This photo is like hearing someone hammering in the next room and realizing, all at once, that you aren’t alone. There is no one here but us, thank God, only since we aren’t the lords of this manor, others can come and go. And what about those photos of the two young people, printed next to the one of the woman? How’d they get that footprint on them? My guess is that a running shoe made it—and from the looks of it, one out to make its mark! But then sports aren’t about good manners, you know: they are soulless, and rightly so—where else can people learn ruthlessness? To root for the home team, even if it leaves us rootless, and from there, to sell our souls and rout our enemies. In the army, say.
Uggh, there must be a reason I’m talking about war and sneakers now; beats me. Maybe it is my prejudices talking—my writing has been one long progress report on them (fingers crossed I get good marks!). And the more I read into what I write, the more I don’t see a story of adventure, ambition or derring-do. I see a locked-room mystery, one that shows how little I know and how we are all doomed. The more we flail and kick, the sooner it will all be over. We keep kicking the same hole in the sky, until one day it’ll be wide enough for our bodies to slip through, like a hot knife through butter. Oh this poor, anxious life. It’s a dream, a wounded animal in flight—or no, one that barrels away on four legs before it is staring down the barrel of a gun. In a choice between fight or flight, you know what I’ll pick, every time! Because when ambition is done with you—when you and it have danced your big number—it rarely pays your flight home. Maybe it is time for me to leave the kick-line, anyway, to make room for someone with more fight left. And better legs.
Where were we, though? Sorry, there must’ve been something in my eye—shoo, fly, don’t bother me! ’Cause in the end, we all belong to nobody. I can barely see these two youngsters on the paper—that mystery shoe got them right in the face—and so anyway, let’s get back to the woman. I get to pick whose face it is: she is me, she is me not. If she looks good, we’ll call her me, naturally—though if she looks too good, maybe not. That face, I could swear it is mine, thinks Brigitte, but then a second later she is sure it can’t be. No one would ever take her picture like that, not that she knows; she ducks publicity. Sure, she might pose for the local paper at an end-of-semester concert, alongside her students, but those pictures are always so flat and dull. One gander at them and my whole mood goes south, especially when I see an odd duck like Brigitte, who doesn’t know to head south for the winter. The local government building is where you go to find copies of all that stuff; students’ families can even buy the photos if they want. One piece of good news: Brigitte still has her memory, which is something money can’t buy, even if it only stretches a few towns over and a few concert series back. Of course, these days anyone can just take a picture with their phone, even when there is fuck all to see. If humans were Barbies, phones would be our replacement heads, the things that keep us looking beautiful. Our own looks are spent, shot, depleted, bye: they went out quicker than that old iron ore mine on the outskirts of town, than pleated skirts or all this lip gloss from the makeup counter, all of which is mine, too. So, take a picture, it’ll last longer. A headshot.
Still, how could Brigitte end up in an old photo like this? Or who knows, maybe it isn’t so old at all! Lying there half-soaked, not glossy like it used to be, only when was that? You can’t tell, like I say, and with no date on it, the thing could even be from yesterday. Besides, who goes around town throwing away ancient magazines? It could happen, sure, only I picture piles of paper in some far-off building, all bundled up like orphans waiting on a forever home—a.k.a., the dump. Or I know: maybe the little scrap tore itself out, to go in search of its own adventure story. Most of us throw everything away immediately, so it doesn’t pile up. All except the touched-in-the-head ones, that is, out there saving for a forever we’ll never see.
Anyway, now Brigitte is holding the picture up next to the mirror for comparison. It is tough to see, though, because her eyes aren’t looking their best: the catfight of fate has left them a sight. If mirrors were a reality show, Brigitte would probably tune out, especially now, when she has put on weight again. Partly out of laziness, sure, but there is also her secret drinking—what a shame! Could getting a picture in the paper help her feel like somebody again? At this age, you’ve gotta stay in shape if you want to keep your shape, even if you never had one. And you need less food—less of everything, day after day—just as the world needs less and less of you. You run from one fitness activity to the next, not that anyone asked if you like running. And if you are Brigitte K., you definitely don’t; you’ve got better, more tuneful things to do. What’s all this crap about aging in place, then? Old people have to keep moving, get their steps in. It is not good enough to just get tight and saw on a violin all day. The waistband of Brigitte’s pants is so tight already, I’m surprised she doesn’t have to saw herself in half to get undressed! Her blouse, not so much: everything in there went south ages ago, but then that’s the way of all flesh. Brigitte has gone from the big top to the big bottom: in the one-ring circus of life, she is a one-woman seesaw, a no-man band.
And her eyes keep wandering to this one window in the house across the street. Something was there earlier, a quick reflection, but it is gone now. Nobody home. She definitely saw something though, plain as day, someone walking in the dusky no-man’s-land of her gaze. It was her polar opposite, a warm body that, for now, isn’t anybody: in other words, an eighteen-year-old boy. He has written something on the dusty windowpane with his finger; the fool must think every transparent rectangle is for interacting. The glass stays dirty because his divorced mother is gone all day and doesn’t have time to dust. She works in the next town over, at a branch of Raiffeisen Bank; their logo is the gable cross. More layoffs are coming, though—management could nail fresh bodies to the cross any day, and this time, maybe it is his mom’s turn. She has a feeling she’s been due for a while now, but she keeps this to herself, ponders it in her heart. The fired ones do not even have to stand in line, they are shown the door right away. They know they are superfluous, though I would point out that fewer workers mean fewer checks to deposit. Still, the gable cross doesn’t protect them, nothing does, any more than all those home buyers in America were protected back in ’08, when the banks crossed the Rubicon of CDOs and zero-interest loans. The houses practically built themselves after a while; you could get a bigger one before your first was even finished. Somehow, America invented the first-ever Rube Goldberg machine for housing, and all to put rubes out of doors. The buyers got conned, and nobody bailed them out when the boat started sinking. Unlike all those goldbricking CEOs who just made like hay and bailed.
What am I really trying to say, though? What’s my thesis? That it is every man for himself and the rabble take the hindmost? If so, no sense nailing that one to the Federal Reserve door—it’s so thin, it would blow away! The whole story came out in the press, anyway, even if Raiffeisen Bank probably buys more newspapers than it reads. Newspapers, magazines, they will all get nailed to the cross in the end, like leaves on an old dead tree. Because what are newspapers, really, but places lost souls can go to read about themselves, in their own obituaries? So we’ll cherish the old gable cross, till the last of our cash we lay down. It is not that we reject money—not hardly! It is more that it keeps giving us the slip, so why fear rejection at all? As for the bank teller, she doesn’t worry who her son is lying down with the minute she leaves the house. She is too busy thinking about how no one’s gonna care what she does either once the bank gives her the pink slip. That is one thing that worries her a lot: how soon she’ll go from being a cog in the global money-spinning machine to a plain old spinster. The boy is almost grown now anyway; he basically has already left her. Nobody stays here in this town, just like no body stays hard. What, you think I’m exaggerating again? Ask your mirror: mirrors always have to add their sneering two cents, same as the camera adds ten pounds. The sight of a body leaves them cold, I guess, like everything else.
Still, was that really the neighbor lady’s son in the window? Something tells me not. And Christ, Brigitte, put down those opera glasses, you shouldn’t gawk like that—he’ll see you! Not that the glint of your eye-spy-gear hasn’t tipped people off already. And even if it is the son, so what? Why shouldn’t it be? Who else is there? Where else should he be? Maybe he is answering that letter you wrote him. What, you’re surprised I told? But why, when selling my heroine down the river is so much easier than telling a story. Plot twists were never my thing and every good story needs one of those. It is something I have confessed to before: how I cannot tell a story to save my life. My readers have said the same thing—more than once, in fact, if not in those exact words. When it comes to storytelling, I just cannot say what happens, not so people can follow along. The more my plots pick up speed and are borne aloft, the more I ride them into the ground. Some people are born storytellers, but yours truly? No way. I just cannot do it, can’t go with the narrative flow.
