Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  The mansion is silent, as they have all been; the closing of the front door reverberates through the foyer like an indecent human interruption on a place that has been at rest for a very long time, a rock ricocheting through an empty canyon, the vibrations never quite settling back into nothing.

  You say, at length, turning back to me: “I think we’re good.”

  I breathe out, and the sound indicates relief, which I know is only encouragement. But then we spread, and the thrill of indiscriminate discovery, as always, begins to surmount the other feelings: the sense of being somewhere we’re not used to, the familiar apartness, how unabashedly odd things feel here, how strange and funny in their difference.

  A kitchen wraps around behind the staircase on the first floor, not huge by the standards we’ve acclimated to, but by the looks of it fully outfitted and perfectly functional. Peeking off the left side of the kitchen I find a dining room, six chairs around the table, a mantle and family photos, and it feels almost relievingly normal, until I hear you shout from somewhere far removed: “Oh my God—I found the kitchen!” I retrace my steps, somewhat confused, wondering how your voice could possibly seem so remote from one room away, how thick the doors must be. You’re not in the kitchen, and I shout out, “Where are you?” My voice bounds across the tile, returns to me. You answer distantly, and I work my way toward you through the house using a game of Marco Polo (which we play by shouting out “Wilkes!” “Krier!”), feeling lost in the specific way in which I don’t really take in anything around me, but rather move blindly in a single direction, following an invisible point. I find you, eventually, and when I do for a second I think I’ve somehow doubled back to where I started, until I realize that you’re standing at the fringes of an entirely different first-floor kitchen, at least four times as big as the other, with an island-counter in the center that shines like a dark sea. On the far side of it, another dining room, which looks like the first one except stretched to dimensions that defy all reasonability. I show you the disparity—we trek back to the other side of the mansion, toward the stairs, fumbling a few times because the rooms are still unfamiliar. When you see it, you put your hand over your mouth and buckle, briefly, in laughter. “This must be where the dolls eat.”

  “Or perhaps the virtual family.”

  “Or Daddy, when he’s on a business trip.”

  In time, we climb the stairs to the exposed second floor. There’s an oil painting just to the left at the top of the staircase, likely visible from the foyer below but which I don’t notice until I’m in the hallway-cum-landing above the ground floor. It depicts a hugely formal noble couple, two bearded young men, standing side-by-side in ruffled finery and clerical robes (one in shimmering red and velvet black, the other burgundy), posed among a carefully selected array of intricate and deeply meaningful objects and instruments both scientific and religious, an unabashed triumph of technical skill and humanist thought: a lute with a broken string, a hymnal, a pair of globes, a crucifix. It’s late Renaissance, probably, when the symbolism was flat and apparent but itself a little arcane—an astrolabe represented the afterlife, a lily maybe purity or death. An angled disc of meticulous, amorphous gray and beige occupies the bottom quarter of the painting, placed directly over the oriental carpet at the subjects’ feet without any bearing on the surroundings, like it was added to conceal a topical error, to trick the eye; it’s the shape of a diagonal slitted eye, bleached and shadowed within like a craggy alien landscape. I open my hand over the shape. Beneath my palm, the texture of the gray disc on the canvas is indistinguishable from the rest. It must be part of the original painting. I feel my sweat merging with the centuries-old paint, chemically bonding. “Are you communing with it?” you say from beside me. We leave it be.

  On the other side of the bathroom door in the hallway, set against the wall, a series of four white marble heads done in the neoclassical style sit atop white pedestals, each of them identical to the others. The effect is disarming; the duplication seems accidental, like they’re collected here awaiting distribution to somewhere else, to other galleries or homes. To the left of the staircase, past the painting, we find two bedrooms, one decorated in a gruesome, exposed shade of red and the other surrounded completely in mirrors, floor to ceiling, the bedsheets and curtains in glossy black like a setpiece in a BDSM club.

  When I open the door to this room, you have the same reaction as when I showed you the miniature dining room, covering your mouth, going to ground. “Careful, you’ll smudge it,” I say.

  We take off our shoes and rank socks and stand at the very fringe of the carpeted hallway, our toes at the edge of the weird reflective floor.

