The house next door is burned down. Its black frame stands naked and quivering, a thing shorn. No walls. No doors. There is a hole in the roof. Inside, embers sputter and hiss. If it rained, it would sound like a den of snakes. A spoon. A child’s purple sweater. A television slurred across a table. The first aid kit. This is all that is left. The rest is charred ruins. Coal sand castles, black hoodoos still smoking. They slope and point like broken teeth, the twins’ faces carved into every surface. It is now, in disaster, that god is an artist. There is a small crowd gathered beyond the yellow tape, taking photographs, the cuffs of their pants blackening with ash. They don’t even speak to each other. Mink would have studied the wreckage too.
The twins decided, “against good judgment”, to make pastry for us in the middle of the night. Now they have to wear tight white nets to keep their skin on and they have to live in the suburbs. When they heal, their faces will look pulled and uneven as though smeared with egg whites – left there by a cook, half-asleep, to glaze and congeal. Mister and Mrs. Next Door “have had it.” So the twins have been sent to live with their grandmother who cannot tell them apart so she uses only one name for both of them. Eventually, they do too.
Their grandmother, brown lipstick, gold teeth, has a one-bedroom apartment, thirty-five storeys up, that looks over a highway and then onto a graveyard. By nighttime, she jokes about the graveyard. In her medicine cabinet, bottles are lined up like a front line in an old war. Her bed has a lever system, turning her bedroom into a chamber for a junior masochist. The apartment has a small balcony where she has put a television and hung a flag. So weather-ruined, the country is unreadable.
There, she watches “her shows”, in a nightgown, diaper, and coat covered in fox heads, her face beset by foundation that matches, orange to orange, purse clutched to her breast so that she won’t be robbed by “scoundrels.” She gurgles there, falling asleep, head hanging down as though she has been hit, slapstick, from behind with a bottle. Back, a calcified mound. Hair, cobwebs. When the twins wake her, to carry her to her bed, their favourite activity, the fur coat slippery, the ankles and wrists too, she pulls them close – soup, baby powder - and whispers, “When can I go?” “Never,” they whisper. “You have to stay here with me,” convincing her that there is only one of them and that she is seeing double.
We meet the twins’ father in the driveway. His eyebrows and eyelashes are singed hay-yellow. He is wearing blue pajamas. They are threadbare and need mending. His hair pokes through them. It is thick like quills. Mister Next Door coughs a bit, and then he asks, “What will become of the house?” It is the first time he has ever spoken to us. His voice is mellifluous, pure as though it has never been used. If he wanted to read to me for an entire day, in the dark corner of a strange room with nothing else in it but a hobbyhorse, I would let him. “We don’t know,” says Immaculata. “We haven’t decided.” I am too busy to answer, hoping that he will speak again.
Mister Next Door motions for us to follow. We do. To his hatchback. A peeling dwarf beside him. He opens the trunk. Pop. Will he throw me inside of it and lay a tarp over me and tell me to shush it? Will he make me his slave-companion and squeal out of the driveway before Immaculata, too clumsy to fight, can stop him? Will he carve a hole through the backseat with a hunting knife so that he can tell me touchdown stories while he drives too slowly through small towns and into sunsets? Will he park the car in an abandoned campsite, reach through the hole, with food and water and eventually, with his hand, to hold mine, and cry a bit when I fall asleep, his mouth pressed there, unanswered?
No. Mister Next Door pulls out a black suitcase. He flicks it open, covertly, like it is a music box, full of uproar, full of dancing girls. It is full of money. Neat stacks of it. So much, it must be fake.
“Is it real?” I ask, recalling his photocopier scent, seeing him alone in a dank basement, making money, photocopier light rolling over his face all day like flashbulbs, and he is famous. “It is,” he says, not lying. He is a man whose failure came for him too young. It hunted him and it shot him down. He blinks, full of dusted over fantasies. “I keep my valuables in the trunk,” he adds, flicking the suitcase closed and handing it to us. There is nothing else there. No ruby pinkie rings, no yearbooks. No wife and no twins. Immaculata takes the suitcase. Surprised by the weight of it, she steadies herself. The bricks of money, too much to tuck into her bobby sock.
“You’ll
find it spotless.”
“Thank
you.”
“There’s
leftover cake in
the fridge.”
“Great.”
“It’s got
nuts in it.”
“No
problem.”
“And the bathroom
light works,
just give it some time.”
“Every house has
its quirks.”
“That’s
our only one.”
I hear a dull chatter. I look back at the house. Termites. They are taking to the wood. They waited for us to leave and now that we are gone, generations of them are building nests and tunnels. Termites have a king and a queen and they have workers. The workers can feed each other, freeing the parents from this task, allowing the colony to grow, to grow so vastly that it can devour an entire house, slowly winning it over, like children desperate to impress.