Instead of taking the road around, he pulled the flashlight from his laundry bag and sought a shorter path. He followed a trail of broken, grass-invaded sidewalk through the unkempt greenbelt and up the hill. He had to struggle through tall-weeded fields, ignoring unidentifiable animal sounds in the underbrush, the occasional glimmer of a red or yellow eye. Man-shaped spaces opened up in the dark vegetation a few feet away, but no one approached. He tried to remember what, if any, of these features had been here when he was a boy. It had been wilderness then, too, although even less controlled. He and his friends would venture there after sunset. He vaguely remembered the darkness, and the dreadful confusion of echo, but nothing else.
He was nerve-exhausted by the time he entered the murky blocks of identical one story ranch houses and sodden lanes of the development. The neighborhood of his youth had been a crowded slum but at least it had some grandeur in its height and architecture. A sea of bright holes identifying downtown shimmered in the distance behind him. Ahead were the squat rectangles of unlit homes, and houses with few lights on, and houses half-gone into ruin, a handful of dried-up gardens and trashed-out back yards, their wire fences plastered in random trash.
In an abandoned playground a shattered teeter-totter sprawled like a sacrifice across its steel pipe center. The swing framework still stood erect but rusted, its seats and slide gone without a trace. So where did the remaining children play, or were they too old for something so innocent? One was crying now, he thought, although it might have been one of those stray cats.
Simon had no way to determine which houses were actually empty, and which were occupied by people who just wanted to keep to themselves. Without knocking on doors, perhaps peeking through windows, which he wasn’t about to do.
In the old days, in that other neighborhood of taller and less uniform homes, he heard a great many things: the voices of friends he hadn’t seen in decades, music playing from a record player in a neighbor’s upstairs window, misunderstood whispers from lovers hiding themselves in the shadowed strips near walls. All of that had been torn down and bull-dozed, the old neighborhood beheaded. It occurred to Simon he now had more memories than life. It was an uncomfortable way to travel.
Several houses had yellow police tape stretched across their front doors and around their near-identical porches. He assumed the police actions had something to do with drugs; in the news it always had something to do with drugs. That and gang activity. A lot of these poorer teens fell into gangs.
When Simon was young a bike ride to and from this neighborhood had been nothing. He’d fly down the steep curl of road and although the trip back up was a challenge he accomplished it without too much difficulty, feeling like a star athlete afterwards. Not anymore. He should have kept in better shape. Once here, he didn’t expect to leave often. He supposed that was how older people became trapped.
He found the house Will was providing—low and dark and indistinguishable from the others. The newish lock looked inexpertly installed, the hasp mounted crookedly, and rattled as he fiddled with the key. Simon slipped inside and slapped the switch, lighting up the messy interior. He gasped involuntarily from the stench: human waste and aromas both sweet and sour underneath. He reminded himself that his cousin was allowing him to stay here for nothing.
Houses weren’t built to last anymore, nor did it make sense to. Technological expectation changed so quickly it didn’t pay to invest in building for the long term. People moved on, although not necessarily up.
When he first glimpsed the living room walls he imagined a crowd of onlookers, but the arrangement of shadows proved to be stains. Studs and nail head patterns were clearly visible beneath the thin paper.
Cleansers and chemicals and various old tools were stored in a closet with random junk. He couldn’t tell how old any of it was, or how dangerous, but he did what he could, sweeping the foulness out the back door and dumping chemicals on the hardwood floors where they’d been deeply stained, windows open to the cold air to get rid of the smell. He just needed to get his situation clean enough so that he wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor. The revealed boards were scarred as if from games or ritual. Or maybe from cats. Cats can do a lot of damage if locked inside by themselves.
On several walls sprays of relatively fresh graffiti obscured older layers of scribbling, and here and there certain words and symbols were emphasized by means of deep cuts. He could make no sense of it, although the patterns of marks created an emotional effect not unlike music, so he wondered if some of these marks referred to songs. Over the days to come he painted over the graffiti, but with no confidence it wouldn’t return.
Long threads of dust floated through the rooms. The remnants of his old life were hardly more substantial than these. With most of the people he’d ever known gone, the fabric of day to day reality seemed thin.
That old house where he’d grown up had probably been less than a hundred yards from here. It had a screened back porch where on late nights the adults filled their drink cups and the children consumed their allotted portions of sugar and ran mindlessly around the yard. This house and the ones around it had no back porch and he wondered when those had gone out of fashion. No doubt around the same time as gatherings with the neighbors.
He remembered games of hide and seek that lasted for hours and covered every lot in the neighborhood. He remembered childhood crushes on young girls whose names he no longer remembered. He remembered he would not take a bath when a certain babysitter was on duty, the one who always wanted to help.
In one corner of the living room a sleeping bag, some toiletries, and food had been left for him. When he thought he’d cleaned sufficiently for a relatively untroubled night’s sleep he crawled into the bag and succumbed almost immediately.
The morning came quickly. He had dreamed and sweated, and now the sleeping bag stank. He wondered who might have used it before. He crawled out and walked barefoot into the kitchen, splashed his face with water tinged a muddy rust color. He’d let it run until it cleared. He went to the back door and opened it for air and sun.
He was surprised not to see the sun, or even the sky. A few feet in front of him a tall brick wall with curtained casement windows blocked his view, awash in smoky gray shadow, part of a larger house that rose three stories. Looking straight up he glimpsed the old-fashioned soffits and Victorian roof. It looked somewhat like the house he’d grown up in, except larger. Turning his head he saw similar large houses out to both sides, an entire neighborhood of slummy Victorians in ill repair. He could also hear creaky music, children’s voices, a cat’s howl, the soft explosive echo of a distant barking dog. But he couldn’t make out any of the finer details of his surroundings, not even this close.
Simon went to get his flashlight for a more detailed look. But when he came back there was the sky, and the sun just over the treetops illuminating a vista of dull one story homes. The filth he’d scraped from the house the night before still lay piled around the bottom step. Sometime during the day he would have to bury it.
He took a breath. He hadn’t been fully awake. It happened sometimes, even several minutes after walking around, a piece of dream still lodged in your brain changes the world. There were the sounds of children squealing like the damned in a nearby yard, but was that still part of the dream? The excited screams of children at play often fooled you into thinking there had been some grave tragedy.
Simon worked several hours in the bathroom and kitchen—scrubbing and throwing out the useless and the unsalvageable—not bad for an out of shape old man, he thought. He felt uncomfortably heated and propped open the back door. The outside temperature had dropped precipitously. He’d tried the thermostat but the furnace wouldn’t come on. Another problem to ask Will about. Whatever sounds he heard—the whistle of a speeding car, the broken explosions as a plane pushed through the air overhead—were very far away. Whoever lived nearby was impressively quiet. “Safe as houses,” as his mother used to say, but it never reassured. Some houses weren’t safe at all.