LIKE A BOMB WENT OFF by Kristopher Jansma
The Neighbor’s House Explodes
The neighbor’s house explodes at 5:05 p.m. Harriet is behind the family station wagon, vacuuming summer’s sand out of the trunk. There is an incredible noise, like something collapsing to the ground. She looks up to see a white cloud rising behind the fence. Warm air rushes by like bathwater. There is no fireball. “It was like a bomb went off,” she’ll soon say, for the first time, even though it is not like that at all.
Pre-foreclosure
Harriet and Vish move to Westchester from Brooklyn with Clara and baby Theo two years before the explosion. The only hesitation is the neighbor’s dilapidated house. Vish jokes it is a meth lab, but their realtor assures them it is just neglected, and in “pre-foreclosure.”
Later, online, Harriet finds no proof of this at all.
Vish shrugs. “Maybe we’re all in pre-foreclosure, if you think about it.”
They decide to email the older couple they’re buying the house from, asking what they know. The three sentences Harriet receives back curl in her mind like a poem:
Luis has been there twenty years and raised three girls.
He has a son still in school.
Once
When I was doing some work on the roof,
He came over to help hold the ladder.
A Broom
Ten seconds after the explosion, Harriet is at the top of her driveway. Cars have stopped in the street, which is bathed in shattered glass, the twisted frame of a screen door, and part of a fence. Harriet takes out her phone and dials 9‑1‑1. As she does, an orange sedan begins honking furiously. The sound startles her – a brighter, louder interruption than the explosion had been.
A man gets out of the car, face red, waving his hands wildly, and screams, “Get a broom!”
Harriet stares at him, utterly blank. What?
“Come on, lady! Get a fucking broom!”
But she just stands there, unable to process this command.
The man screams again, exasperated. With both hands, he pantomimes pushing a broom in the direction of the broken glass. Like she’s stupid or something.
“9‑1‑1. What’s your emergency?”
But Harriet still can’t speak. This man is so angry, so ridiculous, that she simply cannot.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Flecks of actual spit fly from his mouth.
Maybe, Harriet considers, he doesn’t understand what has just happened.
“This house just blew up,” she explains, voice unnaturally high. What she means to say is that this is not a problem that a broom will solve.
“9‑1‑1. What’s your emergency?”
“Hi. I’m sorry. My neighbor’s house just blew up? It was like a bomb went off.”
“Fucking get a broom!” the man howls one last time. Then, deciding she’s useless, he begins to kick at the broken glass and twisted metal with his foot, pushing it with jerking swipes.
Harriet turns and looks at the fence, which has been knocked flat over. Through the waist-high grass she sees nothing – no house. Just a heap of splintered wood and cotton candy insulation.
“Ma’am, did you say your neighbor’s house blew up? Ma’am?”
“Yes. I’m here. Yes, it just – it blew up. It’s completely gone.”
There is a heavy slamming of the car door as the man, having decided he has done enough, revs the engine and peels through loudly, as if to make his final point. Horrendous, the crunching under his tires, but he gets by.
How dare this house blow up when he was trying to drive down the road? How dare he be delayed, what, thirty seconds, now – at most?
Stuck out there with some lady who can’t even get a broom.
Faulkner
Not long after Harriet and Vish officially move in, Luis comes smiling over to that same fence during a moment of mutually occurring yardwork to welcome them to town. He and Vish shake hands and chat about baseball. Luis apologizes for the sorry state of his yard and mentions his wife, in a hospital somewhere. He confesses he just can’t keep up with it on his own. Vish is deeply moved by all of this. He’s sold: Luis is a good man, trying to provide – trying to lead a simple life out here in a world that no longer stands for all it used to. (He reads a lot of Faulkner, Vish does, and collects Bob Dylan bootlegs. Harriet remembers she used to like this about him.) Vish tells Luis that he works in construction, which is only half-true. Vish works in HR at a company that does construction. He used to tell people he was a poet stuck in a desk job, but that won’t fly here the way it did back in Brooklyn – Vish’s figured that out already.
Banco
By the time of the explosion, it has been months since Harriet has seen Luis around. Since the start of summer there has been no sign of him or his son – only a strange man: a renter, or possibly a squatter – speaking only Spanish and disturbing everyone else on their street by sitting out by the road in a folding chair and enticing passing trucks to honk their horns. Harriet thinks it’s funny; in the Local Moms Group on Facebook there’s a whole horrified thread about it. But one day, the renter leaves a stuffed bear by the fence for Theo. Harriet takes it straight to the trash.
The renter, eventually, comes to the fence to wave guileless hellos to Harriet. When she asks about Luis, the man responds with an onrush of Spanish that she cannot follow. Then he says the word, “Banco,” gripping both hands around his own windpipe – and this she understands well enough: the pre- had become post-, all in good time.
An Attractive Nuisance
That first year, whenever friends and family come up to visit the new house, they inevitably comment on the neighbor’s place. There is much speculation about meth being cooked in there. Much talk of it dragging down Harriet’s property value. Much examining of the backyard, which is strewn with old junk: a rusty swing set, an upside-down riding mower, an aluminum shed with a collapsed roof. In the summer the grass grows wild all around it, going all the way up to Luis’s armpits. Then he rounds up a few other men to spend an afternoon mowing it all down again. Harriet suspects there is ragweed in all that wild grass, and that it is causing her allergy attacks. But what can you do?
There are things, she knows, that you can do. Harriet’s father, during one visit, tells her to call the town and report the overgrowth. To file a complaint about the collapsed shed being an “attractive nuisance” and insist it be torn down.
“That’s not a thing,” she says.
“It is too. One day Clara will go over there and climb around and get tetanus. And look!” He points to several trees that have fallen on the property. One is stuck precariously in the branches of another tree at a 45‑degree angle to the ground, just waiting for a strong wind to finish the job.
“What if that falls the wrong way and goes into your yard?”
“It’s leaning the other direction entirely.”
But her dad just tut-tut-tuts and stares out. Watching as if it might come down any moment.
She ignores him. She simply cannot bring herself to imagine that it is any of her business. Vish agrees. “People don’t understand the choices that other people have to make in the grips of poverty,” he says, as if he knows.
But whatever, she agrees with him basically. Not their house, not their problem.
Since This Was All Trees
Only now, suddenly, there is no house. Just a dust cloud, lingering. Just the memory of the warm air and the tremor that moved under Harriet’s feet. The other neighbors come outside from all the way down the road. It isn’t long after the cars begin moving again that Harriet becomes aware of an older Black man standing across the street. She’s never seen him before. He doesn’t seem like he gets out of the house very often. But seeing as they are both standing there, staring at the same thing, she crosses between the rubberneckers and waves. He introduces himself as Peter.
“That used to be a nice house,” Peter says, turning to face the debris. “A Polish couple built it when I was a boy. They lived there forty years before Luis bought it from them.”
“You’ve been here a long time then?” she asks Peter.
“Since this was all trees.” He waves towards the much nicer development behind them.
“I hadn’t realized that was so new.”
“Oh yes. Only maybe twenty years now.”
That doesn’t seem very new at all to Harriet, but, she reasons, if they stay in this house until Theo is grown, it will be about as long. Their own house, by then, will be a hundred years old. If it can make it that long. Houses, she is coming to understand, are not permanent things.
“What do you think happened?” she asks Peter, pointing to the wreckage.
“Lazy son of a bitch let it all go, didn’t he?”
