Dwelling Solo RPG Session 5: Eyes of a Boring God
FOYER & FRONT DOOR
The Conjure and Remember prompts at the threshold of the house offered much leeway for looking forward and back, inside and out. Our narrator sees what he fears is the neighborhood’s patron saint outside, and remembers a rupture from inside that, in part, made him the tenant of this house.
Conjure
The street at night usually delivers a measure of serenity, or at least a kind of peaceful weight: A slumbering electric village that blots out the stars in accord with the leaves that bob under streetlights.
I spot my Jetta on the curb, still new enough not to look tatty. It is hard to enjoy. I’m certain that every wall in back of me is made of pasteboard, actors moving in on me and demanding my undoing with some innocent-sounding request. Somebody turns the corner toward me from the dining room, advances, resets and enters again. This loop is running several times a second.
The Vogelsons got one of the first MINI Coopers in the neighborhood and they’ve parallel parked it right in back of the Jetta. Today the light hit just so on the cottonwood that guards the Jetta, so I thought I would sit on the trunk and watch the evening fill in, but once in place I realized I was just a guy trying to watch himself watch something, like a friend who keeps calling out parts of a song that you can’t wait to be over.
All I could think about was how depressing it was to sit in a neighborhood full of married people with chalky legs who puttered around in striped jean shorts. You think one of them could have a decent ass, that would add some property value at least. Sometimes I’ll hear snatches of the music they play and it’s even worse. I write notes in my head that the spouses could leave in marker on the fridge: “I can no longer bargain my way around the fact that I married into no ass,” just a single capital letter for the signature and then nobody sees them again, they’re off to the Merchant Marines.
So I tried re-posing in this late afternoon portrait in my head, went inside to dust off my pants, came back out and wiped down the trunk of the car and took the perch again, but I gave up because what kind of gimcrack theater was I trying to put on here. There’s nothing to look at once the cigarette’s over.
Can I request a Groundhog Day loop where you don’t learn anything, just emerge on a fall evening after one of those naps that are so restorative that you feel like you’ve been saved from an alarm bell that’s been playing in your head for days? Emerge from the house, have the first smoke of the early evening, arc the butt out into the street and there you are, emerging onto the front porch again.
With my ass on the trunk and my feet on the bumper, the only thing I could see were several hours of dappled joblessness, each house bleached to a jealous idiocy, no arrivals or entrances worth a moment’s rise of the heart: I was fucking marooned.
After the most recent layoff — my third in two years — something turned. As if some unconscious group urge to self-preservation, the last of my drug buddies disbanded. There weren’t any fights. Nobody ODed, although it was always a possibility. It just broke like a bubble that couldn’t stand its own tension.
I don’t miss the mornings with my nose crusted up, crashing and wondering how anyone was going to get home without getting arrested or searched under the informant sun…wasn’t anybody going to say anything? One morning we’d wrapped up about 9:30 on the 14th floor of whatever building we ended up in after last call and we rode down in the same elevator as a guy fresh up and ready to go with a spendy road bike. He could have said something, just turned and said it and saved us eight months.
We made it to the parking lot and Ember said she would drive me home, but then took me all the way out to Lakeside Moors. I begged as she kept making the wrong turns until we were on I-70 West, wheedling me the whole time. Took me to the suburbs, my socks slick with foot muck inside my dress shoes, got vodka out and started inviting people over.
Now I see the face: Once your eyes map a face in the night boughs, you’ll start searching it out whether you want to see it or not; mine is a giant or golem with a steam shovel jaw. When a light breeze moves the branch of his lower face, it looks like he’s chewing. This filled me with loathing the first time I saw it and I nicknamed him Diln.
Diln, I could feel, was the god-mascot of this block, presiding over the milky cloistering of those who didn’t realize the prelude — before everybody sorted themselves into dependable breeding and economic teams — was the show.
Diln had never heard of the nights through which we used to roll like marbles. Where he presides, there isn’t even a word for them. Back then there were no faces to look for in the green, black and yellow canopies of Lower Downtown.
