When True North Fails

1101 North Highland Street. A nice place, briefly.

It was only a month before everything went wacky and began breaking. The AC failed. Pipes burst behind walls. The basement flooded. Our Internet went offline. HomeShield Insurance Company dropped us. It was as if some cosmic anomaly of evil plasma had settled onto the realty, altering the reality—of rules and commonsense observation—down to the atoms.

In the real world, we began to worry that maintenance bills might soon exceed our mortgage. We had to live frugally.

It was just the three of us—my wife, Danielle; my son, Logan; and myself. It was to be our dream home, our first ever venture into American Dream ownership. It was the crowning life achievement by which we’d never look back at apartment living again. Now, however, we looked back, perhaps fondly, because we were the landlords now. We footed the bills. Then, Danielle and I lost our jobs, so our austerity program tripled.

The intramural technological revolt, however, paled to the other things.

“Why did you tell me you’d make the coffee this morning?” Danielle asked me. “I’m still waiting,” she said with pre-caffeine impatience.

“For what?”

“The coffee, Mike.”

“Danielle, I never said that. I don’t even drink coffee.”

“I know. I thought you were just being nice. You’ve never offered to make it before.”

“I didn’t today, either.”

“Mike,” she insisted, “you did. I didn’t imagine it. Forget it,” she concluded. “I have it brewing now. You know Logan likes it, too, so you’ll be having this discussion with him.”

“What discussion?”

“Of why you didn’t make our coffee when you—so clearly, I might add—said you would.”

“So, this conversation’s not over?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Danielle yielded. “It is. Maybe you’re just getting old,” she laughed.

I let it go. Maybe I had a lot of things on my mind, with the bills, unemployment, and our new home fighting us. I was a set-up for distraction.

No new homeowners really find out what they’ve bought until they move in, when what sat empty on the multilistings finally becomes a working home. Strangely, even in this seller’s market, this one had sat for three years. Its asking price suffered the attrition of those years, and then we came along. By then, the price was right. We stole it!

Logan was a proud senior in high school and had become quite the young man. He’d excelled in school and even was accepted to three universities—one offering a free ride on a swimming scholarship. He was smart, like my PhD brother; but unlike my brother, he wasn’t so smart he was crazy, which happens.

Still, it hadn’t always been so smooth Logan and me.

We all had gone through some changes, some very rough times—the ugly times out of cramming three humans into 1400 square feet during our apartment years. Logan and I had even come to blows when he was at the peak of his postpubescent angst, which delayed, punitively, his getting a car by a year. He blamed losing his girlfriend on that, since she ended up with someone else—someone more mobile. That’s how young love works in the brain before the frontal lobes mature. He never mentioned it again, but I feared he’d never forgiven me.

Ancient history. But now history repeated itself in a way, since his car was part of the new home’s technological revolt. Something about the brakes. When I couldn’t loan him mine, I saw an old side of him re-emerge. Perhaps the old wound.

He slammed his palms down on the kitchen countertop which made me jump.

It’s weird what you notice in split-seconds like that. There had been perhaps a dozen magnets on the refrigerator door, holding appointment cards, photos, graduation announcements, a wedding invitation, and business cards of people for fixing the increasing number of things no longer working. They were all on the floor now. When it occurred to me it was probably from the force of how he had slammed his hands that caused them to fall, that’s when he went for my throat.

This was more than just “coming to blows,” which previously had been only some shoving back and forth.

This wasn’t my son. This was a crazy person. And I was being choked! I kicked hard at one of his knees and he fell backward, landing on the floor; and as if he had done nothing wrong, he looked at me incredulously.

“Why’d you do that!” he shouted.

“Why’d you choke me? Over the damn car! Really?”

“I didn’t choke you,” he said, tearing up, holding his knee.

I had no comeback. How had he not remembered what just happened? He began to lift himself up, with great pain, so I offered a hand. He flinched at my hand, thinking it meant to strike him. “Don’t touch me!” he said and limped out of the kitchen.

How had this happened? How had it come to this? And so quickly. Like a car without brakes, which was ironic, portending some quantum entanglement between the household technological revolt and our devolved kitchen scene. Perhaps we all were on edge in our frugal times; sacrificing breeds score-keeping and resentment.

“Logan,” I called.

This had to be made right. Immediately. Parenting demanded it. We were father and son, after all. There’s no room for such ugliness in a family.

“Go to Hell!” he called back from a hallway that led to his room.

I walked over to the dinette table and sat, trying to make some sense of this. I looked at the magnets on the floor. I arose to scoop them up to re-affix them to the refrigerator door, but they wouldn’t stick. I sat back at the table, letting them drop into a small pile. After a moment, Danielle came in, holding her coffee.

“Thanks for making the coffee, Mike,” she said. “That was sweet.”

Ordinarily that would be very weird, but I had more pressing things on my mind.

“Logan,” I asked her, “did you see him?”

“Yeah,” she answered, “just now. Why?”

“How is he?”

“What do you mean? He’s fine. I just woke him up. I didn’t want him to be late. They get their senior class rings today.”

“Was he O.K.?”

“Yeah,” she repeated, confused. “Why? What’s the matter, Mike?”

“We just had fight.”

“He snapped at you maybe because you tried to wake him up before me? Was he cross?”