Harriet realizes he is still looking at all of this with a much wider lens than she is.
“I meant just now. Why do you think it blew up?”
Fire trucks are coming now, siren sounds moving towards them, louder every second. More and more onlookers are arriving, clustering to their left and right.
Peter grumbles. “I heard someone over there this morning. I bet that asshole just turned on the gas and walked away.”
Nobody would do that, Harriet wants to say. Luis certainly wouldn’t. Not when he knew that she and her family, her small kids, were right there, next door.
There’s a crowd now, watching the firemen put on their boots and unroll long hoses, though there’s no fire to put out, so they remain flat and limp.
“Meth lab,” someone nearby speculates.
“That’s why there was no fire.”
Since when is everyone such an expert on meth labs? There’s a TV show, she knows – Vish likes it – about some ordinary suburban dad who secretly becomes a drug kingpin.
“The other day, when that storm hit, I saw the house get hit by lightning.”
“Screwed up the wiring inside.”
They’re all talking, and talking to Peter now, whom they seem to know. Harriet doesn’t know any of these people at all. She feels suddenly like some random bystander.
“That’s my house, right next to it,” she explains to someone. “I was outside when it happened. It was like a bomb went off.”
Voicemail
Harriet realizes that the fire trucks are going to block her driveway if she doesn’t hurry. She rushes back to the station wagon still parked behind the house, trunk still open and the engine running to power the portable vacuum cleaner that is still going inside. She yanks the cord out, closes the trunk, and guns it out of her driveway just before a ladder truck gets in the way. As she heads to gather Theo from daycare, she leaves Vish a voicemail:
Hey hon, it’s me. I just need to tell you, so you don’t worry if you hear from someone else, that the neighbor’s house just exploded? And I’m fine. And I haven’t seen anyone over there in a month maybe. But anyway, I’m fine, and our house is fine, but – the other house blew up. It was, seriously, it was like a bomb went off. I was standing right outside when it happened. I’m getting the kids now and we’ll meet you at the train station. We’ll grab some pizza. Give me a call when you can.
Cold Dark Matter
Fifteen years before the explosion, Harriet is in London. It is the last free summer of her life, she knows, even then. She’s just received a degree in Elementary Education, after abandoning her Fine Arts major. Vish and three guys from his dorm are doing a monthlong escapade, following Bob Dylan through a dozen stops on his Never Ending Tour, from Northern Ireland all the way down to Italy. A month of backpacking with the Subterranean Homesick Aliens does not appeal to Harriet. The way she sees it, when she and Vish move to the city in September, they’ll be around each other all the time. Instead, she splits the rent on a “charming flat” with Amanda Chan, who is already in a doctoral program at Imperial College. Something to do with quantum science –. Before she graduated, Amanda used to come by with Vish’s stoner friends but wasn’t into getting high so she and Harriet would sit together and soberly snicker while everyone else read sections of The Sound and the Fury out loud and debated if Dylan’s Christian phase had actually been good or not.
Amanda remembers those days. They reminisce. They do the whole London thing. Sit by the Thames and eat fish and chips wrapped up in a newspaper. They drink pints of ale. They take a bus to Stonehenge. During the weekdays, when Amanda is busy at the lab, Harriet strolls around by herself. She visits museums and is heartened to find she can still appreciate Bacchus and Ariadne and some J.M.W. Turners without imagining that she, herself, will someday paint something on that level. Heartened to find it is even more enjoyable, to just be there with Sunflowers and Self-Portrait with Two Circles and not have to be deconstructing them. She’s made her choices. And it’s fine if Vish wants to pursue his whole musician-poet thing – scribbling down his own lyrics doesn’t seem to ruin Dylan’s songs for Vish, but for her it would. She likes to be able to step back. To just be under their influence, without being under an Influence.
Only then – it happens. She is at the Tate Modern; it is pouring, and her architecture walking tour has been cancelled last minute. Contemporary Art never did much for her; of course, it was all her classmates had ever wanted to talk about. “Piss Christ” and the endless adulation of Warhol and the hollowness of commercialism – when really, they all just wished they could have been alive to hang out at his table at Max’s Kansas City. All of which is to say that Harriet’s not expecting much as she walks beneath the steel legs of Maman in Turbine Hall, hoping to find the café and a hand dryer. Instead, she rounds a corner and steps into a dark empty room.
Only it is not entirely dark. Or empty. There is a single light, up ahead, dangling in the far corner of the room. Shadowed shapes swivel around it: some huge, some miniscule. It takes her a moment to identify them as bits of damaged wood and other half-incinerated materials, and that they are moving, gently, in the air – suspended on threads that must be there somewhere.
It’s an explosion, frozen in time. A big bang, billionths of seconds after.
Slowly, she works up the nerve to walk forward. Into it. The room is cool, but she feels like it should be hotter, the nearer she comes. Soon she is right up against the outermost particles, and if she were not so terrified, she knows she could reach out and tap one, sending it into a gentle rotation. Looking closer she sees that there are things in there. Not just shrapneled wood and glass, but the charred leg of a child’s doll, a shard of a china plate, a melted rubber wading boot.
There is the quietest click-clacking, as bits and pieces of the blast cloud tap into one another; they pirouette around. Sparks of white light dance and flash out into the darker parts of the room. Art – a teacher of hers once said – is man’s way of defeating the relentless arrow of time. Every painting some reclamation of memory, some permanence-making of the fleeting pure imaginary. Sculptures, edifying. Photographs, capturing milliseconds. Films, preserving the illusory flow of it: time. But never before that moment had she felt it, really.
Time. What it means to be submerged in nothing but potential energy.
She tries, later, to tell Amanda about it. Cold Dark Matter, the piece is called, by British artist Cornelia Parker. According to the audio-guide, Parker had been doing a series inspired by cartoon deaths: things run over by steamrollers, and things tied to train tracks. She’d taken a small shed and packed it with dolls and kitchenware and all kinds of other domestic odds and ends. Then she’d arranged to have the Army blow up the shed in the middle of a field somewhere. Afterwards, she’d collected every bit and set about recreating the explosion, there in the Tate.
“What’s that mean?” Harriet asks. “Is dark matter really cold?”
Amanda hums. “Well, whatever dark matter is – it is probably the same temperature as the rest of space. About -459 degrees, just a hair above absolute zero.”
“How do you not know what dark matter is?”
Amanda laughs and drums a little on the report she’s supposed to be working on. “No one does. It’s just what we call all the mass in the universe that we know exists but we can’t find. But we’re working on it. Give me twenty years and maybe I’ll have an answer for you.”
Train Station
An hour after the neighbor’s house explodes, Harriet sits at the little pizza place across from the train station, preventing Theo and Clara from doing too much damage as they excitedly hop around. There are news helicopters up in the sky now, hovering over by where she knows her house is. “It was like a bomb went off,” she has now told Theo’s teacher as well as the lady who runs Clara’s after-school program. They’d looked at her like she was making it all up. Houses did not just blow up. Now Harriet hopes they’ll see – it’ll be on the news tonight. Local, at least.
She’s looking through the window watching trains roll in from the city. Vish is coming. He texts her to check that she’s OK. He says he didn’t get her voicemail. The neighbors have all been texting him. He was incredibly worried.
She texts back: I left you a voicemail. Why didn’t you call?
He responds. I was in a meeting. Next time, send a text.
Oh, OK. Next time the neighbor’s house blows up, I’ll do that, she thinks.
