by Simon Jacobs
It occurs to me in the space of a moment: you are trying to run away from me.
The knife clatters to the floor. I kick it behind me as hard as I can. I hear it skitter across the tiles. I hold my hands up. I take a demonstrative step back, like I’m hitting my marks. “I didn’t touch her.”
But somehow this denial is actually a confession, I’ve delivered the line totally wrong. Your face screws up and you shake it violently back and forth, backing out of the kitchen the opposite way, toward the foyer.
“She hasn’t gone,” I say. My mind goes blank and then spits out a name. “What about Collin?”
“Who the fuck is Collin?”
But I’ve forgotten the name of your brother too, as well as the reason I drew this pointless connection. I look briefly to the floor, as if to study its meaning, and you bolt.
I come after you—in the foyer, I reach out and just barely touch your fingers, at which you scream, legitimately scream—but even after all of it, you’re faster, and you throw open the front door into blinding sunlight.
The connection, but not the name, resurfaces as you’re eaten by the glare across the lawn: two people who no one actually saw disappear, who for a time existed somewhere unknown to us, alive and whole (when they pulled your brother out from under the tank, at first he was completely unrecognizable, and I imagined the frantic momentary hope that it wasn’t actually him, that he’d changed uniforms with someone else at the last minute). When I reach the top of the stone steps I’ve lost it again, and by the time I can see properly, you’re long gone.
All at once we’re separate. All at once, there’s nothing to navigate but the wilderness we’ve chosen for ourselves, to walk endlessly up and down these steps, entering and exiting.
*
I turn against the mansion. To follow you now seems impossible, a gambit that could only confirm everything you think I am; it would be a chase, and I would be the monster that never stops. My back to the woods, in the relentless sunlight, the cancelling shadows, I stalk back into the house.
Every time you’ve left I’ve thought it was for good: every time you left our apartment in Indiana, the building in the city, even on some mundane errand, I felt there was an equal chance that you would never come back, you would return to the plot that had been laid out for you originally, before I had intervened, and that would be it. There was a guarded part of you I’d never known, a history I’d only seen in fragments, like another life we were always at the edge of. I felt like the tangent where you hid from the rest of it, and when we weren’t together, I imagined you out there interacting, fighting or embracing it; your stories to me were codes I couldn’t read, a mask I couldn’t push back. And after each absence—whether it was an hour or a week—every time the door opened, a shadow flickered in the stairwell, the data would scramble for a moment, the lines would reconnect, and then it would be you again, suddenly and unexpectedly as a death.
I don’t bother to close the front door behind me; there’s nothing moving in the world now besides us, and eliminating these barriers leaves me open to the larger labyrinth (the outside), rather than isolating me inside a separate labyrinth (the mansion itself)—in some abstract way, I tell myself, it bolsters the chances of consistency between the two, the inside and the outside, decreases the likelihood that whatever is behind me will reset again. I retrieve the knife from beneath the dining room table, and with one hand each on the blade and handle, I pull it apart. The raw metal at the base grates against my palm. I throw the handle into the unused fireplace beneath the family photos and stuff the blade into the sinkmouth, clench my fist until I’m sure it won’t bleed. I don’t follow immediately, and here, another path forms.
After Casey, when you learned of his death, you sputtered back to life for a moment to the people we’d left in Indiana, crossed severed channels with your messages of sympathy and return, exchanges that I read through that same night as you slept, in the moonlight through the curtainless windows and the glow of the four-inch screen—perverse among all of that self-inflicted poverty but admit it, before we threw our phones away we were both still on our parents’ plan, they could have tracked us—just to get a sense of how you recalled yourself. They read like you’d wanted me to find them, like little burrs in people we’d known:
“Holy shit! You’re alive! I thought you were lost to us.”
“Lazarus, bitch. How have you been?”
“You coming back for the funeral? This place is nothing without you.”
“I am def coming back. I miss all you guys.”
“Where have you been?????”
“Ha, living. How have you been?”
