In Universes, page 14
The day I’m supposed to get the test, I wake at five in the morning. The beehives are dark shapes, huddled and staring down at us. The smell in the room is strange, not quite sweet, a little musky. I nudge Kay. “Can we get out of here?” I say, and after blinking her eyes into openness, she nods.
We walk across the dew-damp grass to the car, and I drive us away from the house without a plan. The appointment isn’t until the afternoon. Kay dozes in the passenger seat and I feel the calm of early morning settle into me, that time before expectation or obligation.
I think I’m driving aimlessly, but I begin to recognize the neighborhood. We pass a dilapidated house with a large yard, a few strands of wire fencing it in. There’s no horse in the yard, no couch steaming in the sun.
I drive us to a nearby park, deserted at this hour of the morning. We meander along a dirt path, past a playground like the one where I’d once gotten into a terrible fight with my college boyfriend, Caleb. The path winds through gnarled oak trees, which give way to fields of flowers. The sky lightens gradually, the day sneaking up on us. Eventually, Kay settles onto the grass and I lie with my head in her lap, breathing in the scent of her favorite laundry detergent, fresh-cut grass, wildflowers. I watch a bee dart from bloom to bloom, doing its best to kiss each flower. Put a hand on it and it will sting you, even though there will be no winner. It will sting you when it is afraid and both of you will be hurt and there is no way of phrasing this to make it less damaging.
Sitting there in the sunshine, I tell Kay about the moments that weren’t in the photo albums. Memories of hiding at the top of the stairs, sitting in a classroom or on a therapist’s couch. Images of myself at five, eight, eleven that I have refused to look at for years.
“We are a family,” Kay says, when I’ve finished laying my memories out before her. “Baby or no baby, fractured or whole.” If the word family has any meaning, she must be right. It must be this, here, her body curved around mine, her fingers in my hair. Graham letting themself into our apartment, my dad’s voice on the phone saying “Hey, Giraffe,” Kay’s mother of love digging her talons into my shoulder.
I find a new door in the house of my body and rest my fingers on the knob. How horrifying it is to be mortal and to love someone, in this world whose brutality I have run from but never forgotten. How much easier—and emptier—to refuse the possibility of loss. How do you bear it? I ask the self inside that room.
Nearby, the bee hovers in front of a vermillion flower. It is stationary, untethered from gravity, but the stillness is an illusion created of constant change. The bee’s wings are twisting in figure eights, beating two hundred times a minute, spinning the air into a vortex that holds them aloft.
Chapter Nine
The House of Discontent
Raffi finds the physical manifestation of the House of Discontent on an evening in October when the shadows are stretching. They’ve been hiking for hours through the forest outside Paradise, the kind of long, punishing hike whose sole purpose is to make sleep possible. They’re not carrying bear spray, which is more invitation than oversight.
The house is hidden by Ponderosa pines, but even in small slices—even though, prior to this moment, the house had lived only in Raffi’s mind—they recognize it at once. Their legs go wobbly and then they are kneeling on the ground, making fists around pine needles. They count to steady their breathing, focus on physical sensations: the pine needles are sharp and silky against their palms, a small rock is digging into their left knee, the cold air burns the back of their nose.
Once Raffi can stand again, they approach the house. They move slowly, as if it might startle, turn tail, run away. The path leading to it is overgrown, and at first Raffi doesn’t notice the FOR SALE sign, propped haphazardly in the hard ground, bird droppings speckling the red letters. When they see it, they stop. Look back and forth, house to sign to house. The house is so familiar that Raffi wants to embrace it, press their body up against its walls, curl up on the porch and sleep until the ghost opens the door and welcomes them in.
They don’t have their cell phone or anything to write with, so they read the number on the FOR SALE sign out loud once, twice, three times like a spell. Then they turn and walk away. Raffi feels the house watching them go. When they reach their car at last, they enter the number into their phone with a shaking finger. They press send, but the call fails. Fucking Montana, Raffi thinks, not for the first time.
