dream theater: so this one's a creepy one
I hadn't seen my friend in a few years, and so I was shocked at the condition of his house. The sprawling, museum-like manor he lived in had once been well-kept, well-lit, with fascinating collections and curios on display; but he'd locked himself into his house, not permitting anyone to visit, since the death of his wife several years ago. The garden had gone to dust and weeds, and the windows were grimed and opaque; the shingles were balding, and the paint had dulled. I let myself in through the front gate, set in high concrete walls, and picked my way up the walk, up the steps to the door.
When he opened the door, I had to fight with myself not to shrink back. He'd always been a big man. Now he reminded me of a winter bear. He stood stooped, his clothes hanging careless and dirty off his frame. He had grown far too thin, and stopped shaving. His hair hung dirty around his face, and his beard obscured his mouth. He looked at me with empty eyes, and it seemed far too long before a spark of recognition lit far back somewhere in him. He said my name, invited me in for tea.
Inside, it was even worse. Piles of possessions lay stacked around the rooms, covered with dirt and grime; it looked as though he had gone through the house, throwing things into piles by some unknown method of categorization, and then perhaps run wild, destroying the piles and flinging them about. He hadn't cleaned since then. Footworn paths snaked through each greyed room, showing the routes he walked as he moved through the house. The kitchen smelled of mold and decay. He stood aimlessly in the center of the room for a minute, then moved to the stove to lift a kettle, looking lost.
The house is awfully dark, I said. I bet your tea's gone off. Why don't you go out for a few hours, get some sun, go get a box of tea? You look like you could use a good long walk, some quiet time. I can dust a little while you're out. Stay out for a while, let me help you.
He stared at me. I began to be afraid, but kept my smile on by force. Finally he said, Okay. I'll ... be gone a while. Is that good?
When he had gone, I chose a room, dug a laundry basket out of the mess, and began to deconstruct the piles. First the junk, I told myself, and then I can work on the dust and dirt. It would be a big job. If I took it in pieces, I could manage it.
I took basket after basket out to the huge cans in the garage. The piles were made up of broken things, ancient documents, things tht had belonged to his wife. Throw away everything that wasn't immediately useful, I told myself. He's keeping all these things, and look what it's done to him. We'll get rid of the things, and then maybe he can start to live again.
I began to find things that troubled me. Some of the possessions I found suggested that perhaps his wife had been pregnant at the time of her death. Often those things were broken, ripped, shredded; or they were stuffed far back into the recesses of cupboards and buried at the bottom of the piles. I tried to ignore the twisting unease in my gut, and threw a huge pile of half-used soaps and sponges into the basket.
Hello? An uncertain female voice. Is someone there?
I emerged from the dust and piles to find a couple I knew, friends both to my friend and myself. I was glad to see them. Some company besides the creepy, filthy piles of stuff would be a relief. I explained to them what I was doing. A good idea, they agreed, and came with me to help. We hauled junk out to the trash, pile by pile. Slowly, the rooms in that section of the house began to look more like rooms and less like junk heaps. We were clearing space, finding floors and walls.
I was working on a pantry shelf when the woman came in from another trip to the trash cans. I found something, she said. I think you guys need to see this. We put down what we held and followed her.
We'd been working on rooms in a single wing, going back and forth in a path. One area at a time. But the woman had detoured through the front courtyard. She led us in, and we all stopped and stared. Throughout the courtyard stood mannequins and crude, life-sized dolls, all clothed in our friend's wife's dresses. Many of the dresses were faded, falling apart. Strings of lights hung from the trellises and trees; sunbleached plastic flowers decorated every corner. Display cases of carefully arranged belongings stood along the walls. We crept through the courtyard, staring around us uneasily.
In the room that had been a sunroom, curtains had been hung and chairs carefully arranged in tiers to make an amphitheater. In each chair a framed photograph of our friend's wife had been placed; more pictures hung on the walls. A projector played a constant loop of video from their wedding on a screen at the front of the room. The sound wasn't on; instead, from speakers hidden in the curtains, overlapping tapes of her laughter played repeatedly. The tapes had worn and stretched, slowing and distorting the sound. Dust and grime lay heavy in the room, as in all the other rooms in the house, except for the path through the center.
We followed the path into a hall with display cases built into the walls, a hall that I vaguely recalled hosting some of the best treasures of our friends' collections of old. Now they held dioramas, pieced together out of found materials and crudely painted; scenes of domestic bliss, idyllic displays contrasting with their makeshift, careless construction. As we walked along the hallway, we saw that our friend's figure vanished from the scenes. The figure of his wife stood alone in increasingly wild, abstracted settings, construction and design degenerating into nightmarish jumbles.
A figure of her was seated in one of the last few cases, carefully arranged in her wedding dress, draped and arranged like a classical portrait. The figure beneath the dress was made entirely of garbage. Where her face should be, an open, empty can gaped. In the case across from it, a tiny figure lay in a cradle of drapes and plastic vines, likewise made of garbage, swaddled in a neatly knit blanket. Its face was represented by the peeled-back lid of the can in the other display.
Beyond this unsettling allegory, the walls and the glass of the final case were painted in wild, crude sweeps, paint colors mixing into dull and muddy swirls. Here and there, we could make out letters, but if there had been legible words, they were painted over. This mural was lit by a spotlight with a red bulb, throwing the thick crustings of paint into high relief. Brushes and tubes of paint lay on the floor in neat rows. Perhaps it was still a work in progress.
We crept back out into the central hall, a place once lit by skylights and lush with potted plants. None of us knew what to say or think. How would our friend react when he came home? We were disturbing the fossils of a vanished life, throwing out artifacts that perhaps held some deep and demented meaning. Something was very, very wrong, but was it our place to clean it up? Who else would do it? What would happen if nobody did?