  “Is it glass?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How is it so fucking spotless?”

  I push you forward into the room—you run a few steps and then stop in the center, your feet smacking and sticking as if on wet tile. We leave footprints, like a hand held to a fish tank, illuminating and then mostly disappearing; it feels delicious.

  “This is definitely a sexcapade bedroom.”

  “For Daddy, when he’s on a business trip.”

  The room is a perfect cube, and at first we just relish running around it in our bare feet, whipping each other into the walls, whose panels tremble and ripple in their frames, leaving random prints and smears, bits of DNA. In the corner of the bedroom, one of the mirrors makes a hollow sound when I smack into it. I stop, our reflections juddering momentarily. I run my hand along the groove beside it until I find a notch. I pull it outward, and the mirror opens on a hinge. Sure enough, it’s a walk-in closet filled with leather outfits, sex gear and bondage equipment, almost as deep as the room itself. Above this stuff, a line of global-southern masks of various makes and materials leers out at us. The sexual character of the room becomes blatantly, hysterically obvious. I do a spit-take when I see the masks, we make a series of escalating puns about colonization. You strap over your jeans an enormous wooden phallus roughly the diameter of a canteen (it looks like an object of anthropological study jury-rigged into a sex-toy, namely by fastening it to a harness) and chase me up and down the second-floor hallway, screaming about English blood. I collapse at the top of the stairs in a fit of laughter, barely able to breathe, and you thwack my shoulders and face with it.

  I tear off my suit jacket and once-starched shirt and throw them over the balcony (it’s infinitely cinematic, they take on their full volume and twirl in the air) and unearth from the closet a tiny, furry vest. I slip it over my bare shoulders—it feels cheap and plasticky against my skin, the fur a bargain synthesis, like the tawdry rich who lived here had to drive some distance out of their way to buy it, far from what was familiar or where anyone would recognize them, someplace off the highway with a name like the Lion’s Den. I dance down the second-floor hallway in a seizure-like, erratic shuffle, flaunting the vest and pumping my elbows, while you stand at the other end, your fingers meeting in a diamond above your head, thrusting into an invisible partner while the harness slowly slides down your legs. I feel giddy like I haven’t in an unspecifiable amount of time, and I am aware of this—aware that for the longest time I haven’t capitulated to a moment like this, let myself enjoy its absurdity so completely as to feel that it lacks consequence, and exists fully as a moment in and of itself, you and I dancing toward each other in this ridiculous configuration—while at the same time conscious that the physical qualities of this experience—of a mind wiped blank, free-associating, slightly dizzy, thoughts arriving sporadically and isolated and each one of them hilarious in its isolation, an overwhelming tiredness my body struggles to fully process and which is taken out on my brain, fighting with each unfettered and hysterical thought to remain awake, intoxicated by itself alone—these physical, sensate qualities are more recently familiar, that they are the same as delirious hunger. I remember us, days after the bus landed in the city, before we had a building to inhabit, after we’d ceased spending money, had decided that wha
tever we were carrying was all that was worth having, I remember us doubled over each other on the blanket beneath the awning of a building we’d never dare to enter, laughing uncontrollably at some snippet of dialogue we couldn’t remember, which had taken form between us in the space of our hunger (isolate, hilarious, etc), and then instantaneously vanished, the laughter it caused the only residue of its existence, starved and horny with the thrill of having nothing, absolutely nothing.

  We meet at the door of the other second-floor bedroom, the furry vest on my shoulders, the wooden cock jiggling around your knees, and then we burst into it—the wallpaper colored like something pulled up from deep inside us, raw stimulation—our hands at each others’ shoulders. We collapse onto the bed on top of each other, the massive headboard carved—yet again—with cherubs. We fuck messily on the throat-colored bedspread, your pants at mid-thigh, buckled together by the harness. The wooden phallus knocks rhythmically against my kneecap. I look up at the canopy, lilting from an idyllic breeze through the window, and the ripples look like veins under skin. We roll up off the bed together and then break gooily apart, hands still together, my cock dangling out of my pants. I twirl you, we dip, and I spin away into the center of the room, furry vest flapping. I leap twice, and stick the second landing next to the mahogany wardrobe, my hip jutted out, one hand held daintily opposite, the other just tickling the brass knob with its fingertips (the promise of more rich secrets), and let out an exhalation I can’t afford to waste that sounds like the final exclamatory motion of an elaborate and exceptionally well-executed dance. In one more overly choreographed movement, the coital rush, I pull the wardrobe open.

