The Dwelling: A Novel (51 page)

“I’m drunk,” he admitted, to the room. He drank again. As he began to relax, he glanced around. As soon as he did, the image of the man began to waver, shimmer, as if through beveled glass. The image went double, then seemed to fade. He squinted, focusing on where the old man had been. Where he had been was only dark now. Slowly, without conviction, he glanced around the rest of the room, but the old man was gone.

“Where’d ya go, old man?” he called. His voice echoed off the back wall. He shook his head.
Bad drunk.
And finished off half of the rest of the bottle in one swallow. The computer hummed. The light glowed from the screen. It was turned away from him, facing his chair. He pulled the rest of himself up through the hatch.

He stood up, unsteadily, and lumbered two steps over to his computer, kicking the leg of the little table and making computer and lamp shudder. An ashtray fell over the side, hitting the floor and sending up a cloud of ash, cigarette butts scattering. He hardly noticed.

He pushed the screen of the laptop open all the way and was not surprised to see something written there, but he swallowed and looked up to where the old man had been.

As he read, the oily, acrid smell from previous nights clouded around his head, stinking up the air and making him nearly gag. The source of the smell came to him casually, as if it were something he’d known all along but hadn’t realized.

Burning flesh.

He’d smelled it before. Once, completely baked
(pun intended, ha ha)
he’d fallen, hands first into a ring of campfire, badly burning an elbow as he tried to avoid plunging both hands into the flames. He’d singed his hair, and burnt his shirt, but mostly what he remembered from that booze-soaked evening was the smell of his flesh, blackened and blistered after the guys pulled him out, and ripped his shirt off him. He still had a scar.

A whole page, nearly, was on the screen this time. He squinted and read as best he was able, going back several times and rereading what he might have missed, his eyes widening, his stomach turning, the dulling effect of the alcohol losing its edge.

“Pain is a catalyst,” came the voice from the other side of the table. Richie looked up just as the man came close, gliding, his feet off the floor. He held something aloft in his hand and Richie did not want to look.

“Get away,” he said, backing up. The attic was pitch black behind him. Something small scurried past him and he glanced down automatically to see what seemed to be a small child scampering past, away, fast, like an animal. “Get away,” he said, louder.

“Richie,” the man intoned, his voice resonating in the small space, “pain is your good friend, is it not? Do you not invite him into your life, yourself? We are alike, you and I.” The old man smiled his sad smile and Richie saw not lines on his face, not lines of age, but scars. He was scarred, slashes on his cheeks so long they appeared to be flesh, wrinkled by age.

The man came closer. “I had to die. They were coming for me. But I did it my way, a way that would extend my pain into pleasure and I would go out the way I chose.” He smiled widely. “I hurt and hurt and hurt.” What seemed like a laugh came rolling out of the scarred face, the thing’s eyes black without irises.

“Do you deny that you live your life, hurting all the people who love you? Your lady friend, your son, the people you hold dear and close? Do you deny that?” He tilted his head condescendingly to Richie.

Richie, unable to speak, stared.

“You hurt them, you hurt yourself, and then you blame others. All the while you are consuming your own flesh.” He clicked at him with his tongue, his mouth black, fathomless.

“You would never hurt anyone again, Richie,” he said, and he held high what he had been holding in his hand. A rope, held by the end, the other end, looped.

A noose.

Richie stared, unable to take his eyes from it. There was a full silence in the room, that waiting sound that he had heard before, breath held. It seemed to him that the attic was crowded with souls, listening to hear what he would say, watching to see what he would do. The rope dangled in front of him, close, just beside the table.

Your lady friend your son the people you hold—

A lifetime without smoothing the sharp edges.

He reached out, the rope a lifeline, his fingers stretched.

And the rope disappeared.

Like a switch being thrown, he was staring at a blank screen, the only sound in the room the hum of his computer, the screen white and pure.

In his hand was his beer. He felt his fingers around it. He raised it to his mouth, draining the bottle.
Salud.

He cried self-pitying tears that did not last long. He was much, much drunker than he’d thought he was. Once convinced of that, and the conspiracy against him, he shut his computer off without bothering about details and went back down the hatchway, stumbling off the last two rungs of the ladder in haste to get out of the dark and into the light. The hall was dark too, the only light from the bathroom, through which he could hear the slow, steady drip of the tap. And he knew who would be in there.