I was in the car.
He writes: I’m glad you’re OK.
Why don’t the neighbors text her? But she knows. Vish is the friendly one, who meets people at the park and says, “Let me get your number so the kids can get together.” Harriet gets the sense from the other mothers that this is not how it is supposed to work. Vish should not be asking them for their numbers, should not be setting up playdates – this is her job. Their husbands, Harriet suspects, won’t love seeing Vish’s number in their phones. “What’s your wife’s name again?” they are always asking him. And Harriet doesn’t love the thought of all their numbers in Vish’s phone. Mary’s Mom. Who then becomes just Cheryl. Then Benny’s Mom who becomes just Katie. It is a problem, Harriet knows this. But she just never thinks to ask when she sees people at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings. Back in the city it was always just, “Hey, will you be around tomorrow?” People would say, “Let’s get something on the calendar,” and that was all that needed to be said. It was enough that everyone wanted something on the calendar. Here, they actually whip out their phones and start rambling about all the activities their children are booked in, every day, and how stressful it is, and ask rhetorically when they are supposed to get their nails done? (They always seem to be done, Harriet notes.)
“They want you to ask them to go get manicures,” Vish explained once.
“I hate getting my nails done,” she’d said, studying her hands. Painted up and polished, they never looked like they belonged to her. Who wanted to walk around with someone else’s hands all day?
Just then, someone comes over from the counter at the pizza place. It is a woman Harriet half-knows, Clara’s friend from school’s mother. Maybe her name is Joan?
“Don’t you live near that house that blew up? I just texted Vish!”
Harriet shakes her head and widens her eyes. Is this how she’s supposed to look? This is how they look, all the time. Oh my God.
“That’s our neighbor’s. I was standing right outside. It was like a bomb went off.”
Before she can say more, Vish comes up in a rush. Joan-or-whoever looks relieved to see him. She grabs his shoulder – pats at it.
“She was just telling me what happened,” she says, as the kids, oblivious to all of it, leap up to try and tackle their father onto the table. “What’s your name again, by the way?”
Living Here
The look these women have – a little afraid, always. Harriet is meant to be afraid of a lot of things, considering it is one of the more affluent suburbs in the state, in the whole nation. The local dads here are not secretly meth kingpins; the crime rate is essentially a negative number, and the people are all so nice, though they don’t drive nicely, and often they yell loudly into their phones, and sometimes while they’re driving. But she’s not afraid of these people, who she assumes all have better things to do than worry about her. Though some other things do vaguely alarm her: deer ticks, which she combs around for each day after the kids get inside, and there are signs up all over about what to do if you encounter a coyote – once she saw one outside in the thin morning light that seemed the size of her whole car. And then every year there are a few sightings of some large bear moving through the area. This time he was affectionately named “Mr. Quakey” after the numerous appearances he’d made along Quaker Road. And earthquakes? Apparently. Someone just casually mentioned this to her at the grocery store. Isn’t it incredible that they would put a nuclear power plant so close to a fault line? I’m sorry, a what? Next to a what?
Oh yes, well, that’s why she got a form from school in the first week asking if it was OK to give KI pills to Theo in the event of an emergency.
“What for?” she asked. “What’s that?”
“K, I. Potassium iodide,” the woman in the Toddler Room explained. “For if there’s a meltdown over there.” She waved, vaguely, towards the woods.
“Oh,” Harriet had said. “Well, do the pills do anything?”
“I don’t know,” the woman answered. “I guess.”
“Sure, OK,” Harriet had sighed. “Load him up.”
News12
Their road is closed to traffic by the time they get back to the house. Initially the policeman in his neon vest refuses to let them through. But Vish politely points out that they have two children in the back and the officer waves them past. He tells them they’ll need to walk along the edge of the road because there are emergency vehicles everywhere.
“This house exploded and sent live wires right in the street.”
“It did?”
Soon enough, they see for themselves, a mess of cables on the road. Harriet, now carrying a shoeless Theo in her arms, realizes she must have run right past them. They’d been there, black electric death snakes, inches from her feet as she’d been calling 9‑1‑1, and as the man had been yelling about brooms. No chance to absorb this before a reporter with a News12 microphone approaches and asks her if she knows anything about what happened.
“I was standing outside when the house blew up,” she says. “It was like a bomb went off.”
She’s aware of having said this phrase a dozen times by now – and that it is just as inaccurate now as it was at first – but she can’t think of anything else to say.
“Do you mind if we come into your yard to get the damage from the back?”
Harriet leads them down the driveway. Vish and Clara follow. Still holding shoeless Theo, Harriet pauses to point to where her car had been and where she’d been standing.
“There was this warm breeze,” she explains. “I didn’t see a fireball or anything.”
“There’s glass,” the reporter comments.
“Where?”
“Here. Everywhere.”
They look down together, Harriet, Theo, the reporter, and a large and expensive-looking camera. There is, indeed, broken glass all over the driveway – some just inches from where she’d been standing when she’d felt the warm breeze. Harriet reaches down and picks up a jagged piece, the size of her head. She stares at it for a moment, studying it as if it has secret writing on it somewhere.
“Holy shit,” Vish says, moving Clara away. “Honey. You could have been killed.”
Harriet hums. It certainly seems that way, though it does not really register.
“If you want to go back into the yard,” she tells the reporter, “you can see better.”
Painting
Harriet has been trying to quit painting for sixteen years. By the time she’d met Vish in college, she’d already switched into the education program, thinking that she could become an elementary school art teacher. She did not then feel, and still did not, like she was meant to be a sweet, kind woman who encourages third graders in making things out of clay. But it had seemed easier to pretend to be that than an anarcho-syndicalist like the other young women in her Fine Arts classes. She’d been tired of lying to people at parties about having a girlfriend in the city. But even as she’d turned her attention from Monet and Pissarro to Piaget and Rousseau, Harriet had never fully been able to quit painting. If, then, it was still excusable as a frivolity, a hobby – now, a marriage and two kids later, continuing to paint was no longer harmless. Time spent with brush in hand ended up coming back on her later: why weren’t the kids’ lunches ready? Why hadn’t she gotten enough sleep? Why were her lesson plans a mess? It was difficult not to blame the thirty minutes she’d spent mixing the proper shade of violet for a painting no one would ever see or care about.
It serves no logical purpose. She harbors no fantasies about being discovered, a primary school art teacher whose work might, at best, get a piece up at the local mall atrium or in the foyer of the library. And even if that happened – then what? She has no desire to rejoin the posturing and preening, to attend the gallery parties that she’d skipped out on even back in her twenties. Yes, everyone pretended to not care about them, but this was premised on everyone else knowing it was only pretend. She had no hunger for attention. No statements to make, nothing substantive to express. And you had to have those things, it turned out, to be a painter – that mattered a lot more than just liking it, or even being good at it, whatever that meant. But the paint doesn’t care that she is not a painter. The paint doesn’t believe her when she tells it that.
She wishes it were as easy as it is for Vish. By the time of the explosion, he has dutifully placed his worn-edged Moleskines and dog-eared Faulkner novels up on a high shelf in the office-slash-guest bedroom. He keeps up with his Dylan fan boards and seems content; he still picks up the odd bootleg – but that’s different. All the dads here collect useless things: vintage lunch boxes, signed baseballs, antique cars. Things one can show off during playdates; discuss with other parents at the playground. Even if Vish’s collecting seems pointless to her, it has a point to him – whereas her painting always feels pointless, even to herself.
It is inconvenient – annoying, even, to Harriet that ideas are still somehow attracted to her brain, talentless as it is and always has been. Fuck off, she says to the ideas, sometimes – but they fucked right on, so what else could she do?
Awake late at night, going over the forms of something in the back of her mind.
Driving past her exit in the car, lost in a plan for how she might reproduce a certain shade of orange she’d seen in the evening sky.
Burning the stuffed portobellos as she thought through the layers that would be needed to create a texture so real to her that she could feel it against the pads of her fingers when she pressed them against an imagined canvas.
Every few weeks, she takes her paints and things down to the boiler room down in the basement and sets up an old easel right there by the hot water heater. Some nights, she’s up until one or two, just to be there with it. When the kids wake up at five, she hates herself for having done it. But she does enjoy it, in the moment. At first it feels wrong, even shameful. Then, slowly, it becomes knot-tighteningly good, and exciting in a way that hurts in her chest, which she savors for as long as she can before reality intrudes. Before it all comes out misaligned, colors too flat, the whole thing unpleasing. Then she wraps it up and sticks it back behind the oil tank, telling herself she’ll return to it in a few weeks when she has more time to focus. And the desire goes away, for a little while.
Dr. Landrieu
Harriet and Vish haven’t slept together since the explosion, six months ago, and honestly before that it had been sporadic at best. They start going to couples counseling. They’ve been strained around each other; there have been tears. It is easy to find things to blame for it: the kids each up twice a night, his father’s been sick, the school where she teaches is mismanaged. Money, as always, is tight – a burst pipe in the basement costs them twenty-three-hundred dollars they don’t have. And though the plumber tells her it has nothing to do with the explosion – that this just happens in a house as old as theirs – Harriet can’t stop imagining what else is about to give out on them. Roof beams, floorboards, foundation walls. Every tree in their yard now seems a disaster-in‑waiting. Sometimes, as she’s washing the dishes or folding a bedsheet or just flushing the toilet, she feels it. A moment passing in which everything could be blowing up all around her – all of it – and then it doesn’t, and then it hasn’t, and she goes back to whatever she’d been doing feeling just a little sick inside.
“What are you really fighting about?” Dr. Landrieu will ask them, a few times each session.
Each time they come up with different answers, but they’re all wrong, Harriet knows. They’re really fighting about how, after building this whole life together, somehow now they’re each wandering away from it in opposite directions. Vish tells stories about his working-class upbringing and Harriet has to bite her tongue not to point out that his father was a software engineer, not a coal miner, and that they had a house in Cape Cod. “It was my grandmother’s and mostly a rental property,” he’ll say. “We were only ever there one or two weeks a year.”
Harriet might be better off if she invented her own tragic backstory, but she only has tragic frontstory at her disposal. Her parents are still married, they loved and provided for her and her three sisters, who all still get along and don’t seem to harbor deep wells of antipathy for one another. They’re all, like her, settled down, supposedly satisfied with child-rearing and committee work. But who cares? That’s everyone she knows now. That’s nothing special. So she just sits there in Dr. Landrieu’s office thinking about all the bits of wood and boots and doll parts, hanging in the room at the Tate Modern, one-of‑a-kind and powerful, which is all she wants to be.
Insurance
Homeowner’s insurance covers the resealing and repainting of three rooms. Harriet spends a few hours at an approved paint store three towns over, picking out swatches in soft pinks and blues. Vish is acting like this is all quite a boon. Fresh paint. Fixed cracks. New medicine cabinet. Win, win, win! They stay in a Marriott thirty minutes away for a weekend while the painters do their job. This is covered too, plus there’s a stipend for their food, so they go to a Chinese restaurant nearby and eat their fill. Harriet still can’t quite believe it. Someone else’s house blows up, and you get new paint, Chinese food, and a weekend at a hotel in White Plains. God bless America!
The biggest job is to clear the glass. A team of landscapers spend an hour or two with massive leaf blowers, flushing a thousand tiny shards of glass off their side porch. But the lawn is another story. About half of it is covered in shards of glass. She and Vish have gotten the largest pieces already, but as for the rest, they’ll never be able to be sure it’s all gone. With kids running around, bare feet, and all that, the advice is to rip up the top inch of soil and lay down fresh sod.
“Sod,” Harriet repeats. “Like all new grass?”
“They bring it in big rolls,” Vish explains.
How does he know these things? Harriet again longs for a proper city, and an apartment with a super who attends to things like cracks and paint and sod.
The insurance company agrees, and so the men come back a week later and tear up the lawn with long spades. In an hour, the left half of the lawn is a brown patch of dirt. Then the men unroll fat spirals of fresh grass, fitting them together like tiles on a bathroom floor, until it’s all green again.
Although – not the same shade of green. The new grass is a darker, almost hunter green, and neat and uniform, whereas the old grass is brighter, a kelly green, and still run-through with unruly clover and wildflowers and other meadowy things. Harriet has always loved its nonconformity, out there. Now her lawn is a two-toned rectangle, like a tipped-over Rothko.
“It’ll even out,” Vish assures her. “Eventually.”
Which will win, she wonders?
Sleepover
After the bathroom is cleaned up and the engineer’s finished with his report, Harriet decides they can’t stay the night in the house without power, and all the trucks outside and the men shouting under their floodlights as they work. A utility pole has been blown in half, snapped like a twig.
“Sleepover at Freddie’s?” she suggests.
“Theo can’t be around all those cats.”
“What about Patty and Jim?”
“Clara and Genevieve aren’t friends anymore. Clara called her ‘squid-butt’ or something.”
Vish’s face twists with a glee he cannot stifle. He loves when Clara comes up with these things. Didn’t she love him once for being so childlike? She can only half remember. Her phone buzzes – the first time since the explosion, aside from Vish’s texts.
A number she doesn’t recognize.
Hey! Did I see you on News12? Are you all right?
Harriet assumes it is one of the other mothers, and texts back: Crazy, right? We’re fine!!!! It was like a bomb went off!
Can I do anything?
We lost power so we’re just looking for a hotel or something.
There’s not even a pause.
Come stay here! I’ve got two guest rooms.
It’s too late for Harriet to admit she doesn’t know who the number belongs to, so she texts:
My planner is in the house, where are you?
In a moment she gets an address she doesn’t recognize, just a few towns over. Who does she know in Elmsford? No one comes to mind, but they’re only ten minutes from there and Clara needs a bathroom, so Harriet plugs it all into the GPS for Vish.
Soon they pull up in front of a house that Harriet has never seen before.
“Is this Sarah’s new house?” Vish asks.
Harriet doesn’t know who Sarah is, but she can’t admit that either.
“You’ll see,” Harriet answers. “Come on, let’s go.”
Clara unbuckles, squirming like crazy and Harriet jumps out to run her up to the door before she has an accident. They take the wide flagstone steps two at a time, as Vish lags, still extracting Theo from his car seat as the girls ring the doorbell.
There’s a shadow behind the glass and then the door opens. It is Amanda Chen.
“Oh my god!” both women yell as Clara cries, “I gotta PEEEE.”
Amanda quickly points the girl to a nearby bathroom, and Harriet hugs her old friend.
“I haven’t seen you since London!” she cries. “I didn’t realize how close you were!”
Vish arrives, with Theo in tow, hand out to deliver the perfect pump.