“Cross? He tried to kill me! He wasn’t sleeping in his room; he was right here, choking me!” I said hoarsely, rubbing my neck where it was still sore. Danielle studied me.

“First the coffee, now this,” she said, visibly worried like a wife might concern herself over her husband’s health.

“Coffee? That again? Wait—did I or did I not make the damn coffee?”

“I made it,” Logan said, walking in, holding a tumbler.

“That’s your answer on the coffee,” Danielle said. “But Mike, what about all this other stuff? My goodness!”

“’Mornin’, Mom,” Logan said, kissing her on her cheek. Then he leaned over me to kiss me good morning on my own cheek. “’Mornin’, Dad. I have a ride today with Peter, until I can get those brakes checked out. I don’t like the scraping noise they’re making.”

“So we’re good?” I asked him tentatively.

“Dad, you’re freaking me out,” he laughed. “Why wouldn’t we be good?”

I was not good. Not good at all. Yet, it was just the beginning.

Not only were all the mechanical, electrical, and electronic things in the house malfunctioning, but the family was well on its way to being broken. That’s what I realized three nights later, when Danielle shook me awake in our bed. She was standing over me, shaking my shoulders violently.

“Have you lost your mind!” she shrieked. “He’s dead. You’ve killed him.”

“What? Wait, you’re dreaming, Danielle. A nightmare. Calm down.”

There would be no calming her down.

“Look at all the blood!” she shouted.

True, I looked her over and even in the dark of the bedroom I could see she was saturated with blood. Hers? Mine? I could smell it, like when there’s a lot of it.

I patted myself down. No, I was dry. Logan’s?

“Whose blood is that? Are you bleeding?”

“No! It’s his. You’ve killed him. Logan. He’s in his bedroom. He’s gone! How many times did you stab him, you son of a bitch? My baby! Gone! And you did it!” She began slapping at me fitfully. “I watched you do it after all the commotion woke me up. I walked into Logan’s room, and you were there stabbing him and stabbing him and he was crying out for you to stop, but you just kept stabbing him and—”

“A dream, Danielle. I can’t explain the blood, but I’ve been in bed this whole time. Look, let’s go check on him. I’ll bet we’ll see him sleeping.”

She reluctantly—yet icily—accepted my hand, and we walked together toward his room. I wasn’t that confident, however, over what we’d see, because I struggled to make sense of the blood.

There Logan lay, still.

Like our hearts, but only momentarily. He was only sleeping. Danielle gasped. She patted down her nightdress; it was dry.

“Oh, God!” she cried, diving into Logan’s bed to hold him. Logan was startled awake.

“Watch my knee!” he said when she embraced him. “It’s still sore.”

“It seemed so real,” she said over her coffee the next morning after Logan had left for school. She was still very upset.

“Danielle,” I replied, “it’s the same thing as my fight with him.”

This struck a chord, triggering a look between us we’ve never shared before; one of terror when at the mercy of something conspiring against us.

Something strong, something not very nice. But what? This house? Some communicable mental illness?

Logan’s presentation, several days later, was his own admission into our club of madness. Imagine his psychotic hysteria after witnessing our murder-suicide—he was inconsolable with a forced struggle of horror vs relief.

“I saw it all. Dad! You shot Mom in her head and then you put the gun in your mouth.” By this time, almost incomprehensible, he was babbling. “Why’d you do that?”

“But I didn’t,” I consoled him. We were in a family embrace now. “We’re all here. And fine.”

“He wouldn’t do what you think you saw,” Danielle agreed.

“But he could do something like that,” he sobbed.

“I wouldn’t. Never, ever.”

“But you might. Maybe this house is showing us the future.”

“Nonsense,” Danielle said. “That’s crazy.”

“Is it?” he countered. “Maybe this is a crazy house. Nothing works. Electronics are glitched. Motors are conking out. We’re on the fritz.”

“And those magnets,” I added. “Why would magnets not work?”

“Who do we call?” Danielle asked.

“Call?” Logan laughed.

I’ve chosen carefully to whom I’ve told our story. With only limited understanding, I’ve been told that vacant homes are accommodating environments for the net dipoles of all their atoms, played against all the effective exchange interactions between them, for dissipation into some steady state.

Or something like that. That’s what my brother told me, the PhD who’s so smart he’s crazy.

By the time the “For Sale” sign had been hammered into our lawn at 1101 North Highland Street, entropy had already won, and the probability cloud of all quantum outcomes had collapsed into three former homeowners renting yet again.

Renting, but alive and well.

The house sat empty another three years, during which time we had to surrender it in foreclosure. But now we know why it was so hard to sell.

There are endless timeless terrors—timeless errors—when possibilities careen and collide within empty rooms, outside of time itself, building new dipoles of ill intent, ready to flare into probability—or worse—when those, like us, bumble along their linear number lines to intersect with these clouds’ rain of doom. A reign of doom. I wondered if the next owners’ observations would collapse into a some nefarious alternate reality for them.

Caveat emptor!

A year later, it didn’t surprise me to read that the house had burned down. But what shocked the community—but didn’t surprise me—was that the whole family had locked themselves inside, incapable of escaping the alleged arson.

For buying a house, I submit, a compass might prove as valuable a realty tool as a mortgage calculator, if either of them were to even work.