I looked upon the scene before me–upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain–upon the bleak walls–upon the vacant eye-like windows–upon a few rank sedges–and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees–with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium–the bitter lapse into everyday life–the hideous dropping off of the veil.
-Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
Mary crouches over a row of needles, queasy with hunger. It’s daybreak, perhaps later; the cabin is engulfed in an opaque plume, thick as the window curtains that conceal her from the world. A nagging fear creeps up her shoulders like an old tick, a fear that her rations are dwindling. They are; she’s nearly out of dope and she can’t bring herself to believe it. Drops of white opium rush to the far reaches of her body, leaving in a fury of perspiration. Beneath her, tepid bath water lifts ancient stains in the carpet, carrying them to the corners of her bedroom in a delta of brown froth. The bathtub is long overflown. It remains concealed behind the locked bathroom door she leans against, where she watches her oasis become a floodplain in the dim light. Joining the flow, angry tears begin to gush from her eyes and she doesn’t know why.
There’s not enough of anything around here.
Mary doesn’t stir. She’s heard me speak so many times before, it’s a wonder she doesn’t recognize me now. I would guess it has something to do with the pills she stuffed in her mouth a few hours ago; clinging to the inside of the bottle, they were the last survivors of the flood. She hadn’t noted the dose but they had helped her fall asleep fast, so it was no matter; now she is only half awake. She can do nothing but take inventory of her provisions again and again, as she fights fatigue and clings to a bottle of whiskey.
Disheartened, I make the house shake with discomfort. I make fear ooze from her brain and her neck hairs stand on end. I make her body ache inside her own skin, I try to make her loathe this place and everything in it. I do so much but it’s never enough, she doesn’t listen to me anymore. She’s stopped checking in with the little voice in her head and she feels like she’s fine with it.
Alcohol makes her feel like she’s fine with everything, even though she’s got nothing left. Deep down she yearns for her body to spin again, like the Gravitron she used to ride at the county fair. As a kid she had always wanted to get out as soon as the rickety old spaceship started revolving, but as it got faster and faster she would begin to feel so alive. So queasy, but so alive; she loved being out of control. Now the reminder of it puts a bittersweet knot in her throat; nonconsensual nostalgia. It feels like a lifetime since she’s longed for anything different.
The bedroom is colder than it was yesterday. Without a draft to keep moisture from sticking to the walls it just keeps getting more humid. It will never be the same again after last night, and Mary has no idea why. Her husband’s dead, that’s why, but she still anticipates the anger that the overflowing bathtub will inspire in him. The well is nearly drained, downstairs the ceiling is raining, and the bedroom floor is ruined. It’s as if the house is trying to cleanse itself, and failing.
The bedroom carpet isn’t capable of getting clean, either. Covered by all manner of her husband’s bodily fluids, it must have been too shocked and humiliated to protest. Forever absorbing the dirt and grime of the people who trod on them, Mary and the carpet are a lot alike. Stained by the same culprit, they endlessly yield to his drug-induced rages. Now, as the bitter taste of alcohol causes her to squirm, she becomes consumed with a steadfast ambivalence toward him. The same ambivalence that allowed her to part her legs when her stomach swirled with disgust, the same ambivalence with which he used to use her. Those were the good old days, long before “no” made its way into her vocabulary and became his new favorite word.
Inside her ear I whisper, bury him, bury him, bury him, but she ignores me. Hidden inside her belly is an itch she’s desperate to scratch, and no measure of domestic catastrophe can disrupt her obsession with it. Until she musters the courage to kick down the bathroom door she will remain listlessly confused, as usual.
Even without her husband anywhere near she can still feel his presence. Her neck tingles from the phantom scratch of his chin against her skin, and his calloused hands wrapped around it. The same hands he used to pack her fresh bowls of weed, to tuck her in at night, to strangle her; as if clasping for some semblance of affection that he had already destroyed. He used his hands to pay the rent, the electric bill, the water bill, and he used them every day to constrict her arm just above the vein.
Everyone she knows tells her she’s gone too far, done too much, but inside she feels utterly empty. Maybe it’s because they’ve stopped calling on her. Maybe it’s because nobody bothers to visit anymore, or maybe it’s the oxy that deprives her of any motivation to reach out. She certainly lets it keep her from doing most things, like ever leaving the house. Today she is far too preoccupied with her fix to do anything to help herself. Looking down at the remains of liquid left in a few of her vials sends a shiver up her spine; does she think they are going to get up and run away? If only she could squeeze a drop from each needle into her veins it would be enough to keep the shivers at bay, at least for a while. She takes a long swig from the bottle; for now, this is the last window into that cool limbo she craves.
Or so she thinks. Behind the locked door and the torn shower curtain her husband’s body begins to relax, just starting the process of decomposition. Murky water overtakes Mary’s color coded bath salts on the sill of the tub, the kind she uses for more than bathing, creating an aroma of rotting lavender flesh that she cannot make sense of. Each item she had meticulously assigned a home has been displaced; the bathroom is in total disarray. Bubbles continue to escape from her husband’s wet mouth but the sound is drowned out by running water, and she hears nothing.
Mary is a compulsive woman. Usually too keenly aware of any disturbance in her home, she is nothing if not vigilant. To her husband this behavior had warranted constant supervising. The four rooms of her home: kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom, have come to replace the four compartments of her erratic mind: the hungry, the tired, the sick, and the desired. Without the visual of her structural surroundings she is too easily lost. At times, the fragile walls of her home have been all that have kept her from floating away. It makes sense that she should want to keep track of them, especially during those wildest hours when they almost seem to move on their own.
