Aimee Bender
A Short History of a Haunted House
Once there was a family in which all the people were temporarily dead, but they were unaware of their deadness, were passing through a phase of deadness not uncommon to families. In fact, many families pass through this phase but do not usually know or realize it until later, because the fact of the deadness thrives in part due to the ability to not know of it. A knowing sparks a light that creates a little aliveness and in that the form and mood changes.
Being dead at this time, due to a lost job, money worries, a disappointing friendship, a splintering marriage in which talking about things was difficult because both players felt ashamed of their flaws so easily, and a child who was already daydreamy and also did not want to rattle parents already full of their own concerns, the family attracted a ghost. This was to be expected; ghosts are, of course, drawn to deadness—also to aliveness, to great aliveness—but more often a camaraderie with the corpse inside, and so the ghost found itself pulled to the house, and moved in upstairs, in an attic, with a heavy chain to rattle, with a whooo practiced on the glide over, with a faintly malicious and mostly bored intent.
The child lay in bed at night, afraid. He heard the chains rattling; he understood it was a ghost. The mother thought something was wrong with the structure of the house; the father felt the mother blaming the house, which he had advocated for, and he felt angry at her as a cover for his own sense of failure at picking a broken house, and in this way the ghost infiltrated them all, but really only reached the child.
It took several days for the child to climb up to the attic, but what else was there to do? They were home all the time. This was the era in which many families did not leave home due to glass-edged dust particles sweeping the streets, moving sharply in and out of bodies. There was also that to contribute to the situation. Up the stairs to the attic, into the small crawl space with the dark wooden rafters, to the chain piled on the floor which the child did not recognize. Had the chain been there before? How would he know? He was not one to go up into the attic and take inventory of details.
He rattled it himself, and the mother and father heard something, glanced up, ears alert, circling through their same thoughts: the house is broken, she’s being a bitch, he never acknowledges anything, I picked a broken house, all unspoken.
The ghost was in the attic now with the boy. The ghost obviously did not leave; the way with ghosts is to come in and stay awhile. They do not flit from house to house; there is a loyalty. The ghost went and passed through the body of the boy for a moment just to feel this body, to encounter the beating heart, the hoppy nerve circuits, the slippery blood, and during this moment the boy felt what he could only call a naming happen inside him, and in this was a sudden and entirely unexpected comfort. The comfort that comes from a thing recognized, and only a ghost could find the deadness inside and be so exactly like it as to name it. The word ghost did not rise up in his mind, not even the word dead, but he could suddenly locate the feeling as something inside him and not the whole of him. It was a solitary moment excepting the brief presence of the ghost whom the boy did not realize was there, and when the ghost exited and he went down the ladder and headed back into the kitchen he was a different person, had a handle on something that previously had been air.
The ghost had felt it too, but in a different way. It had felt the boy relax; that was meaningful to the ghost, who long ago had been a woman of another era who had sewn all day for her work and had not considered herself valuable or recognized by either the smaller or larger spheres of her life, and yet here had felt how her existence had offered something only she, only a ghost, could. It was of some significance to her, even in her ghost form, remnants of the woman mostly gone. And yet what was in the future for her now? She had experienced the full spectrum of ghost opportunity: home, chains, movement through. And the outside did beckon—the breeze, the way one could let the molecules grow farther apart and become so disparate that there was no ghost left at all. One knew of this option as a ghost-being, knew it the way a spider knows to spin a web. The boy was outside now, playing in the yard. She could feel him—it’s not like she used her eyes. She just felt him, his presence on the lawn, as he flipped his body around, the glimmer of life that was so different from her now, and it was enough to let her slip through the cracks between the boards into the outside and give herself to the wind that released her to the different corners of the neighborhood and beyond.
She left the chain in the attic. No ghost wanted to move along with earthly material like that. Jesus it was heavy. Much later, when the parents had moved out and divorced, when the boy had formed his own new life across an ocean—working, was it coincidentally? as a lawyer defending textile factory laborers—when a new family moved in, someone did go up the ladder to check out the attic. The person, whoever it was, looked around, noted the rafters, and the crawl space, but did not see the chain; it had grown so benign in its look that they did not even perceive it to be an object and instead blended it into the rafters as if it were as ordinary and expected as a screw or a nail, and in this way the chain became part of the house. Of all the pairings in this story, the house and the chain are the two that remained together. They were together for many years, through a couple of families, and different governmental parties in power, and they were only parted by an accidental fire one autumn, caused by a wayward campfire flame and an unusual heat wave, which together burned the house down. By the time the firefighters reached the lot, the structure had collapsed and only bits and pieces of mineral debris studded the landscape.
At the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” there is a gust of wind, and the one-legged tin soldier with the powerful yearning flies into the fire, followed by the object of his great love, a tissue ballerina. When the housekeeper goes to clean the grate in the morning, she finds a blob of tin shaped into a heart, and the leftover spangle of the ballerina.
Oscar Wilde loved Andersen’s stories and wrote his own, “The Happy Prince,” in which a swallow falls in love with a metal statue of a former prince and both learn something of sacrifice and love together and when God asks, at the end of the story, for the two most precious things, the dead swallow and the heart of the metal prince are given to God, and one cannot help but see the tribute to Andersen’s metal heart in this metal heart and this duo.
The chain and the house are not the same, but those others stories live in me, too, and do their work on me. The chain and the house were not in love, but one did hold the other as long as it could, and one stayed, as long as it could. What are the pairings in the world, we might wonder, the truest pairings, the unexpected pairings. A one-legged soldier and a ballerina. A swallow and a statue. Even, perhaps, a chain and a house, because it is the house that is chosen by the ghost, after all, not the people.
When the second wave of firefighters passed through the plot of land that had held the house, one stooped down when he saw a glint and picked up what looked—slightly-- like a heart of metal, and a wisp of wooden rafter ash. “Look at this!” he said aloud, with delight, because he was young, and hadn’t yet been through a real fire. To find a melted metal blob with two mountainous lumps up top that in any small way resembled a heart still wooed him, and he hoped to find someone to give it to: “I found it at the fire,” he might say, he imagined himself saying, to that person’s great admiration, even tears. He meant to pocket it, but his superior called him over to show him a part of a standing structure in the next lot, so that they could consider clues about how the fire had spread, and as he spoke with his superior, the wind swept more grass and dust and ash over the metal heart and the rafter debris until they further burrowed into the earth. When the young firefighter went afterwards to find it again, he could not, even after searching for a while. Many years later, when, by a stroke of luck, he happened to have found his own pairing, after his third fire, after the doctor had pronounced half his lung tissue dead, the memory bubbled up out of nowhere as he drove away from the hospital, and he thought: “I have found the person to whom I would’ve given that heart,” and the holding inside him of bright life and corpse in every breath he took was what made him hang his head and weep at the stoplight.
Aimee Bender is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent being The Butterfly Lampshade, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC.