Perseveration

I had just flown in from out west. I hadn’t seen Alan, my college roommate, since the last time I saw him. In that time then he’d gotten married, become a professor at some midwestern college, and moved to a suburb. Back in school, Alan had a tendency to rattle on. Alan’s a storyteller. Sometimes, he likes his stories more than the people he tells them to.

“Actually, the day of the fire, we had plans with the Babcocks. Harris was going to cook some big dinner. The new season of ‘The Blacklist’ was premiering that night, so he was going to whip up this pulled pork dish with a coffee sauce--with hand made zucchini pasta because Lilah was trying the gluten free thing at the time--and after dinner we’d all catch the new episode, but of course that never happened. It’s a shame. He already had it in the crockpot. Harris loved cooking, but sometimes it made him so frustrated that he would tense up, running around the kitchen cursing and slamming around pots and skillets and cabinets.  Still, he said he never minded. When he was cooking, he was just cooking.”

We’re all sitting around their fire pit. Lilah sits by Alan. I could see them reflected in the sliding glass door that framed their silhouette. Together, they make one amorphous shape in the pane. Beth sits quietly by herself in the plastic white chair to their left and my right. Old dirt is embedded into the seat and its arms and legs, creating a molting pattern beneath her.  We all have glasses heavy with drink in our hands. An empty bottle sits on the table inside, a fresh one sits next to Alan. He’s playing with the cap, rolling it in between his thumb and forefinger.

“I remember driving home from campus that day, traversing the network of roads that made up Canterbury Park. The way they curved always seemed so absurd, decorative. I don’t remember what song was on the radio, but I remember it was a summer song, and the windows were down, and I could feel the air going by and not just the song, but all of life had that upbeat rhythm that only appears in the warm months of the year. I could see the smoke growing closer, rising from behind other people’s roofs. I thought it was just the Olsens burning leaves again. 

“When I pulled into the cul de sac, and saw them there, in front of the house like that, well I could use all sorts of clichés, but,” Alan trails off here, looking at his shoes and studying the fire coming out of the fire pit, the light from it dancing across his oxfords, cut into a perfect grid by the metal cage that holds it. Lilah rubs his back with her hand.

“Honestly it just felt terrible. Terrible. Harris was there with Beth in his arms and she was crying, sitting right there on their own curb, and there were fire trucks all the way around the sac, wherever there wasn’t a driveway. The police were there and so were some news crews, and the smoke was coming out their windows, most of it rising from the back. The hose to the fire truck was coming out their front door like some sort of umbilical cord, and there were firemen on ladders smashing in the windows. You could see a small waterfall running down the steps of their porch. They had personal belongings scattered all over the front lawn, mostly electronics and a few hand knitted blankets, and things were being tossed out the broken windows, mostly busted picture frames but also melted desk lamps and wet books. They were carrying out the delicate stuff---laptops and iPads and jewelry boxes. As you looked higher up the side of the building, the smoke damage got uglier and uglier until you reached the siding that met with the roof, which was completely blackened. The Moore’s boy was running around taking pictures. The firemen were doing their best to keep the kid away, telling him to stay across the street, but he just kept running around the back, hiding behind small trees.”

“The firefighters were so sweet,” Beth slurs a little at the end of her sentence, “they saved all our computers and my hard drive first thing, and my mom’s jewelry. I don’t even want to think about the things they couldn’t save though.” Beth fades back into herself, her eyes become distant and thoughtful.

“After I pulled in my driveway, I got out of the Subaru and I just stared. I couldn’t help it. It was like a delicate monster, the way that column of smoke moved up the sky, black and ugly and growing taller and dispersing. I couldn’t take my eyes off it all. Then I saw Harris waving at me. I waved back and he says to me--he says to me ‘Are we still on for tonight?’ Our television wasn’t as big as theirs but obviously their’s wasn’t going to work any time soon, so I told him, ‘Yeah, you guys should come over whenever you are free, take your time,’ and that was that, dinner was at our house. 

“They were out there in the yard for hours. I worked from my laptop that afternoon, in the living room, right by the bay windows, next to our little ficus tree. I kept looking out the window, I saw them talking with the firemen, with the police. I saw them pacing in the yard on their phones, wiping their eyes. I saw them watch as the firemen carried out their dogs wrapped in blankets, completely covered. That one was hard to see. At one point I, I can’t remember when, I heard Harris yell ‘Fuck’ and I looked up to see him there on his knees, right in the middle of the sac, perfectly aligned inside a gap between two trucks, hands in his hair.”

