by TJ Price

F-1: blueprint

The house, then, and its rooms. Viewed from the outside, it is nothing extraordinary: situated at the top of a hill, its single-level structure is unassuming. The front lawn is studded with the acorns of oaks and maples, themselves with none of their lowest branches reachable from the ground. There is a small flower garden in the center, ringed with stones yanked from the surrounding woods like teeth, and the façade of the house is guarded by unkempt rhododendrons even on the brittlest of winter days. The long driveway bristles with forsythia on one side, golden and inviting in the early spring.

It is not a place I visit anymore, except for in memory and in dream, both of which are unreliable navigators, though I imagine it cannot help that the map I’ve given them is outdated. When I left the house and its rooms for the last time, I did not know I would not be returning, otherwise I would have taken more careful note of its territory.

A house has multiple forms of ingress and egress, though only some are doors. This house had a front door—rarely used, except for Halloween trick-or-treat (and even then, only a handful of times before we started leaving the porch light off)—a back door, which was reached via a small porch, and a sliding-glass door through which was the kitchen, gained access to by means of a deck. There are more doors than there are rooms in the house, but there are more windows than doors, and some rooms have neither. The most common entry-point, however, was through the garage, past the stairs to the cellar, and into the kitchen.

The garage also held a secret door: a mouth which was heralded only by its dangling, uvula-like pullcord. Once tugged, out unfolded a set of creaky, hinged steps, leading up to a squarish hole in the ceiling. This, the attic, whose floor was more like a ribcage, spanned with planks that sprouted off in either direction from the main beam. Between them billowed pink, filamentous clouds of fiberglass insulation. I remember thinking the first time I saw up into that space how visceral it seemed, and from a very young age internalized the image, believing my own chest—and perhaps that attic of my own body, the skull—to be crammed with the same stuffing. Besides that, there wasn’t much in the attic. It was a hollow space, fit only for adventurous rodents and the odd avian inhabitant. Perhaps it is thematically appropriate that the place hovering over all of our heads for so long—the skull of our house’s body—was largely empty.

Opposite the attic, the cellar. As the visitor progresses into the house proper from the garage entrance, a set of stairs leading down becomes evident. They turn sharply to the left at the top, then, at the bottom, twist to the right, so that the cellar itself is hidden from the casual viewer. I note that this is standard for most houses built this way—but here, it felt deceptive, intentional, as if the architect of that part of the house needed to hide it.

The architect of the house was my father.Is my father. He is not yet dead, though he might as well be. He might even be reading this, right now, whenever now is for him.

Aboveground, the house is a normal composition of rooms and apportioned space. Both the kitchen and the living room are grouped around the long brick stem of the chimney, and the short, stubby hallway juts out from there, branching into three bedrooms and one bathroom.

At least, that’s how I remember it.

It is possible there were other rooms.

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F-2: aerial view

Through the tin eye of satellite imagery, the house looks small. Squashed flat against the small clearing like a fly on a windshield, situated in the middle of what looks like a rough sea of darkness (woods, forest, trees)—the edges of which have been fought back tirelessly over a period of decades. I myself was party to this battle, an ant against giants, and remember sweltering as a child beneath the summer sun, my hands throbbing with callus and splinter while the wood-splitter roared and chugged. The trees fell slowly, graceful even in their swooning, and the crash when they hit the ground shook my molars to their roots.

satellite’s tin eye peering down I spent more time in the woods than I did in the sun-drizzled yard, despite the lure of the swimming pool—something about the cool, quiet dimness, on the borders of our property, appealed to me. I’ve never been one for heat. I don’t like how the warmth of the sun feels like pressure, and how sweat pops out of my pores as if obliged to, how it resentfully oozes out of me and then clings to my skin as if afraid to let go. If I sit too long in unabated sunlight, I begin to feel discomfort and then, gradually, alarm, as if my body has been squeezed beneath the thumb of the sun and has reached its implosion threshold. I used to imagine my body capitulating to the pressure in a juicy glut of fruit-like gore—a blood orange, maybe—leaving a sticky residue where I’d been.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that I sought refuge in the cellar, which seems notof the house, somehow, but which also serves as the basis of the entire structure. It was belowground, and the raw walls of the house’s foundation offered cool balm to my fevered skin. I would press myself against these surfaces, inhaling their musty odor, even lightly abrading my cheeks on the uneven concrete.

