“Ma maison cachait un secret au fond de son coeur…”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
“My house hid a secret in the depths of its heart.”
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The leaves rustle papery songs of death beneath my feet. Trees spread honeyed flames across the street; they flicker but they do not burn. Light swims down, filters through every physical surface, melts through the houses, their windows, pools in the disconnected leaves that rattle in the gutter. Townhomes post ranks of narrow corridors against knotted, back-bent trunks. Beneath their brittle claws, beneath the industrial webs of power lines I walk. Cracked lines in the sidewalk twist away ahead, suggest a route, here here they say, but following finds only another stone-hobbled, leaf-dusted pathway whose homes, though put on with all the bygone fashions—ionic columns and curlicues, verandas and gaslit lamps—sleep like temperamental giants with their heads half buried in the ground, noses stuck out upon the earth, eyes closed in a stony sleep of the ancients. I should like to believe they dream, but I cannot find it in me to presume as much. What would they have to dream about? What do they have to hide?
It is I who dream. It is I whose insides flutter with ghosts, I who stand harboring things unknown that wisp behind the windows of my eyes and in my darkened doors. Here the quiet rows of houses become merely an extension of my mind. Here every window offers a glimpse into the carnival of disillusion that spins its starry rattle, chaos and bemusement, at my every chance of solitude. Especially rampant this time of year. For October sweeps in with a vengeance. October brews such sweet and cinematic madness. Omens wheel out of the air, and I do not know which songs to listen to, which words to share. I tense, patient for the crash, for the acrid-sweet smell of death. This morbid indulgence of thinking feeds me and I it. Will I suck, will I drink all the color, all the poetry out of this city till it turns a pallid gray—only to find it is a mutual exchange, and it has drained all the life out of me?
I walk the streets and the streets begin to breathe. Their houses awaken from empty shells to magic boxes with separate tableaus of gothic merriment, every residence sporting some gargoyle, some nightmarish horse, a gnarled witch’s tree, the façade of a gorgon carved into someone’s porch, garden statues smiling in cold serenity. Burble fountain of Venus; gurgle fountain of Pan, and all their pagan faces leer alto-relievo from the crowns of these gothic mansions. I follow the lights lit by the living, but through their golden windows I catch only glimmers of ghosts…
Carmen Maria Machado, a favorite contemporary author, wrote a memoir called In the Dream House, in which she details the facets of an abusive relationship through an array of tropes in literature and pop culture—one of these being ‘the haunted house.’ This Dream House is described as both a physical place shared with her eventually abusive lover, as well as an abstract representation of this relationship and all previous romantic encounters, the subjects of which mull about certain parts of the house like ghosts. The imagery has rooted itself deeply in my imaginings, this concept of relationships and experiences embodied by houses—particularly haunted ones; and as I amble throughout the morbidly ornate areas of my neighborhood—its edifices and their interiors, whether darkened or illuminated, take on a wildly fantastic life of their own.
The shadows of Machado’s writings waltz behind the windows of the nearest ivy-embraced manor; hunch-backed forms of unsatisfied attempts at love stumbling half-dead behind the panes of another. Shuffling into the shadow of a stony, gate-barred estate, I am reminded of my own Dream House, one established long before I would come to read Machado’s memoir. Titled simply “Dream House” the short story was one of the first pieces of fiction I wrote with any real sense of depth—though quite unintentional and merely a result of my need to process. At the time, I was a sophomore in college and still newly confronting my sexuality—the ramifications of which had just begun to spread beyond the realm of morbid journaling and private longings. In the piece, the narrator and his closest friend utilize a technology that allows them to enter a simulation projecting the physical realization of the narrator’s dreams—in this case a mansion, which the narrator uncovers with a sort of respectful reluctance. Each room, whether opulent or decrepit, shimmering or shadow-cast, opens into a different dream or nightmare of the narrator’s psyche, penultimately leading to a beautiful demon held in the basement, which begs for release and whose chains must be reinforced, again and again, playing out a dreadful loop of imprisonment. Concluding the tour, the narrator comes to realize the presence of his friend—a means by which to divulge terrible truths and reach for some chance of release—has all been a part of the simulation, and he wakes up alone, safe but still possessed by the fortified chambers of his “dream house.”
I liked the piece so well that my pride in its composition outweighed my fear of sharing it with a small number of friends—one of whom, a film student at my university, was gracious enough to state that while reading it, he had instinctively begun to wonder how he might translate it into a short film. Though such demons have now been disbanded and my old dream house deconstructed, encountering residences of such dramatic hue and character unwittingly summon visions of these former spirits, and I cannot help but wonder what demons—metaphorical or otherwise—wait unconfronted in their deep, windowless cellars. Do such spirits linger from piled up layers of history? Or do the houses merely provide us the space—that we might put them there ourselves?
The darkening street inhales, exhales, draws up another yawning edifice, this one with drooping windows that allow for fragmented views of a parlor and dining room, shadows thrown from the silver arms of a chandelier and golden figurines twirling on the banister and mantles. I see a couple stepping in time—quietly, serenely—among the gilded curios and thickly-framed mirrors. A man smiles into the face of a man, but the scene shimmers with deception in my mind, a mirrored illusion. It echoes a recent film at the cinema, in which the wife of a seemingly picturesque 1950s couple discovers her reality to be a simulation in which her husband has trapped her, that they might escape their dismal living conditions and share in the “perfect” life together. After the film I toyed with the idea of recasting the leads as a same-sex couple and all the additional layers such a dynamic would add to the story. Suddenly, rather than escaping the poverty of their living situation, what if the couple also sought reprieve from persecution or societal estrangement? It would make a more complex argument when revealed that one lover drugged the other and dragged them into a fictional reality. But then again, marginalized or not, what individual wouldn’t suffer temptation at the chance to reinvent their reality into their own perfected dream world, caught in the middle of which spun the object of their affection? No, it wouldn’t be real love, you argue. It wouldn’t be choice. But do we want choice? Do we want chance? We want a perfect world, don’t we, in all its brutality and ignorance. I pass the rest of the structure, watching the spectral couple one-two-three one-two-three into some undisclosed cavity of the room, catching a shimmer in the corner of a mirror as the one leans forward, whispering in the ear of the other.
I built this dreamhouse for you, oh my darling, oh my devil.
Such craftmanship, I think. Such detail. How much we pour into the shells we raise around ourselves. And all for the same end. For we may build our houses of illusion, but their corridors stretch and fold; their turrets burn. Their dream-harboring occupants stand poised on the edges of their towers, noose tied and ready around their china doll necks.
These libraries of memory and experience, these temples of residence caught somewhere between grandeur and decay, evoke the spirit of my queer experience, which they seem keen to symbolize and encapsulate—as this experience has played a symphony largely composed in notes of horror and isolation. Horror, in the sense of wrestling with a terrible truth [a seeming power of destruction come rising out of the shadows] that could not be reckoned with—rooting metaphysical monsters so deeply in the fissures of my psyche that the nightmares they exhume still remain a power not entirely exterminated—and isolation in regard to the fact that once self-acceptance was achieved, I discovered I belonged neither to the world of my past, nor to the realm of conventions almost unanimously adopted by those similarly bearing the mantle of queer. It was as if I had crawled up from the basement or down from the lone tower, only to find myself wandering listless between echoing rooms where guests drinking tea and brandy in the parlor refused to acknowledge the reality of my experiences and masqueraders waltzing in the ballroom embraced me in their revels only if I aligned myself by their garish, hollow behaviors. As I hovered about the stretches of my own quiet and darkly framed corridors, chambers of morbid decadence became both an escape and a beautiful sort of prison, until slowly, by degrees, I managed to extricate myself from the walls of this Dream House as it stood in an interpersonal sense. And where I once felt isolated within, now I stare into its darkened windows from the end of the street and wonder if monsters still linger there… and what residual shadows might still float…
I cross from planes of crackling asphalt and flickering lampposts into an adjoining, forested park—a space seeped much deeper in this city’s air of the ancient. Held in the palms of encroaching night, the park’s amphitheater and its pillared arbors come gaping out of the shadows like a chanting prophet’s open mouth. I stand upon the edge of its vacant stone rows, unused for the season and overtaken by a twisting network of weeds and vines, as though preserving itself for the mythical band of performers sure to emerge now or in a hundred years and resurrect the space with their fiendish, merry plays. Though I alone am no such zealous troupe, the park still retains a few frayed ribbons of its bygone magic, which I pry from the bark of its curling fingers and the hollows of its empty stage. With cathedral towers silhouetted in well-water blue, piercing the city’s expanse in echoes of tolling bells and organ-pipe moans; with the surrounding nests of mansions and their coal-yellow eyes staring morosely into the dark, the park is gifted a perimeter for its dark magic, a charmed circle of sorts. So I throw the space a ghostly sort of gauntlet; I offer up my challenge like a prayer. Who here can bring to life some story? Who can regale me with some myth?
