Get in Trouble: Stories (34 page)

“And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom with twin beds. A stain in the closet. A really big one. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

“Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain that goes right through the duvet, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up
through
the mattress.”

“Uh oh,” Gwenda says. She thinks she’s beginning to see the shape of this story.

“You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both houses. She also volunteers at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy. Maybe that’s why he liked me. Those boots.

“Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

“Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called
CSI
, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom and the stain in the master bedroom and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

“So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his
house. And in that other house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother because lately when he tries to talk to his mother all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it, either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still not all that nice. The only reason he’s nice to Liam is because Liam is his heir.

“His uncle has showed him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he tells Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high-school kid got up in the middle of the night and killed his whole family with a hammer. And this artist, his idea was based on something the robber barons did at the turn of the previous century, which was buy up castles abroad and have them brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. A lot of those castles were supposed to be haunted. Buying a castle with a ghost in it and moving it across the ocean? Why not? So that was idea number one, to flip that. But then he had idea number two, which was, what makes a haunted house? If you take it to pieces and transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost come with it if you put it back together exactly the way it was? And if you can
put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, can you build your own haunted house from scratch if you re-create all of the pieces? And idea number three, forget the ghosts, can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, would they know which one was real and which one was ersatz? Would they see real ghosts in the real house? Imagine they saw ghosts in the fake one?”

“So which house were they living in?” Sullivan asked.

“Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both houses. He said he never knew which house was real. Which house was haunted. The artist was the only one with that piece of information.

“I’ll tell the rest of the story as quickly as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it. Maybe for religious reasons? Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or smoking pot, something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case it didn’t do any good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”

“Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.

“Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later
on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe you grew up in a place where there was always a party going on, all the time, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or maybe just somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t sleep as well without that TV on. You can’t get to sleep. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”

“That’s sick,” Sullivan said.

“Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”

Mei said, “No, wait, go back. There’s got to be more than that!”

“Not really,” Sisi said. “No. Not much more. He’d brought a picnic dinner with us. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his childhood. Then he gave me the tour. Showed me all the stains where those people died. I kept looking out the window and the sun got lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”

They were all in that house now, flicking through those rooms, one after another. “Maureen?” Mei said. “Can you change it back?”

“Of course,” Maureen said. Once again there were the greyhounds, the garden, the fire, and the roses. Shadows slicked the flagstones, blotted and clung to the tapestries.

“Better,” Sisi said. “Thank you. You went and found it online, didn’t you, Maureen? That was exactly the way I remember it. I went outside to think and have a cigarette. Yeah, I know. Bad astronaut. But I still kind of wanted to sleep with this guy. Just once. So he was messed up, so what? Sometimes messed-up sex is the best. When I came back inside the house, I still hadn’t made up my mind. And then I made up my mind in a hurry. Because this guy? I went to look for him and he was down on the floor in that little boy’s bedroom. Under the window, okay? On top of that
stain.
He was rolling around on the floor. You know, the way cats do? He had this look on his face. Like when they get catnip. I got out of there in a hurry. Drove away in his Land Rover. The keys were still in the ignition. Left it at a transport café and hitched the rest of the way home and never saw him again.”

“You win,” Portia said. “I don’t know what you win, but you win. That guy of yours was
wrong.
”

“What about the artist? I mean, what he did,” Mei said. “That Liam guy would have been okay if it weren’t for what he did. Right? I mean it’s something to think about. Say we find some nice Goldilocks planet. If the conditions are suitable and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Did they come along with Aune? With us? Are they here now? If we tell Maureen to build a haunted house around us right now, does she have to make the ghosts? Or do they just show up?”

Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”

The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.

“Maureen!” Portia said. “Don’t you dare!”

Gwenda said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”

“Not really,” Sisi said. “What are you saying?”

Gwenda looked at the others. Then Sisi again. Sisi stretched luxuriously, weightlessly. Gwenda thought of the stain on the carpet, the man rolling on it like a cat.

“Gwenda, my love. What are you trying to say?” Sisi said.

“I know a ghost story,” Maureen said. “I know one, after all. Do you want to hear it?”

Before anyone could answer, they were in the Great Room again, except they were outside it, too. They floated, somehow, in a great nothingness. But there was the table again with dinner upon it, where they had sat with one another.

The room grew darker and colder and the lost crew of the ship
House of Mystery
sat around the table.

