I used to share a house with three of the biggest geeks you ever
saw. They were computer programmers. I had my own excuses.
The four of us had discovered just how viciously we valued our
privacy by sharing a two-bedroom squat. I do not recommend sharing a
space that small with anyone you're not deeply in love with, or who
isn't a very small tank of fish. Mike used to try to cheer us up by
riding around the apartment on his unicycle
in his underpants, which was funny for a while, especially when he
was cooking, but then he'd bump into a stack of somebody's stuff
(stacks were our primary storage technique: clothing, books, discs)
and knock crap all over the place and we'd all swear and get pissed
off and wish we had rooms to storm off to and doors to slam, but we
didn't, so we spent a lot of time at waffle
house instead. We usually went there together, which I realize
is funny. They're good guys.
When Jackson's boss suddenly realized he had hired a coding
savant he could not afford to lose, and quintupled his salary, the
first thing Jackson did was to start looking for a house. He said
he'd pay for it and we all said Oh we couldn't let you do that, when
what we all meant was, Please be serious, there will be some bad
homicide if we don't get out of here soon. He was serious. He found
a house in the classifieds and we moved.
Our new home had two floors, plus attic and basement. I'd never
had so much room to spread out in. Even shared among four, it was
more than enough space for everyone to have a bedroom and separate
work area. Jackson was quite the darling of the house for a while.
Our salaries couldn't compete with his so we showed our appreciation
in the ways we could afford: Conrad washed his Honda, I cooked, and
Mike kept his room admirably free of accumulated filth for a far
longer stretch than we'd ever seen. It all embarassed Jackson
terribly and I think he was glad when we fell off our weird
gratitude-driven habits and went back to being pigs
and bickering over whose turn it was to do the god damned dishes.
The house was fully wired, but the power was a little iffy. I
was raised by my grandparents, so I had an edge: I was able to show
off lots of previously useless skills, adjusting the flues of
fireplaces, trimming the wicks of kerosene lanterns, and generally
making sure we didn't burn the place to the ground. One day I came
home to find Conrad
kneeling on the living room hearth, running his hands over the
stones. Where is it, he wanted to know, Where's the thingy?
There's no gas, dorkus, go chop some wood. The boys learned
to hit Save every three minutes, but still, sometimes the lights
would flicker and I'd hear three distinct shouts of godDAMMit from
all corners of the house.
None of us owned much furniture other than sad hollow mattresses
and folding chairs, and most of that got taken out to the curb,
fast, after we saw the ridiculously elegant stuff the house was full
of. None of us were experts on antiques but we all knew that beanbag
chairs and pressed-wood card tables don't go with maroon velvet
divans and glowing mahogany. It was elegant. We hated to ruin the
effect with our pcs
and xboxes. But we did. I got used to typing while engulfed by a
massive chair whose gnarled legs ended in lion's feet, my keyboard
and monitor lonely on the end of a table built for twelve.
The house came complete with curtains, paintings, dishes. A few
lovely sepia-toned photos
in copper frames. The wallpaper was beginning to peel at the edges,
and the carpet had worn a bit thin in the halls, but everything was
in amazingly good shape for its age, cheerfully frozen in the era of
the previous tenants. It was like living in a charming, historically
accurate dollhouse, or a museum, or someone's odd antiquated dream
of the past. We weren't sure how old the house was, or who had lived
there, and we had no one to ask. Our landlord was a small, silent
man who preferred to receive the rent by mail.
At first we did not explore - in a house so filled with personal
relics of someone
else's life, we felt like we were staying overnight in a stranger's
grandma's very weird home. The attic was eventually too much
temptation for me, and I climbed up the terrible rickety wooden
ladder and through the trapdoor. By the time the boys got home from
the grocery store I had found the most amazing trunk full of
artifacts. Connie
came up the ladder to find me rustling around in a high-collared wedding
dress.
And in the hope chest, under layers and layers of lace, was
Sarah's diary. The leather was cracked and the pages were crispy
with age. We couldn't wait.
We read from it every night after dinner. We gathered in the
parlor, the one room we kept free of all modern junk. No Depeche
Mode cds lying around, no Snickers wrappers. We sat on ponderous,
brocaded loveseats and listened to Mike decipher the spidery scrawls
in the little book. He read slowly and made it last. We watched the
grandfather clock's brass pendulum gleam back and forth. We kept it
wound although it was never right - the ticking did not measure
accurate seconds, the bird jumped out at random and disconcerting
intervals, and who can say, really, in which direction the hands
were moving?
We learned that Sarah had married Benjamin, a wealthy mill owner
who had built the house to impress her. It worked. We learned that
the marble for the mantels of the eight fireplaces had been shipped
from Italy at enormous expense, and that the immense and curving
bannister had been hewn from the trunk of a single tree. This
sounded like nonsense, so we went to check. We slid our hands all
over it; such a smooth wood, it left the illusion of having applied
an opulent oil to our palms. We found no seams.
