When I first entered 45 Spring Drive, I had no indication of how long I would be staying. Only the vague sense that this house had been important, once, if not to me, then to a family-- how big, I couldn't begin to guess. But it was a decently sized house, in a cul-de-sac tucked just a couple blocks away from a park and a pond. In one of the driveways, nine cars somehow fit bumper-to-bumper like a gift shop toy. I never saw a single neighbor get in one of those cars.I figured I somehow misanticipated their timing windows. My driveway, however, was always empty. I came to Spring Drive by the strength of my legs and my feet. The same legs and feet that, once they had arrived, seemed stubbornly reluctant to leave. The things I grew accustomed to at that house numbed all of my body like this. My fingers unfolded cold and slowly. My tongue fell into disrepair, hardly working. And as for eyes, they are only so useful below a certain seeing-level: now I see shapes for shadows, and I make company out of spectres.
So I entered the house, noticing first the shady gloom that gathered in the corners, and how I could make use of it later. I could hear only the sound of my own breath, irregular and an intrusion to the silence. It seemed no matter where I went it would never be fully silent. I was realizing that then, but I never learned it. Only when the waves of sound stop, and the chatter of primordial energies in the brain ceases, do we remember that the sound of our heart heaving sticks with us, and it seems like it will stop at nothing to let us know that we are still alive. I hated my body for being so stuck up. Every breath I took became a tightening of my throat. I went looking through the house for some sort of remedy.
The stairs to the basement had been lopped off. Though that couldn't keep me away forever, it convinced me for the time being that there were other places to be. I went into the kitchen and poked around. Sugar, honey and flour were in the oak cabinet. A couple glasses still above the sink. I expectantly looked into the bread box. A few minutes later I was shoving buttered bread with sugar on top into my mouth. The flavors melted on my tongue in a way that I loathed. I looked around a little more. Everything was so unfathomably quiet, like a cabin no one knew existed in a wood not yet discovered, and I was the first to discover the site. The bedrooms were bare and depressing. I hardly went into them, as if the bodies that had slept in those beds were still there, trapped in a perpetual nap. I went out back and lit a cigarette, making sure the embers fell through the cracks in the deck. I wasn't prepared to set fire to something until it was rightfully mine. That night I made my decision that it would be good for me to stay.
I woke up on the floor. I cursed my back and it cursed me back. As I expected, I woke up not alone. That was what happened whenever I stayed anywhere. The shadows catch up with me, they track me down like trained dogs and desecrate me. I woke up smelling french toast. Sure enough, my Nana was in the kitchen, whipping up a storm. Her perfected recipe was being put to use in this decrepit kitchen. Her eggs, which she made with milk, were also sizzling in the pan. Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice in a pitcher. It seemed like a perfectly good way to end up on the toilet. Nana acted like she hadn't seen me in years, though it feels she's here at least every other day, making me eat things and getting me thinking about things I was getting away from. I asked her what she thought of the house.
"I don't know why you always act like the man of the house, when you are just the mouse," she said.
"I don't know what means."
"You eat, eat and think about it." She grabbed her STOP sign. "I have to make sure the kids get to school safely. I nearly got run over the other day. It's not easy what I do, you know! I have to stand right in the middle of the street! Cars pass me every which way! Someone's gotta do it, though. These kids, they're all looking at their phones or their game machines, none of them pay attention."
"I know, Nana." I watched her struggle with her boots.
"Someone's gotta do it," she said again. Then she was gone.
Can you hear them come? The legions of my leisure, the empty-handed army of my history, every single one of them on their single path, like deltas flowing into a single river, flowing directly to me. I never felt any immediate danger except from myself. It became a madhouse of mirrors: at every hour of the day I had another visitor, another piece of me protruding from my consciousness, or something to that extent. It was as if the lease of the house had been signed in the name of my misery. How I put up with it for so long, I'm not sure. Probably the hope that if I listened hard enough, the lesson would be learned. I never did do very well in school. I had heard that every twenty-something ought to have a mentor. I figured, why not accept everything as my mentor? I knew I had much to learn... but my eyes were already beginning to fail, from a lack of nutrients and too much time in front of the TV. I hated watching TV but it was the only thing that stayed the same, no matter how long I did it. It was like my life, in that way.
Not everyone that came to visit me was very helpful. Some came and never left. My first girlfriend, the only person to ever hand me the pearl, showed up with her boyfriend. They blew right past me to the bedroom, where they haven't left since. Now at all hours of the day I can hear him pleasuring her, and her emphatic "Ravage me!" and moaning. Her choice of words left me drunk on my own sadness. I sat staring at the TV, with a clock just over my head, featuring birds instead of numbers. When the clock struck cardinal, I grabbed my legs and forced them towards the backyard. My third grade teacher was planting geraniums in the garden. The old, gentle grouch who gave me my driver's test was painting the shed. The circus of everything made me uneasy. Afraid of who would join me in bed, I slept mostly on the floor. I listened to the TV half the time to save my eyes the strain.
