Fiction

By Monday, your guests have left again.

I turn the key in the lock and push the door open, braced for the worst. This moment, though rote, sends a thrill of dread to my stomach. I don’t know what I think I’ll find on the other side of the door: the furniture smashed to splinters. Filth smeared on the walls. All the potted plants shattered, their roots at angles to the sky.

But it’s never happened. Three years and 210 reservations later, I’ve yet to have a particularly bad experience. Still, I often wonder: What would happen if my worst fears came true? I’d have to let you know right away. I’d dial your number and wait.

Yes, I’d call, though as a rule I take special care not to. Perhaps this time, surprised to see my name on the glowing rectangle in your hand, you’d answer. I’d greet you and explain the situation. I’d tell you I’m happy to clean up, but perhaps I ought to take photos first, for the insurance. You’d agree. You’d probably swear, ‘God damn Airbnb.’ I’d sigh sympathetically and tell you I’ll email the photos as soon as I’m able. You’d say thanks, then make your excuses.

I suppose there’s a part of me that wouldn’t mind if, one day, I’d find an insurmountable mess in your home.

***

Old age suits me. I am courteous, if slow; people are patient with me in turn. I find myself forgetting more and more. It isn’t that the memories I’ve accrued have leaked out of my ears at a slow trickle. It’s that the pressure of time has compacted them into a tighter and tighter space, a little sphere taking up less and less room, growing dense as lead, yet easier to ignore.

Lesser concerns fill in the space, too. The state of the roof. Worries that a simple cough is the herald of the pneumonia that will finish me. Whether the orchid in the front room is getting too much light or not enough.

I suppose it’s possible that, if I live long enough, the sphere will shrink and shrink, changing in size but not in mass. Then, once the power of it becomes overwhelming, it might slingshot out in every direction, spattering my mind with everything too bright and too painful I’ve ever known. I’ll wander the streets, a lunatic blinded by the past, brought to heel only by a paramedic with a needle full of tranquilizers.

I suppose it’s possible. But for now, the guests said they’d arrive at 3 p.m., so by 11 a.m. I was already at your doorstep with the necessary implements.

Bleach, vinegar, boric acid, rubbing alcohol. These, my mother taught me, were the only things one needed to totally cleanse a home.

I’d first tackle the kitchen, then the living area, the guest bedroom and bath, and, after everything else, the master bedroom and en suite bathroom.

Though it’s been updated with modern comforts, each room of this house holds a weapon sharp enough to cut me to the bone. A mug you once handed me, full of coffee I myself put on. A rug where we threw the i-ching on a lark. I would have bought this place in a heartbeat, when you said you were going away, but you asked instead that I serve as its warden. By now, I’m rather more of a spectre that haunts the halls, impotently rattling my chains, droning curses to the rumpled sheets of your bed.

I wash a cutting board and knife in cold water, wipe the counters, and polish the faucet. The floors are still spotless, but I give them a turn with the broom.

Normally, I ought now to head into the living room to straighten up and vacuum, but I decide to take a detour upstairs first.

That room looks far different now than it did when you slept in it. Your old embroidered quilt is gone – I packed it in vacuumed plastic myself and put it in the attic – replaced by a luxurious goose-down comforter.

I remove the linens and replace them with identical ones from the cupboard.

The action’s the same now as it was then. Shaking out the blanket, letting it float in the air and land smooth and still on the bed.

The first time I stayed over, I couldn’t believe I was making your bed and kept looking it over, bemused, convinced I was drunk or dreaming.

You who I had loved since school. You had let me in and let me stay.

Even after four decades, these memories are like an old god, gargantuan, furious, willing to destroy me if I don’t pay tribute. These duties– taking in your trash bins, gathering your mail– are the devotionals through which I am spared the lightning bolt, the plague, the flood.

It has never occurred to me, never, that you might not love me back. I consider this to be an incontrovertible fact of life. If I ever asked you, I’m not sure whether you’d dismiss it in your typical high-spirited, no-nonsense fashion, or if you’d smile and avoid saying something definitive, or if you’d simply pretend not to have heard the question.

True, our time together waxed and waned in the span of a meagre weekend. But the imprint was made, the connection threaded, the indelible knowledge inscribed in both our minds: ‘There is someone like me.’ That isn’t something time or circumstance can change.

I sit on the edge of the bed, at the foot, an unobtrusive spot. I put my head in my hands and wait for all of it to pass through me.

***

I move to the bathroom.

