*****
By the time my second marriage foundered on the shoals of quiet despair, I had the lovely house with all the extra rooms, and the light and the color and all that, but it didn't feel like home. It wasn't where I was safe or comfortable or welcome…welcome to be me, at any rate. I promise you it didn't start out this way, but by the end, I was living a role. Playing the part of someone else entirely.
Well, it wasn't my home. That much is clear, now. At some level, I must have always known.
So here I am. Just me and the orchids in yet another rented apartment, dreaming of home.
*****
Home is where the whisky is.
Home is where you cry alone.
Home is where the temperature is up to you.
Home is where there's fresh flowers. Or not. Home is where the dreams are.
Home is where you can find me.
*****
I'm not sure it's a coincidence that "home" and "hope" differ by only one little letter, only a few ticks apart in the great alphabet. There is so much hope involved in setting up a new home with a new lover, mate, spouse, husband. Love and joy and excitement and the absolute certainty that this is now it, and will be it, for the rest of your silly lives. Every salad bowl purchased, every rug laid down, every piece of art hung on the walls…tangible expressions of desperate, pathetic, wretched hope.
Even the brand of toothpaste. He uses Colgate, and you're a Crest person born and bred? Someone will compromise, you will agree, a change will be made, your journey toward soul-mate-ness takes another creamy, minty-fresh step! Pearly white smiles of hope!
Ah me.
*****
But I promised to tell you about the dreams, and how mine are different. I know you don't want to hear another tale of dreams. Dreams are boring, dreams are a cop-out, they are a story that does not make sense. The first serious piece of fiction I wrote, I cheated the ending with the classic "And then she woke up."
Forgive me. I was only eleven. I know better now.
I wish I could wake up.
*****
In the classic, happy real estate dream, I am walking through my house when I find a door I haven't noticed before. Opening it, revealing the new room beyond, I immediately rejoice and begin making plans for moving furniture in here, settling, incorporating this space into the house.
In the newer, unhappy real estate dreams, my discoveries are darker. I haven't noticed that half the roof is missing, or that the floors droop or sag, or that there's an eight-lane freeway just outside the window, cutting the yard in two. It's a good thing I'm not seeing that therapist any more. She would be very worried about me.
If we spent our time talking about dreams, that is. Unlikely, I have to say. I have much greater issues now.
*****
I was cooking my dinner — red beans and rice from a mix, to which I added an Italian sausage saved from the week before, plus some frozen shrimp and frozen peas dropped in right at the end — fantastic stuff, and makes leftovers for days. Rinsing the shrimp, I looked up and noticed great billows of white, acrid smoke pouring out of the window of the apartment building directly behind mine. You'll forgive me if I admit that my first thought was my own home, such as it is; but I quickly ran outside to investigate, grabbing my phone along the way.
Good thing, I suppose; I was already dialling 911 as I heard the screams. Flames licked upward, bruising the wood of the outer walls and crackling the paint. Now the smoke was black. An ugly smell of burnt hair was everywhere, along with something darker underneath. The sirens came quickly — a fire station is only half a block from here — but I couldn't tell if the screaming stopped due to rescue or tragedy.
After the firemen shooed me away, I went back inside and finished my cooking, saving my own meal from becoming a catastrophe. What else could I do? In the modern world, there is no role for the helpful bystander. We are only in the way, once qualified help arrives.
Somehow worse, though, in a big city like this there's no gossip, no dissemination of information, no way to know what happened. No one to ask. I don't even know the woman who lives across the hall from me, though on a hot night when we both have our back doors open, I can see that her kitchen has much newer appliances than mine and a really nice tile countertop, a foil to my chipped Formica.
No matter, I thought. I won't be here long.
*****
Tell me about your first home. Walk me through it, every square inch of it. What did each room mean to you? Were any rooms forbidden?
Tell me about the first home you loved.
Tell me about the first home you made love in.
Tell me about the first home you were left behind in.
Or kicked out of.
Or just left.
*****
Someone died in that kitchen fire. I know they did. In the night I could still hear her screams, though when I got up to look out the window she fell silent.
She was in my dreams.
I know that's impossible. But she was there.
She wanders from room to room in a huge house and she's screaming and wailing and burning burning burning and her hair bursts into flames and her clothes have long burnt away so her skin crackles and blackens and her eyeballs melt and pour down her ruined face and the uniquely disturbing smell gets up my nostrils and still she cannot stop screaming, screaming.
*****
The house begins to haunt my days. Or maybe it's the lack of sleep. Or the heartbreak. The death of hope. God, how I wanted this one to be different. Or at least tolerable. But in the end, I realize that I am peculiarly unsuited for love. Destined to be alone, fundamentally, forever. Destined to not find my home, my promised land, my resting point.
It's the house of my dreams, but not the happy dreams, oh no. Still it is huge, with convoluted, twisting turning hallways and passages, and way too many rooms. She roams them, wailing — yet she is me and I am her and — oh, I see I am telling this all wrong. Let me start over.
