a ghost story

How to get to new york, part nineteen.

“The region from which these illusions arise is the life of the imagination; at the time when the development of the sense of reality took place, this region was expressly exempted from the demands of reality-testing and was set apart for the purpose of fulfilling wishes which were difficult to carry out.”

—Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud (1930)

You solitary-minded devil. A romantic old house is all you’ll need: romantic old hours. Time told in dust gathered. Melt away from the world. You come to me out of the past. You come to me with grey eyes. You ask for my time? A grandfather clock chimes midnight. Now. NOW. A pet mouse in a sweater vest scurries. The sultry hours between midnight and one, stretched flat out in a blanket of wool designed to conceal and keep warm and made into a house, a small manor. Quiet hours. Be warned, however, as the coccoon may itch and scratch before it becomes comfortable; — but what else could you expect from a “Space to Grow”, concealed away from this pesky bustle outside? It’s the dilemma of our time that we must choose between an inside and an outside life that are becoming indecipherable from one another… To juggle the hours in pre-linguistic daydreams… English (as a language) being an old house in itself… The day winds down and up like a wristwatch ticking by if you let it… But you don’t have to let it…

But to get back to the question: wouldn’t you like an old house? Wouldn’t you like a working fireplace? A dock on the lake? A house whose geometry is formed from a number of drawn out lines, grey avenues, all formed together under the structure of a space alone in a wilderness, weathered by the wind, protecting a quiet interior luxury? It’s a nice house, a big house, a Bachelardian house. Dead pricks have fallen upwards out of poverty into riches to live in that house, the one you imagine. Dead pricks have held onto inheritances, settled into the seasons in that house, separated from the meddlesome masses in that house. Dead pricks have fallen downwards, too, spiraled into poverty in that house; they lost it to someone with more — a bigger fish — will that be you? Will you return from that house, back into the American sprawl and too broke to keep your shoes tied? What about you? Well… If you’re in the world today, I’m assuming you are none of the above: you were born too late in humanity’s season to live such simple life-stories.

I’ve heard you say it over the phone through invisible wires: I’ve heard you whisper that you want to be consumed. At least more than you want to be broken. Who am I to judge? Well anyways, here’s your chance: your mother’s rich friend’s vacation home on Lake Superior is yours and yours alone for two weeks. Wait, wait: what month is this? July? Oo Aa a lake house in July. Who could ask for more?

Okay I should be honest here: I’m not speaking to you, of course I’m not — or am I? — so let’s correct the course of this craft and reset this second-person skew into something more comfortably third-person. My long-time friend L—, a name I’ll blank out with the letter L (the most innocuous of all letters!) and an em dash for the sake of privacy, was fresh out of a two-year situationship which broke her foot and her heart and left her high-and-dry for an aimless post-grad depression spanning over three years. Around the start of that spiraling, L— took to her mother’s friend’s lake-house for two weeks the summer. Strange things happened. I’m going to tell you all about it, though there’s a good chance L— herself is reading this now; and if you are, and I know how busy you are these days, I’m sorry for telling your story for you. Here’s hoping I can do it some sort of justice here. It hasn’t left my head since you told it all to me on that road trip.

Before the quiet couple of months prior to her trip north, L—’s foot was broken quite severely by the rear tire of her ex-boyfriend’s Toyota Prius. It had been a quiet night of loud emotions. Underneath the blue-yellow lights outside her class-C apartment complex, hidden away in an alleyway, she attempted to convince a guy she’d met in a mid-level linguistics class four months prior to stay a little longer. He was the most recent in a long string of flings, situationships, and partners and after he packed up his things from her apartment — some of her things too, btw — she came up to his car window, politely knocked on the glass of the car’s passenger side door which the unshaven man then refused to roll down, or look towards in general, while he put the car into drive and sped around the corner. The back tire of the Prius rolled clean over L—’s unassuming foot, one toe at a time, but with a quick enough succession of pain that all five little piggies went wee wee wee all the way home together. The pain flooded in, intense and all at once, as if the breakage had lit her blood on fire inside her arteries. She collapsed onto the asphalt, howling, but soon stood up and hobbled back to her apartment where she threw pillows around for thirty to forty minutes before calling an Uber to the hospital. Besides the pain, there was a certain stubbornness in L—’s blood — and of course I love this in her. She refused to let her ex-situationship know it had even happened, that he had ever even hurt her physically, for the sole reason of Fuck him. Fuck his number. Fuck him fuck him fuck him. He broke all the toes in her foot, and he would never get the privilege of knowing, unless his soundcloud rap career somehow took off and in such an event, L— would end him with a tweet. But until then his number would remain blocked until the end of time. For all I know, since his soundcloud career never took off, his number is still blocked.

