Two-Story Houses

My town began with a heart of gold; a man in the past stumbled upon the gold and set it pumping. Roads stretched like arteries from the deep hole forming in our canyon, the lifeblood of my town trickling outward into the country around it. The heart still pumped when the town’s first generation died; it pumped for the second and third. There were people who saw the infancy of my town and there were people who saw its prime. A town, a place, has the chance to be immortal; the pieces of the body die but the whole has time to heal. While the heart pumped, the body had a purpose and it kept itself alive. Houses that fell were rebuilt, the town pushed against its boundaries; soon it welled up in the canyon and spilled over the brim. I grew up on the brim of our canyon and by the time my window framed the town its heart had sunk deep into the earth. There were people who saw its infancy and its prime; I was born into its twilight. When its heart stopped, the town I grew up in decomposed like an animal on the side of the road.

Before that, though-

Before all that I lived in a cabin and was surrounded by the forest, the tremulous heartbeat of the town as natural as the morning birdsongs. The forest was a friendly place, familiar, in the sense that I knew it well, and familiar in the sense that it seemed to become a part of me and, I, a part of it. We were not always friendly- I would climb wildly and crack a tree’s favorite branch. I would chase birds and squirrels and chew violence among the wild raspberries until my lips and teeth were stained red with unripe fruit. The forest would shape me in turn- a thousand splinters, a dozen twisted ankles, a few small scars.

We came to certain truces, the forest and I. In the autumn, I found an old dollhouse in the bottom of a shallow pit. It seemed like a gift only the forest could give and a house that only the forest could imagine. Its carpet crawled with insects and its wood was softened by moss but I loved that house as much as the cabin I lived in.

What was the forest trying to tell me, then? A child of divorce should recognize the subtext of gifts and, to find something like that in the mouth of an abandoned dig site, a toy house in a hopeful pockmark forged in the glory days of a gold rush nearly forgotten, well, I’ve since learned the importance of omens. I deciphered the premonition only three months ago when somebody sent me a picture of the cabin. What is left of it, now, looks just like the dollhouse did.

And I can imagine the insects crawling in the carpet there.

And I can see the moss-softened wood.

I was just old enough to listen by the time the forest thought to warn us again, not that it’s made much difference.

It happened in a place near the cabin that my brothers and I endeavored to make safe only because it seemed so dangerous. It was a field of thistle, taller than us by a yard at least and wide with stinging leaves. The thistle was mean- an accomplished nuisance. It could send small pieces of itself home in our clothes so that we’d itch for a day after brushing by. It could grow a foot overnight, reversing our many attempts to contain it. The thistle would survive the winter, somehow, dry and bent under the snow until we dared trespass. Then, it would leap up and sting us through layers and layers of jackets. The thistle was mean and it guarded a massive pine in the center of its field: the perfect tree.

The tree hated the field too; its lowest boughs only touched the tips of the thistle in a storm. On a still day this meant a wide open space between the earth and the tree’s bulk, walled in by a natural barricade. To triumph over the thistle, even in a simple, straight line, meant access to that enclosure and, though we loved the vastness of the forest, it sometimes drove us to seek out hidden places. We returned home splotchy-red and itching for weeks. Our parents hardly noticed when they arrived from work or errands and, if they did, why not let the children battle thistle? Humanity and nature are perpetually at odds.

They were away when the thistle fight was halted by the discovery of a cement door in the field. We kept the door a secret, sure, somehow, that our parents would disapprove of our opening it, of even standing nearby. It was heavy and its handles were thin rebar that cut our palms and left our aching fingers red with rust. We rarely risked more than one attempt on the door a day for fear that we would be spotted from the window.

There came an afternoon when we knew our parents would be gone and we scavenged a lever from the wall of a ruined shed nearby (promising to return it, though I’m not sure we did). Our combined weight was enough to lift the door an inch or two from the ground and we wedged rocks in the widening crack to keep it from re-sealing. The frantic straining kept us from recognizing a growing smell. When we finally heaved the door open, we faced a deep pool of shit- the cabin’s septic tank.

