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Sempiternal House
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Thomas followed the map’s instructions out of the city, off the highway, into the woods.
He parked at the pulloff, hiked what seemed longer than a mile over mud and slick leaves, found the house.
He didn’t owe the Aarons anything, really. When he’d told them the company he was working for, he had no idea they’d find an agent or invest in the very financial instruments for which he was writing math. They hadn’t told him.
Frozen rain rattled down. A copse of birch trees grew up against the house’s walls, erasing whatever path once led to the front door. Even if the market hadn’t tanked, Thomas couldn’t see how they could afforded to restore it — three stories of Victorian so far from existing roads.
When Marilyn asked him go upstate and shut off the water in their summer house, it seemed like the least he could do with his Saturday. Inside, it didn’t look like the summer house of a small college football coach and his high school secretary wife. Every wall was all shelves and every shelf was crowded with seashells, unfamiliar musical instruments, crystals, lizards in jars…
He looked at the instructions to see where he’d gone wrong. The laser-printed map was now a numbered list in Luther’s handwriting. Directions: find this piece here and move it to there.
Death mask of Marie Antoinette from the library to the kitchen. Gorilla shinbone from the upstairs bathroom to the front hall rug.
No matter how many times he asked himself, he knew he hadn’t seen what future that was hiding in the formulae.
Model of the central city of Atlantis from the pink bedroom to the green.
Could have seen, but why would he have even looked, when everyone was doing so well? When he was doing so well.
Griffin’s skull (boulder-heavy and, he was sure, really some kind of dinosaur) from the rolltop in the library to the dining room sideboard.
A rearranged constellation of curiosities, completed when he set the owl’s beak on the chessboard. He heard the door lock, looked in time to see it merge with the wood of the walls.
The phonograph wound itself and spoke in Marilyn’s voice, “Thomas, dear, make yourself at home. Don’t be angry with us. We aren’t angry with you. But the house needs a caretaker, and we thought you could use some time for reflection…”
Papa November
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
The shortwave radio still sat on the desk at the back of the cabin and it felt like more than luck when Shelly found a numbers station on her first run down the dial. A woman’s voice read the numbers, calm, never pausing for breath, reciting five-digit combinations.
When she was young, Shelly’s grandfather only gave those stations a few seconds if they found one during the day. They’d move on to more interesting transmissions, accented voices from places she’d find in the old atlas with musty-sweet pages. At night, he’d let the numbers ramble.
“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.” He’d open another beer, grandma would read fat historical paperbacks, and Shelly would doze off.
The monotone numbers soothed her now, while her mind spun questions for morning. Take or avoid the interstate? Go north to the city? How near was a town where she could top off the tank? The further she got tomorrow, the better.
“I know how you think,” Glen always said. “You’ll never leave me ’cause I’ll guess where you’re going before you even get there.”
But he hadn’t known she would leave. She hadn’t known until she drove past work and onto the onramp. Then she couldn’t go back — even if she got home by five like everything was normal, he would know.
The radio voice repeated the call sign “Papa November Pa-pa Nov-em-ber,” and maybe Shelly did doze, because a man unfolded himself from the air up near the ceiling, his gray skin nearly silver in the light of the bare bulb. He climbed down the dresser and looked at her.
She tried to speak, but all the muscles in her throat and neck froze rigid. The man’s shoulders were twisted, one leg was too short, one foot too big. He stared as if seeing into her, and evened out. He had Glen’s eyes and forehead, then he didn’t; there was a hint of grandpa’s many-times broken nose, then his face went mannequin blank.
Shelly felt her lips moving with the numbers, as if she knew them.
The gray man replied with codes of his own: “35-A14, 24-C9, 63-J2…”
She woke just before dawn with a hunch. In the atlas, she saw she was right: those were pages and map-grid coordinates. Places she could go.
Glen might know her, but he didn’t know Papa November.