Immovable Tangible Property
Originally published in Broken Pencil; republished in CIRQUE
Colten Dom
We couldn’t do it alone: there is no further frontier, no more free real estate, and even the homes that dot the shittier streets of your far-flung hometown are reserved for millionaires. Ten years after graduating, I work a good job—she doesn’t, but I do—and now there’s mold in the basement suite. We wake up with stuffy noses, listening to the dripping windows and the leisurely gurgle of a sink that doesn’t drain. It’s a strange taunt, hanging Christmas lights on someone else’s house. And she wants a garden; we’d have to ask permission to plant a single tulip.
Housing market? D’you mean the thing down the street with apples, oranges, and tampons? Or an entity that hides in newspapers, jumps from burning bed to burning bed—Toronto, Victoria, Vancouver—and sloshes around inside of you like a dark, breathing sea, numbers and currencies flowing through your ventricles? Soothsayers ride the waves: sirenic realtors with blonde hair, suntans, and razor-sharp teeth, surfing through your life like a cannonball. Can you spit it out? Vomit it up? Just once, I’d like to see someone grab a home off the grocery store shelf and cram it into their shopping cart…
One day, we baby-talked throughout high school, I’ll live in a great big mansion. But now the kids in the break room—even the gals with business degrees and the guys with accounting jobs—all agree: there will be no castles, no penthouses. Their eyes grow moist as they spell out a little standalone with a petite backyard, a second floor for their parents, and a suite for an international student. Bunkbeds downstairs and Lego bricks in the dining room. A frenzy of stray cats and rescue dogs.
I had a nightmare about death, a dream about my inheritance, and woke up, retching, to the sound of the gurgling sink and the slow blink of the Christmas lights. She doesn’t have a good job, she has a great job, but no teacher gets paid much in their twenties. We want kids but not specifics, realities like when and where. We don’t talk about it; we can’t say that the next rung on the ladder is a headstone. It’s unspeakable.
*
Then the glacier shifts, a recession rippling across the country, then the province, then the city. For some families, the revelation arrived alongside a diagnosis—diabetes, or one of the less lethal cancers—and the promise of at-home care. For others, it appeared alongside a surfeit of historical inquiries, front pages dedicated to headlines like “Defining Multi-Generational Housing,” or “Refusing to Sell After a Century”. Awkward, even embarrassing, at first, to re-acknowledge that great, antithetical need—kin, clan, house, home—and the contradiction in the centre of a sociopolitical creed. After all, wasn’t it as simple as reaching down for your bootstraps?
My family wandered through a darkened neighbourhood. Like great ships in the night, homes buoyed atop the curling driveways as if the cul-de-sac were one giant concrete marina. Passing the For Sale! signs bobbing atop the frosty lawns, we suddenly stood outside the two-storey craftsman we had come to see. Been inside yet? my mother asked. It’s open house. My parents looked pale and old. Feeling sorry, weak, you waited alone at the bay window until you overheard the women glowing about the low-slung living room and the dense kitchen, already sailing ahead and offering each other the master bedroom, giggling, and you lock eyes with your father. A gentle transmission, his clouded irises like smoke signals, blinking a wordless acknowledgement, an approval to grow old and die there in that ancient house (we’ll fix it up), on this cold street (we’ll meet the neighbours), in this gentle, infant town.
*
Together, we make a single millionaire. Who would’ve guessed that, in the end, the near-entirety of human history had been correct? That the grandiose economics of spreading peanut butter across some four-thousand kilometres of toast—two centuries of stolen space carved into states and provinces; a continent of long whooshing hallways, empty living rooms, and throaty elevator shafts—could be wrong?
But when the glut of things subsides, whistle, and let us find each other. Let us meet back on the sidewalk in front of the old abode; we’ll remember how to do it, how to be it, that family, again. Pheromones and genetic memory will aid and abet, taking us back to Dad gargling in the bathroom and Mom kicking us out of the kitchen. The generational helplessness was not learned but shared—and most of the retirement communities have sunk, are sinking, or will sink beneath the white-hot sea regardless.
The banks hurt as the mortgage market fell apart, but fuck them anyways. They couldn’t match the petty cash tucked on the mantelpiece, hidden under the four-legged jar of Clive’s ashes, nor the late nights across the dinner table, your parents in their chewed-up slippers, secret pains all over their aging bodies, diving into their retirement fund and saying Okay, we’ll help you out. The op-eds tracked the fall, miles of print and talking heads wailing, trying to write away the flood, to legislate against the new weakness. But how could a news channel understand the infinite strength of helping your mother weed the backyard? Of your father handing you the sledgehammer to knock down a dividing wall, inhaling the gypsum together? Of bobbing amid the currents of a Sunday morning kitchen—around the pot of coffee, over the sink, across the cutting board—and cooking omelettes for the sleepy-eyed relations grumbling in the hallway?