That sister crew, those old friends, they looked up from their meal, from their conversation. They turned and regarded the crew of the ship
House of Secrets.
They wore dress uniforms, as if in celebration, but they were maimed by some catastrophe. They lifted their ruined hands and waved, smiling.

There was a smell of char and chemicals and icy rot that Gwenda almost knew.

And then it was her own friends around the table. Mei, Sullivan, Portia, Aune, Sisi. She saw herself sitting there, hacked almost in two. She got up, moved toward herself, then vanished.

The Great Room reshaped itself out of nothingness and horror. They were back in the English country house. The air was full of sour spray. Someone had thrown up. Someone else sobbed.

Aune said, “Maureen, that was unkind.”

Maureen said nothing. She went about the room like a ghost, coaxing the vomit into a ball.

“The hell was that?” Sisi said. “Maureen? What were you thinking? Gwenda? My darling?” She reached for Gwenda’s hand, but Gwenda pushed away.

She went forward in a great spasm, her arms extended to catch the wall. Going before her on the right hand, the ship
House of Secrets
, and on the left,
House of Mystery.

She could no longer tell the one from the other.

Light

 

two men, one raised by wolves

The man at the bar on the stool beside her: bent like a hook over some item. A book, not a drink. A children’s book, dog-eared. When he noticed her stare, he grinned and said, “Got a light?” It was a Friday night, and The Splinter was full of men saying things. Some guy off in a booth was saying, for example, “Well, sure, you can be raised by wolves and lead a normal life but—”

She said, “I don’t smoke.”

The man straightened up. He said, “Not that kind of light. I mean a
light.
Do you have a
light
?”

“I don’t understand,” she said. And then because he was not bad looking, she said, “Sorry.”

“Stupid bitch,” he said. “Never mind.” He went back to his book. The pages were greasy and soft and torn; he had it open at a watercolor illustration of a boy and a girl standing in front of a
dragon the size of a Volkswagen bus. The man had a pen. He’d drawn word bubbles coming out of the children’s mouths, and now he was writing in words. The children were saying—

The man snapped the book shut; it was a library book.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a children’s librarian. Can I ask why you’re defacing that book?”

“I don’t know,
can
you?
May
be you can and
may
be you can’t, but why ask me?” the man said. Turning his back to her, he hunched over the picture book again.

Which was really too much. She had once been a child. She owned a library card. She opened up her shoulder bag and took a needle out of the travel sewing kit. She palmed the needle and then, after finishing off her Rum and Rum and Coke—a drink she’d invented in her twenties and was still very fond of—she jabbed the man in his left buttock. Very fast. Her hand was back in her lap and she was signaling the bartender for another drink when the man beside her howled and sat up. Now everyone was looking at him. He slid off his bar stool and hurried away, glancing back at her once in outrage.

There was a drop of blood on the needle. She wiped it on a bar napkin.

At a table nearby three women were talking about a new pocket universe. A new diet. A coworker’s new baby; a girl born with no shadow. This was bad, although thank God not as bad as it could have been, a woman—someone called her Caroline—was saying. A long, lubricated conversation followed about over-the-counter shadows—prosthetics, available in most drugstores, not expensive and reasonably durable. Everyone was in agreement that it was almost impossible to distinguish a homemade or store-bought shadow from a real one. Caroline and her friends
began to talk of babies born with two shadows. Children with two shadows did not grow up happy. They didn’t get on well with other children. You could cut a pair of shadows apart with a pair of crooked scissors, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. By the end of the day the second shadow always grew back, twice as long. If you didn’t bother to cut back the second shadow, then eventually you had twins, one of whom was only slightly realer than the other.

Lindsey had grown up in a stucco house in a scab-raw development in Dade County. On one side of the development there were orange groves; opposite Lindsey’s house had been a bruised and trampled nothing. A wilderness. It grew back, then overran the edges of the new development. Banyan trees dripping with spiky little air-drinking epiphytics; banana spiders; tunnels of coral reef, barely covered by blackish, sandy dirt, that Lindsey and her brother lowered themselves into and then emerged out of, skinned, bloody, triumphant; bulldozed football-field-sized depressions that filled with water when it rained and produced thousands of fingernail-sized tan toads. Lindsey kept them in jars. She caught wolf spiders, Cuban lizards, tobacco grasshoppers yellow and pink—solid as toy cars—that spat when you caged them in your hand, blue crabs that swarmed across the yard, through the house, and into the swimming pool where they drowned. Geckos with their velvet bellies and papery clockwork insides, tick-tock barks; scorpions; king snakes and coral snakes and corn snakes,
red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black friendly Jack;
anoles, obscure until they sent out the bloody fans of their throats. When Lindsey was ten, a lightning strike ignited a fire under the coral reef. For a week the ground was warm to the touch. Smoke ghosted up. They kept the sprinklers
on but the grass died anyway. Snakes were everywhere. Lindsey’s new twin brother, Alan, caught five, lost three of them in the house while he was watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Lindsey had had a happy childhood. The women in the bar didn’t know what they were talking about.

