Shadowplay 3

"I spoke to the forest, I spoke to the trees, I spoke to the river, but it did not speak to me.  I carved your name in the cypress tree bark, I tattooed your name in a ring round my heart.  I wore out my welcome, I wore out myself, I wore out my reason, I wore out my health, I forgot my name... on the day that you came."

Jack,

I followed the sound of music down the stairs of the Gray House School for Boys.

"I never said I would stay to the end..."

Jack?

"The woods eats the woman, and dumps her honey body into the mud..." 

The stairs darken, blacken, turn to a charred mess of splintered wood closely resembling bone, sweeping the delicate arch of the foyer, which is now open to a huge and ghastly machine.

"No man alive will come to you with another tale to tell, and you know that we shall meet again, if your memory serves you well..."

The gears of the machine form the walkway toward a black chasm of space big enough to house a planet, or everything I know.  The gears match in size things like the height of my apartment building.  The width of a plaza.  They move slow, rumbling, garbage discarded in their huge teeth.  The house is gone, and instead I am inside a great Machine.

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.

Nauseated, dizzy, turning slowly, I vomit off the side of a metal plate into nothingness that is endless below me.  I'm stunned by this idea that we have been sitting like this, moving slow, on top of the great Kaleidoscope machine that turns the world for us.  Hung in space is what we are, Jack.  Inconstant, frailly placed on the side of a massive clock, counting down the minutes until... what?  I don't know.  Did you think they would lead me somewhere small, the back stairs?  No, I followed the music, and got led astray from the safely stationary School for Boys, down to a huge and hollow place where I am a stuffed man and things haunt the silence like the assurance of our own destruction.

Under the house, there is nothing but space, and time, and lack of any means to mark the passage of either.  That, and the song, bubbling up through the cogs with a gentle whispering along the brass cymbal, and the dark and erratic bass line.

In that hollow space, the sudden and jarring rattle of the guitar is ground to silence as the gears pass close, their teeth closing the space from below for a moment, and opening again.  The flat plate of the gray metal on which I stand is slick with ice and lightly dusted with dirty snow.

"Evelyn!" Adam shouts, and I snap my head upward from the frozen metal, and see the dark space vanish, for the replacement of my bedroom.  Was I asleep?  Was I dreaming?

"What?" I ask him, squinting to find him framed in the doorway, his arms tense at his sides.

"It's Ian.  He's having a seizure."

I stare at him through the dim light for a full 5 seconds before the information settles into the right places.  I blink, and he looks frantic from me, to the door across the courtyard where Matthew sleeps.

"I... I dreamed about it," I tell him, blinking slow and stupid, and he vanishes with a soft linen swish.

"Come quickly," he calls back, and I try to still the beating of my heart.

In the bright light of the hallway, all the boys crowd in their boxers or pajamas around the void of Matthew's dark room.  I push through Brad and John, gossiping in whispers.

"Did you see his face?"

"How long has it been since this happened last?"

The dorm of us is silent, and Rosie is standing detached from them all, her face pale and watchful.

By the time I reach the inside of the room, dark but for the spilled light from the courtyard, the seizure has passed, and Matthew is still and unconscious between Clyde's knees.  The scene is warm with awakened light at night, a common disturbance awakening the entire house.  There is concerned solidarity emanating from every surface.  While this isn't the first fit Matthew's had, it's the first of this particular nature, of this particular kind.

Shadowplay 2

Jack,

Although our moving reality prohibits the existence of declarative statements in some ways, knowing that all things are possible and therefore must be true (in the manner of "its five o'clock somewhere"), I feel the need to tell you...

Of the 12 members of Gray House available to you, you've not in recent memory fucked either Dean, John, Grady, or me.  Maybe one of that list in realities far-reaching and distant from this one.  Maybe in times and places waiting to be discovered.  But as for you and I...

Our relationships have been diverted by near-misses and close calls the stuff of cinema.

Because of you, I have formed the opinion that in the minds of most people, there is a divide between love and sex; simply put a point at which sex with someone is no longer possible, because of a mountain of expectation which becomes impossible to traverse.  It's always felt like if I wasn't your dream girl, then I was the unattainable and icy version of her she becomes when you finally ask her out.

But I think about it.  I think about it a lot.  I wonder what it is about me that makes you say you're in love with me and then slip silently at night into Rosie's room to let her make you cum, easy and uncomplicated.  It was due in large part to those actions that Rosie and I discovered these attitudes in ourselves - that her nature dictates she's a whore and mine dictates I'm the girl whose picture you keep in your wallet.  Fond memories, Jack?  First kisses?  Promises you can't really keep?

I might know more about your naked body than anyone else, for all the artistic study I've given it.  Maybe Rosie and Clyde and Nick and Brad all held it in their hands, but they didn't take the time I took to create it from nothing but your coy and sometimes jealous description.  I think Rosie would say your relationship is one of late night calls and confessions, and that's true.  But while you eventually hang up the phone and go to her house, we live in different towns, you and me.

The last time we touched was the 22nd of January, 2015.  You were asleep in the basement, but had asked me to come sleep with you, me and Rosie both.  Rosie was awake when I went down to the big bed at the bottom of Gray House, but you were not.  You were a boy.  I pushed my body against yours in the bed, the blankets warm around us in the cold winter.  Your arm covered my rib cage, lazy and heavy in your sleep.  I laid still and tried not to wake you, half because I wanted you to sleep and half because I was afraid of what to do if you woke.  I can remember the span of your shoulders and the sound of your breath.

I wrote you a letter the next morning, which I kept, and you didn't.

I kept the letter I wrote you after you said  you loved me, which I remember, and you don't.

Since then, the physical distance between has gotten not only wider, but colder, with more blame.

There was this one night, not long after that night in January, when you asked me to come to your room, and

the television was on.

You were laying in bed, your eyes widened by some muted car chase.  You were growing your hair out, and it was spread out on the pillow around your face.  I was nervous, but I saw you'd been listening to all the records I left in your room, and I felt like maybe something I said had made a difference to you - had mattered in some way.

I climbed onto your lap.  We fucked while the credits screen darkened your room, and then the movie switched to blue input.  You held onto me tight enough you left bruises along my thighs the next day.  I said I'd always hoped you were real.  You said it back.

The next morning, you told everyone nothing happened.  I went back to your room to get my panties off the floor when you were out.  Alright Jack, I guess nothing happened.  I was angry, I told you so.  I said you'd embarrassed me.  You were appropriately apologetic, said you were sorry for the mix-up, but that despite my protests, nothing happened.  Thankfully you left again soon after.

But you came back.  You always come back, missing your memory and the things for which it would make you responsible, like our hearts.  We haven't touched since, you and me.  Not one handshake, not one hug goodbye, not one flirtatious kiss on the cheek.

But I think about it.  I think about it a lot.

Because of the ways we've become enemies since, I know it's now my duty to tell you why I'm mentioning all this to you in the first place.  How it matters to you and why I'm not a waste of your time.

I'm telling you this because you can't know how stupid I feel trying to get you to love someone through a flourish of pen.  Someone especially whom I know you would never love, and why this smokescreen exists through which you feel you can't really see me.  Why I keep holding these people out to you and not myself.  Why if this happened to Adam, he won't or can't speak for himself, and so on. 

The set up and the delivery were always your choice.  That you ask me to tell you secrets because you think I know them.  That you want me for something like this, but you don't want me for a hundred other things.  And that this history of ours will always be hanging in the air between us, in the distance further than an arm's reach.  I want you to know what happened with Matthew, and so I'll describe the events to you in great detail while I know you're looking up my actual if not only my intellectual skirt.  Whether or not you want Matthew or me or none of this is something I've never really known for certain, but you come home, and you come home, and you come home in echoes.

And so all I have to tell you is while you were away, I fell in love again, and it wasn't with you.  I'm sorry I'm like this.  While you were away, I was me again, I got lost again, I became someone else again, I ran into a boy again, I got something I wanted again, it came with a price again.  I don't know what else to do but tell you who I am again, through this mist again, to make you feel at home again, and maybe love Matthew again, before you leave again. 

But if you want me, I'm here, Jack.  As always.

Evelyn

Shadowplay 1

Jack,

While Gray House is a clock in it's formation, it's also a kaleidoscope. Standing at the center of the courtyard, given a certain light, could show you the lazy shifting of realities, movie sets, mythological fables, and ideologies through which you might be able to see your own story. Standing here, and arranging the house into a chain of configurations, is something we all do to make any kind of sense of ourselves, colored heavily by our own hearts, minds, and perceptions.

"How does it feel?" is the question we ask almost as much as "What do you mean?" Because how else can we know? We are living in a pile of bricks, on the knife's edge of all other possibilities. How do we know we're even in the same house?