It is a large house, but not very attractive, in fact rather plain. Many people have lived here over the decades since it was first built; very few have called it home. It is not spooky or scary or particularly dark or forbidding; it's just, well, unloved. And in an awkward part of town — not really city, not really country.
Then the city encroaches more seriously, and the large old house gets carved up into large comfortable apartments.
After a time, the apartments get further divided into smaller apartments, and another building is built in what used to be the yard. It is increasingly expensive to live here, space is at a premium. Soon, the house is in the city itself; the small awkwardly shaped apartments rent for thousands of dollars a month, and are tarted up with painted woodwork and bright linoleum that quickly cracks and fades.
This is when she comes. This is when she cooks that fatal dinner. This is when she breaks down the barriers that divide what was once a home, whole and intact. This is what she roams after death.
And only I can hear her.
*****
Home is where the ghosts are.
Home is where your mother is.
Home is emotionally and politically fraught: hometown team. Home base. Home port. Home on the range. Homeboy. Homebody. Homemaker. Homely. Home schooling. Homemade. Department of Homeland Security.
Home is a lie.
*****
She stands before me, a blackened skeleton in the darkness, barely visible. The night wind howls through her hollow bones; her teeth chatter, her ribs bump against themselves like a handful of dice thrown across an oak table.
"You're taking me home," she whispers.
"I have nothing to do with this," I answer, although my lips do not move. Am I awake or asleep? Which is more real — the angry remains of this foolish woman taken before her time because of a miscalculation in the kitchen, or the tattered shreds of my own wasted life?
"To the promised land." Her empty eyes stare past me. I'm too exhaus
ted to even be terrified.
"Please go." But there is no energy behind my words.
*****
I think part of the trouble may be that I was raised by wolves. I mean, not literally, not entirely; it's probably safer to say that I raised myself. My parents — young, over-educated, optimistic, perhaps foolish — fell prey to the predominant narratives of the Age of Aquarius, and experimented with every, well, experimental form of home and community and family before giving up on one another to settle down into entirely traditional marriages. But during my childhood there were many homes, shifting partnerships, an assortment of configurations that were called "family" and deemed perfect and right and the be-all, end-all answer. All before I was ten years old.
Soon enough, I learned how to make my own peanut butter and raw honey sandwiches on cracked wheat bread, how to amuse myself without the benefit of television or playmates, how to find my own way to the little rural school in the morning. Such innocent days. Today if you see a spooky blonde seven-year-old girl in Goodwill clothes walking down a country road all alone, no adult around for miles and miles, you think there's trouble.
Although, I suppose that was true even then, wasn't it?
*****
Shopping list:
-Bananas
-Milk
-Strawberries
-Toilet brush
-Power drill with hole saw bit
-Pistachio ice cream
-Laundry soap (and quarters for the machines)
*****
The air stank of the fire for days, until the fog blew in from the coast and blanketed everything in a soup of damp, sodden air. Then it just smelled like mold. As per usual.
Should have bought some cleanser to go along with that toilet brush.
I became afraid of my bed, afraid of going to sleep. Which was foolish at best, and dangerous at worst: the hallucinations only increase with the hours awake. But I just couldn't stand it. She stalked my nights far worse than my days, and I did not want to see her. I stole catnaps, sneaking into the dream world in five- and ten-minute snippets, dashing back out again before I'd get caught.
"I should just move out," I said aloud to myself in the kitchen as I stared at the marred building behind mine, struggling to keep my weary eyes open.
Speaking of hallucinations. Well, there she was. I'm on the third floor, so I knew it couldn't be real, but there she was, peering back through my window. "He's taking me home," she said, without sound, though I heard her.
"Yeah, yeah, to the promised land."
She nodded, her bony, broken and burnt face eager, lighting up with excitement.
I was even more exhausted, but this time, the terror found me. I took a Vicodin left over from my last emergency room visit, washing it down with a healthy slug of Bushmill's. Then I threw myself at my bed, pulling the covers over my head as though I was a child in a fairy tale. As if that would help.
*****
What does she want from me? I couldn't have saved her. I'm the one who called 911, for crying out loud. I did the best I could. They sent us away, they sent us all away. I'm not the one who burned up my own stupid kitchen.
*****
The lawyer said I could have a lot more money, and for a lot longer, but I would have to do a whole bunch of specific things. It was too hard to remember them all. I wrote it all down in the meeting, or at least I thought I did, but when I looked at my notes they were a jumbled, crazy mess. The scribbles of a madwoman. She was costing me $300 an hour, the lawyer was; I was trying to focus so hard, so goddamn hard, and I had to pee so badly, but I didn't want to take any of my precious time to go pee — how much would two minutes of peeing cost? Five dollars a minute — that's a ten-dollar pee! That's three lunches! — so I just held it, but in retrospect, that was probably foolish. Probably I lost more than two minutes to the distraction of having to pee so bad.