“Did you get a new phone or something??”
“No, just been busy. Why?”
Most of the conversations didn’t last more than two or three texts, always ended with questions you didn’t respond to, mild and disappointed followups—a flicker, and you were gone again. I imagined all of the crushes and former acquaintances, flushed with the reconnection, thinking to themselves, “She’s asleep, she’ll reply in the morning,” and then waking up to nothing, waiting for a response that never arrived.
I remember the last phone call I made to my parents, from our apartment in Richmond, the night before we boarded the bus and left for good, the same night I’d introduced you as my wife at the party. I hadn’t gone home since graduating—Dayton was just over an hour away, across the border in Ohio, and I wouldn’t go. I didn’t intend to make the call. I was sitting on the couch—the couch where we’d screamed at each other in the ecstasy of possession, which we would leave behind the next day without a second thought (we’d decided not to take anything we couldn’t carry ourselves)—looking through the contacts on my phone, trying to find someone to tell that I was leaving, to switch out this sense of permanency with something else. My finger hovered over “Home.” I scrolled back and forth around it, I told myself I wouldn’t call; if I could make it through this one night (I was alone, you were absent at the time), the rest would be easy, and freedom would come, or the future would come. These lapses would happen from time to time, I knew, it was largely a matter of persevering through them. I told myself I wouldn’t call. I watched the clock moving forward. I called.
The phone rang less than once before my mother picked up. I interpreted this as reflex rather than eagerness or desperation; the phone was sitting right next to her, and she grabbed it. She must have been at the computer. “Hello?”
I lost my composure the instant she answered. Any plan I’d had for this conversation, for what I was intending to tell them, evaporated. I wet my lips from corner to corner. “It’s me.”
“Oh! John!” I heard her move the phone away from her head and call for my dad. “Beau—John’s on the phone.” And back to me: “Daddy’s going to get on the other line.”
Another click. “Hello, son.” My hand was pressed over my mouth as I began to cry. I knew that whenever I moved it, everything would be obvious.
“How have you been?” my mom said. “We haven’t heard from you!”
I took my hand away, couldn’t help the wet sound of congestion when I sniffed. “I’m leaving.” My voice broke at the end, and I clamped my hand back over my mouth. My whole face quivered, my throat clenched and hurt.
“Leaving? Where are you going? When?” My mom again—I could tell my dad was still there, though he wasn’t speaking: I pictured him exactly, downstairs, in front of the TV (muted), on the one phone that still had a cord, which, when I was five or six, I’d drawn all over with my interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
“Tomorrow.” It would have been plain to anyone that I was crying. I looked out at our apartment in the dark, the lights off, like I hadn’t moved since the sunlight went away. My vision blurred and resolved into wet coronas of light from the streetlights outside the window. I felt tears running down my cheeks.
“Are you all right? John, where are you—”
I hung up; I left them in silen
ce. I pictured my dad, once he’d realized that I’d cut them off, hanging up the phone, pulling himself out of his chair, and going upstairs, where he’d found my mom trying to figure out what buttons she needed to press to call me back. He’d put his hand on my mom’s wrist—not trying to take the phone, that would have made her hysterical—and said, “He’s just upset. Let him sleep.” He’d said, “I’m sure he’ll call back tomorrow.”
They’d gone to bed after a while. The next morning, they woke up to nothing. I hadn’t called back. When you returned a few hours later, you told me to start calling you Joey, that Josephine was a past version of you that had been too long (“sprawling,” you said), and now ceased to exist.
*
On my way back up the stairs to the second floor, the house uncloaks another of its secrets, this time in the Renaissance painting of the two nobles in the hallway. Ascending from the final landing, as I step across the balcony toward the painting, the incongruous gray disc in the bottom quarter of the canvas suddenly takes definite shape, and in the space of one step, like a mental pivot, reveals itself to be an impeccably rendered human skull, painted in forced perspective, only readily identifiable when the painting is viewed from above at this angle, from its far right edge—a visual gimmick and shameless piece of technical bravado, classical painting’s favorite memento mori. From where I’m standing the skull looks physically separate from the painting, floating in non-space beyond the frame. I almost laugh at the brazen symbolism, as if someone’s trying to teach me a lesson so broad and obvious that it’s completely over my head, but this quickly turns to anger at the cheap deception, the plastic of the house even with the front door open.