Beth gets up wordlessly. She slides the glass door and steps inside, and for a moment Lilah and Alan’s reflections disappear, and I am left only with their illuminated bodies. 

“Harris and Beth came by a little after Lilah got home. She had picked up a few bottles of wine on the way back from work and we opened up a Malbec on the spot and they told us all about it. Beth said she had just left the house ten minutes before the neighbors called the fire department. What would have happened if she had been running a little late? They said the fire spread so fast. Neither of them knew how it got started, just that it was in the kitchen. They said all their furniture on the first floor had been cooked. They showed us pictures on her phone of veneer peeling off Beth’s grandmother’s dresser. It bubbled up like blisters, like morning bacon.  The contents had been cooked too. All of their clothes had been destroyed. Their library didn’t burn but it was soaked by the firehose and roasted by the smoke. some books in the basement might make it though. I grilled some chicken that evening out on the porch. I asked them if the smoke from the coals would bother them, but they sat out there with me and Lilah the whole time and we kept talking. They didn’t complain once.”

I can see through the frosted glass of the bathroom window that a light has come on, and a shape like Beth moving around in there.

“I remember Harris saying they found the dogs huddled together in the back, on the bathroom floor. He told me he couldn’t stop imagining them backing away from the blaze, the fire spread so fast, but the firemen said they asphyxiated, and it was like falling asleep. I kind of got choked up when he said that.

“I remember Beth talking about how much she would miss taking the dogs out for a run, how much she would miss their giant book collection, their wine collection, their television. You know they had a fifty-six incher!”

Beth’s silhouette is rummaging through the bathroom cabinet. We are all actively not looking her way, Alan keeps talking.

“I remember them talking about how long it took to build up to what they had, and they had everything they needed. Now they needed to buy a cheese grater and a DVD player and a shoe rack and clothes for work. Everything.” 

I watch Beth’s silhouette pour a handful of pills out, then swallow them with a splash of water from the sink. We say nothing, I exchange a glance with Lilah. She shakes her head.

“We drank a lot, a few bottles at least, we talked all night about everything, not just the fire. There was a lot of silence too, just sitting there and not looking at each other. There was one moment I don’t think I’ll forget. Lilah and Beth had gone inside and it was just me and Harris and the grill, and Harris starts talking about how suddenly it felt like the life he made before this fire was perfect. How much time he’d spent building it, making it just so, earning it. You’ve got to understand, Harris’s dad left him behind when Harris was just five. Everything he got in life he got himself.”

Beth slides the glass door open, then wordlessly returns to her mottled plastic chair.

“Gosh our lawn was so perfect back then. The soil was perfectly even. It was perfectly level. It was. The grass was the same green from every corner to every other one, each blade the same height, our landscaper practically went over the yard with scissors! We had this giant old oak tree, older than the neighborhood.”

Lilah looks at him sideways, “It was the mole infestation, they killed the roots and then the rest went. they keep coming back, it drives Alan up the wall.” 

Alan pats her leg mindlessly, “Anyway, do you know what cul de sac means? To us it’s literally the end of a road. In that sense it’s perfectly clear why storytellers use it as that sort of metaphor, but it actually means ‘bottom of the bag’ or rather, directly translated, ‘Ass of the bag.’ That’s all I could think about when he told me that. All the while, the smoke from the grill rose, white and empty. That’s how they ended up staying in the spare room. I mean where else would they go, a hotel? Beth had gone so quiet by this point, and Harris was clearly a nervous wreck. He kept running his hands through his hair like it was always in the way, scratching at his brain. I don’t know. We were all sitting there there in the setting sun, burdened with nothing left to say. What else could I do with that silence? I offered them the spare room, and they said yes with the most honest and heartfelt smiles. All the energy flooded in and we drank more and talked more and felt more, and we broke out the karaoke machine. We sang our hearts out. I don’t think I’ve lived life in such excess before or since.

“So, the next day Lilah and Beth went out clothes shopping--”

“Oh, we bought so many clothes!” Lilah interjects, “It really was a great time, wasn’t it Beth?”