A foot with a full set of toes are simple and easy things to forget about when properly functioning; but a broken foot is impossible to forget. It’s one thing to find a job when freshly graduated into a recession; it’s another thing entirely to find a job when one cannot walk. There’s almost always restaurant work to be found; good luck finding any. The comfortable remote jobs are fiercely protected by people over the age of 30 and there’s not a whole lot of trickling down to people in their twenties these days. What’s left, then, but a diet of Frozen Microwaved Food and Bed Rotting? Head in the Proverbial Tank? Lobster in a Restaurant Aquarium?

With a phone from ten years ago chronically half-charged, with a handful of social media feeds, with a collection of pillows and blankets in enough positions to keep the bedsores and cramps from taking over completely, L— felt the disappointments settle in like so much dust. She found out from her mother that she wouldn’t be invited to Italy along with the rest of the family. “I’m so sorry honey,” her mother had told her. “But we can’t be showing weakness in front of the Thompsons. How would you even get into a gondola?”

I remember her texts to me about it, her disappointments, each text a short chip of sadness. I remember vaguely how baffled I was that anyone’s family could afford trips to Europe every year, but I knew L— came from wealth. I was trying, at the time, to get better about not being petty towards anyone with any money. And not even wealth could heal a foot after it’s been run over by a car. Even wealth couldn’t get her outside without crutches, even wealth couldn’t help her in feeling like she had any hope for the future. The last thing she wanted to do was press her parents on getting her a job somewhere. They could, sure. But that would be a defeat. She did give in eventually, but not until last year.

And I’ve been inside that post-grad desperation too, — who hasn’t? — I’ve been inside the iced-over port city of Aimless Agony, trapped inside all the time without any of metaphorical windows or doorways appearing, those which might make youth into a worthwhile transition into some sort of success, and the feeling is of aimless sinking into the quicksands of time passing. There’s nothing to do and there are cameras everywhere. I think most of my generation has experienced this feeling; we’re bound down to this strange cliff-face between two precipices — that of the undead neoliberal world order (1968-2008) and the cybernetic aftermath of it (2020-?) — and that’s all to say we will know no peace or understanding in our lifetime. All the rules have been torn up. It is what it is. At least it’s interesting.

And I like my generation. I like Gen-Z. There’s a certain hardiness in us. We’re left out of the best bars and clubs because we weren’t drinking back when they existed, we’re left trying to find something, trying to find anything that could stick, as the day becomes night and the towers that grow in the animosity of the culture at large begin to cast their shadows darker than anything I could imagine, darker than anything you could tell me on a night when we’re both too drunk on our misery to be positive. Everything’s been torn to shreds for the sake of the bare minimum. I don’t mind building things in the wake of such. It sucks that we have to; but as I said, oh well. The only answer might be to put out some straw on the floor and sleep on the most familiar patch of Earth we can find.

ANYWAYS, back to the story: as the first month of post-grad life went on, L— began to feel like slime in her apartment, and as the lease was coming to a close with no reason to stick around her college town after she’d graduated, she opted to move back in with her parents in rural Michigan. In the passenger’s seat of an SUV packed to the gills with cardboard boxes and trash bags of thrifted outfits, her mother glanced over to see L— heavy breathing at the window at the countryside going past, fogging up the glass. “You know,” her mother said. “As a matter of fact, despite you wanting to be all bohemian all the time, I know you secretly deepdown want some kind of quiet domesticity in the countryside. I was like a hippie when I was your age and all I wanted really was to settle down with a nice husband and a nice place in the suburbs, I just didn’t know it yet.” And L— didn’t know what to say about this.

“I know just the place…,” her mother continued. “A very romantic house. Up on Superior… Very beautiful this time of year… My friend, and I’ve known her since I was your age, she’ll be gone for two weeks at the end of the month and I think it would be perfect for you to recharge after a stressful run of things, don’t you think? She needs a house-sitter, after all. All you would have to do is keep the plants watered and you could do that.” Her mother glanced down at her foot. “You could do that, couldn’t you?”, she asked. And L— wasn’t in a position to say no or anything so instead she said nothing. It was July, after all. What a time to sit on a dock… broken foot or no… “I could water the plants, yeah,” L— said, as if confirming the inevitable all while continuing to watch the countryside flit by outside the passenger’s side window.

One must be sure, when leaving the house, to bring along the things that will keep you as a person who’s about something. In many such cases, this is a laptop or a smartphone or maybe a Nintendo DS. For the two week stay at her mother’s friend’s lakehouse, L— brought along a series of devices to be used against (and some for) insomnia, some reading material, and quite a bit of tanning lotion.

Her mother drove her up to the cabin soon after she moved home. When they saw the lake they sat looking out it along the side of the road, an endless cold expanse. L— shuffled in her seat. Mother and daughter, not saying a word. They drove past a rough-and-tumble whitewashed hotel with a sign declaring The Whitefin Inn, standing like any building build during its time: stocky and firm against the gales coming in along the coastline. A small meadow cowered behind it, leaves fluttering and making a loud ruckus. The hotel looked like it might belong better to Nova Scotia than Michigan but the car hummed past it all the same, not caring much for regional aesthetics, immediately arriving at a metal gate that was once painted red — some small chips of paint remain — with a passcode and a camera perched on top. The number was 1234; L—’s mother typed it in quickly. And then, past the gate’s passcode, the car arrived at a large ranch style house facing inland. Behind the house ran a long wooden dock over the grass and then over the water splaying up and over, splashing against the rocks, splashing against the roots of the ceders. There was a small blue boat house nearby. A pontoon underneath a blue tarp. The grey trunked Aspens towered at a great height over the house and their leaves speckled the whole yard with gold and yellow — through the whistling, bristling leaves high above, the dull blue of summer sky peaked through.

It was such a sight that L—’s heart broke into a hundred small pieces just seeing it all. All that was missing was a lighthouse in the distance and, well, sure enough, there was one in the distance, as L— would eventually learn. It was only visible at night by the light of its occasional flash coming out and over the dark moonlit maw of the long, dark lake.

L—’s mother’s friend, a woman named Léa, had been in the middle of packing her bags for a trip to Singapore and she gave the two of them a tour of the place, though slowly, for the sake of L— hobbling around on her crutches with her broken foot leading their way through the dark inside of the house, showed her what plants she was to water, and when. L— kept becoming distracted by Léa’s great, whtie veneers. The veneers didn’t not work, per se. But the older woman couldn’t quite close her mouth. Shaking herself free from staring at her teeth, L— mentioned the general lack of any television anywhere. “Oh this is a screenless house,” Léa said, moving a chair back to the dining table. “It’s a refuge.”

L— nodded at this blankly. Hm. “Maybe I’ll leave my phone in your car,” she her mother, who rebutted “but what if you fall and break something again?”, — L— hadn’t told her mother how exactly her foot was broken, btw — to which her mother’s friend said, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, shrugging her shoulders, “There’s a phone at the Whitefin. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

Spending two weeks without a phone or any wired/wireless connection to the outside world seems small and pedestrian in hindsight, as if it were some event written in a planner from last year — two lines across two weeks with the words “no phone” sharpied in excitedly; but in the immediate stages of preparing for a two-week phone break — a bender on friction-filled reality — such a detox feels quite a bit more unprecedented, quite a bit less certain. It becomes an abyss to cross.

When she told me the story in full, L— explained how she felt excited to feel loneliness again. “I had a feeling that I hadn’t really encountered loneliness, and I mean a healthy loneliness, since I was very small,” she explained. “Everything since I started spending my time online has been like a… I don’t know, a diabetic loneliness? Empty carbs of feeling alone. I felt like this was a good chance to get away from all that. I wanted to feel lonely but only if it was going to be a constructive loneliness. I saw my chance. I took it. You know?”

While they were touring the house, amid Léa’s grand sweeping hand gestures at various (clearly expensive) appliances, L—’s mother returned from the kitchen with a cup of chamoile tea, came up to L—’s side to say, “What a perfect place for you to recover! No stressful distractions. No pressing deadlines. No need to apply to anything. Let it filter out. I know how your generation is. How tight wound you all are!”

Léa smiled at this, now moving a couch up against the wall from the center of the living room where it had drifted. “Tell me about it — my secretary is twenty-eight.”

“What’s upstairs?” L— asked, ignoring Léa, looking up the dark landing at the upstairs. There was some sort of static in the air. As if it were superimposed. With her arms in the saddles of the cructches, L— rubbed her eyes and the static was gone.

“Oh just the same old same old,” Léa said. “A guest room, a bathroom, attic”

Her mother and Léa left together the next morning, arm in arm, like they’re setting out to find the wizard of Oz along a yellow-cobbled road, leaving the house entirely in L—’s hands as if L— were the Wicked Witch who had a house dropped on top of her. The full weight of the house was hers for two weeks and without haste she took herself outside on her crutches to do the one thing she’d been waiting for two days straight to do: light a cigarette, a bad habit which her mother (thankfully) knew nothing about.

The moment after L— had lit it, though, and took that first inhale, feeling the tension dissipate from her tense heart, arms, back, across her chest, smoking suddenly seemed like such a childish thing to do with the house glowering down on her like it was.

The second-story windows and the porch made the front of the house look terribly like a face and not at all a pleasant one. Taken with the depth of silence outside which made itself more and more clear — the leaves on the trees still fluttered, but the sound felt distant and far away — a simmering eerie uncertainty crept in. Not even a bird called. The breeze was too thin to conceal the wellspring of nothingness that bloomed and flowered around the house in a stream. The squeak of L—’s lighter sounded like a car’s brake squealing and she was stopped, sealed into the moment, by the sudden contrast the sound of her lighter made to all this dead air. The cigarette’s end burnt down away from her lips as a sense of irrelevance, smallness, crept over her and she herself felt soggy within all this irrelevance. This was an old house, it occurred to her. No matter how fresh it looks on its outside, this house has seen things: cruel and stern memories. This house has known more winters than summer, let’s be clear, being in the part of the country it’s in, and such secrets catch in the air like dust particles.

Winter, in the midwest United States, at least, is a tremendously more ancient season than summer. The opposite goes for more tropical climates. But in this part of the world, bordering Canada (Winter owns the nation of Canada), summers become grey avenues between grey bones whitened every year by fluorescent snowfall, a powdery preservative of millennia past. This house here, L— felt dimly, is a tomb. Certainly there would be more emotional and spiritual baggage in, say, a European castle with its hundreds of years of seasons and tragedy, but an American gothic house such as this is more unsettling in its blunt nearness. Certainly the American ranch style house is an offshoot of colonial gothic, but unlike the gothic architecture of the third world, here the US the colonists have eaten the ghosts of the dead and mass-murdered, and have tried to stomach the indigestion. L— felt the grey avenues of her own memory tie up with that of this great sun-stained whitewashed house; it took some of the weight off of her own back to remember the summer houses of her childhood and to stand them up next to this one, ehre — it helped take some of the weight of the silence away, but it left her feeling vacant the same. At least the cigarette was nice.

She pocketed the butt and started her hobbling crutch-walk across the front yard towards the lake. A small bird stood in her way, looking up at her: a small songbird. She stood as still as she could on her crutches, hoping not to startle the small creature away, wishing vaguely she knew more names of birds. Maybe she knew the name of this one already — a sparrow?

“We’re having a moment,” she said cheerfully to the bird. The little animal stood before her, looked up at her amicably. Another bird of the same type flew down and stood next to it. And another. And a robin. L— realized, at first dully, that despite all of these birds in front of her — what were they expecting of her? — there was not a single birdsong in the air, only a continuing dead silence. The birds continued fluttering down, landing on the dewy grass, and L— didn’t feel all too alarmed — they were small birds, she could certainly take them on broken foot or not — but something about their presence felt strangely forbidding. She hobbled around them carefully, telling them “you all look like you saw a ghost! And my god, If I was the ghost you saw, I’d be bored!” The birds watched her wobble away to where she sat on the dock in the bleached summer sun, the splashing water cooling her feet and legs and wetting her cast, where she forgot entirely about the birds for the time being.

Later on during this first day, after idly poking around the flowerbed in the back yard, she went to the kitchen to cook herself some pasta at the narrow gas stove and she, for the first time since, reflected on the birds in the yard and wondered about their silence, whether the quiet of the place had steadied their usually loud birdlives into something akin to a quiet contemplation. She looked around outside the window for the birds. What was with them?

The water began to boil. Steam rose thick. She reached over the counter for the box of angel hair and tripped on her crutch, pushed a nearby empty glass jar of dry rice onto the floor, and with the back of her wrists as she caught herself. Too late for the jar, though. It fell to the marbled floor and exploded rice mixed with glass across the four quadrants of the kitchen. “Fuck,” she said. She assessed the damage for a couple minutes, looked around the empty kitchen. Her eye came to rest, finally, on a small black ball on the wall above the dish rack: a round security camera she hadn’t noticed before. Had it always been there?

“And there was a camera,” L— said, throwing her hands up over her drink. An elderly couple walked into the Whitefin Inn behind her, and the bell above the door chimed. She turned to watch them walk down to a table on the other end of the empty bar.

