Pareidolia
Matron
Mrs. Lorena carries, with great effort, two dozen steaming pockets of fried meat heaped in a pyramid; little white wisps smoking off of each and twirling around each other into a thick bundle. She doesn’t force me to take the platter from her, however, if I don’t take it from her she’ll probably collapse beneath its weight and send the thing into me. I don’t wait to be offered one; my mother raised me to understand the horrible rudeness of not eating everything a Caribbean woman puts in front of you.
Mrs. Lorena traces the knuckles of her left hand as I eat.
She knows that this sounds crazy, and, speaking over my insistence that it doesn’t, she says that she knows what crazy sounds like. It’s his nose. He called it a beak but she loves — loved it.
“I thought he looked just like a king in a painting.” She hands me her phone where she’s pulled up a photo of him in profile. That nose almost pierces the frame.
Mrs. Lorena is looking her story over once again, thumbing through the mental pages. She believes that, with new scrutiny, she can present her case in a manner that won’t come across as deranged. I am afraid to hurry her along. The empanadas have stopped steaming and the filling has congealed; they are unpleasant to eat.
She never supported new development in the neighborhood, having fallen in love with suburbia, and when construction began she saw all of her greatest fears being realized.
“It was more like an art piece than an office building.”
She is clearly awestruck as she recounts the early days. With each new iteration, she was certain of what it would come to be, and then it would morph completely. In March she whispered to neighbors that it was a temple to some kind of panther god. In May a pyramid. On the Fourth of July the city held a fireworks show there to celebrate the centerpiece of its revitalization efforts. Those electric starbursts blew against the night sky and illuminated an exact replica of the Colossus of Rhodes — less a torso. She did not dream, she says, that the end result would be so mundane or so awful.
“You aren’t the first person to make a complaint.” I say, “You aren’t even the first person I’ve talked to today. Someone said it looks like the pitbull that ate his childhood pet.”
“It looks just like him. It can’t look like anything else.” She tries to hand me an old polaroid this time. In it, Mr. Lorena is paunchless and his hairline has reclaimed a bit of the space around his temples. “Look at the nose.” She taps on the photograph too hard and knocks it from my hand. Neither of us pick it up.
The room has very quickly become uninviting. The platter of food radiates frigidness, it chills my right arm, I cannot forget the emulsified texture of the cold empanada filling and Mrs. Lorena has become transfixed at the spot on the floor where her husband’s face has fallen.
I thank her for her time and for inviting me into her home. I compliment her cooking and her bravery in talking about her late husband, who seems like a great man of course, I then assure her that she was much more pleasant than the last person I talked to, who in turn I had thanked for being more pleasant than the last person I talked to who does not actually exist. I do not tell her this. I give my thanks and my goodbyes in the same sentences. And all of these pleasantries are dispensed while moving backwards towards the door.
The amount of food prepared suggests that she’s expecting more company anyhow. Or maybe cooking is comforting for her, stupors being the preferred mental state of the surviving.
Beggarman
Mr. Tomlin insists that I call him Craig; the name “Mr. Tomlin” belongs with his father. He stops me from removing my shoes, more perplexed than offended, and pushes me into a sinking loveseat. I have not finished falling through the cushions before he begins his complaint.
“First off, that thing is a fucking eyesore.” He waves towards something beyond his walls, not at all in the direction of the building, continuing “Who’s idea was it to build something like that in a residential neighborhood? Kids live here!” He neglects a perfectly upright lazy boy across from us to seat himself next to me on the couch. Very physically he directs my attention to a painted portrait crouched in the far corner of the room. “You ever been to Machu Picchu?”
The artist has captured what it must be like to see visions in flames. Each figure is vibrant like that copper green ectoplasm that sometimes hangs over a campfire . Drawn with brushstrokes as clear as lines carved into wood are five nudists formed into a trapezoid, limbs folded upon themselves, weaved within each other, heads tied together with hairlock sutures and their mouths are opened so wide that they must have been forced into that shape.
The painting hangs hilariously over a reminder of “The House Rules”. It occupies the only spot in the living room that is not littered with food waste. Covering the other walls are various sports memorabilia, big bass catches, an occasional plaque for good work, employee of the year, some family photos. The painting still holds Mr. Tomlin’s gaze and his grip tightens around my shoulder.
“No, I haven’t,” I say.
He slaps my chest, “In Machu Picchu they used to take the shittiest government official and feed him to a fucking jaguar.”
“Are there more details to the complaint you filed with our office?”
