Where I End and You Begin (17 page)

“I suppose it is,” he says. But the troubled look on his face doesn’t go away. Then he shakes himself. “So what are you doing out here? Coming back from lunch?”

“I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

“Bianca!” he says, his voice reproving. “It’s almost two in the afternoon.”

“So?”

“You need to take better care of yourself.”

“That’s what Tanya says.”

“She’s right.”

I roll my eyes. “Well, if you want to come back to the dorm and make me something to eat from the peanut butter, salami, and left-over Indian food I have to my name, you are welcome to do so. I can’t be bothered. Eating is a chore.”

“I will,” he says. “But what are you doing out here? Did you just get up?”

We turn toward Marchand, and I try to think of how to reply to him. Should I tell him the truth?

...I should. For some reason I don’t want to lie to Daniel any more than I already do. He’s too good for that.

“Well, I was supposed to go over to a guy’s room that I kind of know, get drunk and sleep with him, but I decided not to,” I say.

He’s quiet. “Oh?” he says after a moment.

I look at him from the corner of my eye. “Yup,” I say.

“Any particular reason you decided not to do it?” he asks.

I give him a sharp look, but he’s all innocence and I shrug. “I decided I wanted to spend the day at home with people who actually like me instead of with people who want to use me.”

“That’s a pretty good decision.”

“I’m really bad at making good decisions,” I say. “Watch. I made this decision, and now the house will burn down. I bring disaster and destruction wherever I go.” Though, to be fair, most of it is entirely internal, but I don’t say that out loud.

“Perhaps I should hang out and make sure that doesn’t happen,” he says.

“Are you inviting yourself over?” I can’t quite hide my smile.

“Yes,” he replies. “I want to make sure you’re okay.” I narrow my eyes at him, and he looks taken aback. “What?”

I sigh. “You’re kind,” I tell him. “Someone is going to hurt you really badly some day.”

He’s quiet. We pass the music hall, one of the prettier buildings on campus. It looks almost like a cathedral. Inside, someone is playing piano, and the music floats out onto the quad, beautiful, haunting, and the leaves swirl in time with the cascading notes.

“You’ve made me think about ghost stories a lot,” he says suddenly.

I look at him in surprise. “Really? Usually I try to keep them to myself. People think I’m weird when I share them.”

“That piano sounds like it could be played by a ghost. The campus is so deserted right now it seems like we should be the only two people here.”

“I do know a ghost story about pianos,” I say.

“Tell me.”

“This one is an unfinished business story. The story goes that there was this man who worked a shitty dead end job and he hated it more than anything in the world, but he could play the piano by ear. His kid loved to listen to him play, and he’d sit down at that piano after dinner or whenever he had a day off, or even late at night when he was supposed to be sleeping and just play for hours. Finally one day he decided he wanted to start recording his magnum opus, which was in his head, but which he’d never written down because he couldn’t read music, he could only play it, and he wants his kid to be able to listen to it, you know, when he’s gone, or once the kid goes off to college or something. So he buys a bunch of recording equipment and starts recording himself playing the piano.

“But he keeps messing up because now that it’s being recorded he’s nervous. He starts drinking so he can relax, but he doesn’t know it interacts really badly with some medication he’s taking, and one day he drinks just a bit too much and he goes loopy from it combined with the medicine. He kind of blacks out, leaves the house, gets in his car and drives away.

“Of course he’s totally fucked up at that point and drives his car off a bridge into a river. His wife and kid are devastated. He didn’t finish recording his magnum opus, and now they’re poor because he’s gone.

“And then one night, his kid wakes up and hears the piano playing out in the living room. And the kid recognizes the song. It’s the magnum opus that was never finished. So the kid jumps out of bed and gets all the recording equipment together and presses record, and the piano’s just going and going and going, and the kid finally hears the whole magnum opus through, from start to finish, and it’s the most beautiful piece of music in the world. But when the recording is played back, it’s just static. The man came back to play for his kid and no one else. And that’s the story of the haunted piano that I know.”

We are almost to Marchand now. “Your stories are so sad,” Daniel says. “Ships that pass in the night. Waiting that’s never rewarded. Goodbyes from beyond the grave.”

“Better than no goodbye at all,” I say, and we are at the house. I let us in the back door.

I have a moment of déjà vu, and then it passes, quietly.

“Whoah!” Daniel says. “It’s freezing in here!”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “I forgot. The heating must have gone out. That’s why I left in the first place.” I turn and wink at him. “Getting laid warms you up, you know. Oh wait, you probably don’t.”