It was almost a shame when the man who had theories about being raised by wolves came over and threw his drink in the face of the woman named Caroline. There was a commotion. Lindsey took advantage of it and left, in a leisurely way, without paying her tab. She caught the eye she wanted to catch. They had both been thinking of making an exit, and so she went for a walk on the beach with the man who threw drinks and had theories about being raised by wolves. He was charming, but she felt his theories were only that: charming. When she said this, he became less charming. Nevertheless, she invited him home.

“Nice place,” he said. “I like all the whatsits.”

“It’s all my brother’s stuff,” Lindsey said.

“Your
brother
? Does he live with you?”

“God, no,” Lindsey said. “He’s…wherever he is.”

“I had a sister. Died when I was two,” the man said. “Wolves make really shitty parents.”

“Ha,” she said experimentally.

“Ha,” he said. And then, “Look at that,” as he was undressing her. Their four shadows fell across her double bed, sticky and wilted as if from lovemaking that hadn’t even begun. At the sight of their languorously intertwined shadows, the wolf man became charming again. “Look at these sweet little tits,” he said over and over again, as though she might not ever have noticed how sweet and little her tits were. He exclaimed at the sight of
every part of her: afterward she slept poorly, apprehensive that he might steal away, taking along one of the body parts or pieces that he seemed to admire so much.

In the morning, she woke and found herself stuck beneath the body of the wolf man as if she had been trapped beneath a collapsed and derelict building. When she began to wriggle her way out from under him, he woke and complained of a fucking terrible hangover. He called her “Joanie” several times, asked to borrow a pair of scissors, and spent a long time in her bathroom with the door locked while she read the paper. Smuggling ring apprehended by _____. Government overthrown in ______. Family of twelve last seen in vicinity of ______. Start of hurricane season _____. The wolf man came out of the bathroom, dressed hurriedly, and left.

She found, in a spongy black heap, the amputated shadow of his dead twin and three soaked, pungent towels on the bathroom floor; there were stubby black bits of beard in the sink. The blades of her nail scissors tarry and blunted.

She threw away the reeking towels. She mopped up the shadow, folding it into a large Ziploc bag, carried the bag into the kitchen, and put the shadow down the disposal. She ran the water for a long time.

Then she went outside and sat on her patio and watched the iguanas eat the flowers off her hibiscus. It was six a.m. and already quite warm.

no vodka, one egg

Sponges hold water. Water holds light. Lindsey was hollow all the way through when she wasn’t full of alcohol. The water in the canal was glazed, veined with light that wouldn’t hold still. It was vile. She had the beginnings of one of her headaches. Light beat down and her second shadow began to move, rippling in waves like the light-shot water in the canal. She went inside. The egg in the door had a spot of blood in its yolk when she cracked it in the pan. She liked vodka in her orange juice, but there was no orange juice in the fridge, no vodka in the freezer; only a smallish iguana.

The Keys were overrun with iguanas. They ate her hibiscus; every once in a while she caught one of the smaller ones with the pool net and stuck it in her freezer for a few days. This was supposedly a humane way of dealing with iguanas. You could even eat them, although she did not. She was a vegetarian.

She put out food for the bigger iguanas when she saw them. They liked ripe fruit. She liked to watch them eat. She knew that she was not being consistent or fair in her dealings, but there it was.

men unlucky at cards

Lindsey’s job was not a particularly complicated one. There was an office, and behind the office was a warehouse full of sleeping people. There was an agency in D.C. that paid her company to take responsibility for the sleepers. Every year, hikers and cavers
and construction workers found a few dozen more. No one knew how to wake them up. No one knew what they meant, what they did, where they came from. No one really even knew if they were people.

There were always at least two security guards on duty at the warehouse. They were mostly, in Lindsey’s opinion, lecherous assholes. She spent the day going through invoices, and then went home again. The wolf man wasn’t at The Splinter and the bartender threw everyone out at two a.m.; she went back to the warehouse on a hunch, four hours into the night shift.

