The Architecture of Fear (37 page)

I sat down on the edge of the mattress. Soft, soft, all feathers. I hadn't slept on a featherbed since I was a kid. When you're a kid, beds are great, beds are playgrounds, magic ships. All the fooling around later, the trick architecture, heart-shapes and vibrators and waterbeds, that's got nothing to do with seduction; if it did, no bedroom would be without the rear bench seat from a '58 Chevy; no, it's all an attempt to make the bed fun again. When you're a kid, you don't know how much you'll need the fun. You don't know what it's going to mean to be alone.

My right wrist wouldn't rise from the bed. First I thought it was just buried in the feathers, but I looked down and saw the attachments, the ligaments twined down into the springs, the arteries coupled and pulsing. I jumped a little, sight of your own blood does that even when the blood's contained, and felt it somewhere past my fingertips, so the nerves were linked too.

Well. My right hand was attached to the bed, too attached to leave it, and I was too attached to the hand to leave it either. I leaned back and was accepted, taken, absorbed.

I'm not certain how long the process took, but it's just about done now, all but the brain (How do I know? Snide, aren't we? I think therefore there is still brain.
Somewhere)
and its stepchildren the eyes. I can still see the room very clearly; the light is still soft and sweetly gold, but the candles are burning low. It won't be long now.

Brain and eyes, that's all, and I cannot be certain where the brain is. But then are we ever? Wittgenstein had a problem with this.

But the eyes I know. My eyes are resting upon the pillow. Resting lightly if you please.

A tremor of the candle flames tells me of her footsteps on the stairs. What shall I do, I wonder,
sans
tongue,
sans
touch,
sans
everything? Drink to her only with mine eyes, I suppose, and she will—

The door as it opens makes a sweeping shadow on the wall, a dark scythe with a mothglow behind. I wonder if the house is still sitting, never flitting, on the pallid plot of Long Island; what are they thinking out there, how long have we been gone? Perhaps no time at all. It occurs to me that not one of us scientists checked his watch for movement, and now too late to check my watch at all. Oh my ears and whiskers.

What will they do when the house appears in Russia, in China, in the Middle East? Do you remember when we were told, with a straight face and an upraised rifle, that wearing the
chador
was a revolutionary act? Do you remember, surely you must, how often we were told that those who made peaceful revolutions impossible would inevitably bring—no, you never believed that. Well. I have seen a revolutionary act. I have become a revolutionary act, physical graffiti on the psychouterine wall, o men read me and weep.

You must, for I am past tears. In a moment she will be here, with her blazing candle, and put me past it all.

Love should, as they say, be blind.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a champion of the small presses and a defender of historical perspective in the fantasy field. She is a groundbreaker, both as an editor
(Tales by Moonlight)
and in her own writing. The best in any art always shine in the extremes. Whitman in sonnets and free verse; Burton in Shakespeare and in improvisation. Here's another.

"It's lovely," said Nona in her quietly sincere manner, gazing upward at the three-story house, gabled and dormered and with bay windows. It looked altogether Victorian to her untrained eyes. It was handsome at all events. She took Donald's arm and said, "It's really ours."

He grinned at her bright face, amazed that an old house could make a woman in her late forties look suddenly years younger. The place made him feel invigorated as well. The sunlight reflected off the face of the big house in a way that made the whole structure glow, as might some heavenly palace. The light reflected into the wild, neglected garden where Donald and Nona stood gazing, she at the house, he at her; and that light made them angelic, too.

"It's every bit as beautiful as the photographs," she said.

"Don't get your hopes up
too
high, love. My uncle put a new roof on it a couple years before he died, but before that, he'd let the whole place go rather too long. We'll have to put up new plaster-board before it's habitable."

"I'm prepared for all that, Donald," she said. "Quite prepared. But let's look at it from here a moment more, okay? The light makes it look, well, so
new
in a way."