He glares and I laugh, and then we weave through the halls to the foyer. Tanya is still sitting in the living room and she looks up to see us enter.

“Hey guys,” she says, then narrows her eyes at me. “I thought you were going to go get laid or something.” She shifts her narrowed gaze to Daniel. I don’t even have to look at him to know he’s blushing.

“I decided not to, and I ran into Daniel on his way back from Mass.”

“What are you guys doing here?”

“I have to get something to eat,” I say. “Come on, Daniel.”

I lead him into the kitchen. In the refrigerator are the leftovers from my Friday night dinner—lamb shahi korma. The best of all worlds. I heat it up in the microwave while Daniel leans against the counter.

As my bits of dead sheep pirouette around and around getting bombarded by radiation, I turn to Daniel. “So what’s going on?” I say.

He looks at me in surprise. “Why do you think something is going on?”

I shrug. “You’re here. No offense, but we haven’t exactly done any hanging out in a general context. It’s been studying and sticking our noses where we probably shouldn’t.”

He thinks about this. “You’re right,” he says. “Why don’t we think about hanging out next weekend?”

I chew my lip and study him. “Why not today?” The sheepish look on his face is enough for me to divine his intentions and I laugh. “If you want to go exploring you just have to ask.”

“I know,” he says. “I want to go visit one of the old houses. I’m really getting back into photography again. It’s sucking me in.”

The microwave beeps and I pull my food out. I don’t want to bother putting it on a plate, so I just grab one of my forks—only two left after freshman year—and start stuffing my face. My stomach growls as I do so and I realize that Daniel was probably right—I do need to take better care of myself. Not that I’ll ever admit that his paternalistic bullshit might be on-target.

“Did you stop when you entered seminary?” I ask him as I start to shove food in my mouth. If we’re going to go somewhere we need to go now instead of later. And Daniel’s still in a suit.

“Pretty much,” he says. “But it was just a coincidence. I just didn’t feel like I had time for it.”

“So which house are we going to? We’re heading to Nompton, right?”

“Yeah. There’s one house that was abandoned in the late nineties and it’s pretty big. I wouldn’t say mansion, but it’s really nice and probably not rotting all the way through so we can go upstairs and everything.”

I can’t hide my smile at the thought. “I’m in,” I say. “Are you going to change or something?”

He looks down at his suit. “Oh, right, I should probably do that.”

I shake my head. “I can’t believe you forgot you were wearing a suit. I hate dressing up. I can never wait to take them off again and put on pajamas.”

Daniel smiles. “You may have many sins, but I believe the sin of pride is not among them.”

“I bet everything we do could be considered a sin. It’s impossible to go five minutes without sinning in your heart,” I tell him. That was big in the tongue-speaking church. Sinning in the heart. It was a good way to keep people terrified of themselves. You didn’t even have to do anything to anyone else. If you felt a negative emotion? That was a sin.

Frowning, I swallow the last chunk of lamb, then tip the container and let the sauce run into my mouth.
All emotions must be sins by that logic,
I think, because anything can be spun negatively. Love? Well, why aren’t you loving the Lord more? Fear? You don’t trust the Lord. Anger? Your pride blinds you to the Lord’s plans. Lust? Earthly pleasures keep you from fulfilling the Lord’s plan for you.

No thinking. No feeling. No fucking.

The last of the sauce drips down my throat and I sigh. It’ll be a while before I can afford that again. I cross over to the trash can and throw it in before turning to Daniel.

He’s looking at me incredulously. “You just
drank
the sauce?” he says.

I put my hands on my hips. “Why not? I paid for it. It tastes good. I’m not going to let it go to waste. That’s... I’m sure that’s some kind of sin.

“Yeah, but drinking it was gluttony.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Wrath,” I say. “I’m feeling wrath right now.”

He grins. “Pride.”

“Sloth.”

He raises his eyebrow. “Sloth?”

“I had the impulse to slap you silly, but I was too lazy to do it.”

He runs a hand over his chin. “You’d slap this sweet face?” he asks.

“You really are full of pride.”

He drops his hand. “So they tell me,” he says. Pushing away from the counter, he stuffs his hands in his pockets and brings out his keys. “Are we going or not? We have to stop by my apartment first, but then we’ll have the rest of the afternoon.”

I nod, and suddenly I am so glad I decided to come home. I’d rather spend the day with Daniel, suicidally crawling through condemned buildings than drinking bad rum, then letting some guy fuck me just so I can pretend I’m loved. I could get used to this kind of routine.