... here I woke up.
That's some heavy anxiety and moralizing on the part of my subconscious about packratting and cleaning, I think. Probably set off by our recent few days of CLEAN ALL THE THINGS. Mom, if this doesn't freak you out as much as it did me, I will be very surprised. D:
When he opened the door, I had to fight with myself not to shrink back. He'd always been a big man. Now he reminded me of a winter bear. He stood stooped, his clothes hanging careless and dirty off his frame. He had grown far too thin, and stopped shaving. His hair hung dirty around his face, and his beard obscured his mouth. He looked at me with empty eyes, and it seemed far too long before a spark of recognition lit far back somewhere in him. He said my name, invited me in for tea.
Inside, it was even worse. Piles of possessions lay stacked around the rooms, covered with dirt and grime; it looked as though he had gone through the house, throwing things into piles by some unknown method of categorization, and then perhaps run wild, destroying the piles and flinging them about. He hadn't cleaned since then. Footworn paths snaked through each greyed room, showing the routes he walked as he moved through the house. The kitchen smelled of mold and decay. He stood aimlessly in the center of the room for a minute, then moved to the stove to lift a kettle, looking lost.
The house is awfully dark, I said. I bet your tea's gone off. Why don't you go out for a few hours, get some sun, go get a box of tea? You look like you could use a good long walk, some quiet time. I can dust a little while you're out. Stay out for a while, let me help you.
He stared at me. I began to be afraid, but kept my smile on by force. Finally he said, Okay. I'll ... be gone a while. Is that good?
When he had gone, I chose a room, dug a laundry basket out of the mess, and began to deconstruct the piles. First the junk, I told myself, and then I can work on the dust and dirt. It would be a big job. If I took it in pieces, I could manage it.
I took basket after basket out to the huge cans in the garage. The piles were made up of broken things, ancient documents, things tht had belonged to his wife. Throw away everything that wasn't immediately useful, I told myself. He's keeping all these things, and look what it's done to him. We'll get rid of the things, and then maybe he can start to live again.
I began to find things that troubled me. Some of the possessions I found suggested that perhaps his wife had been pregnant at the time of her death. Often those things were broken, ripped, shredded; or they were stuffed far back into the recesses of cupboards and buried at the bottom of the piles. I tried to ignore the twisting unease in my gut, and threw a huge pile of half-used soaps and sponges into the basket.
Hello? An uncertain female voice. Is someone there?
I emerged from the dust and piles to find a couple I knew, friends both to my friend and myself. I was glad to see them. Some company besides the creepy, filthy piles of stuff would be a relief. I explained to them what I was doing. A good idea, they agreed, and came with me to help. We hauled junk out to the trash, pile by pile. Slowly, the rooms in that section of the house began to look more like rooms and less like junk heaps. We were clearing space, finding floors and walls.
I was working on a pantry shelf when the woman came in from another trip to the trash cans. I found something, she said. I think you guys need to see this. We put down what we held and followed her.
We'd been working on rooms in a single wing, going back and forth in a path. One area at a time. But the woman had detoured through the front courtyard. She led us in, and we all stopped and stared. Throughout the courtyard stood mannequins and crude, life-sized dolls, all clothed in our friend's wife's dresses. Many of the dresses were faded, falling apart. Strings of lights hung from the trellises and trees; sunbleached plastic flowers decorated every corner. Display cases of carefully arranged belongings stood along the walls. We crept through the courtyard, staring around us uneasily.
In the room that had been a sunroom, curtains had been hung and chairs carefully arranged in tiers to make an amphitheater. In each chair a framed photograph of our friend's wife had been placed; more pictures hung on the walls. A projector played a constant loop of video from their wedding on a screen at the front of the room. The sound wasn't on; instead, from speakers hidden in the curtains, overlapping tapes of her laughter played repeatedly. The tapes had worn and stretched, slowing and distorting the sound. Dust and grime lay heavy in the room, as in all the other rooms in the house, except for the path through the center.
We followed the path into a hall with display cases built into the walls, a hall that I vaguely recalled hosting some of the best treasures of our friends' collections of old. Now they held dioramas, pieced together out of found materials and crudely painted; scenes of domestic bliss, idyllic displays contrasting with their makeshift, careless construction. As we walked along the hallway, we saw that our friend's figure vanished from the scenes. The figure of his wife stood alone in increasingly wild, abstracted settings, construction and design degenerating into nightmarish jumbles.
A figure of her was seated in one of the last few cases, carefully arranged in her wedding dress, draped and arranged like a classical portrait. The figure beneath the dress was made entirely of garbage. Where her face should be, an open, empty can gaped. In the case across from it, a tiny figure lay in a cradle of drapes and plastic vines, likewise made of garbage, swaddled in a neatly knit blanket. Its face was represented by the peeled-back lid of the can in the other display.
Beyond this unsettling allegory, the walls and the glass of the final case were painted in wild, crude sweeps, paint colors mixing into dull and muddy swirls. Here and there, we could make out letters, but if there had been legible words, they were painted over. This mural was lit by a spotlight with a red bulb, throwing the thick crustings of paint into high relief. Brushes and tubes of paint lay on the floor in neat rows. Perhaps it was still a work in progress.
We crept back out into the central hall, a place once lit by skylights and lush with potted plants. None of us knew what to say or think. How would our friend react when he came home? We were disturbing the fossils of a vanished life, throwing out artifacts that perhaps held some deep and demented meaning. Something was very, very wrong, but was it our place to clean it up? Who else would do it? What would happen if nobody did?
... here I woke up.
That's some heavy anxiety and moralizing on the part of my subconscious about packratting and cleaning, I think. Probably set off by our recent few days of CLEAN ALL THE THINGS. Mom, if this doesn't freak you out as much as it did me, I will be very surprised. D: