by Simon Jacobs
I pulled myself up on the trunk of the car, feeling it sink a little beneath my weight. My legs felt numb. I noticed a couple of roof tiles scattered on the lawn. As I walked up the little slope to the front door, my left foot scraped on the ground sideways, half-asleep. I kicked it, took short, quick steps to try and bring the sensation back. When I knocked, I stomped on the stoop simultaneously.
August seemed shorter behind the door than I remembered him, but was dressed the same as always in flannel and jeans, except without shoes; he was a barefoot guy. He looked at me through the screen door without any particular recognition, which hurt me more than it should have. “Can I help you?”
It struck me that this was the first time he’d spoken directly to me, and reconciling this with the way “Candace” had sounded leaving my mouth, I felt a sharp contraction in my chest, a moment of doubt as to why I’d come here, in my purpose. I quelled it.
“August, right?”—there it was again, the proper names, and I may have accented the wrong syllable—“I heard you were selling.” It was a terrible line in every iteration, like a vocabulary I’d borrowed from someone who had no idea what they were talking about.
He took it in stride, which made me question how serious a drug dealer he actually was. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong house,” he said. His eyes flicked up and down, and he seemed to take me in, categorize my features and file them away, assess my commercial potential. “Why don’t you take it easy for the night and maybe I’ll see you around?”
His reply overflowed with transactionary codes. He made to close the door. I put my fist through the screen and grabbed the handle, aware that I’d just escalated the situation tenfold, yet feeling, strangely, as if I had others accompanying me, massed in my wake. “You take it easy,” I said stupidly. “Come on. I’ve got the money.” Rather than tearing, the screen had separated from the frame, and hung down like a bedsheet, imparting disrepair rather than destruction.
“You’ve got the wrong house,” he said again. He tried to push the door closed, but I jammed it forward with my forearm. The inner edge hit him in the chin with the same sound as the door closing, and he vanished from the crack. I flung open the screen door and crashed into the living room. August was half doubled-over on the left, shielding his face, and to my right were the couch and the TV, showing something grainy and lit in red; past that, there was a counter with stools that divided the living room from the kitchen. The order and tastefulness of it all surprised me. There was a flurry of movement from that side, a body in the kitchen obscured by the hanging cabinets, and I realized that August wasn’t alone. On the far side of the entry-way—across from the door I’d just burst through—a hallway led straight back. I thought: This house has been organized for exactly my purposes.
I felt my surroundings accelerate, move suddenly into high resolution. Instinctively, I angled my body to the left, away from the kitchen, and as August rebounded I grabbed him by his shirt collar and pushed him down the hallway. He ricocheted off the wall like a rag doll, his hands held up in limp defense. The figure in the kitchen screamed, I heard bare feet on tile, a panicked collision with a chair and another fall. I followed August into the hall, my left foot still prickling, and he launched himself at me, clutching at my jacket with both hands (his chin cracked and bleeding, matting the beard, his hair unseated), a parody of his usual bearing in a crowd, negotiating by touch, clawing for the same responses in me, that I would kiss or hold him. I wrenched his hands free and pushed him through the door at the end. I followed, kicked it closed behind me. The wood was too light for the door to slam. It whipped the air and bounced open. I shoved it closed again. I was suddenly in a bedroom.
The room was fluorescent-lit, falsely bright. Opposite the door, shelves were built into the wall, stocked with books numbered on the spines, stuffed animals and action figures filling in around two plastic snake tanks; a Dark Side of the Moon poster hung on the wall to my left and Kurt Cobain across from that; the floor was littered with clothes, like the trappings of some twelve-year-old’s bedroom had been lifted and transplanted here. For a second I relented, absorbing this dislocation, and in that moment, August punched me in the neck, his fist mostly open. I reeled into the shoddy white door, gasping from the weirdness of the blow and the sudden constriction of airflow. The door made a hollow sound against my weight. The shock of the retaliation spurred an equally violent response, and I shoved back harder than I should have, so that August went fully into the shelves, the tanks and animals and books all upended and crashed to the floor, scattering their woodshavings and plastic tops onto the white carpet. He fell to the bed, patterned in camo, a stain-concealing riot. I stood over him, and his eyes frantically panned the room, squirming, looking for snakes, finding me.
I planted my hand on his throat, and his eyes forgot everything else, wobbling in their sockets, unsure of what to focus on as I raised my other fist into the air. My future spiraled out in front of me. And drawing my hand back, August’s face was not the combination of guilt and fear that I thought it should be—that I had counted on it being—but rather a muddle of absolute, uncomprehending terror, and there above him I realized the fundamental truth of the situation: he didn’t recognize me at all, he didn’t have the slightest idea who I was or why I was here, of the way I related myself to him. In its apparent arbitrariness—any semblance of a script abandoned at the door, no mention of Candace whatsoever—my violence lost every part of its potential meaning, its moral intent, turned into a random invasion. There was no reason for him to understand why I’d come, no dawning moment of comprehension or repentance; I was just this insane person, a psychopath, not even vaguely familiar (and ostensibly looking for drugs, I’d gone far enough to make that claim) who had burst into his house and attacked him, without cause. I realized that my role in this, now exaggerated beyond all proportion, had been nonexistent in the first place, I was no one, that the person in the kitchen when I entered, who had fallen, who I now sensed in the hallway just beyond the door, panicked, it was unmistakably Candace—the unspoken and available reason for all of this, the rampage—and she was just as terrified of me as August, and this, this was the sensation of bringing everything to a single, empty point.
Above my head, a cold, heavy weight materialized in my hand. When I brought it down to August’s face, I was holding a gun.
He cried out, sucked air through his mouth and nose, threw his hands over his face. I stumbled backward, the gun, a pistol, falling to my side in my hand like dead weight, pulling on my balance while I scanned the wreckage around the bed for other bodies. A moment passed in which nothing moved, where I just recognized the orange tail of one of the snakes. I turned and barreled out of the bedroom, colliding with Candace in the hall, her face all confused fear, a mask, the gun dragging behind me like a sudden anchor, blindingly bright, and she fell to the floor. As I crossed the foyer I spared a glance backward in time to see her look from the bedroom door back toward me, her mouth frozen open in a silent sob, one hand planted on the wall, the other on her crotch, her legs buckled beneath her, like a moment after her body had reacted but before she was able to produce sound, a scream was wrenched there within her, tearing to get out.
I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the campus, two miles away. The whole way, I did not let go of the gun, nor attempt to conceal it—the way it had appeared in my hand, my finger over the trigger, was the only way I knew how to ensure it didn’t fire. I remember looking down at the tips of my shoes as I ran, which were spotless white and new-looking; it was a pair of Converse I didn’t wear often, that I consciously left for occasions where I cared what my shoes looked like. In the night, they were like reflectors. Arriving in sight of the dorms, rationality took hold of me at last, and I shoved my hand inside my jacket. When I finally let the gun go, fifteen minutes after that, the grip dripped with my sweat, and my hands—both of them—smelled like metal. When I let it drop, the trigger guard hung off my index finger for a second,
as if my body didn’t want to let it go.
And then, shortly after, everyone started to disappear.
*
I’m sitting at the long table in the northernmost dining room of the main house, flooded with sunlight and dusty from disuse, when you finally return from pacing the perimeter, after the octopus has escaped from its tank and disappeared. I’ve been sitting here for hours, since I discovered this room by accident (by flinging open every door on the first floor); the way that the sun-faded carpet crackled when I stepped over the threshold and the burst of musty air when I opened the door told me that it was rarely visited. I don’t know how long you’re in the house before you find me, or how closely you trace the doors I’ve left open—it seems like a given that we would connect eventually. Compared to the rest of the mansion, the dining room is primitive and dated, a mismatched relic from an earlier era. Maroons, dark greens, and browns; wood paneling; black-blotted candelabras hanging from the walls with crusts of old wax; the petrified carpet. On the wall to my left, at roughly eye-level beyond the head of the table, the mantle is decorated with two austere urns, silver candlesticks, and a small portrait of Jesus with his arms raised. A faint halo of dust between the urns makes it clear that a third is missing. This is what I choose to bring up first, bursting with info, as soon as you enter the room, as if I’ve been holding it in: like, when they left this house, what drove them to choose one ancestor over the others.
You slide into the chair across from me. Your feet are bare from your travels outside the house; it’s hard to tell from where I’m sitting how far out you need to go before it truly counts as wild. A giant shield hangs over the mantle and the urns like a vulgar, oversized medal, emblazoned with a grizzly. Below, the portrait of the savior reads like a last-gasp addition, the mark of someone looking for reasons after the fact.
“Maybe it was a kid,” you say. “The third urn—better to cart along your dead kid than your nattering parents, right?”
“I’m not convinced,” I say, as if my inside-house experience has offered me special knowledge of the routines here, as if to debate our two experiences of these new environs, loving the way the suit continues to perfectly fit my body into the third straight day, the way I can spread my arms like I own everything around me, like I’m sitting at my own dinner table. “Where are the family photos? Where are the young master’s toys?”
“To succeed with a money-child”—you’re talking like a guru again, picking up a thread from the previous mansion—“is to be able to hide all evidence of it.”
I picture immaculate tile, scrubbed daily. “Then why would they keep an urn with his ashes?”
You shrug. “They didn’t.”
I realize that we’re balancing on a delicate position, namely to admit whether or not we think the family still exists, here or elsewhere, kept or vanished, the manifestation of a larger conversation we aren’t having. A kid-shaped silence floats between us. It’s telling, despite all the open doors, how nothing I’ve yet found in this mansion looks remotely sized for child-like hands, or like it’s ever considered the idea of children. The table we’re sitting at, for example, is eight feet wide. Reaching over it, we could barely touch each other. To imagine a two-year-old clambering across the foyer or scaling the front steps, crying out from its princely crib in an empty echo-chamber of a bedroom—it seems worse than out of place, trivial.
