Home and Other Ruins

My dad has been dead for nine days and four hours and I'm sitting in the living room of an Airbnb house, wishing I could burn it to the fucking ground. I shouldn't even call it a house; that's an insult to houses. This is a house-like object. It's the body snatcher version of a house: so close to the real thing and yet devoid of all the proper affective markers that make something a house. If it were a real house, there would be a gas can in the garage for the lawnmower that would also be in the garage, and matches in a box on the mantel. But the fireplace has a sign hanging on the grate that informs guests not to build fires, because it's not real. So, unless I'm going to go out into the driveway and siphon gas from my own car into garbage bags and drag them, sloshing and dripping, back into the house-imposter, there's no handy accelerant. And there are no matches for a fireplace that isn't, in fact, a fucking fireplace.

I'm distantly aware that wanting to raze an overpriced Airbnb in an affluent neighborhood outside of Minneapolis is probably not an indicator of top-notch mental wellbeing. This is a form of dissociation, and I'm fine with that. I'm adept at looking at thoughts, feelings, and urges the same way a kindly grandmother might examine the preserves she keeps in the pantry. Look, I say to myself, pointing at the glass jar full of a black, churning maelstrom: there's my overwhelming grief over my dead father. And look there, I say, pointing to the jar filled with chaotic lava: there's my rage that my dad is gone forever. Ah, I say, softly tapping my finger on the glass that holds tiny bursts of flame in a haze of slate smoke: THERE'S MY NEED TO BURN DOWN THIS FUCKING HOUSE.

This architectural travesty is not my Airbnb. I wouldn't willingly spend money on something this vile, even if I had the kind of money necessary for this kind of place. I'm just the chauffer, delivering a friend who's visiting from out of town to her rental, so she can change and get ready for a doomed dinner that we're both attending with other friends. Well, it's not fair to call the dinner doomed. The dinner will be delicious. I'll be the only doomed thing in the vicinity.

Grief is a weird beast. Half the time you want to throw yourself down a well so your outsides can match your insides, all dark, wet, and howling. The other half of the time you want to sleep. Wedged in between those halves is this tiny sliver of self that says yes to dinner parties because, oh boy, aren't friendly parties a pick-me-up? I'm not sure where that sliver gets its ideas; I can't imagine something I hate more than dinner parties, even when I’m not constantly picturing my father dying in his hospital bed in front of me.

We'll get to the dinner party eventually, a place I will have to flee in tears because everyone there is so goddamn intact it disassembles my carefully crafted suit of normality. They'll laugh and smile and joke and I will feel sorrow welling up in my gut like you’d feel a bout of vomiting coming on. No, I will say to myself, please don't cry over the finely grilled cheese and beautifully plated hummus, in front of the middle-aged women with easy-to-care-for hairstyles who are reliving shenanigans of their youth while they eye their significant others with carefully designed affection. Don't throw up on the good ole days.

Yes, I'll think. The good ole days. When my dad wasn't dead.

 ***

When we got to the Airbnb, we had to come in through the garage. My friend had never used a garage keypad before, so I did it for her. The door into the house from the garage, which was left open for the new guest, is the exact location at which my brain stopped taking in reality one new piece of input at a time, and began following disparate paths through many timelines simultaneously.

 ***

Path One

Two weeks ago, I watched an episode of Criminal Minds in which a serial killer broke into houses by stealing garage openers. Because, as Agent Rossi pointed out, people rarely worry about locking a door that's behind a locked door.

Two weeks ago, my dad was struggling to get through his new radiation treatment. I had argued weakly against it, since the doctors had said he didn't have much time left, even with the treatment. And since it was radiation of his brain, he'd have all sorts of side effects like memory loss, cognitive decline, irrational anger or fear. The doctors posited these side effects as “possibilities,” which I thought sounded like bullshit. I thought he should do hospice. Relax. Have some top notch drugs. Avoid being stuffed in a fucking MRI ever again.

No one in the family agreed with me and I didn’t want to press the issue, since I thought it might sound as if I were saying, “hurry up and die.” Given that my dad's cancer was in his brain, I'll never know if he didn't agree with me about hospice or if he simply went on autopilot, working and struggling to the end like the stubborn creature he inherently was.

If forced to choose, I'd prefer a serial killer stabbing me to death in my kitchen over the course of three harrowing minutes rather than the drawn-out, years-long torture of cancer treatment, madness, and physical deterioration. Maybe that makes me a coward. Maybe it makes me an asshole. I really don't know. But I'd like it to be in my kitchen, not the kitchen of a shitty Airbnb.

 ***

Path Two

The door in the garage opened up onto what the Airbnb entrepreneur almost definitely referred to as a mudroom. But it wasn't a room. It wasn't even a hall. It was the suburban house-simulacrum version of an abattoir murder chute. A tight deathway adorned with five IKEA hooks on the wall. For coats and things. Look, this claustrophobic and terrible space said, you're gonna die in this house. But at least do us the favor of taking off your shoes.