“Do we know each other?” he asks.
Harriet slaps Vish pretend-playfully on the chest. “It’s Amanda, from college! From London!” she says, as if this had all been a big surprise she’d planned.
“I’m an idiot,” Vish says, slapping himself now, on the forehead. “Amanda. How are you?”
Urinating
About a year after the explosion, Harriet looks out the bathroom window one night and sees Vish urinating off the side of their deck. He stands at the railing, feet set apart, hands at his crotch. The arc of the pee is higher than she’d have thought. In the moonlight she can make out his serene profile. Why wouldn’t he just come inside and use the other bathroom? She’s horrified and grossed out and considers confronting him about it when he comes to bed. As he changes into his pajamas, she wants to say, “Pee on anything odd lately, Vish?” but she doesn’t.
After Bedtime
It is already late once they’ve settled in at Amanda’s house, so Harriet directs the kids to brush their teeth and get to bed. Vish takes them into a guest room for a nighttime story; Harriet is glad to be able to catch up with Amanda in her pristine white living room with the softest un-jumped‑on couch cushions she’s ever felt.
“I want this,” Harriet moans, as she sinks back.
“Pottery Barn, I think,” Amanda says. “Cocktail?”
“I seem to remember that word,” Harriet murmurs. “From another life, long ago.”
The beautiful glass and marble side table, with cut-crystal decanters and gorgeous French aperitif bottles in every color. And a record player, with a collection of opera performances, and a fireplace so large you could walk inside it, near a bay window draped in silk. Everything about this room, this life, is something Harriet knows is off limits to her now.
“You’re at IBM now? Doing research?” she asks.
“That’s right,” Amanda replies. She stirs something ruby red inside of a mixing glass with a long mother-of‑pearl-handled spoon, and then pours it through a perforated silver clamshell. From a bowl comes a fat yellow lemon, which Amanda zests expertly, curling the peel around her pinkie before dropping it into a wide coupe glass. She hands the finished drink to Harriet, who sips and moans and lets her eyes go back.
“It’s called an Old Pal,” Amanda laughs. “Just like a Negroni, but with whiskey and dry vermouth and lemon, not orange peel.”
Harriet tries not to drink it all in one gulp, as she contemplates how something can be “just like” something else except with three things different.
Amanda laughs. “Guess you needed that.”
“It’s been a day.”
“So, tell me. What happened?”
Harriet runs through the whole saga, from cleaning the car, to the man shouting for a broom, to the neighbor across the street, the pizza place, the news crew, the glass on the driveway, six feet from where she’d been standing. “It was like a bomb went off,” she says, again.
“You could have been killed,” Amanda gasps.
Harriet knows, on some level, that this is a true statement, and yet she cannot feel it is true. She has not been killed, and so, she cannot wrap her head around the fact that she might have been – had she been standing just a little closer. Had the explosion been just a little larger.
After another sip of the Old Pal she closes her eyes and tries to remember the feeling of the warm wind passing over her.
“Could I have another of these?” She holds the glass up even though it isn’t empty yet.
“I’d say you’ve earned it.”
As Amanda turns to make the next drink, Harriet tries, hard, to think about it. What if that had been her final moment on this Earth? Cleaning sand out of a car’s trunk with a little vacuum.
But no – she cannot. It is not real to her, no matter how hard she tries.
Then Vish comes into the room and it all changes around again – the orbits all change in the presence of his mass, his charm – and after two more cocktails and some light nostalgia, Harriet is ready for bed.
Where Sand Comes From
At some point Harriet gets into the habit of taking the old orange broom out to the deck and sweeping it from end to end. There are hundreds of little helicopter seeds from the overhanging tree. She cannot remember ever seeing so many before and wonders if, perhaps, this over-pollination is an evolutionary freak-out following the explosion. If, having survived a sudden disaster, the tree is just going overboard in reproduction-mode. S.O.S.! Genes, disperse! It has been happening to her as well – desire had returned to her from out of nowhere. Desire, not for Vish, specifically, but not for not-Vish at least. Just a steady shortness of breath, a cloudiness of mind.
Her lawn is still two shades of green. The battle between meadow and monoculture rages silently on. She sweeps the deck three times each day. There are always more seeds, and when she pushes them off the edge they spiral towards Luis’s yard. She imagines that they might, there, take root. That in five years maybe there could be just a forest of little trees there. That in ten more they’ll obscure her view of the wreckage completely.
There are tiny bits of glass, always, amidst the helicopter seeds – even though it was all blown off by the landscapers back in the fall. At first, she was finding pieces a few centimeters wide, but after a while there are just little pebbles – identifiable only when they catch the light. Finally, these are indistinguishable from all the other dirt that just accrues normally. Little crunchy bits, no bigger than grains of sand. Isn’t that where sand comes from anyway, she thinks?
Zen
Summer, one year after the explosion; the children are in camp. Harriet is home alone every day for the first time since their birth. It is eerie at first. She spends hour after hour sitting at the kitchen table, sipping at the same cup of coffee, getting up only to re-microwave it, and staring at the abandoned house on the other side of the fence. It has gone on the market finally, though there is still a mountain of debris, taped off with fluttering yellow caution tape. The listing has three photographs of the now-condemned structure, but the town, or the Banco, never cleared the pile of insulation and siding. From time to time a car pulls up and a few house hunters walk slowly around the debris, conferring quietly before leaving again. She has not yet seen the same people come by twice.
Her deck-sweeping has taken on a ritual sensibility. It summons a calm that she hasn’t felt since even before the explosion. Looking down at the spotless deck, she feels her breath lengthen. Her pulse slows. The clouded waters inside her head part. Then one day she carries her art supplies up out of the boiler room and sets them out on the deck. She finds that she can concentrate on painting for an hour, maybe two, right after sweeping. After a week, she is going a whole morning with brush in hand. She begins by redoing a few of the old pieces from behind the oil tank. Then she finds herself painting new shapes on new canvases, mixing new colors, playing with new brushes and laying new lines. Some days she can barely get them all back down in the boiler room before Vish gets home.
Other Dimensions
In college Vish’s stoner friends are prone to making small talk about things like black holes and quantum mechanics and, even sober, she finds it fascinating – at least to a point. Amanda explains what quarks are and what string theory is. On her own, Harriet reads several books that Vish’s friends dismiss as “pop” science, but which give her much to think about. She should read Gödel, Escher, Bach, they think. She should read Feynman. She ignores them. She understands enough: like how entangled quantum particles can feel effects in unison, despite being thrown off at incredibly far distances. Or how the known universe might be just one of many universes, and how within infinity there must be, logically, other universes where only one very tiny thing has happened differently.
“That’s reductive,” Vish explained to her in irritation, once.
“How can it be reductive if it’s everything?” she’d demanded.
“Babe, are you high right now?”
“No, you are.”
And then they’d had sex in someone else’s bathroom even though she had not especially wanted to. All this comes back to her as she paints out on the deck in the summer, feeling the grit and sand there under her bare feet.
There is a universe where she stood a few feet closer to the neighbor’s house and became blinded by those same tiny bits of flying glass. Another where the explosion is more powerful and rips her entire body to pieces. And there are an infinite number of universes where it never explodes at all. Another infinity in which it was never built by the Polish couple eighty years earlier. Other infinities in which she, herself, never exists at all. She realizes that she thinks of the things she has been painting like they are stray flashes from these other universes now come to her with some kind of intention behind them.
