Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a slip of paper curling out from between the mattress and the box spring beneath it, which I register as a mattress tag. I wiggle my index finger into the loop, still seated. The paper is crisp and thicker than I expect, and this itself is a satisfying tactile sensation that, for a moment, completely focuses my attention: I interpret the texture as “rich people paper, a bed fit for a king,” and I think of mattress labels printed on authentic Egyptian parchment (to accompany the lyrical cotton), wondering, without clear resolution, if the sheets are actually satin, which seems like a word for the wealthy, for this level of glossiness, and then I look down and see that the slip of paper I’m fingering is not a mattress label at all but a hundred-dollar bill, unfurling from where it’s been tucked beneath the mattress. I pull it from its hiding place and hold it between my thumb and index finger, stiff in the still air. The sensory memory is barely familiar, feels false.

  I rise from the bed, holding the bill slightly away from me, almost embarrassed at what I’ve uncovered. It should not be this easy: like the idea of waking up next to someone who’s magically returned, I didn’t think this was a cliché that existed anymore, the stash under the bed.

  I wedge my hands beneath the mattress at the foot of the bed, coffined in satin black (which sounds more correct the more I say it), and overturn it onto the floor. The hidden nest of money explodes into the air in ridiculous, gratuitous array, countless, shockingly green, more than I’ve ever seen in real life. It’s unbound, all hundred-dollar bills, like you’d see in a movie depicting complete and utter decadence, reflected in every possible combination by the mirror walls. The room turns suddenly into a perverse disco ball as the bills come fluttering down around me, my arms outstretched. I cannot stop laughing. Still, as I stand there in this absurd vortex of money, I can’t help thinking, aren’t you supposed to put the money inside the mattress? Shouldn’t it be organized, contained in some way? How else are you supposed to take it with you?

  The bills stick to my bare feet as I walk across the room, and at the door I stop to peel them off. The option should occur to me to take the money, like one would take food from the cupboards, to take it all and run toward civilization, but this doesn’t seem like a real possibility—my curiosity stems mostly from its strangeness, its randomness and obscure origins, the same as every gaudy object here. The idea of its activation, its use in a meaningful, consequential exchange seems absurd. Where the money has settled, this is where I leave it, dirty under my dirty feet, a testament to its own uselessness.

  I open the door to the landing. When I step out, it’s into a completely different environment. While I was sleeping, the house has shifted again—I knew this was coming, I shouldn’t have closed the door. Above the foyer, a bolt-shaped gash has appeared in the domed ceiling, through which pours a thin, steady stream of water. Above it, I see sky. Beside the gash, a jagged hole bores to the foundation, the anchor for the chandelier, whose carcass lies directly below, bulbs and crystals sprayed across the foyer. Its skeleton sits in a crater created by the impact, which in turn has filled with water, forming a shallow, glass-ridden pond on the first floor, glimmering slightly, a sinister preserve among the wreckage. Somewhere at the bottom of it sits the split marble head, like an artifact from an earlier time. The front door is flung entirely open, the hinges pulling up from the wooden frame. Bits of debris, branches, leaves stray in a gusted path across the tile and surface of the water. The only sound is the stream from the ceiling, like that of a fountain, cascading over the empty tubes and sockets, swelling the pond, faintly pulsing out its perimeter. The electricity is gone; some of the bulbs are blackened from when they met water.

  Toward the edge of the rippling pond, slowly creeping into view from the far side of the chandelier, a single flamingo walks through the foyer, bright and rudely pink, an animate stain on my reality. The sight of this life drives the same piercing cold through my chest as abject fear.

  The bird raises one long, spindly leg and sets it down carefully, silently, avoiding the scattered glass. Long neck doubled over, it dips its beak around the broken field of the chandelier, beached as big and strange as a whale. Stark and glamorous, the flamingo doesn’t dignify me, another escapee from someone’s impossible private menagerie, each step cautious, traversing new terrain. To my left, the Renaissance painting sags in its frame, hopelessly waterlogged; I realize now that it’s just a reproduction, a copy on flimsy wood. The carpets are totally soaked through, shades darker.

