I

It was a white house. It had four windows on the front side and four windows on the back side, facing a small garden and in the morning the sun as it rose. It was located in Wyoming. It had a red post-box. Its roof was a pair of two rectangles slotting into each other. Its back door was made of glass and its front door was made of wood, probably oak. Inside the house were two adult bedrooms and one bedroom for children. There was an attic. The house had a basement that was converted into a cinema room. It had only one staircase and these were, I recall, spiral stairs.

The family that lived there owned a dog, a dark brown labrador. They also owned an orange cat that reminded me slightly of Garfield. There were three of them. One man, one woman, one child, although I can’t remember if the child was a boy or girl. (It’ll come back to me later.) They were well dressed. The father sometimes wore suits and the mother frequently wore sundresses. She seemed to have more than one. The child, meanwhile, wore shorts but rarely wore shoes. They went around without their shirt on. I saw all this from my back garden when I lived next to House III, as you know.

II

During the warm months of the year, the father was often outside. He was barbequing. Meanwhile, during the cold months, he stayed inside. The house did not have a garage. It was either inside or outside. The blinds would go up in the morning, one after another. It would begin with the bottom left blind, then the bottom right blind. Then the mother, I assume, would go up the stairs and open the top right blind, then the top left blind. We can also assume that she raised the blinds on the back side of the house on the ground floor whilst down there because of the slightly longer delay between her opening the blinds on the ground floor and opening the blinds on the second floor than I would expect from her simply going up that staircase. I hope I’m not being confusing.

Most days would begin with them accumulating in the kitchen. It was gradual and it was very natural. One by one by one they would enter, usually the mother first, then the father second, then the child third. The mother would start because she was the only one who knew the breakfast recipes. I only saw the father make sandwiches by himself. He would make these affectionately for his wife and child. But it was pretty evident from where I was sitting that he couldn’t really manage anything more complicated than this. Once he removed a can of tuna from the drawer above the kitchen sink, he put his finger in the ring and pulled it half-way, the metal cover reeling back uneasily. Then he looked at it. He removed his finger and then he put it back in the cupboard. Correcting himself, then he put it in the fridge. He was trying to hide this embarrassment from his wife by pretending that his appetite had just changed part way through. It was endearing.

The child, meanwhile, fed predominantly on pack lunches and their ingredients. For example, they once had a jam sandwich, usually made by the father, followed by a small sausage roll or two, a purple carton of fruit juice, a bag of crisps, and last but not least a Tupperware box filled with strawberries, blueberries and raspberries, of the mother’s devising. The box itself that these all went into was a rectangular prism with a cartoon image of a crocodile on the largest side. It was designed to look like a child might have drawn it.

After packing this box into the child’s school bag, a blue backpack that was a little too heavy for them, the mother and the child would kiss the father goodbye and leave through the wooden front door. They would walk directly to the school about a mile and a half down the road. Either the child would be walking barefoot as usual or the mother would have to argue with them to put their shoes on repeatedly before leaving the house in the first place. Like most things in their lives this became easier with time.

They would go out along the empty grey road. The child would sometimes run on the pavement and sometimes dance around and laugh on the road itself. Part of them wanted to tease the mother. Part of them just enjoyed movement. The mother would always walk on the pavement. Sometimes she would pull out her phone and call another woman for half an hour. This meant that the child could get away with dancing on then road whenever the mother walked ahead of her. She was often very engrossed in her phone calls.

In House III, however, the father would still be sitting at the round breakfast table in the kitchen with his elbows spread out after the boxes of cereal had been cleared away. He would look down over his hands and watch small drops of sweat form and flow from the top to the bottom of his palms. Every so often he would undo his cufflinks but without removing them.

I believe the reason he did this was that he was waiting for something. It is not implausible that he was gradually coming to realise where he was.

III

There are only three occasions on which I have left where we live and gone to speak with the family described above. Fortunately enough, however, I had the opportunity to speak to each member of the family and familiarise myself with some aspects of House III that my work had not allowed me to consider before. You already know about the third incident. So let’s start with the first.