We learned that Benjamin had died only a few years into the
marriage. After his death, Sarah had nothing
to say for several months. The next entry, though, was full of an
enthusiasm that seemed anything but forced. She'd started painting.
She learned to sew. Once, she admitted to have initially thrown
herself at these pastimes as a way of distracting herself from
grief. But, she said, despite this broken heart, she was not yet
done with her life.
It
was Conrad who had the hunch, went looking, and was right. The
paintings and sketches which cluttered the piano and hung on every
wall each bore a tiny S, often hard to spot, twisting among tree
branches or edging the curve of a cloud. I fell asleep each night in
Sarah's old bedroom, under a sheet edged with delicate needlework -
blue tulips which danced on the ends of S-shaped stalks. In my
dreams it was prounounced shhhh, shhhh.
Connie got hooked on the things. I'd come in and yell Anybody
Home, get no answer, and scare the shit out of myself by bumping
into a person where I did not expect to find one. Gazing into a
canvas, he would go into a contented trance. We made fun, but the
more I thought about it, the
nicer a place it seemed he had found, so I started standing with
him, at first trying to see
what he was seeing, then relaxing
into my own experience, imagining myself creating the same shapes
with charcoal or pencil or paint.
So of course she turned us all into artists. I will not say we
had talent, natural nor developed, but that didn't worry any of us.
It was enough to lie on the floor in front of a fire, making marks
on paper. Connie
went through this phase where he insisted on drawing me with
butterflies tangled in my hair, or feathers, or tiny little fish.
It had once felt wrong to rifle through a stranger's belongings,
but soon enough we stopped thinking of her as a stranger,
and we could not imagine living anywhere else. We agreed that this
was the first place any of us had chosen to live that had ended up
feeling like home. Jackson decided to buy the house. We voted him
Dad.
We made ghost jokes, of course. We live in a haunted house ha
ha. OooOOOOoooo. In private, though, Jackson admitted that he often
felt as if we had an invisible fifth roommate, and that he gave her
a little nod every time he entered the house. Mike, drunk and
urgent, once whispered that he often felt like Sarah was always one
room over from wherever he was. He would hear distant footsteps or
the shish of pages being turned, way over on the fuzzy edge of
perception, but he could of course never catch her at it, though he
tried. And Connie, who told me everything, admitted he often woke
himself up at night by talking to a woman
whose face he could not quite discern, nor touch, which he wanted
very badly to do. And I - well, I thought about her all the time.
None of this was creepy. It was just the way things were. We liked
it.
We stopped spending so much time goofing
around with electricity and started talking to each other a lot
more, every day. None of us had ever had anyone to talk
to every day before. Not for this many days in a row. We had all
been hurt enough times by worse people to be able to really
appreciate the good ones. I mean me, of course. I felt lucky all the
time and I knew I was right.
When people are allowed to live the way they'd most like to, in
a happy house filled with the people they like best (tangible or
otherwise), funny
things start to happen. Jackson quit speed. I quit prozac. Mike
planted a garden and found out he could cook.
Jackson started making a comic book. Conrad started touching
me, and I found out I liked it.
So it was quite a shock when our landlord stood grimly in our
parlor and said That is not a possiblity. He turned to leave.
What? What do you mean, not a -
He said we were not well suited to the house. He said we could
not buy it. He said something about development, and the house
shortly being torn down to make room for a - No! (Out of
whose throat did that burst? All of us, or someone who was no longer
there?)
The landlord stopped and looked at each of our faces. He said,
Why should you want to live here?
Because we love her.
He closed his eyes and stood there, looking tired, looking like
a tired little old man, but smiling, which we had never seen him do,
but there was no time to think about that because we were all caught
in a crash, a, I don't know what it was, a sonic wave, an invisible
WHOMP that caught us all in the chest, what happened?
You might think death will be the biggest thing to happen to
you, maybe you're right, but there are other moments which will end
you just as thoroughly, or begin you. What happened? The air did
something, it changed form, we could see it ripple. A shimmer, hard
to see, but there, we all saw it, we are skeptics and math
majors but we saw, it was all around us and it was inside us
and it was so LOUD, it was like a deafening chord of music when you
weren't expecting any music at all, it was, forgive me, there isn't
any vocabulary for this, what happened will not be punctuated -
What happened to us? It's easier to repeat the question
than to explain the answer, there are many answers. A lot happened
to us. We were opened up. We were taken to the edge of something
that might have stopped our hearts, then sent
us home safe. We were given a flicker of time in which an entire
other life might be carried out, birth to death, as an exercise in
paying attention, as a gift.
We were electrified but we were not afraid. Somebody gave us the
truth in a lightning bolt : the
world is warm and likes having us in it. The room spun; I
thought for a second that the house was falling down, but it was
only me, and I woke up back here, my night-silent apartment, in what
I used to think was my real and only life, lying in the same
position as I'd fallen, with the word Sarah
audible in my room, I heard it, I heard it, she was there.
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