This, she worries, is what a crazy person thinks like, and she eventually tells Dr. Landrieu.
Dr. Landrieu says she’s not crazy at all, and urges her to consider that these images might be manifestations of internal, rather than extra-universal, concerns. Wouldn’t it make more sense that they stem from her anxieties? Perfectly understandable anxieties, shared by millions of other human beings who’ve experienced a trauma, or who have nearly experienced a trauma. Yes, Harriet agrees, that would make perfect sense. Logically, yes, that’s what they are. A subconscious in pain, urging her to address its wounds. Only – that just isn’t what it feels like. Try as she might, talk as she does to Dr. Landrieu, every Thursday from 1:00 to 1:50 – this framework simply doesn’t take. Harriet finds it impossible to believe that these lines and colors are coming from anywhere inside of her – they are too intense, too magnificent – and if they are coming from inside of her then how can she be so inept at bringing them out on the canvas? Again, she knows on some level that this is the reality, and that her failures to represent it all visually are none other than the same shortcomings she’s had since her days in Art Studio, but at the same time, she is used to that level of limitation and flaw. This is bigger.
Quietly, she maintains her belief that things are leaking into this universe from other ones. Something has ripped the fabric of – and, with the tip of her brush she pushes hard against the canvas. It punctures, then tears. And for the first time she looks at her own work, fully satisfied.
FOIA
Harriet fills out a Freedom of Information Act request over the phone with someone at Town Hall, and a few weeks later receives a notice saying that the police report she’s asked for will be available for her to view. It takes an hour to go down to the police station to retrieve it. Driving over, she feels queasy. She weirdly doesn’t want to know – what if they’ve concluded this was arson? That a propane tank’s valve was left open intentionally and that Luis, or the renter, or someone else entirely, was there that morning as the other neighbor had reported? She cannot decide what she would do with this information; she fears that it will crush her. If it turns out that the kind man by the fence set off this explosion, which could have killed her, or her kids, or anyone – it would rip such a bigger hole in her universe. The sociopaths in the news are one thing, hard enough to deal with, but they are mainly abstractions – far away from her. This would be different. This would change everything.
“Here’s the report,” the officer at the desk says, as he slides over a single sheet of paper.
“Just one page?”
He looks at her as if she doesn’t know anything, and she supposes she doesn’t.
On the form there are illegible scribblings in different areas, mostly numbers and abbreviations she can’t decipher. Things filled out there, on the scene, on the fly.
But towards the bottom there is a typed section for the conclusions of the investigation. Someone has typed three words, near “Cause of Incident”:
House blew up.
In the Dark
Harriet wakes up with a start in the middle of the night, Vish asleep next to her. It is another moment before she can put together what room she is in – that this is Amanda’s beautiful guest room. From a jumble in her mind, she reassembles the strange sequence of events that led her here. The explosion, the train station, the text message, the cocktails. Now it is two in the morning, and suddenly, Harriet is thinking about Clara’s medication, which she’s left sitting on the counter in their kitchen at home. It’s just an antibiotic, from when she got a cut on her arm after calling Genevieve “squid-butt” and getting pushed into the wire fence at the playground.
If Clara misses a dose, Harriet knows, nothing will come of it at all. She can just give her a pill after school once they’re back in the house. But Harriet can’t let it go.
Vish’s a sound sleeper, and there’s no issue getting out from under his splayed legs and back into her jeans and shoes. She expects to feel off after the Old Pals earlier, but everything seems unreally sharp as she sneaks out of Amanda’s house and drives off. Her heart pounds – she has never just snuck out before. It feels like an abandonment of her family there, as if they’re kittens she’s dumped on someone’s lawn. Go. Be with Amanda now, she imagines telling them. Your father will care for you.
It is barely ten minutes to get back to her own street, with hardly anyone else out. But when she comes to the turn, she finds that the whole road is still roped off, and a police officer is standing out there watching as ConEd trucks work on the downed power lines under huge spotlights.
“Hi, I live there next to that house that blew up,” she says, for the second time that day. “I forgot some medication my daughter needs. It’s just in the kitchen. It won’t take a minute.”
But the officer shakes his head. There’s no way – it’s all closed off, and with the downed lines, forget it. He recommends that she come back in the morning, early – just a few hours, and get it then. She doesn’t argue. She knows it isn’t even that important, and she’s worried he’ll demand proof this is a life-threatening situation of some kind. Which it isn’t. She knows that. Still, she can’t just go back.
Instead, she parks the car around the corner and walks over to the running trail that goes through the woods behind her house. She’s never gotten to it from her yard, though she’s heard from many neighbors that it’s not far off. Harriet is not a runner, but maybe she could be. Someday.
Walking up the trail she soon loses the glow from the streetlights, and the slivered moon above is behind heavy clouds. It is so dark she can’t see her hands in front of her. Only out through the trees to her left does she see the silhouettes of neighbors’ roofs against the farther sky. There’s no way to know how far she’ll need to go, or where to turn in. As she walks into the blackness she feels as if she’s moving through the cold silent reaches of outer space, through dark matter, though it is not cold at all and the night forest is alive with the operatics of the late summer’s cicadas. No, she is not walking through nothingness but muchness. Life is all around her, and so too, perhaps death. Coyotes. “Mr. Quakey” could be an inch ahead of her and she’d never know it until she walked into him. And why not, then, nuclear meltdown? These things can happen. Things just explode whenever. Death just arrives whenever. That’s allowed.
Her hands shake. She turns on her phone’s flashlight mode and illuminates the trail in a bath of silver light. Nervously she taps on the screen until she gets a GPS map up again and can roughly determine that she must be about a hundred yards behind her own fence. From out beyond she can now see the glow of the floodlights. Stepping off the path and onto the leaf bed, she ducks below low branches and over stumps and rocks that threaten to send her sprawling. She turns the flashlight off as she comes to the fence and needs her hands to climb. The men out there, in their high bucket seats, working on the power lines – could they see her, coming? Would they think someone was trying to break into these empty homes? Suddenly, with one leg over the fence she realizes how reckless this is. The officer she’d spoken to earlier could be patrolling, could see her shadow moving across the lawn – she feels the crunch of strewn glass beneath her feet as she moves along: any step could send a shard right through her shoe, she’s sure, easy as anything. God, she thinks, how fucking stupid am I? This is so fucking stupid. But she’s there, now. At her back door, and getting it open with the little key they hide inside a hollow plastic rock. Then she’s inside the kitchen, putting her hands around the little orange pill bottle on the counter. There are just two little pills left inside – the course is almost over. But it feels so solid in her hand. She’s alive and her house is still standing, and she leans, then, against the edge of the sink to keep herself from losing her balance. The adrenaline is sending her head into a flood. She breathes hard and fixes her eyes out the window on the place where the neighbor’s house used to be. The view looks all wrong, but she knows that soon it won’t.
The Heat Death of the Universe
Amanda comes over to the house one afternoon, almost two years exactly after the explosion and the night that Harriet and her family spent at her house. She drops off some shoes of Theo’s they left at her house. Harriet says she could have just thrown them out – he’s four sizes bigger already.
“You never know,” Amanda says. “I thought maybe you could end up having another.”
“Child?” Harriet laughs. “No thank you.”
She has managed to clean up mostly, but the painting she was in the middle of is still out on the deck and needs a few hours to dry.