At the top of a mountain pass, Raffi finds service. The number rings and rings. They’ve given up hope by the time a woman picks up. Hello? she says, sounding tired. Hi, Raffi says, I want to buy your house.
Raffi doesn’t have the money to buy a house. Before the attack, they were a snowboard instructor in the winter and a hiking guide in the summer. (Before that, they were a physicist, but that life is so far away now that it belongs to someone else entirely.) After the attack, they are a server at the diner in Paradise. They like the job because it requires them to put on cheerfulness each day like the black apron they tie around their waist. They smile at the people who come in, ask how they’re doing and whether they’d like coffee and if they’re done with that. It’s a small town—everyone knows how the ghost became a ghost. The customers are gentle when Raffi forgets the cream for their coffee. Marta, the owner of the diner, doesn’t yell when she finds Raffi staring off into space, just pats them on the shoulder. But neither waiting tables nor teaching snowboarding results in the kind of money that lets you buy a house, even a falling-down old one in the middle of the woods.
What results in enough money, it turns out, is loss. The ghost—before he was a ghost—left the girl a small inheritance. When Raffi found out, they tried to give the money back to the ghost’s parents, but the ghost’s parents said it wasn’t what he would have wanted. So Raffi left the money in a separate bank account and tried to forget it existed. Using the money felt like accepting it as a fair trade for the ghost’s death.
Parked at the top of the mountain pass, Raffi hangs up with the real estate agent. They close their eyes to visit the House of Discontent. It is instinctive, this retreat to the home that lives inside them. They want to visit the Room of Difficult Decisions, with its elaborate brass scale, taller than Raffi. Around the edges of the room, pros and cons of all sizes for them to label and set on the scale’s plates to see which way it will tip. But when they close their eyes, all they can see is the house in the woods, and its door is locked. They squeeze their eyes tight enough to see spots of light. Please, they think to no one in particular, to the universe or the mountains rising in the distance or their own mind, I can’t lose anything else. But they know the universe doesn’t care about what they can or can’t do. Both the ghost and the house he helped them create are gone.
Raffi buys the house without ever going inside. You sure you don’t want to see it? the real estate agent asks, and Raffi has to repeat their answer several times before it is accepted. The only person they tell about buying the house is their dad. They make him promise not to tell anyone else, by which they mean their mother, who would call this delayed grief or erratic behavior or some other term born in a self-help book. Their dad sounds worried, but he is 2,400 miles away, and it isn’t so hard to sound okay from that distance. Raffi tries to put a chirp in their voice. They end several statements with exclamation points. Raffi’s dad needs them to be okay, so he believes them. He asks how much work the house needs, and Raffi doesn’t tell him that they haven’t been inside. They say, well it’s a fixer-upper! They ask him for a list of tools to buy. He is a mechanical engineer who knows about these things. He sends them a long list.
A month after finding the house, Raffi walks up to its front door. Three months and seven days since the ghost died. Five years, plus or minus, since their aunt died. Do all griefs age their way into blurriness? Raffi hopes not. They want their grief over the ghost’s death to stay sharp as a razor.
Their senses are unusually acute as they approach the house: the wind through the trees is a roaring; the sharp, sweet scent of pine sap overwhelming. They drop the key twice before managing to unlock the door. They step over the threshold into an empty room and they realize that some part of them had believed the house would look the same on the inside as it did in their mind. The mudroom in the thought-House of Discontent had a large workbench on which a variety of dissection tools were arrayed. It was the place where they assessed their emotions, figuring out which ones would become rooms. It had a rainwater shower in one corner for washing off lingering confusion. The mudroom of the real house is just a small square, with dirty floors and a cracked window looking out into the overgrown yard. Okay, Raffi thinks. It has become a habit to think okay when nothing is. Okay, so it’s a skeleton. The flesh and blood are up to me.
