by Simon Jacobs
But the front door hangs open exactly the way I know I left it, my breath still on the lawn below, my guts a mix of certainty and utter wrongness at the velocity of my movement, at the fact that when offered the opportunity, you hadn’t run. I leave the door open behind me, because I’m convinced this means something. The foyer carries a wet heat from the boiling bathroom. I pick up the suit jacket and shirt I’d thrown from above; they feel like elements from a prior life, a former physical manifestation. I return to the second floor.
The hallway is enveloped with steam, trickling over the balcony. The marble heads all sweat on their pedestals. I run my finger through the carved curls atop a perfect specimen of youth, frozen in time. I listen again at the bathroom door. It’s sweating, too. And again, all I hear is the sound of running water. I knock lightly, and then harder.
I feel a hum of vibration in response, someone speaking on the inside. I detect conspiracy in the tones. I turn the knob gently, silently until it stops. I draw mythic, angry shapes in the condensation on the door.
Eventually, I go back to roaming the second-floor hallway, ascending and descending the stairs, counting circuits and steadily dampening from sweat and steam. A ripeness exudes from me, and pressure builds in my bladder. Twenty laps later, the odor of anxiety around me now concentrated and powerful, I hear the soft click of the door being unlocked, then quickly opening and closing, the water continuing to run behind it. I turn in time to see you hustling off in the opposite direction. In a couple of strides I’ve leapt the last few stairs and overtaken you.
You’re wet with perspiration and bathroom steam, hair dark and plastered to your forehead, furiously bunching and unbunching Vivian’s blouse in your hands. I’m flushed from my journey outside. Our two-shot strikes me as strangely erotic, our respective bearings deep and earthly.
I test it. I reach out and put my hand on your shoulder. It echoes back to an equally basic gesture, some form of taking. You seize with the touch; an involuntary, disgusted look glances across your face like a flickering light, like I’m calling back the moments before we summoned Vivian out of the wardrobe, the sound of our bodies colliding. For a second, I forget who I am, of the way that we’re related: I’m standing in your way.
“This is so fucked,” you say, elbowing past me, my hand shrugged off, falling to my side like it’s heavy with water.
I turn, the breach widening between us. “What happened? Is she okay?”
You open the door to Vivian’s bedroom, shaking your head. “She’ll never be okay.”
Inside, you root around the wardrobe, one half of the door propped up beside it, flicking through pastel-colored blouses as if someone’s going to judge the color.
“What happened to her?” I ask.
“What do you think happened to her? There’s no one else here.”
“Is that what she told you? That they left her?”
“You heard what she said. Someone told her to get in here, and no one ever came back for her. I haven’t asked for more. I don’t want to traumatize her by forcing her to live through it all again. I don’t want to know.”
“You went back to calling yourself Josephine.”
You shoot me an angry look, like I shouldn’t have noticed. “It was an impulse. I thought we—I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.” You turn back to the wardrobe. “I didn’t know yours was short for Jonathan.”
“It isn’t.” I step deeper into the bedroom. The bedspread is mussed from our contact, and a smell hangs in the air. The harness sits discarded near your feet. Death everywhere. “We need to be careful. We don’t know what happened here before we arrived.”
You whirl around and shake a lime-green dress you’ve selected in my face; it’s an awful choice, begging for stains. “Stop it. I’m just trying to show a little fucking humanity. What else are we supposed to do? Do you want to throw her out? Is that what you’re saying? Out of this house we just happened into? Is it ours now?”
Our list of options seems especially stark, and I don’t have answers for any of these questions. “I’m just saying we use some basic caution. We don’t know her story. We don’t know who’s looking for her.”
You go to the bureau and pull open the top drawer, as if it’s a place you’ve visited many times, and draw out a pair of kiddie underpants that glimmer in the light from the window in a way they really shouldn’t. “I know enough of her story,” you say. “She was abandoned. We don’t have to do the same thing.”
I stand at the bedroom door as you walk back down the hall, an entire outfit balled in one hand. One level below, the body bakes in the lowering sun. You knock twice, gently, on the bathroom door. “Vivian? I’m coming back in.” When you ease the door open, into the steam, your face widens into a smile I’ve never seen before, beatific, I think, and then it closes.
*
There was something else, and that was your car, the indeterminate sedan with the cracked windshield. When I saw it for the first time in relation to you, I’d recalled it as if from déjà vu, assumed I must have tangentially processed it driving by on some other random occasion. But on our way home through the heat on the summer night you told me about August, I realized where I’d seen the car before, where the connection until now hadn’t been present. The car had been parked in the street the night I descended on August’s house the previous autumn, and I’d believed it to be his. The points connected as if on a map, expanded and took on the meanings I gave them: that you’d let him drive it the same as you let me drive it—which August had done enough for me to idly assign it to him—and that, in the fact of this regularity, the shared vehicle, even shared home, the two of you might have been closer than you let on. I wondered how you would have described him to someone else at the time, before he disappeared, using which word; if it was Candace who had eventually risen to supplant you in his life, if this was where the spite came from, if it was as basic as that. I wondered how long the overlap had been, the process of this replacement, if it had begun the night I saw August touch her for the first time, how much you, Joey—invisible to me until you weren’t—how much you had known it was happening. If, when I’d broken into his house those weeks later, it was only a matter of statistical chance that you weren’t the figure in the kitchen rather than Candace, that when I entered his bedroom you weren’t curled up on the camo bedspread. I wondered if in the end I had become August’s convenient excuse for leaving, a perfectly legitimate fear for his life, and if this might have been the reason he didn’t tell anyone what I’d done, that he let Candace do the talking for him so he could slip away unseen, blameless, leaving you behind. If maybe, under different circumstances, had I been looking elsewhere, it would be the two of you who disappeared; the car that floated into the horizon would be yours, its broken windshield blaring the sun in two.