The silence spreads across the room and takes on other dimensions. You shift in your chair, look to the walls. I think of the apartment in the city, how the living room could map to this dining room, how big it looked with nothing inside it the first time we saw it. How long had we been arriving and leaving just because we couldn’t keep our bodies still, because we couldn’t stand how the rooms were decorated? Our perceptions of the house settle again in the wake of our dialogue, its walls thicken and tighten, new chambers clarify, and at approximately the same time we notice the giant, gleaming kitchen knife sitting unaccountably in the center of the waxy wooden table between us, completely spotless, black handle, white knife, the blade caught in the sunlight from one of the bay windows, out of place in its perfection. In all the time I’ve been in this room, I haven’t noticed it. There are cracks in the wallpaper, bubbled ruptures beneath the surface, an oily stain on the carpet, a gilded, tarnished mirror to my right, blue drapes—all things that I haven’t taken note of, deeper makeup, thoughtlessly absorbed as part of the whole. Has it been here as long as I have?
My heartbeat quickens inordinately. Our eyes juggle from the foreign object to the bare expanse of table all around it, to each other. There’s no way to adequately communicate that I don’t know this knife, that I didn’t position myself at its handle on purpose as some idle threat or joke, that I wasn’t effectively waiting here with a weapon. It falls to me, as resident of this room, to make use of it, to qualify its presence here. I reach across the table (I have to stand), and grab it without a clear plan of action. It leaves a clean shadow in the dust. “I guess that answers it,” I say, for lack of anything else. “It’s a fucking sacrificial altar.”
My fingers slip over the handle, already clammy. The metallics are far too reminiscent and I don’t know what to do with the knife besides remove it from the room, so I resolve to make food-related gestures and disappear into the nearest kitchen (three doors). Passing from the stately oak into the nearly translucent tile feels like stepping through time, from one world into another; there’s a change in air quality. I open the fridge and find nothing save a dejected bag of bruised oranges. I split one on the counter as an exercise, and it sprays faint brown juice onto the wall. I’m hustling to bury the knife behind the pipes in the back of the cabinet under the sink, chewing the inside of my lips, when you appear in the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“Just putting this away,” I say, returning to standing, kneeing the door closed, the knife out of sight and receding. The two orange halves rest on the counter, rapidly going black. I step to block them from your view, as if the food is incriminating, implies that I could turn anything in this house into sustenance, could prolong existence using its means. “These people survived on spite and valium,” I say. “The essentials.”
You turn back to the dining room, walking your fingers across the countertop. “There are flattened patches out in the western garden,” you say, “where parallel strips of the land are just totally pulverized, like a segment of railroad ties. I wonder if this location sees a lot of saucer activity.”
I wash the toxic metallic smell from my hands and return to the dining room. You’ve already left the table, but upon taking my seat again—like a reflex, it’s my seat—I realize where the talk of dead children came from, its context beyond the missing urn and altar-like table: carved along the edge of the wooden table are dozens of cherubs, their minute details obscured by a fine layer of dust, swirling alongside each other like minions to the final judgment on the plains of tablespace above, where the gods feast. I scoot the chair back by its equally ornate floral frame and crawl beneath the table to check the underside—sure enough, there are branching plumes of the naked winged infants roiling out from the table’s legs, too, each leg footed in a knobby gargoyle claw, the epitome of Gothic bad taste. I knock my head on the edge of the table as I stand, and in the quick flash of pain, the sensory kick, the dining room changes color, and I see it through the lens of the past, as if the mansion had been refurbished and modernized around it to leave this room pointedly untouched, a shrine. My eyes land on the painting of Christ floating heavenward on the mantle, arms beneficently, generically outstretched, and I picture the two desperate parents hurtling into the backyard to throw ashy fistfuls of their son or daughter hopelessly toward the sky, praying for the wind to take.
You’re sitting on the wraparound black leather couch in the dug-out living room on the other side of the house, in front of the ceiling-high aquarium, lit from below, which at this moment is free of overt religious iconography, so that’s
where I join you. You’re staring intently at a branching series of tiny cracks that have appeared on one side of the glass, about halfway up. I examine the tank from all angles, and it’s clear that in addition to the octopus, the bamboo shark is now missing, too. I put one hand against the glass, barely cooler than room temperature—an unexpected betrayal—and I close my eyes, as if in communion but really because there’s nothing we can do to keep things from coming or going within this house.
On cue, you stand, ascend from the room and walk toward the front door, a little crescent of moisture from your instep just visible each time your foot leaves the tile in the foyer; detectable in your stride is the trace of a limp, a favoring of one side over the other. Abruptly, I decide you’ve switched legs since the last time you went outside.
“Where are you going?”
“To take a walk. Jesus.”
The name unsettles me, because I’m convinced he’s back in the dining room.
“I’ll go with you.”
“I’d prefer to go alone.”
“Does it still hurt you?”
My question is vague enough to make you stop and turn around. I remember Casey; I wonder if the remains of loved ones in this region are kept in-house to avoid making lengthy commutes to the cemetery. The outside seems eons away. “Does what still hurt me?”
“Your leg.”
You pause. “Does yours?”
Beneath the impeccable fit of the stolen pants, I feel the faces burn in psychosoma—it’s a dig into our shared past exactly as cutting as it wants to be, as I’ll allow it to be, for everything I’ve failed to address or let be, the times I haven’t trusted you. It does.