They spend the day pacing around the house, making plans, panic prowling after them. The house is in a state of tremendous disrepair. Its boundaries have become porous: moss creeps in through the broken windows to carpet the floor, a tree reaches its branches through one of the living room windows, mold mottles the bathroom walls. There is an entire family—or perhaps village?—of raccoons residing on the second floor. Many of the rooms are empty, but others are home to a strange assortment of furnishings. A claw-foot tub stands alone in the center of one room. In another, a taxidermied buck hangs slightly crooked on the wall, one of its antlers broken off. Raffi finds a box of yellow notepads, strangely pristine. An old fur coat, moth-eaten, in a closet. A surprising number of broken mirrors. There is a study whose floor is papered in books and magazines, as though victim of a small, localized tornado. In one room, there is a bed that looks as though some enormous creature ate a few bites of it like a sandwich. Beside the bed, there’s a nightstand on top of which Raffi finds a book of poems. The house feels both eerie and familiar. They keep thinking they will know what is behind the next door. Mostly they are wrong—mostly there is nothing but dusty air—but sometimes they are right.
The house tries to help Raffi. It closes doors softly behind them, it warms the light that slants through the windows. The house loves Raffi—how could it not, when it knows them so entirely?
It was the ghost who dreamt up the House of Discontent after Raffi’s aunt died. Of course, that was before the bear attack, before the ghost was a ghost, back when he was just Graham. Raffi—who was a niece then—had moved to Paradise to be near their great-aunt, who was dying. It was a decision they couldn’t entirely explain. They had always been terrified of death, but when their mom told them about the cancer, said she didn’t know how Zlata would cope, out there in Montana with no one to care for her—no Jewish community at all, and her so private she’d starve before asking for food—Raffi said, I’ll go. They’d finished college a few weeks earlier and they could already tell it was going to be another bad summer. Are you sure? Raffi’s dad asked later, and Raffi was surprised to find they were. They packed up their old Civic, quit their job in the observational cosmology lab, broke up with their boyfriend, Caleb, presenting the decision as a mutual one—neither of us wants to do long-distance—and he’d acquiesced to this version of things, as they’d known he would. To their aunt, they let the move be a favor they were asking of her: a place to reset, to reassess the shape of their life.
And for a while this view of things held. Aunt Zlata weakened incrementally, so that the change was hard to notice until some measurement of daily living quantified it: a fall going down the stairs, a new difficulty opening pill bottles, a sudden inability to understand clocks. Raffi made themself useful—got a lift installed on the stairs, found an automated pill dispenser, learned about portable oxygen concentrators and different brands of nasal cannulas—but this still left them with more free time than they’d ever had. To fill this time, they learned to snowboard, got a part-time job at the nearby ski resort, met Graham, found the perfect recipe for a flourless chocolate torte, ate roughly a hundred slices with their aunt, who’d developed an astonishing sweet tooth as a side effect of one of her meds, and fell into deep and lasting love with the mountains. Even when Aunt Zlata slipped out of the house at 3:00 A.M., thinking it was morning, and fell on the ice; even when Raffi had to restrain her as she tried to climb out of her hospice bed, whispering in languages Raffi couldn’t understand; even when the doctor said, in the euphemistic hospital phrasing that Raffi hated, that they ought to prepare themself; even though they’d come to Montana for this very reason—even then, Raffi didn’t truly believe their aunt was going to die.
Afterward, they couldn’t bring themself to go back to her house. Instead, they went to Graham’s couch. That first night, when he heard them crying, he lay down next to them and held them so tightly that the sensation of floating untethered in outer space eased. I don’t know what to do with all the sadness, Raffi said. There’s no room to live around it.
Maybe we need to build the sadness its own place to live, Graham said. What would its house look like? And when Raffi closed their eyes, there it was, fully formed, looking like any normal house until you stepped inside. Together, Raffi and Graham walked through the door and began imagining the house’s architecture.
The next night, Raffi said, Will you sleep with me again? They didn’t know if it was an appropriate thing to ask. They were friends, not lovers, and Raffi didn’t want to change that. But he nodded, padded into the living room later that night and lay down next to them. Maybe there should be a room for forgetting, he said, not permanently, but a place to go when you need a rest. Raffi listened to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. A room where memories can lose their sharp edges, they said.