“I just wanted to drag one of you down here to see that thing. I don’t think you’ve ever looked at it, or else we wouldn’t have to file one damn complaint. Have you seen it?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Can’t have really looked at it.” The end of his sentence is hardly audible and he is focused again on the painting.
I realize that I have interrupted his lunch as a beeping sounds from the kitchen. He’ll eat after he’s through with me, he says, cause the kids don’t go outside anymore. Everyone’s hiding from that big glass tumor sticking up over the horizon. Blocks out the entire sun in the afternoon. Mr. Tomlin leaps off the loveseat, he is speaking with urgency now, gesticulating in a manic and feverish way. He fears that he’s losing me, or maybe I never understood. As he demands more fiercely his stature warps and folds unconsciously. He is pitched over, almost pleading, a great big beggar in his own home.
Stupidly, I apologize. Who’s ever asked for an apology? Mr Tomlin says that apologies should come with gifts in hand or after we’ve fixed the problem. Maybe the building’s come down under the force of my apology like the walls of Jericho.
“Go, look out the window and check,” he says, but his eyes flit towards his shuttered blinds, even as he laughs at me. He bares his teeth as he rants but he lacks any wickedness, ill intent guides his tirade and still he seems jovial, almost giddy, he no longer mocks my interjections, this cross stitching of a rant begins to looks like after a few turns a regular conversation. And between the spaces of this happy chatter the microwave rings still somehow loudening each time.
“But, you get it, right?” Mr. Tomlin, having never really elaborated on his particular issue with the building, looks at me with some kind of animal desperation which I reflect back at him, wary of his unfamiliar new energy.
I’m mocking him, if not me then somebody at HUD, maybe the whole department is in on the joke, ’cus she worked there and they knew how we got on. If he has to look at it one more time, well, he doesn’t know how he’ll react but it’ll probably be pretty bad for us. Any reaction to that statement will likely only beat his anger deeper into him so I don’t even acknowledge that he’s said anything.
Once again the microwave screams, and he moves like he’s been hit with a cattle prod. My presence in his home forgotten, he shuffles around a bend and into the kitchen, completely out of sight. For a few minutes I listen to him slurping something thick and viscous; every so often he’ll cough hoarsely, before eating with more vigor than before.
Witch
The Caswell Estate is one pristine incisor in a rotten mouth. It’s not hard to imagine a man like Henry Caswell intentionally planting two hundred of these shoddy little bungalows and then erecting his steel and glass campus in the center of the neighborhood. Henry ensured that the lower class never forgot him. His neighbors worked in his packing plants and purchased meat from his stores and bought his houses on credit. His own little fiefdom. The castle, sadly, seems eager to follow its owner into the ground. The Caswell heiress was a precocious little girl and then an eccentric young woman and now she’s decomposing while walking. Little more than a nocturnal shimmer in wall-to-ceiling windows, Nicole haunts the place already.
As I approach the entrance she is already waiting for me in the doorway. Shaking the woman’s hand is like grasping a plastic bag full of chicken bones. Her clothes —old college sweats— are moth-eaten. Hair greasy and hanging in slick strings. Any mental picture of Nicole eating something seems ridiculous to me, to look at her face is to see all the features of her skull. From what I can see of the house’s interior, it is covered in an impenetrable dark that seems to pulsate behind her.
I wait for her to invite me in, but the woman begins her dialogue while hanging limply against the doorframe. A sound comes from behind her, and her eyes track upwards; for a ridiculous second, I’m expecting them to roll all the way back to look for the source of the noise. Instead, she examines a rotting block of wood above that’s snowing dust and hailing chips of pine. Just when I think she’s forgotten me, she begins her complaint.
On the day of his passing, Henry Caswell grabbed his daughter’s arm so tight that you can still see the bruise. Syphilis dominating his mind, he demanded that Nicole erase every piece of him from this world. When she refused, he hit her with the last of his strength. It was his tendency to follow abuse, after some quiet and tense hours, with an apology that was half whispered and slipped through gritted teeth. But that night he went on without saying anything else.
After taking some time to grieve, Nicole realized that her demented daddy was probably right. The world deserved to forget him. And her first desire is to tear down that monument at the edge of town. Ugly as it is, she says, it’s still too good looking to properly represent her father.
Almost flippant, she moves through theaters of conversation as if her issues can be resolved just by her naming them. And too, she says, the neighborhood is almost too ugly to live in. Vinyl siding has this tendency to cover itself in filth.
I tell her that conscripting a crew of pressure washers to clean up the neighborhood is all I can hope to do for her.
This stops her reading through the mental list of tasks she has for me, and she touches her lips as if struggling to remember something important. She wants assurance that I’m able to do something about the building and I can’t offer that to her. Some strength had returned to her as our conversation went on, but once again she’s waifish and sagging.
