The garden. A mess of groundhog piles and dirt bike tracks—the local youth had found a good place to blow off some steam. The apple tree had been ripped out of the earth and was covering the potato patch, just as my grandmother had always predicted during storms—Someday that damned tree will ruin our entire harvest—the claw of its root menacingly curled toward the skies. Names and hearts were carved into the bark. I was not angry. The space was here. It existed without a claimant. It belonged to these vandals as much as to me.
I stomped in this graveyard, crunched it underneath my boots. I’ll rent it to some nice Prague folks, Shoe Man had promised once. And then he’d left it all to die.
I inserted the house key into the lock before realizing that the front door was open. Scratches around the handle suggested many attempts at picking the lock before the intruders had succeeded. I entered to a smell of mildew. Thick layers of mold had colonized sections of the carpet like hair on an old man’s back. It had seeped through the walls too—stains of it had metastasized wherever the rain had managed to circumvent the decrepit structure, wherever the drunken vandals had chosen to piss.
I left the hall and stepped into the living room. With blood thumping into my fingertips, I stumbled toward the kitchen counter, my eyes open wide and searching for ghosts. The faint haze of leftover cigarette smoke thickened the room’s ozone; the smell of tobacco overpowered even the musk of fungi. Where was he, the shape of my grandfather, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspapers well into his death? Was his passing a lie too? But this doubt dissolved as soon as I spotted the Monument of the Vandals. Where the living room table had once rested now stood a pyramid, nearly as tall as I was, composed of beer bottles at the base, on top of which rested pounds upon pounds of cigarette butts, all burned to their very nubs, all Camels, the brand my grandfather despised. The squatters had left the monument as a reeking flag of their presence, much like the first men on the moon, a statement of ownership of this forgotten land, this house of no one.
What did my arrival mean to their conquest? Did it erase their authority, or was I the squatter, my presence nothing but a haunting in need of exorcism?
I kicked the pyramid. It fell apart, spilling forth like the gushing blood of a pig. The stink of stale tobacco and saliva put me on the verge of retching, and I retreated into the hall to embrace the much more pleasant aroma of withering. I chose to ignore the bathroom and pantry for now—no good things could await there.
Then there were the bedrooms. In the room that had been mine was a single bed littered with rags stained with semen and blood, and spent condoms dry and shriveled. I pulled the rags off. And there, on the mattress beneath, were the two small stains from my boyhood nosebleeds, along with a bigger, darker blotch from the feverish, salty sweat of my back. This was my bed. The small form of my child self was imprinted on the fabric like a postnuclear shadow. The bed had been gnawed on by mice and burned with lighters, but it was unmistakably mine, surrounded still by collapsed shelves holding my grandmother’s history books, also marked by rodents. I sat down on the mattress, not at all concerned whether the juices of teen carnage had seeped onto it through the rags.
Above me, a giant hole in the ceiling and roof provided a direct view of the clouded heavens. The cave-in must have happened a long time ago, as there was no sign of rubble.
From underneath the pile of half-eaten books emerged a daddy longlegs, its torso fat and dragging on the floor—so rich was the house with insects for it to feast on. It made its way toward me without any hesitance, then stopped a few feet away from the bed. I felt its eyes upon me. I felt at home.
“Is it you?” I asked the spider.
It didn’t move.
“Lift a leg if it’s you.”
Nothing. But it was there, its gaze upon me consistent. Interested.
“Stick around,” I pleaded. “I’ll be back. You stay.”
I walked outside, leaned the Ducati against the cracked wall of the house. I had no knowledge of what time it was—it seemed that it was still early in the day, a good time for the errands ahead, but with the village streets so empty, I couldn’t be sure. I followed the main road, no longer comforted by the hallucinogenic speed of an engine. Gravity reached from beneath the concrete and clawed at my ankles, keeping me slow but steady.
An old woman whose face I didn’t recognize waved at me from a bench in front of her house. She puffed on a pipe, pulled her skirt up to expose legs colored with black-and-blue veins. How soothing the winds flowing from the east must be to the pain of aging. I waved back, asked after the time.
“Haven’t owned a watch in thirteen years,” she responded, toothless.
I made my way to the new market. In my basket, I collected potato chips, bacon, eggs, milk, brownie ice cream, deodorant, a loaf of fresh sourdough, smoked mackerel, two jelly doughnuts, lard, a cooking pan, and a jar of Nutella. The stuff of Earth. I held a newspaper in my hand before putting it back on the shelf. Too much.
With my filled plastic bags, I circled around the market and down the gravel path next to the closed distillery. I reached what we the children of the village used to call the Riviera, a beach of rough sand and grass patches flanking the river. The currents ran wild and deep as they reached past the distillery, and there we used to hold on to the thick wooden poles hammered into the river’s mud that emerged above the surface. The water would wash over our shoulders, and we’d play to see who could hold on the longest before the current loosened their grip and took them away around the bend. I’d almost always won.
It was obvious the Riviera hadn’t seen swimmers in a while. Half-buried newspapers and plastic bottles peeked from the sand. A black snake slithered from the bushes and vanished underneath the water’s surface. I considered taking my clothes off and following its example, but the water would be too cold for at least another couple of months. Setting the bags down, I rolled up my pants just below my knees and entered, shivering momentarily as my skin touched the ice-cold river. I stood there until the feeling of cold dissipated and the mud beneath my toes became warm. Everything had changed except for the water. Whenever I got in its way, it simply poured around me and continued on. It welcomed me for a swim and cared not when I left again. Even its attempt on my childhood life had been without evil intent. So close I’d been to my life ending early, to perishing here and never knowing Lenka, or Hanu?, to never seeing the golden continents of Earth from above. But again and again I had come to the shore, clawed myself onto it, and lived.