It became their nightly ritual, lying side by side, imagining new rooms until sleep came. Even after they’d built enough rooms for Raffi’s sadness, even after Raffi could fall asleep without crying, they held to the routine. The house got a Room of Unexpected Joy, for the feeling of driving around a bend in the road and seeing the mountains appear, for discovering that it’s possible to invent a relationship that doesn’t have anything to do with the drop-down menu life presents you. Its name remained the House of Discontent, but it didn’t mind. It knew that whatever its name, it had enough rooms for every sort of emotion.
The most significant limitation of the physical-House of Discontent is that its space is finite. Raffi is both relieved and alarmed by this limitation. They are already daunted by the work in front of them. But how are they supposed to fit all their sadness into a bounded space?
The rooms on the first two floors will have to be fluid, they decide, changing from the Room of This to the Room of That as necessity dictates. The attic, with its sloping ceilings, will be for daydreams, wishes, and aspirations, which itself feels like an aspiration—the idea that someday such a space might be necessary. The bears will go in the basement. Raffi doesn’t want any bears in the house at all, but that’s not how the House of Discontent works. So Raffi will put them in the basement and lock the door.
Raffi thinks they know the house. It’s lived inside them for so many years, but containing something isn’t the same as understanding it. Raffi doesn’t know that the bears aren’t the only ones who live in the basement. Raffi doesn’t know that the ghost lives down there too.
The years between Aunt Zlata’s death and the ghost’s death have a golden hue to them now. In grief, Raffi found themself asking, for the first time in their life, what it was that they wanted—not in the way of goals or aspirations, but in a day-to-day, moment-to-moment way. In grief, they couldn’t care anymore about what people thought of them. Couldn’t care about genius or success. They searched out small joys to help them get through the days: alpenglow on the mountains, a moose snacking on the tree outside their window, the first snowboard run of the day in fresh powder, the meals Graham cooked without ever expecting Raffi to do the dishes. They discovered they could build a life out of these small joys: moving in with Graham, teaching snowboarding for money, painting and reading and hiking, falling in love with Graham’s friend Kay, falling back out of love, but gently. Ending each day sitting on the couch in front of the woodstove, dreaming up new rooms for the House of Discontent.
Maybe there’s a universe where Raffi’s whole life unfolded this way. Where Raffi never suggested mountain biking, that morning up near Glacier. Where the ghost never careened around that tight twist in the trail, whooping with delight, crashing full speed into the bear. Where Raffi had remembered to grab the bear spray that was sitting on their counter. Where the attack became a story they told each other for the rest of their long, entwined lives. Instead of the destruction of the world.
The ghost likes the bears, which is surprising, since they’re the reason he’s a ghost. He has the sense that this is not the first time their paths have intersected, not the only time he has died in this way. In death, the ghost has become philosophical; he finds it difficult to blame the bears. They each followed the path a zillion small choices and chances set them on—blue sky, the scent of berries, the joy of rushing wind—and when their paths intersected, when the ghost rode his mountain bike around the path’s bend and directly into the bear, they each did what they had to do, which is to say, the bear attacked and the ghost died. It doesn’t hurt him to think about it now. In campfire stories, ghosts have many regrets. But in reality regret is a heavy emotion and the ghost is insubstantial. Anytime he tries to hold on to regret, it falls straight through.
What the ghost wishes is that Raffi would walk down the basement stairs, so he could tell them that none of this is their fault. That whatever story they’re telling themself is the wrong one. He would tell them it isn’t so bad being dead. He would say, I’m sorry I’ve left you all alone, but you’re going to be okay, and Raffi would shake their head, and they would both cry, but the words would plant a seed inside Raffi that would eventually blossom into truth. The two of them would sit together, overlapping slightly, speculating about how the singular bear who killed the ghost had turned into a multitude of bears. They would laugh at the bears’ antics—even Raffi wouldn’t be able to help themself—and the future in front of them would be a promise instead of a casket.
