The Dwelling: A Novel (42 page)

So, he made a small, feeble attempt, mostly for himself. He put on his baseball cap. He always wore his hat to write. Way back in the middle of his life, it was kind of a trademark around his buddies. When he had the ball cap on, his head was up his ass. They were proud of him.

He realized that no one at Dubs’s had asked him how the book was going.

Five years between books is a long time.

He got up off the couch and started on the dining room. It made him think of Ashley and
(oh god forbid)
before that thought was allowed to turn pleasant in his head, he thought of everyone seeing him picking her up that way. Right after Jennifer had been there. Right after she left. Then he thought about the stupid things he’d said and done. Fucking around with Jen. At some point in the night he’d called over to Wellington’s, the bar they always drank at, all of them, and told Matt the bartender to pass the word about the party.

What the fuck was I thinking?
He’d told Rob he wouldn’t mind fucking Lois. Lois was Rob’s wife. He’d sent Gord Kimble out for beer and then, like an asshole, called him
sucker
when he asked for money after coming back. Gord Kimble hadn’t worked in a year. He was living with his ex-wife on unemployment insurance.

He dragged on the smoke and put it out in the ashtray that he’d emptied but hadn’t washed. It was coated in thick black ashes. Beside the ashtray on the filthy, sticky coffee table was the pack of cigarettes from the night before.

I stole those smokes.
He’d run out and he’d seen the pack on the table in the living room when he’d changed the CD. He’d just picked it up and walked away with it, feeling clever. Richie drained the beer, went into the kitchen and put the bottle in one of the cases. He stacked them neatly, the full ones on the bottom. He stared at the pile. They’d been drinking all day, hadn’t they? Or had it just been him?

His insides felt like they were curling up, away from his flesh, as though trying to get away, or make themselves small.

I’m not an alcoholic.
Any thought, real or pretended, of writing slipped away, buried under the ugly, bare words. A heavy gray blanket of shit settled over him and then began what he knew very well would be a long, arduous trip through a self-loathing so palpable and strong that he sometimes thought it was a part of his body, like his nervous system, carried along on his pulse.

I’m not.

As if to prove it, he reached into the fridge and opened another beer. To help him sleep.

Richie woke up in the living room on the sofa. The room was bright, the light above him still on.
Passed out.
On the coffee table in front of him were (and he sized this up with apprehension) three empty bottles. He did the math in his head and decided that he had fallen asleep because he was tired. He breathed. He sat up and stretched.

The clock was still perched at the wrong angle on the little shelf over the fireplace. It was after one already. He had to be up early to drive RJ to school in the morning. He noticed then, for the first time, that three or four beer bottles had been tucked into the open fireplace, hidden earlier because of the shadow. He got up and stretched again, bone weary, his headache back and his stomach a little weak. He bent over and stuck his fingers into the necks of the bottles and grabbed all four with both hands. He gathered the bottles on the table into his arms and he had all eight. An abundance of riches.

Aaah, it was a party.

He stood up straight, his back sore from (passing out) sleeping on the couch, and bent backward to stretch it and from upstairs came a familiar but unplaceable sound. He stopped and listened, holding his body in that awkward position and tilting his head toward the ceiling.

Tapping.
Regular tapping sounds, quietly from upstairs.
Tap tap tap.

Obviously, a tap dancer, ba-boom-ba!

It stopped. He listened intently for it to start up again, and when it didn’t, he shrugged and lost interest immediately. Could have been anything, a mouse, the house settling, termites; whatever it had been, he was in no position to care at that moment in time. He took the bottles into the kitchen and put them on the counter. He was going to leave them there—
I’ll deal with it in the morning
—but they looked so bad, he put them in the cases.

On his way through the hall, the tapping started again. He ignored it until he got to the foot of the stairs and then it was so close that the familiar sound ceased to be theoretical, and it occurred to him what it was.

The computer keys. He looked up the stairs.

“RJ?” he called up. The tapping stopped. He listened, trying just to listen, but probabilities confronted him because he was a writer; a paranoid, self-loathing, drunken writer.

He woke up and saw me passed out sleeping on the couch and got pissed off went upstairs writing me a note about my parenting or just pissing me off playing his fuckin’ computer game—

He called up, more forcefully and started up the stairs. The tapping had quit
(of course it had he heard me coming).
“RJ!”

The ladder was down, the hallway lights were on. Richie stalked toward it, frowning; how the hell was he supposed to deal with this now?

And smaller yet: would RJ tell his mom that he found his dad on the sofa in a—

Richie climbed the ladder.

It was dark in the attic, the desk lamp was not on. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Even once they did, he could hardly see past the hatch. The only light in the room came from the glow of the computer screen.

“RJ?” he said, more quietly, because the space seemed to demand it. The room was utterly silent. Underlying the silence was the friendly purr of his laptop. No one sat in his chair, the outline of which had begun to come clear. If RJ was in the attic, he was hiding. He glanced around at the deep, unrelenting blackness that constituted the attic. Hiding?

That seemed improbable.

Plot change: the kid’s asleep, there are mice in your attic, and you are a paranoid son of a bitch who drinks too much (but is not an alcoholic) and you left your computer on, idiot.

With a sigh he heaved himself up into the attic and over to his desk, navigating by the light of the screen. Leaving the computer on was an improbability that flew in and out of his weary brain, and he did not pursue it. He was too tired.

He did, however, read the words on the screen.

He read it twice over, believing he’d gotten it wrong the first time and that it was something he’d written while fucking around buying time. But it couldn’t be placed in his head. Gooseflesh grew on his arms and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up sharply because he could swear—
blackout
—that when he read it, he heard a voice in his head reading it back. It wasn’t his own.

“Dad?”

He jumped, nearly knocking over the chair behind him. He looked over his shoulder, a most terrible feeling surrounding him, the feeling of spiders dropping on your shoulder, mice running across your face in sleep, something breathing in the dark.

“I’m up here!” he called, and the sound of his own voice, so loud in the dark, frightened him. He flipped on the desk lamp, and light flooded around him in a circle. It was not much better, casting shadows where anything could be (breathing).

“Dad?” RJ’s voice was sleepy-sounding.

“I’m coming,” he called, and that time it was better. He didn’t bother with technical details, he shut the computer off, happy enough to see the screen go dangerously black. When it was gone he shut the lid and managed, only with the greatest trepidation, to shut out the light.

“I don’t feel good,” RJ said. He was waiting for him in the hallway, wearing only his pajama shirt and a pair of boxers.

“What’s wrong? You wanna throw up?”

The boy shook his head. “I wanna sleep in your room,” he said apologetically.

Richie gestured with his chin. “Go ahead. I’m going to the can. Don’t hog the covers,” he said, trying to make his voice light. It didn’t quite come out that way.

There was a morning rush that neither Richie nor RJ was used to yet in the new house. Game Boy, hat, PJs were all left behind. Breakfast was toast (no milk for cereal) and warm juice from leftover juice boxes—picked up at the convenience store and used as a mixer by someone at the party, but he didn’t tell RJ that—and Richie hadn’t reprogrammed the stereo to get the settings right for the radio, so they had to listen to crappy shit.

After dropping RJ off at school, Richie came home to get in a full day’s work at the computer. Passing by the little bedroom under the stairs, he noticed that the light was still on, the bed was still down and sheets and blankets had been left in a pile at the foot of the bed, where RJ had no doubt kicked them the night before.

He went in, pulled off the blanket and folded it. Once folded he didn’t know what to do with it; there was no dresser or desk or table, except for the little one beside the bed with the lamp on it. He tossed it into the corner.

Richie debated taking the sheets off, but instead just straightened them out. A lump of something stuck up under the top sheet at the foot of the bed. He pulled the sheet back. The lump was RJ’s pajama bottoms, crumpled into a ball.

The night before he’d gotten into Richie’s bed with just a pair of boxers. He’d gone to bed in pajamas, though.

Plot twist.

Richie grinned sheepishly, almost shyly, unfurling the bottoms and seeing the telltale stain in the middle. He blushed in spite of himself and shook his head, realizing why the boy hadn’t felt well and why he’d gone to sleep with his old man. Wet dream. Probably it scared the shit out of him.

That’s it now, boy. It owns you.

Still grinning, he pulled off the sheets without further inspection and tossed everything into a pile on the floor. He’d call it laundry and not mention it to RJ unless he brought it up. He shut off the light and closed the door to the room. It shut smoothly, without creaking, in spite of its age and position under the stairs. He found that remarkable. He looked up at the large light fixture on the ceiling in the hall in wonderment. The house, so huge, and he was alone in it.
“I think it’s a little big for me,” he said to the realtor.

She stared off into the space up the stairs with a small smile on her lips. “It’s a lovely house,” she said.

It was, of course. But he still wondered why he’d bought it.

Richie grabbed the paper from the porch and stood in the hallway glancing over the headlines. Municipal gas prices were going up. The annual pageant of lights was scheduled for a week following. A girl from the west end was still missing. He scanned that article and then fumbled through the rest of the paper for the crossword, pulling it out and dropping the rest on the floor.
Maid’ll get it.
When he got a maid.
Jen’s coming tomorrow.
The thought, running quickly through his head, left him feeling light, easy. She had that way about her.

