Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  *

  I start awake an indeterminate amount of time later. It could have been minutes or hours, I have no idea. The same light filters down the stairs.

  The square endtable I’d stacked on top of the three chairs—the top of the furniture pyramid blocking the door—is now upright on the floor in front of the blockade, the drawer closed and fully intact. My skin chills and then prickles with the onset of sweat, like each pore awakening to action. The movement is thick with intention. The house has rotated again, shifted its furniture around, or else someone has been here to alter it. I can’t tell what else has moved; I look at the floor—suddenly sick of breathing, of my constant awareness of it—and see only the marks from the table I dragged to block the door, a code inscribed into the carpet, a written record. The three chairs are stacked on the table the same way I left them—a gap in the rest of the sheeted furniture across the room, the space they used to fill—and the sub-basement door is still shut. The sheet from the clawfooted table behind me is crumpled on the floor, its dust settled, time passing.

  I rise to my feet, trembling with anger, my head swimming with phantom noise and the wrong memories, the fear that while I slept dumb I’ve somehow changed houses, that the mansion I’d fallen asleep inside was switched out and reconstructed around me, but imperfectly, and I’m resentful at having spotted the error. I feel like I’m being taunted. Beyond what I perceive in the room, beyond the objects shifting and repeating, I sense mean human calculation.

  I grab one of the heavy chairs from atop the barricade and hurl it as hard as I can across the room. It doesn’t go far, but one leg cracks against a corner of the table and snaps off, and the body thunders to the ground—however thick the floor is, anyone below would be able to hear it. The sound roars through the basement and up the stairs, as if calling Come here, come here.

  The second chair doesn’t break when I throw it, so I lift it by the shoulders and bash it into the carpet, into the other chair, over and over. When the legs crack against each other, my body shivers involuntarily as if it’s a bone being snapped, clinical and ruthless, and then, as I repeat the action, I acclimate to the sound. There’s sweat running down my face by the time the legs break, the energy pouring out of me raw and unfiltered. I pick up the displaced endtable by two of its legs and slam it to the ground in the same place, then three times more, until the legs separate like those of a smashed insect and the drawer bursts open and spills forgotten placecards to the floor, bearing handwritten names like Weatherby and Morris. I pound the third chair into the wreckage of the others until it splinters, making as much noise as possible, screaming, the wood dividing into shafts, into its basic shapes, as if there’s a target beneath me, a spraypainted X marking demolition, and if I keep hitting, eventually the floor will give way, eventually I’ll come through the ceiling, the process will be complete. My voice creaks when it first leaves me—my last word was your name, shouted into the forest—then catches, holds steady. When the rest of the blockade is destroyed, I walk to the long table, the single piece of furniture remaining in front of the door. I hoist one end of it above my head—legs digging into my shoulders, my strength feels infinite—move my hands to the feet, shove and jump back with a final, anguished yell.

  The table crashes to the ground with unearthly force and a painfully loud crack, like a tree falling—the vibrations surge through the floorboards at my feet, rattling everything smaller than I am. Elsewhere in the house, something has been set off and continues ringing, but there’s nothing beyond it, no responsive movement, nothing racing downward or upward, and in the force of the moment, its physical tremble, the lack of retaliation only makes me angrier.

  I take a severed chair leg from the rubble and negotiate around the fractured table to the sub-basement door. I raise the leg in my hand like a murder weapon and have already hit the flimsy wood once, twice, three times before I finally understand what I’m doing, what I’ve been doing since I woke up from the memory of another door I broke through realizing I could never save the people I intended, not Candace, not Vivian, and certainly not you, and having, maybe, the answer to a question I’ve been failing to address since long before I met you, since I saw other eyes that looked like mine: I am creating terror.

  I let the chair leg—pathetic, brutal weapon—fall to the carpet. In contrast to everything else, relinquishing it makes no sound whatsoever. The silence falls over me like a blanket. A line of paint flakes drifts from the door like ash. I stand there, the mansion towering above, around, below me, bracing myself. I turn the knob—which rattles on both levels—wait a beat, and pull the door open.

