It Will Just Be Us, page 13
What a disappointment it must be when the person answering the door is not a disfigured monstrosity or a minion of the undead, but my smiling mother or little me. But it’s the opening of the door that matters. You don’t know who is on the other side; that’s the thrill, the Parable of the Knocker. I could be anyone. Anyone at all.
One of these days, I’d like to give them a scare. I really would.
How would you like to see a real ghost, children?
No one is inside when I come home. I can sense it; the house has a quality of abandonment, the kind of feeling you get only in empty houses. It hollowly echoes my footsteps and my voice when I call out hello, only to hear my own self calling back and back and then silence.
Open the door, Sam, it seems to say.
I find them in the garden.
Mother is sitting in her favorite chair peeling a clementine while Elizabeth trots around, absurdly watering already-overgrown plants with a rusted watering can, despite the frequent rains we’ve had, the storms, the wetness that is always heavy in the air.
“Hello, dear, how was your day?” she says in a parody of wifely charm.
“It’s only just past noon,” I point out as a cloud creeps over the sun, dimming our world. Out in the swamp, the trees clothed in moss and hung with scarves of vines stand grotesque in the gray sealike light, and angry little black birds dart across the pale sky like the shadows of souls fleeing hell. They scream at each other, and I remember the naked bird on the kitchen table. We are like birds, I think, like birds in the swamp.
In a moment, the sun returns, and everything is different again.
“What on earth are you doing?” I ask.
“Lizzie’s watering the garden,” my mother intones, as if this is not obvious, as she continues to peel her clementine, discarding shards of orange skin.
She hasn’t gone near my filled-in holes, at least. From here I can see the mounds of overturned dirt beneath the red maple, fallen leaves already blowing over the grave.
“Someone’s got to take care of this place,” Elizabeth adds. “And, frankly, I’m getting bored sitting around all the time. Sitting around too much here can drive you crazy.”
Open the door. The echo is following me, in my mind. Maybe I am crazy. Open the door.
“Look,” says Agnes, and we all look.
The girls are playing again. Two little girls, bouncing a birdie on ancient tennis rackets that must have been rusting in the basement for years. The goal seems to be to keep the birdie in the air as long as possible. They laugh as it whips upward like a little rocket, bouncing and spinning, until it falls at Sam’s feet. She signs an apology, but little Lizzie grins wickedly.
“You are banished from the kingdom,” she says.
We watch, holding our breath. When we played at royalty in the old tower room, banishment meant climbing down, opening the basement door, and descending into the dungeon, there to stay for an hour in the dark. If you were lucky, the other wouldn’t close the door behind you, trapping you behind it. I skirted the rules as often as I could—anything to avoid opening the door on the black maw of the basement and stepping through it to the other side.
Elizabeth turns around first, ignoring the memory, taking the watering can to the other end of the yard to drown the weeds there, turning her back on the girls. I watch as little Sam, instead of heading inside for the basement, takes off running toward the swamp, getting tinier and tinier, banished, banished from the kingdom.
Open the door, Sam.
* * *
I’ve left them outside and come up here alone to the end of the third-floor hallway, unable to put it off any longer, but unable, either, to do it. The closer I draw to the door down that cramped and narrow hall, the more terrible it seems. Standing here now, I am hardly able to lift the key, it is so heavy, and I cannot help but feel that something is simply wrong with this place, this room, this suffocating windowless hallway.
It is a door that should not be opened. What if it is meant to stay shut?
Shivering, I slide the key into the lock, and it clicks into place.
Open the door, Sam.
All right. I open the door.
9
The door opens.
The air smells like it has been shut up for a long time, like the breath of an ancient desiccated corpse. When I step inside, spider webs creep down and cling to my skin like sticky whispers, invisible in the fragile light from the hallway, which offers only enough for me to know if I might bump into one of the brooding funereal shapes that inhabit the room.
It is only a room, I think to myself. Only a room that has been closed off for a very long time, like the abandoned wing of a hospital or a shuttered factory. There is nothing inherently bad about the room but that we have made it so, by locking it up for so long. This is what I tell myself, even with my heart in my throat and the subconscious hint, from which I deliberately turn away, that there is something else to this place, that it is more than just a room, that what I see is not necessarily what is there.
If there ever was a light in here, I do not know how to find it, and it’s unlikely still to work, so I feel my way across the darkness, my arms outstretched as far as they can extend, until I find the window and pull aside its heavy drapery.
Now the daylight can have its way with this place.
The tall, narrow window is so dusty that it lends a grayish quality to the sunlight.
In that light the color of winter, I can see the room now. The shapes are of roughhewn furniture, including a set of drawers and a table coated with dust. The ceiling here is unfinished; wooden beams crisscross overhead, spinning shadows for the spiders. Here and there the floor sags, made soft by rot; I see holes in the decayed wood; a dusty, cracked mirror sits along the back wall; a confetti of broken plaster gathers on the floor around a tattered old armchair, exposing the uneven slats of lath where the wallpaper has peeled away; and even along the rest of the walls, the ancient florid wallpaper of an infinitely repeating pattern clings barely, hangs down in yellowing strips.
