Dwelling Solo RPG Session 2: Come Sit By Me
This is the living room scene generated from the prompts on pages 28-29 of Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. You can read the first installment here. In this passage, the narrator has just descended a staircase into the living room…read or listen below!
LIVING ROOM
Scene-Setting: “The living room is dimly lit by the glow from the streetlights and moon filtering into the room. I start to walk through the room, but with each step, my legs feel shaky, like they’re no longer as sure in the knees as they usually are.”
The shift in scent is utter, it’s her curated mix of all the bright and fussy cans and bottles you’d see in advertisements with white backgrounds like rock videos, plus the sum of her mom’s house dust and what she cooked. It is like a cannonball of beach coconut, steam and gravies, candy-flower room deodorizers. I am felled.
I am still on the floor when an arm reaches out from the shadows on the couch end and pats the middle cushion: Come sit by me. I go where I am bidden. I gape at her as she forms, legs tucked in at the end of the couch, hair bound in back, working her cuticles. She could vanish into those for an afternoon, so absolute that I wasn’t sure which one of us had disappeared.
The scent-envelope lasts about as long as an FM summer hit. The harder I peer, the quicker the scent weakens, and her outline with it. There’s just a small depression in the cushion left when the TV comes on. The chunky green numbers don’t match the style of what I know J’s TV to display. His TV is old, but not as old as these green numbers.
Channel 84: The blond wood coffee table with the oval frame that had a hollow for magazines that you could see through the inline glass panels at either end. That should have tipped me off.
Skinny kid with brown eyes and cropped hair, underweight at about six feet, cap with some kind of golf resort logo parked on the back of his head. He’s side-lit from the sliding glass door by a summer sun’s mid-afternoon arson, its smoke a colossal column of boredom that breeds the legion of usual aches. You can beat the first ache with lunch, the second with masturbation, but they multiply regardless. He lifts the needle on a record player on a shelf behind him. The bookshelf matches the coffee table.
It’s “Trust” by 7 Seconds, their love song, last track on The Crew from 1984. He can never pick which part he’s air banding, he switches between bass, guitar, drums and vocals several times. It’s just 2:17 long.
He cues it up again. This mope is tireless. On the third play I recognize it’s me and I watch the fourth and fifth play through my fingers, sick with shame. The scene isn’t supposed to be lit like this, the world outside so bleached with light that dusk doesn’t seem possible even though there was one just the day before. It was lit by footlights in a small music club. When the chorus hit I’d look down — I’d have to be on bass or guitar for this one — and see her in the front row. Somehow it mattered that my band had booked the gig and I hadn’t known she’d be there.
That poor over-freighted melody. The sentiment of the lyrics was all stolen, they were show-home staging tricks. The idea was always the melody that would corkscrew us inside each other. It’s always the melody. Hijacking that was the false voice that you think will make you understood at 17. Because you still wouldn’t know what to say to her or do with her before or after the song.
I just wanted her to call me once that summer, I wasn’t even excited about going to college.
Channel 130-142: I recognize myself immediately this time.
Good God Almighty, I even dreamed myself up an eye patch in this one, pulling up next to her at a stoplight on one of those night-cooled four-laners with landscaped medians that connect master-planned stretches of this and that. What would be playing. Maybe Funkdoobiest if I wanted it dangerous and cavalier, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin if I wanted to instill uptempo regret in her. In Version One I’d turn slowly from behind the wheel of my astonishing vehicle and regard her with dead eyes, because what do you do for vindication except stare at them from a distance greater than the span of their retreat, one-up them for scars, accomplishments and mystery? Streak like metal and liquid across the dome of their dream world like they did yours.
In Version Two on Channel 131 she has girlfriends in the car to witness what a dreary plane she’d confined herself to when she let me go; they gawk as I light a cigarette just before the green light and the hookiest part of the sample hits and vroom, that’s that. The channels advance faster. Apparently I devised a whole career’s worth of these.
Oh look, now I’m in a track suit with bodyguards in a resort town where she happens to be staying with her family, again with the eye patch, not very imaginative to keep replicating that touch. The channels keep flipping through one tawdry coup de théâtre after another, all shows of strength and indifference, you’d think this I could have worked a rescue or two in there. I feel sick, but I stay on the couch.
Channel 187: I look like I’m in my late 20s now in the pool hall. It’s a well-appointed one: The regulation tables have beautiful felt, the rails are lustrous, the lights are even and the rafters high. I’m overdressed for Denver as usual.
Her cousin is there with her boyfriend and there is a lot of laughter. Nobody besides me gets too invested in their turn during our doubles game. Those couples’ games would stretch, the last seven balls invincible. We’d try to coach, but it would be seven balls perpetually because the girls weren’t that interested and the boys were too drunk.
The pool hall is crowded, young professional kids on a Friday night and there seems to be a lot of people we don’t know forming a gallery around our table. What is it with these onlookers? They’re almost all men, a cluster of ectomorphs.
Then I notice Bryce is there, looking at ease, he’ll be the one on her arm at her little sister’s wedding, ropy and tan as a lifeguard. There’s Andrew, for whom she jilted me before Bryce. Gentle Karl is there in a tartan driving cap and his long, brown hair.
I sink the 10 ball with a beautiful cut that rockets it neatly to a corner, magnetized to the cushion for what looks like a gymnasium’s length. I leave the 20 oz. cue on the table and walk away unnoticed.
Channel 102: That same pulverizing sun except it lights the respiratory junk of the desert gambling tower roofs and the awful concrete that boils and the cars are its lava. Drawing the thick inner shades, it’s 10 a.m. At some point the rolling chatter of the machines turned into the choir of Mammon as the night we had T-boned the oncoming morning.
Please stay here with me.
What is sold to you as fun under the dead sun and the concrete. She is as calm as a cultist. There’s no need for a fight because there’s nothing to fight about, she is going to walk right back into the heart of that thing that whispers in the spaces between $1 coins hitting the metal troughs; throbs behind the lit ad panels, their jumbo lobsters and necropolis summers; gurgles beneath the green water that conjures the free 11:15 show up out of the synthetic lagoon.
Please stay here with me. It’s been all night, I just want to clasp her under the sheets and drift off together. It’s very important, but her smile is fixed for sacrifice.
She goes out the door and into the hall of the 15th floor to find the elevator down.
I can’t leave the room. I should be hungry. I’m not looking out the window or watching TV, that’s just another window, except worse.
The TV turns off. There’s a trace of artificial berry lip balm and cigarette smoke on my mouth.