Devil House(106)

As we were saying good night on his front porch, he said, Wait here, and went inside for a minute. When he returned, he was carrying a wooden box that looked like something you might pick up at an auction or a yard sale. It was dusty but sturdy. There were no distinguishing marks or labels on it, save for the dings and scratches old things tend to pick up over time. It looked big enough to hold several dictionaries, big ones. Good luck, he said, you can send this back to me whenever, we’re into much, umm, later edits now, I don’t need it.

I flew home from San Francisco the next day on a half-empty plane with my mysterious cargo in the overhead bin.





6.


MY WIFE LOOKED ACCUSINGLY at Gage’s wooden box when I brought it home: in my travels, I rescue things like Gage’s box from dusty shelves around the world. All over our house lurk its wide-ranging brethren: matryoshka dolls, monster model kits, manual typewriters, old radios; big rocks, knobby sticks, oversized chunks of glass sanded smooth; off-brand comic books no one remembers, and trade publications that I will never read. It would be fair to characterize me as a collector of paperweights that haven’t yet learned their function. No, no, I said, this wasn’t me, you remember I told you about my friend Gage, the writer, the guy I knew in San Luis Obispo, he sent me home with a draft of his new book, the box holds it.

And to demonstrate good faith, I opened the box, which spoke rather more convincingly to her case than to mine. Even the title page was a mess; it presently read DEVIL HOUSE, but the same page had borne six other titles beforehand—OGRE HOUSE, TITAN HOUSE, SPECTER HOUSE, FIEND HOUSE, and BEAST’S LAIR—all of them struck through in turn with a ballpoint pen. I’d have thought you’d just make a new title page if you changed the name of your book, but reasoned that this might have been part of his procedure—tracking changes, keeping a record of the book as it grew from its beginnings to its final form. Maybe he’d typed them all out on one page to see how they looked, then scribbled through the ones that weren’t as good?

But there was more to it than that. There were several yellow Post-its on the very same page, the handwriting on them tiny and obsessive, running from margin to margin like the work of an annotator with too much to say—one was a list of American cities (from: Boston, Austin, Santa Fe, Taos, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco), another I couldn’t figure out at all (Archis, Ainesh, Rohak, Sarva, Surya, Sonny). In addition, there were two semi-rectangular patches where it appeared something had once been affixed with clear tape and then removed.

There was something troubling about it. I felt like I had a decent enough read on Gage; I knew his work, and had spent a very pleasant evening with him. He seemed fairly together. But what did I know, really, I said to myself—maybe everybody’s manuscript looks like this on its way to publication.

You’re going to send that back to him after you’ve read it, right? asked my wife.

Oh, of course, I said, he said there’s no hurry, but—

Naturally there’s no hurry, she said, laughing, you don’t want to be in a hurry when you’ve got a—

A big box, I said. When you’ve been married as long as we have, you understand each other even when your priorities diverge.

Then I turned over a couple of pages, and we both saw that all the pages were like that, more or less: annotations, decorations, circled words, notes in the margins, several different colors of ink, little drawings, punctuation marks.

I’ll send it back to him when I get done, we don’t have room for this, nobody has room for this, I said, laughing along with her.



* * *



I FOUND A SPACE on the basement floor where the box could live comfortably for a few days; our basement serves chiefly as an oversized closet. I keep guitars down there, and boxful after boxful of old compact discs, and a Nintendo 64 hooked up to an old television that sits on the orange desk that served as my workstation for the better part of a decade. Tons of stuff. Over by a small freezer, there’s a ratty tatami mat that used to be a pretty nice tatami mat; if I have anything that needs to be glued together or painted, that’s where I set up to work, but I hardly ever have any work of that sort to do. Like many abandoned spaces, it’s an indicator of where somebody once saw some possibilities.

I set the box down squarely in the middle of the mat, where it began acclimating to its new surroundings, it seemed to me, in a real hurry: the floor beneath the mat is concrete that somebody painted blue once, years ago, but the paint has long since worn down to a dingy grey patina. Old dinged-up box, ratty mat, worn-down floor. Everybody harbors unscientific ideas about the workings of the world, I’d bet—about causality, and sufficiency, about the relative weights of presence and absence, about every old thing—superstitions, habits of thought that we seldom, if ever, acknowledge, even to ourselves. I try to be aware of mine. I’ll put something on the lip of a bookshelf, or in a dish or on a coffee table, and then I’ll think, or perhaps feel more than think: There, that’s where that thing belongs, it lives there now; and this feeling is invariably so satisfying that it results in half a dozen things always gathering dust on windowsills or end tables around the house, just because, when I last set them down, they seemed to have reached the place where they belonged.

It doesn’t quite aspire to the condition of a credo, this feeling, though I obey it as if it were law. It’s a sort of organizational principle. And so, when, four days later, after I’d fully reentered the orbit of home life and could steal a little time for idle investigations, I went down the basement stairs and pulled the string that turns on the light above the tatami-mat work space, the sight of Gage’s box felt like an inevitable presence, something I’d always been meaning to attend to, something that already had something to do with me.