Beth provides a weak smile and nods, looking around the firepit to confirm with eye contact that it was indeed really a great time. She finishes her drink and gestures toward the bottle.

Alan passes it to her and continues, “Me and Harris went over to start clean up that afternoon, after the insurance guys finished documenting everything. We had to pry the wood panels off the front door. They had boarded up all the busted windows to keep out looters. Who’d of thought, looters in Canterbury Park? 

“The place was a mess. The smell of the fire hung thick in the air with all the dust, which caught the light from the door and made a big ray of gold in the first two rooms, but the rest of the house was only lit by little slivers coming between the boards on the windows, or the blue tarp that covered the hole burned into the roof . The light passed through the tarp to make this dull glow. The living room had soot covering the floor, with big footprints where the firemen kicked their way through. Everything on their bookshelves had some fresh black or brown on them. Books, old steins from renaissance fairs, old stuffed animals, the urn of Beth’s mother’s ashes made of cherry wood, that black and white picture of Harris and his pals from the corps, in uniform smiling with their thumbs up, their faces completely obscured by the damage. All of this, licked by the smoke. The hallway had bits of broken things scattered everywhere, plaster bits from the ceiling. There was this crumpled pillow in the corner, no clue how it got there, but the soot on it looked just like a face. Water was everywhere too. Furniture was soaked and books were soaked and it all was starting to get that mildew smell. Once you started to get closer to the kitchen, insulation started falling through the ceiling. It had melted some and became these yellow stalactites, coming out of this gaping nothingness. The kitchen had been completely blackened. All the cabinets had turned to charcoal. That beautiful drift wood dinner table of theirs was charcoal. 

“Harris walked through all of it with this stern face, he’d go through each room slowly and thoughtfully, picking things up and wordlessly furrowing his brow, then just as silently, he'd put his old belongings down and turn away and wipe his blackened hands on his shirt. When we got to the kitchen he opened all the cabinets and looked at all his specialized pots and pans that Beth and his son had gotten him for Christmas and Father’s Day and his birthday. It was all turned to delicate ruins. By then his shirt and pants were covered in soot. The mess was inescapable.

“Eventually we both ended up standing in the master bathroom, just staring at the floor for a while. The dogs must’ve gone in there to seek the comfort of the cold tile. We had just started sweeping when Harris got the call from the animal hospital. They wanted him to come get the pets. They were done being cremated. I decided to stay and keep sweeping, but it was hard work, hard to focus on, you know? I probably only managed to cover a third of the room. Harris got back after forty minutes or so, a cardboard box in each arm. Inside were plain clear plastic bags, and they were filled with ashes. All he said of them was, ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ 

“He told me he figured it would be best to have them buried before Beth got back from shopping, and he wanted to do it alone. I figured it would be better to scatter their ashes somewhere but he wanted to bury them. He wanted to put his back into something, he said. It made sense, I told him so.

“He didn’t come back to our house ‘til after dark. He was covered in soot and dirt, and he didn’t say anything about it. We had dinner together in silence. We watched the previous night’s episode of ‘The Blacklist’ in silence, and we went to bed in silence. That’s how things were for a while, Beth kept herself busy with her job, Harris took a leave from the university to work on the house. He insisted on doing it himself. We all thought it was a horrible idea. The man was an intellectual, did he even know what he was doing? We told him insurance would help, that he should wait, but whenever we brought it up, he’d just tense up like he was in the kitchen, then get up and walk away. He left Beth to deal with the insurance issues by herself, I don’t know how she handled it. Each night he’d come back later and later, always sweaty and grubby. 

“Meanwhile, everyone in the neighborhood starts having this mole problem. Our lawns would get these little bulging spots, or little divots, or it would just get softer and you could feel out the path with the soles of your shoes. The Olsens wanted to smoke them out with the exhaust from their truck. Sylvia Huisinga, ever the little humanitarian, wanted us to use chewing gum at the entrances instead, but nobody had entrances to the nest in their yards, so there was nothing we could do. 

“One day he comes back and washes his hands and sits down at the dinner table, and I see that there are blisters all over his palms, but none of us say anything. By that point we didn’t know what to do. Harris just kept coming back to our house later and later into the night. One night, I heard him trudging in at two in the morning. Another night, we hear Beth and Harris fighting. Eventually Harris just stopped coming home at all. 