My dad was the person who taught me not to be afraid of anyone or anything. When I was in high school and all of my friends had curfews and nervous parents, my father took me aside and taught me how to break a man’s knee with my foot and then smash the bridge of his nose up into his brain with the flat palm of my hand. I went into a lot of places over the next twenty odd years in which I should have been, at the very least, concerned; but I never was. Not so much because learning how to maim someone twice your size comes with a free pass, but because my dad never doubted that I could handle myself.

As a Marine, my dad was that special kind of crazy and wasn’t afraid of anyone. But he was bone-deep to the core terrified of small spaces. One of the first stories I remember him telling me about the Marines was about when they did torture survival training. I’m not sure what inspired the telling of this story, only that I was thirteen years old and we had just moved into our new house, out in the country. We were standing in the basement, on the soft, white carpet, and the room still smelled of wood, concrete, mortar, and the metal of the ducts that carried the air around the fresh space. The story went like this: The Corps folded him into a tiny wooden box and tipped him upside down, evidently to teach him how to survive the pain of such confinement. Instead, he flipped the fuck out and smashed the box to pieces from the inside. They told him that counted.

When the family had sat down with him to discuss the possibility of new treatments, at the beginning of June, he only said, “I don’t want to get back in the fucking machine.” The MRI. He hated that banging contraption of modern medicine more than anything on the planet. I tried to tell him that he didn’t have to get in one of them ever again, but my mom shushed me. I let it go. I shouldn’t have let it go.

 ***

Path Three

At the end of the mudroom/hallway/slaughterhouse entrance, was another door. And on the other side of that door was an attempt at an open-concept house that looked like Crate and Barrel had gotten wasted on Fireball with HGVT and, during a wild romp of raucous lovemaking, they had both exploded and spontaneously generated this fucking nightmare.

I spent over a decade studying the history of architecture. I spent four years remodeling my own quite modest house. I know too much money and a complete lack of equivalent taste when I see it. I can tell you that whoever purchased what used to be a comfy bungalow and tortured it out of existence and into submission did so within the last five years. I can tell you they paid a contractor to gut the place in its entirety and complete every bit of remodeling at the same time. I can tell you that they completed this remodeling solely for the purpose of renting the space out, rather than living in it.

I cannot, for the life of me, tell you how they sleep at night.

I checked the whole house, top to bottom, in search of that aforementioned garage-opener-stealing serial killer. In the mostly finished basement, I found the only corner of the residence that had been left untouched: the laundry and furnace room. It was a sad, quiet place with a cracked concrete floor and an old washer and dryer pushed against one unfinished wall. The space behind the furnace was bereft of any murderers, but it seemed to sigh to me, that it was once a house and a home. It had possessed a soul.

On the top floor, I found a nook in the hallway with neatly capped utility lines poking out of the wall. All that perfection throughout the house and they didn’t even bother to put a kitschy chest of drawers in front of the weirdly exposed guts of the place? If you can read the above without thinking of H.H. Holmes and his gas chamber murder rooms, fucking congratulations, I guess.

On the main floor, I found this living room.

There are two rugs, used to indicate the two main seating areas in the room; a bold assumption regarding the social structure of the people who make it through the murder chute, evade the serial killer, and remember their gas masks.

There are no window coverings on any of the windows that do not face the street. It could be assumed that a residence of any kind would elicit only one direct reference to Criminal Minds, but that is simply not so with this locale. Staring out at the backyard, sloping down toward a neat tree line between this property and the next, all I can think about is Agent Prentiss pointing out the spot where the killer hid and watched his prey.

There are two chairs positioned in front of the fireplace that isn’t real, but at least they’re far from the exposed windows.

There are no books.

There’s a couch, which I’m sitting on.

And, next to me, there’s the quintessential rental house object: the bookcase with puzzles and boardgames.

Since I was eleven, my family has been renting a house on Higgins Beach, just south of Portland, Maine, nearly every summer. As I am forty-three now, that’s a lot of weeks spent in replica houses that aren’t homes. The first time I read Baudrillard in grad school and everyone debated how space could be simulated? I thought of those houses. Cozy Nor’east cottages to some; unhomely hauntings to me.

I know these sad puzzle/boardgame bookcases well. They are the strangest attempt at humanizing a space, especially because they all look exactly like the recreation room bookcases in Hollywood productions about asylums. There’s our protagonist now, proving that madness is only a societal form of control, throwing caution to the wind and losing a game of Connect 4 to the resident schizophrenic in exchange for the Lord’s most beautiful trophy: human trust.

In 2002 I was twenty-four years old and one of my closest friends had just died in a car accident before the family went out for our annual trip to the beach. Our place of residence that year was on the salt marsh, inland from the beach but near the small river that runs down to the ocean. Every morning I woke up, slightly damp from air that never dries on the coast, and shambled through waking life to the best of my ability. My parents sat with me at the oval kitchen table, and while I sobbed, my dad told me that the best way to cope with the loss of someone you love is to be grateful that you got to know them at all.

The second to last time I was at Higgins Beach with my family, in 2016, I installed Pokémon Go on my dad’s iPhone and we wandered the dimly orange-lit beachside streets at night, catching Magicarps and Eevees. We stood on the beach on the 4th of July and watched the fireworks reflected on the ocean and the wet sand. Everything smelled like salt and roses.

Also on that trip, I got in a fight with my sister about BLM and screamed at her that she was a jackass. When she poutingly said, “It’s like you think I’m stupid,” I yelled back, “Because you fucking ARE.”

The last time I was in Higgins Beach with my family, in 2019, my sister had been dead for nine months and my dad was angry all the time. He yelled at me about eggs. He yelled at me about butter at the lobster shack. He yelled at me about too much lobster in his lobster roll. He yelled at me about tripping on my shoes. He’d had a terrible year and a half.

In January of 2018, he’d had open heart surgery and we learned that opiates of any kind made him batshit insane. I had stayed at the hospital with him for days, while he told me we were in a basement in Sweden and repeatedly asked me who the hell wrote the play we were trapped in.

I told him it was Beckett and that’s why everything sucked.

In July of 2018, he had surgery for colon cancer and we did the same dance again, except that time he was hiding out in a frozen bunker fighting Nazis in the mountains. He thought the med cart in the hospital hallway was full of basketballs, bombs, or heads. He wasn’t sure, but he felt the strong need to warn every nurse who went past the cart.

On the night before Halloween of that year, his oldest daughter collapsed in a restaurant, while she was out to dinner with her friends. The paramedics revived her five or so times. We got to see her, hooked up to breathing machines, one last time at the hospital, and then she died in a Medivac helicopter on her way to Rochester’s Mayo Clinic. Technically, she died on Halloween, flying through the sky like a witch, and I contest this is the most bitchin’ time and way to die and would make her perfectly situated for proper hauntings, if she were so inclined. Or if I believed in ghosts.

In April of 2019, my dad got his ribs smashed in by a rogue branch from a tree he was cutting down. He was 78 years old and out in the woods felling dead oak trees with a giant chainsaw that I can’t even lift. He managed to call my mom with his cell, and the paramedics had to run through the woods with a board to reach him. They shot him full of ketamine and before he passed out, he said, “You have to get Sara, she’d think this was hysterical.”

I spent the night with him in the hospital that time, too. The nurse came into the room and said, “Aw, did we have a little fall?” as though my dad were a toddler. I looked her in the eye and said, “he got hit by a tree he was cutting down with a chainsaw.” She didn’t have much to say to me after that. I slept on what passes for a loveseat in a hospital waiting room until another nurse woke me up at 3am to tell me my dad was awake and scared. I went to sit with him until he fell back under the weight of the drugs.

It was the routine checkup after that event that led to the discovery of his lung cancer, which he started treatment for in the fall of 2019, months after our rage-filled trip to Higgins. The treatment was hell. Hell for him. Hell to watch. He was in so much pain and kept having panic attacks. At one point he was at the hospital and there were about a dozen people in his room while he panicked. The nurse was telling him something about the soothing powers of Ativan, and my dad looked at me and said, “If it doesn’t work, Sara will take care of me.”

Everyone nodded sagely. As if this were the sweetest thing in the world. They didn’t know him well enough to know what he was actually saying. They didn’t know he meant with a bullet.

But I did.

*** 

There are no more paths to travel down.

I am here, on this shitty couch in the belly of this shitty body-snatcher house. I don’t believe in souls or heaven. I do believe that time is an illusion. I am always with my father, as he teaches me to feed the horses. I am always with my father, as he tricks me onto the ski lift that takes us to the highest hill and then tells me I know damn well how to get to the bottom. I am always with my father, as he dances with me at the Girl Scout father/daughter dance.

I have to learn to forgive myself for being too much of a coward—despite everything he taught me—when it came to truly witnessing his suffering and telling him it was okay to die. He had believed that I could be trusted to take him out, but in the end, I couldn’t even be trusted to tell him he could let go.

I have to assume he already forgave me. After all, a Marine and former sheriff’s deputy should know that even mercy killings are illegal and generally socially frowned upon. A father knows what his daughter can and cannot bear.

He would not find it surprising that I cannot bear the thought of leaving this hideous approximation of a house standing, and would laugh if I told him I wanted to burn it down. Beyond all of its grotesquerie, it’s the empty soullessness of it that offends me. It’s a stage rather than existence, where the set ensures the erasure of anything troublesome, like the complicated suffering of losing your father. The way its existence proposes sterility as happiness, emotional void as success, makes me dream of gasoline and matches. I may not burn it down, but I will leave this place, walk off this set; I will wander through and out of my grief and back into the real mess that is living. I will revel in the chaos of everything, grateful that I got to know any of it at all.

Except this house. Fuck this house.