Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  I move out, in the usual way. Further endtables, thick lamps with yellowed shades, Tiffanys, rolltop desks, looming clocks, and tasseled, stiff furniture occupy every free space, accumulated like dust. The kitchen cabinets are filled with chipped ceramic plates and heavy cast iron hanging from hooks. Any improvements to the house seem to have ceased in 1976. A pioneer motif dominates the artwork beyond the portraiture, the settling of new lands, merchant ships and formative exchanges with the natives. In a sitting room I find an enormous tapestry covering one wall, a pack of noblemen with spears and dogs arrayed around the bloodletting of some beast at the center. A library occupies one wing of the first floor, with great bay windows that look out on the treeline in an expectant way, the lawns a staging area, as if those who lived here were accustomed to sitting in their easy chairs and watching things break through. The middle pane of one window is shattered, the window unlatched, glass sparkled over the bench sill in a plume. The library hasn’t acquired books since the Kinsey Report.

  There are three floors above the first, the staircases set wide under bulbous oak railings and thick, well-traveled carpet fraying at the edges. From a second-floor bedroom wardrobe—I brace myself before easing it open—I take another set of clothes from beneath plastic: a 1940s button-down with some sort of checked pattern and sleeves that I roll up, dark pants, an old set of Oxfords; in every item I default to black. And still—it’s inevitable in a way that seems defeated—the longer I’m in the house, the more I explore of the mansion dressed in the manner of its previous inhabitants, the less it feels like a novelty, and slowly, the rooms, the furnishings begin to repeat. On each landing, in a niche on the wall stands a marble head on a pedestal, Grecian and familiar.

  My second time through the foyer, I follow the curve of the balustrade backward into a wide, peaked hall leading south, lit by electric torches. A deep coatroom wraps alongside it, the wooden hangers bare and inexplicably sad. At the end of the hallway, a closed set of double doors begs to be thrown dramatically open. I oblige the instinct, and burst through them into a huge and empty ballroom. I twist a knob on a panel beside the door and light springs from a million invisible recesses; I dial it way back. From outside, this section of the house pulses once. A bar reaches to the left, its surfaces reflecting, and past it, floor-to-ceiling windows with the curtains pulled back look out onto the ocean. An illustrated series of panels compose the wall to my right, molded with arches and complex layered borders in velvet red and gold. Maroon patterned carpet spreads in all directions, nicked in places. A few sparse tables and chairs fill about a quarter of the room in no particular order, left over from the last event. A rectangular dance floor begins about halfway across the ballroom, scuffed everywhere, and beyond it, on the stage, a sleek black grand piano sits alone, top open. I imagine a body crammed inside. Above it all hangs a set of four colossal tiered chandeliers in a style now familiar to me, which I’m confident in pinning to the 1920s. Keeping the wall to my side, I make my way around the right edge of the room, wary of the space below the chandeliers.

  About a third of the way across the ballroom, opposite the ocean, my hands unconsciously locate a slot in one of the wall panels, a narrow groove leading about eight feet up. I hook my fingers into the molding and pull. A section of the wall swings silently open on artfully disguised hinges, like the closet in the mirror bedroom—I think that this must be a feature of rich houses, this mystery-novel way of hiding secrets. Through the door, another carpeted staircase leads down, alongside a more basic wooden ramp. I follow it to the bottom, expecting something truly sinister, but it’s just a storage basement, albeit one finished with tasteful floral wallpaper and green carpet. The room is large and at its capacity likely held all of the furniture needed for the events in the ballroom above; as is, it’s about half-filled. High-backed chairs are stacked to one side of the stairs, circular tables rolled together and nestled beside them. Near the base of the staircase, where I’m standing, sits a long dining table draped in a white dust-sheet. Other unidentifiable furniture is similarly covered in the far corner, where I imagine it’s remained for years. Directly across from me, a closed door marks another passage, a closet or the entry to some deeper basement, a sub-basement. Light from the ballroom filtering around me just illuminates the room—if I stood still for long enough, I could probably see particles moving through the air. Because I’m interested to see how deep this house goes—because I’ve already counted the levels up—I walk across the room to the closed door: for once, plain wood in the wall, brass knob and all.

  When I open the door into the darkness, I hear the sound of ragged breathing cut short into dead silence. My entire body braces, and my senses instantly retract, leaving me to move forward by pure momentum, all that’s left over from before I heard that sound. I feel my way slowly onto the staircase, wooden, no railing, an abrupt shift, as if this was the one part of the house they didn’t care to improve since its construction, because from the basement below was all service. I put my hand out to the wall on my left, cold concrete. It’s like being somewhere close to home again.

  I am three steps down when a deafening sputter of gunfire erupts from my right, exploding into the wall next to me, illuminating it briefly, pocked with bullet holes. Ears ringing, hearing shells clatter to a hard floor, I scramble blindly back the way I came. I slam the door behind me, my senses returning to full alert. Panting, I back blindly across the room until I hit the edge of the sheeted dining table, and, feeling it there, I drop to the floor and scurry pathetically beneath it, ensuring that I’m hidden from sight before I let myself fall apart, before I collapse into that most basic position. I take huge, gulping gasps of air, more rawly panicked than I’ve ever been—than when I was holding the gun myself—because it feels abruptly like warfare. Lying on my belly, I peer out from under the edge of the sheet, eyes locked on the sub-basement door, my chin digging the carpet. That’s what I’m thinking to myself, a frantic chant as I scrutinize the stationary door, the forces mounting behind it: This is war. This is war. This is war.

  I stare and stare, forcing my eyes open as wide as possible, to preclude blinking, as if otherwise I might miss it, the split second in which I’ll be forced to react, to flee or engage or conceal myself, to start the car. I shudder, but attempting to regulate my breathing only makes the rest of me harder to control—the sensation is the same as fighting back tears, and when they follow, it’s almost a relief. I let it happen, I’m so petrified that I will let my body do what it wants, will take anything it offers as evidence of being alive, of still breathing. I squeeze your stupid shoe so hard I’m afraid that it will pop in my fist.

  When I’m beyond myself, I listen to the house, trying to detect the vibrations below me. I wonder if my shaking can be felt from the sub-basement, if the path of my footsteps running across the room was easily traceable, where I’ve been positioned by whomever waits below. I imagine him training his sights on the ceiling. I feel the bullets erupting up from the carpet, clear through my body, to lodge in the table above. I hear the spilling of shells again, the transition from live to dead weight, the slump of my body perceptible from below, final.

  Whatever waits for me in the sub-basement, there must be more of them in the house: they must occupy every floor. They must have watched as I explored, as I moved up and down. I remember, completely unheralded, when I was about four years old and we were visiting my mom’s parents in Mount Vernon, I’d wandered into the living room and sat in front of the extinguished fireplace for twenty minutes before I realized my grandfather was sitting in the chair beside me, completely silent. It was a moment of utter, basic terror. I think of the figure wrapped in my sleeping bag, clutching it to them like it was the only thing they’d ever possessed in the world, motionless throughout the entire scene, during our combat around them. There have always been others.

  I blink, and among the covered furniture there are men standing with their backs pressed to all of the walls, perfectly still, blendi
ng with the wallpaper. I blink again, and they’re gone.

  The carpet under my chin is salty-wet. Demolished, I rest my cheek in the grit, the brief cool. The rendered foot of the table next to me catches my eye: it’s in the shape of a monstrous claw, a form that I recognize from somewhere. I follow the carved pattern up the table leg, raising my head, letting the edge of the sheet fall back to the ground, vanishing me beneath it. I trace the wooden shapes in the almost-black to the underside of the table, and discern at its edge a bubbling mass of cherubs sculpted into it, one breaking from the rest, his chubby arms reaching toward the long side of the table as if to escape his brethren, sucked down toward the monster below.

  I have seen this table before, in the mansion where we found the urns, where the knife appeared for the first time. It is exactly the same table. I launch to my knees, my breath a mess again, rearing back. My shoulder hits the underside of the table; it rumbles through the house. For a baffled second, I think that I’ve somehow circled back to the same mansion, to the same point in time but now populated, always populated, that I’m so disoriented I can’t even recognize a house I’ve slept in before, to which I’ve been brought back to be killed. I hear footsteps thundering from the floor above, raining down the carpeted stairs.

  But I know that it cannot be the same mansion, and that the truth is even worse: the table, the marble heads have followed me here, as has everything else. Every building I enter is the same but with its ingredients shifted around, arranged in different patterns, the floors stacked in a different order, the artifacts and artwork shuffled randomly—a changing set of labyrinths built from recycled parts and fixed variables. The walls here are the floors somewhere else, the carpet a magnified copy of a throw rug, a vase transposed from a gallery to a vacant building, a camo-print bedspread knit into someone’s pants. The judgment table. An overturned throne. A bedroom surrounded in bathroom mirrors. Marble heads repeating exactly on every landing, miles apart. A wolf in the foyer, an octopus inching slowly through the sunroom, a gun in my hand—the elements, like a dropped deck of cards, repeating numbers in different suits. Some are populated, some are not. I’m sure that if I opened the wardrobe on an upper level, I would find Vivian. Or I wouldn’t.

  I wonder where—as that mansion came into view around the final bend of the path off the highway, as it was generated into our consciousness, or as we fucked on the bed, or entered the bedroom—where Vivian was yanked from and put there, which subway car, from whose scattered aspects she had been composed. If August’s bedroom was actually someone else’s, reconstituted, that of a brother I’d once had.

  I wrap my fingers around one talon of the claw-like foot, anchoring myself in this reality, and once more, I sink back to the carpet, my ears straining to hear sounds that aren’t there. For a moment, I don’t recognize the tattooed shapes on my arm; if they were rearranged, I would never be able to convince myself they’d ever been any different.

  At length, I slowly raise the white sheet a few inches and scrutinize the basement again. Everything looks the same. I walk the fingers of one hand out on the carpet a foot or so, and then leave them there, ghosted in the dim light, fighting every urge to pull them away. After a minute, I gather the courage to drag myself forward out from under the table. And then my foot is on the floor again, and I’m getting up, mostly because I’m certain that when I yank the white sheet off the judgment table I’ll find the knife sitting calmly atop it, faintly smeared or gleaming as if it’s never been used, and in a populated house like this, it’s comforting to know at least one thing, to know where one weapon is, to possess this limited certainty.

  Instead, I leave it concealed, and walk across the room, my eyes everywhere, toward another dust-sheeted table. I don’t uncloak this one either; I grab two corners and walk it in minute shifts backward, as quietly as possible toward the sub-basement door. Its feet leave indentations in the carpet, notching time on the floor. I move the table length-wise to block the door, as close as I can without touching it, for fear of sending sound downstairs. I stack three heavy chairs and a square-topped endtable on top of it, all hefted with ancestral value, decades of human cells, blocking the shooter inside. A wave of nausea overcomes me—the physical manifestation of a reality that I’ve been putting off, space that the rest of my actions have been masking to fill until this arbitrary moment of disruption, like light breaking through—and I realize that I have no idea where you are, and probably haven’t since I left Vivian’s mansion, that I’ve made it to the coast for another reason altogether, or for no reason at all.

  I return to the judgment table, and whip the white sheet off with a flourish. Another plane rotates out.

  A cloud of dust explodes visibly into the air. The table is completely bare underneath. My stomach lurches and, instinctively, I spin to face the sub-basement door. I know what I’ve seen. I drop your shoe. Hands gripping the naked wooden edge behind me, I lower myself again to the ground. Like everything, I wait for it to burst open.

  *

  The first time we had sex—which had occurred in the prison cell-like environs of your dorm room in Brinkman, six weeks after I’d first walked you there—in the slightly giddy aftermath of the act itself (because I always believed in a slightly giddy aftermath), during the minutes I assumed were meant to be filled with tender and earnest flattery (though we’d both known this was coming for some time, had planned it specifically), coated in a pleasantly sleepy sensation, my breathing still residually ragged, my head pressed into your neck and my face angled down, I traced my finger around the curve of your clawmarked shoulder and said, “My favorite part of your body is the collarbone.”

  I knew, by this stage of our relationship, that you weren’t really receptive to compliments, especially those about your body, but, again, I was feeling sensitive and earnest, so I said it anyway.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you,” you said. “That’s everyone’s favorite body part.”

  I think the double meaning occurred to us both at the same time: one, that this was a clichéd body part to choose, in general, that I was not unique in this regard, which, fine, and if there was a time I was allowed to be clichéd, after losing my virginity was probably it; and two, the meaning specific to you, that everyone you’d been with before me (or, even more broadly, everyone who had ever admired your physical character) had picked out this same feature and identified it as their favorite—worse than a cliché in and of itself (even having a “favorite body part” was a cliché, maybe), it was a reflexive kind of cliché, one that had developed in response to your person alone, and then was repeated so many times that it had become a predictable, boring quality in your admirers, along the lines of “I like girls with tattoos,” or “I like the Misfits.” The implication here being that I was just like everyone else.

  You didn’t follow up to clarify—there wasn’t a graceful, immediately apparent way to do it without referencing in some way the past guys or girls who’d complimented your naked upper form—and I didn’t reply, either. It had become more or less a habit, after the appearance of the gun, that occasionally, in conversation, I would spend so much time dwelling on my possible replies, and the replies to those replies and so on, that eventually I’d awaken to the fact that I hadn’t said anything at all, that I had let our conversation slide into silence, carried on, only hypothetically, into a conversation in my head. We fell into one of those silences then; when I realized it, I didn’t speak (not knowing, ultimately, what to say) but instead tried to make the silence resolute rather than defeated, natural rather than disruptive. I continued to stroke your shoulder, and I kissed you again in the dark, and I squeezed your body at intervals, like I hadn’t noticed the history that had crept into the room, and I repeated this series of motions, again and again, until my physical gestures (the stroking, the squeezing) became background action, reflexive reassurances, the way you reach out to catch something when it’s falling. I fell asleep.

  Which is to say:
seated on the floor of the basement, with my back to the claw-leg table, eyes tracking the stillness of the sub-basement door blocked by furniture, assuring myself over and over that it’s not moving, exhausted beyond anything, I fall asleep.

  A moment later, I’m back in the bathroom of Villa Scum in Richmond, with the noise all around me, the walls vibrating and Candace’s head in my lap. I’m trying to shake her awake. My hands are on her shoulders and I’m staring into her eyes, as if the harder I concentrate, the better this will work.

  The moment still takes me by surprise: she awakes, the film dissolves across her eyes, clearing them, but this time her face changes—or I’m aware, somehow, that it’s different from what I remember—transforms to someone else’s entirely, to someone I don’t know, like a veil drawn back from my memories, revealing details once obscured. I am on the floor in the bathroom and I am holding this perfect stranger in my lap, participant in an escalating history of intervention in which my role grows more and more irrelevant and uncertain, more and more sinister. She jolts to life, struggles to her feet, and runs. The rest of the scene is exactly the same.