Then, as she was picking up carrots, coal, and various items that four-year-old Will had used to personify a snowman, it visited her in the backyard, same as the front.
And if she could venture into neither yard without meeting a tempest of dread, how was she to leave? And how to let her son play in the yard if she couldn’t go out to retrieve him? What if a stray dog came? Or, God forbid, a man?
So they stayed inside. Thankfully, her son was so obsessed with building and painting and his constant tumult of inquisition that he never seemed to mind. Both Will’s father and his uncle Charlie had been solitary boys, content with books and models, words and drawings. It was almost relieving, this simplification, and there followed some relatively peaceful, untroubled years.
Then, around Will’s seventh birthday, it came in. She was folding laundry when the air was sucked from the basement, the way water withdraws from the shore before a wave. Terror like lungfuls of knife-sharp fumes choked her, and her mind tumbled. She was on hands and knees when she reached the stairs to claw her way out. She didn’t imagine anything truly harmful down there, no ghosts or stranglers, just the immovable fact that panic came for her was enough. She ordered Will a stool and taught him to do the laundry by drawing him a diagram of the controls. She ordered another and placed it at the foot of the freezer.
But the most regrettable by-product of staying inside was losing the capacity to face another human being. The micro-rhythms of conversation, the dance of facial mimicry, the fencing match of eye contact were lost to her once she fell out of practice. She soon ceased answering the door—another chore Will assumed with gusto. She grew lonely, but this, too, dropped away. She no longer yearned for people, other than Will, of course. She sated her social impulses with films, music, books, consoled by the fact that no matter what, the actors and characters could never see how hermetic she’d become, how far she had fallen.
At times she’d considered leaving. Pulling on her olive duffle coat and tramping outside. Perhaps bringing an umbrella. How strange it would be. “Hello, I’ve lived next to you for eight years, nice to meet you.” Yet there was never reason enough. She’d always believed that the day she left would be the day she was required to. How that could ever happen she could not say.
If only they could manage to escape, maybe she’d leave the whole mess here behind in Thunder Bay. Back to Toronto, or a fresh start somewhere else, Paris perhaps. Arthur’s generous support checks, which surfaced each month in her account as predictably as tides, would bankroll anything she could dream up. But that would mean an airplane—the anticipatory preamble: tickets, packing, waiting, and searching, then the imperativeness of actually stepping through those awful retractable tunnels and finding her seat, with a whole plane watching in judgment. She half-considered hiring some amateur anesthesiologist to put her under for the journey, but she feared needles, and the effects of drugs, and dreamless sleep. Since passenger ships no longer served the Great Lakes (she’d checked), they couldn’t even take a boat.
Besides it wasn’t that she couldn’t leave, Diane reminded herself. She was refusing to. Her terms. Years of the Thunder Bay Tribune and American news shows had proved what fresh horrors the world invented each day. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t much of the Thunder Bay she’d known left. Its industries gone, just strip clubs, strip malls, taverns, and hockey rinks remained—the old Eaton’s department store now a call center. The houses were still all aimed at the lake like faces to a coronation, eager for some great arrival, even though the lakeboats had stopped coming and the storefronts downtown, once strung with garlands and signs and teeming with families, were now mostly shuttered and vacant. But it was the knocking of grain-ship hulls from the harbor she missed most—now there was only a spooky quiet over an overgrown industrial ruin that reminded her of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a film she’d nearly memorized in college that seemed made for her alone.
No, she and Will were stuck, like the pilgrims who’d built the frames of their houses from the planks of their ships. All they could do now was decorate.
3
Before Will’s trip Outside, he’d always given thanks for what their house provided. They filled their lungs with the air of its rooms, drank from its faucets, and were powered by its outlets. They warmed themselves in the abundance of its furnace and cleansed their filth in the waters of its tub.
Lightbulbs popped, went dead, were changed. This was repeated. The vacuum whorled galaxies in the carpet and seasons transpired in their windows like plotless movies. Plants reached from their pots to taste the sun. The fridge murmur-whined in complaint if you opened its door, yet, nobly, it never quit. The dishwasher whooshed plates new as the furnace huffed warm air through the teeth of its vents.
Will and his mother lived as indistinguishably from the house as its appliances and furniture, its lumber, drywall, and brick, dousing time with activities and art. Days were spacious and never-ending. Will painted masterpieces while she played guitar or thwacked paperback pages in her reading chair. They scoured flyers and transcribed codes for what they needed from catalogues—A, B, C, D … AA, BB, CC, DD—and the very same things materialized in the arms of deliverymen. Once, a teenager from the grocery store returned with a replacement egg for one he broke, pulling it from behind Will’s ear like a magic trick.
Will signed their clipboards with a swashbuckling replica of his mother’s signature, and the deliverymen tousled his hair and asked why he wasn’t in school. “Home school,” his mother would say, bending around the corner from Paris in one of her threadbare, translucent tank tops, acting as if she hadn’t come to the door because she was cooking, not because she was afraid to touch the doorknob. “Lucky duck,” they’d say with a conspiratorial wink he knew was more for her, because she frowned.
Will and his mother reigned over their private kingdom with the Black Lagoon as its border. It decreed where they could go, how deeply they could breathe, what shapes their thoughts could assume. It reminded them that the Outside world was dark, pitiless, futile, transpiring only in the windows, in their books and films, in the TV they seldom ignited, that there was no true world but their own. It was perfect.
Until it wasn’t.
In the weeks after his jaunt Outside, a clutch of nine minutes Will had rekindled over and over with perfect dives of fragrant memory, the house seemed infiltrated, altered, both unfamiliar and familiar, disgusting and comforting, like a wetsuit he’d been wearing for a year.
Since then, Will could muster no desire to paint masterpieces or sculpt or even sketch during Relaxation Time. Maybe it was an attempt to emulate Other Will’s bravery, the way he moved through the ocean of the Outside as though he’d been born there, or maybe his spirit had infected Will somehow, emboldening him. But each day, as soon as the headphones were clamped over her ears and the glasses set over her eyes, Will would descend into Toronto to satisfy a new hunger.
His first Destructivity Experiment involved the G.I. Joe figures that had survived the great toy cull of a year previous, when his mother solemnly phoned the Salvation Army, and an annoyingly cheerful man came to cart Will’s childhood away. His mother had already loathed ordering the ammunition-laden figures in the first place. “We just got this stuff,” she said. “But that’s okay,” she added quickly. “You’re really developing lately.” Will wept when the man plucked his boxes from the foyer, all his soldiers finally sent off to die. “Killed by the Salvation Army,” he said later, and her laugh spat coffee on the table.
Down in Toronto, with the windows open to vent fumes, he burned the remaining figures into napalm-attack survivors with a barbecue lighter he’d secretly ordered and hidden behind the furnace. They burbled above the flame as drools of plastic slipped from their arms, legs, and—when he’d built the nerve—their faces. They released a purple-black smoke that stuck in his nostrils and pushed his head into somersaults. He shaped the little corpses with popsicle sticks, sculpting mutants, severing their elastics, and undoing the screws that bound their bodies, reassembling them in unholy configurations. Next he managed to start the ancient lawnmower and ran them over, flinging the soldiers across the unfinished basement, leaving gory gashes in their already mangled appendages.