We said very little as we closed the tank again. We never mentioned it to our parents. I’m not sure what lesson we drew from the forest that afternoon, but it quashed our campaign for the perfect tree and the thistle reclaimed the field in the span of a week. The deep sickness of the mine began to reveal itself in less subtle ways by the following month. A round of lay-offs meant we would leave the cabin shortly after. We moved from the forest and into town. I was nine years old.

            Our new house was a duplex and we shared it with a man who smoked cigarettes in the basement. He didn’t speak to me or my brothers and we didn’t speak to him but we knew he was there and so we walked on tiptoe. Peace, which had been abundant in the forest, felt tenuous in the duplex. My parents began to argue in the evenings and my brother began to see a ghost in the corner of our bedroom just before sleeping.

            The whole town began to see ghosts in the peripheries as autumn approached. Families disappeared from their houses. Windows darkened and paint peeled. Trees thinned and the cemetery suddenly appeared prominent on the eastern canyon wall. I hardly noticed the details at the time, but I knew that something was happening underneath the town because we walked quietly, even outside.

We had neighbors, suddenly, but I hardly knew them. The old couple to our right owned an angry dog on a tattered leash. The man to our left was friendly but strange- when we arrived he was gathering bags of sand to create a small beach under the balcony of his backyard. He would sit in his chair and wave at us as we played along the slope of loose dirt that dropped steeply behind our houses. The man died while I was in college when his balcony collapsed over him.

My brothers and I spent most of our time in the dirt behind the house. It was a strange environment- a slope, as I said, of shifting earth that terminated in a dry river bed a hundred feet or so below our side of the neighborhood. The edge of this slope crept closer to us each week that we lived in the duplex. The quiet deterioration of the hill below meant that, no matter how deeply we tread in the dirt and no matter how carefully we constructed small caverns for our toys, we would awake each morning to find the slope’s surface returned to its smooth natural state.

We tracked so much dirt into the duplex each night that things began to go downhill there as well. A group of men arrived to take our car. Our cats abandoned us for other homes. The ghost in the corner grew more vivid, my brother more afraid. The dirt was everywhere. My socks were stained with it; my feet grew dirty on the wood floors even though my mom swept and swept. I found pebbles in my sheets and I sneezed brown grime into tissues and, though the house seemed to be filling with dirt, the slope was the same each morning.

But closer.

Winter arrived and it seemed to hold things in place for a while. The earth was frozen beneath the snow and though the cold came in through the door as the dirt once did, we lived in relative peace, settling into the cold months with the same creaking uncertainty as the staircase to our bedroom. My elementary school was just down the street from the duplex, it took me only five minutes to walk there- four minutes if my youngest brother tried his hardest to keep pace. The nearness to the school, this town-living made it easier to maintain the few friendships I had fostered from a distance. I grew closer to them.

There was more to it than that, I think.

Our families tried to shield us from the condition of the mine but, if we couldn’t exactly understand their worry, we certainly knew it was there. When we asked them, and we did, they only worried more. There were long silences- wringing hands and ringing ears. Undefined, their worry hovered, a ghost in the corner of our minds, its quiet as oppressive as the winter hush.

The school was kept clear of snow, for the most part, and was even free of ghosts for a time. We banded together against the silence, wedging ourselves in the playground’s cool plastic tunnels until they warmed with the heat of our huddled bodies. There, we could make up our own secrets, whisper them to each other, and hope that the adults of the city were only playing.

Like the adults, we began to assign ourselves new, menial jobs. Bree could make animal keychains from beads and string (one rests on the shelf nearby as I type). Danny opened a small shop of trinkets, constantly trading and re-trading the same stock (his jacket rattling like teeth in the cold). Patrick could create a fort from a snow pile that could withstand any barrage (his sister was a whore- we said this to each other without understanding what it could possibly mean). Bethany had a small radio and she would play music while we worked (or sing, sometimes, when the batteries died).

Without anything tangible to offer, I traded in words. My services weren’t particularly attractive, but I could write a friend’s name in cursive and I could settle a dispute and I could provide someone with a reason why their worksheet was late, assuming they could repeat exactly what I said exactly the way I said it. I could lie, in other words, and I could teach others to lie. That became my most marketable skill.

I lied to my family when I eventually told them I saw the ghost in the duplex too because, by the end of fourth grade, I had a suspicion that the world was not the fantastical place I had assumed it was. I lied because I wanted to see the ghost, because a ghost might mean there was still something strange out there. A ghost could give form to the duplex’s otherwise diffuse tension and, eventually, we all embraced the lie for that reason.