  I take a handful of money from the floor of the mirror room and throw it over the balcony. The bills become leaves and drift down toward the gray water. The flamingo looks up at me with two distinct bobs of its neck, unimpressed.

  I root around in the closets upstairs for new clothes. I find the pieces of another outfit, a pair of shoes to replace those I’ve been wearing since the last mansion. When I’m newly dressed, I return to the mirror bedroom. I pick fifteen bills off the ground—I’m dimly aware of counting—and roll them tightly together. I slide the bundle into my back pocket. It’s not enough to matter: the weight, the tumorous bulge it makes in my pants isn’t enough for me to notice or acknowledge that I’m carrying it, always.

  I walk down the stairs, into the foyer. The flamingo stalks the pond with utter deliberation, indifferent or oblivious to my presence. Glass crunches beneath my feet with each step; the new and unfamiliar shoes make me feel like an observer, a non-participant. I try to remember footage I’ve seen on TV of these birds in flight, if they can fly at all, but I can’t convince myself either way, and this indeterminate fact floats in my brain as something I’ll probably never confirm. I wonder about the route it intuited between houses.

  I walk to the interior kitchen in the name of observing what’s changed after the storm. The jar of pasta sauce has exploded on the tile, pooling in the groove between wall and floor like a murder scene. The first cabinet I open is brimming with spices—the shelves you failed to locate two nights ago. I look at the basil leaves in their little glass jar. I consider rolling them up and smoking them, not for any specific reason, but for the novelty, to see how it would burn, the taste of the smoke, because no one would ever know I’d done it.

  I tap out a little mound of garlic powder onto the counter, shape it into an approximate line with the tip of my finger. I lean down, close enough to smell it, and pinch one of my nostrils closed. I stand up quickly and banish the whole mess with the side of my hand. I’m dialing back to the moment in the city when we stopped talking about food. I was rolling a bruised apple in my hands like an old piece of clay as it browned in patches.

  You gave me a sidelong look and smiled a little, like a challenge. I felt myself teetering on a moment of commitment. “Are you going to eat that?”

  I passed it from hand to hand, and then I let it go. It rolled across the sidewalk, skipping on the grit, until it went over the curb and, as we’d discussed, turned instantly to garbage. It was all garbage.

  I don’t take anything. The sun shines wetly outside.

  *

  The first time you disappeared—really, truly disappeared, no contact at all—came after I laughed about your brother being dead at the party our final semester in college. You were gone from the apartment by the time I returned an hour later (and I couldn’t explain how it took me an hour to get there, where the intervening time had gone), but had left your car, the keys inside on the table, as if daring me to guess where, to come after you.

  My first, insane impulse that night was to drive to 19th Street, to take your car right up to the house August had vacated over a year ago, as if the whole thing was some perverse re-staging of our personal histories, as if I expected you at any moment to spring into reversion and return to symbolic empty spaces of your past, my past, etc. When I turned onto his old street I’d already decided I wasn’t doing it. New cars were parked out front; the house was a different color, and nicer than I remembered. I hardly slowed down as I drove past.
<
br />   I didn’t stop. I’d met your parents at the funeral the year before, and knew you’d pledged not to see them again, not intentionally at least, but for some reason—no less symbolically but maybe more plausibly—I thought you might have gone to their house, somewhere private I couldn’t breach, your brother’s bedroom with all his old shit, the comfort of pain and nostalgia. The next morning, when you didn’t return, I followed your specter there. I parked your car across the street and waited, convinced despite everything that you were inside. The house was a brick one-story ranch alongside other brick one-story ranches, inhabited by the same people forever, with a chainlinked yard behind it and a trimmed lawn in the front with ornaments, a flag in the window, exceedingly normal. The layout was the same as August’s house but with a paved driveway, different building materials. You hadn’t spoken with your father since just after the funeral, and I knew this.

