by Jac Jemc
I return to the house and realize I’ve left the back door wide-open. We’re so certain of our fear that we don’t think in those binaries anymore: inside outside, good evil, known unknown, fact fiction. There’s nothing to eliminate. There’s no way for us to know the same thing with our separate brains.
I fill a glass with water. I inspect it for spots of mold. I stare out of this container we’ve placed ourselves in. From every window I can see the neighbor’s house, the woods out back and to the side, the street, all at once, from every view. I imagine our home folded out like a map of the earth. I look out instead of in. I wonder where the break falls, like that scar that pulls the Pacific Ocean in half so we can see the whole flat world in a single glance. I think of the hidden rooms. I try to piece together a blueprint in my head. When the spaces don’t fit together, my mind breaks them apart, like resetting a bone.
I notice a shadow move in the house next door. Sure enough, there is Rolf’s face in the window. He stares at me for a moment, then is gone. I am wishing that I had proof. Whom would I show it to? I am reevaluating my allegiances.
72
I KNOCK ON Rolf’s door. I wonder if I actually saw him. I consider calling the police. I don’t know if what I have to tell them is truth, though.
What I do instead is return to the basement of my own home. I start pawing at the walls. I shove the cabinet out of the way to look at the stain. I grab a sledgehammer from the workbench. I barrel through the plaster. Nothing is hiding behind it as I’d hoped. The stalactite and stalagmite growths of dripping minerals from the edge of the foundation gather where the beads drop and land. I’m reminded of the subway stations back in the city. The growth is so gradual. The natural fights its way into our man-made world.
I run my hands around the rest of the basement walls. I see a shadow beneath the paint at the bottom of the stairs. I scratch at the wall with my fingers. The plaster lodges under my nails, stinging. I traipse to the workbench again. I rifle through the mess of my previous disturbances. I find sandpaper.
I will perform a dig. I will rough away the top layer of paint. I will uncover a truth.
I start wiping at the wall with the coarse square. The faint gray line becomes darker. I follow the line. I scratch down its length, like driving slowly in a snowstorm.
What I uncover is another face. It is not unlike the others that have shown up more plainly, a squared-off circle of sorts. I swipe at the middle. I find its crude features. I wonder if what I’m doing counts as drawing. Like the wood being carved away from a printing block, am I bringing these figures into being after all? Have I done this before?
I continue scratching. I find more of them: faces, a few stretching themselves down to shoulders. The plaster is thin in spots. A hole forms itself perfectly in the center of an eye or in the maw of a mouth. I try to look beyond them to see what is on the other side of this wall. My logical mind tells me it should be the furnace room.
I can’t see anything but darkness. I tell myself to get a flashlight. I obey.
I return downstairs. Piles of plaster dust the ground. I should have put on a mask. I think of what was trapped behind the walls that I might have released. I think of the mold crawling down my throat.
I pull myself into a formation. One arm aims the flashlight through a hole above my head. My eye is situated at another opening. I flip the switch in my hand.
The space I find is not the furnace room. It’s a skinny path between walls. Maybe even a slim hallway. It’s big enough that a person could walk through it by shuffling sideways.
A bed, narrow as an army cot. Pillows and dolls, covered in filth, litter the floor. Unframed photographs leaf the walls. My eyesight goes in and out. I see a class picture of Julie’s. I find a photo of my family on the beach when I was a teenager. A snapshot of a young girl I don’t know, blinking against the sun. I feel certain that the picture of a man fishing on a familiar-looking dock is Rolf.
73
I’M HIDING OUT in the floor’s shared ladies’ room when Connie finds me. She recognizes my shoes under the door and knocks. I panic and try not to answer. My head is unspun. I feel parched from crying. Too disoriented to understand why the walls are thumping at me, and too paralyzed to slide back the lock. She makes the sacrifice of allowing her knees to touch the tile so that she can peer under the stall’s door to find me sitting on the closed toilet seat, my face streaked with tears. “Can you unlock the door, Julie?” When I don’t move, she slithers under, saying, “I must really care.” She struggles to stand, unlocks the door, but doesn’t try to maneuver out yet. “You can’t hide in here all day, Julie. What happened? You were holding it together.”
