Buildings

Every night for one long, hot month I had one dream: the dream of a house perpetually on fire, burning, burning, burning in the dark. It was self-same and endless: the house lit from the inside like a lantern, the wood snarling, glowing with a light that seemed to emanate from its heart, from the very heart of the wood. The crash and snap of pieces of facade falling in flame onto the dark earth, a collapsing staircase within the deep interior, the sound like a body breaking somewhere out of sight. There was urgency in the brightness and the heat, but also a strange peace, like a death rate viewed on a website, that single number ticking up, always forward and never backward, like a clock. I never stayed long enough to watch the entire thing burn down, but how could it not? What thing can burn forever without burning out?

I want to tell you something now that I know may make you hate me. A woman said this to me once before confessing a thing so minor that I’ve already forgotten it—was it about how she ate? I’m not sure, in any case, that there’s a way to speak with the intention of pushing someone away. Each word is a call, each call is an invisible limb extended out, reaching. When we argue we say, “Come here! No, you come here!” and we remain in our places. But there are of course words that can push another person away, cries that evoke avoidance, a silence the length of an arm. These words are taught to you when you’re young, and the danger is you could be taught the wrong ones by your parents, who likely were taught the wrong ones themselves long ago.

Here it is: when my dog is unwell, I pull her into my embrace, I check every inch of her smooth-furred body for pain, for the pit of a wound or the mound of a cancer. I call the veterinarian, my heart quakes inside its cage. But when my husband is sick, there’s a chilly place in me: I feel, for reasons I can name and reasons I can’t, that he has done it to himself. I want him to get up and walk, to fight his illness rather than languish in it, to show some fire. He tells me it makes me angry when he’s sick and I deny it, I’m just distracted. But maybe it’s that my dog so rarely cries out, she limps silently around the home, and when she sees another dog coming toward her as she hobbles along on her daily walk, the limp vanishes until the stranger has passed out of view and it’s safe once again to show a little weakness. It’s the behavior of an animal remembering that it must do everything it can to survive. My husband, on the other hand, accidentally hits his finger on the steering wheel and shouts, oh-oh-ow- ow-ow-ow! He tells me there is a cut on his hand that he didn’t know he had, and he holds his ring finger out for me to see: the red is written like an eyelash, no taller than an ‘l’ on the page of the novel I read at night. He cradles his wrist, waiting.

For the first few nights, I stood there and watched it burn. I asked myself whether there was anything in a dream that doesn’t call out for action, for interpretation, for meaning. Can anything in a dream simply happen, as it does in the everyday, meaningless enough to be ignored? Day after day, a burning home goes from emergency to nonevent—we don’t worry, for example, that the sun is on fire, though perhaps that’s due to the distance. I soon found that I didn’t have to stay within viewing distance of the burning house in my dreaming, I didn’t have to be anywhere near it at all. I simply walked off into the darkness and found myself eventually in other more ordinary corners of imagination, giving a speech before an entire middle school audience or wrestling a knife away from a man threatening to kill himself. At all times, though, I could hear the sound of the burning, the gnarl like a dog chewing on a bone, and smell the scent of wood transfigured into light, smoke, and fine black powder. And there on the faces of each dream person I saw the slight gilding of ruddy campfire light, the sort of warm hue that conjures a hint of almost invisible blue, as if heat implies coldness, the deep unbreakable bond of opposites.

I tell him: I care if you get sick, I try to keep you from catching my colds, I make you cups of licorice-reeking teas to hold off the infection, I rub your shoulders, I curl my body into the shape of a bean and kneel with my knees on the place you show me on your back to weigh the pain out of it. But it has to do with my father, who posed the problem so succinctly in an e-mail he sent me once: in the body of the message he explained that he had tried life, and he wasn’t much impressed by it. The pain and restriction that came along with getting older, the unexpected limits that, once encountered, only reminded him of how much he had never tried to do when he was ignorantly able. All he really cared about now was the size of his television set, so large that a second team from the store had to come out to his house to bolt it to the wall with specialized hardware, and being at home, where he was “surrounded by music all day long.” The television set I remembered well—you could see it from the lake across the subdivision, a square of bright, abstract light jittering around through large, empty windows—but I had always thought of that home as quiet, endlessly quiet, and full of closed doors.

The burning house left a stain on my days. I wandered about thinking the same thoughts again and again about a thing that didn’t even exist. Was there anyone inside trying to get out? Did the house go on burning while I was awake? By spending time in the waking world would I miss its final collapse? In the symbolic language of my dream, was I the house or was I the burning? These questions obsessed me even as, from the outside, I appeared more detached than ever before. My husband asked me if I was sick, if I had been spending my nights, as I sometimes did, playing a small game on the small screen of my phone where I lined up shapes in neat rows of three or four and they vanished, chiming. That nobody could see the candlelight inside my skull made it more real to me, a secret lick of flame that reminded me that even the most ordinary things were part of the long question of survival.

At my computer I watched the trending topics tick across my screen, the newer emergencies coming to rest above old ones, weighing them down, pushing them to the bottom of the screen, where they would eventually disappear into the deep sleep of the cache. The newsfeed taught me to forget as it forgot, the motion made more simple through repetition, a subtractive solution. I watched a video of someone driving slowly through a raging wildfire, a continuous churn of orange and black underlined, at certain moments, by the sizzle of a burning branch crashing to the ground. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god said the voice holding the lens up to the disaster, but her hand remained steady. It was then that I realized what my father was referring to when he said he wanted to be “surrounded by music all day long”: I remembered that when I came over to visit, I would find the television on downstairs, set to a channel that played New Agey instrumentals, songs with no vocals saturated with swirly, chiming chords. With my father upstairs in his office and my mother asleep downstairs, the music poured out, endlessly out, playing for no one.

Sometimes in the space between two statements I hear the terror, the panic, of not knowing what to say next. When I was a child, my father used to drink a two-liter bottle of soda every day, parceling it out through the hours. After his heart attack, he began cutting his portions, sawing a croissant in half with a serrated knife, peeling open two planes of molded plastic to reveal a circular puck of steak slightly smaller than the palm of my hand. Still, the food was always rich and indulgent even in these diminutive sizes. I walked into the kitchen one morning to find him generously buttering a filled jelly donut. My husband has high cholesterol and I have a guilt complex, so we try to stay vegetarian. But in the late of the night, when I bring him to my parents’ home to visit, I hear the two of them watching TV late into the night, smoking marijuana and folding thin slices of meat onto buttered crackers. They rarely talk, but sometimes I can hear their laughter ringing out, muffled by the distance, at the exact same moment.

After thirty-one days of burning houses, the dream stopped as suddenly as it had begun. For a long time I had no dreams at all, I just stepped into the blackness and emerged the next morning, as if from a dark tunnel. When my sleep finally began to stir with life again, the sequences were short, furtive: a tree trunk wormed with bioluminescent insects, a box made of steel spinning on its edge. Something in me went mild at this time, and instead of rushing always from one place to the other, I would stop on my path, turn around, and walk several yards back to smell the honeysuckle I had sensed in the air moments before. One day on the walk from the train to my home, I came upon a house that was on fire. The flame was pale in the daylight, thin orange through one window, all smoke through the other. The house’s residents stood in front, calling for the fire department on their phones, watching the smoke in a posture both anxious and contained. I stood with them, waiting, watching, feeling the heat from the house on my face, mingling with the heat of the summer air. Maybe there was a reason for all this, it might have been one of those moments that, if approached in the right way, could dislodge a thorn from your heart that’s been there since birth. But when the fire trucks showed up, I turned from them and continued on my way. There were flowers lining the sidewalk, sirens in the air.

Read this story and many more in print by ordering our sixth issue here.