When the snow melted, the slope had crept to the base of the duplex and the once-dead river below became violent with life and mud. A week later, the man in the basement left a cigarette on his mattress and started a fire. It was small and over quickly and, except for the smell of smoke, I thought that life would resettle in the duplex and we’d go on tracking dirt across the floors until we’d hardly have to lift our foot to the porch. All the talk of ghosts had unsettled my parents, however. They agreed, in so many words, that there was trouble in the foundations and the fire was the catalyst for a new move.

We had the latter half of the summer to settle into the new house- a huge thing that groaned in the breeze and cluttered with mice in the evenings. I didn’t mind either and my brother initially reported that the house was ghost-free (later he would describe a woman on the stairs and much later we would learn it was he that had been haunted, not the houses). There was even a small yard, even a rusted playset, even a small clump of trees that sheltered a small hollow. There was a door on the second story that opened on a sheer drop outside (‘Never open this,’ my mom said, though we often did) and there was an attic that overlooked the street (‘It’s entirely safe,’ my mom said, though we would rarely risk the climb).

We were further away from the store, yes, and further away from the school. We had no car but had learned to walk well enough. If there were any troubling moments in those initial weeks they were in spotting the empty windows of houses nearby, in seeing the weeds push up through their porches. We were well within city limits but had moved towards our home’s extremities. The town was in shock, had been for more than a year, and blood rushed to its core. Life on the edges had begun to decay. It’s why we could afford to be there.

The sudden space awoke, in me, a new desire for privacy. I shared my bedroom with my brothers (and would for many more years) but the corners and turns of the attic house and its neighborhood afforded seclusions that would have been impossible in the duplex. For the first time in my life I realized the simple pleasure of being alone and the more complex enjoyment of being hidden.

There were several places I could rely on for privacy. The attic was one, but it was stuffy in the summer and flies gathered there to die. There were the foundational remains of an otherwise forgotten house and, within, a cellar, but it was frightening in ways entirely opposite to the attic. There was a small arcade in the basement of a casino downtown that few ever entered, but a mechanical gunslinger in the corner would quiver and speak at odd intervals.

In the end, the relatively large closet of our bedroom became the likeliest haven. It was often piled with our mixed belongings but there was a shelf in the back and a small window for ventilation. In bringing forward the shelf, I could create what amounted to a chest’s false bottom and a cursory glance would miss me entirely. Better, I could emerge quietly, when called, and feign being anywhere else. Whether or not my parents knew where I really was, I was never disturbed in that place and I felt far away from the eyes of the town’s people and its ghosts and even my family and my friends.

Occasionally, I would ask to sleep in the closet, a request granted only if I more completely organized the inevitable mess that grew as my brothers and I shoved clothes and toys alike inside. I would lie in my rolled comforter on the floor, pinching myself to stay awake and, when the only sound in the attic house was the tapping of mice in the kitchen, I would sneak back behind the shelf and crack the window.

            There exists a certain mania in the darkness of my home town, a mania that had been entirely absent outside the cabin. It would make me careless, as a teenager, but, leaning out of that window as a child, I felt only the sense of something impending. I felt jittery and unsure but hopeful, too. The couple passing under the streetlight in the early morning, the yowling of an unseen cat, the cold undercurrent of midnight air- something in it all assured me that a change was coming.

And it was, though it would still be some time before I understood it was me that was changing. The town was deathly still, for fear that any new shock might hasten the end. The heart at its center continued to hemorrhage and the tremors of its death shook snow from the powerlines and shingles from homes.

We may have lasted longer if the mine had simply quit working but, deep underground, corruption and rot were churning in the silence. As the heart burrowed deeper into the ground it had required pumps and valves to keep the groundwater and snowmelt at bay; the pumps were run by engines and the engines ran on money. If the engines were shut down the water would flood back into the cavity but the toxins from the mining process left in the surrounding rocks would flood back with it. The result would be a massive mercurial pool. Money drained into the hole in order to keep the infection from progressing and the town entered a short period of stasis.

