Audrey’s Door Page 5

  Heart and soul, I fell in love with you

  Heart and soul, the way a fool would do, madly

  Because you held me tight!

  “It’s too much,” she said under her breath, but the three movers heard her and glowered. They were skinny guys, and she was surprised any of them had the muscle to prop the jeans over their bony hips, let alone lift a baby grand.

  “I don’t wanna move this again, lady,” Gangly Plastic Man said. He was sweating so much that the floor around him was damp. It was a warm October day, and this was, after all, the fourteenth floor.

  Saraub. The man was a saint. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp. The ring. Good. She’d never forgive herself if she lost it.

  “Please! Where do we put this?” Boss Guy asked.

  She startled. “Oh. Right. The den.”

  They followed her down the long hall, wheeling the piano on its side. When they got about halfway, the lone bulb dangling from the ceiling hissed, popped, and went out. All the doors were closed, and no light crept through their cracks. Everything got dark.

  “Hold on!” she called, feeling her way toward the den with one hand, cradling her cactus with the other. Somebody, maybe Gangly Guy, yelped, like the piano had pinned him to a wall. She thought about those four kids, and Clara. What if their spirits had never left The Breviary?

  In her mind, a hole opened up in the floor, and Clara’s wet hands reached out. Stop! She scolded herself. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Then, to the movers, “You okay?”

  “Fine! We’re fine!” someone answered. But it was so dark in here. Was that one of the movers talking, or was there someone else in this apartment?

  Breathing fast, she ran her hands along either wall as she walked. The hall ended. She slammed her forehead—bonk!—and reeled back. The den door creaked open. A rectangle of midday light shone through the turret and illuminated the hall just enough for her to see the movers’ shapes. They blended together with the piano like a single, lumbering beast.

  She found the light and flicked it. Everything got bright. The men blinked like moles. Their faces sagged in this less-forgiving light, and she realized they weren’t as young as she’d thought.

  “Where?” Boss Guy growled. They were sweating. They were pissed.

  “Oh, right!” she said, after she caught her breath. She pointed to the buckle in the middle of the den. “Sorry about the light. You can wheel it right to this hole in the floor. I think somebody had a piano here before. Or something heavy, at least.”

  All three of them chose this moment to roll their eyes at her, like it was her fault that pianos are heavy. Then they wheeled it into the room.

  After they made two more trips, Hot Guy finally spoke. “This place isn’t right,” he said. He wore a cigarette behind his ear and a pack of Pall Malls rolled into the short sleeve of his sweat-stained undershirt. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “What’s not right, the piano?” she asked. “Where else should I put it?”

  He was a good-looking guy, and from the way he posed, cross-legged against the wall, she got the feeling that he was accustomed to the attentions of the fairer sex. “My cousin lived in a place like this,” he said. “His dog used to bark all night long at the fireplace, like it saw something there. Then my cousin saw it, too. An old guy’s face, watching him. All red-eyed and crazy-like. Turned out, some guy’d been murdered in the house, then buried under the fireplace with some extra bricks. His wife did it. Happened a hundred years before, and nobody who’d lived there after that had ever noticed anything wrong. Something about my cousin brought it out. Or, hey, maybe it was the dog that brought it out.”

  She decided he’d smoked a bowl before reporting to work. Who else but a stoner would say something so stupid to a woman about to spend her first night in a new apartment, all by herself?

  “Did something bad happen here?” he asked.

  A shelf dropped in her stomach. She thought about four children. Acknowledged the thing she’d been denying. She’d read that Clara DeLea hadn’t emptied the tub from one child to the next. At those tender ages, they could not have understood what death meant. Had only learned what it looked like as their mother had plunged them underwater, and they’d witnessed its wild-eyed mask on their siblings’ rigid faces.

  Hot Guy pressed his ear against the plaster and listened. Then he ran his piano-string-greased hands up and down the walls, as if feeling for a vibration. She thought about tiny fists and pictured the monster, Clara DeLea, crawling across the apartment one night and sneaking up on her children while they slumbered. Her knees would have left an imprint on the old carpet. A slightly darker hue, where she’d pressed the nylon the wrong way. Or worse. Maybe, like a witch, she’d crawled along the walls, and her greasy, bloated body had left snail trails that hadn’t been washed clean but instead painted white. They were coming through that paint now, psychic residue, in the form of this mover’s dirty paws.

  Audrey pointed. “You’re making a mess!”

  Startled, Hot Guy dropped his hands. His smears were everywhere. Nobody looked angry. Just uncomfortable. She tried to think of an explanation: I’m feeling a little fragile…I just broke up with my boyfriend…Of course it’s haunted. A woman slaughtered her four children here!

  Hot Guy looked like he was going to say something, but the boss interrupted him. “Look at what you did to the nice lady’s wall, you mucker! Go get a rag.”

  When they were done, she handed them each a ten-dollar tip. “Don’t listen to these numbskulls,” Boss Guy said, pointing his thumbs at his accomplices. He waited until Audrey cracked a smile, then added, “You know the magic formula, don’t you, sweetheart? If you want to be happy here, you will.”

  “Thanks. I’ll make sure to tap my ruby slippers,” she said, regretting her rudeness even as she spoke.

  Boss Guy raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Uh, yeah,” he said, and left without another word.

  It didn’t occur to her until after they were gone, that when she’d first arrived, she’d opened all the doors along the hall. But when the bulb went out, they’d all been closed.

  So, who had closed them?

  4

  Going Gently Into That Good Night (Iniquitous Darlings)

  The first thing she did was situate the cactus. It went on the turret’s ledge in the den, where at least some sunlight filtered. It was Saraub who’d named him. About a month after she moved to his place on York Avenue, he’d written “Wolverine” in neat, black pen on a swatch of masking tape, and stuck it to the side of the orange planter. “Little guy needs a name,” he’d told her, like he’d been worried about the prickly member of their family for a while now and had finally done something about it.

  With Wolverine securely placed, she painted the far walls in both bedrooms. She’d decided to go with Calvin Klein metallic white; cheerful, but not ridiculous. After that, she hung her drafts along the hall. Most were sketches of the mourning garden above the Parkside Plaza office building on 59th Street that she’d been working on since she’d started at Vesuvius. It was coming along more slowly than anyone had anticipated, which nobody at the office was happy about. Tomorrow morning was the next status report, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. There was the distinct possibility that heads would roll, or at least shamble to the unemployment line.

  After unpacking, she camped out on an air mattress in the den and flipped to the TBS Classic Television Marathon. Somebody was still paying the cable bill, which was handy, if unsettling. Clara had killed her family in July.

  Out the turret window, couples and large groups scurried toward their destinations. A crowd spilled out of the Columbia hangout The Hungarian Pastry Shop, where grad students carved oh-so-deep aphorisms (“God is dead!” “Let the river run, let all the dreamers take the nation!” “I text: therefore I am” “Rick Wormwood Will Light Your Fire!”) into the pine tables. She was too high up to hear their laughter, but she could see their distant smiles. She looked at her w
atch: 7:30 on a crisp fall Sunday night. The kind of night so alive that you can almost hear the city’s beating heart down in Times Square. Here she was, all moved in.

  And it was very quiet.

  Living with Saraub, she’d gotten used to low-level background chatter whenever she was home. He talked on the phone with Los Angeles a lot. Producers, agents, studio executives, secretaries, and crazy people, who tended to encompass all of the previous. For as long as she’d known him, he’d been trying to get financing for his documentary about the privatization of natural resources, Maginot Lines.

  Last she’d heard, he was close. But that was Hollywood, he’d once explained. Even the shoeshine guy thinks he’s close to a green light. He paid the rent by directing commercials freelance. I New York was his biggest account. He’d been doing it for years now, and the thrill had worn off, but they both agreed that it was significantly better than shoveling coal.

  She repositioned Wolverine. This time his name tag faced east. A stained-glass bird caught her attention. Its red eyes were disproportionately small, beady. “You’re weird,” she told it. “No offense.”

  Her hands were spattered with paint, and she chewed on the cuticle of her left index finger. It tasted, well, metallic.

  What was Saraub doing now? Had his mother set him up with another Indian dial-a-bride? Was he getting drunk every night alone? Or maybe his best friend Daniel, who never slept with the same woman twice because he didn’t want her getting clingy, was taking him to strip clubs.

  Did something bad happen here? The mover had asked…How had he known?

  She wished she had a little hash. Make that a lot of hash. Old school, three fatties a night back in Nebraska hash. Instead, she turned up the volume on the television—where Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw was explaining why sleeping with strangers is awesome, and sat Indian style on the inflated AeroBed, with her laptop balanced between her knees. Somebody close by had a wireless account (BettyBoop!), so she Googled “Remaining examples of Chaotic Naturalism.”

  On the television, Carrie wore a washcloth for a dress and wondered whether men liked freckles. Online, the first entry that popped was a reprinted Cambridge University psychology thesis in a critical journal called Extrapolation:

  Diary of the Dead: Casualties of Chaotic Naturalism

  She moaned. Oh, crud. Seriously? She wanted to shut the laptop, but now that she’d seen the link, there was no turning back. Its ominous title would fuel her nightmares unless she investigated. She clicked on it. The article was written in 1924, by a graduate student who’d trained under Carl Jung. She skimmed the introduction, which espoused the merits of alchemy, and started on page two:

  —ravings of madmen.

  Edgar Schermerhorn’s religion, Chaotic Naturalism, waned more than a decade ago, and only a scant few of his buildings remain. Most people don’t know that he was originally an architect, and did not found his cult until after reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.

  His theory was founded on the notion that the human mind had evolved into a pattern recognition machine: man perceives cause and effect, and from this, extrapolates reason. For example, plants grow from seeds. This fact is now obvious, but back in 1000 B.C., the idea that wheat could be harvested triggered the Neolithic Revolution and transformed civilization from nomadic to agrarian. Because of pattern recognition, society emerged. Humans transcended their biology and ceased to be animals.

  But Schermerhorn believed that the human mind was overactive. It miscategorized, and forced patterns where they didn’t exist. For example, natural observations assume that time is linear—Humpty Dumpty can’t be uncracked, and returned to the wall—but such narrow perceptions don’t account for Yeats’ widening gyre, alchemy, particle-wave duality, or time travel.

  In the stead of realism, Chaotic Naturalists’ followers embraced chaos, which they reflected in their breeding practices (like good eugenicists, they abandoned or drowned imperfect newborns); the families they raised (most were bigamists, and it was not illegal for siblings to marry one another); and the buildings they designed (Schermerhorn had many disciples). In eastern Europe, they were hailed as visionaries, and even here in America, they achieved a brief celebrity. It wasn’t until the 1880s that their membership dwindled as their buildings crumbled one by one, and popular religious leaders of the Second Great Awakening proclaimed that they deserved it, for having made an enemy of God.

  There were twenty-six true Chaotic Naturalist edifices all told.

  Schermerhorn honed his craft, then returned to America with what he thought was a perfect design. Like the modern Gaudis in Barcelona, they were modeled after nature, not Euclidian geometry. But unlike Gaudi, they borrowed from the snails’ spiral, the winged bivalve, the honeysuckle vine, and then broke apart these natural patterns into a disjointed mishmash, as if to prove that not even God held providence over man.

  The buildings’ tenants were self-selected crews who tended toward emotional instability. With so many neurotic personalities housed under one roof, they fomented each other’s afflictions, unleashing the anima and animus. It is Jung’s contention that it was this release of unconscious desires, and not the architecture, that is responsible for the wealth of reported Chaotic Naturalist hauntings.

  Jung has stated that the buildings functioned as repositories for their tenants’ repressed desires, and over time, became closed universes unto themselves. Eventually, the tenants’ suppressions became animate, not solely to the dreamer who’d dreamed them but to everyone in the building: the singular psychosis reached the critical mass of collective mania.

  Mirroring the structures of the buildings that housed them, the tentants’ thoughts fragmented, and they went mad. Their waking hours degenerated into Byronesque nightmares. Some took refuge in their opium pipes. Others ceased to go to work or care for their children, claiming that all efforts were futile, because the end of the world was at hand. In many cases, their journal entries started out in pen, and finished in childish, nonsense scrawl.

  I would never contest the brilliant Mr. Jung’s conclusions, but in studying the history of Chaotic Naturalism, I’ve found cause to attach some qualifications to his theories.

  As we learned from the Freiberg philosophers, it is anathema to his biology for man to embrace chaos. Even if spirits exist (watching us, haunting us, inhabiting alternate universes that subvert time), granting them entrance through the spaces in our minds, or the structure of our homes, and any other doors we might construct, can only result in man’s utter destruction.

  Who is to say that the door, once opened, could ever be closed? And in these alternate worlds, what capacity might man inhabit? Witness? King? Or victim, host, slave. Both author (Schermerhorn) and interpreter (Jung) neglected one thing: because of pattern recognition, mankind has learned that kindness and fellowship are in his best interest. Society evolves slowly, through group effort and the education of its children. A world without pattern recognition would be a cruel, inhuman place. Forgive my sentimentality, but without consequences to our actions, there is no love. And without love, man has no echo or memory. He can never be immortal or transcend his own coil. He returns to the slop with the swine.

  Happily, few of Schermerhorn’s buildings still stand. Each pile of rubble tells the same wretched story. In Dubrovnik, a woman refused to abandon her seaside, Schermerhorn house with her family, despite the likelihood that it would crumble. She insisted that the walls spoke to her and that she had work yet to do. Her husband, recognizing that she’d lost her wits, removed all the sharp objects from the house and stranded her there, hoping that without food or the means to cook it, she’d eventually surrender to the city where he’d moved with the children. When he visited two days later, a plume of black smoke frothed from the lopsided chimney. Inside, he found the coal-fire stove burning blue flames, and her head stuffed inside it. He was not at first able to determine how she’d written her epigraph across the side of the house until he saw her right in
dex finger, which was broken and raw. In the absence of a knife or kindling, she’d carved her last words with her own, still attached index finger bone: “Gol deschis în sfâr°it.” Translated from Romanian: The void opens at last.

  In Krakow, the Pigeon sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily bludgeoned—

  Audrey stopped reading. Something squirmed in her stomach. It felt like a worm. She scrolled past the rest of the text and moved on to the lithographs and black-and-white photos at the end. The first depicted a mansion with its slate roof caved in. The spike of a four-poster bed poked out from the rubble. The caption read: “While They Were Sleeping at The Orphanage, Boston, 1887.” There were houses in Romania, Croatia, Poland, Boston, and finally, the last photo: The Breviary.

  Her mouth went dry, and her heart double-beat inside her chest. Its limestone was white, and its gargoyles sharply carved. 1900, she guessed, when the world had still been new. The caption read:

  Schermerhorn’s Iniquitous Darling. Its foundation is embedded in Harlem’s subterranean granite mountain, so despite its slant and impossible geometry, it is the only Chaotic Naturalist structure expected to stand.

  She sat back. Oh, boy. She wasn’t sure what “iniquitous” meant, but she didn’t like the sound. On the television, crazy Carrie Bradshaw decided that some men like freckles, and some don’t. But she wasn’t going to bother with the men with freckles, because that would be self-destructive, wouldn’t it? Except, she couldn’t help but bother. Really, she was so depressed about it that she couldn’t get out of bed. Why, oh why, didn’t the man she kind-of-almost-loved, like freckles?