“Is this a bad time?” Amanda asks, noticing Harriet’s hands are still specked with color. “Are you working on something? I smell turpentine or something.”
Harriet tells her it’s nothing, just some touch‑ups to the baseboards. She offers Amanda, “Water, or anything?”
“I’ll take Anything,” Amanda jokes. “Anything stronger than water.”
“I don’t think I can manage a cocktail for you,” Harriet laughs. “But I have some white wine in the back of the fridge left over from something.”
And Amanda seems fine with this, but for some reason Harriet goes further. “There’s some weed stashed in the back of Vish’s nightstand, I think.”
Soon they are giggling, reminiscing, with two joints sloppily rolled – and they’re standing out in the yard so that Amanda can see the wreckage out there, over the fence.
“I can’t believe they still haven’t cleaned it up!” Amanda says.
“People come by sometimes to look around. The bank must be trying to sell it. Sooner or later, I guess. Someone will knock it all down. Start over.”
Harriet looks down to where the “new” grass has begun to die out in light patches.
“You’ve got rabbits,” Amanda says, pointing a toe at a small hole in the burrow.
“Really? I thought it was groundhogs or something.”
Amanda shakes her head. “They dig around underground too, but they also pee everywhere. It’s bad for the roots. But you can get this stuff to treat it.”
Harriet points to the old grass, the more diverse and interesting and non-homogeneous clovers, and says she’s hoping that it’ll spread into the dead spots and even out, eventually. Amanda seems to like this plan. “I’m glad you’re not one of those lawn people,” she says. “When I heard you were living up here, I thought you’d end up turning into some Stepford wife.”
Harriet laughs. “I’d be like the lady they all eat for fuel or something.”
Amanda blows some smoke towards Harriet, who, feeling the pot taking hold, dares to ask finally, “What about you? No kids to destroy that beautiful house of yours?”
It is a loaded question – the sort she hates from the other mothers. But she feels like Amanda won’t take it that way.
“I’ve never really seen the point,” Amanda says. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Harriet says. “I’m not always sure I do either.”
“I work all the time, you know? And I’m not very loving.”
“That’s not true.”
“I don’t mind it. It’s just not in my DNA. I’m fine with that.”
Harriet is happy to hear it, really. It’s the first honest thing she thinks she’s heard another woman say to her in four years, even.
“Hey,” she says, suddenly. “Back in London – maybe you won’t remember this, but one time I asked you about ‘dark matter’ and what it was, and you said, ‘Give me twenty years and I’ll tell you.’ Do you remember that?”
Amanda laughs. “I do, actually.”
“Well, hasn’t it been about that long?”
“Has it?” Amanda says. “I guess it has.”
“Any closer yet?”
Amanda smiles and says, “Yes and no.”
“How do you know it exists if you don’t know what it is?”
“Well, they’ve done these calculations based on what we knew about the Big Bang and all that, and they come out showing that the universe ought to have, like, eighty-five percent more mass than we’ve ever observed . . . otherwise it should all just be getting ripped apart.”
Harriet thinks she follows. “So dark matter is what keeps the universe from blowing up?”
Amanda shrugs. “The universe is blowing up – but dark matter explains why it’s happening so slowly, relatively. Otherwise, nothing would even exist at all.”
“What do you mean the universe is blowing up?”
“Ever since the Big Bang, right, thirteen-point-eight billion years ago. Everything’s been expanding, right? We call it the ‘heat death’ of the universe.”
“Bunch of poets you have working on this stuff,” Harriet laughs.
“All it really means is that we’re slowly losing energy, as things expand and cool . . . but if it wasn’t for all this dark matter, that would all happen much, much faster. Whatever it is, it’s probably one of the only things keeping reality in place as we currently grasp it.”
Harriet nods. She thinks this all makes sense; she’s also a little high.
“What’s that?” Amanda says.
Harriet realizes she’s just said something. Then she remembers what it was.
“We’re all in pre-foreclosure, if you think about it.”
Amanda nods, as if she knows just what this means, and Harriet stares down at the light brown spots on the lawn; it crunches under her shoes a little.
“It’s Vish.”
“What is?”
“Peeing,” she says, “on the grass.”
Amanda almost doubles over laughing, even though Harriet isn’t even smiling. Slowly, Harriet explains what she’s been seeing Vish do at night.
“Maybe it’s a . . . sex thing?” Amanda offers. “Isn’t that like a fetish that people have?”
“Peeing on lawns?”
“Well, no. On other people.”
Harriet shudders and gags, and Amanda holds her hands up. “I mean, I don’t know. I just know that’s a thing for some people.”
“Vish and I never have sex,” Harriet confesses. “Well, almost never. And a lot of times when we do, he can’t – you know. Finish.”
Amanda looks concerned. “That sounds like a problem.”
Harriet sighs. She says she guesses so. That it isn’t like she’s been clamoring for it either.
“We’re sort of out of my wheelhouse,” Amanda apologizes. “I haven’t been on a date, even, in like five years.”
Harriet quickly offers to set her up with someone – there are a few eligible bachelors from their city days who are still looking to settle down somewhere.
“I like women,” Amanda says, “I mean, not very often, obviously. But when I do.”
Harriet rushes an apology and says she never knew.
Amanda shrugs. “Are you sure that isn’t something you’re painting up there?”
She’s pointing off to the deck, where, at just the right angle, there is a way to see the painting that Harriet has left drying.
They walk up together and Harriet, embarrassed all over again, shows Amanda the latest painting – a mostly black canvas, ringed in radiating fragments of light and color. The single rip in the center which completes it. Amanda studies it for a long time. She looks at it from the back and then from each side.
“Can I buy this?”
“No.”
“No, I can’t buy it?”
“No, I mean . . . you don’t want to do that.”
“I do. I want to hang it in the living room. Above the bar. Don’t you think it’d look good?”
Harriet doesn’t know how to thank her. It is a bigger compliment, in some ways, to be on a wall in that room she still dreams about – than to be in any gallery in Soho. They settle on a price that humiliates them both as little as possible. Then as Harriet wraps it with Clara’s roll of art paper, Amanda says, “I hope things get better with Vish.”
“I do too,” Harriet agrees – and the sentiment comes as a surprise to her too. But she does.
“I really hope he doesn’t want to pee on you.”
Then, there’s laughter everywhere at once. Brilliant soundings of it, sailing off into the air and echoing off the wreckage next door and coming back to them again.
Prospectors
One day, Harriet is out there, sweeping, when she hears someone over in the other yard. They come and go, still, these twenty-first century prospectors. But when she looks over, she sees it is not some young couple up from the city, or another pair of bankers looking to invest. It’s Luis. Standing there waving cheerfully at her, just like the day they’d moved in.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“I went to stay with my cousin, three hours north. I saw you on the news!” he says.
“Yeah,” Harriet says, thinking of the glass in the lawn. “It was a real mess.”
Luis shakes his head sadly, looking out at the rubble he’d once called home.
Did you do this, Harriet wants to scream. Did you blow this thing up at me?
”I wanted my children to live here someday,” Luis says. “I feel like I’ve failed.”
“No,” Harriet says, reaching a hand over the fence before she can stop herself. He grabs at her hand and squeezes it kindly. “You raised them right. You did the hard part.”
Luis says he supposes he has, and then walks behind the crumbling rear deck and is gone.
When Will I Be Blown Up?