“Let’s go,” I say.

He nods, and I lead the way out of the house. The back door is closer to the quad than the front, so we weave through the lower halls, and when I push against the door, it opens easily.

We are already talking about what we will find in our next undiscovered country when I hear the door slam shut behind us, the sound cracking through the cold air like a gunshot.

I have the strangest notion that I have just heard the door of the past closing, and our lives are about to change, suddenly and forever.

Then Daniel makes a joke and I laugh, and the feeling is gone.

T
hey say that God never closes a door without opening a window.

I hate that saying. Closing a door is an asshole move, and opening a window just means you can look at, but not take part in, whatever is on the other side. Or maybe the window is there so you can throw yourself out of it. Either way, it’s a shitty deal, and why wouldn’t you just kick the door back open? That must be how ghosts get back into the world. They won’t accept such a bullshit compromise. They rebel. They come back.

Except I’ve never seen a ghost. I’ve never heard a ghost. I’ve never witnessed any evidence that they exist at all. So it must be something more than a door that separates us from
then
and
now
.

Chasms, perhaps. Pits. Meandering rivers that can only be forded one way. Across our lives, cracks appear, separating us from the past forever. Some of them are small, hardly noticeable, but others are an earthquake, a sinkhole, a bloody, jagged void a thousand miles wide, and it marks the line between
when I was young,
and
now I am this
.

W
hen we pull up outside Daniel’s apartment he turns off the car and sits there for a moment, frowning at his dashboard.

“What’s wrong?” I say.

He purses his lips. “It’s too cold for you to stay outside,” he says.

I blink. “Yeah,” I say. “So? Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

He takes a deep breath. “I haven’t invited a woman into my home, alone, since my undergrad days.”

It takes me a moment to understand what he’s saying, and then I have to giggle. “Oh, really, Daniel. I promise I won’t accidentally hump you. You’re studying to be a priest. There’s nothing inappropriate about this.”

He doesn’t answer me, and I see his Adam’s apple bob beneath his stubbled skin. “Right,” he says. “Come on.” He pops the door open and gets out, and I follow.

The car’s heating had been working so the sharp sting of frost in the air makes me gasp as I stand up. I try to keep my head down in the wind as I follow Daniel up two flights of stairs to the third floor. He unlocks his apartment quickly, then stands aside and lets me enter first, just like a gentleman of the old school or whatever. I take the gesture. It’s fucking cold outside.

It’s not
much
better in Daniel’s apartment, but it’s something. Like all grad students I have to assume he’s barely making ends meet by eating rice and beans and wrapping himself in blankets and sweatshirts while keeping the heat turned down.

The inside of his apartment is austere. In the kitchen and living room area there is a television, a beat-up loveseat, a desk where the dining room should be, and then a door leading off to the bedroom. The decorations on the walls are minimal, containing only a degree and a crucifix on the wall above the loveseat facing the TV, as if Christ can’t stand to miss an episode of
Real Housewives.

Daniel shifts from foot to foot as I look around, and I notice he’s wringing his hands, massaging them as though attempting to relax them. “Feel free to sit down and flip through the channels,” he says. “I’m just going to go... you know, throw on something better for crawling through rubble.

I smile. “Take your time,” I say, grabbing the remote and turning on the TV. From the corner of my eye I see him nod, then make a beeline for the bedroom.

For some reason, Tanya’s comments on how hot he is come back to me. The suit has not helped that impression, and I am having difficulties suppressing my Pavlovian reaction to being in the apartment or dorm room of the opposite sex.

Blech,
I think to myself.
He’s a priest. Gross. He’s totally safe.
My inner thoughts are not convincing. But being attracted and doing something about it are two different things, though, and with a huff of impatience I push the thoughts away. It feels incredibly rude to even have thoughts like that in Daniel’s sanctuary. Sleeping around with any man that I can pretend loves me is a habit I should probably get around to breaking, and I can practice doing that with the easiest one: the guy who’s not supposed to sleep with me at all.

I grab the remote and flip through channels until Daniel emerges from his room, wrapped in sweatshirts and jeans and boots. He still looks cold, and he crosses to the little door that leads out onto the balcony, peering through the blinds. “You don’t think it’s going to snow, do you?” he asks.

“It’s still October,” I say. “It’ll just feel all cold and then we’ll get hit with sleet or something.”

“Better bring some umbrellas, I guess,” he says. He disappears back into his room and comes out with two small travel umbrellas.

“What do you have those for?” I ask. I don’t even own one umbrella.

He smiles. “When you’re really poor and you want to try taking some pictures with professional light, you can
sometimes
rig a regular old umbrella to do all the reflecting and directional stuff. Not that I’ve tried it. It all kind of got pushed by the wayside, if you know what I mean.”

I nod. “I used to knit,” I say. “Before I came to college.”

“You knitted?” He looks surprised.

“Yes. What’s so shocking about that?”

“It seems...” He searches for the right word. “So domestic.”

I roll my eyes. “I’ll have you know that knitting was a man’s past time for a long time. I’m still manly. Don’t worry.”

“You’re anything but manly,” Daniel says.

I don’t know what to say to that, and he seems embarrassed to have said it, because he clears his throat and tosses one of the umbrellas to me. I barely have the presence of mind to snatch it out of the air.

“Ready to go?” Daniel asks.

I nod and get up. He locks the apartment and we get back in his car and start heading north.

I watch the landscape slide by. It’s starting to become familiar to me now, though I have to wonder what it looks like in spring or summer. All it seems to me now is a dead place, a cold-blasted land stripped of growth and warmth. A ghost land, after the bombs go off.

The trip to Nompton is easy by now, but Daniel turns off on a different street than normal. “I want to show you the church,” he says. “I’ve seen some pictures and it looks really cool.”

I nod and have to smile at the thought of a failing priest taking me to a dead church. It’s almost appropriate. We travel down streets full of dilapidated houses and old stores with faded signs and empty windows. The town is dying, I realize, and it makes me sad. What must it be like to live in a place that is dying? Does some of it rub off on you?

I sneak a look at Daniel and wonder if we’re just death tourists, dipping into decay for a thrill before retreating again.

“Here it is,” he says suddenly, and I turn to look.

A cemetery is outside my window, ancient headstones and broken crosses, and just beyond it sits a clapboard structure that must once have been white, but the rotting wood beneath shows through the last remnants of the paint. Few windows dot the sides, but a bell tower stands at the front, the cross on the top jutting into the cloudy sky.

“Wow,” I say.

“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” Daniel says. “I’d stop here, but it’s way too cold and windy, since we can’t go inside.”

“Why not?” I ask, but I already know the answer. This church must have been built a long, long time ago. The whole thing could come down at any moment.

“Unstable,” he says. “Too much fiddling around and everything collapses.”

I look at him sharply, but his words are entirely innocent and I turn back to the window. “Where’s the house we’re going to see?”

“Farther north,” he says, turning the car around. “The pictures of this one are really beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“In a run-down, beat-up sort of way.”

I nod. I know exactly what he means.

He drives the car through more meandering streets, until the town peters out and he turns off onto a long, dirt road leading into a thick woods. A queer sense of anticipation rises in me as we drive, the sense that we are trespassing somehow, in a place where we don’t belong. Of course, that always begs the question: if we don’t belong, who does?

The answer comes to me as the dirt road fades and Daniel stops the car. “This is as far as we can go on wheels,” he says. We get out, but Daniel doesn’t move around to the trunk.

“No light?” I ask him.

“Don’t need one,” he says. “Natural light is the best anyway. Come on.” He jerks his chin toward a dim path through the trees, and I swallow my apprehension and follow him.

The path gets thicker and denser as we walk, and only twenty feet in I am glad for the umbrella that Daniel has loaned me. Though the woods cut the wind, leaving us warmer, the trees are not happy at our passage. It’s not much, but I can use the umbrella to billy-club my way through grasping branches and snagging undergrowth. There are few times in life when the words, ‘everything would have been better if only I’d had a machete’ are truly applicable, but I think that this may, in fact, be one of them.

“Just a little further,” Daniel says. He points into the trees. I follow his eyes and see an old shack, fallen over, its dead wood a heap of useless timber fit only for firewood. Cracks and broken boards jut out into the surrounding trees, as splintery as a matchstick house.

“What’s that?” I say. I don’t like how quiet it is out here. My voice is loud, an intrusion, and every time the wind picks up I shiver, listening for things moving.

“Just an old storage shed,” Daniel says. “It’s right by the old house, so we’re close.” He forges ahead and I follow him, my heart beating in my throat, my pulse fluttering in my wrists.

Then, as though by magic, the woods retreat a little, and we are standing in front of the old house.

It’s not a mansion, like Daniel said, but it might have been back when it was built. Three stories and probably a basement underground, the structure is mostly brick with wood trim and a wooden porch in the front. Plants have grow up around it, crawling up the facade, sprawling over the steps like unwelcome visitors. A place that once was human, falling back into nature.

