Bang!
Let’s say optimism or pessimism, depending on the nature of the explosion.
Then there are the people who get theirs by peering into the building of another. We might call them voyeurs.
And finally, finally we come to a murky place, where a murky undergrowth of people, for whom peering into buildings is not sufficient, live. Computer gamers allergic to sunlight, fifty year old internet teenagers… liars… the regretful…misfits…; it is some social fabric down there. For their intents and purposes, you see, they have done it. They have found a way in.
This is a story about a way.
One late January in the early afternoon rain, an old black station wagon pulled into the empty driveway at 239 Grant Street, Morton, plumes of smoke blown out the rear exhaust pipe. Stephen Entosic stepped out and squinted his toes over the edge of his thongs. The old neighbourhood, in his clothes and on his skin, felt cold. American Presidents. All the streets in the area had leeched their names; Abraham Street ran parallel to Grant; Rover and Woodrow Courts nestled side by side between them, George Parade connecting the greater Banyule district with bigger roads that led to Realside Tennis Club and into town. Three hundred thousand people slept in Banyule, a municipality heaving, over-lived– classrooms full up, nursing homes so crowded death wasn’t quick enough for the waiting lists, and here, by rights, was a house that deserved an ultimatum: be lived in, or be bulldozed. Wasting space was more than an inconvenience. It was a ‘fuck you’ to everyone who had precious little.
Why, Stephen always wondered, was his street called Grant and not Ulysses? This question threw itself back at him many times in his life; during the dizzy spells he suffered after training because of his low blood pressure, or while the slit wrists of his little sister lay in the bathroom sink, or in bed before sunset with a pen in his hand, it would come and pull at him, pull at him. Ulysses. The point of the reference would be blunted. Not many world leaders had taken their name from Homer. A thick yellow bush that grew around the letterbox was closing fast on the sidewalk, nobody had clipped it down. Front lawn of dead grass, weeds profusely alive, redbrick façade turned grayish, like a steak done blue by the elements. There were always cockroaches in the newspaper unless it had been clipped down.
Black hair in the stain glass panels of the door, refracted back as a kaleidoscope - long and straight, tucked in behind his ears, headbanded. There was a ring of baldness about the spot a Jewish skull cap went, but if you weren’t seven feet talk it was only visible from behind. The hazel of his eyes seemed locked in argument with skin that was pale, as if the sun had never touched it, and a four day growth of rusty hair – scattered black strands just below his eyelids, sunken – took attention from the scar dug into his right temple by the fork on the back of a hammer head. Inside, a collection of cardboard boxes sullied an otherwise vacated living room. Earwigs scurried up the dusty walls. Bedrooms were empty. Inside those walls, unattended but for insects, sour smelling, like an ancient image so decayed that even memories seemed dead and awaiting burial. You took the ashes of memories with you – encased them in concrete, tossed them into the ocean. Walking down the corridor to the bathroom Stephen found himself steeped in all of it, soaked through, an inconvenience – it has to be said – he never predicted. Still a bathroom; sink, shower, bath, toilet, vanity intact.
The old pipes groaned and flexed, and the water seemed, at first, to be the rusted copper itself escaping. Once it cleared Stephen took a few handfuls and doused his arms and face. Then he turned on the shower and then he turned on the bath. His arms were drying but the ritual was compromised, Milana must have taken the mirror with her. Fuck, fuck. A skylight made of spider webs, an arm purging water by magic, and here was Stephen Entosic without a mirror. He left the bathroom alive – sinkholes plugged, liquid and pipes seeping out like something alive, and took the note out of his jeans pocket. Her handwriting was terrible. Years ago, when he first began to decipher it, she would slide little notes under his door in bright crayon, driven across the page like sandpaper, asking that he read her to sleep with one of his stories or poems.
Stephen: I have taken everything of mine already. Everything that might be of value to you I have put in the attic. The other boxes are unknown items, some of which may also be yours. We will discuss the house and the rest of the inheritance next week. You may remember that I will not be at his funeral, nor will I have any part in organizing it. If he is to have one, I feel that it is your duty to take care of it yourself.
M.
A board of Masonite still stood on its side at the fifth stair. Steffi had cried for days when they first put it there, but she had taken to shitting and pissing in the corner by the spare bed around then and no disinfectant could wipe the ‘Steffi’s’ off that carpet. Twisted ankles, an arduous half year spent forgetting patterns, remembering new ones; one, two, three four, step over. Muscle memory. You could’ve walked blindfolded in the dark before that board, and after – even years after – there was this unshakeable feeling that each time you went in things might be different, that you would be hurt unless you kept it together, remained on your guard; after that board, it paid to be afraid of the dark. The attic was black and bedless. Carpet was all pulled up and the floorboards, nails jutting out where the joins had been, smelled like Steffi.
Even in the company of a downcast camping lantern the attic was dark; wood varnished the colour of red wine, walls the same black Masonite as the fifth stair prison bar. Six cardboard boxes stood in pairs at the center of the room like dead trees, and there, over by the little boxy window, was Stephen’s baby mobile. Suddenly he felt an insipid lack of energy or will, and was dizzy with vertigo. Attic; black and bedless. From where he stood it was clear that the balls were still affixed.
They were still bright, too bright for this place. Perhaps that had been the old man’s error. Perhaps his fatalism should have gone a step further and only affixed worn out old balls that had been played with by champions. Something was moving through the house downstairs. Vertigo eased and he went towards it, picked it up; it felt warm in his hands, or rather his hands were warmed by its touch. A connection still existed -this icon of his earliest years, one that he had desired in secret, hated in the open. House, mobile, the bathroom sink and cockroach bush pulsing with cockroaches, wispy walls resurrected by earwigs and Stephen’s footsteps strafing ashes across the quiet ground beneath him; something still connected the lines that were erasing themselves, thwarted by the arrival of this man who was a boy here once, whose longing to remember was redrafting them again. The water level was rising. Stephen was fairly certain he heard the pipes sighing with relief. Inside one of the boxes he found both of his diaries. While one looked like a regular school organizer, the other was a tremendously thick notepad bound with string, encased with the cover of a Jean Paul Sartre novel, in the French, which he couldn’t read. A moth flew out frenetically when Stephen opened the second diary, wings harassing his cheeks like butterfly kisses. There was a poem, about a ballet dancer, on the open page;
she’s dancing, oh yeah!
As I sleepwalk she’s a jewel
in this black and white nightmare.
He laughed hysterically for five minutes and the house was in rapture, before his tear ducts opened and crying came out of him, and the house was in mourning again. Duck, duck, duck, goose; walking slowly, slowly walking, around the three sets of boxes, he picked up the mobile. His wrists were sore. He had taken a lot of pills today. There was a story here, but first it had to be thought up, redrafted, imagined. Water had reached every crack and crevasse. Earwigs clung to their walls somewhat harder than they had done before Stephen came in. At last he lay on his back and fell asleep, cradling the books and a baby mobile made of tennis balls in his arms. In his dreams it would swallow the whole house, and the house would expand until it was breached like the walls of a hollow dam, and Stephen would survive, even if he drowned up there in the attic, because by the time the water reached him a story would be carved out, and unlike a life which could vanish into the ether a story would always dwell somewhere waiting to be found, then lost, then found again.
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