The House is Dying
The House is Dying
by Christopher A. Walker
by Christopher A. Walker
The house is dying. No getting around it. Houses routinely live for hundreds of years, so when one does die, especially before its time, it’s a real tragedy. It’s not something you can really plan for, either. No inspector in the world can tell you how long a house has left to live. One day, it’ll just happen. You can get upset about it, wonder why it’s happening to you and not someone who deserves it more, but there’s not a thing you can do to stop it.
I noticed it first in the bathroom. A spot, greenish-black and bulbous like a mole, maybe an inch above the showerarm. It looked like mold to me, so I doused it in bleach and wiped at it with an old rag. When it was still there after the third pass, I knew I was out of my depth and called a professional.
The professional lumbered out of his van and into my bathroom, carrying his little folding step ladder and tool bag, sealed in a blue coverall uniform with an embroidered name patch on the left breast pocket that read CHUCK.
He knew right away that it wasn’t mold.
“What is it, then?” I asked.
“Rot,” he said.
“What do you mean rot?”
“Rot. Decay. Like when something dies.”
“Like some rotting stud in the wall? Who do I call for that?”
Chuck unzipped his tool bag, fished around inside, and removed a slim pamphlet.
A Homeowner’s Guide to House Death: Funerary Rites and Responsibilities
“Bad luck,” he said as he handed me the pamphlet. “Never easy when a house dies. But you just follow that and you won’t have any trouble with your insurance company.”
He gave me a swift pat on the back. My blood boiled. Chuck the mold guy with his pressed uniform and galvanized steel tools with rubberized handles and compact little bag with a mesh compartment just the right size for a pamphlet, as if he’s announcing to the world, look at how fucking prepared I am, I can crawl into any rotting old dying house, devastate the rube who lives there, and then hop back in my stupid van and go home like it’s no big deal.
I wanted to hit him.
When he was gone, I threw the pamphlet into the kitchen drawer where I keep the takeout menus and old batteries and slammed it shut. Chuck.
I thought that there must be someone who could tell me everything was fine and that Chuck didn’t know what he was talking about. I dumped bleach onto the spot and wiped it again.
To try to get my mind off Chuck, I cooked dinner—a dry-aged steak from the butcher, garlic butter cremini mushrooms, Pommes Anna, roasted broccoli rabe, arugula salad.
I hadn’t done a spread that big in a while because I hadn’t needed to apologize for anything. Right after the penultimate fight of our marriage, I put together a beautiful meal for my wife in lieu of having to admit out loud that I’d done anything wrong in the first place.
She had come home from work in a terrible mood and did what she normally did when she felt that way, which was to ask how my job search was going. I wasn’t feeling so great myself, and the constant rejection was putting a damper on my motivation. I hadn’t applied to anything since the last one, so I had to fib a little.
When being purposefully dishonest, it’s best to obscure the outright lie, the real thing you don’t want discovered, with a more innocuous one. A smokescreen. A softball that’s easy to sniff out so that the party being lied to can fool themselves into believing they’ve uncovered the bullshit they’re no doubt detecting. The other thing is believing the lie yourself. The first person you’ve got to fool is you, because if you believe it, you’re not so much lying as mistaken. Mistakes happen all the time. So that’s what you should strive to be. Mistaken. If you’re going to lie, that is.
The problem is that I’m no good at lying on the spot. I need time to prepare.
What I ended up saying was that I had a couple promising leads that were maybe a bit above my experience level. She reminded me that I’d been unemployed for a year and had agreed to focus my sights a bit lower to get back out there. I tried doubling back, but she had me cornered. She asked why I was applying to jobs above my experience level. I fumbled for an excuse. She asked why I was lying. I fired back by asking her what the big rush was, since we were doing okay and the two of us were okay financially, it’s not like we had kids to support. On reflection, sticking my finger in that wound just to score a point wasn’t the best strategy. She said something about how I might still have a job if I weren’t such an asshole all the time, which was fair.
But I made her a nice dinner the next day, and things were okay for a while.
As soon as I sat down to eat, Chuck’s words came back: Rot. Decay. I even started to smell it. The stench of death. I shoved a bite into my mouth and tried not to breathe. It wafted over the back of my tongue and up into my nose, filling me with a putrid stink. I fought to stomach each forkful. I wondered if it was possible to rot alive from the inside out.
◊ ◊ ◊
A few days later, the bathroom looked smaller.
To continue reading, pleasure purchase a copy of the anthology Beyond the Vanishing Point.