  My tendency for determined waiting from the past three years, the passivity and angst of sitting and watching for hours without clear intent (the phase that had led me to notice Candace, to follow that path) I’d thought was behind me by the time we met—or another version of it was playing out in the aftermath of the gun—but it’s easy to settle back into old habits. For the first few hours, I sat outside your parents’ house with the air conditioning on and my hand resting on the key in the ignition, running down the gas in your car—the idea was to be primed, as few moves as possible away from active pursuit, as if at any moment you’d come hurtling out of the house and I would have to follow. Over time, the air conditioning came to feel too convenient, and further, like it might be concealing something, a telltale noise from the closed house I might hear from inside a sealed car across the street. I turned the engine off and let the cold air bleed out. I preferred to sweat; it was the route that gave my actions physical consequence, pretended exertion. Nothing was behind me.

  The car quickly became suffocating, even after I cracked the window, and my back stuck fast to the faux leather. I traced the long, cartoonish line created by the crack in the windshield, never repaired. I had to fight to stay awake, kept shoving myself up in the seat, my eyes fixed on the house. Late that afternoon, your mother pulled the car out of the garage and drove off, the first sign that the house hadn’t been empty to begin with. I saw her in the window as she drove past, and I remember thinking that she was so indistinct-looking that I probably wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her again—this, after having met her in person once before—that I could check out at Walmart with the same woman and not realize I’d attended her son’s funeral. I kept fastidious watch on the house after she left; I thought this seemed like a time when you might do something, might make your presence known, as if by sliding up one of the windows and shooting off flares.

  Your mother came back an hour later and pulled into the garage. I had the impression that she’d seen the car I was in, had slowed down as she passed it, made note of the addition to their street. I wondered how long the crack in the windshield had been there, if beyond the model and plates this was a distinctive or recognizable characteristic to your parents. The garage door slid closed, and thereafter the house didn’t move. I texted you again, then held the phone in my fist, hoping for a response and silence in equal measure, something to drive me to either extreme.

  Around six, your father came home. He parked his SUV in the driveway, and when he got out—tall and thin, a white button-down and tan pants, brown shoes, bald head (when I’d shaken his hand at the funeral the idea of a bald Mormon had, for some reason, shocked me)—he turned and looked at me directly, at his daughter’s car. He looked to the house, and then back at the car. He took a few steps down the driveway toward me, craning his head to look at the license plate while I tried to stare directly ahead without moving my body. There was little I could do to explain why I was here, at his family’s home in his daughter’s car, where his daughter was obviously not.

  He stopped at the edge of the street at the mailbox, and then retreated, as if the car held an answer he was better off seeking elsewhere. I remembered then, without a specific memory to attach it to, you mentioning having inherited the car from someone else. That was the word you used, “inherited,” which sounded like blood, and which—it didn’t occur to me until I was sitting there watching your father going into the house—must have meant from your brother, after he’d shipped off, before his departure became permanent. On the bumper of your father’s SUV, I picked out the silhouette of a POW/MIA sticker.

  I waited for the blinds to move. I wondered if he was telling his wife what he’d seen across the street, their dead son’s, now their daughter’s car, obviously populated, parked like an omen. In some part of my mind I knew the fear I was inspiring, how simply improbable it was that you were actually in the house—you’d told me repeatedly that you no longer spoke to your parents, that their role in your life you preferred to keep at “less than zero”—I knew this the same as I knew what the reappearance of this car could trigger, the ghosts I brought with it. Inside the house, I imagined your father picking up the phone, standing just in a spot where he could see outside to the street without having to adjust the blinds and reveal his position. Your phone ringing somewhere distant, your father watching a motionless figure in his daughter’s car not answering, nothing where it was supposed to be, there but not there. At an arbitrary point, I raised my own phone to my ear, silent, held it there for a minute and pretended to speak.

