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Home Got to Be Intolerable

by Matt Hale


Arthur takes Linda by the hand and she looks at him funny. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“What?” She speaks to him kindly, but with a mock-rigidity—like she has no choice but to play the part of the stern sentry even as she can’t help but acknowledge the role’s absurdity. “Where do you think we’re going?”

Arthur keeps a poker face. I honestly can’t tell you whether he’s oblivious to Linda’s protests or actively ignoring them. His eyes seem clear, though, to me. I see a seventy-something-year-old man, aware of his surroundings, and aware of the fact that people treat him like a child, and though I’m not reading any anger in those eyes at this moment, I can’t help but imagine its aeonian presence.

He grips Linda’s hand a little tighter and walks toward the front door.

“Arthur,” Linda isn’t worried—at least not yet. She’s, I’d say, curious but cautious. She lets him lead her. “You know you can’t go outside for too long.”

Arthur opens the door and I follow them out, first onto the front porch and then down the steps into the yard. Arthur walks with determination.

They get to the sidewalk out front and Linda’s starting to look a little less bemused and a little more concerned. He’s walking at a brisk pace. She’s having a bit of a hard time keeping up.

“Now, Arthur, you can’t leave the yard. Beth told you. And right now I’m responsible. Don’t put me in the middle of a bad situation, please.”

But he just keeps walking and she keeps following. What else can she do?

“Please,” she’s trying to be as emphatic as she can, but she can’t really disguise her disdain for the directives she’s been asked to enforce, “You know I don’t want to be a warden. Why are you putting me in this position? I said before, you can go where you want as far as I’m concerned but I told Beth I’d follow the rules. I promised her. You know that. Why don’t you do this kind of thing when Beth is here? She thinks you don’t care. She really does. I told her she’s stupid to think that. I’m on your side. Why must you pick on me?”

She keeps pleading with him, but I can’t really make out any more of what she’s saying. They’re a ways away, now, and I’m still just outside the house, watching them get smaller and straining to hear.

I’m not sure why, but I do not feel like this is the story of where they are heading. This is a story about the house.

I can’t hear them at all anymore. They’re a spec when they finally round a corner and disappear entirely.

I turn my attention back to the house. It’s a fairly unremarkable single-story middle-class suburban home. It’s painted an understated butter yellow. The lawn is well-tended. I think many people would describe it as ‘pleasant.’ The neighborhood, too, is ‘pleasant’ (forgive the scare-quotes, but I personally find neighborhoods and houses like this somewhat oppressive and nerve-wracking and so I do not feel comfortable using that word without casting some doubt onto its veracity, even as I do believe it to be the correct word in this context).

I step back inside. The house is empty of people. While there is a pronounced mechanical hum emanating from somewhere (the refrigerator most likely), and I can also certainly hear the various small sounds of a quiet suburban day coming from outside (a gentle but persistent breeze, the dolent call of a mourning dove, a passing car in the distance), the overwhelming sensation I’m left with is that of silence. (Since we cannot survive in a vacuum, there is effectively no such thing as true silence, so we create it out of contrasting levels of ambient noise—though part of me feels the need to reach for the scare-quotes again, I am relatively comfortable letting the word stand as, though I acknowledge that it is not entirely accurate, I believe it to be truthful.)

The curtains are closed save a small crack about an inch thick where a shaft of brilliant white light illuminates multitudes of dust particles in the air. I think about how I could happily spend hours watching dust particles dancing in the light when I was a child. I’d follow a shaft of light as the sun moved and analyze the differences in the particles as the light traveled across the room. I’d refrain from stirring the dust, even as I wanted to create more motion to stare at, because it seemed to me somehow unfair.

The single, concentrated light-source peeking through the gap in the curtain makes the ambient light in the room seem dimmer than it is. It’s a sunny afternoon and the curtains aren’t that thick. I’m sure I could, for example, comfortably read a book without further opening the curtains or turning on a lamp. Even so, I can’t help but describe the room as ‘dark.’

The shaft of light terminates on an end table next to Arthur’s green, fluffy recliner. On the end-table is a book of crossword puzzles (open to a half-finished page), a pen, and, underneath, a few sections of newspaper.

I think about all the memories in a house. I think about our tendency to personify the building itself—to speak of walls which ‘see’ and ‘hear’ and are ‘haunted’ by the lives lived within them. I do not, ultimately, believe that a house can remember anything in any real sense. But people do. We walk into an empty house and we start to remember. Sometimes I even find myself intuiting that we can remember lives we never lived because we are standing in the building where they happened, but then I think better of it. I think that our imaginations can’t help but create lives for an empty house. It is almost impossible for us to let an empty house stay empty. There is something wrong with an empty house—something deeply unsettling about it. And so our imagination fills it up with stories.

I hear a stirring somewhere down the hall and turn my head. I just barely catch the tail of a small animal (probably a cat) in my peripheral vision as it darts into one of the two bedrooms.

I move down the hall and into the bedroom. The bed is unmade. There’s a glass of water sitting half-full on the bedside table next to a pair of reading glasses. I am overwhelmed by a feeling of stasis. There’s no light in this room bright enough to animate the dust particles I know must be moving about in the air for me. This room is like a photograph and so I am frightened.

I don’t see the cat. Maybe it’s under the bed?


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