But whatever, we’re finally getting to the good part, so: the boy has Brigitte’s letter; he found it a while back. I can see him reading it—he’s got promise, this kid, a real A-student! Let’s just hope the thing doesn’t end up on his permanent record, because we are about to enter it into the record here, as Exhibit A against the party that wrote it. He has kept us waiting, this boy: he promised to come yesterday but then didn’t, or the day before that. And I need him, so I can finish this no-good story; otherwise, he’s no good to me. The letter says—what was it again? Here, I’ll read it: “I send you kisses and wrap my legs around you.” Unthinkable, that this strange woman who would rather hang out with a violin—which, like the picture, is just a poor copy—would scribble down something so animalistic, so reckless. She just isn’t the exhibitionist, let-it-all-hang-out type! And fine, maybe you and I have different definitions of “animal,” but those couldn’t be her words, right? There is no way, although honestly, why not? Writing is child’s play next to the violin; I’ve done both and trust me, there is no comparison. So yeah, it seems crazy, but then again, if violin-playing were simple, you might even see me out on stage taking bow after bow. I took the easy way out, though, and so I do what any simpleton can: I write.
*
Will all that remains of me really vanish in the end, just like that? Since I am dead already, my life is fruitless; it’s all I’ve got to waste. Not that this makes me special or anything: every barren woman is supposed to make like a tree and leave—and like, yesterday. Just think: the only things men give birth to are the world’s great horrors and we are the ones told to disappear! Seems unreasonable somehow, not that reason’s my bag. And maybe if us old bags did die out—not that we’re allowed to be born or even leave the house in some places—men could finally stop being so horrid to us, could take a break from chopping us into bits the moment we walk through the door.
Well, whatever, let’s cut back to Brigitte now, the way we do sometimes. I haven’t got the chops to write fresh scenes for her and anyway she never tells me what to write. Never talks at all. She just stands there in the kitchen, like me, with her bag of sad little purchases. My friend D. is always fussing about how few groceries I buy, though you’d think he would be happy since that means there is less to schlep inside. The neighbor boy does not move much either, not with his jeans around his ankles, but that is how Brigitte wants him: bare from the belly button on down, a gift basket tied up with a bow for the teacher. She is not his teacher, not in the traditional sense, though she has shown other wild-oat-sowing so-and-sos how to scrape and bow. And if he wants the used car she promised him, he will do the needful and swallow any senseless giggles that bubble up inside, like that blaze of light Brigitte saw streak across his empty windowpane. The young man sees the violin teacher, takes her in with his eyes. He knows she has some savings; without them, we wouldn’t see her at all. This money is her one big selling point, big enough for him to sell his soul and whole parts of his body—though can you really call it a sale if the parts grow back?
Which makes him unlike that man from the homeless shelter in Vienna, the one from Reichsapfelgasse, 1150. A nineteen-year-old cannibal ate him bit by bit, even though the papers never said which bits. Can you imagine being murdered so some German can plate your tongue and innards and start munching on them? And then, before he is even through, he opens the door for the cleaning lady, mouth all smeared with blood, and says: “There’s been an incident.” See what happens when you don’t teach boys to cook! This one killed a man and tried eating him—a pretty raw deal, naturally, though I guess there is nothing pretty or natural about craving human flesh. It is extremely rare—cannibalism, that is, not the flesh; the flesh was raw, the kid didn’t even try roasting it. Though I guess our own flesh can rub any of us raw if it doesn’t get enough of what it wants, or if we stew too long in our own juices.
And do you want to hear another weird thing? No, of course you don’t, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. I am the teacher for show-and-tell today, not that I spell anything out. It is about that house, the one on Reichsapfelgasse: just a generation ago, it was home to not one but two cannibals, both female this time. Two weird sisters—or mother and daughter, really—casting spells in hopes of casting out their demons, not that they were the type to cut deals with the devil or pray the gray away. They just chased away their guests and devoured the rest, anyone too slow to run. And here is the twist: these two man-eaters were my very own Mama and Gran, meaning I was the main course! That’s right: others have been chewing me over since before I could walk, starting right there on Reichsapfelgasse, where my Mama was raised—or bred? Breaded? Bled? Razed? God knows. They snacked on me at their leisure, those two grandes dames, Mama full-time with Gran replacing her in the summers; the child was the fodder of the gran. Later, in the autumn of their years—and in summer too, who the hell are we kidding?—the old hags would stagger their mealtimes, to let the surviving, if not exactly thriving or self-driving bits of me keep growing. A golden calf needs fattening up, after all: more meat to go around, more antibiotics per pound. Veally good.