“More. More since you found the new bruise.”
“What more?”
I’m feeling protective of myself again and look down instead of answering.
“It’s okay. You’ve got to pull it together, though. People are looking for you.” She leads me out of the stall and makes me splash water on my face. She hands me a paper towel to dry it.
In the mirror, I catch sight of my face, looking as if my plates have shifted, as if half my face were on a different level from the rest.
“Ready?”
I follow Connie out of the bathroom.
While we’re walking the concrete hall back to the office, I see the two detectives flash a badge at the front door and the office manager points at me, though I would bet Connie wonders if she’s pointing at her, too, and they stride toward us. “Ms. Abbatacola, I hope you’re well this morning. Mrs. Khoury, it’s you we’re hoping to talk to. Is there somewhere we could speak privately?”
I lead them to the big conference room next to the entrance.
“We’re sorry to disturb your workday, Mrs. Khoury. We have a few questions. First, do you recognize these photos?”
The taller detective, O’Neill, shows me pictures of the drawings on the wall of our bedroom and I wonder what else they know. All of it? The way the search engine has bounced my entire life back to me as if I were being surveilled? I convince myself it’s nothing so complicated. They must have stopped at the house and James was home to let them in. I pause and know there is only one way to answer their question. “I do.”
“And can you tell us who made these drawings?” The detective cocks his head to the side.
“I thought it was my husband, but he denies it.”
“And you saw the drawings that showed up on the wall of Ms. Abbatacola’s house, right?”
I see where he’s headed and believe I’ll gain credibility if I get there first. “I did, and, yes, they look like the ones in our bedroom.”
“But you didn’t inform us of the drawings that appeared on the wall of your bedroom?”
I wonder if the shorter one, Poremski, ever talks. He doesn’t look like the muscle between them, and I look him up and down trying to figure out what part he plays, before turning back to the one asking the questions. “Like I said, I thought that my husband was playing a trick on me, so no.”
“But not even after you saw the vandalism in the home of your friend?”
There’s a knock at the door and my coworker, Tim, peeks his head in. “Whoa, I’m sorry! I’ll book another room!” He ducks out.
“I’m not sure I have a good answer for you.” All of my other worries show up again, and I change tacks: “Have you found our neighbor yet?”
“We haven’t. I’ll take that to mean you also haven’t seen him?”
I rub my forehead. “No.”
“Okay, Mrs. Khoury. That’s all for now. Please let us know if you think of anything else that might be helpful.”
“Did you talk to my husband?” I have the urge to know that our stories match up.
“We did.”
“And?”
“I’m sure he’ll fill you in,” one of the detectives says, and they excuse themselves.
74
I WANT TO assume Julie is the one to blame because it feels easy and possibl
e. All of the signs indicate I’m the one doing the drawings. Even alone in the basement, looking at myself, I come in and out of focus as the culprit. I wonder if I’m losing my grip. I refuse to believe it. I let myself accuse Julie instead. I don’t hold back. I flood with all the pent-up anger that she moved us to this tiny town. I blame her for stopping me from gambling. I blame her for thinking it was a problem. If I’d had a little more time, my luck would have turned around. I think of the bruises on her body. There’s no reason for them. I imagine her running herself into walls. She makes the marks appear. She was never trapped in a secret room as she says. Maybe there is a grave in the backyard. Maybe it’s filled with the body of Rolf. I’m furious that, through all of this, she’s dismissed my fears and demanded sympathy and comfort for her own. I have visions of the police arriving and taking me away for our neighbor’s murder. I imagine Julie looking at me as if I’ve disappointed her. That feeling is so familiar I do the only thing I can think of to avoid it.
That afternoon I pretend to be Julie. I write letters confessing to causing all of this. I explain how she did it. I write that she drugged me. She clawed holes in the walls. She hid Rolf’s body. She made every drawing. Every sentence paints a motive. She did it for proof of life. She did it to scare me off. She did it as revenge for my misdeeds. She wanted to test her limits. She wanted to teach me. She wanted to teach herself.
I try to mimic her handwriting. I get pretty close. I throw away the ones that look least accurate. I leave the good drafts on the table. I go back to the basement.
