Jack,
The four walls of this hotel room are windowless and panel-brown. The carpet is that shade of gold that might as well be green. There is no bedspread. The painting over the single queen is a yellowing mountain landscape, cut with a river (items 2 and 3).
The bathroom is by the door. There is a small yellow-enameled bathtub and yellow-enameled toilet and yellow-enameled sink. It probably once looked sunny, before the grout turned black. There is a light over the sink shaped like a bread loaf, and a bare hole in the wall where Adam has torn out the medicine cabinet. There are miniature bottles of soap and shampoo, all turquoise, behind the shower door which is cloud-colored and marked with streaks (items 5-7).
The front door of the hotel room has a conspicuous metal bar, which I know wraps around to the outside where it's padlocked shut. The turning mechanism for the deadbolt has been removed.
In the spare skeleton of the room, I search drawers and find a change of clothes, fresh panties, and a makeup bag stuffed with tampons (items 8-25). No TV, no alarm clock, but an analog on the wall. I count the items in the room including furniture, that fill up the empty space. Twenty-nine. Thirty, counting myself.
The livid red poppy (item 31) Adam's left on the card table that is bolted to the floor is a calling-card, I guess. It's sagging for how long it's been laying there without water, the petals become weak like the skin of the elderly. The petal flop when I lift it up to smell it, knowing full well poppies have no real scent to speak of.
The center of the flower has a black heart and a cool yellow eye. It smells heavily green and sharp, the stalk furred lightly like an animal. That, the missing mirror, and the acrid smell of his cologne, are the only clues I have that he was ever here before I woke up. But there are ways those are plain symbols of Adam and the soul he embodies - the hole in the wall punched there in his rage, the waft of his bourbon and cigarettes and cologne reeking of regret, and the apology flowers left on the table. Because to be a romantic the way he is a romantic, is to also be a deeply flawed and vicious man.
The story of why I am here has been told many times by Adam, and with more eloquence than I've ever been able to find in myself. Yes, the brute of him has occasion to be eloquent, and it's his eloquence which lends him so readily to viciousness.
I'm here because...
Despite the availability of certain massive and universe-spanning destinies, I'm often still a girl. Although I can hardly breathe a word of that sentence without having to inhale, somewhat forcibly, the return argument of a girl being the specific embodiment of those destinies. I want to be allowed to throw all my divinity away, but I can't without having to choke on every piece of it on the way out, until I'm a microcosm of the kind of reasoning that explains how we are what we are, no matter how you might want to change things.
The explanation of why I'm here is provided, on the table next to the poppy, on cream-colored paper, in his graceful handwriting (item 32):
Pip,
I imagine you'd find some humor in the fact that I knew you first, by your red hood. Of course, I mean your Clairol hair color. I mean the lipstick you wore two Halloweens in a row, and never between. I mean the bra you keep, in the bottom drawer. I mean your blood exposed by jaggedly burst capillaries, under your skin white as the snow upon which I dream it spatters. I mean your tongue, revealing itself when you laugh. I mean the anger constricting my view of you, walking unguarded and alone at night. Of course, Epiphany, I mean the sting of your scent in my nose.
There is only one thing that has hunted you more ardently than your wolf, and that thing is me.
4 rounded paws, posterior 2.6 inches in length, 2.2 width, anterior 2.1 inches in length, 1.8 in width. 4 toes, none opposable, with small nail markings. Staggered step patter, with alternating direct register. Paws keep the same pressure of impact: The animal is a healthy, red fox.
Tail swish impressions after long (400ft.) stretches of travel.
Love,
Adam
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Shadowplay 15
Jack,
I woke in the night with a start. I do that sometimes, just like the movies, from a nightmare that I can't remember. I woke with a line replaying over and over in my head: the rest is history.
The house was silent. The house is never, ever silent. It quiets at night, but always through the walls plays Brad's television on low, or Grady's record player softly crying out over the small hours.
The house was dark. The house is never, ever dark. In the recesses of Clyde's room, and Matthew's, it gets pitch black, but light spills under the doors from the courtyard, and the windows in rooms three and nine. Christmas lights, lightning bugs, televisions, and the yellow displays on old radios all contribute to the low glow of the house at night, but this time it was dark.
The bed beside me was empty, and I could see on the floor of my bedroom wet footprints belonging to someone I suspect was Clyde, having used my bathtub. I knew immediately that Matthew's absence meant he was going to kill himself. That the night of the great train collision had finally come, and I'd... fucking... slept... through it.