  Gunfire shatters the forced quiet, ear-splittingly loud, spraying the concrete wall next to the stairs and lighting the gloom in streaks. I jump backward and hit the table. The barrage doesn’t stop after the first burst, not like the last time, but continues, drowning out the falling shells. I pick out that its bursts come three rounds at a time, barely separated, issued by something large and automatic. The smell of acrid burning lead and pulverized cement drifts up from the sub-basement. I’m back in the open doorway when, abruptly, the gunfire ends.

  My ears are still ringing, but I’m able to hear again before whoever’s down there, with all that echo. Beneath the ringing, again, the staggered, panicked breathing of someone who has been found.

  It is my turn to speak. My shadow looming at the top of the stairs, multiple versions of the scenario unwind in my head: in one of them, I turn and run, once again—I run from the mansion completely, disappear, risking that they will follow, that I will spend the next indefinite period of my life in fear of pursuit. In another, I walk down into the sub-basement, confident that I’ll be mowed down where I stand, that this can end, here and now, with my body on the stairs. Or, I call out something, announce myself not as an enemy but as another survivor—if that is what we are—reveal that, when all is said is done, I’m not cavalry. I stand there and deliberate, projected in different directions. The future sprawls like a lawn. I breathe in, at last, and open my mouth.

  A final burst of three rounds cuts through the breathing, but not against the concrete wall, oddly soft, and then I hear something wet, turning freshly apart.

  I am running down the stairs and screaming, “I’M NOT GONNA HURT YOU!” before the shells hit the ground.

  *

  The sub-basement is pitch dark. I hit the wall at the base of the steps and fumble for a lightswitch, my breathing smothering everything, the air hot and thick with the smell of mixed metallics. My hand finds a string above me. A lightbulb sends unanimous light across the narrow space. My eyes squeeze shut, and then I blink rapidly against the tears as my pupils adjust.

  When I register the room, I cry out and trip backward over nothing. Opposite the wooden stairs, maybe twelve feet away, a body uniformed in black lies slumped against the wall, resting between an ancient washing machine and an enormous boiler. Most of the head is gone; the wall behind it and one side of the washer are soaked in dark red gore. Blood runs down the concrete with a soft hiss, its heat escaping, the body still pumping up and out. An assault rifle is propped between the two bent knees, clenched in white, vise-like fingers, angled backward, toward where the face was.

  I plant my forearms against the wall and retch—aware, suddenly, that this is my response to everything, to just expel it—but this time nothing comes up, I cannot find relief here, my stomach has finally been totally emptied. A new, petrified sweat envelops my body, a different odor, and once again, I begin to shake, starting in my jaw and moving through to my fingertips, my knees: I did this. I did this. I will wake up a thousand nights from now, and still I will have done this. A pit opens inside of me, and out comes everything: the distinct memory of being dragged out of a swimming pool, screaming from every direction, wrestled to the ground with someone already laid out beside me like a failed competitor, suspended in a place before you’re certain that everything has changed forever—before you realize that the loser isn’t b
reathing, that there’s hair caught between your fingers—an indication that I will never forget anything again, that my memory is crystal clear and always has been, always will be.

  I collapse at the base of the stairs, letting the air dry and clear while the body settles into permanence. Around me, there’s evidence that he had been living down here: empty cans, boxes, and foil wrappers discarded in the corners, food that he must have taken from upstairs; the typical smells of old waste. His boots sit before the washer, the laces loosened and tongues pulled forward, airing out. I focus on each object concretely by itself—the blood-spattered washer, the monstrous boiler, the bare lightbulb in the ceiling, an empty soup can, the mess of heavy iron pipes on the far wall—absorbing their significance independently, focusing on the make, the color, the texture, the provenance, the range of filth and decay and age, so that their raw physical data fills my mind completely, and I try to consider it all (how old the can of soup was based on the design of its label, the font, how long it had been stored here), and then I shift from one object to the next, as little space between them as possible. Still, through the cracks, the realization, the fact of the body rushes through in waves, a clock in me desperately rewinding. My throat knots, and again releases nothing.

  I force myself to stand before I’ve plotted my exact course. In one motion, I pull the body forward by its clammy, socked feet, away from the gore and toward the center of the room. The upper half collapses to the floor among the spent shells, a sound I know from the crash site in the forest but which I don’t expect to echo like it does. I roll down my sleeves and hold one arm over my mouth and nose, taking in the smell of mothballs. He’s outfitted in the same bulletproof vest and black uniform as the bodies in the clearing. The gun is empty—he used the last three rounds on himself, gauged the end, when I would storm him—as is the ammo belt, as if he’d seen combat before he arrived here. The black fabric mask and gloves sit on a corner of the washing machine. There are pieces of the head that I distinctly recognize, hair—I turn away, obscure my vision as much as possible, but I don’t throw up again.

  I pry his fingers off the empty rifle, using the gloves between his skin and my own. I unsheathe the knife and throw both weapons over by the boiler—I don’t even want to touch them. I hold my breath and hoist the top of the body toward me, keeping my head back, fumbling with the straps of the bulletproof vest. There is no resistance at all, and it peels away cold with recent sweat. Blood rings the collar. Emerging from one sleeve, I see that he has tattoos on one of his arms down to the wrist, a pattern that looks like flower petals. My mind hovers, briefly, on a name I never knew.

  *

  Another night, I awaken in complete, sudden awareness with the feeling that someone is standing over the bed. I’m out of bed almost instantly, my senses fully alert—the experience is similar to the morning in college I learned about the train accident in a text from a friend, realizing how quickly my body can shift from unconscious to full-action.

  You don’t stir—even in your sleep, your arm is stretched above your head to the wall behind the pillow. I can’t remember how many times you knocked before passing out. There’s no one else in the room, but still, in front of me there’s a flicker in the texture of the door, someone ahead of time manipulating it, drawing me forward.

  I open the door into the balcony hallway. As I exit in the dark, I notice the same rifts in the air, the same immaterial flutters of motion. One occurs down the hallway to my right, in front of the door to the bedroom where Vivian sleeps; another, more pronounced in the moonlight of the foyer, radiates from a point just above the stairs in front of me. I take the stairs. I run my right hand down the banister—it gives me a strange sense of validity, almost, that I have gained enough power here to treat the house casually, as if I’ve always lived in it, always been accustomed to its luxuries. As if I am following nothing, being led by nothing.

  The stairs seem to spill directly into the smaller dining room (though I know I’ve taken at least one right turn to get there), and from here, the only logical path is to enter the kitchen, to kneel and open the cabinet beneath the sink, to draw forth the knife I know to be chambered there. The blade shrieks quietly against the metal piping.

  To my right, again, a warping of the air in the door to the dining room, of potentiation. I step through it—I feel nothing—and then turn back, testing its physical bounds. The kitchen looks just the same; I am still holding the knife. I walk away from the potentiation and exit the kitchen the opposite way, again feeling the rush of control (despite knowing faintly that both paths lead to the same place, to the foyer). Flushed with this sense of moral victory, I cease to notice the permutations in the air, and the next thing I know, I’m halfway up the stairs. I catch myself and my stomach turns; behind me, twelve steps that I don’t remember at all, this gap immediately in my past, already widening, and I don’t remember if I entered the foyer through the dining room or the kitchen.

  I burst down the stairs, almost tripping—when my bare feet smack the tile foyer, the sound echoes, and I’m suddenly sweltering. I use my momentum to barrel forward to the front door, before my body can recover enough to drag me back to the stairs, before the mechanics kick back in. I crash hard into the door with my full weight. I feel it resonate throughout me, a shivering flash of pain, the knife ringing in my hand. I bounce sloppily off, and at the same time I feel a pulling back in the direction of the stairs. As I detach, I grab the handle with my free hand and yank, so that the door comes flying open with me attached to it, revealing the moonlit steps outside. The door clatters on its hinges and then starts to swing back, while I hang desperately on and simultaneously fling myself forward. I let go just before the door slams, and am catapulted onto the terrace. I take quick, frantic steps down the stairs, as if I’m running down a hill and trying to stop. I reach out for the railing. At its end, I swing myself again, to the right, and then crash hopelessly into the front of the house, pulled ever backward, knife arm raised straight above my head like a maniac.