Richie plunged into his bedroom and closed the door. He pulled the chair over to the door, the clock on it pulled off violently by the cord, and propped it in front of the door.

“Stay out,” he mumbled. And he crawled into the bed, fully dressed, and pulled the covers over his head, hiding away, like a little kid. He did not sleep. Not then. As the drink began to wear off, he thought less about the man and more about the rope.

The subconscious is a powerful thing,
he thought, before drifting off, finally, in the wee hours of the morning, when the adrenaline began to subside and his body, too, began to succumb to exhaustion.
The subconscious can tell us things we really feel.

Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.

Richie did not bother with the pretext of writing. He had other things on his mind.

Carefully he went over each and every moment of pain that he had caused anyone, from his mother to his son. The things he had said to people, casually and deliberately. The million fights he’d had with Jennifer. The way he and Janis had broken up, when RJ was still Richie Junior and only a month old. He tortured himself.

Once
(drunk,
of course, everything bad could be traced back to some drunken incident or other, and he became relentless about admitting to himself the unadorned, naked truth) he had accused his mother of driving his father to his death. He had, up until this time, only an internal memory of the event, only his own thoughts, scattered and dull and one-sided as they were, but now he sat and looked at the terrible memory from the outside. How he had stood above her in the old house he shared with his brother Jimmy after college—the drunk tank they used to call it—he stood above her, the traces of a dinner she had cooked still on the table, his finger pointing, so close to her face that she backed away from it, spittle coming out of his mouth as he denounced her for her sins as unearthed by him. He remembered her own cries and the way she bent over nearly double as though there were a pain in her stomach, and the way she buried her face in her hands and was unable to speak for minutes, until she managed somehow to regain control and stood up without another word and left. She didn’t talk to Richie for several months after that, something that he took as an admission of guilt; it was shame that kept her away. He and Jimmy had many drunken conversations about that, none sober. Jimmy lived in Los Angeles now, managing a successful restaurant; he was married, no kids, and was a Buddhist. Or as Richie described it to his buddies (when asked), “a candy ass.”

He got himself a new girlfriend when Janis was nine months pregnant, and told himself it was because they were fighting all the time. But they were fighting because Richie was never around. He resented the fact that Janis, enormously pregnant, seemed to need something constantly. She, of course, never found out about the girlfriend, but when she finally kicked him out, when RJ had been just over a month on the planet, he told his buddies that it was a mutual decision. Then he dumped the girlfriend, to be free.

For two days, Richie wallowed in pain. His and everyone else’s.

Upstairs in the attic, there were the sounds. Sometimes he heard them and wanted to go up. He did not drink. For the first day, he didn’t even want to. By the second day he thought about it, but was terrified that, in drunken judgment, he would wander up into the attic again.

A terrible bleakness settled over him and the whole house. When dark came at night, he sat in it for hours, brooding, forgetting to turn on lights until he heard something from upstairs, or outside. Once he heard laughing. Like little kids playing. The tap dripped into the tub. Something thumped down and was dragged in the attic.

He had truly, truly loved Jennifer. She had not been a crutch, or a bauble to make him feel better when he was down. She had come into his life in a flush period, an extra in a time of abundance. He had never cheated on her; she’d never done it to him. On some level, even when things turned very, very bad, he had only been daring her to leave him, the feeling that she ultimately would so overwhelming that he couldn’t bear the interim between her being his and then not his. By the time things started to go sour on him, when he couldn’t write and drinking (his real love) became his crutch, his bauble, he had become tired, exhausted by the waiting, and expected her to book out on him with every drink. He wondered, in his gloom, if he had been pushing her to it, tired of waiting, deciding subconsciously to act.

Richie’s first novel had an alcoholic in it. Those were the days before Jennifer, and after Jimmy; no roommates, no soulmates, just him and his computer. He’d worked then, full-time at a direct-marketing company, writing form letters selling copiers, long-distance companies, upholstery cleaning, and spaying or neutering your pet. He’d get home at night, sometimes feeling like he was completely out of words. Come seven-thirty, he would have wandered over to his typewriter and worked on something. He’d written a lot of short stories then.