I walk down the second-floor hallway to one of the marble heads on the far side of the bathroom and use both hands to topple it. The head busts through the plaster of the neighboring pillars and takes down the other three all at once, like dominos—the heads clunk to the carpet with a loud, muffled stamp, undertones of cracking beneath, and roll thickly on their stumped necks. The destruction is enormously, physically satisfying. A cloud of burst plaster fills the air, the scent of paint, like a house simultaneously under construction and mid-demolition. It feels as if I could dig my fingers into the walls and tear them down like a roll of paper, revealing the shoddy joists underneath, the ultimate truth that this was just a set all along, an imitation. I feel intoxicated.
I kneel and pick up one of the severed heads, an exemplar of classical male beauty—it’s absurdly heavy, I have to lean back and carry it with my legs bent—and stagger to the balcony overlooking the foyer. I heave it over the edge. The head hits the ground floor and breaks before I even have time to appreciate the beauty of it falling. The crash echoes throughout the house (the chandelier rattles above) and several tiles leap up with the impact, cracks branching from the new indentation in the floor, the wide-open front door spilling light inside. I’m laughing and clutching the railing, which vibrates beneath my fingers, until I recognize the fall, the accident I’m replicating.
I feel wolf eyes. I leap backward, as if the banister had suddenly become electrified. The chandelier twinkles like the most garish and obvious object ever installed in a home. I pick up the single remaining undestroyed plaster column—it weighs about eight pounds—and hold it over my head like a weapon, inching back toward the balcony, expecting to see something alive in the foyer below, drawn out by my noise.
There is light everywhere. The head is split in three pieces, clustered together as if by magnetic force, but otherwise the lobby remains empty. The foyer. I turn back to the second floor wall, cross the hall, and decimate the pillar against the painting. I step into the explosion of plaster like a shower, and inhale. It cuts into my nasal passages, tastes of chalk and blood, craft projects of old. The petrified white men get whiter.
In the haze, I spend the next hours combing the house for Vivian, though I know I won’t find her, that my search is like fulfilling an empty promise I made in a distant life. As the day collapses, it doesn’t seem consequential that the longer I wait to pursue you, the farther away you become, the wider our paths are drawn apart. I feel time advancing independently, for me alone, the house like a cell apart from its passage. I move methodically from room to room, past the interior house and into areas we’ve barely touched, the interior house’s larger counterparts, looking in every closet, under and behind each piece of furniture, in each wardrobe, each drawer. I crawl down on my hands and knees, plaster in my hair and caked to the inside of my mouth and nose. I find nothing but inconsistencies, proof that this house all along was just like the rest: an enormous empty frame in a prominent spot on the wall; windows mounted in the hallways that look directly in on bedrooms; an unused fireplace in the back of a closet; empty, oddly shaped rooms with acutely angled ceilings, too many corners, and no furniture; a chute on the second floor with no obvious egress (I shove one of the marble heads into it, where it lodges with a clang that rings through the walls for a solid three minutes). All things you would find interesting, hilariously out of place, but nothing of any use. All the while, through the afternoon, the front door lies open behind me the way you left it, allowing anyone and everything easy entrance or escape without my noticing. The sun sets, the fragments of the marble head draw long shadows across the foyer like a sundial reading my fate. If Vivian were here, she could have left a hundred times. You could have returned in the midst of my dismantling, my fight with the house, and then left again. You could have left over and over.