The date was March 11, 2007. I confronted the father outside the house at around 6:30pm. I’ll play you the first recording.
—Hey, do you mind if I speak to you, just for a second?
—Sure. But why?
—Why the microphone?
—Yeah.
—Nothing. I’m just a kook, I guess.
—Well, that’s not the whole story, I hope.
—It’s not. I’m a film student. I’m making a film.
—Oh, cool. Is it experimental?
—Why would it be experimental?
—I don’t know. I just have this image in my mind of all these intercut segments of the local area. Different people telling their stories. It’s been done before but seems somewhat appealing.
—That is the thing some of my classmates are interested in.
—That, and you seem a slightly eccentric fellow. Are you from round here?
—Yes, I’m opposite.
—You’re what? Where?
[I pointed to absolutely nothing. And he probably wanted, then and there, to get rid of me rapidly because I didn’t answer for a little too long.]
—Further opposite than that. I’m in the clearing, near Green Street.
—Oh, okay. . .What did you want to talk about?
[. . . .]
—Are you OK?
—How does it feel to live in House III?
—Fucking fantastic. . . .is this an art student question?
—I’m not an art student, sir.
—What does that mean?
[At this point I slightly lowered the mic and laughed a little into my hands. He then wanted it out of his face, and so the audio got much worse.]
—I thought you would have figured it out by now. . .pity yyou.
—You’re f[]eaking me o[]t. [ ]=[] y[]u OK?
[….]
—You mean that echoing in the corridor at night? How do you know that?
[….]
—You’re paid? Why are you paid to do that?
—It’s my duty. I was recruited way back.
—T[]at’s [  ]  [bad].
—So I need to interview you. But just the sounds. I’ll get everything we need.
[….]
—What was that?
[He turned and began entering House III.]
—I…pity…you…

IV

Getting an interview with the wife was more difficult, but not too much so. I did not believe that the husband had told her about me by the time I approached her on April 12, 2007. Even if he had, I hoped to have faded into the background by then. This time I got my camera to take some stills, although I must say it felt awkward seeing them, the mother and child, substantially far away from the primary subject of study: House III. For themselves, they were primary. They were characters. But for us they were secondary objects, dutiful like microwave cleaning products organised around an already purchased and used microwave. But that’s unfair to them. I do pity them, after all, however you feel.

Here’s the recording. If you open the packet, you can see a few pictures of that pretty woman gradually getting embarrassed. This is vessel #2, if you couldn’t tell. The recording was #1, obviously.

Actually, since we’re using a visual medium, why don’t I set the scene a little before we get started?

Back when I was a kid, I used to dream that my procedures would reach an end point. I would tell my dentist, “Well, sir, when I’m an adult, I won’t need any of this.” And it would go on like that, for a very long time, really. My braces would come off. My limbs would no longer be sore. Might would no longer be right. And then I realised, on no particular day, like a piece of coal being placed in my milk tea, so obvious, so burning, yet inevitably, also because it was inevitable, I hadn’t noticed it. I didn’t notice life until it was too late. I didn’t prompt the dentist. I didn’t ask him, “Why are my teeth hurting now, ever as they did?” Nor did I ask the heart surgeon, “Will I be alright?” But these are etceteras. What I care about is my mouth, my eyes, chewing. Forever. When was the last you went without a meal? And are you in love? This is a relevant question for those that understand hunger can and will absolutely desecrate your highest capacity to feel. When the time comes the body wins. This is a very mortal consideration.

I am saying all this because of the pain in the woman’s eyes in the first photograph. If you look closely you can see she has a small scar between her breasts. It was likely a transplant. I feel bad for her still. She was like I used to be.

“What do you want, sorry for sneezing,” she said. “My allergies are bad.” That was when I took the first.

The little girl seemed to get along with me immediately. I’ve been told I look trustworthy before numerous times. When you’re dealing with a child and parent, and more particularly a child and mother, getting the kid to like you is your way in.

“Alright. I’ll let you photograph me. . . Just because you think the time of year goes with my hair. Auburn, you called it? That’s kind of flattering.”

The woods were white in the spot we were. Birches leaning, covered in black-eyes, stirring like zebras, seeing, listening.

“So my job, since you asked what the camera was for,” I said. “Is to survey the occupants of House III. It’s a historical location from the future.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”

Snap.

On the table: a woman blushing with tears forming in the corners of her eyes, thinking, “Is this guy dangerous?”

So I took a step back; the little girl was laughing with the kind of unwarranted authority a kid gets when she sees her tyrant countered.

“I wonder what opportunities there are for me here. . .” the little girl thought.

Snap.

V

So here’s the third photo: a woman smiling, perhaps too widely, with her eyes looking just above the camera and her make-up slightly stained. Grass is blazing up the front of her dress.      

I took it on that particular day and gave it to her as a gift; she told me it made her feel better about everything. Apparently her husband had been distant for a while and she had repeatedly tried to contemplate a future with him, a future photograph even, where their daughter was all grown up, and even at this early stage in marriage she had found that impossible. It didn’t bode well for the future so, she supposed, my odd attention was actually appreciable. It made her feel pretty again, so she said.

Hence, when I found this photograph in my chest of drawers, where doubtless my superior decided to leave it to complete #2, it was a pleasant surprise to see she had also written at the bottom of it.

“Dear Oscar, Thank you for making me feel pretty….”

It was a sad human life. But, then again, most are. So perhaps it is entirely unworthy of our special attention.

When you’re done looking, by the way, put the pictures back inside the packet and fold them away. This is the last time that we are meant to look at them.

VI

It must have been five years later, still April, evergreen. Or far further ahead in time. At least it was a while before the event in question manifested in House III, which stood, as always, sadly too inhabited for anything new. As I approached the front door for the first time, I found myself meditating on the existence and non-existence of the nuclear family. How it builds and incinerates potential.

People are bonded together in order to generate offspring that resemble them. These offspring enable them to deny their own bodily deterioration that would, on the sexual market, be too blatantly and perversely perceived if they did not belong to the particularly rare and beautiful. A marriage was a contract in natural law, not simply a piece of paper, even if that’s what it has become in modernity. No, it was, it is, when it works, the knitting together of man and woman into a being that is capable of producing life. A miniature god. The hermaphroditic race that in Plato threaten and declare war on the gods because they possess their own power to create. That is why men and women were split up from the miniature god: that is, in order to weaken them. It is a funny story and I believe it, given what I know.

I passed the sad brown tree where the dog and cat were buried, one could imagine eating one another’s tails, forever, like the sun and moon.

The girl was the last one left, as is only right.

I pressed record on my video.

VII

Low angle: a distorted carpet; a disorganised pile of books; a broken dream-catcher; in the kitchen, which is directly to the left, the round wooden table which was the father’s place; some cupboards which, opened, reveal enough food for a woman living alone; the taps work, although the hot water on at least this sink does not; the dishwasher is empty; there is a card on the mantelpiece of the dining room, to the right of the entrance, gathering dust; only one placemat sits on the table; I remember how easy it was to push the door open after getting the key that our employer gave me; this is the dwelling of an animal lying in wait; it did not have to be this way: on another occasion she would have resisted, but this time I was certain that my job would be easy. And so it was, if you couldn’t tell.              

Mid angle: the living room has sustained itself nicely; a gold couch, a red couch; there is a sea shell from a holiday trip purchased seemingly thousands of years ago; there is an old fat television that has not been updated; again, there are books and books and books; this is the house of someone who has learned to fear technology, or, as I have said, lies in wait of an explanation; I’m using the mid angle here, however, so we can get a better look at the windows; they’re all darker now; not enough to confuse someone between day and night, but at least to desirably put a filter on day, to, in essence, say: “They are outside now. The dawn has come. But you are not going to be outside. You are going to stay in and vegetate. He has not come yet. You are to remain here until the one comes.” Perhaps I flatter myself.

High angle: the staircase, grey now, spiralling gently into the upper reaches of House III, towards the ceilings; there are no spiderwebs; there is a faint blueness; there is slight mould in the space above the shower in the yellow bathroom, whereas the blue bathroom is pristine and looking out to the front yard as well as across the street into my dwelling; on removing my second key, gold this time instead of the silver one which I used to get in, I unlock the attic where the girl is staying and make my way in. I prepare myself to give an explanation that is simultaneously hard and easy. “Hello,” -you can hear me practicing here. “Your house is not your house. It is its own. Your family merely lived here.”  

VIII

“. . . .”

I turned my camera off.

She was on the ceiling. She was all over the floor.

I turned my camera on.

A belt was tied and displaced on the ground.

Her neck was decimated by a pair of black shoelaces.

I went downstairs, retrieved the only knife available (she had seemingly thrown away or buried all of the others), a bread knife, and hastened back up the stairs and up and through the attic to cut her down.

When I entered again, camera in one hand, knife in the other, the face of ecstatic bliss that greeted me was impossible. She had the look of, “I am the offspring. Me. Me. I am the last one standing.” even as she hanged there. I am sorry to say that when I removed her from the rafters it did not go away. That face, that sentiment.

It was almost noble. And it made me wonder if her father would have been proud of her, now that he was long gone, for maintaining some pride in herself even to the end. A grown woman.

Her eyes were black. Her tongue was a dead slug. Her hair was everywhere.     “. . u . .”

What if she coughed, she spluttered, she breathed; and we had a dialogue, would that matter?           What would she have to say?

“. Y . u .”

I turned around and saw you where I expected you, at the door, the cleaner. The one who comes afterwards. Do you remember this part?      

“Yes, me.”

“I am afraid I couldn’t get anything out of her. She perished.”

You took her up in your strong arms, your black uniform.