The holes I made in the wall are gone.
I can’t see where they were. I don’t know where to search. I run my hands along the surface. I don’t find what I’m looking for. No wet plaster. I go to the tool bench in back. The drill is in place, the battery cool. The mop is dry. I sit down on the stairs in front of the wall. I try to convince myself that what I saw was real. My memory feels fuzzed out, coated. I think about grabbing the sledgehammer and confirming what I found behind the wall here. I rush through ways that Julie could be responsible for this. I look in the darkroom to see if she’s hiding there. I call her name. And again. My mind keeps snapping into focus, knowing Julie isn’t the one who fixed this wall. My thoughts blur again, but then I can see she’s not guilty of the rest either. At least not all of it. I consider writing letters where I take the blame myself. Fatigue clarifies in me. I check the time to find it’s only 6:00 p.m. Still, I call it a night.
I glance at the letters on the dining room table as I head upstairs. I should shred them. I should turn them into pulp before Julie gets home. Their edges are beginning to whorl. The air of the house spoils even crisp paper. I pause. I watch as one piece rolls itself into a tube. It rocks back and forth, ever so slightly, as if under an invisible hand. A sickening flicker. I reach the bedroom. I collapse on the foot of the bed. I contort.
75
JAMES OR NOT-JAMES doesn’t respond when I call out, “Hello?… No? Nothing? You’ve wandered off again? Transformed into someone else I don’t know? Left me here talking to myself?” I envision him pummeled by the tide at the lakefront, facedown in an alley somewhere. I think of him crawling back into the earth like a worm after rainfall.
The stench in the house has gone from awful to unbearable. On the table, I see sheets of loose-leaf curling themselves in the moist air, and on them I find my own handwriting laying bare confessions, saying I am to blame for all of the bullshit that’s been going on in this house, sneaking crushed pills into the food and unscrewing pipes in the basement and clotting them with huge handfuls of mold and pinching my skin so hard it shows the deep colors of bursting blood vessels.
I do not remember writing these and the fright nerves through me as I wonder how and why they exist. I take them out onto the deck with me because I think I might choke on the air of the house and I sit on the step and read through them again and wonder at what I don’t know or can’t remember about myself. Certainly James or not-James read them and that is why he has gone and while I’m reading about the bruises, my hands go to their evidence and I’m shocked at how paranoid and frantic I sound in the letters, each one a bit different, giving alternative reasons for why I’ve done what I’ve done, as if what the pages contain isn’t truth, but an attempt to find answers by claiming guilt.
I ask myself what I should do, because if I leave the letters out, it’s like saying I agree with them, that I accept that these missives have been written in my hand. If I hide them, maybe nothing will come of it, but if someone finds them, if the detectives decide to gut the house looking for evidence, they’ll be certain the confessions are true, hidden away for a moment of courage. I could burn them, but if I need them as evidence later, to show how I was being manipulated or how I was out of my mind or how their multiplicity proved that none of them was true, what would I do? I go into the house and bury them in James’s office, in a file he won’t look at again, a tax-return folder from years ago.
Let’s pretend it’s James who knows this secret instead of me and let’s take away the blame. Is he trying to protect himself or me? Whom would I rather shelter than harm?
I walk upstairs and James’s or not-James’s body hulks at the foot of the bed like a pet. I strip and climb into bed, leaving the man who thinks he knows so much below me.
I look at us from the outside and think of the Google search as proof. My thoughts guide themselves like imitations. If there was another voice in my head, what would it sound like? I try out different inflections, like writing a script, until one of the voices comes through easy and clear, less like I’m making it up and more like I’m listening. I wonder if that’s how those letters got written. I ask myself if the voice that wrote those letters is my own, my other voice, a not-Julie’s, like James is not-James, if it was this other voice that took over for a while, thinking of the neighbor constantly, feeling what it is to be absent of oneself and worrying that my shape might shift the way the house seems to grow and shrink, the way the figures on the wall breathe, the way the bruises pulse with unusual life, the way the stains glow and dim and the pipes blossom, and I decide to keep a close eye on myself. I decide it is best if I note where I end and the world begins, boundaries to be defended.