Not too far from the house was a duck pond, at least for most of the year. When the cattails started to look like popsicles, the ducks stopped visiting, and I started to miss them. The only moments I had been somewhat alone since first being there had been sitting on this bench, watching them glide through the glass, well-protected by their patented duck-oils and completely resistant to wetness. I asked them, "How is it that you spend half your life in water and yet you know not water?" Growing frustrated when they failed to respond, I kept up my peevish questioning. "Do you even know the sky? Do you clean yourself of that, too? Or how about me?" When they disappeared, I knew that blaming myself was missing the central argument, and that even ducks have a time table to keep, but that didn't stop me from kicking the maple tree, losing my footing on the black ice, and losing consciousness for a few cold hours.
In my lack of consciousness, there was a room. The room was drowning in toys. I started to clear a path to my bed, like our mother told us to do every night, and before it was time for bed I began to read a book. It was bright, colorful, with a lot pictures. My brother was doing the same from across the room, having cleared his path just the same, lost in a world of pictures just like me. Suddenly the silence fractured like the window just above my feet. I couldn't imagine what had happened. I wanted to know. I got up and looked out the window but could see nothing but night. My mom screamed at me to get away from the window. The policeman had to look hard to find the small dark rock among the toys. Earlier that night, we saw my father on the steps of the apartment complex, with his elbows on his knees and a six-pack by his feet. My mom said something to him that I no longer remember him. He must have been so drunk-- he thought the window that he broke was his own.
The next morning my father appeared. I woke up bleary-eyed and pissed. I could not open my eyes for the first twenty minutes of our conversation. The sun had been too brave that morning and I hardly slept, tossing fits on the basement floor. The owls on the oak tree had been keeping watch for me. My father stood on the other side of the counter, spreading butter on a blueberry bagel. He asked me how my homework was doing. It was the same question he'd been asking me for ten years.
"I don't have homework any more, dad," was my answer. "You know that."
"If that's what you say."
He took a bite. The crunch was deafening. I thought about kicking him in the shin but I didn't know where to begin. I scratched the crown of my foot with my toe and opened my eyes.
"Since when did you get an eye piercing?"
"Since yesterday," he said, at least I think, blueberries in his teeth and everything, it made it hard to understand him.
"How's work?"
"I don't work any more. You knew that."
Except that I didn't. I couldn't look away from his eyes. The two golden rings he had fixed in his pupils made it look like my father could see nothing but gold. I kind of understood why he did it. "Did it hurt?"
"It hurt more without them, to be honest." My father, the tortured artist. It must have hurt him, being first an insurance salesman and then a janitor, two jobs farthest away on the spectrum of artistry. I'm sure he looked at numbers and saw elegant patterns. Or murals in the swirls of shit-colored water. But what's a man supposed to do with that? I wanted to ask him about it, but thought better of it. If he really was out of a job, he needed another soon. There was no end to the loans he accumulated over the years.
"How do you expect to find another job wearing those?"
He finished his bagel. "That answers your question." He took a cigarette from my pack on the counter, and disappeared out the back.
There was at last a night that I made the mistake of moving on. I had picked up smoking inside. Whatever respect I had for the house when I arrived had vanished. The peeling walls had already started to yellow from my being there, and from an outsider's glance, it seemed there was no end to the waste piling up in the house. Cigarette butts gathered in the corners, making foul-smelling nests for the mice. I fell asleep with the TV on again and a cigarette still lit in my mouth. Orange and yellow light danced in the darkness of my lack of dreams. I woke up with warm breath on my face. Even as I opened my eyes, I felt no alarm. The lights were brilliant, hot and perfect. They made marshmallows out of plastic furniture. The black streaks on the wall were dancing, bending to the groove of the fire, grooving their way from down to up, where blazing sheets of white fell from the ceiling. The mice ran around like little bottle rockets. I could smell burnt fresh toast in the kitchen, I could smell the geraniums melting in the garden, I could smell the ash of my own breath. Down the hall, they were still going at it. I hoped in the heat of the moment they would become fused together, flesh conjoined with flesh, to create a superior form of flesh, so that they would never come apart or feel empty inside. I tripped through the burning shit laying everywhere, looking for anything that I might need. The flames whipped my cheeks. Never was I so grateful for my own saliva. Nothing was recognizable once it was on fire. Everything became an extension of the flame. I felt for a moment that even I was no longer individual, no longer a person out of place, but fully in the place of the flame. Just a dancing blaze with an outline. An orange apparition out to devour everything.
I left the house feeling full and satisfied, followed by no one.
When I came to the pond, where the ducks had returned to sun themselves, I tenderly lowered myself into the water. The cool water brought my body no relief. It had grown resistant to wetness. I floated on my back, waiting for the laws of nature to kick in, but I put my faith in the wrong solutions. The bits of charred chandelier in my skin did not flake off. My hair continued to rage like it was the fourth of July. Smoke funneled out of my mouth, like a volcano on the island of my body, floating among the ducks. I waited a long time, listening for the breathing of my body. It slowed as the sun lowered. I was unable to put out my fire. I took one last cigarette out of my pocket. It crumbled as I put it into my mouth. Then there was nothing but water, nothing but shapes above the watery film in front of me, the shadowy boats of ducks going through their channels, every which way but towards me.