*
I collapse against the balcony railing opposite the bathroom door, level with the bases of the pedestals lining the royal blue carpet. On the floor, indentations notched at right angles show where the columns have been shifted recently, presumably for cleaning. The corner of one pedestal is worn and peeling, bits of white flaked off, tiny cracks radiating upward. I realize that they’re just plaster, these columns, cheap stands holding up heavy sweating marble, where every minute renegotiation becomes a feat of balance—like the painting by the bathroom, an investment in the object itself but not its preservation. I fabricate an image of the woman I found dead in the bushes cradling one of the heads in her arms after it had toppled during some routine action, its impressive weight pushing her to her knees.
Behind the bathroom door, I imagine the intimacy being built under the auspices of your birth name. It occurs to me that somewhere in the act of choosing clothes for a little girl lies the path to a fundamental compromise, to my expulsion from the house. I run two fingers downward from the corners of my mouth to meet at the base of my chin, over the hair barely curling out of it, and my face feels unfamiliar to me, as if, without noticing, I
’ve been shifted gradually into someone else. I look down at the leather shoes leftover from the last mansion that for some reason I cannot stop wearing, which have lost all of their shine and rubbed completely to matte, beaten and scratched from overuse, their upkeep a gesture once made in earnest but then forgotten. Everything around me bleeds with hard-won convenience—a moneyed stasis fought for so it could be ignored, expensively maintained by others and available for appreciation piecemeal, at random.
The presence of the body itself feels significant, in that it’s the first body I’ve seen at all—until now, the signs of disappearance and death that surround us have been subtracted of their most obvious remainder. I consider a mass evacuation; I wonder if whatever happened could have occurred in waves, like a pandemic, by geographic locality, spreading into surrounding areas in a widening radius, and that even as I sit here, the radius moves farther south, toward where we came from, or has already cleared it. I think back to the train headed north, to the pulse across the landscape I recall for the first time, that I’m now convinced I witnessed. I try to remember which way the trees shifted, if the force was moving away from the city or toward it. Against the movement of the train, it’s impossible to discern.
I feel my clothes dampening against the floor. My anxiety balls up in a noxious cloud, my eyes fixed on the door behind which the water continues to run unabated, concealing a detail, a mechanical fact that now stares me in the face, hanging there unaddressed since we found the car in the driveway: these disappearances do not leave bodies, not that we’ve seen, and the woman in the back, therefore, is not among them at all, and has either been there since before the people who lived in the mansion left it—that for some unspecified amount of time they occupied the house while she lay dying below their bathroom window, one bedsheet missing—or she’d died afterward, same as us, had entered the house and then tried to escape, from something inside.
Softly, without notice, the bathroom door opens. An eruption of steam, and within it there stands Vivian, hair wet and tousled, dressed in the lime-green outfit you chose for her, which is much too small, which doesn’t even reach her knees and stretches to cover even her narrow torso, its straps digging into her skin, and behind her, you stand with your hands gracing her shoulders in an approximation of the tone I heard in your voice earlier, the smile, mother of mercy, the dusk light shining beautifully over your shoulder through the window, beyond which hangs, etc. You’re illuminated with a new, rich kind of excitement, the sheen of knowledge. I understand, at once, that there is no breaking this bond, no matter where Vivian came from, no matter what has come to pass in this house before us.
*
Afterward, your bearing is as if Vivian has told you everything, as if the two of you are inseparable and always have been. She’s one step away from being in your arms. “Let’s have a nice dinner,” you say. “A nice dinner.”
We restrict ourselves to the miniature kitchen and dining room—the first rooms I discovered, behind the foyer—the smaller house within the house. While you explore the cabinets, I enter the dining room. On the otherwise-bare table lies a broad kitchen knife, like an apparition. It wasn’t there before. I grab it before my body reacts to the fact of its existence. I take it down the hallway; I stuff it into the back of a random closet, my heart battering away. My surroundings shift and refresh. I have to remind myself that I am not in the same house, that each has its own separate supply of weapons, cabinets full of guns.
The photos on the mantle in the dining room reveal themselves as family portraits, a parallel to the last mansion and its urns. A bride and groom; an older couple in front of an ivy-covered gate that I recognize from where we entered the property; a family with two kids outdoors. I scan for familiar faces, finding none, and turn the most incriminating portrait to face the wall, then return to the kitchen.
