Devil House(7)

My friend André, who, like me, had moved to San Francisco after graduating from Cal Poly, helped load up the U-Haul. There was nothing really wrong with my futon, so I folded that and tied it with a bungee cord; I’d had my writing desk, a real antique, since college, so it had to go on the truck, too. Its exact vintage was a mystery; but it had to’ve belonged to a newspaperman back in the forties or fifties—an editor, maybe. Great blotches of India ink Rorschached its surface, and several deep grooves scarred its grain, probably inflicted in haste or anger by some unknown hand wielding a letter opener.

It weighed a ton. “Do they not have Office Depot in Milpitas?” André asked me, grimacing as we maneuvered it down the narrow stairway that led from my old apartment to the street.

“Sentimental value,” I grunted.

“You’re a cheap bastard,” he said, followed by, “Fuck!” as the desk mashed his finger against the banister.

“Well, that’s true, too,” I said. “Flip it up onto the side?”

“Might as well,” he said. There wasn’t really enough room in the entryway for maneuvering; it was an irritating game of inches, and it seemed to take forever. But when we finally emerged on the sidewalk to find the smallest available vehicle in the whole U-Haul fleet parked and waiting for us at the curb, it felt momentous. The place I’d lived in for an age was no one’s place now. What traces there were of me still in it would never be parsed by anyone: Twin half-moon grooves in the floor because I’d thought I could drag the futon in its frame over to a less sunny spot without anybody’s help. A deep chip in the porcelain of the kitchen sink from when I dropped an antique champagne bucket into it after signing away the movie rights for Omens. A smudge on the bedroom wall that an ex-girlfriend put there on purpose late one Saturday night, applying lipstick to the heel of her hand and dragging it across the paint: “In case you need something to remember me by,” she’d said. After the cleaning crew came, there’d be no trace of that memory left in the world.



* * *



THERE WAS SO MUCH PAPERWORK. I was a first-time home buyer; everybody working billable hours was very happy to see me. We walked through the property with an assessor, we sat on facing sides of cheap tables in banking offices, we read through reams of fine print on legal-sized paper. I got preapproved. It seemed like a lot of work for a small brick building whose ultimate fate was clear to everybody involved; maybe it would change hands another time or two before somebody knocked it down and opened up a Mattress Firm, but such exchanges were stalling tactics. The writing was on the wall.

We were scheduled to close Monday, but I drove down early Friday afternoon. All my things were in shrink-wrap on pallets or secured to the floor of the truck; even my pillow was in there. For an idle moment I considered getting a cheap sleeping bag and pitching camp in the grassy side yard of the house; I wouldn’t be the first to seek shade in the shadow of the freeway, I knew. There were some narrative possibilities in the idea, I thought: but I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. So I booked myself into the La Quinta, fifteen minutes by car from the place I’d move into as soon as I collected the keys.

The motel room had two double beds; I used one as a combination work desk and dinner table, eating pizza as I went over my notes and printouts. The idea was to immerse myself deep enough in the facts of the case to make my arrival the next day feel like a return. You can do this to yourself, if you try hard enough: obsess over blueprints of houses whose original incarnations you never saw, memorize meaningless details of rooms you know only from pictures, sneak through hidden doors into imaginary spaces. Eventually it burrows into your skin, the place you’re attempting, remotely, to haunt. You fabricate empty memories of walking from room to room, testing out light switches, knocking on walls. If you stay up too late doing it, it starts to feel a little risky, but that’s the point of the exercise. It’s like staring at an optical illusion for longer than the seconds needed to make it work. When you close your eyes, it’s still there.

I stayed up later than I needed to, probably later than I should have. I had an appointment with Whitney scheduled for nine the next day. But it’s exciting, setting off into the vast continent of the big new story. I get all caught up in the moment of departure. The future feels dramatic when you think you see a little of it cresting the horizon, the more so if the present feels routine.

I remember, before I finally fell asleep, feeling like there wasn’t all that much to say about my life. I’d had several satisfying relationships; they hadn’t amounted to much. I’d gotten better at my work, and been rewarded for it, but I sometimes felt like life had run out of surprises for me. I did what I did, and got the results I expected. I kept up my practice and it paid my way. My wheels made an agreeable noise when they spun.

The move to Milpitas didn’t feel all that different. I’d done things like it before. It was a bigger play than parking down the block from somebody’s house to watch them as they came and went, but that difference was a matter of scale. The stories I sought out weren’t exactly interchangeable, but they shared a space where the distribution of light and shadow was governed by similar latitudes. I’d be moving into a new building, yes, but beneath the foundation, there wouldn’t be much I hadn’t written about before.

That was how I thought of things at one in the morning at a La Quinta in Fremont, anyway. As it turned out, I was almost entirely wrong. There’s unexplored terrain lurking in known shapes, unmapped quadrants waiting to be located by means of simple shifts in perspective. “Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes.