This is an old 'ghost story' of mine that was written around 2002 and published in the Spring 2003 issue of The GW Review. You're currently listening to an audio interpretation of the story written and produced by badmammal.
Unfortunately, and despite my best efforts to recover them, I've lost all the images that accompanied the original text (to the overall function of which they were and still are pretty central). Most of them were Photoshopped sections of blurry, aggressive, and overlapping text that floated ominously behind the sedate and stately Garamond. Seeing as they were meant to represent the presence of ghosts both personal and linguistic, it's ironic that these same now-missing images were printed almost too light to see in the published Review version, anyway. The point being that whenever I try to show them to the public in whatever small way the ghost words just keep disappearing. So maybe it's just as it should be, and in the spirit of the story it's probably ultimately fitting. The images are gone now, but they weren't supposed to be there in the first place.
House Back Home
Sight
One plank of wood in particular—wet, cracked,
gored by potato-eyed circles of rot—stands out as exemplary of the whole, of
this house and this city and all the people who live and lived here. See it as
a piece of art, a relic of urban decline on a black background, a piece of
something larger, meaning something more. Maybe it’s an easy meaning, like black
and white photos of hookers or the homeless (not nearly as complex as the two
portraits clutched to your side). The sort of pain that everyone can see and
has no choice but to feel for.
Like them, this particular plank of wood, this porch
and set of steps, manipulates you. Demands that you compare them to
your own solid steps, to your own weekly-swept steps and insulated houses,
demands to know what sort of horrible things you must have done in order to
acquire such clean and well-swept steps and such beautiful houses back home. Whatever
place home is, exactly.
Besides, that
house is miles away and you are here to see this
house. And this particular plank of wood is one of the steps that you need to
take to get there.
Still, you’re hesitant to step on the steps, to really
trust them with the burden of your body. It’s raining, as always, and should
the rotten steps surrender then you’d probably fall into dog shit, or cat shit,
or some cache of stagnant water in a basin of uncut grass. Maybe you could run,
you think, looking down the walkway behind you at the cracked concrete and
bubbling urban earth, and jump, clear the steps entirely and land on the porch
beyond. Surely the wood there is sturdier, built to take more weight. Though
maybe not. Maybe the whole porch would collapse and you’d fall into something
far worse.
Then again on second thought maybe you should run away. Maybe if you don’t then
the house might fall into you.
Seen
Marcos totes lunch in a brown bag,
snacks in a Safeway plastic, walks west down Marshall and nods to all the
locals; pets dogs, shakes hands, reads menus in restaurant windows. He smells
smells, wants cars, stops and has a cigarette with the punks on Marshall and
Clean. They all share a box of cookies and everyone agrees that it looks like
rain. In the liquor store Terrence sells Marcos a twelve pack and a smile.
Marcos says thanks and stay dry, threads his way through winos’ slack hands to
buy a bag of pistachio nuts at a hot-dog cart. And yeah he pushes past
boutiques and bazaars and oddity shops, past storefronts with hand-painted
signs, wood ones, chipped things, glass doors covered by stickers and hung with
bells. He passes bent green poles holding up street signs by rust-colluded
notches, passes men with different haircuts and guys with different hats,
bundled-up babies in different kinds of carriages and girls trailing
afterimages in different kinds of perfume. Here
they are, Marcos thinks, moving through the city, dropping shells, here is everyone in the city and all of
their evidence.
Rounding the corner at Marshall and
West, Marcos is practically there. He watches the stores dissipate into gas
stations and then yellow houses, all the leashed dogs fading into kids playing
catch. Even after three months he still can’t shake the weird sense of
displacement that these streets make him feel, like stepping simultaneously
into his childhood and his future. Being Back Home. Because it’s safe to say
that he probably shouldn’t be here, that by being back in Rock City at all he’s
regressing somehow or using his life to take naps, but none of that really matters
anymore, because the point is is he’s here, and that’s that.
But that’s just one man’s opinion, and a maximally
biased one at that. In his more reasonable moments Marcos would readily admit
that he wouldn’t mind being an adult here, working here and raising his kids,
being quote all-grown-up. But that would have been after college, after what he
hoped would have been his impetuous yet remarkably successful youth. Which
means that right now for Marcos being back here in
Here he is. Stepping up the
poorly-painted steps to the house that he rents with three of his high-school
friends, Marcos silently and stoically bemoans his fate, failing to recognize
or even to perceive the three child ghosts that are clutching his body and
crying.