She starts every question with an apology. She’s sorry, but doesn’t the estate have the final say as to using Henry Caswell’s likeness? Sorry, then why can’t she do anything about the building? Anger enters her now, and while she insists that she’s not calling me a liar, she’s certain that I’m lying. Or maybe I’ve never seen her father somehow, the man who’s grinning on the walls of most buildings in the city.
That’s a famous face, I tell her, but one that was not on the minds of the builders.
Alright, obviously I haven’t seen her father like she has. Without invitation she pulls me inside. The interior is candlelit and the flames struggle against the dark. The creature from before can be heard scratching somewhere deeper within the house. Already I regret ever wanting to be invited in. There’s more trash underfoot than clear floor, and it’s been so long since anyone’s cleaned the marble that the tiles adhere to the soles of my shoes.
We stop at the threshold of the living room. Spanning the whole south wall is a family portrait in oils on canvas. Nicole is looking at the painting and then back to me, seeming more incredulous each time she turns her head.
My mistake is in showing her pity. She moves so far away from me after that, almost falling over herself. She’s positive that the man in the center of the frame has a perfect recreation of his head at the edge of the city, more than a facsimile; it's like they cast the steel around his skull. Nicole disappears into the room’s blackened center. She’s still presenting her argument, more harried now, but her voice has become disembodied, coming from all corners of the room. She reappears in front of the painting, snatching a candle from the floor and holding its light up against her father’s face. When nothing like understanding has settled on my face she becomes furious with herself. I’m the audience now, a voyeur to self immolation.
Nicole’s dismayed cries come out like barks. With the way the woman conducted herself, I’d forgotten her appearance, the dilapidated state of her home, and the squalor that had begun to invade even the whites of her eyes. Now, Nicole the walking dead is fully realized in front of me. She smashes the candle against the painting, a fat smear of coagulated wax covers Henry Caswell’s face. That blotch glimmers in the low light even as the painting itself is swallowed up by the dark.
Nicole’s pet plunges its claws into me and I understand that I’m being made to leave. In that low light I never saw so much as an outline of the animal, but its divots are wide and deep in my calf.
Swords
The building stands almost at the edge of everything. It is surrounded by the disturbed and sewage colored waters of the city bay on three sides. The only safe approach is from the very front up a slight incline, and when making this walk you are forced to appreciate every inch of the scaling tower.
Most modern skyscrapers are thin, almost pathetic. The designers for those cities have thrown too many grand things together and the new things must be made to grow choked like reeds. This building was made to revitalize a city in which the tallest building was a three story mall, long abandoned. It was given more room to grow than it could possibly use. Old government housing projects were razed almost too happily. People who owned their houses sold them for cheap, believing in this billion dollar lazarus project.
As it moved from sketch paper to CAD design and made its way onto social and news media the city’s fervor only grew. But now the building sits empty. Ten years of endless expanding scope increased the cost to an unbearable degree. The city cycled through building partners. People who had been pushed into the far corners of the city, or who had sold themselves into poverty on a promise, began to finally flee for greener pastures or any pasture at all. Before it became the source of terror for so many it acted as a misery trigger.
I saw its construction as Mrs. Lorena did, though I did not see her same visions. I saw my own wonders of the world in its early versions. And now as I approach the thing I know it has a particular image emerging for me from the facade. The centerpoint for me is always the eyes. How does that oblique black glass morph into a perfect sculpting of them every time, imitating the way they half protruded from his face? Is it really a trick of the sun?I’ve brought every physical piece that he’s left me: a roll of photo booth prints, a toonie, six menthol cigarettes smashed flat, and a field journal that I’ve never opened. I can’t say what specific aspect of the building demands sacrifice, but I know I desperately want to appease it. Turn my memories into a talisman; ward my dreams against his face in the glass. I’ve piled up kindling around his old possessions; the red can of kerosene shakes in my grip, the liquid dribbling out.
The fire swallows all of it quickly. I can even hear the coin warping and snapping in the center of the flames. I look at the unchanging facade while the bonfire crackles. Disappointment doesn’t feel earned; I haven’t learned anything about it. Just filled my head with stories much sadder than mine, which doesn’t do anything to dislodge him from my mind or peel his face off this building.
But when I look out into each of its reflections, there’s no mystery on the waters. In the waters, chopping and filthy, it appears as it should: an ugly hexagon of black glass shattered into a hundred incongruous segments. As it reaches up towards the sky it starts to falter, seeming to collapse backwards, yielding to its own weight.