitability of its ruin. I glanced into the kitchen, where there were normal-volume voices and people at the counter, a sinkfull of beer. Both of the bedrooms on the first floor were dark, home to twin mattresses and cardboard boxes, variously unpacked. I found the bathroom door, locked. I’d passed it on my initial lap of the first floor and had sensed its potential, but had waited to exhaust my other options, to drive its latent tension as high as possible before I tested it. I knocked, and there was no response, but this didn’t mean anything in itself, I couldn’t even hear myself above the music from the living room. I tried the knob more assertively, turned it several times, trying to aggravate whoever was inside, to force a response. I put my hand on the door and leaned close to it. “Candace?” I said. I realized it was the first time I’d said her name aloud; it felt strangely proper, as if I’d expected more syllables. “Candace, are you in there?” I rapped with my knuckles.

  There was still no answer. I knocked harder, and then pounded with my fist. I took a step back from the door. No one entered the hallway—the assumption at these things was that someone was always off somewhere destroying something.

  I said her name once more, at speaking-level.

  And then I rammed the door off its hinges.

  The split came with a sharp, neat crack, and the door burst open and inward. Candace was lying on the scuzzy, egg-colored tile, her body wrapped around the toilet, completely gone. Blood ran from her nose, bright red on pale-pale. She was dressed in the jacket I recognized and a short black skirt. The heel of the door had gashed her leg as it swung open, ripped an arc from her leggings, but she hadn’t stirred. I ducked quickly inside and pushed the door approximately into its frame behind me.

  I knelt down by her side, my head full of noise. I checked for a pulse, as in I held my fingers at her neck, but the whole house felt like a pulse—the floor shook beneath us—and I couldn’t feel anything from her. Her eyes were open and glassy, lips just parted, pupils bloated, her fists clenched. I took her by the shoulders and shook her, I shouted her name. It occurred to me that I hadn’t yet called for help, that I was acting as a rescuer without any idea of what I was doing. I pulled her upper body roughly into my lap. The back of her head was bleeding from the fall, a darker pink.

  I reached up and turned on the sink, sprinkled a handful of water on her face, diluting the line of blood from her nose. I thought sudden, unexpected stimulation might wake her up. I shook, and I shook.

  It happened all at once: I was shaking her, staring into her face, the eyebrows like they’d been painted on, and it was as if her eyes emerged suddenly from behind a translucent film. She inhaled a huge lung-full of air and jolted upright. When she registered me, her eyes trembled with panic. She shoved me away and planted her hands on the toilet and sink for balance. The lid slipped and broke free in her grip.

  “Candace—”

  She gasped and scrambled to her feet, as if my knowledge of her name was what scared her, I shouldn’t know this much. She pulled on the door for balance. It toppled open, and she ran, oblivious to the cut on her leg, the blood on her face. As I stood, I noticed further elements in the bathroom—a Family Video card on the edge of the sink, a rolled-up dollar bill on the floor, inadvertently bent in half: it all came across as too convenient, too typical. The door teetered once on its edge, and then fell forward, dangling treacherously from the latch.

  I got to the porch as fast as I could, but she was gone into the night. The lawn was choked with cars. A few people were smoking beneath the porch, but they couldn’t tell me anything. The bands played on inside; her blood was streaked across my thigh. I filled with rage beyond anything that I’d experienced before. I blamed August for all of it.

  I stood on the porch until the world shifted around me, until I noticed the sound had ceased and people were moving past me, into cars and onto the street.

  Given everything afterward, I’m not sure that this sequence happened as I remember it; I haven’t earned the right to connect the pieces as I do.

  *

  North: overnight, the octopus escapes from his tank, and in the morning is nowhere to be found—they’re crafty like that. The bamboo shark continues to bash its head fruitlessly against the glass. On your way out to the gardens again—a habit we’re forming, me within the house and you without—I stand on the terrace at the edge of my kingdom and ask if this is the kind of wealth where people kill.

  “Check the bathrooms and closets,” you say, your back to me again. “That’s the surest way to tell.”

  It’s where I found the suit, the suit I put back on this morning. You disappear into the tiered grounds, as if on patrol, and I sit down on the stone steps and stare at the shoes taken from other feet.

  I expect a howl, but instead all I hear is a crack from inside, the sound of something breaking and leaking out.

  *

  I took to August’s house with wanton violence and crystalline purity of intent. I stood across North 19th Street just after one a.m., watching dim shadows through the pale curtains of his living room, the light a kind of sickly yellow, mixed wattages inside. Two miles from campus, his house—an untended copy of the white-painted ranch-style houses to either side of him, minus the pickups in their driveways—was a known entity,
was accepted as “always open.” Two cars were parked on the street in front of the house, one of them a tan whatever sedan with a long crack bisecting the windshield and Food Not Bombs stickers, a stringently punk-rock vehicle that I knew to be August’s. As I rounded the corner onto his street, there had been a thrill in seeing the streetlight bounce in a jagged line off the glass, like the car was a distinct, recognizable piece falling into place in the schema of how the world was meant to function on this night, proof that my thoughts and actions were consecutive, well-structured, valid. I’d picked the night—a Tuesday—without real reason, when I could no longer physically stand to do nothing. I’d walked there with my headphones in but nothing playing, now a sweaty bundle of cables in my pocket. It was ten days after the Villa Scum show; I hadn’t seen Candace since, and I had drawn my conclusions. It was freezing but my body was heated independently of it. I’d waited the week on my bench before I started counting the minutes, imagining the confrontation with August. Two hours earlier I had been in my room, watching another clock move forward, and in a single moment, on an even number, I had made my decision. I ought to have expected others.

  I waited across the street for over an hour, shadowed by a tree in another lawn, until three people—two women and one man—came out of the house laughing, fumbling with their keys, their breath visible. They climbed into the other car and pulled away from the curb; the house appeared to have cleared out. When their headlights vanished, I stepped into the street, breathing in a way that allowed me to hear and see it, and was nearly sideswiped by a passing truck. The driver honked and shouted something out the window and I flushed with more heat, but I resolved not to acknowledge him. (Inside, I imagined August responding to the sound of the truck, glancing to the front window and then back again to whatever he was doing, while I moved unstoppably forward.) I crouched or collapsed behind August’s car in the street, sweating through my jacket and clothes. I had dressed very carefully for the occasion, though at this moment I couldn’t remember how. I saw through a sliver in the curtains that the TV was on.