But as I wrangle my hands into teal cleaning gloves and sprinkle borax in your bathtub and try to grant myself the luxury of thinking of your face, I find that the images have blurred together, like one of those portraits of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis that are, upon inspection, made up of hundreds of smaller portraits. There are too many impressions of you for me to linger over any one, and the effect of them all together renders a creamy, overwhelming likeness.

My hands in front of my face suddenly seem too real, too vivid, like replicas moulded on a computer screen. It’s all too obvious. I am not me in your home, but an elder in the neighbor’s empty house, making futile arrangements to make a futile impression about memories long faded. I fear for a moment my heart will fail, or has failed already.

But no. I plod into the entryway on leaden legs, bend with great effort to plug in the vacuum. It’s no use. I could summon all the strength of my body and still find the silent beast’s limp cord in my useless hand.

I step outside and observe the street, the street where I’ve stayed beside you an entire lifetime. But you’ve been gone a year now, and you hadn’t thought twice about leaving me your drudgery, so thorough was your confidence in my inability to let you go.

Yet it hasn’t been dependability that has kept me interested in your well-being, eager to see your mind set at ease, no matter how thanklessly. It’s been, of course, love. This has been the one trustworthy fact of my minor life.

***

I look back at your house. Its visage has stricken me all my life as I have pictured you, and the memory of you and of me, moving behind its doors. Suddenly, today, I am able to move before its gorgon face.

My mind is clear and empty, the inside of a ringing glass. I follow my socked feet.

Momentum carries me the few blocks to the city square where, beneath a great wooden dome, bleachers facing each other in parallel groan with the weight of a full orchestra. The players are cherub-faced and excitable, heads bobbling under the too-large, military-style caps of the local high school’s marching band. I try to make them all out: the apple-cheeked, red-haired boy with a clarinet resting on his shoulder. The long-necked girl with great, silent eyes and no visible instrument in hand. The hyperactive clowns, one slight with dark hair in spikes, the other his blond inverse, making mirrored monkey faces at each other over a xylophone.

Then, a small woman in perfectly round glasses approaches an electric keyboard and taps out one long note. C. A tuning note. The time must have come. On the knell of the second long C, the entire orchestra lifts bassoon, trumpet, tuba. I stand, awe-struck, and wait.

The reeds begin, launching straight into the familiar melody. Grieg’s Pomp and Circumstance. The clean, human voice of the French horn leads the way. I try to find the musician, but the faces, the instruments, the music, the crowd– their vibrancy immobilizes me. This is it. This is it.

It’s coming for me and I can’t stop it. In the swelling of the music, the images of you break over me like a battering tide.

Your wedding. The vision of you illuminated by the setting sun, the lapping waves of the ocean behind you– you were breathtaking. And as I sat in my hard plastic chair and applauded and wiped my eyes, I felt no regret, no sorrow, no envy. I felt something correct had happened; that our love was both brilliant and impractical, anathema to the light of day, incapable of withstanding routine and illness and signatures on pieces of paper. It was a radiant ideal full of fire and vigour, yet fragile as a pistol made of glass.

I remember the whole day fondly.

When it was my turn to wed someone kind, reliable, and well-suited to my lifestyle, you were out of town at a convention for gardening enthusiasts. 

The difference between us, of course, is that I take your life quite seriously, and you’ve always found a way to conveniently absent yourself from mine.

The million diligent favors of forty years threaten to suffocate me. Why had I done them, one by one?

Not out of expectation, for I had none. Not out of obligation, for I had none. But to satisfy a deep and ancient desire within me to see you happy.

But perhaps I’ve been mistaken all this time, and what I’ve called love was really just self-abnegation. I had to insinuate myself in your life to find the cracks through which I could enter, make myself small as an earwig to crawl through. So I could crawl all over you, quick enough that you could never bat me away in time.

This, I realise, is the the truth: That my attempts to be near you have been a betrayal of the artefact of love itself.

The great old god of my affection for you seems, suddenly, to step out of the brilliant halo of light behind him to reveal himself an unwell old man with thin, white hair in patches; with pot belly and black teeth, unloved, left to rot. 

Perhaps, just now, I’ve burnt through the myth. You gave me a drop of oil, and I performed a miracle and bid it flare for a liftime. I’m sure I knew this day would come. The covenant broken. The blind prophet sees everything, at once, in a flash. I am both free and utterly alone. But, as I bring my humiliated gaze to the orchestra, I know– I know– I know–

***

Several days later, I log into the rental website and see your last guests have left you a 3 of 5 star review.

“Nice place, though I don’t think the cleaners finished before we arrived.”

When you send me a question mark in query, I walk across the empty road from my house to yours. I drop my keys through your mail slot, tearless. I return home.