Unseen
a
multitude of child ghosts ((or ideas) haunting the house at 59 Edwards
Street; the focus flashing from kid to kid, boys and girls both, each one almost visible and speaking together in chorus (e.g.: one
boy sitting on the roof of the house next to a surprised looking moon, outlined by a cobalt
sky and peppered with winking stars; one girl upside-down (to us) in the
attic ceiling’s northeast corner amidst a cloud of swirling paint chips, curling
in and out of tears, blue-ish; one boy on
the living room couch sitting next to a living boy and leaning over until his
lips are practically touching the boy’s ear, speaking into the ear while the
boy watches TV) saying, all at once: tongueless,
timeless, impossible us. Some entelechy or bigger being trapped, magazine stacks and no sleep, just a slow drip down a dirty wall, maybe, just a creep and a slide and a
nu-nu-nu-NUDGE in the attic, push, walls laced floral by our
fingerprints or Fingerprints. He’s sneaking inside us and sort of laughing furiously, feeding us in all sorts of ways. Feeling
us out…)
Sight
Or, you know, just jump already.
Seen
Your junior year is over and you’re
back home in
I-360 at seventy miles per hour from Pennington takes
you past semis and family vans to exit 9 in twelve minutes, Marshall Ave, where
Marcos told you he was living the last time the two of you talked. Which
doesn’t really help much,
Halfway to the door a disenfranchised young voice
snatches your ear and tugs your head sideways, presenting you a waifish punk-rock
boy who has twelve spikes of hair and two high-caliber sleeves and is asking
you whether or not you have one cigarette, which you do, you say, rummaging
through your handbag to find one and then pulling it out and adding that it’s a
Virginia Slim if he doesn’t care, which he claims that he doesn’t and goes on
to ask for a lighter to light it with, which after you dive back into your bag
and produce he makes no discernable effort to take from out of your hand, rather
just sort of standing there and expecting you to light his (your) cigarette for
him, causing you, who at this point is slightly amused, slightly insulted and
slightly intrigued, to step up a little bit closer to him than you think that he
thinks you will, make solid eye contact and ask him if all he brought was his
habit, which he laughs at dangerously and confirms, cupping his dirty little fingers
over your clean ones and leaning in, you flicking, him sucking, lighting him
up.
Sufficiently lit, he steps back. The two of you
share a grin.
“My name’s Stomachache.” Stomachache says.
“Hi, Stomachache.”
“Yeah,” he nods, spitting onto a patch of dead
grass. “So where the fuck have you been?
I’ve missed seeing you around here.”
“What does that
mean?”
“Nothing, nothing,” Stomachache stammers, “I just
remember seeing you around here all the time, like, a few years ago. At the Legal
Walls and shit. You’re a tough fuckin’ face to forget.” He bites his pierced
lip and thinks about this for a second, spits on the grass again, adding that
he means this “In a good way, I guess.”
“Yeah…” you guess, curling your lip imperceptibly
and shifting the weight in your hips, sniffing the air and saying “…thanks”, suddenly
and inexplicably fascinated by a far-off section of sky, sort of regretting
that you let this encounter deteriorate into conversation at all but at the
same time dimly recalling that maybe Marcos mentioned something about some
neighborhood punk once, so, “…listen, Stomachache,” you say, in your best
Let’s-Wrap-This-Up tone, “you don’t by any chance know a boy named Marcos, do
you?”
“Marcos?” he nods, smiling, “Yeah, I know Marcos.”
“Great. You know where he lives?”
Stomachache looks at you like you’re crazy. “With
Joshua.” he says. “Two blocks down Marshall and left on Edwards. Number
fifty-nine.” He stares at you, expecting a reaction and not getting one. “On Edwards,’ he repeats, “Number fifty-nine. He lives on number Fifty-Nine Edwards Street.”
A
little bored, a little annoyed, and a little weirded- out, you start to back
away. “Okay, then, Stomachache. Thanks. I guess I’ll see you when I see you…”
Stomachache’s hand shoots out and snags you by the
wrist. “No…” he emphasizes, genuinely concerned, “…Fifty-Nine Edwards.”
“I heard you, dick,” you snarl, squirming free,
shuffling back, “and I’ve gotta’ go...”