*
The market grew still, financial waterways now an anchorage: a flotilla of concrete, rebar, and wallpaper embarking on one long stationary voyage, sailing through the days and decades. After the boxes emptied out and the moving trucks rumbled away, the real work of patching and painting began. The attic needed re-insulating; we blocked over the squirrels’ doorways and portholes. We steadied ourselves in the galley, sealing the countertops and pulling up the rotting boards. In no time at all, sailors are signing on: international students, cousins, or the odd tenant at reduced rent. Stowaways practically spring out of the woodwork when her job goes steady and she gets pregnant. Once, twice, the years turn. A dog shows up, then a cat. Soon enough, the kids have become mariners, manning the curtains, cleaning the ribald mess, and protesting the chief officer’s bunk inspections.
*
Inside, outside, the generations resonate; a thousand times, a million times cleaning and refilling the hummingbird feeder. The compost bin has been there longer than any of us, an entire civilisation of worms with border-town anthills and raiding groups of spiders. We survive in the cross-section of a song, a symphony of voices: the wind snickering in the chimney, the croak of the stairwell, icicles snapping inside the gutters—plus the human instrument of steps sneaking through the house for late-night leftovers, or to scroll porn on the family computer. Who needs photo books when your chipped tooth records the patio step? When, for three months of the summer, the barbeque clocks overtime, etching the siding in chicken burger soot? Arteries fail; Grandma passes; her dented mattress is dragged downstairs; the teenager inhales the dust of her dead skin every night. He sleeps with his first girlfriend atop it.
The walls do not listen (but they do), and the floors cannot breathe (yet they must), existing in the preternatural now, in the tide of an entropy that neither a dozen renovations, new countertops, nor fresh bathroom tile can stop. For the house, there are only these people and this time. Carve your initials in the attic beam; in a century they will only be lines. Hairballs grow in the shower drain. Saltwater moves to fill the space, be it a cup, bowl, or jerrycan; love, likewise, can flood a drafty mansion, a stuffed apartment, or the tent atop a concrete sidewalk. Beneath the bedroom nightstand, we still have our cookie tin of vibrators and lube, just a little quieter with the kids down the hall. She giggles as I lock the door. I stare at her forty-year-old breasts. Do you think Dad will knock?
*
The news gets worse, uglier, as you grow older and warmer. So come on home—the diaspora is over. Dreams, nightmares? Come back and kiss the rolling deck, sniff the familiar carpet. You can finish your university courses from the bedroom desk. You can check in on telework from across the ocean. There was once a time when you could say, I planted my father in this paddy; I raised my son in this field. Not a movie or a novel but a bleeding script; your grandparents didn’t know how to narrate. Australopithecus, in their herds,could neither read nor write. They didn’t text across the anthill.
How else can I tell you? Don’t hate this house with its leaks, copper pipes, and creeping mold. Try and see it for what it is, existing somewhere in the process of material between a thatch hut and a starship. Sure, there are the too-hot summers unsuited for the architecture, the flooding basement, brownouts humming in the walls. But it goes on, be it a tent or a mansion, a hovel or a flying saucer.
And so what of apocalypse? So what if they go and drop it, that final bang? Then the house only becomes dust, or glass. This home may end, sinking to the bottom of a still-darker sea; many will not. You hand the international student a glass of wine at Thanksgiving dinner. They look well-fed and frightened. If you get out of school early, you tell the sailors, come straight home. And, If you’re hurt shooting hoops in the road, come right on back. And if the world should end while I’m sitting downtown, let me struggle past those burning highways, sparking powerlines, and drowning people. Just let me make it home in time to tack up the Christmas lights.
The outhouse feeds the tulips. The moths eat Grandma’s furs, then her daughter’s fakes. Please, let me rot here, fading out beneath the lawn—at worst, spread my ashes in the garden where the racoons walk so when they lick their paws, they taste me. We never told you about when you were in diapers, did we? And those same bandits got into the trashcan and boom, exploded it into a million pieces, all across the carport? Don’t feel embarrassed; there is no glory here, only a house. There is no fantasy, no dream, and we are not sick dogs—come in from the outside, come and die in the burrow. But don’t forget, after you bury me, to exhume my lower jaw. Wash it clean with the garden hose, then submerge it in the bird bath so that, when spring comes again, I can kiss the robins, tooth to beak.