Untitled (Way of Being)

A story about the upper room of an old house at night.

There is a way of being which is sitting on the floor in an upper room, a bedroom of a ruined house found abandoned not marked on any map way out in the desert at night. It is having come and driven out in response to a Missing Persons alert and having walked in one direction for miles away from the road over and through the rocks and sand and brush in the dim but rising moonlight and having found the house miles away from any labeled track, the remains of an old mining camp possibly, or failed homestead, or something else, and having heard faint and muffled screams of terror from inside. Faint and muffled, but definite screams, definite terror. Having looked all around the perimeter the house and having found nothing and then having gone inside, with the high-powered softly whining flashlight turned on and making a bright shaking circle of doorways empty and dust creaking boards some old bust furniture wood-burning stove with slipped chimney pipe. Having seen no evidence of recent habitation and having then gone further into the house, up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms, the smaller lesser one in the back of the house, having seen in the bright whining circle a chair on its side and a hole in the floor and a bed with a pale white peeling headboard and a yellowed mattress a black moldy stain burned down the middle. Having had the flashlight suddenly become dislodged in some way from the hand and be shattered and flung away and rendered unusable, silent, and having no secondary light source with which to navigate the pitch black of the house interior at this night. Having then recognized that the derelict and decayed state of the house, remembering the holes in the floor, makes it markedly unsafe to attempt to leave under such conditions, in fact makes any movement at all extremely dangerous, and that the only course of action that does not involve intolerable risks is to sit and wait for the sun to rise and illuminate the space. There is thus a way of being which is sitting on the floor in an upper bedroom of an old abandoned ruined house way out in the desert at night waiting for a dawn that is still many hours away. Sitting perfectly still in the dark in the house listening very closely for any sounds and hearing nothing, hearing a mute breath of wind sometimes, but no screams, no terror. A sound sometimes, a slight creak or dry rustle, but nothing else, nothing more. And still the eyes inventing, pulling shifting webs of gray out of the dark, making shapes out of dead air, clinging to the fading, fading memory of light. An old, rotten smell beneath the surface of dust. And in which the question of the flashlight’s breakage is unresolved, as when it was dislodged it was a sensation both as if some other person, or someone like a person, had dashed forward and knocked the flashlight from the hand bodily, had been in the room and hidden from the light and had reached out and knocked it away with speed and silence, yet still also a sensation as of placing the hand to the back side of a spinning fan’s cage, of the flashlight ripping itself out of the hand and away, like the air was pulling on it, like the grid of space was puckering, was sucking, and afterwards having reached out, having felt in wide arcs and made a few cautious steps before thinking better of it, having felt for another body, person, presence and in reaching out having felt nothing, no body, no warmth, no presence, and having heard nothing but the air wrap around the edges of the empty window frame on the far side of the room, and whisper through the doorways, and drift up and down the stairs, and slowly sitting down, and becoming resigned to waiting sitting very still and silent until the sun creeps up and makes it safe to move again. For it is not safe to move. There is a way of being that is like this. That is waiting. That is feeling how the silence and the darkness presses on the skin. That is trying to feel the dimensions of the room, that is trying to remember the distance of the walls and the location of the hole in the floor. That is remembering the shape of the stain on the mattress in the circle of light just before it was snuffed out, and the glass shattered, and the batteries split open and leaked their acid into the casing, and the sound of the screams. There is a way of being in this absence of light in this ruined house on this night when a car was found abandoned on the side of the road with the engine still running and the radio turned on still tuned to a frequency between stations and its two headlights as twin trails leading off out over the sand where it appears there are faces painted on the walls, where it appears there is a tall figure standing in the corner behind the mattress fumbling with something between its legs. But there is no sound, and the movement is slow like something underwater, something conjured from the eye drawing patterns from the stains on the wall the cracks the falling plaster the dust in the air, and a minute later it is gone. But there is a way of being where it is there, there is a position within the shape of spacetime, and from this position there are many things which could be possible, and many lifetimes in which one begins to forget the sun.

Hidden in a compartment beneath the floor, a reel-to-reel tape stops, rewinds itself, and starts again. The ribbon faintly crackles as it runs over the head. It repeats.

A voice on the tape repeats. It has been erased. It repeats. It repeats.