He relents and backs away, an incredulous look on
his face, holding out his palms to show that he’s unarmed. “What?” he asks you,
his green eyes level with yours (as it occurs to you that they match his hair
exactly) “I mean, do you…not know?”
“Do I not know what?”
“About that house. About Fifty-Nine Edwards.”
“What about it?”
“That it’s fucking haunted,” he tells you, wide
eyed. “Fucking big time.”
“Oh yeah?” you ask.
“Yeah.” he answers. “Fucking haunted for real.”
Seen Unseen
a multitude of child ghosts ((or ideas))
on the steps, to really trust them with the burden of both (each one almost
visible and speaking two ways). Should the steps surrender to the house next to
a surprised looking moon, or some cache of stagnant water
in a basin with winking stars;
(one girl upside down) (you think, looking down the walkway behind you,
amidst
a cloud of swirling paint chips, curled earth,
and jump), clear the steps entirely and land on the living room couch because
the wood there is sturdier, built to take more weight, (practically touching the boy’s ear, speaking). See it as
a piece of art and have a cigarette with the
punks in the background, a piece of something
larger, me-cookies and everyone
agreeing that it looks like really, like pictures of hookers or the homeless,
like a twelve pack and a smile that Marcos has no choice but to feel for. Like
them, this winos’ slack hands buy bags and bags of steps, manipulate you,
demand you past boutiques and bazaars and oddity shops, past weekly swept steps
and insulated houses, wood ones, chipped
things. Glass
doors covered must have done to acquire such clues: bent green poles holding up street signs, houses back home.
Whatever place home is, exactly.
Sight
Maybe you were right the first time, maybe jumping
is a bad idea. Maybe you should just climb the steps after all, au pied, test their durability with an
incrementally pressed sneaker and then take them all one at a time. Maybe that
would be safer.
Seen
When the doorbell rings and it’s you, Marcos is
struck dumb. Absence and dejection—rejection, too—have greatly blurred his
mental image of You, his most highly-prized ex, made you more distant and less
shockingly beautiful—obsolete, in a
sense— because now, let him tell you, Wow.
And now that you’re here, one dimension more than an image, your here-ness just
reminds him of gone. Of LA and distance, of everything that’s not his and aches.
“I miss you already,” is the first thing that he tells
you.
“I love you.” is the second.
“I miss you, too.” You tell him, giving him a kiss
on the cheek.
You go inside.
and then
go inside.
inside incide
two
too
2coincidences(SORRY,
THIS ____ IS STILL IN ________, AND IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT,
SO FOR THE SAKE OF __________AND _______, HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS!!!
YOU ASK MARCOS ABOUT __________ ________AND HE HAS ___ ____ WHAT YOU’RE _______
____MARCOS’ ROOMMATE (JOSHUA), HOWEVER, DOES, AND ________ A ______ _____ ABOUT
HAVING FOUND TWO OLD ______S
IN THE ATTIC WHEN HE FIRST MOVED IN
Seen
Joshua Phelps is slapping white paint onto walls at
fifty-nine Edwards because they’re dirty and he just moved in. He’s painting
white walls and scrubbing off ovens with steel wool, pausing occasionally to
sort out taped-up boxes of whatever—of cutlery, racquets, blenders, clocks—all
the unlabelled ephemera of his newly moved-in life. He’s pulling it out and picking
it up, putting it all into places, going up the stairs and down, going up the
stairs and down, carrying things, sticking them where they’re supposed to go. There’s
insertions into cupboards and wedgings into tough corners, the spatial
frustrations of couches and doorframes. There’s swearing and sweat and sore
backs. By his reckoning he’s got about a half an hour more of this before it’s
his turn outside on Box Watch, defending the heavy equipment that’s yet to be
lugged up the stairs, all the threadbare couches and cigarette-burned coffee
tables that sit on the lawn whispering steal
me .
Box Watch mostly consists of sitting on the porch
drinking OE and looking tough, like maybe there’s a shotgun behind the rocking
chair so you’d better think twice about lifting that ink-stained ottoman. Until
then, Joshua decides to go up to the attic to get a start on the crawlspace,
maybe see what he can find.