That was true enough, and odd. The bathing sunlight came over the trees, striking the face of the house. Instead of showing up the need for paint, the brightness made it look freshly whitewashed. It was a peculiar sensation standing together on the lawn unmowed for years, between masses of rose bushes gone wild (but no less beautiful for that), a warm wind kissing their cheeks. Eerie. Eerie. Donald couldn't place why he felt strange about it. "Nostalgia," he thought. For he had lived in this house as a boy. The house and the land around it was full of echoes of childhood.

He'd actually inherited the property years before, but let an uncle live in it as caretaker—foolishly perhaps, since the codger accepted the free rent but not the responsibility of keeping the place fit. It had been Donald's and Nona's dream to settle in the big house as soon as he was able to retire and get inland from the coast. At an age when many couples thought of selling their big houses to buy into condominiums, he and Nona were embarking upon the adventure of renovating a veritable mansion.

As he looked at his wife's profile, he was able to superimpose his memory of the young woman she'd been when they were married: no lines about the hazel eyes nor at the corners of her lips. How good it was that both of them were still dreamers when so many years had passed! She turned her bright face slowly to face his, then gave a pleasantly startled laugh. "Donald!" she said. "How young you look!"

He smiled. They even thought alike after so many years. "It's the house," he said. "We should be daunted by it, I suppose; but the thought of fixing it up is rejuvenating."

"I'm glad," Nona whispered, kissing his cheek, "that you always kept it in the family. Remember when I tried to convince you to sell it? Hard times in those days. How far we've come!"

"Yes," he said. "How far." And suddenly his own smile felt forced and brittle. "Let's look inside. It was supposed to be cleaned for us, but I'm sure it's a wreck."

Before she joined him on the walkway to the front door, she plucked a rose from the wild brambles. "Those were planted before I was born," said Donald.

"No!" she said in mild disbelief, smelling the petals before joining him on the step.

"I'll dig out the pictures of when I was little as soon as our things arrive, if I can remember what they're in. Those roses were prize-winning hybrids when I was a tot. Now they've completely reverted—virtual weeds instead of flowers!" He fumbled the old-fashioned skeleton key into the door, hardly knowing how to work anything but a deadbolt.

"They're not weeds at all," Nona protested, butting in to work the key for him. "We'll get the trellises back up and they'll be real beauties. Nothing wrong with wild roses."

Donald noticed that the rose had pricked his wife's finger. Why didn't she wipe away the blood?

"You've hurt yourself," he said.

"Have I?" The door swung inward. She removed a handkerchief from a pocket and wrapped it around her thumb. "It's nothing," she said; and they stepped inside.

***

It was indeed a mess. They'd arranged for a clean-up and paid stiffly for the service, but some things would take a lot more than suds and water. The linoleum was cracked and warped; Donald kicked at a loose piece in the hallway. "Pretty bad," he said.

"What's under it? Oak, you think?"

"Fir, I'm afraid."

"Well, no matter. We'll have tile or carpets."

"Can't have everything at once."

"Floors and walls at least," she said high-spiritedly.

There were missing pieces of plasterboard; the cleaning troop had apparently hauled away the loose fragments. The wall had a weird, ugly pattern of growth on it—mildew years and years old. "That goddamned Uncle Morton."

"Now, Donald."

Donald almost touched the moldy part of the wall, then changed his mind. At least the roof was fixed now. He hoped there wasn't any dry rot in the beams or rafters. They'd know soon enough, when they pulled down what was left of the plasterboard.

Other walls had not gotten wet, but Uncle Morton had lived as much as possible without heat, so that the wallpaper was damp and loose. Donald patted his forehead and went a bit red in the face. "Rather more to it than I warned you," he said.

"Nonsense. We knew it needed interior walls top floor to bottom."

"We'll have to hire a crew," he said. "We can't do it ourselves. Not at our age."

"I feel we could," said Nona. "But I guess we'd be too slow. Why so worried about cost?"

He laughed at himself. They weren't exactly poor nowadays; hadn't been for years. He'd been successful in his business. More than that, the ink was almost dried on the sale of their home on the coast. When that money came through, they could do a lot to this old place, never touching their sizable savings.