For a long time, the cellar was as unused as the attic, serving only as storage space for whatever we didn’t immediately need or want upstairs. Bins, boxes, even an old hi-fi stereo with a turntable built into the top of it. A few old recliners and a sofa, all facing one another, as if longing for occupants to complete the scene. I liked it better this way, unattractive and unfinished, though even I gave the dark corner toward the back end of the cellar a wide berth—directly beneath the back porch above—where it extended into a cobwebby, unlit alcove.

I never had a name for that spot. After all, to name a thing is to have power over that thing, and I cannot—even to this day—claim that I do.

It is the source of all the darkness in my dreaming.

The place where the wind gets in.

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F-3: deconstruction

Suppose a child asks you: what is the meaning of the word “house”? All you can do is offer up other signifiers, like “room,” or “hall,” “shelter,” or “roof.” Derrida would call thesetraces, which is what begin to proliferate when the signifying word (“house”) isdeconstructed; when one takes a wrecking ball to its linguistic meaning. In contending that writing is the “foundational structure” of language, thetrace is the element through which that meaning operates. It is the residue of something gone absent.

Something which was once, but is no longer.

So then, pretend I am a child again.

Pretend I am asking you: what is the meaning of the word “memory”?

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F-4: unhoused

How the wedding present led to the lawsuit: my mother and my father were married, and my paternal grandparents gifted the newlyweds a parcel of land adjacent to their own, upon which they were meant to build a house, and upon which they did. I have impossible memories of the construction: my father, barechested in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his eyes shaded by aviator sunglasses. He is lean, wears jeans. The thrum of drugs in his blood, he grips a hammer and uses it to pound nails into beams. Slowly, all around him, the house takes shape, moves from an imagined outline. How points joined become a line, become a wall.

These images are impossible because I was not yet conceived, but the detail is still staggering. I can see the flare of the sun in a cloudless sky; the beads of sweat on my father’s forehead, already furrowed even in his youth. I can see the skeletonized house, rearing up from two dimensions into three. I can hear the frenzied whir of the cicadas in the trees.

My parents met while roller-skating, each of them peacocking, strutting their stuff by skatingbackwards, heedless of the others either gliding or stumbling by. They crashed into one another. How strange, one’s first meeting a physical blow, the face of the collision unseen. They married in 1979. Maybe October, maybe August, maybe July.

There were matchbooks in the junk drawer in the kitchen. Little white matchbooks embossed in gracile gold script with their names and the date of their matrimony. It was one of these—from a Ziploc bag full of them—that I once burned, bending the match backward, like a contortionist, to bow its head to the striking strip. I let the whole thing sear with sudden, bright flame. When my stepfather found out and accused me of “playing with matches,” he taunted me with the punishment of “burning all my books,” and I remember thinking how strange it was that the word for a group of matches is a book.

My father was arrested when I was six years old, and subsequently incarcerated as a criminal. After weathering a significant amount of time in denial, my mother eventually decided on divorce, and this action incurred the wrath of my paternal grandparents. They sought to “take the house away from us,” a phrase which I remember was spoken quite a bit when I was a child.

I thought of them conjuring some kind of scowling, hateful tornado, like the one early on inThe Wizard of Oz, a hideous force that would rip our house up by its roots and hurl it far away. Whenever this image came to me, I would always cough reflexively, as if preparing myself for the dust and wind to shatter all the windows as we hurtled, spinning through the miasma, clutching at one another and wailing our collective distress.

No wonder I felt so drawn to the cellar. It is, after all, the preferred place of refuge for those beset by tornado.

In the filmTwister—unironically one of my favorite movies of all time—the main character Jo (played by the incomparable Helen Hunt) has a breakdown in the middle of a torrential downpour, near to the climax of the movie. It is a moment of naked vulnerability, unencumbered by inhibition or self-awareness, and Hunt delivers the line with a tremendous amount of force.

“You’ve never seen it missthis house, andthathouse, and come afteryou!”

Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in Twister Her co-star (the excellent and sadly deceased Bill Paxton) stares at her as if she’s just socked him in the jaw. “Christ, Jo,” he says, stripped of all pretension. This is a truth, being revealed, this is the moment after the lightning strikes. “Is that what you think it did?”

Years later, and after the lawsuit was dealt with, I realize how silly it is that I thought ordinary people had the ability to summon—let alone direct—a natural disaster of that ferocity. But then again, I was also the kind of kid who stood on the granite rock in the woods, tilted my chin up and willed the wind to blow—then felt it rushing against my face.

In antiquity, it was thought that demons were everywhere, invisible, even sometimes clogging our breath or invading our blood—hence the sobriquet for Satan: “Prince of the Air.”

If I were capable of such magic, shouldn’t others have been, too?

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F-5: traces

this, like all tornadoes,

is sick at the core,

will only end in

a slow dissipation &

torn earth, debris

strewn around

as if to remind us:

all this began

in pieces,

was solid for a brief time,

spinning in mid-air,

& will end again

in pieces

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[legend]

In every blueprint—every map—there is usually a system of glyphs to denote specifics, and then a list of said glyphs, associated with their meaning. This, called the “legend,” allows for interpretation of the signs.

Derrida mentions that the “trace” (the “room” of the “house”) is the mark of an “absence of presence,” which instantly brought to mind Mark Fisher’s seminal work of literary genre theory,The Weird and the Eerie. In that book, Fisher discusses the dichotomy of the two classifications: more specifically, that the “weird” is something that “doesn’t belong,” whereas the “eerie” is either a failure of presence or a failure of absence—to wit, there is either something that should be which isn’t, or something which isn’t that should be.

A house with no doors and no windows.

A house with no roof.

The destroyed house, rendered flinders—can it still be called a home?

Or is it now renamed, instead called “kindling”?

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[scale]

In my junior year of high school, I signed up for a creative writing class as one of my mandatory electives—a phrase which always irritated me with its contradiction. One of the first exercises given by the teacher was to write a list of nouns, starting with the word “home.”

I remember I sat there, surrounded by the rising sound of furious scribbling, staring at the blank page on my desk. I was afraid to put anything on the paper. I kept thinking of things that shatter. Things which fall apart, losing their meaning when impacted by a great force. Words like “family” and “love.” In a great rush, I turned my pencil over and erased what I wrote, watching as the letters turned to outlines of themselves. All I could see of the word “family” was “fa il .” Of “love?” The “l,” one arm of the “v” and the “e” made it look like “lie.”

I wrote the word “father,” then the word “dad,” but I added an e and made it “dead,” then erased it all again.

The teacher called time, and I looked down at my list. It was a grimy field of ghosts. I had nothing to share about “home.” Home wasn’t home if it wasn’t safe. If it wouldn’t last. If the roof threatened to peel off like the lid from a can, exposing us, cowering in our rooms below.

Later, during a summer when I abused prescription drugs and ran around jumping out of my skin alongside other ecstatics, I wrote a feverish collection of poems in a notebook and called itF-5, for the most extreme level of tornado—according to the now-defunct Fujita scale.

The collection consists of the same poem, repeated five times, and each time the poem appears, there are gaps where some of the words used to be, or splinters of words remaining, words smashed into by the metatextual force of the tornado. The poem itself details the terror of a family clustering in the cellar as the storm tracks closer and closer, howling. Eventually, the howl drowns out the poem, leaving onlytraces.

A memory of the words that were once there; letters reduced to lines, attempts at communication, garbled by the roar of erasure.

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