Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  *

  We install Vivian in the mirror bedroom on the second floor, while we take up residence in the viscera bedroom next door, where we found her. There are plenty of other bedrooms to this side of the mansion, but these share a wall; these are part of the house we’ve carved out of the house.

  The mirror bedroom retains our prints on its reflective walls. Prior to bringing her up, I’d made sure the closet was sealed. “Look,” you say, kneeling at the wall across from the black and endless bed. “If you knock, we can hear you on the other side, and we’ll knock back so you know you’re safe.” You knock twice. Your knuckles leave eight marks on the glass.

  Vivian nods. She’s wearing a set of horsey-printed pajamas that are, once again, obviously much too small. That the other bedroom is hers is the logical argument, but she doesn’t make this claim again, and her introduction to the mirror bedroom betrays no familiarity with it; this piece of cunning does not occur to her. She reaches out and knocks twice in reply to you, and sort of smiles, banishing anything that’s left of your doubt.

  As you stand, she hugs your legs, spontaneously, and you press her head into your stomach. “Just let us know if you need anything,” you say. “And knock before you go to sleep.”

  We return to our gore-colored room together, but before you have a chance to speak I depart for the bathroom down the hall. A crack of dark sky and a sliver of cool air greet me from across the room as I enter. I switch on the light. The floor is barely slick from earlier, and your last set of clothes lies in a pile by the drying tub, but otherwise, there’s no evidence of human interaction. The end of the red sheet is tethered to an arm of the toilet paper holder and pulled taut. It seems impossible that you couldn’t have noticed. In the drawers, I find nail scissors, old razors and shaving cream, a nest of expired acne treatments. I go about shaving off my nascent beard for the most obvious reason, which is to prove that I do not look at all like August. The cut on my upper lip has mostly healed over, leaving a thin, dark furrow bisecting the top half of my mouth. Its precision makes it look intentional.

  I return to the bedroom, and you start when you look up from the bed, where you’re sitting with your shoes on. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Interesting.”

  “No, it’s not ‘interesting,’ shut up. I’m sorry, I got flustered. It was just muscle memory,” you say. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It’s been two years.” I want to bring up the car, August’s replacements, the bodies, to lay out the connections I’ve made and be praised for making them, for having known all along. I try to remember you putting your shoes back on, at which phase of the evening you decided you needed them.

  “I’m sorry!” Your heels dig into the mattress, and I hope there’s a lot of dirt on them, that they’re absolutely filthy. “You know how, with every person you know, you have a set of circumstances and settings that you associate with them, that are specific to that person?” you say. “Mine just got jumbled. I spent a lot of time eating spaghetti on the floor of August’s house in college. He was a terrible cook. What do you want from me? What are you trying to prove?”

  I feel an intimate sense of casual, thoughtless deception, like when I discovered that the really foul smell I’d noticed on occasion for six months was actually the smell of your bare feet. Still, I know what you mean, in the same way that I look at you sometimes and see Candace, for whom, I guess, I was probably once willing to kill.

  “I made a mistake. Jesus. I have no idea what I’m doing.” You hug your knees.

  I look back at the closed door, behind which stretches the mansion, dozens of rooms we don’t know, an inexhaustible amount of space. I feel suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. I turn back to the bed, another thing, your being: “What is our plan here?” I don’t mean to repeat your sentiment, but that’s how it comes out.

  “Shit, I don’t know.” You rub your face on your knees, bite the fabric once. You scoot forward on the bed, look around the room as if someone’s listening in, at the broken wardrobe, at me. “Did you feel it, when you opened the door and saw she was inside? Like something was being reset?”

  I bite my lower lip in an unconscious echo. It feels like the closest we’ve come to addressing any of this in a broader way. I wonder if we put it all down now, everything, together, we might be able to make sense of it. Before I can reply though, you lower your voice: “Do you think this is some kind of a test? Do you think this is our chance to—to start over?”

  It’s the most uncertain you’ve ever sounded, uncertainty cut with hope—that somewhere out there is a larger meaning, a kind of final tally, a use for your full name, an aspect of God—and I don’t want to speak and destroy it. And again, in my lack of response, my silence, we shift, you speak again: “I was thinking—I thought we should stay here with her.”

  “Here? In this house?”

  “Why not? This is her home. We can use the interior house.” The swatch of the mansion that we’ve inhabited thus far—the two bedrooms, the bathroom, the staircase, the small kitchen and dining room, the foyer—we’ve never mentioned it specifically, but I know exactly what you’re referring to. “We have to stay somewhere. We can’t just keep wandering forever. At least there’s food here.”

  The mention of food surprises me; it seems to come out of nowhere and, thus, sounds like a lie. “Would you want to stay in the place where your parents disappeared?”

  You absently start untying one of your shoes. “Another house, then.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  You look up at me accusingly. “An eight-year-old girl? Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we try to help her?”

  These are two separate questions, but before I can point this out, I hear two quiet knocks on the wall just beside the bed. Your face breaks into the kind of smile that tells me this is a decision I never had a say in.

  “I’ll go,” I say.

  “You don’t have to go. You just have to knock.” You turn on your knees and lean down, press your ear to the wall.

  “I just want to check on her.”

  I don’t know what I’m doing. As I open the door to the hallway, you knock back. Almost immediately, Vivian knocks again. You reply, two knocks. I think: You are doing this all wrong. I should be stopped.

  When I open the door to the mirror bedroom, I’m greeted with an image of Vivian from almost every angle. She’s crouched on the floor by the wall, her hand raised in this useless game with the wall, with the reflected version of herself. She turns to look at me across the darkened room where I stand rooted in the doorway, suddenly multiplied six times over, briefly uncomprehending my naked face, her eyes glowing in the dark, already gone.

  “I wanted to see if you needed anything. Goodnight.” I close the door without waiting for an answer, reach absently into my pocket. I stumble in the hallway, in the dark; I reach out and grab the banister. My throat constricts. I punch my chest, like there’s some object caught in there, some hard evil I can cough up.

  In our bedroom, you are still knocking. One of you will need to stop first. “How is she?” you ask, grinning.

  I say, “Cozy.” The word feels dishonest, as far from the truth as possible. I say, “Falling asleep.”

  *

  Hours later, I lie in bed in the dark beside you with my eyes open, wracked with fear, our conversation unfinished, my hands so wide against the sheets that they ache, sweating out my palms. The canopy shifts above my frozen body, the air invisibly packed with motion, with vying forces pushing against each other. My existence hangs in a state of loaded potential, a behavioral holding pattern. The room feels poised to propel me forward at any moment, to bear me out of bed and into the rest of the house. If I fall asleep, I know the knife will appear in my hand, and that this time, I may not be able to control what I do with it. I can almost feel its weight in the bed with me, the weight of the gun; I can smell it. The reappearances—in this house, in others—are warnings: that this imp
ulse has followed me, has been priming me for years, but has only revealed itself so gratuitously now that the potential for its use has narrowed to a single point, the randomness and bystander targets eliminated, the selection obvious and the reflex coaxed; that, when the time comes, there will be no real choice to make, and the act will be at its core, like the slip of a name, completely mechanical. I bid them to run. I should have run. I should have left this house lifetimes ago.

  Darkness and exhaustion bear down on me, anticipating another knock through the wall, the door opening, inviting me inside. I can’t do it.

  I fall asleep.

  And needless to say, in the morning, Vivian is gone.

  *

  I have a dream in which I am the train, plowing into the north. For the most part, it’s peaceful, even comforting, a dream about being on tracks, in quiet, preordained control: there is a path, and I am following it. The dream begins at approximately dusk and proceeds through the night in an aisle between swathes of varying landscape, moving forward without effort, my field of vision fixed on the tracks ahead. The baring trees bordering the tracks at intervals, the cast of the sky indicate late autumn, northeastern climates. There’s no sound, but my journey is enveloped in a constant vibration, the sound’s physical manifestation. I sail along into the darkness, which deepens more quickly than in real life, as if the footage of the dream has been gently fast-forwarded, pushed insistently along. The progress toward the horizon is satisfying, game-like, the way I steadily overcome the sparse decorations of environment approaching to either side of me—the trees, the houses and mild traffic—as if I’ll never need to stop, as if there is no end. I cross through small towns and the outskirts of larger cities, lofted slightly above, factories and old warehouses in the distance, occasionally long stretches of fields. The farmland, the flatness feels out of place, inconsistent with the region, but I interpret this as a regular malfunction of the dream, I don’t know the geography of this area well anyways. At crossings, I watch the gates drop well ahead of time and the cars wait, stalled—I see them as I pass, like stationary objects. Everything rotates out at the same pace, time and distance condensing. The landscape blandly repeats its forms, and the night goes on. There’s no telling how long the train stretches behind me. Innate of nothing, three figures resolve themselves on the track ahead where they shouldn’t be, their backs to me. There is no time, but they seem to deliberate while I advance; it seems impossible that they’re oblivious to my presence. They turn, sluggishly—I notice that all three are wearing flannel, that I am close enough to make these distinctions. It’s here where I feel the engine—or the accelerated pace of the dream—start to slow, a subtle pitch in the scroll, the first sense that there is someone beyond me, controlling, but machines like these are nothing but momentum, variously disguised. They clear the tracks—no one stands there unless they want to die—but, again, not by enough. The friction drags them back toward it. I take them in and spit them out unseen behind me. All I hear, all I feel is the constant vibration, unaltered. My pace goes unbroken. I do not stop until long after, beyond the scope of the dream.

  *

  I’m on my feet before I realize that I’ve been asleep, that an unidentifiable amount of time has passed since I was last conscious and aware of what I was doing, and the vibration from the dream has turned into your scream from next door—long enough for the light to return outside. I stop in my tracks midway across the bedroom. I run my hands down my sides and legs before I exit; I’m carrying nothing, but my right side aches all the way down my arm and chest, as if someone beat up just the one half of me while I slept. My palms and fingers tingle; the room feels swampy and uncertain.