The house is a collection of houses of memory, and impression. The Victorian manor Adam entertains as the Frankenstein house, the haunted house at the end of every neighborhood, the house on Neiboldt Street, your grandmother's house, or her mother's, the notion of the great plantation homes of the voodoo South, the dilapidated abandoned ruin of that idea, post-war and evaporating, the piecemeal communes of the 60's, and orphanages and boarding houses all shift, align, and come together at this vertex of bayou Lafourche. Looking carefully, you can find the echoes of these places, in dim corners, and draw along the banisters the lines where something else begins.

Just as often, and with the same subtlety, the bayou itself shifts from the swampland of Louisiana to the garden of Eden, and into a jungle housing all the torments of Vietnam. At night, the lights slip careful into hues unnatural to set the house delicately on the violet moon, or into the black void of space. From the tree house, there is a view of a vast wasteland. All you have to do is wait, and watch carefully.

These descriptions are predicated on a simple concept. There is a House, inside which children might be able to play pretend, or hide-and-seek. This House sits on the land called the Backyard, where children learn the conduct of war, and trial, and fair play. That is the simplest and most pure definition of the differences of our natures, the occupants of Gray House. Some of us play in the House, and some of us play in the Yard.

When all this began, there was something seeping from the walls of the house, into our rooms. It was a smell which made Matthew and John twitch slightly as they woke from sleep - a sharp and anxious exit characteristic of late mornings when you wake up already knowing you've missed your first bell. In turn, Drama's shoulders tensed with their institutional reactions, donning his crested jacket more and more, and Adam replied in a language of three-piece suits and late night jazz.

When Adam changed, into this facet already known to me named Alistair, I could sense the changes in the courtyard which became scholastic; the centerpiece of some dormitory I was certainly not allowed in. The boy's rooms became collegiate, monastic, and utilitarian. Brad rushed from one room to the next, balancing a stack of books in one hand and pushing his black-framed reading glasses up with the other. I always wondered why they all wore such outdated glasses, but it's because they were always living here, on some level, in some convergence of patterns of this kaleidoscope.

The courtyard still looks like the mall. I can see that it does, but the context changes, and the boarding school they attend holds the sway of the afternoon. The rock band posters inside Nick's room take on a nostalgic air, and Clyde's boots thud with the authority of a riding boot. Cigarettes vanish from ashtrays, and begin to show themselves fervently doused in the sink, or the bowls of toilets.  Their eyes begin to hold the punchline of some inside joke, the boys.

And as fast as it turns into a prep-school, boarded in the summer months for the kids whose parents could not or would not fly them home, the clock-face of Gray House also becomes the backstage of that same idea.  Closets turn to back stairwells, boiler rooms, and storage rooms for classroom equipment.  The smell everywhere is one of high-stacked reams of paper and laundry which never quite gets clean.

"Ayup!" Nick pounds on closed doors in the early morning.  "Shower's open!"

Before Jack came home, we did have a long locker room, inside which I first encountered Drama himself, his sport coat buttoned neatly against the steam.  There was a decadence to him I could feel radiating off the dingy tiles: he was the last thing we'd all been waiting for.  A culmination of every missing thing, perfectly arranged into this semblance of a man.  The boy who both drove a Honda and wore an ascot.

"Welll... what have we here?" he asks me, and I notice he's been watching me from the doorway of Joshua's room, his arms crossed over his chest and a smirk on his face.  

"Nothing," I brush him off, making my way from this overlap of dorm rooms to my room, a haven made of the sewing rooms of spinsters.  

I could do this forever, you know.  I could leapfrog and lilypad through the shifting glass beads to things unrelated, to other worlds where there are other colors with other names.  I could disappear into my room and become the girl or boy I am inside it.  I could don my half-shirt from a Des Moines radio station contest and shave my head and tell you everything I know about election fraud.  We could go anywhere, and that's the treacherous thing about living here.  We could become anyone, at any time, for any reason, and the forms we do hold on a daily basis are just suggestions which imply a comfort zone - a fond set of memories, held together with the taut twine of a legacy.  

Christmas lurks under the floorboards, ghost cars screech tires down the dirt driveway, British-ruled India haunts the foyer.  Keep your mind right, maintain focus, and don't get lost unless you want to.  Because while this took place in a prep-school, it didn't begin there.  I took a wrong turn, I think, going down the back stairs to sneak out to the city descending into night.  I could've ended up anywhere, but I ended up here.  It's this constant maelstrom I want most for you to understand, and the point at which I continually give up the fight to do so.  Because how do I walk from one end of creation to the other?

But it doesn't matter.  I'm not going to the end of creation, just to the moon and back, on a roll of celluloid, held in the arms of a dead boy.