  We are greeted by screaming.

  It takes a wild, detached second for me to realize that the sound is generated from within the wardrobe rather than outside of it, and then I see the small, curly haired body crouched on the low shelf beneath the hanging clothes, eyes and mouth wide with terror. We cut a grisly pair, me in my furry vest and you with the fake penis dangling at your knees—something clearly opposed to the entire world this child knows, a costumed menace, and the kid screams, and we scream in response, and I whip the mahogany door closed again in impulsive disbelief, which muffles the shriek but not by a lot. Then I yank it open again, like I’m redoing a magic trick for a second time and hoping that the mechanism will trip and the false bottom will fall out, leaving me with an empty box. I refasten my pants, horribly late.

  The screaming child does not disappear or abate, no matter how many times I slam the door on it.

  Eventually, you grab my wrist—to keep the cycle from repeating into infinity—and I release the door. It slams once more, then bounces open. The screaming persists.

  I shout, “SHUT UP! WE’RE NOT GONNA FUCKING HURT YOU!” while you shout, “BE QUIET!” and it doesn’t even register a pulse in the noise, the scream just gets louder and throatier, more obviously the product of real effort, just like we’re all taught.

  I turn and look at you with new eyes, your fingers still wrapped around my wrist. I try to take you in as a stranger might: ridge of hair matted off to one side of your head, the rest unshorn for weeks and steadily growing out, tribal piercings, dirty, quickly wrecked clothes, and the giant phallus like a blunt weapon, your legs locked together. We’ve had no shortage of luxury bathrooms since we left the city, but the fact remains that we are bodies left to starve in someone else’s finery. We arrived here with nothing—the afternoon sunlight trickles over your shoulder through the window that takes up half of the opposite wall, slightly open, covered with a peach-colored drape (it, too, lilts in the breeze)—and now we’re standing in a room expensively designed to play off of natural light. I am wearing a furry vest over bare skin.

  The screaming resounds so much in the wardrobe that we don’t notice immediately when it stops, that the room has suddenly become relatively still, save our guilty breathing. Into this quiet comes a sniffling from the wardrobe, something less abrasive, weakened like a wounded animal, a sound that draws us both in, brings us closer. Our delicate parts are raw, we’re still feeling sensitive and flushed; we are feeling the need to regroup, to protect something outside of ourselves and hold it tight.

  I pull the wardrobe door open once again. It’s been slammed so many times that it breaks fully off of its hinges, but I try not to act surprised. I lean it gently against the wardrobe on the floor. Inside, shrunken in the corner, once again, is the curly haired child, legs drawn up into a little ball, eyes poking over knees, shivering.

  I push my head forward as slowly and gently as I can, forcing my every aspect to read deliberation, kindness. I use my opposite hand to swing open the other door, not too quickly, to let the sunlight in on this child. The head rears back.

  For the first time, I realize that I have a beard now, unintentional and probably everywhere, neck and all—an unfair and hostile mutation.

  The kid screams again, and you throw your hands over your ears and make a comical wailing face. I bring my finger to my mouth, move my lips behind the bristle, as if I’m saying something too quiet to hear above the crying, leaning deeper into the wardrobe. I do it again, holding my finger there, just keep moving my lips in the same pattern (“watermelon, watermelon”), until the screaming gradually starts to lessen, until the child is captivated enough by the movement of my mouth, the projected quiet, to try and discern what I’m saying. I start whispering when it’s quiet enough to hear, just nonsense syllables at first. Slowly, the face starts to move out from between their legs—the face seems to shuffle every time I see it, changing slightly, as if settling on its final form—testing the air, trying to catch the words of this hairy stranger. I wonder idly what my voice sounds like at normal speaking volume in such a constrained space, but I resist the impulse.

  I turn the nonsense syllables into a sentence, which I say again, in a whisper: “No one’s gonna hurt you.”

  As I repeat this, one finger still pressed to my lips, sibilant air channeling around it, I reach my other arm out, inside the wardrobe, inch by inch, until, in one powerful lurch, the kid, a girl, springs out and grabs my forearm, desperately tight.

  Her fingernails digging into my arms, I slowly withdraw from the wardrobe, dragging her with me. I repeat the mantra: “No one is going to hurt you.” Her body unfolds as she emerges, the joints cracking—it’s anybody’s guess how long she’s been hiding in there. She climbs out nervously, bringing herself to her full height—probably four feet—every vertebrae clicking into place. She looks nervously from me to you, and in the sharpness of her features, the tight cropped curls only recently begun to undo, I read an imposed history of strict control, of someone who has never been permitted to choose her own clothes.

  She looks about seven or eight, and like her normal existence ended on the day of a family portrait: she wears a white summer blouse patterned with little blue birds, rumpled and yellowed in places. I lower my whisper; my hope is that eventually the sentence I’m repeating will become subconscious and repeat on its own.

  I notice your two fingers are hooked inside the front of your pants, still unbuttoned. I snap my fingers once, to get us both out of it, to remind each other that we are not necessarily horrible creatures. You react as if startled from sleep, fasten the button.

  I ask, in the same whisper: “What’s your name?”

  The question doesn’t register, lost in my tone. I try again. The third time, she looks up at me: “Vivian.”

  Of course. She would have the name of a fifty-year-old. Her voice is scratchy, dangerously affecting. I swallow.

  “How long have you been hiding in there?” you ask. We look at each other, and there’s a quiet nod of assent, as if resolving to try and handle this situation as normally as possible—we’ll take turns. A part of my mind is trying to count the days since we’ve seen another living human.

  “I don’t know,” she says. Her speech seems unpracticed, like she hasn’t had much occasion to use it; I’m already drawing shaky parallels betw
een her and us. “Since Mommy told me to get in.” She looks down at her feet—bare, chipped blue nail-polish. I imagine her toes grasping at dewy, freshly cut grass, suddenly snatched away and switched out for the dusty interior of the mahogany wardrobe. I begin to stitch together another abandonment. Vivian looks back up at us, towering over her, as if finally realizing our presence in this house where, presumably, she once lived with others. Her eyes quiver between us. “What are you doing in my room?”

  “Your—”

  I look frantically around the room again for a sign of childhood that I might have missed—a whirling floral wallprint, a mirror stretching up to the ceiling, the king-size bed slung low to the ground, so shiny that it appears to be moving. The color, overwhelming everything, that looks like viscera to me—I realize, abstractly, that it must be pink. I look back to the wardrobe, at the clothes hanging in it—sure enough, they look stunted, meant for the mother’s miniature iteration. It occurs suddenly to me that if this child is to sleep in this house tonight, she cannot under any circumstances sleep in the bed where we just fucked.

  You take the initiative to ask the next responsible question: “Do—do you know where your parents are?”

  Vivian shakes her head as her eyes well with tears. She’s still clutching my arm, and her thumbnail digs into the crook of my elbow. I reach my other hand out and pat her head. Her hair is gently springy. It feels like a startlingly ineffectual gesture for someone whose parents are probably dead, my hand placed as if prepared to scalp.

  You reach out and take her shoulder. It works, because all of the bone fits into your hand, allowing you to wrap and hold, which is a form of real solace and comfort.

  I don’t move my hand, because I don’t want to admit that your gesture is better, and Vivian doesn’t seem to mind, so we just stand there like that, like three points in a poorly anchored triangle, until you give her shoulder an affectionate squeeze (again, this is nothing I can do without seeming murderous) and lean in close. With the hand not around her shoulder, you tilt Vivian’s chin up to you, then kneel down to eye level. I notice Vivian’s grip slacken a bit on my arm. You say: “It’s going to be okay. No one’s going to hurt you.”