“There was a camera?” asked Sue, glancing at the elderly couple who just sat down as the older man took a menu up in his hands, fogged up his glasses with his breath, rubbed their lenses on his thick flannel shirt. Sue was one of three bartenders at the Whitefin, in her late 30s. L— and her had been quick to get along after L— hobbled into the place. It was early in the evening and the summer regulars were beginning to come through for food and drinks. There was a Friday fish fry special — a massive draw for the Irish Catholics in the area — but the place swarmed anyways with tourists during the summer season generally. According to Sue, though, The Whitefin became a husky solitude the winter and was often abandoned outside of regular maintenance check-ins to make sure no one had broken into the place.

“I hadn’t noticed it before,” L— continued. “It was above the cabinets, like the security cameras they have in stores and outside restaurants in alleyways. You know.”

“That’s interesting… A camera…”

“I mean she might be watching me. Privlidged rich bitch that she is.”

Sue laughed. “That’s not what I was thinking of,” she said.

“I think I was just embarrased at destroying her rice jar,” L— said sheepishly.

“I know Sue. She wouldn’t care. I’m just thinking. Keep me updated next time you come in. Wouldn’t want to cause a hubub without reason.”

“A hubub?” L— asked, then quickly changing to topic of conversation to Léa but she couldn’t get a whole lot more out of Sue in terms of information. Sure. Whatever. “What’s this drink called?” L— asked, eventually, changing the subject.

“That one’s Time’s stopped. Not terribly popular but I like it. Gary made it. Kind of a pain to make, though.”

“Hmm.”

“Let me know if anything else happens at the house, okay?”

L— said sure, finished the cocktail and left and, as she hobbled out the door, hobbled home, hobbled up the stairs. the shadows all along the stairwell had grown with the evening of her second day staying in this house wearing down to a close. the lamps took on a yellow light in which everything in the house began to levitate softly until she shut off the bedside lamp and the house went dark.

While L— slept that night, something strange happened. Something she would never know about. Various pieces of the nineteenth century furniture furnishing the place came alive. First was the table with the waxed and sanded legs who walked about on her nightly routine, to the kitchen, then to the library to meet up with a rosewood chair with a red cushion whom she drank tea with to pass the time. Keep in mind, though, with all of this: the table with waxed and sanded legs didn’t know that she was a table at all… she didn’t know what a table even was, how could she?… for all she knew her name was Rhodna.

The second to come alive was the rosewood chair, who drank Rhodna’s tea and gave quiet compliments on the botanical quality of the tea — “quite.. hm.. scrumptious!” — in her cockney accent.

Rhodna the table blushed at this, a slight red in her cherrywood, but wanted to change the subject and talk about the “daarling, and might I add, rather raavishing,” second-floor loveseat, Björn, who was known around the house as rather quiet and mysterious, himself keeping his own past on the DL — he didn’t know how any of the others would react knowing he was IKEA furniture, hadn’t been handcrafted. That’s to say, he didn’t feel too much of a desire to explain his origins to anyone or anything, thank you very much — and Rhodna hadn’t the faintest idea about him, which Sharon the rosewood chair insisted was important to remember. “You don’t know his origins, my dear,” she reassured. “He could be from Turkey or worse, Ireland.”

It wasn’t just Rhodna, the table with waxed and sanded legs, and Sharon, the rosewood chair, but the rest of the house came to life slowly also, though not necessarily for a prolonged period of time; for instance, the china plates behind the oak display only came to life for minutes at a time, small blips of consciousness before a fading away inside the great dull beast of the antiquated display cabinet they were trapped inside of, which itself clopped around the dining room like a great bull for a handful of minutes before exhausting itself into a dull mopeing around the place.

As the sunlight began to filter in, the furniture rearranged itself to where it had been, though memories, even in habit, are not always accurate and sometimes they would be an inch or two off the mark. The shadows lengthened again as morning arrived and all became as it had been at sunset.

L— pulled down her sleep mask and looked around at the room from on top queen bed. She looked at the side table, the dresser, the nightstand. Nothing obvious had changed, so she slept for another two to three hours before getting up out of bed to pour herself some cereal from Léa’s collection of fiber-full cereals sourced from around the world.

Here’s a poem by Dylan Thomas:

“Out of the sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good;
All could not disappoint;
There must, be praised, some certainty,
If not of loving well, then not,
And that is true after perpetual defeat."

(Out of the Sighs, Dylan Thomas)

The days went by slowly. L— came across the above poem in the small library in the back corner of the house, with a northfacing window (the room was consistently washed with yellow sunlight) looking out on the lake. She came across a book of Ginsberg’s collected poetry too, this one placed perniciously out of reach on top of a bookshelf for some reason; she had had to place a chair beside the shelf to get the copy down but it was all worthwhile as the collection had helped her decide one morning, near the end of the first week, sipping her second green tea of the day, that she would try and find a way to love and trust again, broken foot and all.

She played the role of idle gardener too, now and then, putting her hands into the mulch, feeling out the roots of the flowers, petting black-eyed susans. She caught a ladybug crawling across her hand and she felt okay with this. She brushed it off, though, once it began running up her arm and became more of a nuissance than a nice little thing.

The wind outside had increased throughout the week and she began to hear the waves spray against the dock grow louder against the silence of the yard. The silence… Looking up from the flower bed she noticed a slight hum in the air. Some metallic sound. Hm.

During this rather uncertain period of her stay, she spent more time with her mother’s friend's collection of pocket paperbacks. Most interestingly was, in the far corner by the window, yes… Way in the back… Léa owned a vast, wide-ranging collection of yellowed religious works from around the world made into handy portable (and pocketable!) books ranging from a king james bible, a 1967 edition of the new groovy testament, man!, the new living translation of the bible, the Hebrew bible, the Quran, seeds of contemplation, various confessions, the Baghdad Gita, the book of mormon, the talmud, Crowley’s book of law and book of troth (interesting…), Ram Dass’s be here now, and new seeds of contemplations. While perusing this last book and finding an odd moment of kinship with Thomas Merton, L— noticed above the small nook where all the religious works were stacked, another camera: a round black ball of a security camera, just like the last one.

Another Camera? L— thought incredulously. Where are these coming from? She looked back and forth along the wall. The ceiling fan moaned softly. A thin layer of dust coated the air. The iMac monitor at the desk had a thin layer of dust on top of it. Modern electronics seem to gather dust rather quickly. There was no dust on the security camera, though. How odd.

She turned back to the book, read for a small bit in the red chair, opened another, a pulpy 50s paperback of Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel, and came across the line, “The bellhop beat on the door of the bedroom while I was still underwater in the tub. It surprised me that I could hear him. The noise came through the thick steel tub and through the water, a thumping, ringing sound.” And as soon as she looked up from the page, L— realized the metallic ringing sound had returned: a low hum, almost inaudible.

She looked up and around the room. Above the doorway, a new security camera had appeared. L— stood up like a shot and almost collapsed on her broken foot. Maybe she had missed it? No, there’s no way I missed it. It has to be me, she thought. I must be going insane. She had to touch the camera to make sure it was there, she decided, so she pulled the wooden chair behind the desk to the doorway, climbed on top, and found herself close and intimate with this newly appeared camera, all the more sinister because of how sneakily it had appeared.

She tapped the lens softly. “Shit, it’s real,” she said, blushing, now fully aware of her face being right smack dab in the center of the camera so that if Léa was watching her, she’d be seeing nothing but L—’s face. She stepped down to the floor and hobbled back onto her crutch.

Dragging the chair back, she tucked it under the desk but… as the chair skidded, and as she glanced around the top of the room’s drywall, she noticed something strange: A hazy, black dot, like a sticker on the wall above a shelf of business books. Maybe a spot from straining her eyes for too long, but no, it stays on the wall when she moved her eyes and looked at it from different angles... She hobbled to the wall and noticed, with a shock, that the dot was very real and appeared to be growing in size, growing slightly out from the wall as if the drywall were opening around this object, giving birth to this object. L— realized with horror that something was emerging from the wall. Round and black, it was another security camera. L— almost fell over. But she held strong to her crutches, swung the chair to the bookshelf, and climbed up to get a close look at this newly birthed camera. She tapped its glass once, put her hand around it to feel if it was fastened to the wall and… just like that… the security camera popped out clean from the wall, leaving clean flat drywall behind it as if it had never been attached at all.

Now holding one of the round and black security cameras that had so haunted her these past couple days, L— took this opportunity to drop it on the floor where it thumped and rolled. The humor of this struck her before the terror: she laughed. Cackled, almost. An insane sort of laugh that she couldn’t hold back. Her life had been something of a long series of resigned adaptations to moments of crisis like this. (A breaking point? Perhaps.) Without thinking she climbed down and slid the chair to the doorway to remove the camera that had appeared above the religious texts, too. But after she had plucked out this second camera, she noticed that a third had appeared above the iMac, and the situation became rapidly less amusing and her face became stoney, her mouth narrow.