The trouble with the attic house’s abundant space soon became apparent- we were fooled into thinking we were alone. The nearness of the duplex had taught us to speak softly, but now we vented ourselves into empty rooms and our words echoed through the walls. Arguing rose up from the kitchen and through the floor of the closet where I sometimes lay awake. Adults were rarely seen in the same rooms together. We seemed to see less of them generally, as though their presence had been spread across the new emptiness and diluted in the process.

I felt it most keenly on New Year’s Eve when, at the turn of the century, I found myself alone on the porch, so immersed in the nighttime air that I shook with it. When the distant cheers from Main Street grew quiet, I picked my way across the frozen yard until I could see the closet’s window and, from there, cast my eyes over the attic house in its entirety. It was quiet inside, too- my parents had insisted my brothers sleep several hours before the countdown and they had drifted off themselves sometime after. The pulse of change struck me again as I ran my fingers through the snow. I was outgrowing the space behind the shelf and its narrow vantage.

I showed it to my brother the next morning.

We moved before long and this time only my mom came with us. We were just down the street and moderately closer to the school. It was another duplex, this one split properly between the levels. We began in the upper half which, due to the canyon’s sloping western wall, still had a small yard of sorts but only one bedroom. Space returned to being a scarcity. My mom slept on a pull-out couch in the living room which meant that sneaking outside in the dead winter nights (a tradition I had continued) seemed unlikely. Opening windows in the bedroom would drain the house of heat and I understood that we didn’t have the warmth to spare. Time in the upper half grew stagnant.

My friends and I talked around the idea that we were changing but were more explicit in our consolations. Bree’s mother had passed away (an aneurysm in the local gas station). Danny had never known his biological father (his mother often drank). Patrick’s sister was a whore (we only knew this was wrong, not why). Bethany’s parents circled divorce like vultures (she still sang- a songbird in a silent nest). The games we used to play had stopped working and our imaginary places had grayed at the edges. We would still meet at the elementary school and spin idly on the merry-go-round despite our ascension to sixth grade. I was spinning when I learned, from Danny, of the change to come.

My home had supported two small, but separate, school districts for decades and they were to be collapsed. Money was needed elsewhere and, it’s true, the hallways did seem emptier, the lockers cold and hollow. We tallied lost classmates in the melting snowbank and wondered where they could have gone. We worried what it would be like commuting across town for school, what the surge of newcomers would bring.

Secretly, I hoped some of them still played. I still did, sometimes, in the airtight upper half. It was this hope that led me to carefully hide a small action figure in the bottom of my bag in the first week of the next year when we gathered as a combined class for a track and field day. There was so little flat ground where we lived that our field was a leveled portion of a shallow canyon wall. It towered over the new school and crawled with strangers. I peered through the chain link fence at the town below until I was called to join my class. Excitement, dread, the early autumn chill- everybody shook with something that morning.

The integration of the two districts was free of incident. We were drawn together by the same nervous energy that had led me and my friends to huddle at the old playground years before. They knew, as well as we did, that the town was in trouble. They had drawn their own tallies in the snow. They likely felt it more deeply than we had; their school (our school) was situated close to the open cut- the wound we strove to keep uninfected.

My old friends were better at making new ones than I would ever be but I was careful to tag along where I could. It was exhausting for me- more than the climb to the field, more than the sports. By lunch, I was desperate for space again so I staked out a spot in the far corner of the field and pretended to read. From there, I finally saw the pattern of the change we all feared. We weren’t moving forward as a homogenous whole- we were hardly on the same smooth spectrum. Pressed between sixth and seventh grade, squeezed together as two districts, we had emerged in layered strata- close but entirely different.

And the lines weren’t drawn by anything obvious until I saw the lowest stratum- a group of boys playing with their action figures in the sand of the high jump. My own toy stared out from my open pack before I carefully zipped it closed. I grew up in a mining town and I understood that some stone was more valuable than others. All that’s necessary for something as brittle and flaking as limestone to become marble is heat.

And pressure.

My mom found the upper half stagnant as well and, within a year, our sulking footfalls would drive the tenant from the lower half and we’d relocate there, instead. The lower half was bigger and a little brighter, thanks to a wall of windows on the front. It was easier to access the street and so I began sitting on the stoop until the cold drove me back inside.

The lower half, with its stoop and its window, was more exposed to the town. I began to recognize passersby that I would not normally have spoken to. For the first time in my life I knew our neighbors and occasionally helped them move something heavy in their yard or carry trash to the curb. It worked the opposite way as well- the city could see us. People came to our door, sometimes, asking for money. Some were collecting on bills. Others came from churches on behalf of the impoverished. The town held pressure on its wound, though money inevitably seeped through its fingers. We sometimes offered donations. We often didn’t. We were struggling too.

In eighth grade I felt a gaze reach across town and through the glass of the lower half. It was Bree, whose eyes were familiar but who looked at me differently, one day. We dated for several months before it became clear that we were made of different stuff. Her heartbeat thundered like a rockfall in her chest and mine rattled nervously, pebbles in a stream. I knew we were moving in the same direction, but I also knew I wasn’t moving nearly fast enough to keep pace.

I did try.

There were evenings that I clung to the kitchen wall where the lower half kept its phone. I could navigate a group call about as well as I could a relationship at the time. I was often silent (I still am) but I broke in with jokes often enough to remain relevant (I still try). We spoke, often, about sex. It still seemed a foreign thing to me but Danny had begun dating Patrick’s sister and we finally understood what the fuss had been about (which is to say, we understood how little fuss there should have been).

Those days, I dreamt constantly of the second-story door in the attic house. The door must have led somewhere, once, must have served a purpose. We flew paper airplanes through when our parents were away. We maneuvered our beds through it when we moved to save us the hassle of the stairs. There must be more to it than play, though. There must be more to it than moving mattresses.

We moved, again, when my mom had saved enough money for a house of our own. I achieved the privacy of my own room just in time for my first relationship to end. I was heart-broken within reason, having lost something that frightened and excited me in equal measure. The move helped. Moving houses has always given me the sense of a clean slate and the house of our own was further in the silent outskirts than I’d ever lived before, backed closely up against the naked canyon wall as it curved to enclose our town. Confident that no one would think to look for me so far away from the school, I slept with my windows thrown open and would wake, sometimes, to the trees whistling strange midnight dirges from the cliffside that rose behind the house. The weak pulse of town hardly reached us.

My contentment with solitude carried me to Christmas when my brothers and I were gifted a computer. The internet’s arrival in the canyon allowed for a new perspective on life there, becoming a window, of sorts, that shed light on our circumstances. While the adults reeled at the sudden illumination, the town’s youth peered out at the world beyond the hills. We huddled in chatrooms just as we once did behind the school, our stagnant whispers disturbed by the sudden flow of voices from the outside.

I met someone from across the state, where the hills flatten to prairie. Her town was dying too- it had been for a long time. The outskirts were already collapsed and the remaining populace was gathered around what was left of its heart: an old windmill. The people of this town were so weathered that they hardly recognized its shrieking in the wind.

I saw all of this for myself months later when I forfeited a birthday present to travel east with my mom on a work trip. Linsey met me at the husk of a fast food restaurant where I could hardly hear her speak over the driving snow. We walked several blocks and by the time we reached her house my skin was raw from the cold. She slipped off her shoes and as I struggled with my laces on the threshold I began to feel something that remained with me for as long as I was away from the hills.

Exposure.

There was nowhere to hide in Linsey’s town, no respite from the wind. The sky was a swirling gray and it stretched downward until the gaps between houses became saturated with it. The window in Linsey’s bedroom looked out over miles of farmland. The skylight spun with horizon. I slept with the windows closed tightly, the shades drawn.

On the second day, the sky cleared. Linsey and I warmed, re-discovering the familiarity that we had developed online but committing to little more than friendship. We had found each other because we were both searching for an exit, for whatever path would take us away from our towns and, in the short time that they ran parallel, we only came close enough to hold hands. We parted, promising a second visit that would never come.

I was happy to be home, where the snow piled softly on empty clotheslines. I was happy to confirm that my town remained healthy by comparison, even if the prognosis was the same. I sometimes medicate myself with the misfortune of others- a guilty habit that began in the house of our own. I tame my insecurities by feeding them- why else would I write that she is still there, Linsey in the dying town that seemed, to me, like a fever dream?

She is.