Meanwhile, downstairs, his roommate Dove (who
should be on Manual Duty down in the basement, incidentally) is outside with
Ben on the porch drinking OE and protecting their property, listening to
something they all can nod their heads to, sipping on English and smoking. Down
the block they sight a group of drunks stumbling houseward, from the
silhouettes of whose haircuts appear to be some of those punks who sit on the
curb all day long at the corner of
“Stomachache,” he shouts, “we just moved in! Come
on over and have a beer...”
Three-and-a-half floors upstairs Joshua is
coughing, pushing past dust-clouded objects in the crawlspace, moving through
organisms and dead skin, which is 
and all the things that used to be here. He is
breathing them in and they are getting inside him because there is not much
room for all ten-billion and one of them in this eight foot tunnel with its
five-foot ceiling. Flakes are falling on Joshua’s face, translucent and
tough-to-breathe, probably asbestos or worse, he thinks, half-breathingly,
hacking them back in the atmosphere and sucking up pre-breathed replacements.
Getting dizzy he stops to sit still, guesses this the best alternative to sitting
still and breathing, bumps a box and knocks an old folder onto the floor, wiping
off a cloud
that billows brownly
up and in his face, stings his eyes and makes him cough, spit, sputter, slackens
his brain’s already loose-enough grip on the crawlspace’s available oxygen all
the crawlspace’s available oxygen oxygen oxygen oxygen
so
shook soozey-eyed like low blood sugar, Joshua
conceives, Uh-Oh equals oxygen loss might mean imagination, maybe, but
extracting two pieces of print from the source of the nerve-knocking dust cloud
maybe it actually is a spooky circle
of blue translucent kids flashing into fucked-up focus, screaming on another
spectrum at the sight of who’s inside...
Seen
Seen Unseen Sight
Box Watch mostly consists of sitting at I-560 and
pumping people through, like maybe there’s a shotgun behind the rock-stops abruptly
at the foot of a cornfield, and lifting that coffee-stained ottoman. Until
then, left. On the corner of
Sight
Yes. Do it. A hesitant step towards
the house. This is what you are going to do: you are going to climb the steps. You
are going to bring these pictures back where they belong. Yes. You lift your
right leg, surprised at how much it’s trembling, and start bending your knee,
moving closer to the steps and feeling cold fingers coax you towards the door,
fingers from behind the door tug you towards the house, everything but wood and
bricks fading to black all around you, disappearing, something unseen in the
attic window seizing your mind’s eye and fixing it, pulling you in, zooming in
your vision until you think you can almost see, as the tip of your toe touches
down on the steps and makes contact, what looks like the shape of a pointing child…
Seen
“Bullshit!” Marcos and you shout simultaneously, both
lighting nerve-burners nonetheless, scooting closer to one another on the
threadbare couch, dutifully skeptical but also sort of intrigued, because who
doesn’t like a ghost story for this type of thing, for making people hold each
other tight? You sort of wish there was popcorn, idly scope out Joshua’s eyes
and body-language to see if he’s having you on after all, but Joshua just shrugs
and says wait, says the story is only beginning.
Unseen Seen
Bursting from the front door breathless and
red-faced here’s Joshua waving two papers in the air and yelling about
something fucked-up in the attic.
“There’s something fucked up in the attic,” he yells,
pointing with his right hand into the house and up the stairs, presumably
towards where the attic is (Dove’s, Ben’s, Stomachache’s, Angela’s, and Johnny
Twentyfive’s liquor-sunk gazes sloppily climbing his fingerline up and through
the house), meanwhile using his left hand to judiciously present his evidence,
which consists of two cracked and brown-ish portraits of a man and a woman that
everyone seems to be ignoring, still looking past him through the screen door and
apparently fixated on the stairs.
Joshua takes a long swallow from someone’s else’s bottle
and tells everyone that he’s having a paranormal experience. He grits his teeth
while he waits for someone to say ‘My whole life is a paranormal experience!’,
and after they do and nobody laughs and everybody who didn’t say it lets the
laughter’s lack set in, he uses his Let’s-Get-Down-To-Business voice and declares:
“For real. This house is haunted. This house is fucking haunted for real.”
Inside, gathered around a coffee table that’s pockmarked
by cigarette burns, the residents and friends confer. Joshua relates his story
with an uncharacteristic gravity, forcing a quick dismissal to Johnny
Twentyfive’s ubiquitous acid allegations. “Something real happened up there,
man” Joshua asserts.