“They just kept appearing, like they were spawning in from the walls, like the wall was making them and pushing them out and it was organic, like the wall was making them, like the wall was growing cameras inside of it and pushing them out, like it was giving birth to them,” L— said, holding onto the “like” statements until she was completely out of breath. She took a long and slow sip from her cocktail and looked at Sue with crazed eyes. “Afterwards I went around the house with the vacuum cleaner with the attachment just like sucking them off the walls and I feel so weird saying all this and I feel so fucking absolutely insane right now and-”

Behind the bar, Sue stopped rattling a shaker and gently interrupted. “It’s not you, it’s the house” she said. L— looked back at her as if she had been slapped across the face.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Sue sighed. “Give me one second.” And she finished shaking the drink at-hand and pouring it for an older man in wraparound shades, she returned to tell the following story.

The house was renovated shortly after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the general market collapse which followed shortly after. Within months the neighborhood around the Whitefin Inn filled with rich escapees from finance and banking spheres, one of which was a middle-aged woman named Sandra Bennet who renovated the house directly across from the Whitefin, built a metal fence, and assembled a rather intricate security system around the place. A self-proclaimed germaphobe, she had been one the few women to break into a senior position at New York City’s branch of Jane Street in the 90s, and she was one of the few to see the writing on the wall before the American markets imploded. She also, I might add, saw the writing on the wall with her marriage the year before, and had quickly and efficiently filed for divorce from Mr. Bennet, who was still well connected despite the market crash.

Sue herself only met Sandra twice. Sandra would come to the Whitefin only when things became especially bad at the house and she would say something about her germaphobia, make a big show of wearing nylon gloves, but order enough gin and tonics so that her germaphobia became a thing of the more-sober past. Most of this tale comes from Sandra’s housekeeper, a small indigenous woman who was thrice vetted through an intricate application-interview process that lasted three or four months after Sandra moved into the residence and was looking for someone to cook and clean for her. The woman’s name was Waasnoda (“Dawn” in Ojibwe), went by Waasy for short, detested when anyone said “Waaasy-up”, and proudly never took an English name even if english was her first and only language; she eventually pushed herself through studies of Ojibwe later life but only after she saw the things that she had supposedly seen in Sandra Bennet’s house that summer of 2009, and only after she was put on trial to give testimony on the disappearance of Mr. Bennet.

The first red flag that occurred to Waasy while she worked and cleaned and cooked for Ms. Bennet while the rich former-comopolitan spent most of her days sunbathing on the dock, or vigorously checking her emails to see if any of her peers have been indicted for fraud, was that her former husband, Mr. Arnold Bennet, would fly in every three or four weeks and the two of them would proceed from where they left off as if the divorce had never gone down.

Mr. and Mrs. Bennet broke up for good reason, it seems, as they can’t help themselves from going on terrible drug-addled benders and, as if like clockwork, Mr. Bennet would become crazed and redfaced halfway through, punch walls, chase squirrels around the yard, and throw dishes at the wall. Waaby made herself scarce in such situations, sometimes fled the scene and when she herself interacted with Mr. Bennet, she did so very quietly. “Why is she here? You need someone to do everything for you?” Mr. Bennett asked his ex-wife one time while Waaby scrubbed caked on potato from a cast-iron pan with a metal wand. “It gets awfully lonely here,” Sandra responded.

“Well why are you here then?” Mr. Bennet said.

“To get away from it all,” Sandra Bennet said.

The next red flag came when Sandra began to bring up “the furniture” and how it supposedly moves around during the night.

“I can hear it,” she said to Waaby, responding to her somewhat horrified expression. “I feel crazy about it but I can hear the furniture moving. I can hear so many people dragging the chairs and tables around all night long.”

Sure, every morning the furniture had moved from its original position, but certainly not by enough to warrant thinking that it was moving on its own. Waaby assumed, without bringing it up to her employer, the house was not completely level — not uncommon in a house as old as this — and put up with Sandra’s paranoia, helping eventually to assemble a surveillance system throughout the house designed to catch any furniture in the act of moving. “I’m going to prove it to you,” Sandra was saying, but Waaby wasn’t so sure Sandra was talking to her as much as she was talking to herself, or maybe abstractly to her husband who was in London at the time.

So the cameras went up in every room, all of them connected to a single cctv system assembled in the attic where a variety of flat screens were arranged across the two rafters. Waaby disregarded most of this, turned a blind eye, just so long as she continued to get checks written cashable to her name. This changed, though, once the cameras revealed that nothing was happening, at least nothing that was picked up by the infrared. After a couple days of seeing very little of her employer, Sandra came down from the attic and pulled Waaby up to the “observation deck” in the late afternoon, almost as if by the nape of her shirt, and she pointed at one of the screens, this one of her dining room table — Waaby suddenly had the uncomfortable realization that her employer had begun spending most of her waking hours watching footage of her furniture for signs of movement — insisting “look, did you see that?” at a faint motion in the leg of an armchair.