The first novel had that alcoholic in it. He’d done a little bit of research on alcoholism. He’d talked to a guy at AA, who was aggressive and defensive. He’d gone down to the library and read dated periodicals on old research. He’d buried himself in the old man. It scared him some. That had been a pretty dry period.

There was a genetic element to alcoholism. They were undecided as to how genetics played its role, it was complicated; at the time, that information was new. One of the complications was nurture. The child’s environment might or might not have played as large, or larger, a role in developing an alcoholic as genetics. In other words, the times when (say) RJ visited and the house was full of empties and overflowing ashtrays, and the stink and reek of stale beer and spilled wine—that was nurture. And, genetically, the kid was covered. He had it both ways.

When thoughts strayed too close to RJ, Richie mentally backed off. He couldn’t face thinking about his son. Thinking about his son made him feel soiled and depraved; as though even if his thoughts touched the boy he, too, would be soiled and ruined.

Richie swathed himself in pain and dirt, tormenting himself with memories that were irreversibly bad; he was incapable of conjuring anything good from the past, and if, by chance, he happened on something in the course of the wretched accounting, it was only due to its proximity to something horrible, and it was then irrevocably tossed into the dirt with the worst of it, tainted forever by one moment in time too close.

He did this until the space in which to breathe became smaller and smaller, and he felt unworthy even of the effort.

The phone went unanswered. Newspapers piled up in front of the door. The mail stuffed the box.

He brooded and wandered the house, unconsciously eyeing railings and ceiling fixtures, moving up and down the stairs with deliberation and reflection, going from room to room, never straying far from the truth.

Richie had not bothered to get out of bed when morning came on Wednesday. He lay there, as he had most of the night, thinking. By then his thoughts were undefined, jumping from topic to topic, anecdote to anecdote, in all of the stories where he came off poorly. In all the stories he was the villain. A scourge.

The light on the walls went from vague to diffuse to morning; he still did not get up. He got up instead an hour or so after light, when he could no longer hold his bladder. Even that seemed an afterthought. Unimportant. He went to the bathroom and relieved himself, feeling no different afterward, no better, no worse, just less occupied with that one discomfort.

Between bathroom and bedroom, something caught his eye. Hanging on the knob of the banister, at the top of the stairs, something had been draped over the railing. He went closer and picked it up, expecting it to dissolve, disappear before he even touched it.

It was a rope.

It was very real. He held it in his hand, feeling its weight and the coarseness of the braid, smelled the chemically rich odor of the jute, so rough near his nose. Three strands twined together. A good strong rope. Richie sat with it on the top stair, moving it from one hand to the next, feeling its weight, its strength; its possibilities.

He looked up to the hatch on the ceiling in the hall. It was still closed, as he had left it the other night. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked it. The attic was silent. Nothing moved, nothing fell from a height, as though cut down, and nothing was dragged across the floor. A half-dozen alternative questions ran through his mind with just a ghost of the famous Bramley wit:
What are you implying? What’s the meaning of this?
There was no response to anything, and none was required.

He pressed it to his cheek, and curled himself into a ball, burying his head between his legs, the rest of the rope dangling there, a length of it running down the stairs, taking comfort in options and last resorts.

Richie played with the rope for more than an hour, trying knots and braids, his fingers and hands moving independently of thought. He fashioned a noose and undid it, several times, trying to remember where he’d learned to tie one. It was not simple. You had to have a very long piece of rope, at least six feet. You formed two loops into an S shape, running at opposite ends to each other, leaving the short side on the neck piece. The shorter piece was strung around the two larger loops, back toward the bottom, or second loop; successive loops are made, a deliberation that can only be confirmed as it begins to take its undeniable shape. The end piece, now short, is passed through the bottom loop; by pulling on the top noose, it pulls the shorter tie end through the successive loops and forms what is universally accepted as a symbol of death and punishment, pain.

What are you waiting for? Salud.

He held the noose, newly formed, his fingers sore and slivered from the coarse weave of the rope, lightly in his hands and thought how functional knots were. They each had a purpose. They were either easily undone, or nearly impossible. He’d had a book when he was a boy, just about tying knots.
The Knotical Guide?
If that wasn’t it, it should have been.

Nowhere in the book had they shown you how to tie a noose.

He tried to remember where he’d learned. Couldn’t. How was it he could remember every slight he’d perpetrated even on strangers but was unable to remember who had taught him a simple, and likely at the time, pleasurable pursuit, with its own dark attachments that young boys so adore, like tying a noose?

But he couldn’t.

Intruding into trying to remember was the wondering. How would it feel around his neck? The jute would prick and jab his flesh, soft there (and getting softer), even with his near-beard. Maybe it wouldn’t prick; maybe it would only itch, like wool. If he pulled it tight, it would pucker the thin skin on his neck and that would pinch. If he pulled it tight, the blood would be trapped in his head, the pressure intense. His eyes would—

The house seemed to take a breath and hold it. Richie could feel its eyes upon him.

And then the doorbell rang.

At first he wasn’t even sure what he had heard. The sound might have been inside his head; it might have come from one of the rooms—there seemed so many of them, and they all had their sounds. He pulled the noose off his head, the jute catching in his hair and tugging, doing it quickly, like a child caught in the cookie jar. He listened.

The bell rang again. It chimed through the house loudly, so foreign in its temporal purpose that it sounded obscene.

“Mr. Bramley?” someone called through the door. Richie was terrified, scrambling down the stairs to the landing and peering out the side window, like a madman, the noose still in his hand. The scene was absurd. A woman stood on the stoop. An ordinary woman. Familiar, somehow.

She caught his face in the window and smiled, waved. “Mr. Bramley,” she said again.

He knew her. He blinked. Had no idea if he was to let her in. He couldn’t seem to think. Was he to let her in?

The door opened of its own accord and she came in, bringing with her a burst of cold air and whirling flakes. She smiled and closed the door behind her, quickly, glancing only slightly behind the door, as though wondering how he had let her in. She brushed snow from her jacket, smiling broadly, sharing smiles between him and the house, which she glanced around, hungrily.

“Still snowing out there,” she said. She had an accent. “Pretty, though. I see you’ve kept the floors nice.”

The realtor.

As if reading his mind, she said, “Glenn Darnley. I sold you this house.” She glanced around it again, in a practiced motion. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping in this way?” She looked at him squarely, as though really seeing him for the first time. Her face went slack, and he realized what she must have seen. Dark hollows under his eyes, pouches, three days of beard, patchy and dark. Eyes red-rimmed with drink and too-little sleep. She would have smelled him too.

Richie had not yet spoken. He stood on the landing holding the rope.

Her eyes dropped to it, and then back up again, smiling, less sure this time. “Have I come at a bad time?”

There was a pause and then it struck Richie as funny, and he half-smiled, the motion unfamiliar, stiff.

He shook his head. He lifted the noose and looked at it. He let it fall to the floor. “I can take a break,” he said.

She nodded. “I’ve come to talk to you about something important, Mr. Bramley.”

He stepped down the rest of the stairs. “Would you like some coffee, Mrs. Darnley?” he asked her, having some trouble forming words in his mouth.

She declined. “Please, call me Glenn,” she said. “It’s Richard, is that right?”

“Yes.” The two of them stood awkwardly just before the archway into the living room. It was Glenn who first moved. She stepped into the living room with the curiosity of a first visit. She walked over to the fireplace and stood in front of it, as though the fire were alight and she was warming her hands. She was more familiar to him by then, but there was something remarkably different about her. Richie didn’t follow the thought long; instead he looked up nervously at the ceiling. Nothing there. All was quiet above.

“Have you used this yet?” she asked politely, even though the fireplace was clean of ashes and there was no wood nearby.

“No.”

She turned to him and smiled a little smile. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here.” She looked up at the ceiling herself, and ran a hand over the mantel. “I don’t want to ask you if you are enjoying the house.”

He stared.

“I’m dying, Richard. I don’t have many months left.” She spoke more quickly, to cut him off when he opened his mouth to speak. “I am going to present a most unusual proposal, and I do hope that you’ll consider it before turning me down.” She looked pleadingly at him, and he noticed what was different when her cheeks drooped so hollowly and her flesh seemed to hang loosely around her neck. She was thin. Very thin.