I can feel the boggy gas traveling from James’s or not-James’s warm mouth toward me and it nails me down against my pillow. Are we always barely missing each other? Our edges brush. Our hairs stand on end, reaching.
“James,” I say, and not-James emerges, looking smaller, like catching a hummingbird still. My eyelids feel thin, as if too much light is getting in. I pull his hand so his face tilts up at me on the mattress and I well over and feel the fluke of a second self filling me up.
“We can get through this, Julie. We don’t have to give up.”
My mind runs like hell from such empty reassurance and I croon to him, singing in my sweetest voice, forming notes and phrases with the threads in my throat: “If you can’t breathe, punch a hole in the window. If you dive deep into the ocean and the pressure gets too great, beware your eardrums burst first and ring like so many coins from a slot machine and you wish your fortune away and you wonder what you thought you were missing, and your hearing starts to take the form of roots, spiraling deeper into your brain, looking for water. Minutes are measured with the beat of your blood, and someone holds your head against the mat a second too long, and the cartilage separates and your flesh fills with blood and hardens, like a sausage, fat and dense, and like that, the seedy vortex has shifted, and your head is coated in prayer, and half of your brain is filled with your slow, stuttering pulse, while the other side tries to sprint. Maybe morning is no special gift. Hostile darkness no longer taxing, just the norm. How dusk feels different than dawn despite the light measuring the same. Like the sun might be burning itself out. Like watching the day in—”
76
“—REVERSE. REACHING MORNING. The sun sinking instead. The puddles of dew retreating back into the lawn. The idea that you ca
n feel anything correctly. A notion of perfect worthlessness. Something negative being flawless. A mold depressing itself to take in the media, space that must be emptied before it can be filled. The mold breaking around the sculpture but the sculpture holding still. The cage door opens and the bird stays put. The walls pull apart and the floors stack in place like pancakes. Shadows forming chalkier in the dusty evening than in the plump, damp morning. How hard it is to have surprising feelings when you know someone is watching. Being startled out of sleep by the sensation of falling. No forcing yourself to feel. How out of havoc and anger and threats can come veneration. How we think of God as old and all of our saviors seem to die young, turning over inside themselves while the world has them pinned.”
I listen to Julie run herself out. I recognize this jag of her mind as something close to what my own did when I was stalled in front of that photograph at the museum and when I let myself lie down in the water. As a driver in a figurative ten-car pile-up, I can tell if I am going to live. Watching it happen beside me now, I am searching a spiderwebbed windshield for my wife. I can’t know if she will be okay. That broken monologue whirs out into the space between us. The singing has turned into a chanting, like the drone of the house pulled into focus. I drag her in close to me to shrink the gap. “Julie, stop. Shh.” She jerks away. Her face is her own, but behind her eyes is something unfamiliar. Her pupils have ballooned. The whites of her eyes glow.
“How we rehearse and consider what to keep private and what to share. How this transforms. How being completely open with your opinions and feelings can strip away intimacy, honesty traded for privacy. Switch to refusing to answer. How it can be hard to imagine yourself a hero with all of your faults laid plain. Keeping secrets so you have something to share. How a priest might lose control of the secrets he’s been given. How a priest might hold so many stories while also creating his own. How a therapist might whisper the things she knows into her pillow at night to make room for more. Compassion fatigue. How there is no limit to how many times you can tell a person, I understand. How it might still not be enough. How language lies mostly in the flourishes that catch our ears. How language can sometimes only be heard in its consequences. How it can’t stop being heard after that. How it might be easier to know what to say than when not to speak. How both silence and speech can expand until you’re tightly in a corner. How contagious intensity deserves a name of its own. How only one of you might not need the other. How the other still needs to be needed. How impossible that situation becomes. How forgetting can pick up as much as it leaves behind. How necessary it is to reveal your disappointment. How life depends on it. How endings can’t happen without this. How you’re required to gaze at theft as it happens. How you mustn’t look away. The wisdom of watching the candle flames lick the legs of the ladder and keeping quiet. How the strain becomes less frustrating and is no longer called to mind. How desire can be weakest when the fulfillment is most plausible.”