Once, at a party, someone found out she worked for the bank and started yelling at her about how they had been thrown out when her husband got hurt on the job and couldn’t work. Agnes had kept her mouth shut because the girl was a friend of a friend, but she agreed with Trask: These people did it to themselves. The world didn’t owe you a house. The world is a swamp of shit and suffering and you have to bust your ass to keep your head above water and sometimes you still drown. Sometimes you drown slow. Like Agnes.
“You were late today,” he said.
“I know. I didn’t remember what day it was until it was almost too late.”
“You need to start using a calendar app.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’ve showed you how like ten times,” he said, swiveling his monitor to show her the calendar in his browser window, synched to his phone.
A map of the county hung below the televisions. Hundreds of pushpins peppered it, showing homes the bank owned. Lines divided the county into five transects, each of which had its own spirit maintenance worker. Hers was Transect 4, the westernmost one, the space least densely settled, the one that required the most driving. She scanned the map idly, avoiding even looking at Transect 1, and the pin that stabbed through the heart of the house where she grew up. The house her mother lost. The house that got her this job.
Agnes picked up a crude jade frog from his desk, weighed it in her hand, felt the tiny spirit inside. Could it see her? Know her heart? Every object had a spirit, and while stories said that long ago the trees talked and mountains moved to hurt or help humans, only homes still spoke. For the thousandth time, she thought of Micah.
His snarl, his momentary monstrousness, did not make him less appealing. It made him more so. Being with so many bad men had hardwired fear into desire.
“Lunch meeting,” Trask said, rising. “File the hard copies?”
Alone in his office, she wrenched open the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. She flipped through folders, added incident reports and travel logs. Rooting around in the filing cabinet made her feel frightened, like a trespasser. Every time, she had to fight the urge to browse through things that had nothing to do with her. To learn more. To understand. Trask would not tolerate that kind of intrusion. One more way she could lose her job.
But then – there. 5775 Route 9. The house where Micah lived. Was lived even the right word? Micah’s house. But that wasn’t right either. The house didn’t belong to him. It was him.
Cheeks burning, she pulled the folder from the cabinet. Deeds, contracts, mortgages, spreadsheets – all the secrets and stories of the house, encoded in impenetrable hieroglyphics. Resolve settled in her stomach, bitter and hard. Like when, ages ago, in another life, another Agnes had decided for the thousandth time to return to whatever bar or trailer park would best get her whatever illegal substance her body was enslaved to then.
She looked around, wondered if anyone else could see the guilt on her face. Trask’s computer screen was still on, logged in to the property management system. Because he trusted her.
Did banks have household spirits? Places where no human had ever lived? Lots of people spent more time at work than at home, but work was different. What difference would that difference make? Once, she’d slept in a hotel. Its spirit had been flimsy, insubstantial, shifting shapes in an abrupt and revolting fashion. Even her car had a spirit. It never spoke or showed itself, but sometimes its weird jagged dreams rubbed up against her own while she slept.
Agnes shut her eyes and listened. Felt. Called out to the dark of the echoey old space around her.
And something answered. Something impossibly big and distant, like a whale passing far beneath a lone swimmer. Something dark and sharp and cruel and cold. She opened her eyes with a gasp and saw she was shivering.
Smiling and confident on the outside, screaming on the inside from joy and terror, seeing in her mind’s eye exactly how this course of action might cost her everything, Agnes took the folder to Trask’s Xerox machine and began to make herself copies.
HE WAS WAITING for her on the porch of 5775. He hugged his knees to his chest like some people held on to hope. When he saw her, his face split into a smile so glorious her own face followed suit.
“Hi,” he said, rising, T-shirted, eyes all golden fire from the last of the evening sun.
“Hello,” she said, and held up a bag full of fast food. “Hungry?” He clapped his hands, his face all joy. “You’re here early,” he said. “You usually only come through here every couple of weeks.”
“You’ve been watching me for a while now,” she said, handing him the bag. “I don’t know. Something wouldn’t let me stay silent.” He opened the bag, stuck his face in, breathed deep. Happiness made him laugh. Agnes wondered when she had last heard someone laugh from happiness.
She had made the mistake of visiting 12 Burnt Hills Road right before. It had spoken to her, its voice like bricks dragged across marble. It said I want to show you something, over and over. She did not let it.
The file on 5775 had told her nothing. The house was fifty years old, had been owned by a perfectly banal couple who left it to their son and his wife, who sold it to a woman who couldn’t keep up with her mortgage when she got laid off when the school districts consolidated, and had been evicted four years prior. No Micahs anywhere.
He ran down the hall, and came back with a bed sheet. This he spread on the living room floor, and sat on. “Instant picnic!” Micah said, his enthusiasm so expansive she barely felt the pain in her knees when she squatted beside him. Sleeping in the fetal position night after night was beginning to take a toll.
While he took the food from the bag and began to set it up, she watched his arms. Pixelated characters from the video games of her youth adorned his arms, along with more conventional tattoo fodder – a castle; a lighthouse. “How long have you looked like this?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He ate a French fry, then four. “Forever? A couple months?”
“The band on your T-shirt didn’t exist when this house was built,” she said. “Or do you have a whole ghost wardrobe upstairs somewhere?”
He shrugged. “No. I don’t know why they’re the clothes they are.”
“Did you ever look like something else?”
He laughed. Micah laughed. “Sometimes I think so. Did you?”
“Not that I know of. So there’s not a household spirit Book of Rules?”
“Not that I know of.”
They ate burgers, drank sodas. She had so many questions, but what happened inside her chest while she watched him eat answered the only real one. He bit off giant greedy childish bites, and barely chewed.
It made sense that after being empty for a long time, a household spirit might become something different. And lose track of everything it had been before. She asked, “Do you remember the people who used to live here?”
He nodded, eyes on her, lips on his soda straw. “Well. Sort of. I feel them. I can’t really remember them, but they’re there. Like...” Like a dream you’ve woken up from, she thought, but didn’t say out loud.
“I’m not supposed to interact with you,” she said. “I could lose my job.”
“What’s your job?” he asked, all earnestness.
“I make offerings at houses where nobody lives.”
He nodded. The last drops of soda slurped noisily up his straw. “They must pay you well for that.”
“They don’t.”
“But what you do is so important!”