Once, Homer remembers, it snowed in his sitting room, the flakes settling on his face and tongue and clothes. He’d had only Langley’s word and the freeze of the air to tell him it was snow that fell that day. Reaching out his tongue, he feared he’d taste ash instead, but said nothing as his brother laughed and refilled their snifters.
Inside much of the house, the only navigation possible was through tunnels Langley had carved into the piles of garbage that filled each room. Supported with scraps of lumber and stacked newspaper or cardboard, these tunnels appeared to collapse frequently, forcing Langley to start over or to create alternate paths to the parts of the house he wished to access.
Some of the tunnels were wide enough that a person could crawl comfortably through them, and in places even walk in a crouch. Others, especially on the second floor, were much smaller. Langley might have been able to fit through them, but not the heavier Homer. The tunnels were the closest thing the house had to doors, and beyond them were secrets the older brother had most likely not shared in decades.
Langley once claimed to be saving the newspapers so that when his brother regained his sight he would be able to catch up on the news. It wasn’t a funny joke, but Langley wasn’t a funny man. The earliest newspapers in the house date from 1933, the year Homer went blind, and they continued to be delivered until weeks after the house began to be emptied and inventoried. Even allowing for twelve years of uninterrupted delivery, there were still far more newspapers in the house than anyone could have expected. They were stacked and bundled in every room, in every hall, covering the landings of staircases and filled closets and chests. Even if Homer had somehow learned to see again, this was never going to be the best way to rejoin the world.
After Homer lost his sight, his brother put him on a diet of nothing but oranges, convinced the fruit would restore his vision. Homer wasn’t so sure, but he couldn’t go out and get food himself—only Langley ever left the mansion, and even then only at night—and so Homer had no choice but to take what was offered. Every day, he ate a dozen oranges, until his breath stank of rind and pulp, until the undersides of his fingernails were crusted with the sticky leftovers of his meals. Langley told him that if he could eat one hundred oranges a week his sight would come back, but Homer couldn’t do it, no matter how hard he tried. It was too much of one thing, a deadening of his taste buds as complete as the deadening of his irises, his corneas, his optic nerves that still sent useless signals down the rotted pathways of his all too useless brain.
You started making the booby traps after the break-ins began, and never stopped revising and improving this new class of inventions. You rigged tripwires and deadfalls, hid walls of sharpened broomsticks behind the moist surface of your newspaper tunnels. Poured loose piles of broken glass beneath intentionally weakened floorboards. Made other traps and then forgot them, until you were unsure about even your own safety.
More and more, you had to tell Homer that maybe the best thing for him would be to stay in his chair.
The one that got you was a tripwire in the second-story hallway leading from the staircase to the master bedroom. You were hurrying, careless for one moment, just long enough to trip the wire that released the trap, burying you beneath a manmade boulder, a netted mass of typewriters and sewing machines and bowling balls hung from the ceiling months before.
Even with all that coming toward you, you almost got away. Only your right leg is pinned and broken, but that is all it takes to doom you. You cannot see behind you well enough to know how bad the wound is, but even through the mold and must you smell the blood leeched from your body, soaking the already-ruined hallway carpet.
It doesn’t take long for Homer to lose his bearings and get lost, turning randomly at each intersection in the tunnels. Without sight, there’s no way to check the few clues that might yet remain, like the pattern on the ceiling or the moldings in the corners. He reaches out with his hands, stretches his fingers toward whatever awaits them, every inch a lifetime’s worth of danger. The space is filled with tree branches, a bramble slick with rot and sticky with sap. Homer recoils at the sound of movement nearby—insect or rodent or reptile, Homer can’t know which—and with his next step he crushes something beneath his foot, the snap of a vertebrae or carapace muffled by the sheer bulk of the room. He stops for a moment to stamp the thing out, to be sure it is dead. Somewhere his brother moans in the stacks, and there’s no reason for whatever creature lies beneath his heel to suffer the same.
When your father left you and your brother and your mother, he took everything with him. He took his medical books and his anatomical drawings and his specimen jars. He took his suits and his shoes and his hats. He took his golf clubs and his pipes and his records, and when he was gone, your mother scrubbed the house from top to bottom in her grief, removing every last particle of dust that might once have been him. He left her, and in return she eradicated him so thoroughly that for twenty years he stayed out of the house.
And then he returned, bundled in the back of a truck and disguised as gynecological equipment and ornate furniture, as something that could be bound into chests and sacks and bundles of paper.
He took everything that might have been yours, and just because it eventually came back doesn’t mean you didn’t hurt during the years it was gone. Now you have him trapped, boarded behind the doors of the second floor, and he will never escape again. Every stray hair still clinging to a shirt collar, every scrap of handwriting left in the margins of his texts, all of it is him, is who he was. It is all that’s left, but if you keep it safe then it is all you’ll ever need.
The master bedroom was found full of correspondence, tied into bundles organized by month and year. The letters begin arriving in 1909, then increased in frequency during the following decade until a letter arrived almost every single day. After this peak, the correspondence slowly tapers off before stopping in 1923. The bulk of the unopened mail is from Herman Collyer, each letter a single entry in a series of entreaties dating from his abandonment of his family to the year of his own death. Whether Langley ever showed his brother these sealed envelopes is open to debate, but his own stance on his father’s writings is more definitive: Each letter remained an apology unasked for, unwanted and unopened, from the day they were received until the day he died.
Was inherited, not gathered. Your father died and suddenly all his possessions were yours, spilling out of your rooms and into your halls. As if you knew what to do with the evidence of a lifetime. As if you could throw away your father, or sell him off to strangers.
It wasn’t long after that when you started adding to the piles yourself, was it?
If only you gathered enough, then maybe you could build a father. Gather a mother up in your arms, like all these piles of porcelain knick-knacks. Design a family from things best left behind. Replace birth with theft, life with hoarding, death with destruction. This house is a body, and you and Homer move within it. Rooms like cells, floors like organs, and you two—like what, exactly? Pulses of electricity, nervous messages, the tiny sparks that one day might bring this place to life?