In a way I imagine to be similar to the unwinding of a galaxy from a center point of creation, the house unwinds into things which could never contain it as we drive it onward with the elastic recompenses of our imaginations. The front lawn, the battlefield, the site of the Wilkes' barbecue, the Radley's front porch, Dracula's drawbridge, and I don't give a damn. I passed a hundred bodies on my way up the front drive and into my home tonight, all casualties of these close quarters I share with this pack of bloodthirsty animals, and I didn't see them at all because I choose not to see.
The swamp has absorbed all our bloodshed and lost hopes and dreams, and when it became saturated, it spat them back at us as the water overflowed the first floor and the hurricane raged outside. Maybe every storm has been a result of our unnumbered transgressions against god, order, and creation.
Gray House has a garage. I say that limply, to explain why all our cars are sitting on the lawn, or convince myself of some last vestige of humanity we've delayed in shedding out of sentimentality. We have a garage, and there are tools in it, and old boxes of things we've been meaning to throw out or tried to keep for too long.
The garage is large and unfinished with any drywall. The wood beams are home to spiders and the corpses of insects. Grady has three or four motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding housed there, and it looks, no matter how long it takes him to get back to it, like he's only just left the room. I think when he dies, this will be where we go to mourn him.
Adam, having completed the restoration of his own car 4 years ago, has begun work on the repair of John's rust-colored truck, which has refused to turn over since the day he came home. Adam and Grady have eyed the thing with suspicious glares, like it's alive and purposely defying them. The cement floor is generally grimy, generally cool, and growing moss in the corner closest the door.
But if I go to it now - if I cross the threshold of the place from the laundry room off the library on the first floor - and open the heavy steel door and expect to see this dim workshop before me, I know I won't. What will meet me is something a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more heartbreaking. Gray House will betray me, and become Joshua's garage if I look there.
I know from the moment I open the door, the smell of the air which greets me is no longer bayou damp and summer stale. It's winter in the Midwest. The smell of American misery, like piles of wet chaff left to freeze. It's the winter of 1973, and somehow, that is also on the edges of the air, as part of the misery; that which we despise and cannot yet change about our world and ourselves, and perhaps wouldn't, even given the chance.
Joshua's smell slaps me just beyond that - first of his hair and the soap he uses to shampoo it's twelve or so inches, and then the sweat he drips in working on the Plymouth he has on the lift. In this place, Joshua is the biggest creature in existence to me, and my world is comprised of this garage, flavored with his beer and smoke breaks with the garage boys, and blanketed in his vast checkered shirts. From this doorway, it's a hundred miles up to his shoulders where he carries me, to see the secret world above our ceiling fans in our apartment upstairs.
"Bug?" his voice calls, from this somewhere else. "You find it?"
I don't know what he wants me to find, there, or even if I'm allowed in the garage now that's it's night and we've closed. Maybe the sink is leaking and I just can't remember. Maybe I'm about to get in trouble for sneaking around for the first time. Here in the doorway, I can see with some kind of diamond clarity this one thought which dooms me always in that world: It would take a man even bigger than Joshua to...
I close the door.
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