The stone faces leering droop-eyed from the arch of the proscenium begin to wail in a harmonized chord of conjuring. Invisible torches flicker tongues of light upon the boards. The trees standing nearest, as though sprouting out of the very stage itself, shift the rivulets in their bark-plated shells, and from the swimming shadows, from the snapping tongues melt a company of haunts to claim the night and grant me my request.
The amphitheater tangles in ghosts like a fabric-weaving, shadow-threading kaleidoscope. Hamlet pads across the stage clenching a skull in one hand, his eyes two sparks drowning in dark sockets. Lady Macbeth, clothed in pooling red, thrusts a candle high and sways in the throes of unattainable rest. Henry sinks to his knees in a fervent prayer for victory; Edmund wipes black tears from his agonized visage; Lear staggers in a dance of billowing robes and raging arms. Ariel and Puck light from seat to seat, silent laughter mingling with the twitchings of their hands, starry eyes glinting like emerald beads. The sweeping host bends and contorts, melds and mushrooms into a mass of limbs and horns. They part in a swarm of repeated motion as a woman with flames for hair and a chiffon dress the color of bone floats from the recesses of the stage and raises her arms in a rich, guttural cry that winds into the blossom of a song.
Like a pilgrim lead by stoic guides through the spiraling depths of abysmal hollows, I follow the melody’s airy, violent twisting to the heart of the root-bound, snarling stage. The red flames waver beneath every ever-changeable face, and the woman in webs of white rends through the scene with a musical offer of manifestation.
Shall we attempt a summoning?
What, dear heart, shall we summon?
Shall we summon the vessel of all your latest, unrealized longings?
The flickering host raises a contorted mass of arms, our cries extend into the night—reach hold—grasp tight—draw breath— !
A shimmering form that fills the stage not with the presence but with the absence of its shape, stands, expectant and charged, in the center of our little pageant. The fires snap; the wailing dies; the crown topples. I fill the shape with everything I could hope for. I fill it with everything I want, everything I feel to lack, everything I dream of, everything I hope could last— And in a single, fluid motion reach with arms unfolded, arms expectant—to embrace, to enfold this personified wish, this beautiful beautiful ghost into my own ready, receiving heart.
My hands grab hold of nothing, pass through. The imbued spirit dissolves its conjured form, and where its weight was thought to hold, empty air receives me. I pitch forward.
And I am standing in the middle of the street. I lurch in the middle of the road, encased once again by towering, impervious vessels—of sanctuary, of torment. I catch my footing, right my step, can do nothing but continue my traversal of the leaf-littered paths, whose damp and moldering blankets refuse to hold beneath the softened treads of my shoes. Stepping then with light and wary shuffles down the gallery of watchful shells, I think that the only difference between me and the other ghosts who walk these streets is that I have not died here. Yet.
In time, the long night will pass, yes. In time, the spasmic, slithering haunts will find themselves replaced by the quiet, keeping forms of saints, and dreams threading with soft wonder will weave where dolorous mares of night once stamped their hoofs. But until the easing waves of such a dawn break upon the fogged and heavy corridors of this earthy-sweet, antiquated quarter, I will pass the looming windows of these grand and unforgiving houses to watch each little dream sparkle through the course of its beguiling illusion.
And I will think,
I could live here, as I pass by the first.
I could live here, as I come upon the second.
I could live here and here and here. I could live within this one
And this one.
And this.
The street extends. The leaves spindle-spiral through the air and rustle papery songs of death beneath my feet.
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a literary labyrinth 