  The lights went out late. I knew it would be unbearable for them to wake up in the morning and find me there still, that if I continued to wait, I would risk almost certain discovery. I checked my phone one last time; you’d said nothing. I drove back to the empty apartment, dragging a sea of implications I wasn’t able to face, but knowing that I had just stood upon a threshold and had not turned away.

  The next day, a Saturday, I emptied my bank account, crossed into Ohio—within half an hour of my parents’ house in Dayton—and got the Yama tattoo on my left leg. It took four hours. Afterward, I stood at the counter in the front of the shop and methodically, one by one, emptied the bills from my wallet. I counted them at first, and then I stopped counting.

  I drove the hour back to Richmond in your car with my calf bandaged in plastic wrap. Rather than going back to the apartment, I went directly to your parents’ house, again. I parked in the same spot across the street, facing the same direction. If I was going to come back, I was going to come back different.

  This time, my observations were sloppy, and I didn’t know why I was there; it was almost an hour before I even noticed that the SUV was parked in the driveway. Shortly after I did, however, as if waiting for my acknowledgment, the front door of the house flew open, and out came your father, holding something in his hand, not stopping at his car but walking directly toward me with furious determination, almost running. I heard his footsteps on the asphalt. I turned the key—it took a second longer than it should have, because I’d turned the car entirely off—and hauled out of there, leaving him behind, standing halfway across the street, watching me go.

  (Obviously, I’d never filled this gap.)

  In the rearview, he raised the thing in his hand to his head.

  A phone. A phone.

  Somewhere else, a phone rings.

  A line flickers, and then becomes permanent.

  It’s in my hand.

  That’s why I’m coming after you.

  *

  My first step off the terrace, my foot sinks three inches into the grass. The lawn all around me has turned to mud. When I look back, I expect to see the mansion at a tilt, sliding into the ground; instead, I see a white fortress stained by weather, busted off its hinges, its troops gone from their posts.

  Enormous branches lie strewn about the lawn, blown in from distant reaches, tearing up furrows in the ground and leaving behind clumpy eruptions of wet earth. Puddles of brown rainwater line the driveway and grounds, pooling in every available imperfection, spotting the landscape. Th
e Jeep has been shunted off to the side, a blocky piece of litter. The chessboard-like swatches of flowers just beyond the terrace are unanimously pummeled and flattened like a bed of cooked spinach. Around the house itself, the water has filled in to create a moat, as if the estate had planned for this, to detach finally from land. Opposite me, the forest into which you fled the day before looks bedraggled, its wetness sapping the lush volume of the trees, dragging their branches down toward the earth like outstretched arms; where once it was thick and unforgiving, now it seems as if I could stand at one edge and see all the way out the other side. The trees look like soaked mannequins. The sky is a flat white, and the air is finally enough to breathe.

  On my last look back the mansion greets me with a final image: the body from below the bathroom window has been improbably washed forward, navigated by the makeshift rainwater current around the perimeter of the house and overturned on the grass before me, face-up and ripe with water. I’d walked by without even noticing. It’s obvious now from the way her body is positioned that she was stabbed—many, many times—that this was how she’d actually been killed; her sweatshirt is torn to shreds in the front, where it had been angled away two days before. The fall, the hunger hadn’t killed her after all—she must have tried to run, and then been viciously caught. The bathroom, true to form, had been scrubbed clean. Her face is caved in, partially eaten away. I imagine Vivian, from wherever, in the moment she decided she would live in this mansion for the time being, for as long as necessary, no matter what stood in her way, a story that runs in parallel to ours, the survival instinct taking over. We’re capable of anything if threatened enough. My hands unconsciously search my pants like a tic, finding only the useless wad of money in the back pocket. I’m tempted to throw it away each time I touch it, but I don’t. I tell myself that I’m being more pragmatic than that, that someday there might come a time when I’ll need it. I nudge the body with my foot and immediately feel nauseous, there was no reason at all for me to do that.