The holes I made in the wall are gone.
I can’t see where they were. I don’t know where to search. I run my hands along the surface. I don’t find what I’m looking for. No wet plaster. I go to the tool bench in back. The drill is in place, the battery cool. The mop is dry. I sit down on the stairs in front of the wall. I try to convince myself that what I saw was real. My memory feels fuzzed out, coated. I think about grabbing the sledgehammer and confirming what I found behind the wall here. I rush through ways that Julie could be responsible for this. I look in the darkroom to see if she’s hiding there. I call her name. And again. My mind keeps snapping into focus, knowing Julie isn’t the one who fixed this wall. My thoughts blur again, but then I can see she’s not guilty of the rest either. At least not all of it. I consider writing letters where I take the blame myself. Fatigue clarifies in me. I check the time to find it’s only 6:00 p.m. Still, I call it a night.
I glance at the letters on the dining room table as I head upstairs. I should shred them. I should turn them into pulp before Julie gets home. Their edges are beginning to whorl. The air of the house spoils even crisp paper. I pause. I watch as one piece rolls itself into a tube. It rocks back and forth, ever so slightly, as if under an invisible hand. A sickening flicker. I reach the bedroom. I collapse on the foot of the bed. I contort.
75
JAMES OR NOT-JAMES doesn’t respond when I call out, “Hello?… No? Nothing? You’ve wandered off again? Transformed into someone else I don’t know? Left me here talking to myself?” I envision him pummeled by the tide at the lakefront, facedown in an alley somewhere. I think of him crawling back into the earth like a worm after rainfall.
The stench in the house has gone from awful to unbearable. On the table, I see sheets of loose-leaf curling themselves in the moist air, and on them I find my own handwriting laying bare confessions, saying I am to blame for all of the bullshit that’s been going on in this house, sneaking crushed pills into the food and unscrewing pipes in the basement and clotting them with huge handfuls of mold and pinching my skin so hard it shows the deep colors of bursting blood vessels.
I do not remember writing these and the fright nerves through me as I wonder how and why they exist. I take them out onto the deck with me because I think I might choke on the air of the house and I sit on the step and read through them again and wonder at what I don’t know or can’t remember about myself. Certainly James or not-James read them and that is why he has gone and while I’m reading about the bruises, my hands go to their evidence and I’m shocked at how paranoid and frantic I sound in the letters, each one a bit different, giving alternative reasons for why I’ve done what I’ve done, as if what the pages contain isn’t truth, but an attempt to find answers by claiming guilt.
I ask myself what I should do, because if I leave the letters out, it’s like saying I agree with them, that I accept that these missives have been written in my hand. If I hide them, maybe nothing will come of it, but if someone finds them, if the detectives decide to gut the house looking for evidence, they’ll be certain the confessions are true, hidden away for a moment of courage. I could burn them, but if I need them as evidence later, to show how I was being manipulated or how I was out of my mind or how their multiplicity proved that none of them was true, what would I do? I go into the house and bury them in James’s office, in a file he won’t look at again, a tax-return folder from years ago.
Let’s pretend it’s James who knows this secret instead of me and let’s take away the blame. Is he trying to protect himself or me? Whom would I rather shelter than harm?
I walk upstairs and James’s or not-James’s body hulks at the foot of the bed like a pet. I strip and climb into bed, leaving the man who thinks he knows so much below me.
I look at us from the outside and think of the Google search as proof. My thoughts guide themselves like imitations. If there was another voice in my head, what would it sound like? I try out different inflections, like writing a script, until one of the voices comes through easy and clear, less like I’m making it up and more like I’m listening. I wonder if that’s how those letters got written. I ask myself if the voice that wrote those letters is my own, my other voice, a not-Julie’s, like James is not-James, if it was this other voice that took over for a while, thinking of the neighbor constantly, feeling what it is to be absent of oneself and worrying that my shape might shift the way the house seems to grow and shrink, the way the figures on the wall breathe, the way the bruises pulse with unusual life, the way the stains glow and dim and the pipes blossom, and I decide to keep a close eye on myself. I decide it is best if I note where I end and the world begins, boundaries to be defended.
I can feel the boggy gas traveling from James’s or not-James’s warm mouth toward me and it nails me down against my pillow. Are we always barely missing each other? Our edges brush. Our hairs stand on end, reaching.
“James,” I say, and not-James emerges, looking smaller, like catching a hummingbird still. My eyelids feel thin, as if too much light is getting in. I pull his hand so his face tilts up at me on the mattress and I well over and feel the fluke of a second self filling me up.
“We can get through this, Julie. We don’t have to give up.”
My mind runs like hell from such empty reassurance and I croon to him, singing in my sweetest voice, forming notes and phrases with the threads in my throat: “If you can’t breathe, punch a hole in the window. If you dive deep into the ocean and the pressure gets too great, beware your eardrums burst first and ring like so many coins from a slot machine and you wish your fortune away and you wonder what you thought you were missing, and your hearing starts to take the form of roots, spiraling deeper into your brain, looking for water. Minutes are measured with the beat of your blood, and someone holds your head against the mat a second too long, and the cartilage separates and your flesh fills with blood and hardens, like a sausage, fat and dense, and like that, the seedy vortex has shifted, and your head is coated in prayer, and half of your brain is filled with your slow, stuttering pulse, while the other side tries to sprint. Maybe morning is no special gift. Hostile darkness no longer taxing, just the norm. How dusk feels different than dawn despite the light measuring the same. Like the sun might be burning itself out. Like watching the day in—”