“After that started Beth asked me to check on him. She said she couldn’t take this behavior anymore, I don’t blame her a bit.” 

Alan takes a long pause this time, long enough to believe the story is over. He looks to Lilah, he looks to Harris’s wife, he looks to the bottle next to him, it’s nearly empty now. He looks at me, there’s another glint in his eyes, besides the fire.

“Inside the house, he had cleared out some of the furniture, and there was all this writing on the walls, stuff about this and that and notes about the neighbor’s yards, and this thing, a drawing, it looked like a map of the cul de sac.  All of it was drawn from charcoal too, he had broken off pieces of his kitchen and went at it. There were shovels in a pile in one corner. There was a bunch of wooden posts too but it was obvious that besides some clearing out Harris hadn’t worked on the house much, if at all. The backyard was a different story. There were piles of dirt everywhere, tall as me or taller. a lot of them had furniture buried in them, the dinner table or the coffee table or the couch, they stuck out like petrified corpses. There was this hole, right by their garden, it was big... big enough to walk through. The hole just kept going deeper and deeper. It didn’t stop. I’d never seen anything like it.”

“Honey, what are you talking about?” Lilah interjects.

Alan ignores her, “I’ll tell you it was madness. He had dug a cavern all himself.”

“Honey, that’s not how it was, why are you telling this version again?” 

Alan leans forward, away from Lilah’s comforting hand. He’s talking with grand gestures now, waving his arms around. “At the entrance were two piles of ashes.” 

“Honey you’re drunk, I know you miss him but Beth is here. Stop it.”

Harris finally looks at her, his voice goes loud and his face goes stern, and suddenly he speaks tersely.

“Honey, I know what I'm doing.”

Lilah purses her lips and crosses her arms and says nothing.

“The cave had been dug so neatly, it stayed the same width all the way down, it was perfect. The soil was compact and coarse with little bits of roots sticking out. I could see the imprints of the shovels cutting through the sod, or hammering against the wall to compact it. The amount of time, the amount of energy Harris had devoted--the guy had been putting support beams into the cavern like it was some gold mine out in the wild west, I half expected to see rails for carts. The path he dug spiraled downward for a minute until the roots stopped, and then the soil started to turn rocky, then it branched into all these directions, right beneath all the pipe systems running throughout the neighborhood. At certain points you could see the pipes sticking out of the ceiling. There were holes to the surface too, outside the sac, out in corn fields or the woods. You forget how close you are to nothingness in the midst of a neighborhood like ours.

“When I find Harris he’s hammering a wooden post into a wall, and I have to grab his shoulder and say his name and shake him before he sees me. He’s completely zoned in. He finally looks at me, and all he says to me--he says ‘Is dinner ready?’

“I tell him no, I ask him what in hell he’s doing and he looks around, he rubs his eyes, he’s breathing heavy. Finally, he opens up. He tells me that he started digging to bury the pets, then all of a sudden it was night and the hole was so deep he could barely climb out. He says the next day he comes back, he tosses the ashes in, grabs a shovel, meaning to bury it, but he just keeps digging instead. By the time he realizes what he’s doing he’s so far in, I guess he just decided to commit. I asked him why but he just shrugs. He says he’s not sure, he just keeps digging, and it keeps feeling cathartic. Maybe it was meaningless work, maybe everything was a waste of his energy, but he was doing work which felt honest and indomitable. 

“His breath is caught up with him now. I ask him when he’ll be done and he disappears again into his thoughts. I stop seeing trouble in his eyes, they are distant, untouched by wall or depth or hope, only determination. He just gets back at it. I asked him about the Homeowners Association, the property damage, I ask him about his wife here and his son in the city, but he just keeps digging. I ask him when he’ll come out, and all he says is ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fill it back in when I’m done.’”

We all sit there around the fire in silence, swallowing the last of our drinks. The lawn is uneven and patched yellow and the old oak tree is gone, leaving only a shallow pit of black midwestern soil. If I listen carefully past the crickets and the dogs playing in backyards with children, I can imagine the faint sound of digging.

Beth looks up from the flames, first to the hole where the oak tree used to be, at the faint glow emanating from the fire, then right at Alan, and she says “I’ve been thinking about visiting him, maybe bringing him a canary, something to keep him company.”