  I emerge into the hallway with a mounting dread in my chest, the sensation of watching someone just out of reach go off the edge of a cliff, of entering an unfamiliar room where something sinister awaits. I follow the shouting automatically. One step before the door, it occurs to me that I should look in a mirror first, I should go somewhere private to compose myself, but then I’m standing in the doorway of the mirror bedroom, sextupled publicly, and so are you, and the room is otherwise empty, devastatingly empty: the bed lies undisturbed, the pajamas discarded on the floor in a huddle, and you, on your knees, at odds with it all. I notice that you’re wearing sneakers, that you have already been outside.

  “She’s gone!” you say, your voice lowering now that I’ve arrived. “She’s gone.”

  I stride immediately to the hidden closet and yank it open, as if the suddenness of my actions will reveal some additional, deeper secret passageway before it has a chance to close up. The door slides slowly, smoothly forward. It reads like I’m deliberating. I march in and throw the straps and masks and leather gear to the floor, leaving naked white walls beneath. I start shouting her name, which seems excessive.

  “I’ve already looked there. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  I withdraw back into the room. My voice takes on a ridiculous tone, a pacifying authority. “She has to be somewhere. Have you been outside?”

  You’re speaking to the floor, to your mirrored version, for all intents and purposes still rehearsing. Your voice trembles. “She isn’t here.”

  I gather that this isn’t your first time in the room this morning, that you may have searched for hours before you woke me up, maybe I wasn’t trusted to look. That once you had combed the house and its surroundings—made as sure as you could that Vivian had truly left—only then had you returned to the second floor, planted yourself in this room, and called for backup. Both of us know it.

  “This house is a maze,” I say, as if I don’t notice this level of mistrust, as if our stories weren’t already separated. “There are a million places she could be. She wouldn’t leave the place where she grew up, not just because we arrived. We’ll find her.” More of this. I continue to pretend. My arguments—which it seems aren’t actually meant to convince you, merely to temper what we both already know is absolute—are peppered with the most obvious inconsistencies, basic contradictions of what I’ve said before. They are color. I abruptly remember us boarding the bus in Indiana, stepping aside to let you climb on first, our destination as far east as possible, in thrall to an idea neither of us had ever fully articulated, but assumed the other took for granted, considered a necessity.

  “She’s not here,” you say. “I can feel it. We shouldn’t have left her alone. We scared her. We came in and we took over.” I shift, I see bruises on my arm, and the room moves kaleidoscopically. “If she was afraid, she would leave. She’s not here.”

  “What did you tell her? Did you tell her we were going to stay?”

  From the way we’re positioned, I can watch your face develop in the floor before you turn and reveal it to me. I speak before you can answer, before another story of eviction can begin: “I’ll check the first floor again.” And I depart.

  I go downstairs, I open the doors and closets of the interior house, but without specifically taking note of their contents. I know there’s nothing there, same as you; my instinctive destination beckons while I go through the motions and make these needless delays. I open a closet door off the dining room, I shove aside coats, layers of boots and shoes, but there’s nothing inside that shouldn’t be. I feel around for a panel in the floor, a crawlspace, a place of vanishing. I pass through the dining room, where the photo without Vivian still faces the wall. I stop and peer under the table, like looking for a pet cat you know will eventually show up on its own. I enter the kitchen.

  The unwashed dishes sit in the sink—I can’t for the life of me remember who put them there. I kneel down and open the cabinet beneath it, where I’d stashed the knife in the previous mansion, in a kitchen that was different but the same, in a house that was different but the same. I reach past the pipes and ancient cleaning products, through the grime that accumulates in these spaces no matter how rich you are. Wedged in the back, between pipes, I feel a blade.

  I ease it slowly from its trap with the ti
ps of my fingers. I hold the knife in my open hands, feeling the world viciously contract again.

  It looks as though it’s been used recently. The icy gleam is gone, replaced with faint brown streaks down its length, as if someone had tried ineffectively to wipe it off. I raise it to my nose—the smell is faintly copper.

  “John—”

  I hear a step, and turn. You are already backing away. “What the fuck?” Your voice breaks.

  I freeze with the knife nearly at my lips, split and whole both.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” You’re shaking. You try to grip the counter, but it’s weirdly low and so your arm fumbles there, like you’re struggling to remain standing. Your reaction strikes me as bigger than the situation at hand, out of proportion to me, this simple misunderstanding.

  “No, it’s—” I climb to my feet, unintentionally matching your energy. You take another step away, edging back as if I’m advancing toward you, one hand on the wall. “It’s not what you think,” I stutter. “It’s the same knife from the last house. She didn’t live here at all. Vivian—” I have no idea why I’ve chosen this moment to link these things together, why I am not denying everything, why you are moving backward and I am not, why I am still holding the fucking knife.

  “What does it matter?” you shout. “Neither did we!” Your feet trip over each other, and your cheek hits the corner of the countertop as you fall. You clamber back up, pulling yourself up on the counter, palms squeaking on the granite, your breath shallow and panicked. The side of your face is gummed up and already bleeding. The movements are so desperate and sloppy I want to tell you Just slow down, Take it easy, but in the seconds of your fall I’ve moved closer to you, unaccountably, I am ten feet from the sink and I don’t know how, I’m reading violence everywhere and I don’t know which part of it comes from me. I’ve never seen you so terrified.