The Dwelling: A Novel (45 page)

In his head as written by Richie Bramley, master of the supernatural and all things paranormal, he said all the right things.

The dishes, he felt, stared back at him, smugly.
We knew, too.
He sometimes buried his head in his hands and cried. Drops on the tablecloth, the crisp, sharp folds still visible, were testament to it. It went unnoticed by him.

There are four glasses in a bottle of wine. (Unless you get the jug, and no one gets the jug after age thirty.) And Richie poured the final glass, licking the last drip as it dangled on the mouth of the throat of the bottle. The last glass of anything—if you notice—is a depressing and downright loathsome thing. His first taste of it was a sip.

He piled a plate on top of another. He picked up cutlery and put that on the plates. It was a mess. The kitchen was still full of dishes and pots and pans, because in spite of having cooked a simple meal, he had seemed to require numerous and sundry appliances. They were scattered everywhere.

He hid from himself his need to hurt. And he piled dishes. He thought about Porter. Or tried to. The boy in the story. The story, at that point, was too far away from him to make even a small dent in his head.

She could come back. He could call her tomorrow. Don’t do it. Come back to me. I’ll fix it. I’ll do it all. Everything. In a burst of condolence—whether to him or to her he didn’t analyze—he thought he would quit drinking. He stumbled into the kitchen, glass in one hand, dishes in the other and made that vow. I’ll quit.

I will. Tomorrow I will. If you come back. If you come back and stay.

But the feeling in his head was an old and familiar friend that he needed. The only condolence he got came out of the bottle, the only time he could make things completely right (or not matter) was with the bottle.
If you could bottle that feeling—and thank god someone did.

He put the dishes in the sink. He put water in the roaster—her roaster—to soak off the remnants of potato that had stuck there. It was tossed into the sink also, where it stood at an awkward angle, the water all on one side. He tried to prop it up on a glass and it fell. He wandered around the kitchen, back between stove and sink a couple of times, and called it done. He downed the last of his wine.

The glass was empty. And something niggled at him.

Enough.

Even as he argued, a lesser part of his brain whispering truths, Richie walked deliberately over to the far corner of the last cupboard under the sink and opened it. Amid the bottles of cleanser and dish soap was a gleaming, shining example of the American go-to attitude that he liked. A contingency plan.

He reached out for the (half) bottle of bourbon (half) hidden behind a rag and a bottle of cleanser.
Aha.

Hello. And how did you get there?

It flashed through his mind. The trip to the liquor store. The standing endlessly in the wine aisle, finding, choosing, reading, just the right wine to bring her back. To tell her, I’m okay now. A benign wine. A wine of the casual drinker. A wine for all seasons. He wandered through the wines of Italy, France, America, South Africa, Spain, Canada, way to the back, where there was no wine.
Ran out of wine.
The bourbon had been in his hand, almost as a before-thought, and then he picked a nice light, woody South African because it seemed arbitrary and just the sort of thing a non-totally-casual-drinker might choose because of its political value.

The bourbon had come along just for the ride. And now it gleamed with possibilities.

Enough.

Go to bed. Write like hell tomorrow. Be—

He pulled it out and turned the cap before he had a glass or a decision at hand.

On the couch, much later, he ruminated and came up with
it just wasn’t really worth it.
His heart was gone. History. Toast. No more heart. She had taken it with her. He stared unfocused into the dark of the living room (the candles had long since burned away) and thought that it (most of it) was over. She wasn’t going to come back. Not to him. Not to that. To this. And somewhere in the rumination came the scent of something bad.

It took a long time to get there.

He became aware, first, of his nose tingling. He smoked intermittently,
smoking too much nose hurts,
but realized in a sleepy part of his brain that it wasn’t smoke he smelled, but something burning.

It grew until it bothered him. His house on fire.
It would just be like that, for sure.

Bitch.

