The sun pouring through the slats in the roof had evaporated the water that only two days before had formed puddles between hills of soot. Walls still smelled like smoke and wires, but it was a dry smell. Almost a new house smell. What used to be concealed by drywall and popcorn ceiling was now nakedly visible. Above me in the family room I saw where the fire had blackened the last section of roof before tapering off. In the kitchen a coil of burnt wire dangled from above and I assumed, no doubt incorrectly, it was somehow connected to the doorbell chime box clinging to the peeled paint.
Alone, I stood behind the bar where I used to have conversations with my father as he read at the kitchen table. My memories of that room are related to the position of everything in stasis–his hand towel hanging from the oven handle, his barren and flat and polished counter top, the cleared space where his circular table used to be, the open pantry revealing his unhealthy diet of carbohydrates. My memories of the home itself are related to the structure of the place–the walls that separated us and enclosed us, my vantage from the living room couch when midday light would peek through the sliding glass door and illuminate the dining room chair where my cat slept and his fur collected, my father in the kitchen, worn and helpless as the years passed, the corner of the family room where my brother once playfully threw and accidentally injured my sister’s Pomeranian, the dark hallway at night that almost made me believe in ghosts.
Ghosts also hide in the light in plain sight. In the dining room after the chaos of the fire had died down and predatory contractors stopped trying to extort money from my father hours after the news had live broadcast the destruction, I only noticed that the firefighters had covered mom’s curio cabinet in a black plastic veil after I retreated to my bedroom to see that my own belongings were unharmed.
The living room was where I spent most of my time. I wasted my youth not outside, but in that room, tapping the buttons of game controllers and failing to apprehend the depression it no doubt indicated. Somehow it was never the items in those rooms that I feared losing, but the rooms themselves–enclosures where I once felt safe enough to retreat when all else felt hopeless. “Our house,” Gaston Bachelard once wrote, “is our corner of the world . . . it is our first universe.” From my perspective sitting in the many recliners my father replaced in that room over the years to fend off the stench of our cats’ scent markings, I looked from the kitchen to the television and back again, taking in my universe.
Too many cords used to huddle together from a single outlet and a multi-pronged power strip. Instead of using zip ties to consolidate everything I let them dangle chaotically behind the multi-tiered glass television stand. For years I abused my privilege and spent too much time there sating a harmful addiction to video games–simulated experiences to replace the real ones that didn’t suffice–while the swamp cooler roared to convert the scorching heat outside into cool air. A single cord with ambiguous purpose now arches limply in front of the roof-covered wall and its cracked outlet (has the outlet always been this way?). A gaping hole in the ceiling now reveals the vibrant red swamp cooler fan that roared so loudly and made me fume at the fact that I couldn’t hear the television.
The floor under this one isn’t the laminate my father installed a few months back, but the ancient hardwood varnished decades ago and concealed for so long by countless iterations of carpeting. When the contractors came to strip the home weeks later I could see the old floor but I couldn’t feel it. When they uncovered it and it surrounded the never-used rock fireplace I often stared at for hours to find faces hidden in its awkward curves and protrusions, I found that this memory was never mine. I was too young when that floor covered the home. And anyway, my father made too many unilateral decisions in the years ahead to transform the place into something else that felt increasingly unfamiliar to me. It was only his blank canvas onto which he projected his yearning for something novel and interesting.
After the contractors had stripped the home of everything–personal items, doors, wires, walls–it lost all its character and meaning. Over the course of a month my dad drove to the house four days a week, entered the combination on the lock box containing the house keys that the contractors attached to the side doorknob as a security measure, and walked slowly through the structure to try to remember its form and shape. Without the illusion of discrete spaces it felt compact, even pathetic. I visited the house with him twice when it looked this way. Invariably he sank into somber silence while I transferred the complicated feelings into photographs rather than tears. I could almost read the monologue he subvocalized. Here was the pantry. I used to read here. There’s my bedroom. There was the pocket door. This looks like the closet. I can see Shane’s bedroom at the end of the hallway all the way from the kitchen. When he did manage to speak he held tears back to save face and “be a man” just like his stepfather taught him to do. And besides, words weren’t good enough. His silence reminded me of Maggie Nelson’s insight that “Once we name something . . . we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered.” I remember him failing to register small traumas over the years, failing or refusing to put them into words, and I suspect that’s why for the last two months I so often retreated to private refuges to let it all out. I learned from a lineage of masculine suppression.
It only prolonged the suffering, seeing through the walls. And so weeks later his solution to the pain was to tell the insurance contractors that the rebuild should do away with every wall that separated one absent and totally hypothetical family member from another. He wanted the drywall partition between the living room and dining room to be taken out, his master bedroom turned into a dining room, the pantry cut from the blueprints, and an island to replace the claustrophobic kitchen counter. He also wanted the fireplace he built by hand in the early 80s, the only remaining artifact after the place had been stripped clean, destroyed. It was the kind of reaction one would expect from a man either wanting to turn over a new leaf or giving up entirely on letting himself feel. Alarmed by his impulsiveness the contractors convinced him to rebuild the pantry and keep the fireplace.
I was to fly back to Bowling Green in mid-August to finish my last year of doctoral work. The day of my flight I accompanied my father once more to the house. As he spoke to the contractors about what he wanted in the rebuild I looked around the structure for what remained. On the floor of my high school bedroom a small poster a friend had given me for my birthday fifteen years ago had merged with the original hardwood floor. It was a novelty poster featuring cartoon drawings of a child doing yoga poses. Thinking it was funny when I got it I posted it to the wall and let it collect dust even after I switched bedrooms ten years ago. I chuckled at the thought of the cleaners coming across it and being perplexed.
But it wasn’t that poster, or even the absence of every object or wall that caught me off guard and brought me to tears on the airplane home. It wasn’t even the hollow wooden door my friends drew on over the years with Sharpie markers. It was a detail I almost didn’t notice. A small tuft of carpet clinging desperately to one of the two concrete steps leading into the family room where my father’s resilient fireplace stared menacingly at the empty structure before it. I knew it wouldn’t be there for long. In the months ahead the builders would strip the siding, reconfigure the interior, and upgrade the appliances. New doors would be hinged, new drywall placed, new windowpanes and air conditioning and insulation installed. And after all their other priorities had been exhausted, they would finally pry the small piece of carpet from its lonely steps.