  I force myself along the front of the house, trying fruitlessly to drag myself away, while a stronger force twists me toward it, magnetically, bashing my body over and over into the stone foundation as if to pull me back inside, to rip me through the wall. I continue raising and lowering the knife, as if perpetually re-setting into attack stance, and tears stream down my face because I’ve lost control of everything except the propulsion of my body forward, this one set of motions, because everything else seeks to put me in conflict with the house and those inside it. I think that when I reach the corner, I’ll be able to propel myself out, into the lawn, and then momentum will take me, I will be subsumed into the hectic forces of the rest of the grounds. When it comes, I push off and feel briefly untethered, but the movement comes out wrong, like I’ve tried to swerve off a fixed track, my guts correct the opposite way with a vicious twist in my stomach, and before I know it I’m moving down the perpendicular, southern side of the house in the same manner—like there was never any other choice for me to make, like this path had been carved for years, the trenches were too deep to climb out of—my arm jutting in and out, stabbing repeatedly at nothing but brick, trapped in the broken, looped animation of a cartoon murderer.

  I’m led to the back of the house, swiveled again like a toy, and then follow alongside the hedge, stabbing the wall. My actions repeat, my surroundings become abstract in the dark: a vague, changing landscape through which I’m negotiating, hacking at encroaching shapes in a feeble attempt to make them lessen, to reach the end of this circuit. My arm aches as the knife clatters and grates against the foundation of the house, striking and rebounding, striking and rebounding. Anyone asleep inside must be long awake, one floor up, and in the moment I do not care about waking them up, I know the goal, far beyond me, as deep within me as a basement, the goal is to bring them directly into my path. They should all come running. My opposite hand—the one not holding the knife—digs uselessly into my pants pocket, a
s if I’ll find something there to kill the other, as if I ever had control of what I found beneath my fingers. I will myself to draw the knife from the wall, to redirect it into my chest, my neck, anywhere, but the physical manifestation of this thought feels impossible, like an idea someone else had. The hedges dig into my side as I’m thrashed continuously into the house, now parallel to the bedroom hallway on the second floor, the distance closing between us, a red streamer hanging from a window. To my left, there’s a sudden flash of movement at ground level—I notice it there, like a sudden light. My arm surges from the brick—to follow it.

  In the dark before me, interrupting its course, I find a body low in the bushes.

  I stab it past death, a final act of relief, my mind flickering over the after-images of Vivian—you—Candace—on the floor in a room of mirrors, like something pulled up from a nightmare, like everything is just replacement, naked and simple, one for the other.

  *

  And, just like that, I’m free. I rise quivering to my feet. The action and release is so definite, so obvious that I feel completely uncontrollable—years have passed and we’re back to this. I’m crying uselessly, still, or water is coming off my face as I stumble listlessly into the grounds, my feet uncertain, the knife hanging stupidly, thickly, dripping at my side like a part of my sick biology, as if I’ve just fucked someone. The sun is creeping toward the horizon. I wipe the knife in the grass, gesturally, not trying hard enough to mask the results (I am changing my suit for his).

  And still I make my long meandering way back to the other side of the mansion, its front door hanging open as if to confirm every suspicion about the awful things you might find inside. I find the handle loose as I push the door shut behind me. Still, I stash the knife in the kitchen, under the sink, the same place that I hid it in the mansion before this one. I run the upstairs shower, rub more water over my arms and legs, my burning elbows and wrists. Still, I return to our stolen bedroom and climb back into bed on my aching side, knowing, of course, that your eyes are open and have been indefinitely. And I slide myself into the little pocket of gut-colored covers that I left, the train rushing in my head, and wait to awaken again.