Unprompted, a sharp popping sound echoes up the stairs. The case of beer bottles she stored in the freezer has finally exploded and shattered, and she has no recollection of putting it there. Rich amber slush coats the carcass of a half-frozen orange tabby cat stored in a shoebox, distorting the words hastily written there in red ink, “Bury him Mary.”
“Baby?” She calls out, positive that he has just come in the door.
She’s on her feet before her drunk muscles surrender to gravity, but manages to hold herself up with the bathroom doorknob. Swift memories begin to make their way into her mind, glimpses of heroic escapes she’s made from the bathroom window. Many times she has locked herself in there, frightened by an apathetic tone in her husband’s voice or the indignation with which he pounded on the door. On those nights that his impulse control was at its scarcest she had even made the leap of faith to the mossy forest floor. Sometimes she ran the bath to mask the noise of it, feigning that she just needed a moment to relax. He would never let her out of sight, let alone earshot, making these futile escapes all the more daring. He was a much better manipulator than me, but I still do everything I can to encourage the delusion.
You better run Mary.
At the thought of his presence she can almost feel the cold earth beneath her bare feet, the adrenaline pumping through her, the sound of his laughter and the way it resounded through the woods in her wake. “Come back baby,” he would say, “I’m not going to hurt you.” But he always did, even in his attempts to appease her; all he had to do was mention heroin and she was reminded of the power he had. Without him, she would die. With him, she was dying. Her life existed somewhere in between those two spaces, in that dreamlike state that allowed her to forget who she was and what she had done.
Now, only fear seems to awaken her elusive rationality. I raise my voice.
He’s mounting the stairs.
Expanding wooden beams send creaks throughout the whole house. As my words begin to sink in paranoia manifests every inch of her being. Before she knows what to do her knees bring her back to the ground, smashing a few of her vials and embedding glass in her skin. Worse, the last of her heroin washes away with the blood. Some part of her knows that today is not the day she is going to get away with wasting dope.
She feels guilty, it’s written all over her face and body. She can’t stop thinking about him walking through the door and finding her in this puddle of grime that she blames herself for creating. She can’t stop thinking about what she must have done wrong and everything wrong with her that impedes her from fixing it. She doesn’t remember who started the mess but if she did, she’d be free of him. If she did, she’d know this was all his fault.
If only she could see through the walls the way I can. The substances she takes don’t do what they’re supposed to anymore though, they are hardly even real. Her husband had so much to say about heroin that she started to wonder if he invented it. But then his words got bigger, more aggressive, and he began to tell her everything he thought he knew about her. He reinvented love, redefined sex in his own way that left her believing it was his birthright. He might as well have invented it, too. The way he talked about her body left her feeling like it was his, and if ever that was true it certainly wasn’t anymore. I would do everything I could to show her that.
Don’t let him see you like this.
Mary knows she can’t go on like this anymore, I hardly even have to tell her. Her husband felt the same way last night, thank goodness. The world obliged him. Without hesitation, the space that he had filled in the universe was drowned with the energy of everything that was still living, and that was the end of him. All it took was too much heroin and the lack of a heroine when he needed her most; she was too busy sleeping in his mess. So, in accordance with two awful truths, he was quietly set free; death is discreet, and death is sweet. But he had met death long before the sun even found a place in the sky, hours had passed since then and still the memory of him threatens to consume the last of his wife. How lasting the effects of trauma are on the mind. The fear inside her rouses nerve from the pit of her stomach, and before she knows it she is slamming her body against the bathroom door with all of her might.
Put your back into it Mary.
It’s what he used to say to her all the time, whenever she was bending over backwards for him. This time it works. Triumphantly, the door finally releases itself from its hinges. Behind it a sickening silence sweeps from the floodplains of the bathroom. Rounding the corner, she glimpses the last of him; a bloated body floating in the bathtub, apparently dead for some time. Her husband: naked and exposed in all of his glory. The most glory, in fact, that he had ever possessed; in death his demeanor seems almost peaceful as his carcass bobs to the rhythm of the faucet. Mary’s red hands clash with the warped linoleum beneath her as soon as his popping blue eyes meet hers.
Death is all around her. It’s in every nook and cranny of her decrepit house, and it is inside of her, too. I feel myself dying with the tears that refuse to appear in her eyes, dying with the remorse that she does not feel. She doesn’t need me anymore, so it’s my time to go. I know this, because her husband’s left over syringes are full of enough dope to keep her occupied for days, and she ignores them. I know this, because her body is far too weak to support her but she stands anyway.
With one last ping of regret for the wastefulness of it, she turns of the water.
She does not exit that place on her own, she is forced out. Tossed, as if swallowed by a wave of longing and spit forth onto the shores of the outside world. Relief comes all at once. She is not alone, but is carried out with the wreckage of the unphysical home she built for herself; everything she has ever known gushes out that front door with her and she doesn’t look back.
Outside the ground is sodden, too, enough to swallow her feet in moss and leaves. It’s a distant but familiar feeling, one that fills her with the kind of nostalgia that warms her very bones. Her legs are steadier on solid ground, and the foggy air around her is the sweetest thing she’s tasted in months. Her body is much cooler in the strange mist around her house and, not because it still hungers for the one thing she can’t have, her body feels light. Misery gently removes itself from her shoulders.
Rove & Ponder 