The highball glass on the coffee table swirled and doubled but looked nearly empty no matter what the view. Richie leaned over and filled it to the halfway mark (half-full), slopping bourbon down the side and onto the table.

The smell lingered, getting inside him. He tasted it in his throat. It was bad, like something gone over, tires burning, the dump. Decay. He frowned and stood up, wobbling, nearly falling back down onto the couch again, and then, grabbing his glass, he sniffed the air. It was hard to tell where it was coming from.

He squinted into the dark room looking for smoke. He couldn’t see anything, although, he realized, he could see two of the nothing that he saw. This made him giggle. He stumbled past the couch, hitting his shin on the coffee table without noticing.

He walked first toward the kitchen, the most obvious place in the house for a fire. The smell was less noticeable in there. He tried to remember if he had shut off the barbecue after the steaks were done, but remembered that he hadn’t been drunk then. Not then. Just now.
And I am most definitely drunk now.
He walked to the back door and, after a couple of futile passes, pulled it open and peeked outside. No smoke. No obvious flame. Just the smell of steak.

The faint smell of meat cooked earlier was nostalgic and accusing. He hadn’t meant it. None of it. Drunken regret overwhelmed him for a moment before anger took its place. He had meant well; it just hadn’t come out that way.

He was misunderstood. Always had been.

Nobody knows what it’s like to be me
, he thought with boozy self-pity.

He stared out into the dark wishing he was seeing it through someone else’s (sober) eyes, squinting, trying to focus. All he could really see was the dark. A metaphor for my life, he thought, with equal parts pity and clarity.

Fuck it.

He backed up and closed the door, forgetting entirely why he had opened it in the first place until he was assaulted, the moment the door closed on the fresh air, with the acrid smell of something burning. It seemed almost to be coming from behind him, thicker there in the hall than it had been in the kitchen or the living room.

Funneling down the stairs.

Still holding his drink, he wandered down the hall and looked up the dark stairwell. Upstairs in his room, the candles would still be burning. One might have fallen over, lit something man-made, something made of chemicals, synthesized from nature, getting it right in every way except the way it smelled when it burned. A shirt; a sheet; there were no curtains as yet in the bedroom. There was a little rug on the far side of the bed by the window.

Very logical. Or maybe, by then, the candles would have burned out. Given up.

He climbed the stairs, pausing at the bottom only a moment to sip his drink.

*  *  *

The bathroom light had been left on for Jennifer, in case she had to go there in the planned interim between dinner and retiring to the candlelit bedroom. Richie’s bedroom door was closed; he thought maybe the flickering candlelight, spotted on her way up to relieve herself, might have seemed presumptuous.

The smell was very strong at the bottom of the stairs. He jogged his way up, taking the stairs two at a time, one hand on the rail, his drink splashing dangerously against the sides of the glass. The light from the bathroom pooled in the hall outside the door.

At the top of the stairs he flicked a switch and the upstairs hall sconces came on.

The hatch to the attic was open, the ladder down. Like an invitation.

He looked to his bedroom door, still closed, and back to the attic. He stared at it, blinking once, a long, restive blink.

I closed that.

Without giving it further thought, he reached over (not taking his eyes from the hatch and the ladder,
just hanging there…yoo hoo! Up here!)
and turned the knob to his bedroom, pushing the door open.

It was dark in there. No glow from the lit candles.

Dragging his eyes from the hatch with both drunken and cautionary slowness (
Yoo hoo! Up here!),
he poked his head into the bedroom and sniffed deeply. There was a smell, but it was waxy and familiar; like a burned match. Sulphury. He flicked on the light. He saw the small glass candle holder, purchased just that afternoon, on the edge of the dresser closest to the window. It was burned down, and the sides of the glass were murky and gray with the residue of the candle. He looked over to the bedside table and saw a virtual replica of the first. He stepped inside just two steps farther, and glanced over toward the side of the bed. He couldn’t smell synthetic fibers smoldering; he counted off his five little candleholders that had made their way, foolishly, upstairs and nothing was tipped or dripping.

