As weeks gathered, passed in packets — days that often seemed of no uniform length, one unto the other and again — the house took shape around its new contents in nameless ways. Some nights the family would be woken by long bowed tones from all around — their whole house surrounded by an edgeless, shapeless singing; a sound that had an eye. It never seemed as though the family all heard the sound on the same evenings. Sometimes it would stir only the mother or the son. Sometimes the tone seemed, to the father, just inside his eyelid—therein, he could not stand up from the bed, his flesh repelled upon the air as if by magnets. Some nights, the whole night, the tone would row, the mother and father there frozen side by side in bed together, seeing one another, not a blink. In the mornings, one or the other might mention how they’d heard it — the loudest droning—the father thought it was a D flat, though he could not sing it back in tune—and the one who’d heard it the night before would say, Oh, I slept straight through the hours.
Down the street three feet, or just above it, the sound around the house could not be heard.
Some nights, the son, awake well beyond both parents, would shake inside his skin. The sound would form around him, like cold clothing, threading on the night. The gong and organ in his chest would chime right in — repeating, harmonizing. The son felt words along his tongue. In the mornings, trying to tell the father or the mother of the shape growing inside him, all around the house, the words came out as something else.
Panes kept falling out of all the windows. Sometimes the sand that’d made the glass became apparent, insects sprawling in the grain. The tires on the family car would have flattened many mornings. The welcome mat would melt in too much light. The birdbath teemed and toppled. The dishwasher would seem to speak. Nothing ever seemed to line up with one another. The son could not walk from one room to another without bumping his elbow, nicking his shoulder. He often heard people speaking in the vents, grunting or gunplay on the roof. The house would not stay still.
The father and the mother tried to go on, despite the headaches and morning pus. They fixed the windows and kissed the son. They kept their cool. They did not scream at one another when the garage door came down on the car while they were backing out. They did not panic when the front yard flowerbed spat the bulbs out of the ground. They did their best just not to think. Relax a little. They found themselves repeating it: RELAX. RELAX. They slept with their eyes open, all at once.
PART TWO
Live audiences frighten me to death.
WHAT TOOK THE FATHER SO LONG AT WORK
The next day it took the father six hours to get home from work. He took the same way he took home every day but each day it seemed to take a little longer. The streets went on a little further each time he drove them. There were new things on old streets. There were new streets with no signs for street names. There were traffic lights spaced barely yards apart. Certain lights would sit for many minutes red with the father edging the car further and further into the empty intersection. There never seemed to be any other cars. Ahead, the horizon of no dimension — limbless and suspended, several states away.
For a while the father could not hear anything around him — not even breathing, not even wind — except the sound of something dragging under the car, but each time he pulled over there was nothing. The car stereo would not make sound.
At one point on one of the streets the opposite lane filled with running dogs. The dogs were black and had shining eyes and they were drooling from the mouths. The drool splattered on the windshield and made the street slick and the father skidded a little in his own lane. The windshield wipers made an awful screeching, as if soon the glass would break.
The drive home took so long the father got hungry two different times and at each he stopped at the same fast food restaurant and ordered the same thing, though the two items tasted very different. An attendant in one of the two fast food drive-thru windows had her eyes shut the entire time she took his order. There was a picture of the drive-thru window on her shirt and the father swore he could see himself sitting in the car outside that cotton window though the woman never turned toward him well enough that he could see for sure.
Q&A RE: THE FATHER’S CAR & HOUSE, ETC
Finally in his driveway the father stopped and parked the car. He took the key out and he touched the key. The father saw the house. The father paused again and put the key in and turned the car back on and edged it closer to the garage. He moved as close to the house as he could manage without touching. The closer he got the car to the house, the more it seemed to shake. The father put the car in neutral and got out and put his head against the hood.
Q: DID THE CAR SOUND FUNNY?
A: The father could not tell. He was not good with his hands or with machines. To some this made the father not a man.
Q: WAS THERE SOMEONE IN THE CAR STILL?
A: The father didn’t think to look.
Q: WHO WAS WATCHING?
A: The house had several windows.
Q: WHAT SHOULD THE FATHER HAVE KEPT IN THE GLOVE BOX THAT HE DID NOT?
A: A gun, a length of wire, a set of rubber gloves, emergency money and some form of rations, Fear of Music by Talking Heads, fake flowers (the kind that never die), permanent marker (the kind that never can be erased), a photo of his wife from a time he’d like to remember (uh-huh), a photo of his mother.
Q: WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET THAT THE FATHER DID NOT SEE, DISTRACTED AS HE WAS BY HIS OWN CONDITION?
A: The father did not see the enormous object wrapped in black plastic that took up the majority of the yard.
Q: WITH THE GAS REMAINING IN THE CAR, AND ALL OTHER GAS PERHAPS FOR SALE OR UNDERGROUND ELSEWHERE NOTWITHSTANDING, HOW FAR AWAY COULD THE FATHER GET FROM THE HOUSE IF HE DROVE THE CAR AT EXACTLY THE SPEED LIMIT IN ONE DIRECTION AND DID NOT PAUSE?
A: The father could not get far away at all.
WHAT THE FATHER DID THEN
With the car still on the driveway burning fumes, the father came into the house. He’d thought of something he needed to tell the mother. He’d thought of this thing earlier while staring into the work computer and had meant to write it down but didn’t and now he was thankful it had reappeared, veined in his mind. It was an important thing. It was about the house.
The father could not quite say the thing aloud. The father slunk, eyeing for the mother.
The mother was not in the entry foyer, where in the early years she’d always met him coming in, her face engraved with home expression. As well, there, the father was used to seeing the family’s shoes all taken off and stacked in order, as the mother was always a stickler for unsmushed carpet, but in recent weeks she’d stopped bothering to take hers off and so the son had too. The mother and the son both owned several pairs. The carpet was minced and feathered, brained already here and there with darker clot — some slush, some blood, some body oils, a few bits meant to have been eaten. There were so many kinds of stains it looked like more than just the four of them in there, living. Three. Three of them, not four, the father corrected in his head.