O Diln, father of the bland new sect, I was ever your herald. I knew somehow you were coming to exsanguinate the night when my late 20s started slipping out of my fingers and I kept hearing yet another ex had a baby with the very next guy they met after me. Three in a row.
Diln, they are your wards now; guard them well from your throne in the branches as they push their strollers home with sore tits. Soon the kids will be old enough for a babysitter and they can go to the community center and see acoustic sets from washouts for $15.
I’m going to strike tomorrow when the sun blots your outline. I’m going to cut that branch off, then we’ll see who wants to make faces in the dark.
Remember
I was 28, a few years before I became the occupant here and a few years after I learned I could parlay my final heartbreak from AB into a multi-year tear across town and gorge on her many, many proxies, drunk and skied out of my face the whole time. Peak earnings, too, I was dressing like a whole different genus out there and the right people noticed.
One morning I’d kicked some of the right people out of my apartment around 7 a.m. and had almost drunk my way to a thin sort of sleep by around 10 when the call from Mom came. Could I be ready ASAP, she and Tom were coming to get me because there was trouble with J.
A three-hour drive, reeking and strung out in the cat hair all over the back seat, every color bulging and smearing outside the window, I mistook the car’s chassis for my own skin, braced for impact or humiliation several times a minute. I think I was slurring when my stepdad, Tom, tried to make small talk. He was into fly fishing.
Mom was too focused on the mission to interrogate me, there wasn’t a dram of blood in her hands as she clamped the wheel: Beverly had rung Mom 45 minutes before Mom roused me. Beverly was leaving J and there was some kind of scene at J’s house when she tried to extract her stuff and could we help.
Maybe Mom and Tom could help. When a piece of gravel popped off the windshield or she changed lanes, I dug my feet into the floormats. I would have traded the souls of anyone in that car for a hamburger and a shake and sleep but maybe first getting my dick sucked in a dark and well-appointed hotel room it wasn’t too much trouble. Tom kept asking me questions in between patting Mom’s leg. My answers got shorter and shorter until he gave it up.
We got there and had a brief huddle with Beverly and some blinking avian who I guessed was from her book club. I’d met some of them before, but I didn’t exactly keep a logbook of people in bad shirts who carried Ziploc bags of almonds around.
Inside J was cutting a rigid back-and-forth pattern between the kitchen and the dining room. His eyes had a preternatural extra layer of white around the pupil and iris. He picked at the back of his hands. A queen mattress was jammed on end halfway down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs a wire statuette picador sat on the floor, bent cruelly at the waist.
He talked in a register I’d never heard as the room sharpened and contracted; my hamstrings were so tight with dehydration, I couldn’t even sweat: “She thinks she can talk like that to me like a clinician I’m not her fucking patient talk to me like that…”
I stood with Mom and Tom for several minutes of this before retreating to the entrance of his neat Tudor and straddled the door jamb, one foot on the porch and one on the hardwood like a sentry weighing the upside of getting executed for desertion. Beverly’s torso and folded arms were visible in a break through the leaves where she stood and talked to her book club buddy.
“…managing that place for those corpses and she piles up student debt and writes that shit and I cook and I cook…” I heard him say before the voice trailed back into the kitchen.
I couldn’t hear what Mom was saying, her voice low flat like it gets when she’s upset and trying to rein it in, the rhythm of sensible questions being repeated to a hurricane.
“SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING” Yowls and sobs after. I’d never heard such a sound, Beverly milling around on the sidewalk, me spanning two hells over the kick plate of the entryway. “A SANDWICH IS BEYOND HER A SANDWICH AND SHE’S GOING TO COME IN HERE AND STEAL FROM ME”
Some people will have a morning like that and back off drugs. I backed off Uncle J. I couldn’t have that shit, I needed my beauty rest, green curry, and donuts so I could recharge in time to get all banged up at a rooftop bar on Sunday.
I finally slept on the ride back to Denver.
Next: First Floor