Jan Vanderschaaf sits in the center of his living room. A matte black autoloader with a shell in the chamber rests flat on his lap and his gaze draws a line perpendicular to the wall by the door that has not opened in twenty-four hours. Out of the corner of his eye he watches the dancing shadows of tree branches swaying behind the frosted glass.
The light filtering through the windows is cold and gray. This time of year, the sky is dead and generally still. Jan listens for the ugly blatter of rain on the rooftop, the kind of seasonal rain that churns the ground and washes away the traces of man’s presence. Yet he hears nothing but the mocking tones of the wind and the creaking of a rocking chair expatriated from its ancestral home. His motion back and forth is the only aberration in the perfect stillness of the Vanderschaaf household.
If Jan stops moving, he will not start again. This he knows to be true. It is a deeper truth that neither paper nor vinyl nor film can house. It is the truth that the ax speaks to the tree and the hammer to the anvil.
His finger curls around the trigger like the tail of an advancing scorpion. The drywall pockmarked with rust-red flecks taunts him. It dares him to punch a hole in the inviolable walls of the Vanderschaaf fortress and see what crawls out, if not with his gun, then with his tools, his feet, his hands, his copper-scented fingernails.
He hurls the shotgun across the room as he rises to his feet. He barely even hears it go off.
It has been two days, and Jan has not slept. A half-drunk beer long gone lukewarm rests in his left hand. The remote to the television in front of him, cycling through channels of drivel and garbage noise, is clutched in his right.
“So, Matt, what did you think of that play?”
“Well, Dan-”
Click.
“President Reagan has confirmed that-”
Click.
“-and so I said ‘Where’s the lemonade?!’”
The TV regurgitates canned laughter before Jan can change the channel. His face contorts into a grimace, half-reflected on the screen projecting a colorful domestic sitcom set into the dark room. The shadow of his stubbly chin hangs over the picturesque kitchen table like an overgrown vulture. Several seconds pass, and he turns his gaze from the light to stare down the dark hallway where he knows his own kitchen is. He can almost make out his seat at the head of the table flanked by two empty places with plates of dry, half-eaten spaghetti.
He isn’t hungry. The hollowness in his abdomen isn’t hunger, exactly.
The third day begins with a red-green dream of Fourth of July monsoons and sharp edges. Thunder crashes, but is overpowered by the gunmetal drumbeat of rifles and ordnance. Even the fires burn wet and potent enough to defy asphyxiation under the sky’s onslaught. The sun flickers behind the clouds like TV static.
Jan is on his hands and knees in red mud starred with bamboo spikes. The splinters embed themselves in his skin, and defoliant seeps into the wounds. The pain in his limbs testifies so, but Jan Vanderschaaf has never been a truth-teller.
His hands know no difference between traps and fragments of broken glass from the picture frames he has cast down off the walls and shelves. His eyes see no difference between black sheets of rain and dark drywall. The blurry faces of his comrades remain as they were, painted by a Polaroid nearly twenty years ago. The blood he spills onto the South Vietnamese soil lands on a faux-Oriental rug made an ocean away from its namesake.
As he is roused by the crack of close lightning, it occurs to him that every AK-47-toting Vietcong illuminated by muzzle flash wears the same two faces.
Jan rises off the living room floor, riddled with puncture wounds that glisten in the light of the screeching television screen. The bathroom is impossibly far away. Walls rise up to meet him as he hobbles forward in the blurry darkness, but shrink away when he reaches out a hand to steady himself. He can feel the house staring at him everywhere he isn’t looking. Watching him, laughing at him in high-pitched tones like harpies before the feast.
His body once again moves faster than his mind, and he finds his fist at the center of a hole in the wall like the exit wound of a 20mm round.
The next snippet of reality he catches is wet and lukewarm. Something tells him it’s around the fourth day, but time moves as unpredictably as the water soaking his unwashed clothes here. Sitting there for a moment in the half-full, blood-flecked bathtub feels something like absolution. For a moment, his mind is quiet.
The tranquility comes to an abrupt end when his gaze falls on the contents of the medicine cabinet, torn off the wall and emptied on the floor. Most of the gauze has already been looted, wrapped around his hand and tinted pink. Half a bottle of antiseptic is lying open on the floor. Jan remembers its sting still in the lacerations dotting his upper body. Across the tile there are matching near-empty bottles of painkillers and antidepressants for Him and Her respectively, and a bottle of barely-touched vitamins in bright, friendly colors.
Jan slaps himself with his less-injured hand and lets the pain radiate across his face.
“Get it together.”
It’s now the fifth day since the house turned against Jan.
He is sweeping the floor when the phone rings, the sound shrill and near deafening in the silence. He nearly bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood.
“Hello?”
“Is this… Jan Vandersch-”
“Speaking.”
“Hi, this is Shelly from Westbrook Elementary. We’re calling about your son Anton’s absence these past few days.”
“He’s visiting family with his mother.”
“We require notice in advance for-”
Jan hangs up and slumps down on the couch. He drags his hand downwards across his face, taking note of every bony ridge and prickly hair. His body moves forward, regardless of whether his mind follows.
“Fuck.”
Judging by the calendar on the wall, it’s been six days. Jan turns back to the sliding glass door, trash bag slung over his shoulder.
It is no longer wet outside, and the two rectangular patches of dirt at the side of Jan’s yard remain brown and barren. He looks past the yellowing grass, past the tire swing hanging from a gnarled old tree, past the white picket fence to the dark forest where his domain ends and darkness sets in. He should have dug there, where the sun doesn’t shine and the weeds bite at a man’s feet.
And yet, the past is forever outside Jan’s grasp. He steps out onto the deck to resume the trek to the trash can, taking a deep breath as he does so.
The house can’t hurt him here. The house can’t take anything from him here. Here, the house can’t make him do anything. He could tear off his clothes and bound into the woods on his hands and knees, and there the house and the law and that hollow feeling couldn’t follow him.
But he’s not going to. There’s work to be done.
Seven days have passed, and everything is as it should be in the Vanderschaaf household. The floors in every room are clean and tidy from wall to wall. The walls themselves have been scrubbed, and the holes safely hidden from sight. Jan had always been planning to replant the backyard, and the bandage on his hand is from an incident with a broken pot. Redecorating has proceeded without issue. The place is cleaner than it’s ever been.
As for the man of the house, his hair is brushed, he’s freshly showered, his face is shaved, and his breathing is level and untainted by the stench of alcohol. When the time comes, he will answer the uniformed man at the door with a smile.