I get up, toss my trash in the bin, and go back out into the bright, hot day.
~
I am not sure how long I walk, but the sun is low when I eventually find the house. I stare up at it, the looming Victorian with the wrap-around porch. I look around. Where am I? What street is this? I can't place myself, but it doesn't matter. I'm here.
There is nobody around. The whine from the insects in the trees is incredibly loud. I walk up the concrete steps from the sidewalk into the front yard and then around to the side of the house.
There is the door from the kitchen, the porch railing, and the stand of pine trees, just like in my memory, with the almost imperceptible gap running through them. I stand still, just off the porch by the kitchen door, listening into the house to hear if there is anyone there. There is no noise that I can discern, no movement in the windows. The place looks completely deserted.
I walk up onto the porch and try the kitchen door. Locked. I look in one of the windows and see a generic kitchen and part way into the living room, but it doesn't look particularly familiar. I can see the edge of a couch, a lamp, a rug. All the lights appear to be off.
I hop off the porch and find the path through the trees. I move along it, furtively, half-expecting to encounter Jamie in the backyard, and then, what? I would have to explain myself. But there is nobody there. The back yard is empty. The grass is neatly trimmed, just as it was in the front, and the lot backs onto a tall wooden fence. Beyond the fence is another house -- another row of houses. There are no towering trees. No trail leading to a creek bed.
There is, however, against the rear wall of the house, a set of rickety-looking stairs leading up to a cream-colored door on the third story. I feel a shiver across my back.
I know this place.
I am not sure if it is a real or synthetic thought. I approach the stairs and step onto the bottom step. The wood is old and spongy and I feel it creak under me. I begin to walk up the stairs and try to keep my weight close to the house, as the staircase seems very poorly supported. The wood strains under me and I am half way up when I realize there is a good chance that the whole set of stairs will collapse. But I am compelled to keep walking up, up, until I am standing at the top. In the long-angle light of the late afternoon sun, I see that the beige paint is flaking off the door. The door doesn't fit evenly in its frame, and it's small, like a door for a three-quarter size person. I try the handle. It turns. I give the door a push and it gives a little, then pops open when I push again. I stoop to pass through the doorway, and then I am standing in the hallway.
Inside, it's dark, and my eyes take a moment to adjust. The only light is coming from the open door behind me. The hallway dead-ends at what looks like another set of stairs leading down to the floor below. There are four doors evenly spaced along the hall, all closed.
I see a switch on the wall and I flick it. A bare, exposed bulb hanging from a fixture on the ceiling comes on, dim and red, like the light in a photography dark room. It casts an eerie glow onto everything. I look at my hands in the light and see the greenish tint of the dark skin on the back of my hands. The lighter skin on my palms is brighter, almost glowing.
I walk down the hallway to the last door on the right, the one my memory tells me to approach. There is a deadbolt as well as a knob on the door, and I remember watching his back -- Jamie's back -- and hearing him laugh as he drunkenly fumbles with his keys. How I pushed him against the wall to kiss him, right here in the hallway, felt his hard cock pushing against me as we made out. The liquor and cigarette taste of him. I reach for the knob, twist it, and push. The door opens.
I jump with surprise when I see a huge face leering at me. My heart pounds hard, but I take a deep breath -- it's just a poster on the wall opposite the door. David Bowie, a close up of his face. I push the door open further and step inside.
There's nobody in the room. It's large and extremely cluttered. Books and magazines and papers and clothes are all over the floor. Several thirsty-looking potted plants sit on a desk facing the only window, which is propped open slightly. There are strings of holiday lights -- unplugged -- strung around the rim of the room where the walls meet the ceiling. There's a bed with a mattress, dirty-looking sheets. In the corner, I see a terrarium with a heat lamp inverted over it. The lamp is on and casts a warm-looking, reddish-orange light down onto a twisted wooden stump, where some sort of lizard -- a pair of lizards -- are basking.
Is this Jamie's room?
I bend to look at the papers on the ground. They look like ripped pages from some sort of technical manual; tiny, packed printed words in French, German, and Spanish. There are other papers with random-looking doodles on them.
I move over to the desk and see that there isn't really anything on it aside from the plants, just a mechanical pencil and some stray pieces of graphite lead. I sit down in the chair, a ratty office chair on wheels, and place my hands on top of the desk. For a moment, I sit motionless, sensing the immense mass of the old house around me. It's completely quiet in here.
I pull open a desk drawer. Random detritus, paper clips, a few coins, matches, a pack of post-it notes, a marker. I pull open another drawer and see a battered shoe box. I lift it out slowly and remove the lid. Inside is a stack of pictures bound with a rubber band. I freeze when I see him -- Jamie -- grinning up at me from the top picture in the stack.
My hands tremble as I pull the pictures out of the box and slide the rubber band off. I hold the top picture up to get a better look. The light is dim, so I angle the photograph toward the window, into the waning daylight.
It's definitely Jamie, maybe a bit younger and skinnier than he is now, but the smile is unmistakable. In the picture, it looks like he is standing on some sort of mechanical apparatus in a large building, maybe a factory, or a warehouse? He's standing on what looks like a set of huge interlocking pipes. His smile and his body ignite something in me, an echo of sexual desire, the memory of his body under mine. I shake my head, not wanting to be distracted, sensing the attempt to deter me, stop me from looking at these pictures. I put the picture down and look at the next one.
Jamie is grinning and sitting next to someone, a guy. His arm is draped casually around the guy's shoulder. It looks like they are sitting on a bench in a park. Or maybe they are at some sort of carnival -- there are bright lights in the background. I can't see the other guy's face -- it's blurred -- but he has dark skin and big furry arms. He seems kind of big and bulky all over.
Like me.
In spite of myself I feel a pang of jealousy.
Is this one of Jamie's boyfriends?
The next picture is Jamie with a different guy, a skinny white guy. Again, I can't see his face, the guy is leaning out of the frame of the picture. They are on a pier overlooking a pond. Jamie is grinning. I flip through the next two pictures -- Jamie with two other guys. Jamie is grinning in each of them.
Hold on
.
I look back at the pictures I have already seen and feel goosebumps rise on my neck and arms. None of the guys' faces are visible. And Jamie's grin in each photo is almost identical. Not almost. Exactly identical.
I flick through the rest of the stack quickly. Picture after picture shows Jamie, grinning, in some sort of bucolic scene, each time with a different guy. White guys, black guys, brown guys. None of their faces are visible. I feel panic rise in my stomach. I squeeze my eyes shut. I feel the urge to put the pictures away, stop looking. But I force myself to open my eyes and continue. I uncover the next photgraph.
It's different -- a picture of a small figure, standing far away from the camera at the end of what looks to be a long, dark hallway. I flip to the next one. The figure, a person, is a bit closer. I flip again and now I can see that it is a skinny-looking guy standing in the hallway. He stands perfectly straight and the harsh light of the flash is reflected off his ghostly white body. It looks like he is naked. In the next picture he's closer. My heart begins to thud. It's Jamie. I recognize the color of his eyes and his general features, but his body is sickly thin, emaciated, emptied out.
In the next picture, he's maybe ten feet from the camera. His arms are hidden behind his back. The grin from the earlier pictures is gone. His expression is completely flat. The change in him is jarring, there is a dead, sunken look in his eyes that terrifies me.
There are only a few pictures left. Trembling, I look at the next picture. Jamie is a few feet from the camera, now, and he's holding out two objects, a hammer in one hand and a long, thick nail in the other. His head is cocked and he's looking straight into the camera, his mouth is part-way open, as though he is about to say something.
Suddenly, I hear a loud slam that shakes the house. I drop the stack of pictures on the floor. I whirl around. There is nobody there, but I hear muffled voices from somewhere in the house.
Fuck
. I stoop to pick up the pictures and get them back into the box, but they have scattered everywhere and I hear footsteps now, pounding up stairs.
I leave the pictures and move as fast and as quietly as I can out of the room, down the hallway to the cream-colored door, which is still open. The voices are close now. I exit the door and pull it shut behind me, hoping that they haven't seen me. I hustle down the stairs, which make a cacophonous noise, and then I run through the back yard, back through the pines, around the house, and down the steps to sidewalk. I run as fast as I can for several blocks.
When I finally stop, I lean on a large oak tree, breathing hard and feeling the adrenaline releasing its grip on my body. It doesn't seem like anyone has followed me from the house. It is dusk now, the sun is down. I try to orient myself but I don't recognize where I am. When my breath comes back to me I walk down the street until I come to an intersection, but it isn't marked with any signs. I arbitrarily go left, then backtrack when it looks like I am going down a mostly dark street with no houses. After a while and a few more intersections, I finally find myself on a street I recognize, which I follow until it leads back to campus. It's completely dark by the time I get back to my dorm.
