Read Online Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby - Free Book Online

they cascaded into and breached one another. We used to think that houses had no memory at all. But now we understand.
    Though it was not my job, I would sometimes go around a certain house, fixing up some of the minor imperfections — a dangling shade, perhaps, or an unhinged door. Who could
not
fix something that was just lying there, broken to the world? How could you just leave something out like that, hanging like some fibrous, gangly appendage?
    I worked part-time so that I could spend the rest of my day listening to houses that were currently inhabited. My wife’s home, for instance, was a place I was very familiar with. She brought a child and a waffle iron into our relationship; I brought nothing but a lifetime of pouting and relentless self-indulgence. Nevertheless, I was given a set of keys to her place and permission to use the bed and washroom, but not a towel or soap. “For a person that has never heard of self-reliance…,” she’d say, face brought into sharp relief by some base cosmetic arrangement. Consequently, I washed during the day, using a dingy, thirdhand set of linens I kept in a plastic bag under the tub, long after she had trudged off to the job that rubbed her bricked, shuttered life away, paycheck after paycheck.
    She had lots of little things around — a smirking, Bakelite cat clock, two tall reed baskets of seemingly foreign origin, a lone ski pole with the word
champ
written in squidgid, blocked Magic Marker script — objects that stood for various times and places in her life, the relevance of which she vigilantly kept from me. When I sensed one in a room, I would check it with the house machine and, sure enough, all kinds of sound would come rushing out of it.
    I listened to her things for hours while she was at work, carefully running over each surface with the slim, troweled orifice of the microphone, scanning the frequencies for some meaningful tone. On hot, dry days swatches of fabric tended to surrender the most vivid signals. At times, the sound was clear enough to evoke a kind of sightfulness. One morning a nettled tuft of hair brought about a striking tableau of her child, Janet. She was just starting to walk. There were some sounds of her feebly traversing the corner of an apartment that I had never seen or even heard of but that had very nice things in it, much nicer than the things we had in our house. On another frequency I could hear the child handling some plastic figures and blocks, trying to paste together some sort of world out of the cheap talismans. Her head shook like one of those big-headed figurines with springs for necks. By the time I started wedging myself into her life, the girl could already put on her own shoes and say things like “We’re going faster.”
    The end of each day had the habit of getting right up in my face, with little or no advance warning. I locked down the house I was sounding — a massive, interbred structure buttressed by haughty, overdesigned columns and balustrades — and hauled the tapes back to the Museum of Real Estate and Finance. The foreman had a disagreeable face and body, as if it had been preempted by terminal indecision at an early stage.
    “What there — you?” he asked from behind the marquee. He was blind by choice, just like my father.
    “A couple of instructive loops. Some business about a fancy dress, a boating accident, Ibiza.”
    “Clean?”
    “So far.”
    “So far, so far.”
    It was a job that did what I wanted it to. It stayed wherever I put it. Where I lived, though, was massive and untenable, an emotional dumping ground — a house whose thin meniscus trembled and brimmed with discontent.
    The relationship my wife and I kept taking stabs at didn’t slip through my fingers so much as level itself sloppily against them. We were still passing back and forth a virus I had picked up years before. It became part of what we did together — the life we fostered in lieu of a child of our own.
    I was rarely