It is late when Harriet comes to find Vish in bed, reading – she sees, with unanticipated delight – some Faulkner. It’s the first time she’s seen him open one of those books in four years. He sets it down on the night table as she enters and stretches. He smiles at her in a way she thinks he hasn’t in a long time.
“Did you see they were over there picking up some of the yard today?” Vish asks.
He gestures to the window that overlooks the lawn and the other yard beyond it.
She hasn’t told him about Luis. She isn’t sure how to explain the encounter.
“Someone finally bought it?” Harriet asks.
Vish shrugs his shoulders and runs a hand through his hair, scratching lightly. “I guess.”
“I was just out there the other day,” she says, coming to sit down on the edge of the bed. She sees he’s dragged their old woolen blankets out for the winter coming. “Amanda stopped by.”
“She did? What for?”
“Just to return some stuff we left over there.”
“Two years ago?”
She shrugs. “We’ve all been busy.”
Vish smiles, boyish again. “I should be jealous, I guess.”
“Of Amanda?”
He grins. “She always had a thing for you. You know that.”
Harriet laughs. “I didn’t even know she was gay until yesterday.”
“Stop,” Vish cries. “You must have.”
“Am I that unobservant?” Harriet wonders aloud.
“No,” Vish assures her. “You’re just – ”
He shrugs, unsure how to finish. Harriet isn’t listening anyway – she’s running back over their conversation, wondering if she was rude or insensitive at all. Wondering if this explains Amanda buying the painting after all – a gesture of unrequited love and not of actual artistic appreciation. But as much as she would normally be inclined to believe there must be some other reason for the purchase, Harriet is surprised to discover she cannot put aside the notion that Amanda really liked it. That the painting was truly good. That it is actually worthy of hanging there, above the bar, and being stared at while Old Pals are made and operas are listened to – that someday Amanda will put her arm around a lover there on the white couch who will ask about the painting, and Amanda will say, “Oh it was done by a dear friend of mine.” And that, even if, by that point, Harriet has been run off the road by an irate driver, or eaten by Mr. Quakey, or blown to pieces in some fresh hail of glass – that the painting will endure there, and mean something there, to someone. That’s the point, she realizes – or maybe she just remembers.
“Vish,” she says. “Have you been peeing on the lawn?”
“What?” He puts the book down, looking affronted.
“I saw you out there one night. I’ve seen you a bunch of times, actually.”
He gets quiet. Eventually he says, “You didn’t say anything.”
She shrugs. “I didn’t know what to say.”
After a long sigh, he stares up at the ceiling, where thin cracks have begun showing up again, lately, through the new paint, which really isn’t new anymore.
“It’s like a compulsion?” he says, finally. “That’s what Dr. Landrieu calls it.”
“You talked about it with her?”
He nods and looks Harriet in the eye for the first time. She can see his shame, his fear.
“It started right after the explosion,” he explains. “I’d just get these urges. Like I couldn’t stop myself. The bathroom would be right there and I – she says it’s a ‘redirection.’ That I’m . . . ”
He laughs at himself. “That I’m trying to dominate the other house. Like, I don’t know. My lizard-caveman brain got activated or something. Like it tried to kill you and so – I don’t know – this is what I’m doing to get back at it.”
“You’re peeing on the house to avenge me?” Harriet says.
Vish shrugs, clearly not sure he’s made the right choice in confessing. “It’s gross. I know. I swear I always wash my hands, after.”
But it doesn’t seem gross to her anymore. It makes more sense than much else has in the last two years. She moves across the bed and takes his slouched form in her arms.
Vish kisses her, slowly, on her neck, below her ear. She feels something in the pit of her stomach that she’s been holding in for all this time.
“You don’t want to pee on other stuff though, right?”
Vish shakes his head. “Like what?”
“Specifically me, right?”
He breaks into schoolboy laughter, desperately shaking his head. She’s crying, happy.
“No,” he wheezes. “Not at all. I definitely do not want to do that.”
“OK,” she says. “That’s good.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, lifting his hands in the air. “I really am just so embarrassed.”
“That’s OK,” she says. “You don’t have to be.”
They kiss. Things progress. Vish rises to the occasion; she does too. The timing is right, the children stay asleep, for once, and there in the dark she sees flashes of light and joy and circles of color and after, she wants to sleep, but in the dark, to the sound of Vish’s near-instant snores, she is unable.
After a while she gets up to use the bathroom and there, she finds another Faulkner, resting upside down on the radiator: not a novel but a biography. She lifts it and, feeling the warmed pages, reads about the speech that Faulkner delivered in 1950 at the Nobel Prize banquet. It is just four paragraphs long. A few lines catch her eye:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
She thinks how there must have been times in the past when things blowing up were not so uncommon. How there are places in the present when they are not so uncommon. The problem really is that she lives here, and now, at a rare juncture where it isn’t expected.
She mouths those six words over and over, until they are less a question and more a prayer.
When will I be blown up?
When will I be blown up?
When will I be blown up?
She’ll be blown up, she thinks, or her car will crash into someone else’s, or her heart will seize up in the International Food aisle, or cancer will invade her from top to bottom. Lyme disease, or a nuclear meltdown. Something will happen eventually. Probably nothing even that interesting. We’re all in pre-foreclosure if you think about it. Until then, she thinks, she is warmed by the thought of Vish, asleep, upside down, bare-assed to the world. For a second that lasts a lifetime in her mind, there’s no one at fault.
As quietly as she can, Harriet comes down the stairs. The children are such light sleepers. She eases the door open to the outside, and steps into the dark, quiet deck. It is a warm night, and the darkness is full of cricketing and the brush of leaves in the breeze. Immediately, she knows, this is her favorite place in their house – technically just outside of their house. It is womblike, and yet it is open to the night sky and to the world around them. She moves slowly to the railing where Vish had been standing, telling herself that it is such a warm evening that any residual drips will have evaporated. She can’t see anything, there on the gray flagstone. She lifts her head, trying to match the angle of his gaze from earlier. Out there in the night, she can see the neighbor’s yard, the fallen trees, the rusted shed. It is all half-lost now in the fresh summer growth. A green that covers everything like a blanket. She sets her feet a little apart and feels a little sandy grit under her toes. She moves her hands lower. Trying to recreate the same pose Vish had before. She does not have to pee, and cannot, anatomically, do what he’s been doing – but she imagines it. Sending a sparkling stream out into the night. The breeze pushes around her like she is standing at the bow of a great ship. She feels like a seafarer, a ship captain. The green blanket has turned to an emerald-dark rolling sea. She and her house are perched atop a great wave, high up above the rest. She feels a sharp pang of helplessness, as if she is strapped in on a rollercoaster ride that has just reached the top of its track. But there is no drop. This is a moment frozen in time. And she is overcome, and powerful, even more than before. There’s a kind of primal pleasure to it – a dominating forcefulness. A simple, pure “fuck you” to it. Try to kill me and my family and damage my home? Take that. She feels cool, the low boil of rage she has been feeling so long she’s stopped noticing it, is gone suddenly. Inside she washes her hands at the kitchen sink, even though they are not dirty, and she climbs back up the stairs and into bed beside Vish. He’ll never know. The secret of this moment swells inside her chest and creates, for her, a sleepiness that soon takes her away.
Kristopher Jansma is the author of the novels Why We Came to the City (Viking, 2016; Penguin Books reprint edition, 2017) and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (Penguin Books, 2013), winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. His work appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, ZYZZVA, The Believer, Prairie Schooner, and Electric Literature.