Reichsapfelgasse in Vienna! Boy oh boy. The place was my genius loci, my ange qui tout voit—sorry, abattoir. And seeing it on TV positively gutted me: I could not believe it, not that I believe anyone. I recognized the house, of course—felt the feeling of it, right through the screen—even though I had not been there in decades. No more trips to Gran’s for this girl. Who knows, maybe we humans really are what we eat, or else we eat what we meet, keep reheating our own feats. And if we don’t know it is ours, we’ll even eat our own meat! Well, but no, that is a bridge too far; that’s auto-cannibalism.
And when the boy is done performing at Brigitte’s, there is a shortcut he can take back to his house—assuming he doesn’t end up on the cutting-room floor, that is, with the rest of us! Not that he needs shortcuts, mind you, since every path he cuts, unguarded as a left-open window, is already the shortest distance between two points. Plus, someone has left a key for him under the mat, while on another plane entirely, a late-forties, partially disemboweled corpse was carted away after a nineteen-year-old grazed on it for days—over a weekend, I think they said. He is gone now, poor man: the internet got tired of uploading his picture while I sat there gaping like I was mouth-shot, not that anyone wants to blow a load in me. I’m just a blow-up torso now anyway, so how would I even swallow? Unless maybe I am the deluxe model, the one with a mouth. I do still eat, so I must have some kind of face hole left, though I don’t eat dead people, not literally. When I chew over the departed, it is an act of remembrance. Two of them gave me life, after all, plus their name, even if it was so they could live through me. And so, I unearth them time and again, to cart away the remains, or what little is left. Because the graves have caved in, the coffin lids have collapsed, and anyway, who is dying to bust in? Not a soul, that’s who. Mama’s dark blue silk dress was pretty, sure—it had a neck scarf and tiny buttons in the same material—but who would want to try it on now? And when I think how I cursed her that day, laid out there all freshly ironed, and sold her down the river. That dress wasn’t on sale—not by a long shot!—but she needed something for her big trip. You cannot carry a lot with you on flights, or so they tell me, anyway. Try smuggling in a nail file and they’ll wrestle you for it. And when you are dead, everything gets taken from you, everything but your favorite outfit, assuming your relatives can part with it. I had no problem letting Mama’s blue dress return to the earth—going, going, lawn. And what about those leftovers I ate before the service? Are they still part of me too, somehow, even if they are not with me? Nobody wants the leftover bits of me, it is just the stuff Mama didn’t eat. Even nineteen-year-old cannibals do not like scraps: they prefer nice, plump innards and tongue. How the kid settled on that menu, don’t ask me; maybe innards are easier to cut.
What the hell was I talking about before all this, though? Something about a key under a doormat? People lose keys all the time; they are the sort of thing that should just stay in one place: keys under doormats, human meat inside skin. That way, it is there when you need it. Some people even use flowerpots—for hiding keys, not meat—though if you leave those out in winter, they get stolen or break. But that is just the breaks, I guess, in this thousand-year kingdom of need we call life, this fugue state. The maid on Orb Street didn’t have a key, which is why the cannibal let her in with his mouth smeared red and said his catchphrase for the history books. History books are full of corpses, acres of them—just think of those two hundred from Rechnitz, leaving all their furniture, clothes, gold teeth, everything, there in the twilight of their lives. It is something to see, a state taking human life on such a major scale—and triumphantly, in the key of C. “There’s been an incident?” More than a fugue of ’em, I’d say! One long schmear.
*
Cleveland, Ohio
Like I keep saying, folks, try not to envy me! We’ve all got our green-eyed monsters. And I know what you are thinking: isn’t this the old rail worker’s rooming house, the one with the dusty flower boxes on the outside? Yep, sure is, but what’s it doing here? Yesterday it was way down there! And get a load of this bathroom: freezing cold, big too—I count at least ten empty stalls. My naked feet are just about frozen to the floor, but I better make my move because everything is moving—the whole goddam house is making a run for it!