“Oh hm,” Waaby said. “Yeah I think there was something.”

Soon enough, an angsty Mr. Bennet returned from Scottland — frustrated, mind you, at his ex wife’s seeming mental breakdown — with an air rifle and after a few days’ drinking he began to shoot down the songbirds outside the apartment because they were “too loud” for his concentration. This horrified Waaby to seemingly no end and she brought this up with Sandra who was sitting behind her desk in the attic, transfixed as always by a still shot of, say, a recliner, who replied “if it helps him blow of stress good, there’s bigger fish to fry.” without looking up from her screens.

Soon enough the dead birds began to pile up in the yard. The crack of the air rifle interrupted Waaby while she sliced carrots, irritated her — crack — with every — crack — shot, and one time she tossed down the knife and walked out to the porch and put her hands on her hips. Mr. Bennet turned to her. Waaby shook her head severely. Mr. Bennet cracked a rare smile and laughed and turned and shot down a titmouse from a branch where it exploded with a squeak and fell to the Earth.

This was around the time Sue at the Whitefin Inn first heard about all this. The chaos in the house started to outweigh the NDA Waaby had signed. She had been crying over the birds, explained it all to Sue, who began carefully watching the whitewashed house across the street from the Whitefin with something of a mute fascination. When she was leaving work for the night, around 2am, she would look back on the silent, dark mass of house through her rearview mirror. The lighthouse out on the lake peaked through like clockwork, well past the house, a soft white blip. Something seemed to be growing out of the darkness there.

Anyways, after two weeks, Mr. Bennet finally seemed to convince his ex-wife that the furniture wasn’t moving on its own. He convinced her that they should throw out all the security cameras in dramatic fashion — into the lake! And around this time the wind began to grow icy despite the July sun, began to hammer the house and the dock, but Waaby, now tasked with carrying three sacks of security cameras to the lake to toss off the dock, had to make her way into its wicked sharp maw, so she draped and smothered herself in a wide-ranging collection of furs compliments of Sandra Bennet. Fox, Beaver, Rabbit, and some other unidentifiable colors, textures, animals, creatures. Nonetheless they were warm. They did their job. Waaby pushed out onto, this great mass of fur carrying sacks of security cameras over her shoulders to throw them into the lake one by one. She noticed Sandra watching from the second-floor window of the house before the blinds snapped shut.

“And they’re still down there?” L— asked in the bar, interrupting the story.

“I believe so,” Sue said. “No one has gone down to check as far as I know.”

Mr. Bennet had meanwhile been lounging in a lawn chair, sitting outside watching Waaby walk back and forth, smoking a cigarette, sipping on a martini. “Great job you’re doing!” He yelled to her as she carried the fourth sack to the lake, stepping around the dead birds in the yar. On her way back to the house after that last sack had been discarded into the lake, there was suddenly a great (confusing) commotion where Mr. Bennet sat.

“It was like nothing I have ever seen,” Waaby would later say under oath. “It was the birds that carried him away. Not just one or two or even a dozen. It was close to a hundred. They covered him and carried him up and away. He was thrashing about, trying to take his shirt off the whole time, I saw that his face was bloody, and they carried him away. I don’t know where.”

This was carried not carried in court and Waaby was soon discharged after being vetted by a psychologist who checked her pulse and gave the judge a thumbs up and a nod. They never found what happened to Mr. Bennet. For all I know the birds did carry him away. Sandra Bennet moved out of the house soon enough. Nothing much else happened. Waaby married eventually and now worked as a dinner server at a diner in a nearby town.

After this story, the night crowd of elderly retirees began to pile in. “You might want to consider, you know, getting out of there,” Sue said, concluding the story.

L— couldn’t argue with this. She asked to use Sue’s phone and she called me. This was back when I had a car passed down from my dad: a wonderful fuel-efficient silver toyota camry from 2011. She asked if I could come pick her up the next day. I wasn’t doing anything and I love a summer drive so I drove up to the coast, blasting Ween’s The Mollusk the whole way up.

That’s about the extent of my involvement in the story. L— told me about all of this on the drive down. Here’s hoping I did the story justice. As for L—, I think she lives in New York now but I could be wrong.

p.s. if you notice any typos or funky looking grammar in the above piece, please feel free to reach out over DMs or in the comments. since i edit all of these posts in a manic 3-coffees-no-lunch type of haze and also have a severe personal allergy against LLMs, typos sometimes slip through that process. let me know!