He hadn’t expected it to be.

After all, he wrote this stuff. He smiled gamely and closed the bedroom door after himself.

Under the hatch, he stared up into the dark mouth of the attic. He tried to work up a bit of adrenaline and found himself too drunk. He tried to find the drama inside—of course there was nothing up there, obviously he had simply not shut the attic hatch after working that day, but it was an opportunity nonetheless to be his reader for just a moment—but he was too drunk.

The smell was definitely up there. It would be electrical. The smart thing to do was to go back downstairs and turn off the breaker that served the attic. Bad wiring. Old house. Very expensive. The odor of whatever was burning did not smell electrical: missing was that sharp, plastic smell of the coatings burning. This particular smell was somehow animal, like pork, overdone pork, burned too long on a barbecue; but it had a rubbery smell, like tires. It was biting, painful in his nose, especially so close. Synthetics did that. If it was the insulation, he was fucked.

He climbed the ladder. If there was a fire, he might just throw himself on it.

The drink in his hand presented a problem, but he climbed without addressing it. Two steps up he heard the hum of his computer, such an intimate and comfortable sound that he hardly noticed it at first. Not until he reached the top stair and the light from the screen, facing the hatch, met him.

Facing the wrong way. Facing the hatch.

The lid to the tiny portable was half closed (half-empty), directing the light toward the opposite wall. The screen inside, just visible, was white. Like a page. His word-processing program produced a blank white page to write on, just like the greats of old: Hemingway and his notebooks; Fitzgerald at the typewriter; Plath and her pages of baggage.

All around the computer was black. It was the only light, casting a weak glow around the table it sat on, so that he could just see the edge, and the floor underneath it. Fruitlessly, he glanced around the attic at floor level. The light that filtered up from the floor below pooled around the opening in the floor, but not far. He would turn on the desk lamp. He could flash it around the room, like a club. See what there was to see.

Richie took one more sip of his drink before resting it on the floor and pulling himself up. With a bit of a struggle, he stood into blackness. He strained into the dark. The room was silent. It stank up there, for sure, but the smell seemed suddenly old, a hangover, yesterday’s meat.

He reached over and pulled up the lid on the computer.

The screen was blank except for a few words in the middle, as though laid out. He squinted to read, but it was too small.

Four lines. Like a poem.

(little arms little legs)

He stared and read it again, trying to make sense of the words all running together, and he lost himself in them, finally finding the drama. The back of his neck tightened. His mouth was dry and he tasted the old smell of burning
(meat
rubber and synthetics). And he looked up into the dark.

Out of the corner of his eye, a flash of white. He spun that way, staring madly into the dark, one hand lightly on the edge of the lid to his computer.

“Hey!”
he called.

Nothing answered back but the dark. He stared for a long time into it, waiting for something to show itself.

Wondering.

The wonder touched some basic, primal place inside him that it might not have reached in the harsh light of sobriety. In sobriety, he might have
(eat it up)
freaked out, slammed the hatch door, called it heebie-jeebies, left it alone. Calmed himself and maybe (until nightfall) laughed it off.

In his drunken half-numb, half-open state, he allowed the wonder. The fear, prickly, felt good.

“What is this?” he asked of the dark. He swallowed on a dry mouth. His skin woke up, sobering him slightly, but not enough. “What is this?” he repeated, very softly.

Something like a shadow flickered to his right, gray and indefinite. Richie squinted, focusing with difficulty. The light from the computer glowed beside him.

A man stepped closer, out of the dark, and stared back. Richie shrieked. Stood frozen, open-mouthed.

The man smiled softly, sadly, kindly, and Richie saw him distinctly, his pale, watery eyes, white face topped with whiter hair, neck wrinkled and long, poking out of a white collar; the rest of him was dark. Long: he wore something long, like a cloak. The man was very tall and slender, like a tree, his tremendous age and height making him seem firmly rooted.