Guess nobody told it I am still here—well, me and the young guy down in the last room. He’s mine this time, for keeps, or he was for a hot minute, not that that counts for much here. He is laid out on his back, naked as the day he was born, waiting on me, of all people! I’ll go back and get a nice long look at his thing too, soon as I finish up here in the john, where the railroad men all used to shit. The power is off, so none of the hall lights work, but I gotta get back—to my guy, I mean, not to the light. It’s lights out around here. He will be gone soon, so I’ve gotta go to him. I get that now.
The whole house is getting torn down any day, so he and I are the only ones left. Do you think that is why it got scared and hightailed it? Or maybe it just forgot we were here, us and all the other worthless crap people piled up and couldn’t be bothered to take. I would like to know what it is up to, though. What it wants. I swear it didn’t move an inch yesterday. Don’t press your luck, though, or the floor’ll start moving again—it’s an honest-to-God mobile home! And just look at this nasty floor: I didn’t lay it, wouldn’t eat off it either, so you can lay off me too. All the other tenants, they vamoosed, the miners, rail and steel workers, everybody. Don’t blame me: I wasn’t the one who laid them off. They didn’t even have families. All I was gonna do is show what is buried at the edge of the garden out there, but now everything has changed and I’ll never find the spot, if it was even there to begin with.
Uh-oh, looks like we’re moving again—hold on to your hats! And God, it really is disgusting, this toilet. What a dump. Me and boy wonder are the only ones who come in here, and we hold it as long as we can. One good thing: with all these empty stalls, it’s a shitter’s market! Oh, and the toilets still work; the government is leaving the water on till the end of the month, we got a paper saying so. And yeah, this floor is cold as hell, colder than cold, but let me show you around my favorite stall! See the old wooden seat? Doesn’t look like much, I know, but at least you won’t get splinters in your ass. For me, it is a nice place to sit and forget your troubles—for a good two or three minutes. Because then the house starts going again and the message is clear: I better go too. The state is tearing the whole thing down so they can put up a newer model—lucky house, right?! There isn’t any newer model me, especially not the self-propelled kind.
If you go through that door over there, you’ll see another long hall and one of those old-timey shared sinks. It still works, same as the toilet still flushes, but they say they are shutting everything off at the end of the month so we’ve gotta clear out. We got the deadline pushed back three times, but now the house wants to hit the road and if we don’t leave, we’ll be going too! We are on our own here, him down the hall and me on the pot, and soon I’ll be back in there with him, next to that nice red-hot stove. As far as apartments go, this one is nothing to write home about. It is tiny, but I guess it’s got everything you need: refrigerator, telephone—no cell phone, though; they don’t make them yet. Cell phones come later, courtesy of God and man—that way, we can tell ’em all about ourselves, just like the Almighty and the high-and-mighty planned it.
I swear this floor is like ice, goddam! But I’ll be toasty again soon, and if it is too chilly for the space heater, we can fire up the gas stove. They haven’t shut that off either, not yet. The gas, it gives us some extra heat while we wait for the world to go up in flames. People like us don’t give much away but we can always go away, can let ourselves go someplace else. Only now we waited too long and the house is going without us. It’s crazy, how everything has changed. And if I am going nowhere, like I always knew I would, I guess the house can just go in my place. Only it’s a different house somehow, in another place, another time. And you are talking to someone that hates change, so you can trust me on that!
This freezing-ass floor is full of cracks; you gotta put your feet up on the toilet to dodge all the shit and the cold. And even worse: now the whole place is headed into enemy territory with me—with us—inside! I guess the house feels empty since it doesn’t know we’re here, and so it wants to attack all those other houses over there, plow ’em right under. Or maybe it is mad because people nowadays only want single-family homes, but that’s envy for you. You can piss half your life away daydreaming about that kind of stuff, and what good does it do? Those houses eat up miles of countryside, cheaper than gasoline and a match!
Well, if this rooming house dies, the whole town’ll go with it. And that’s no setup, never was, because if the place had been set up right to begin with it never would’ve started moving like this. That’s how it was made, though, so what can I say? It’s a comer, this house, a real mover and a shaker. And it’s about to do what all of us have been dreaming of: to finally come and get it over with.