But if it was late, there was still time to stop him. And so I stood up to get dressed in my foxing clothes, which forever litter the floor of room nine.
I was putting on my shoes when Adam came to the door. I saw his outline in the window, and he knocked softly with a single knuckle.
He knocked. The first time since I'd known him to do that.
"What?" I asked the door, and he pushed it open, to find me dressed. The darkness of the late hour had a smell, and a tangible quality in the air. Heavy, as if speaking loudly were no longer allowed in the low ceiling of the night.
"Evelyn," he said softly. "Please, you can't go."
He stood in the doorway, the light from my bedside lamp touching his bare skin. He was naked, although his eyes told me plainly he had not been sleeping. I only looked at him, disbelieving that he would tell me this, when it was the one place I wanted to be. I could see a familiar pain in his eyes, dark and distant, his eyebrows knitted but still innocent.
Whatever horrors Adam or any other man might become, he still casts the shadow of a boy across my doorway, eyes a-large and questioning their fathers.
"Why not?" I asked him, and his hands reached toward me, slight, palms out almost in apology.
"I..." he began, but hesitated, and glanced at the bedroom door next to mine. He shuffled his way into the room, to close the door behind him. Adam's smell is stinging and almost chemical. Pine needles and moss, in a cold rain. I could smell it when he crossed to sit beside me on the bed, his shoulders low and defeated. He began to cry silent tears which fell ignored onto his thighs.
"The... the wolf is loose in Manchester," he explained. "I have tracked it there. If you go to him... Evelyn, please."
"Clyde's asleep," I reminded him, pressing against his shoulder with my weight. It had been almost a month since he'd been in my room at night, and almost 2 years since we had a place we might call ours together. There was something platonic between us, and maybe even strange.
"Clyde is asleep," he agreed with me. "Yes. But the wolf. Is loose in Manchester. If you go to him, he will kill you."
When I protested, he interrupted, and placed the pads of his fingers on my arm.
"Roseanne and Jack are taking care of it. They've promised to stop him."
"What do I do?" I asked him, and he looked up at the dark ceiling, as if praying for strength.
"He'll call you, I think," he said at length. "He will no doubt call you."
"I want to be alone," I told him, feeling the sphere of things I can control shrinking to a size no bigger than all my collected snow globes. As he left, I tried to fight off the panic that something is now going to happen that I can not shepherd into my own understanding. That Matthew's life was now in your hands. I laid back in bed, fully clothed, and looked at my telephone, used only once, to call Matthew, on the 3rd of February of last year.
I had said to him, "Forgive the unbearable lateness of the hour," and it hadn't sounded like something I would normally say. I knew then that it was Ian's salutation on this night. I said it to him because he said it to me, the night he killed himself.
My telephone is a turquoise-green princess phone that I keep trying to make pink, but isn't. I laid still and waited for it to ring, and felt a mixture of many strange things at once.
The world was shifting. I could feel the kaleidoscope moving, and I felt angry we hadn't yet determined why we were stuck in Dead Poet's Society. That you hadn't really boarded a train with us. That we didn't know for certain if this was the cyclone to Oz. That things had been happening so fast, I couldn't hold onto them, and now...
Now there was a finality in this moment. Winter had come, and when winter comes, I am only one thing, and I am only in one place, and all this would come undone because I will move away from Ian, and the snow globe will disappear forever. I could feel Adam's panic all around me, and Clyde's insidious grin.
Of course, Adam would say or do anything to keep me in the house when the wolf is out. So I wondered if Matthew would really call, or if he simply said that to...
Of course, I also knew that Ian begs for Deborah to take him back before his death, and so the overwhelming feeling I'd have of being the other woman under you intensified in the late night.
So he'd go back to the one of us who'd actually read The Idiot. Sure, I get it. What god creates, man destroys.
I ran through the details in my head, that I knew. I tried to focus on seeing him alone in the kitchen, but I couldn't distinguish him from what I simply wanted to be there. A tea set. A broken clock. A safe arrival of you with a schnauzer under your arm.
Ian rifles through the content of the fridge in 77 Barton. It's spare inside, as Deb has not yet done the weekly shopping. He tugs the tuck of his shirt against his ribs. There is a determined look in his eyes that I recognize in Matthew's, on the day we met in this life. On the day we met in this life, when he'd decided to die.
He wrote me a letter, in which he'd said, "Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted."
No, I guess I wouldn't have.
In the deep green shirt, I watch him, or think I do, kneel onto the tile the color of fatigue. It happens always; it happens forever. He is wearing his shoes, as if he believes he will need them for his departure. He kneels, and he lets the weight of his body go against the clothesline, and he waits. He is patient. He is...