I knew she counted her minutes very carefully, though. As we were walking out and shaking hands and doing those nice social things that normal people do, I looked at my watch and said, "Oh, man, no wonder I'm hungry for lunch! It's one-thirty!"
"One-twenty," she'd said, smiling.
*****
The things I have to do:
-Don't get married again. Duh.
-Find the quit-claim deed. Hmm.
-Stop talking to him. Who is she kidding?
-Don't sign anything. Okay.
-I don't remember the rest.
*****
What was I supposed to do here? Who would ever imagine that a spooky little hippie child who wore used clothes and ate government surplus cheese would grow up to be the kind of woman who would fight over real estate worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? The tiniest slip-up on my part could cost me thousands of lunches! Terrifying.
He said the house was never mine. I agreed with him there — I could never leave my books on the coffee table or an unwashed dish in the sink — but I still thought he was wrong, so far as the money goes. That's what lawyers are for, everyone says.
To my mind, lawyers are for making money for their own selves, but I knew it wasn't helpful for me to point this out.
*****
"Cross my heart and hope to die."
"You're already dead."And you have no heart, I wanted to add, but that was cruel. She must have known. If I could see right through the blackened bones of her chest, surely she was aware of that.
"Jesus made him do it."
She followed me into the living room, bones clacking and thumping, the smells of fire and mold warring with one another, clinging to her in a foul miasma. I ignored her, but she wouldn't stop.
"Jesus made him do it."
"He did not." I didn't look at her. "Go away, stop bothering me. I can't help you."
"You don't understand." Her death-scent increased its assault on my nostrils; she must have moved closer. I felt as though if I touched her, I would die too. I willed her to vanish. I could almost hear her breathing, pungent air filling nonexistent lungs, then rattling back out again through an empty, bony throat.
Finally I turned to her with what I hoped was a bored expression. I knew my eyes were wide with fear — I couldn't help that.
But now she was gone. Just the odor lingered.
The purple orchid on the top shelf in the window caught my eye; I went over and brought it down for a closer look. Its leaves were dark, oily; drooping, almost. "What's the matter, baby?" I crooned as I brushed a gentle finger across the biggest leaf. It came away smeared with a moist, sooty funk.
I didn't even have to lift my finger to my nose. I knew what it would smell like.
*****
Inventory (items to be retrieved later, when I have room for them):
-The rest of my books.
-Christmas box.
-Wedding dress.
-Camping gear (who gets the tent???)
-Bicycle, helmet, pump, etc.
-Snakey.
*****
I don't return the lawyer's call.
I don't return his call, or the weird emails.
I don't go to the PO Box and check my snail mail. Then I stop checking any of my email.
I stay in the apartment for a few days, as motionless as possible. When I don't move around so much, she seems to stay away. I slowly sink into a state of mind where I'm not really awake and not really asleep: I'm safe! This is the answer. Hiding in my own head.
When I realize I am literally picking lint out of my belly button, I know I have to stop this.
*****
Actually, lint is the wrong word for it. I don't know who ever came up with that. It's more like grime, some peculiar body emission. And with a deliciously awful reek — nothing in the world smells quite like that stuff you dig out of your belly button.
It comes out easier if it's a bit wet.
But if you're going to use saliva, it's better to start there, rather than after your finger has been poking around a while. Trust me.
*****
I fired the lawyer yesterday. It isn't about the money, I finally realized that. I don't care — he can have it all, if it means that much to him. If I bought a house with the dirty, begrudged spoils of that dead marriage, then it would be tainted, fouled with bad intent, with betrayal, with ill wishes. It would not be a home.
It would not be my home.
"Now you understand," she says, smiling her grinning-skull teeth.
She stands before me, more decrepit than ever. It won't be long before she cannot manifest at all. I don't have much time.
I lift my t-shirt over my head and let it fall to the floor. Opening my arms, I welcome her into a bare-skin embrace.
She cocks her head, as if puzzled for a moment, then moves toward me. The smell of her isn't so awful any more. I'm getting used to it, I guess. Everything in here is already so coated with the stuff, I could hardly help doing so. The orchids are dying, their leaves starving for oxygen, smothered by the greasy soot, the tiny bits and pieces of her life that flew through the air and became part of me.
My life.
My home.
"You're taking me home," I whisper as she steps into my arms. I pull her close, cracking her blackened bones, shattering them. Jagged edges press into my skin as she begins to fall to pieces. They draw blood, lots and lots of blood, nourishing her even as it pours, floods, drains away from me. Soon I will be gone, no more in this world — I'll find my home, my real home. The pain will stop.
She cries, a high keening sound melding with the wind that rushes through the gaps and spaces that make up what's left of her.
Scenes From the Second Storey Page 9