He poured himself another cup of coffee and made his way upstairs. He got his ball cap from his bedroom and stuck it on his head.

And so began the ritual that was, for him, as old as his firstborn.

In the attic, he turned on the computer and pulled up his file, chapter twelve, “The Copernicus Tale.” He stared alternately at the last few words on the screen and at the crossword in his lap. When things felt right, he began.

The realtor had shown him at least a dozen houses before taking him to the property on Belisle. Mostly they’d looked at small, two-bedroom bungalows, almost to a number without character or remark. She’d pumped him repeatedly on what exactly it was he was looking for.

A fresh start.
But he couldn’t tell her that. Something without Jennifer’s smell in it. Something without the reek of too much drinking. Something without the option of failure. But he couldn’t tell her that either. So he had said, “At least two bedrooms, possibly three, so I can have an office, and appliances.” And there was an image in his head of the sort that only a fresh start can instigate, of a trouble-free, alcohol-free life, tossing a football around the yard on a sunny Sunday afternoon with his kid. “And a yard,” he added.

He had a price range, but it was vague. He had some money cached away and had made a small profit on the sale of his house. Between price range and qualifications, they could have looked at about a hundred houses within the city limits.

“Close to downtown is better,” he’d told her, flashing her the smile that had melted a million female hearts and at least one book reviewer. It hadn’t necessarily worked on Mrs. Darnley, however, because she began to sigh when she pulled up in front of each new showing, each a little different from the other.

Then she drove him, on a whim, she said later, to the house on Belisle.

“It’s too big,” he said.

“Well, we’re already here,” she’d countered. “It’s a lovely house.” He’d believed as soon as they were inside the front door that she had brought him to her own white elephant, the one house that a realtor couldn’t unload. The sheer size of the place made him think of heating bills and plumbing problems, but she pointed out that there was only one bathroom. “It looks much larger than it really is,” she’d told him. And that was when they’d both looked up at the huge chandelier in the front hall.

He didn’t think so.

They looked at the downstairs first, the appliances, the large front window, the shining, redone wood floors, the
working
fireplace! (She’d given him a saucy wink with that and he had blushed, the images in his own head more likely much worse than the wholesome, romantic pictures in hers.) They’d opened the back door and looked out into the yard, with its tangle of dead plants that gave it such a Gothic look. She pointed out the privacy offered by a roadless back lane. No real lane at all, she’d explained, just a path.

By the time they got to the room with the Murphy bed, he was catching some of her enthusiasm. When they were crouched on the floor in the bathroom looking behind the toilet at the new pipes and at the bestial feet of the tub-that-had-been-bought-at-auction, it was more of a tour and less of a showing.

Only once had he faltered. The two of them were in the enormous master bedroom with its odd L-shape, looking out to the hallway through the door.

“The door has been replaced; they had to have it specially cut to fit the archway,” she’d told him, and he immediately thought,
Jen’ll love that it looks like something from a fairy tale
—and then he remembered that
there is no Jen no fairy tale and this is a fresh start.
His heart jumped into his throat and all the fun had gone out of looking at this house, and every other house and every fresh start that might possibly be waiting out there for him.

The realtor had been looking at him, though, gauging his reaction and she said then, “There’s a kind of energy here. I cringe when I think that, but sometimes I can feel it. I’m always happy to show this house.”

And a beat later he felt it flood over him. There was an energy there. It had felt fresh, like a bracing gust of wind.

He hadn’t regretted it. He had, even before moving in, fallen in love with the place, in a way that he might never have articulated, in spite of the fact that he articulated nearly everything, maybe not always in speech but certainly at some point or other, to himself, in his head, where the words resided. He did not think in terms of
I love this house,
but more like there was sometimes a lightness of step that he hadn’t felt in a while, the feeling that a blank page could give him when he was revved, or the way the delete button could be if he had worked poorly. The place made him feel like there were options. And they weren’t all bad.

It had surprised him when he chose the attic to work in, although not entirely. Attics had that writerly feel to them; a room of one’s own, if you were a man, would be an attic. The top of the house, command position. The dark, too, had appealed to him somewhat. In the dark there were fewer distractions. Only one window, and it was far too small to gaze out of and see grass to cut, trees to trim, cars driving by going somewhere (for a drink). No lives to distract him.

Of the other options, the Murphy room was too small and the little bedroom was too blue (although he liked the little cubbyhole, it reminded him of the cubby they’d had in his grandmother’s house when he was a boy. He used to go inside there with a flashlight and read Tarzan books, strictly forbidden by his mother for their feral quality). The yellow room had some kind of smell in it that was both musty and alive, like decay. Mrs. Darnley hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t said much about that room at all, but he had noticed it off and on since he’d moved in, and certainly during his search for a “place.” The attic it had been.

He had yet to get his desk up there. The guys had declared him insane for even suggesting that it would fit up there. One day they would get together and take it apart and then reassemble it in the attic. He was using a small side table until they got the desk apart, with his desk lamp and his portable computer on top; there was no room for notes but, then, he was far enough along in the book that he rarely sat around doodling any longer. He did his ritualistic crossword in his lap. The coffee cup and ashtray sat almost on top of the mouse, and while he knew that was an accident waiting to happen, so far it had not.

He felt good about it. The work would be good. If nothing else, he really felt like it would
be.

The crossword lay unfinished on the floor at his feet where he had dropped it when he felt ready to write, and it lay equally abandoned and at-the-ready, in case he needed it to escape the very real horrors of the next line, the next paragraph, the next scene, the dreaded blank page. It sat there, abandoned, for much of the morning.

Richie fell into the zone around ten-thirty.

His fingers moved almost without thought, skating over keys rapidly and then slowly, and then pausing, the sound like an uncertain soldier with an automatic weapon. The attic grew slowly warmer, and light beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. At some point he paused and pulled off his sweatshirt, sitting in the dark in a T-shirt and his jeans. He smoked only twice. Both times the cigarette burned down in the saucer that served as an ashtray. It was going very well. Smoothly.

He wrote without interruption, internally or externally, until twelve-thirty, when he hit a snag and the rapid tapping of his fingers paused for too long, and broke whatever spell it was that he had fallen into.

The line read,
What did they look like?
as spoken by his protagonist, thirteen-year-old Porter. The pause inside would not leave. Richie tried to get back into the page, his body leaning forward, shoulders hunched, eyes focused, a short, hard line that would one day be permanently etched between his brows. His breathing was shallow, and in spite of his focus, he was terribly aware of himself, his body and his surroundings, while being at the same time utterly lost in his own words.

What did they look like?

They
were aliens. Spacemen. Bad ones, coming in the dark of night and standing sentinel at the foot of the bed, rousing their victims from a sound sleep and taking them off into the most terrible of all unknowns. (He had a thing he said to people when they asked him what he was writing about. He said it was
alien meets boy; alien loses boy; boy tells the world.
Ha ha. A typical Richie Bramley tale of the unknown.)

What
did
they look like? He knew, of course: it was a matter of making the description both accurate according to the tabloid tales and somehow more fearsome than that which had been massively consumed.

It was there that he fumbled and dropped the ball. He glanced at the little clock on the computer and saw the time and thought,
Not bad.
Four pages. Single-spaced, about two thousand words. Keepers, for the most part. Not bad at all.

He stared ineffectually for a moment or two at the last few words he’d written, then pushed back his chair from the table and leaned down to pick up the crossword. Sometimes all he needed was a little distance. As he leaned down, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Movement. A flash of light; not light exactly, but maybe reflected light. Fluid.

He snapped his head to the left, and stared into the dark.

There was nothing there. It was so dark, he thought, like a sudden realization. The darkness filtered in, through the space that was Richie’s thoughts. He smelled raw wood, the dry scent of plasterboard, the dust, but saw almost nothing.

And then:

His shoulders went tight and beads of sweat on the back of his neck felt suddenly cold. He swallowed. Grinned. He hadn’t written it. Could have been anyone, though—there hadn’t been a lock on the attic hatch and, god knew, his friends were just the sort to write scurrilous, offensive child pornography on his computer. Funny stuff. Steve, Dubs, Brad, could have been anyone. Thing was, it hadn’t been saved so that let him out. God knew he saved every puerile, infantile, fractious thing he wrote, like gold from his fingertips, no matter the subject matter; he was an inveterate saver, having had a computer since the days before time. He could look back on a past with function keys and five-and-a-quarter-inch disks, and when booting up your computer meant a whole series of commands and disturbing messages (bad command or file name).

He peered into the dark, not yet frightened but with the interest of someone who has spotted a
spider mouse rat
(something
awful)
and looks to see, knowing it is not there. The grin felt stiff and unreal on his face and, in lieu of anything else, he spoke into the dark.

“Wasn’t me.” His voice sounded flat and small. Instead of whatever he hoped to achieve, he had a terribly (puerile) thought that he had just told the
ghosts monsters beasties
his exact position. Rule number one: must not wake the monsters. That was why you didn’t close doors, flush toilets or turn lights on at night. It was why you kept your feet off the floor when you slept, tucking them under the blankets; that was why you kept the closet closed the bedroom door slightly ajar a way out an escape.