Outside, the sky pitches to dark and it begins to rain, horribly. It smacks against the windows in sheets, and lightning illuminates the mansion like an armature. I stand at the open doorway on the first floor, buffeted by the wind, my eyes trained on the treeline in the distance, waiting for you to come running out. There’s always been this suspicion that when you left to explore the exteriors of these mansions, all the time you remained somewhere close at hand, the actual risk minimized. I watch the top of the trees jig violently in the storm, the Jeep centered in the path swaying back and forth. I imagine the blood-red sheet flailing against the back of the house, the body filling with water. I leave the front door open and the light on in the foyer, like a beacon.
I sleep in the mirror bedroom, where we kept Vivian. It’s not the best idea—if the house goes in the storm I’ll be cut to pieces by a thousand little shards of mirror-glass—but there’s no way I’m spending a night in the viscera room by myself, and at least this way I can keep close watch of everything around me. It’s a small comfort. I close myself in, amongst my reflections. I accept the labyrinth of myself.
I lie on the bed and look up at my body in the ceiling as if adrift on a black sea, listening to the storm, which grows in ferocity, sending its surging forces through the ceiling and walls as if it’s a fundamental part of the house’s structure. To my left and right I can see myself in supine profile in the mirrors, to observe in full-body view exactly what the last six weeks or month or seven or four days or lifetime has done to me: my stomach somehow seems both hollowed out and bloated, an incongruous pocket of air; above it my chest sits awkwardly mounded like a frame I haven’t grown fully into. Red patches on my right side, sore to the touch, whose source I can’t recall. My left side scratched at random, the same, wounds of the road. Breathing in makes me go concave, drags volume from parts of me that don’t feel related to the act—my thighs, the base of my neck. I look like I’ve been ravaged from a holocaust, the tattoos on my arms and legs like massive lesions; I check their proportions, the faces on my leg, to see if this kind of loss would compromise the space they take, would wrinkle them into each other. I’m reminded of an animatronic replication of a human, encountered on a carnival ride, its components both weirdly disconnected and eerily in sync, eyelids blinking mechanically while an arm moves up and down in gesture, posture rigid. Looking forward, down the bed and toward my feet, I see my body reflected in the mirror as if stacked, in this case a pair of feet, some balls and knobs for to
es, fingers and arms, a crotch, the hump of a ribcage and a projecting, naked chin. The soles of my feet are completely black, bulbous and blistered.
I hear mighty cracks outside, great rumbles of thunder. It rains impossibly hard. At one point, I detect the sound of a continuous trickle of water somewhere nearby, outside the bedroom, crackling across the tiles in the foyer like a faucet behind a locked door, or a distant fire. I don’t investigate. A few minutes later, a tremendous rattling is followed by the loudest crash I’ve ever heard; the force rattles the door and I’m worried the mirrors will jump from the walls. It must have been the chandelier. I repeat over and over that if I just sleep, finally sleep (the opposite of what I told myself the night before), that when I awaken in the morning everything will be different, will somehow revert to another version of this story. I’ll awaken in another bedroom, and the cliché will not be that I’m waking up with an erection I can only satisfy to about forty angled images of myself, but that I’m waking up next to you, vibrant and unchanged.
*
I return to consciousness after a thick, strangely dreamless sleep with my face in the crook of my elbow, and there’s a moment of obliviousness about my situation, genuine obliviousness, in which I could be anywhere. I feel it—the cool on my back, the emptiness of the bed—but a few seconds pass in which I don’t recognize it, and then a few more where I don’t acknowledge it. And then I turn, I move my arm, and it’s everywhere, and the hollowness in my stomach is back again, and I’m staring down at myself in the morning dark.
You have not reappeared. Water is still leaking from somewhere nearby.
When I’m fully awake to this bleary reality I sit on the edge of the bed for a while, digging my palms into the mattress, molding around the pressure. I crane my body forward over my knees; I wonder vaguely if my newly emaciated figure would allow me to suck my own cock. The top of my feet look slightly greenish, as if the black from the soles has seeped up through skin and bone—more likely, the color from the shoes and socks I rarely remove has started to dye them.