Yet none of this truly conveys what the room is, how it feels when you step through the threshold. These details tell you of dust mites and neglect, but they do not explain the goose bumps chasing each other across my arms, or the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, or the almost dizzying, magnetic impression of the air, charged not with electricity but some older, primal force, some undeniable strangeness that makes one’s head feel thick and fuzzy.
Worse yet, there is a bed against the east wall, with a gross discolored mattress and a threadbare blanket that must have been white, once. I cannot imagine spending a night in this room.
Even standing here in the gray light observing the room is giving me a headache. The sick energy in the air makes me want to sit, but I refuse to go near that bed. It repels me like the wrong end of a magnet, and it seems to hold the indentation of forgotten souls on its surface. The infinity wallpaper makes me dizzy.
I have not mentioned this yet because I have been trying to ignore it, to convince myself it is only my imagination, but the more I stare, the more the things before me seem to warp and bend, as if I have taken some kind of hallucinogenic. It is almost, but not quite, like the time I tried mushrooms in college with my roommate and her boyfriend, and we danced out onto the quad at midnight while the stars pulsed with a great eternal heartbeat, and then, when we returned to the dorm, I felt feverish in the harsh light that made their eyes balloon strangely.
When I look around, everything seems normal at first, but the longer I allow my eyes to linger on any one spot, the more the warping creeps in from the edges of my vision, like a tunneling, as if trying to compress everything down to a single point.
It all becomes a bit too much, so I find my way to the table and sit heavily on a rickety chair. As I do, I hear a low groan, like a woman in pain, and it sets the back of my neck prickling.
The table is bare but for a dusty notebook that doesn’t warrant too much interest, but I pick it up anyway and flip it open, wondering what sort of forgotten murmurs might have been etched in its pages. To my surprise (I’d half assumed the notebook would be blank, just another empty element of this soulless void, this nonplace), the pages are filled with sprawling handwriting.
As if the room left it here just for me!
An artifact for me to document.
I thumb through yellowed pages, mentally narrating what I will note down of this find. Five by eight inches, soft leather cover, worn binding, handwriting in black ink, most likely ballpoint pen. There is no name on the inside cover—the journal refuses to identify itself. When I flip to a random page, I find … Well, I’ll let you read the entry for yourself:
Sometimes I wonder just when I began to lose my mind.
I’ve been looking at the shadows more closely ever since I came into this room. There seems to be more in the shadows here than anywhere else.
I have read that shadows are the absence of light, yet this seems wrong to me. Where no light exists, there are no shadows either. The shadow shows us not a physical shape that exists in reality but instead the place where light has been blocked. It shows us the inverse of that which we can see via visible light, in the form of a space that we cannot see that exists in the shape and semblance of the thing that is blocking the light. An absence and a presence.
And what if all we see are shadows? What does that tell us about the things we cannot see, the things that are somewhere above, blocking the light?
I cannot help but think it as I look around this room, lit only by the insufficient lamp that misses certain spaces or obscure corners that I cannot see, because the light cannot see them, and while the shadows themselves are not real physical entities capable of existing on their own, there could, at the same time, be anything within those areas of non-sight, of nothingness.
In a sense, the memories that move through this house are also shadows, cast by some sort of time-light. Like the shadows made physical in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, shadows burnt into the ground with the force of the explosion. If light has enough force, then it can make shadows real, permanent.
Is that us? Are we only shadows made permanent? Are we any more real than the echoes that wander this house of shadows—this room of Nothing?
No, not so much nothing as beyond-all-things. But that isn’t quite right either.
Humans have always had trouble understanding nothing. That is, the ness of no-thing, the nothing-ness, the concept of not-anything. And why is this? Because we live our lives in a world of Things: I am a Thing, you are a Thing, this house is a Thing, the grass the clouds the air we breathe—are all Things.
What do we know of ‘no thing’?
The ancient Greeks had no concept of zero. The idea of it, the non-number, made no sense to them. They went about their lives refusing to use zero, even in practical ways, in mathematics and astronomy. It was an abomination. Unthinkable, unimaginable, beyond comprehension. Zero, the evil god perversely existing where it cannot exist.
In Sanskrit the word for zero, shunya, comes from the concepts of void and emptiness. Arabs also used a word for empty, the circle they called sifr. Medieval leaders loathed zero. If God is everything that is, then what is everything that isn’t?
The Evil God Zero again, evil because there is no sense in it, because it breaks rules. We cannot conceive of the void any more than we can conceive of the infinite.
We cannot divide by zero. It is impossible. Try to divide by zero, and what will happen? Insanity. Physics breaks down, the world crumbles, the universe implodes.
Zero-dimensional space has no dimensions. Imagine that. It is a point, a singularity, like the center of a black hole.
Both a point and a void. No-space and all-space of no-thing.
The Zero is here in this room. This is where it comes through—where the nothingness comes from. Comes leaking out.