"Don't get weak-kneed now, Donald. We said we'd live in one or two rooms if we had to, until major repairs could be done for us. All we're seeing now is that that's exactly what we'll have to do. As a matter of fact, I don't think it's nearly as bad as our worst scenario for the place."

"I guess not. Looks better from the outside, though. The place needs light."

"You said it was inspected. We only need to have the electricity turned on. Donald! Look at this stairway!"

"What? What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing's
wrong
with it," she said. "It's
walnut.
Are you sure the floors are fir?"

"Oh, I vaguely recall my grandfather got the staircase as salvage when the third floor was added. The place was heavily renovated before the war."

Nona threw her arms around her husband and said, "It's full of surprises, this place is. For every run-down problem, there'll be a surprise like this old staircase."

"You really like the place?"

"Haven't seen upstairs yet," she said. "But... I love the house; I can tell I do. It has a good...
feeling
to it."

That was what he needed to hear. The place was a wreck and they both knew it. But it was full of his memories. He felt as though he'd spent his whole life away from home and for the first time as an adult he was back where he belonged, wreck or not. His concern had been chiefly that someone as fastidious as Nona would be horrified by the idea of living in a couple of mildewy rooms while waiting for repairs and for the majority of their possessions to be shipped. She was the sort to say exactly what she thought. And she'd said she loved the place. He was relieved.

There were more discoveries to be made. On the third floor, which was smaller than the two main floors, having only four large rooms, the cleaning crew had crowded most of the remaining furniture that Uncle Morton hadn't sold over the years. These unsold items included some rare antiques, in need of refinishing or reupholstering, but potentially fine pieces. "This was my great-grandma's," said Donald. "She brought it from England." It was a sofa in need of re-covering, but with fabulous carving on the arms, legs, and back. "I used to jump on it as a tot," he said. "Got yelled at."

His mom and dad hadn't lived in the place. After their divorce, his father disappeared, and his mother raised him for a while on the coast, through hard times and estrangement from her parents. Then for a while, when poverty was at its worst for him and his unhappy mother, he'd been sent to live with his grandparents. He'd stayed with them for several years, rarely seeing his mother during that time. They were the best years of his life, to tell the truth. He'd loved his mother and wouldn't speak ill of the dead, but fact was, she was a mite rough on him. Took her frustrations out. The time with Grandma and Grandpa—and with Great-grandma while she was alive, holding court in a big part of the second floor—these were the days of joy in his formative years. The rest, well, he'd blocked a lot of it from his mind: dragged from apartment to apartment, staying as long as it took landlords to get them evicted. His mother's endless array of boyfriends either pretended to like him or didn't even pretend... well, no need to recall them. He should just absorb the pleasant vibrations of this old house! But good memories invariably reminded him of the bad.

"You want to live with your grandparents again, do you!" His mother was livid. "They were tyrants! They always wanted to control me! And now they've got my son!" She threw herself on the bed and wept, filling his heart with her tears. "I didn't mean it!" he shouted in an agony of guilt and sadness. "I didn't mean it! I want to stay here with you!"

And all his life, in business, in everything, it had been like that. "I like my job, sure." "I enjoy puttering around our rambler home, yeah." But he was never happy, really, and he wanted to be back in this old house. That was the fool fact of it. And now he was here. Home to roost. It was fine with him; it really was. It was like taking off all the burdens of his life and being a child again.

***

They had to stay in a motel that night, but the next day they met the electrician at the door to get the old place's lights back on. The phone man came later in the day. "We'll square away the kitchen—and the dining room will serve as bedroom for a while," was Nona's suggestion.

The kitchen alone was big enough to live in. It'd be pretty fancy camping out, at least. They struggled down the staircases with a big, thick, chunky table and set it in the kitchen against the wall. Leaning on it, sweating, Donald said, "Grandma used to mix cookies and mincemeat on this table. I remember it as being even bigger than this!"

He opened one of the kitchen cupboards and breathed from the past. From within, he snatched out a round cookie jar. It was a faded shade of yellow with a big smiling face, and around the base stood a laughing dog, a fiddling cat, and a dish running along with a spoon. "I remember this!" He blew dust out of the inside.