A corpse of a house, I think, returning to the dust from which it came.

Daniel tests the porch steps, and, finding them solid, gestures to me to climb with him. “This way,” he says. I follow, the chill of the weather seeping further and further into me.

Inside, the house is a mess. A riot of objects, tossed about by the trespassing winds. Books cover the floor, old magazines, papers. The living room furniture is still here, threadbare and ugly, yet still arranged around the fireplace as though the original occupants of the house decided one day that they were tired of it all, that they needed only a begging bowl and a walking stick, and left this world behind.

How does a place like this become abandoned? What does it mean when everything is left as it was, except the thing it was made for has gone?

I’m glad we decided to come here, because it’s not as riotously chaotic as either the hospital or the school. It’s easier to find our way through the mounds of discarded things, and the windows have all broken out, their curtains long ago ripped or rotted away, and the gray light of the coming winter illuminates everything with a curious glow.

I tread lightly, and the floorboards creak beneath my steps. Trees are coming in through the windows, and the slight breeze ruffles the pages of the books strewn about the floor. I stop and kneel down, curious as to which books are here. One of them flutters beneath my hands, like a bird with broken wings, struggling to fly.

Gently, not wanting to alarm it, I fold it over and look at the title page, the cover long gone.

Moby Dick.

A little bell rings in my brain. Coincidences. Curiosities. There are all sorts of coincidences in this life. And who doesn’t have a copy of
Moby Dick,
besides me?

Licking my lips, I stand. Daniel is snapping pictures like it’s the end of the world and he wants to document every last moment, leaving it behind for the aliens to find when they come at last, too late to save us.

I press forward, wandering into the kitchen.

The cupboards stand open and empty except for the corpses of leaves inside. Dirt films the tiled counters, and the dead shells of beetles are clustered along the cracks. Smashed plates crunch under my feet.

I move through the kitchen, around through a little parlor where overturned chairs greet me, their spiraled springs exposed like bones. Outside the broken window, I hear a crow call. I always hate to hear crows call, unless there are two of them.
One for sorrow
. It’s always one for sorrow, no matter what bird poem you are reciting, or which bird it’s for. I pause and listen for another crow to answer, but none does.

I keep going, moving the books on the floor out of my way, and I idly wonder where all these books came from, since there are no bookshelves that I can see, and most of them are missing their covers.

Homeless words in unbound pages flash at me as another breeze wends its way through the house, and I shiver in my coat.

I don’t want to be here on the bottom floor any more. The place looks sad, ransacked. For a moment I have the curious feeling that I am just in a lower part of hell, the wrong place for me. If I climb higher, I’ll find a neat, ornately decorated purgatory, exactly as it was left so long ago. I exit the parlor and enter the living room again.

There’s no sign of Daniel. He’s moved on to the kitchen, probably, and I don’t want to bother him. I’m sure he’s too involved in taking pictures to want to speak to me. I don’t mind. I like the solitude of these old places. I like walking through them and feeling my own impermanence.

I’m starting to like the idea of impermanence. People like to say
this, too, shall pass,
but when you are in the throes of your life, it never seems like it will end.

I turn toward the stairs sitting at one end of the living room. They look quite solid, but I test the first one with my umbrella anyway. It doesn’t give at all. Whatever wood used for it was thick and hard to stand the test of time. I put a foot out and begin to climb.

The house complains as I mount each step, and I want to tell it to hush, to go back to sleep. At the turn of the landing, there is a huge window, now only a skeleton without its glassy skin.

I pause and look outside.

Half-bare trees look back at me, their sad branches rustling in the wind, knocking together like muted chimes. I feel the chill of the air on my face, and smell the scent of ice again, a ghostly scent, a sharp scent. I watch as a tiny bird alights on a branch, gives a small, sad chirp, listens for someone to answer her, and then takes wing again.

I feel like a bird, sometimes, I think. My bones are sometimes as hollow as bird bones. I call and call in my own bird call, but I can’t find anyone who will call back.

I frown, turn, and climb up the second small flight of stairs, toward the landing, but when I reach the top, I pause.

The room in front of me is rotten. Huge holes gape in the floor, a desk is turned over, a lone chair sits across the gap of decay. It is not possible to wander into this part of the house, and though the layout is such that I can see into the rooms beyond, can see they are austere, full of dusty armoires and old beds, I cannot cross the divide to see them. They are preserved in time and space. I cannot reach them.