The pictures laid out on the table look like every
old picture that the group has ever seen. A straight-laced, middle-aged woman
with beige eyes and a broad forehead. Her presumable husband a half-bald potato,
mustached, tough-jawed. There’s a weird layer of, what, they don’t know, paint?
plastic? gesso? dye? that’s peeling off the pictures and hanging at scratchy
angles, leaving behind shadows on a black and white base. As for the people, their
faces are unsettling only in the sense that they are sculpted by different values
and different times, by languages and places and people that we and our friends
could never understand. And yet, look: here they are.
Everyone is staring at them, thinking.
They are staring back, dead.
All over the house the walls start shaking.
IMPORTANT SHAKING THE HOUSE
IRRELEVENT FROM
INSIDE
See What’s Unseen
Joshua
leans forward, taps his cigarette in the ashtray, gesticulating wildly, “…and it
was the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. It was like there were people behind
the walls in every room, hitting the walls with their fists, BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
BOOM, hundreds of hands. And then the TV, which I swear to God was not even fucking plugged in, turns
on out of nowhere and starts flipping itself through channels. All the clocks
stop and the cats just straight up leave.
Nobody knows what to do. The smartest thing that happened probably was Stomachache
unplugged a drill and plugged in the TV in its place. Of course the TV turned off
and the drill turned on, which if this shit wasn’t scary enough, a fucking
drill. So all six of us are shorts-deep in shit at this point and we go to
check out the whole house together, maybe holding hands, maybe not, I can’t
remember, but we checked out the whole house, inside and out except for the
attic for like pranksters or Totally Hidden Video and the illest thing was that
when you were outside the house then
the house was silent, but as soon as you’d step on the steps then you’d hear
the banging again. When we pointed this out to Johnny Twentyfive he said fuck this and left, mumbled something
about he took acid earlier that afternoon and there being just no fucking way.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this?”
Marcos practically yells, “I mean, I just moved here, I mean—fuck!”
Joshua ignores him, puts out his
cigarette. “So the five of us sit down and come to the conclusion that these portraits
need to go back to the attic now.”
“Sure,” you say, “I guess that’s
logical.”
Joshua nods, looks you in the eye.
“Yeah, us too. Except that everyone was too scared to go up there. The furthest
we got was the attic steps. We pushed open the door with an umbrella and that’s
when we heard the voices. Jesus, Marcos, Jesus.
Kids’ voices, all of them. A hundred crying kids in our empty attic. Fuck. We all started screaming, everyone
thought everybody else was a ghost and someone kicked the door shut, everyone
clambering over each other on the stairs just to get down, just to get the hell
out of there, ripping t-shirts and dropping cursed portraits, shouting things
like move, move and oh shit and fucking go, god damn it, go!”
“The next thing any of us knew we were all outside
on the lawn. Once we caught our breath we decided it would be best if we stayed
out of there for the rest of the night, that Angela and Stomachache would go
find Johnny Twentyfive and go wherever it is that they went, and that me, Dove,
and Ben would fake a burst-pipe and crash at our friend Kristi’s down the
street. We all agreed not to say anything about what happened until the next
day at noon when we met on the sidewalk in front of the house to go back inside
during daylight.”
“So what did you find?”
“Nothing. The pounding stopped. The clocks were
back to the right time and the TV was off and unplugged. Even the cats came
back and were licking themselves on top of the TV. The pictures, the portraits,
which we were positive that one of us, all of us, had dropped on the stairs while
escaping the attic, were gone, nowhere to be found. Except, maybe, in the
crawlspace, but no one was going back in there. We looked at everything in the
house, but there was just no evidence, no trace.”
“So that’s it?” Marcos asks.
Joshua shrugs. “I mean, whatever. It was a little
tense for a couple of weeks, I guess. But there weren’t any more, like, incidents.
We kind of had this sense that if we didn’t talk about it then nothing else would
happen. I mean whatever, you know? Who were we gonna’ call, the fucking
Ghostbusters? And anyway it didn’t. Happen. Nothing happened after that.
Nothing happens.”
Joshua turns to look at you. “Shit—you asking me
today is the first time I’ve talked about it in months”
Something occurs to you and you smile at him. He
shakes his head violently, indicating a serious No even though the look on his face alone says that he already
knows what you mean, and so concurrently the answer is obvious.