When I was a girl, I knew a boy who killed himself in what seems to be an accidental parody of Ian.
Am I still a girl? Life moves always in these cycles that mean we can't escape anything or anyone.
In some world, this happens forever. In some places, I wait, low against the rocks of the moon, and watch the other half of my heart die on a floor in Macclesfield. Outside the windows of the front room, the trees wave in the darkness from the park. While he leans low over the tiles, I feel him sink into me. He sinks into me, the words which flow along the pathways of his blood and the unheard notions he failed to communicate. The way he had God inside him, as Rosie would say, sinks into me like a stain in our sheets.
I didn't mean to love him like this. I would have greatly preferred not to, if we're being honest. I didn't mean to fall in love with him in this way that now bubbles up through the cracks in me, to find places where what I wish were true is forced to touch fact and ruin it. I might've ruined us with wishes, Jack, you and me.
My hand shakes as I pick up the phone and dial any number at all. If you dial any number, Grady will be on the other end of the line. Does that just work in Gray House? I've never tried it elsewhere.
"Si."
"Did they make it?" I ask the silence that follows his short greeting. I hear potato chips crunching in his mouth, all business tonight at the Roads and out of favors to do for me.
"It's being taken care of," he tells me, before the line goes dead.
I woke in the night with a start. I do that sometimes, just like the movies, from a nightmare that I can't remember. I woke with a line replaying over and over in my head: the rest is history.
The house was silent. The house is never, ever silent. It quiets at night, but always through the walls plays Brad's television on low, or Grady's record player softly crying out over the small hours.
The house was dark. The house is never, ever dark. In the recesses of Clyde's room, and Matthew's, it gets pitch black, but light spills under the doors from the courtyard, and the windows in rooms three and nine. Christmas lights, lightning bugs, televisions, and the yellow displays on old radios all contribute to the low glow of the house at night, but this time it was dark.
The bed beside me was empty, and I could see on the floor of my bedroom wet footprints belonging to someone I suspect was Clyde, having used my bathtub. I knew immediately that Matthew's absence meant he was going to kill himself. That the night of the great train collision had finally come, and I'd... fucking... slept... through it.
But if it was late, there was still time to stop him. And so I stood up to get dressed in my foxing clothes, which forever litter the floor of room nine.
I was putting on my shoes when Adam came to the door. I saw his outline in the window, and he knocked softly with a single knuckle.
He knocked. The first time since I'd known him to do that.
"What?" I asked the door, and he pushed it open, to find me dressed. The darkness of the late hour had a smell, and a tangible quality in the air. Heavy, as if speaking loudly were no longer allowed in the low ceiling of the night.
"Evelyn," he said softly. "Please, you can't go."
He stood in the doorway, the light from my bedside lamp touching his bare skin. He was naked, although his eyes told me plainly he had not been sleeping. I only looked at him, disbelieving that he would tell me this, when it was the one place I wanted to be. I could see a familiar pain in his eyes, dark and distant, his eyebrows knitted but still innocent.
Whatever horrors Adam or any other man might become, he still casts the shadow of a boy across my doorway, eyes a-large and questioning their fathers.
"Why not?" I asked him, and his hands reached toward me, slight, palms out almost in apology.
"I..." he began, but hesitated, and glanced at the bedroom door next to mine. He shuffled his way into the room, to close the door behind him. Adam's smell is stinging and almost chemical. Pine needles and moss, in a cold rain. I could smell it when he crossed to sit beside me on the bed, his shoulders low and defeated. He began to cry silent tears which fell ignored onto his thighs.
"The... the wolf is loose in Manchester," he explained. "I have tracked it there. If you go to him... Evelyn, please."
"Clyde's asleep," I reminded him, pressing against his shoulder with my weight. It had been almost a month since he'd been in my room at night, and almost 2 years since we had a place we might call ours together. There was something platonic between us, and maybe even strange.
"Clyde is asleep," he agreed with me. "Yes. But the wolf. Is loose in Manchester. If you go to him, he will kill you."
When I protested, he interrupted, and placed the pads of his fingers on my arm.
"Roseanne and Jack are taking care of it. They've promised to stop him."
"What do I do?" I asked him, and he looked up at the dark ceiling, as if praying for strength.
"He'll call you, I think," he said at length. "He will no doubt call you."
"I want to be alone," I told him, feeling the sphere of things I can control shrinking to a size no bigger than all my collected snow globes. As he left, I tried to fight off the panic that something is now going to happen that I can not shepherd into my own understanding. That Matthew's life was now in your hands. I laid back in bed, fully clothed, and looked at my telephone, used only once, to call Matthew, on the 3rd of February of last year.
I had said to him, "Forgive the unbearable lateness of the hour," and it hadn't sounded like something I would normally say. I knew then that it was Ian's salutation on this night. I said it to him because he said it to me, the night he killed himself.
My telephone is a turquoise-green princess phone that I keep trying to make pink, but isn't. I laid still and waited for it to ring, and felt a mixture of many strange things at once.
The world was shifting. I could feel the kaleidoscope moving, and I felt angry we hadn't yet determined why we were stuck in Dead Poet's Society. That you hadn't really boarded a train with us. That we didn't know for certain if this was the cyclone to Oz. That things had been happening so fast, I couldn't hold onto them, and now...
Now there was a finality in this moment. Winter had come, and when winter comes, I am only one thing, and I am only in one place, and all this would come undone because I will move away from Ian, and the snow globe will disappear forever. I could feel Adam's panic all around me, and Clyde's insidious grin.
Of course, Adam would say or do anything to keep me in the house when the wolf is out. So I wondered if Matthew would really call, or if he simply said that to...
Of course, I also knew that Ian begs for Deborah to take him back before his death, and so the overwhelming feeling I'd have of being the other woman under you intensified in the late night.
So he'd go back to the one of us who'd actually read The Idiot. Sure, I get it. What god creates, man destroys.
I ran through the details in my head, that I knew. I tried to focus on seeing him alone in the kitchen, but I couldn't distinguish him from what I simply wanted to be there. A tea set. A broken clock. A safe arrival of you with a schnauzer under your arm.
Ian rifles through the content of the fridge in 77 Barton. It's spare inside, as Deb has not yet done the weekly shopping. He tugs the tuck of his shirt against his ribs. There is a determined look in his eyes that I recognize in Matthew's, on the day we met in this life. On the day we met in this life, when he'd decided to die.
He wrote me a letter, in which he'd said, "Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted."
No, I guess I wouldn't have.
In the deep green shirt, I watch him, or think I do, kneel onto the tile the color of fatigue. It happens always; it happens forever. He is wearing his shoes, as if he believes he will need them for his departure. He kneels, and he lets the weight of his body go against the clothesline, and he waits. He is patient. He is...
When I was a girl, I knew a boy who killed himself in what seems to be an accidental parody of Ian.
Am I still a girl? Life moves always in these cycles that mean we can't escape anything or anyone.
In some world, this happens forever. In some places, I wait, low against the rocks of the moon, and watch the other half of my heart die on a floor in Macclesfield. Outside the windows of the front room, the trees wave in the darkness from the park. While he leans low over the tiles, I feel him sink into me. He sinks into me, the words which flow along the pathways of his blood and the unheard notions he failed to communicate. The way he had God inside him, as Rosie would say, sinks into me like a stain in our sheets.
I didn't mean to love him like this. I would have greatly preferred not to, if we're being honest. I didn't mean to fall in love with him in this way that now bubbles up through the cracks in me, to find places where what I wish were true is forced to touch fact and ruin it. I might've ruined us with wishes, Jack, you and me.
My hand shakes as I pick up the phone and dial any number at all. If you dial any number, Grady will be on the other end of the line. Does that just work in Gray House? I've never tried it elsewhere.
"Si."
"Did they make it?" I ask the silence that follows his short greeting. I hear potato chips crunching in his mouth, all business tonight at the Roads and out of favors to do for me.
"It's being taken care of," he tells me, before the line goes dead.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Shadowplay 14
Jack,
The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
Here.
Here, no one will hear you scream.
Do you hear the Angels, Jack?
No. Of course not. They're all silent.
When no one is listening...
The night Drama raged at you, he did it knowing full well it would never matter to you, what he'd said. He knew you would take it to mean a hundred things he didn't mean, and none of the meanings he meant. He knew it was all for nothing, and he is buried alive forever under the weight of non-existence, and you and he would never touch the way you and I can, and yet refuse to. He got up on the stage in Gray House we have hidden from you, mostly, and he... well, he told his tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing, Jack.
Absolutely nothing.
Rosie and I laid in bed together afterward, and we sobbed, alone with him in the bright violet stage lights of his despair, because we heard him. It was a monologue delivered to convince you of your own existence, which you have never seen or understood. He lamented his own non-existence. He wished he could be you. He wished he could be anyone besides the empty vessel of desires that comprise an Angel.
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
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