“I was using the record function so I could scoop up as much of her as possible. Now there’ll be nothing. There’ll be nothing left of her for when we go back. That’s #1 and #2. But no #3.”

You pointed to the letter by the side of the bed, waiting there, still enfolded.

I wouldn’t have noticed it if it wasn’t for you and, as a result, I want to open it here for the first time. To save her: #3.

Part of me is happy she might be with her parents again.

Part of me simply sees this as #3, undoubtedly, like you.

.         .         .         .         .         .         .

Dear Angel, who lives across the street,        

I have spent many years wondering whether or not you were a  product of my imagination. Being a disappointed and sad creature, I have decided to pretend that you are. For that is a better explanation for what follows. But, leaving that aside, there are many things I have long wanted to ask you and yet many more I believe I have already figured out.     

It is you, or whom you represent, that is responsible for both of my parents going missing, dematerialising, as it were, and leaving me as I am now: rapidly aged, radically more intelligent, totally alone. Were it not for the photographs of my family I might be tempted to believe that they never existed and that this House, this odd entity, simply conjured them up in front of my idle brain for a day or so. You find me thirty-seven years old (though I don’t know if you’ll appreciate that in your Angel time), and yet for me, it has hardly been an afternoon. Suffice to say, I do not recall my own life. I have gone from a tiny child to a grown, I assume infertile woman, in half a day. I retain the wits and skills of a life well lived, or somehow diligently isolated, and yet I did not choose it: this. And soon, soon if it continues I will be dying. In fact, I am certain I am already dying. We have been drained, all three of us, father, then mother, then daughter, so that something different, something quite opposed to ordinary humanity can make room for itself here. And I believe, in fact, I am pretty sure I know that this is your doing: strange man, with a strange smile, and the kind of face that implies a certain kind of knowledge hidden under a mask of social misunderstanding.

There is a line in Macbeth that makes me think of you.    

“It is the eye of childhood that fears the painted devil.”     

That is so you, if I count myself the child, as I once did before you stole that capacity. Neither father nor mother can even glimpse your world like someone as naïve as I once was, still am, speaking honestly. They did not see it. But for I have always noted some goings on opposite our house, it will have to be me that takes revenge for them, and if not revenge, then at least makes a request for the confirmation that I was right before I dispose of myself to curse the creator, curse the forces of fate that made this happen, who you also represent, for of course you do!                                                

When I was only four I would peer behind the woods opposite our house and imagine an enormous black room with a circus spotlight falling on the floor from a wooden sun hanging up above like a dilapidated chandelier. There would be no heating. And yet there would be a coldness and the faint smell of smoke. All this would be powered not by technology but by the force behind technology, something Luciferian.                                   

At different times of year there would be glass jars kept for storing the essence of a particular person as, somehow, a perverse act of mercy. They would be confined in audio, in photos, in writing even, if that is possible. This would be done over and over again throughout history in order to complete a kind of human sacrifice. A family would be chosen. You would go in. You wouldn’t kill them, so to speak, which is primitive anyhow. You would erase them. Take their souls and input them in a generator that would keep your master in the world of men: the middle world, whereas he is from the lower. For some reason, I believe it is the third time he has come into existence. One, two, three. Simply where our house happens to be built.      

All this I knew, all this I supposed was just my imagination. My childhood stupidity. And yet: am I not right? Are we not always nearer the truth when we are innocent than when we are grown and silly, as I am becoming?    

So why, of all things, yet do I call you an angel?      

Because, Oscar, I am not coming back. I am not letting you film me. I am not letting you get the whole of my soul out of me, even if you have succeeded with my poor parents.        

I refuse your master’s kindness. I refuse your mercy.        

You who have deprived me of my life will not deprive me of my death but, as my envoys, convey what remains to the grave. Maybe that alone will perk your wings up.  

I know nothing of the theological tradition to which you belong or the extent of my own madness but this, I sincerely believe, is what a child is for -is what I was intended for when a child!

Certainly, you destroyed the family for which the house is only ever a metaphor. Then the house may crumble. The house may make room for whatever you wished to place here instead. But the child, the child, who is also father and mother, he or she may speak for the family and rebel against the house. She may even refuse the gods their will to process her into it, pleasing the ghosts of her parents should they dwell within her.                         

Before you could move me out, extract me, so to speak, I have gone all the way back to where I have come from. I have gone home.   

I have hired you as an angel and fired you as a demon.     

What do you think?        

I am glad not to see you again.  

Yours,

C.

.         .         .         .         .

Reading this, I cannot tell what pleases me more: that she believed she could counter our authority, or that in trying to do so, in writing, she enabled us to succeed in retrieving her.

But a pity that they lost.

The family always loses to the gods.