The house is going to kill us all.
The house. In question, this old Revolutionary-era townhouse. Big windows. Oaks out front, out back a porch that juts out onto the beach, a view to the ocean.
It’s on a hill. Of course.
But, that’s not it at all. Describing the appearance of the house isn't describing the
feeling of the house. I can tell you what the house looked like all I want, but I will never, ever be able to tell you how it feels. Only the house can tell you itself.
And you don’t want that.
We had had the house before that, but I guess the story really started when we took in this kid from the slums, LaQuan. About Junior High age. Not really tall, but not really short, either. Hair all in cornrows. You can guess the rest.
His brother, his legal guardian, got busted for selling drugs. Lots of them. So that left LaQuan without a caretaker. And so we took him in. We don't know why, but, after the bust, LaQuan was alone, so we were kind of compelled to help him out.
LaQuan said he’s not going to make the same mistakes his brother did.
The thing is, he was absolutely terrified of bed sheets. All his life he'd been too poor to afford a real Machine reading, but there's not much doubt. He had his guesses, though maybe that's not what would kill him. For him, it was worth taking that risk, and for us it was worth it defending him. (My own slip says, TRYING TO EVIT THE INEVITABLE. There’s no escaping that, I guess.)
"What?" I asked him once. "Are you afraid of making it your deathbed? Is that it?" I laughed. "Rose...bud..."
LaQuan just looked at me funny.
"It's from... Citizen... Kane..." I explained.
"Who?"
"It's not a who, it's a movie. Orson Welles?"
LaQuan just shrugged his shoulders.
"You still haven't answered my question."
But he refused to talk about it.
You know how people are actually killed by their own bed sheets? Strangulation. They’re tossing around in their sleep and the sheet gets coiled around their throats. Smooshes the windpipe in, blocks the air from getting through. They never wake up from whatever dream that was so agitating them. Strangulation. But this kid acted like, I don’t know, the bed sheet was going to
eat him or something. You know how many people are accidentally strangled by their own bed sheets every year? Not many. You know what kinds of people?
Not people like LaQuan, that's who.
This made his accommodations hard to figure out. Anywhere here was better than the slums, but we tried our hardest to find some way to keep warm at night without blankets. The summer months were dwindling, and it was starting to get really cold. The house, being 19th century, didn't really have an internal heating system or anything, so after a review of the house we decided that the only place he could sleep without freezing to death was in a chair by the fireplace in the corner of the living room.
Only there was a bed sheet stretched out in the corner of the other side of the room.
He looked at it, and when he saw it his eyes stretched out open, wider than I've ever seen before. Wider than I thought possible. You could see the whites around the whites. So much so that his pupils and irises were lost in this sea of white. Like he was rolling them all the way into the back of his head.
A momentary wave of revulsion washed over me, but faded away so soon I forgot instantly about it until much later, when I was thinking back on it. All I could feel now was annoyance.
I walked up to the bed sheet mumbling something dark under my breath, and reached down to pick it up. Only, something stopped me. Another wave of revulsion. Fear mixed in this time too for good measure. I could see it through his too-wide eyes now, and I could see there was something wrong with it. The proportions weren't quite right, maybe. It was too wide, or too narrow. One of the sides was longer than the opposite side, while the sheet remained perfectly rectangular. Or something. Something was just off. Exactly what that was seemed to change as you looked at it. You tried measuring it, and it was all fine and good at the particular place you were measuring, but it must have been the perspective or something that was off, on the entire rest of the sheet.
So I don’t know what it was, but I couldn't bring myself to touch it, let alone pick it up and move it. I eventually just had to shrug, and force the muscles in my face to make something of a grin.
And the sheet remained in the corner.
The thing is, though, the fireside was the only place he could sleep. It was getting cold, and the fireplace was the only source of warmth outside a blanket. He couldn't sit too close, either, or he would get too hot. There was a sweet spot, a Goldilocks zone between too cold and too hot, back from the fireplace a little, but that just meant he was positioned that much closer to the bed sheet in the other corner.
“Watch me. Make sure nothing happens.”
We took shifts. At least one of us was awake, all night long. It was sort of enjoyable, even.
One night, LaQuan woke up screaming. There was the bed sheet draped over him. His watcher had fallen asleep. No one fessed up to draping the sheet over him. Once it was off of him, it wound up back in the corner, exactly where it used to be, exactly how it was, without anyone putting it there. As if it had never moved. Maybe it didn't.
I found him outside the house, out the back. Crouched out behind the front of the old GMC pickup truck, looking secretive, peeking glimpses into this old Buzz Lightyear lunchbox he had cradled in his arms.
Looking guilty.
There was something in the lunchbox. I'd guess porn, but who keeps porn in a lunchbox? A weapon? Something criminal. But whatever it was, he had a good reason to have it. I approached him.
When it was clear the jig was up, he relented. Inside the lunchbox were these sheets of hashish, marijuana purified by slinging it against canvases and strained and pressed into sheets. Guess he wasn't avoiding his brother's footsteps as much as he wanted to at all. There was a lot of it. Good stuff, too. I haven’t seen any nearly like it since that time I went to Burning Man back in the '90s. These sheets of hash were better than those at Burning Man, in fact. Incredibly pure.
Impossibly pure. It was weird. They were almost white.
Like tiny little bed sheets…
I pushed the thought out of my head. “What are you doing with all this?”
He mumbled something about not wanting to use the drugs himself, about not wanting to wind up like his brother. He said instead that reselling them to help out his brother. He had gotten the entire lunchbox’s worth of drugs for exactly $20.
I just stared at him, and looked down inside the lunchbox again. I would have shelled out much, much more than $20 for a single
sheet of it, and there were easily dozens of sheets inside the box. If not even a hundred or more.
This was bad. Clearly the seller was trying to get rid of it.
Why? And how’d it get so good?
He was watching the sunset on the patio. He was wearing just a polo shirt and shorts, leaning against the railing, looking over the ocean. He must've been chilly, but, then again, he couldn't very well have wrapped himself up in anything.
“I finally got around to watching Citizen Kane.”
“…and?”
“It was alright. I don’t know. Some of the... cinematic techniques pioneered... haven’t aged well.”
“Well, of course they've been
copied…”
“In fact, it sucked.”
“Sucked?”
“The movie. Welles’s acting was hammy, his directing was too obvious, the symbols were clichéd. It's all focused on this one issue. I know personally, that's not how psychology works. You know. Even if it were. The whole Rosebud thing- ooh, ahh, it was his sled, he’s trying to recapture childhood innocence. So? If the sled were that important in his life, people would already know what he was talking about when he said ‘Rosebud.’ But they’re all clueless.
Rosebud? Rosebud? What is Rosebud? What could Rosebud mean?”
He was quiet.
“How did they even know that he said ‘Rosebud?’ No one was around to hear it.”
I thought about this for a bit. “Maybe that was what was on his Slip.”
“Yeah, but, it wasn't the
sled that killed him, was it?”
I opened my mouth and closed it. And opened it and closed it.
"If anything, it's what would have saved his life."
That made sense. Rosebud symbolized innocence, the very thing he longed for but couldn't return to.
Would it have killed him, had it succeeded? I thought, and spoke. "Sometimes, the things that save our lives are the same things that kill us." I had no idea what it meant. To be quite honest, I thought it was perfectly meaningless. At the time.
The house talks to you, sometimes. An idea comes to you, and it’s not yours, but the idea just seems so neat, so tidy in your mind, like it fits there, was made to fit there. Decency, that’s it. It’s like the idea is the only decent one, and any other thought would seem repulsive to you. An idea comes to you, and it’s as if it’s the only way things could go.
The house won’t let you think or say anything it doesn't approve of.
It makes you wonder why the house lets you think things against it,
is the scary part. The really scary part. The house won’t let you think
anything that it finds indecent, so why does it allow you to think bad
things against it?
Does it want us to live in fear?
Or is it just toying with us?
But sometimes, the things that save our lives are the same things that kill us.
It occurred to LaQuan, that night, as he was sitting there in that corner. Why the amount of money was $20 exactly. It may seem crazy, but the hash was too perfect, too much like tiny little bed sheets. $20 was the only amount the house would let you pay for it. Twenty dollars, it was
the only amount that wasn't infinity dollars.
The drug dealer wasn't real. The drug dealer, that was just a projection of the house. The house was helping him out. It was trying to get rid of him. It was scared of him. He had some power over it, for whatever reason.
So it was out to get him, through whatever way possible. I'm not sure if there was any way to avoid it.
We're getting LaQuan's bloodwork back in the morning.