These philosophical musings on shadows stir something inside me, and it is all I can do to stave off thinking of him—the shadow himself. A nonentity who has yet to become itself, who can appear at any place, at any time, creeping through the long dark hallways of this house or perhaps standing in that corner right now, just behind me, the one I cannot see, watching me from some distant year.
Which reminds me, this feeling of being watched, of a class I once taught, late at night, in a classroom made cozy and small by the dark ruminating outside the window, pondering us as if we were a lone human outpost in a vast blank world, a refuge growing smaller with the encroaching night—the eyes of the students gleaming uncannily beneath the fluorescent ceiling, absorbing the light, drinking it, and me at the podium, trapped by the students and the outer dark, and the feeling of barrenness, hollowness, like a voice in a tin can echoing missives to no one.
The clank of a chain—I’m sure that’s what I’ve heard. I turn around and catch a glimpse of a man chained to the bedpost, his mouth a rictus, and I nearly drop the notebook. Something creaks overhead, and I look up, but there is nothing there.
I cannot stay in this room any longer. The ceiling seems to keep getting higher, glimmering faintly as with stars. I take the journal with me and lock the door on my way out.
* * *
For the next few days, the journal consumes me. I carry it with me wherever I go, reading snatches of it between classes and over lunch. And then I cannot stop myself from pulling it out in class, too, the strange entries drawing me to them while my students are taking a quiz, and like a sneaky student myself, I read it secretly behind my desk.
The journal speaks to me, and this is what it says:
What lies at the heart of this room is what I have been trying to get at. I am working my way toward it. The no-time, the un-time.
My wife would know what I am trying to say, but I feel that I cannot talk to her. She is somehow far beyond me now, in the past or the future or in some other non-temporal sense. I have been keeping it from her, these dreamy midnight wanderings to this room, which draws me back. I can feel it during the day when I am away, my skin buzzing, needing to return. She must by now have noticed my distance, noticed that I get up and leave the bed cold at night, but she will want to know how I got in, how I found the key.
There was a pregnant girl in the house—I don’t know who she was, but she paced the third-floor hallway, back and forth, as if in the midst of some dilemma. She kept looking at the door to this room, like she was afraid of it. I followed her to that room with all the old furniture—that storage room—where she pried up a loose old floorboard and dropped this key inside. And, wouldn’t you know it, when I went in and pulled up the old floorboard, there it was.
But I am thinking, now, that maybe I shouldn’t have opened the door.
The room seems to change, subtly, every time I enter it such that I cannot figure it out. When I first came in, it was no more than a closet, a bare little room from some other time that had no business being in this expansive house, as if it had wedged its way in where it wasn’t originally in any sort of floorplan—and then it was as if it had grown with my being there, with a bed now that invited me to lie down in it and the walls having moved away to accommodate my expectations—and then it was a whole room grown where none had been! Yet it felt old and lived-in, as if it had been here all along but had merely shrunk over the ages because no one had been in it for so long, no one had watered it or nurtured it. Now I am onto something, yes, that is it, the reason it has been locked up all this time. Eventually if it had remained locked and unvisited it might have shrunk and disappeared entirely with no witness, until it was just a door that opened onto a blank wall. But it is too late, I am here, and now it is grown cavernous as a catacomb. Choked with dust and smelling faintly of rot, of the swamp, of burning, of ash.
And it was in this room grown vast and cancerous that I looked, and I saw it—the Zero. Like a hole burned through the world.
If you had seen what I have seen, you would know how impossible it is to look at the world the same way after, knowing it is filled with shadows, that reality lies somewhere beyond us still, or is merely cast on us by what never really existed in the first place, glimpsed through the hole that I have called the Zero, in the Never.
And now it has followed me out of the room, too, through the walls of the house. It’s following me through the mirrors. I see it, from the corner of my eye, in the reflections—some vast dark nothingness behind the facade of this reality, and I cannot look directly at it, I cannot look any longer into any of the mirrors or I will see what no one should see and if it comes again—
if it comes again I should step through the circle
should I?
or failing that I can tie myself a Zero of my own to step through
oh god god help me
I can’t tell what it means, only that the room—yes, the room drove this person mad. Perhaps I should dwell on who this might be, but I cannot bring myself to consider. It was someone who lived in the house. Someone with a wife. No, no, I won’t think of that.
I am trying not to chew on this, listening to my students’ pencils scratching at their papers, scratching away the void, and it makes my skin crawl. A slacker who did not study approaches me to turn in a blank sheet of paper. I slide it away from me, horrified, the nothingness crawling up my throat.
“Zero,” I tell him, throwing the paper back in his dull, befuddled face. “Zero.”
10
I carry the journal with me even at home, unable to let it go. I’m bending the soft cover in my hands when I walk past Elizabeth’s room and hear her shuffling about inside, huffing in frustration over a box of wooden pieces.
She is trying to build a crib.
She has purchased one of those build-it-yourself contraptions. The pieces of wood and flapping pages of directions strew the floor while she sits on her bed, one leg crossed over the other, her foot jangling while she leans into her cell phone, texting furiously.