Bickle and Lowes had hauled out five sleepers, three women and two men. They’d put Miami Hydra baseball caps on the male sleepers and stripped the women, propped them up in chairs around a foldout table. Someone had arranged the hands of one of the male sleepers down between the legs of one of the women. Cards had been dealt out. Maybe it was just a game of strip poker and the three women had been unlucky. It was hard to play your cards well when you were asleep.

Larry Bickle stood behind one of the women, his cheek against her hair. He seemed to be giving her advice about how to play her cards. He wasn’t holding his drink carefully enough, and the woman’s neat lap brimmed with beer.

Lindsey watched for a few minutes. Bickle and Lowes had gotten to the sloppy, expansive stage of drunkenness that, sober, she resented most. False happiness.

When Lowes saw Lindsey he stood up so fast his chair tipped over. “Hey, now,” he’d said. “It’s different from how it looks.”

Both guards had little conical paper party hats on their heads.

A third man, no one Lindsey recognized, came wandering down the middle aisle like he’d been shopping at Walmart. He wore boxer shorts and a party hat. “Who’s this?” he said, leering at Lindsey.

Larry Bickle’s hand was on his gun. What was he going to do? Shoot her? She said, “I’ve already called the police.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Larry Bickle said. He said some other things.

“You called who?” Edgar Lowes said.

“They’ll be here in about ten minutes,” Lindsey said. “If I were you, I’d leave right now. Just go.”

“What is that bitch saying?” Larry Bickle said unhappily. He was really quite drunk. His hand was still on his gun.

She took out her own gun, a Beretta. She pointed it in the direction of Bickle and Lowes. “Put your gun belts on the ground and take off your uniforms. Leave your keys and your ID cards. You, too, whoever you are. Hand over your IDs and I won’t write this up.”

“You’ve got little cats on your gun,” Edgar Lowes said.

“Hello Kitty stickers,” she said. “I count coup.” Although she’d only ever shot one person.

The men took off their clothes, but seemed to forget the paper hats. Edgar Lowes had a long purple scar down his chest. He saw Lindsey looking. “Triple bypass. I
need
this job. Health insurance.”

“Too bad,” Lindsey said. She followed them out into the parking lot. The third man didn’t seem to care that he was naked. He didn’t even have his hands cupped around his balls, the way Bickle and Lowes did. He said to Lindsey, “They’ve done this a couple of times, ma’am. Heard about it from a friend. Tonight was my birthday party.”

Then: “That’s my digital camera.”

“Happy birthday. Thanks for the camera, Mr.”—she checked his ID—“Mr. Junro. You keep your mouth shut about this and, like I said, I won’t press charges. Say thank you if you agree.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Junro said.

“I’m still not giving your camera back,” Lindsey said.

“That’s okay,” Mr. Junro said. “That’s fine.”

She watched the three men get into their cars and drive away. Then she went back into the warehouse and folded up the uniforms, emptied the guns, cleaned up the sleepers, used the dolly to get the sleepers back to their boxes. There was a bottle of cognac on the card table that had probably not belonged to either Bickle or Lowes, and plenty of beer. She drank steadily. A song came to her, and she sang it.
Tall and tan and young and drunken and.
She knew she was getting the words wrong.
A moonlit pyre. Like a bird on fire. I have tried in my way to be you.

It was almost five a.m. Not much point in going home. The floor came up at her in waves, and she would have liked to lie down on it.

The sleeper in Box 113 was Harrisburg Pennsylvania. The sleepers were all named after their place of origin. Other countries did it differently. Harrisburg Pennsylvania had long eyelashes and a bruise on his cheek that had never faded. The skin of a sleeper was always just a little cooler than you expected. You could get used to anything. She set the alarm in her cell phone to wake her up at seven a.m., which was an hour before the shift change.

In the morning, Harrisburg Pennsylvania was still asleep and Lindsey was still drunk.

All she said to her supervisor, the general office manager, was that she’d fired Bickle and Lowes. Mr. Charles gave her a long-suffering look. He said, “You look a bit rough.”

“I’ll go home early,” she said.

She would have liked to replace Bickle and Lowes with women, but in the end she hired an older man with excellent job references and a graduate student, Jason, who said he planned to spend his evenings working on his dissertation. (He was a philosophy student, and she asked what philosopher his dissertation was on. If he’d said, “Nietzsche,” she might have terminated the interview. But he said, “John Locke.”)