The total failure of the mine was formalized on my fourteenth birthday and the heart simply stopped. The consequences weren’t immediately obvious, least of all to me. With so many other organs, can’t the town exist without a heart? We carried on as though nothing had happened because it takes time and work to close a mine and its nurses found work as its undertakers. Still, the heart was gone and we were left with a silence that was louder than the pulse had been for a decade.

A year later I was losing my virginity and the noises we made together were uncomfortably loud. My pencil scratching across a math test startled birds in the park; a late sneeze would wake everyone in a three-block radius. The only place I could go to escape the noise was the edge of the heart cavity, where sound seemed to slide into the abyss. We gathered there like vultures.

When I was sixteen the heavy winter snow collapsed abandoned houses in the outskirts. In the spring, the wilderness that we sacrificed at the town’s founding began to take back the land above the canyon. Some allowed themselves to be pushed toward the hole in the center of town; others retreated into the encroaching forest. We were in the latter group, settling quietly at a distance in the final cabin where we could safely watch things end.

By then, the population of town had become so diluted that I found my friends drifting away from me. Bree got pregnant and dropped out of school (the father, a repeating senior, disappeared one night). Danny was shuffled between family homes (each broken beyond repair). Patrick drifted between obsession and disloyalty with a series of young women (there’s a word for this but I can’t remember what it is). Bethany’s parents divorced (she was quiet after that).

The cabin at the end was the last place we’d ever gather and the venue for the only party I would throw as a young adult. The party was destined to fail. It was borne out of desperation and desperation pervaded every aspect of it. Danny drank cheap whiskey from the bottle and spoke darkly of our senior year. Bethany tried to cheer him up because she couldn’t stand listening to what we all already knew. We built a monstrous fire in the woods and sat silently about its perimeter. We tried to consider the future but could barely see over the edge of the canyon.

Danny’s melancholy spread, as did his drinking. Soon the darkness engulfed him and the rest teetered on the edge of black-out before I could convince them to go back inside. I sent them to bed like a disappointed parent and hovered, sober, in the kitchen, my clothes gray with ash and my thoughts gray with midnight. In the morning I hid the empty bottles such that they were immediately found when my parents returned. I was grounded for weeks but I hardly noticed. There was nowhere left to go.

There was work, I suppose. At the end of summer I had slipped into a vacancy at the radio station on Main Street. The hours ran two extremes: late weekday nights and early weekend mornings. When Friday evenings threatened snow, I would throw blankets on a creaking pull-out sofa in the lobby and weather the storm downtown.

It’s not uncommon for the dying to appear worse late in the day (a phenomenon called ‘sundowning’) and I would curl uncomfortably on that couch each Friday, kept up by the sickly-yellow streetlight pouring through the windows and sure that my town would not survive the night. Drunks would rattle out of the bars around two, sliding and vomiting in the fresh snow. Their shouting- at each other, at the sky, into the spaces between the trees (there exists a certain mania in the darkness of my home town)- would wake me and I would muddle through the last hours of sleep without resting.

Things seemed better in the morning, even if it meant rising before the sun to scrape ice from the sidewalks. It would be quiet, except for the cracking of frost in the trees, and it would be lonely, except for the rare passing car that chose to brave the streets. Daylight still existed in my town near the end, and the snow covered what we didn’t want to see. I’ll say this for the night, though:

It was closer to the truth.

When I was eighteen the grocery store shut down, its inventory collecting dust inside. A few months after closing its doors somebody sent a brick through the windows and stole a 24 pack of beer. The brick had been dislodged from town hall across the street. The broken window was boarded up and, as a precaution, the rest eventually were too. Around that time I was afraid the town would be gone before I had a chance to leave.

I did leave, a year later on one of the towns final outward sighs. I cut ties to any friends I had left, for better or worse, and when my family finally followed, only a few years after me, there was no reason to go back. For a long time afterward I would suffer gaping nightmares and they persisted until I realized it was the same emptiness at the center of town.

I went back many years into the town’s hospice. There are still roads there, of course, and houses for people who prefer living alone. The official buildings have been boarded up and ghosts stand vigil in the corners. I don’t know what the state did or has done to keep the toxic waters at bay but the heart is still empty. I snuck under the fence surrounding the area and stared into the heart’s core but there wasn’t anything of value there anymore.

There was nothing at all.