You’re beaming over a box of spaghetti and an old jar of pasta sauce. Vivian shrugs into the corner when I enter, though I try to look as friendly as possible, mainly by smiling. I transmit with my expression that I won’t betray her presence here, which is ultimately the same as ours, that maybe she has never seen this kitchen before.
You open a cabinet above the stove. “Do you remember where you keep the spices?” You look back at Vivian, who shakes her head. You smile like you understand exactly. “It’s okay, we’ll be spartan with our spaghetti.”
You stuff the spaghetti into a pot of water and set it on the stove to boil. Your moves are panicked and rushed, out of order, frantically trying to project normalcy and missing crucial steps, but I don’t say anything. I’m trying to remember the last time we ate, or what was consumed, or where it happened. You open four more cabinets before you find plates; with every miscalculation I see the stress roll across your back and neck beneath the white t-shirt you found in another bedroom closet. You don’t ask Vivian for further help. It feels strange to be using someone else’s dishes, to find the plates in the cupboard by chance—heavy and ceramic—a part of someone else’s larger system. Vivian sits on the floor of the kitchen with her legs crossed, the lime-green dress ripping at the seams.
You apportion the spaghetti onto three plates and tuck the sauce jar under your arm. You coax Vivian off the floor and we go to the dining room.
The knife has reappeared on the table. Exactly where it sat before, gleaming almost white in the center, as if I’d never moved it. Adrenaline surges up to my ears and I freeze momentarily in the doorway. When thought returns I circle the table and pick up the knife without stopping, as if constant movement will disguise what I’m doing—I exit the room from the other side and stride purposefully into the foyer, to the still-open front door. I pitch the knife over the edge of the terrace, close the door, and return to the dining room, where you and Vivian are still arrayed standing and breathing, motionless. My re-entry seems to restore movement, you plate the table for our trio and in our collective sitting I steal a glance at the mantle, where the photo is still turned toward the wall. I did pass back through here on my way to the kitchen—could I have replaced the knife, opened the closet but never put it inside? I realize that one of my hands is shoved deep in my pocket, grabbing at the meat of my leg, an empty holster.
You take your place next to Vivian, opposite me, and hand the jar of sauce across the table. “Could you use your manly strength to open this?”
Under normal circumstances you would never say something like this to me, never. I accept the jar and notice the moisture from the sweat under your arm. I look across the table and watch your shoulders rise and fall, your body beneath all knotted with tension, trying desperately to fill this role.
“Of course,” I say cheerfully, expansively, aware that my response is arriving several seconds too late to pass for normal.
The lid comes away like nothing. As I glop unheated, room-temperature sauce onto my plate, I discreetly sniff the lid—beneath the tomato sauce, sweat. I offer it across the table.
I jab my fork into the mass before me and mash the two ingredients together. When you and Vivian are situated, I raise a forkful into my mouth. It’s unbearably sweet. My eyelids flutter. The pasta is totally undercooked—I feel it crunch beneath my teeth.
“I tried to cook it a bit al dente,” you say. This, too, is something you would never say, and suddenly I see it, the scene we’re trying to play out, the illustration we’re attempting to become, here at our nice dinner. “Just a little bit crunchy.”
I feel almost drunk, on the edge of dissociation, a tingling sensation on my skin. I say, “Delicious.”
Vivian is wolfing down the spaghetti, her face about six inches from the plate. The sound of her eating fills the room; behind the wet mess of chewing, I hear it snap to pieces inside her mouth.
We are both staring. That smile again. “Well. Vivian certainly likes it.”
I throw my head back and chuckle—there is no other word for it. It hits the air like a wave. I start to sweat afresh.
I try to divert your
attention from Vivian—which somehow feels insidious—by slurping my spaghetti. I stick a loaded bite into my mouth and then begin to suck in, feeling flecks of sauce spatter my shirt and face. You slowly turn toward me with the same glazed smile. “Oh, August. You are disgusting.”
It is Vivian who registers this first. She stops eating. “I thought you said your name was Jonathan.”
Of all the names between us, it had to be this one that you get wrong. August, the disappearance, and the process that seems, obscurely, to be repeating. It takes until Vivian speaks for you to realize it, a visible shudder that Vivian is too intent on me now to notice.
I’ve still offered no objection. “It is,” I say, as if my answer will prove some distraction to the question itself. My eyes flick to the mantle—just to prove consistency exists somewhere, I think—and then, so do everyone else’s.
“What are these?” you say quickly, pushing back your chair and standing at the same time, zeroing in on the mantle. “Photos?”
I realize that, in turning the photo specifically not featuring Vivian to face the wall, I was not protecting her identity at all: instead, I was laying a trap.
You reach the mantle in one large step and begin to handle the photos in a way that suggests you already know who’s missing from them. “Are these of your family?” in the same tone.
Vivian takes the opportunity to finally slop a spoonful of sauce onto her lime-green dress without taking her eyes off of you. A low cry of surprise breaks across the room—we are not making nearly enough noise to fill this house—and you spin around to the table in alarm. It takes me a second to understand that the sound came from Vivian. You rush to her, the photos forgotten. As expected, her front looks like a massacre.