Keep It Upstairs

 A story has to start somewhere, so I’ll start with the clomp of square heels, presumably mine, against asphalt; I trudged up a steep road, my thighs aching beneath the knit of a foreign tuxedo. A thin film of mustard-brown dust covered the buff of my narrowed toe. I didn’t know how or from where I procured the tuxedo, or the shoes, or the polish, and didn’t remember affixing any of them to my person. But the clomp was real enough, tied to my step, and I ran my hands down the sides of the trousers to make sure I was, too, pressing against the ache from the other side.

The night—it seemed later than I sensed it to be—featured a breeze that I associated with my time in San Diego, the air off the Pacific rustling palm leaves above and around my stride. I had some notion I had trekked from the valley below, the old town nestled in it. But that was all dark now, both by sight and memory, and only instinct led me up the incline of this narrow avenue and toward the lights that winked between the trees’ shifts. The wind picked up, as if it had decided to skip ahead, circle me, show its mettle. It kissed away the sweat beading along my widow’s peak, vanished.

I was going to a party, but also not. I knew I was dressed the part, but the static around the edges of what I could remember apprised me that wasn’t quite right, either.

At the top of the hill, the road leveled and split into three long driveways, each ending in a mansion. The two on the edges were completely dark—just shadow on top of night. Almost invisible. The middle one, though, was only half-so—the top level lit all around its perimeter, halcyon shine piercing translucent curtains. Sounds punched through, too, warbled shouts perhaps—but as they mingled with the outside air, or rode along its breezy flank, the resulting muddle just broadcast more ocean.

A crush of palm trees bordered the drive, yet I could see for miles; the sky ruled here even when obstructed. The mansion at the top of the hill never got bigger, except as it did. It stretched and strained, much like time, the hill itself—only all at once could I make out details, led by the cast-off glow from the second floor. Intricate metal work wrapped around a balcony that itself rounded out like Saturn’s rings encircling a post-modern box of a planet. The main structure landed somewhere between Miami-chic and brutalist, on the wrong coast and in the wrong century, looking ahead to a different version of this one. The main structure bore complicated wings emanating from both sides, and behind. I could see all its angles without seeing any.

There are dreams, and then there are the spaces in between, which are even truer, but harder to fathom, like the memory of a lover you’ve long forgotten; when she appears, always unexpected and unwelcome, it’s an invasion, a smash and grab of a chamber of your heart where nothing is taken, just a note left behind: the only version of you that meant anything died in my skinny arms. The mansion, I had some grasp, was built on such sacred and unforgiving land.

Or was an extension of it; the actual ground seemed to reach up to the structure’s foundation, lay its hands over it, the inverse of an excavation—an embrace, rather than a hollowing. Or maybe a palming. The wind rose and I watched the whole tableau shiver. I stopped, blinked—the house held as still as the others I couldn’t see.

Just as I had noted from afar, the entire first level—which extended much farther along the horizontal than the second—was dark. Not even a porchlight shone, almost like a fuse had blown. The upstairs lights, muted as they were behind curtains, could only reach so far, just enough to keep me from tripping up the wide steps cut into the rising earth, culminating at a landing framed by pillars carved with their own intricacies, curling around and up, snakes or vines or some marriage of both. Faint thumping, maybe bass, rumbled down their spindly lengths.

The doubled and arched front doors opened with a simple turn of their knobs. The expansive parlor at the entrance managed its own flavor of black, dissipated by the moonlight stabbing in from long vertical rectangles cut into the thick surface of the walls, a blade with a halo. Neither made sense—the windows themselves, which could not exist in the context of the exterior layout, nor the moon, which had not shown itself, so far as I could recall, along the length of my solitary march.

Inside, before me and just to my right, stood an impossibly wide staircase; I imagined I could carry a center church pew parallel without nicking either banister. The muffled undercurrent of dusk sounds were a little less so inside, but still undefined, a plodding heartbeat leaking from a ceiling that rose far higher than its architecture could foretell.

But new sounds manifested inside, closer and clearer, more immediate—a man’s hoarse cough, an errant sigh, whispered threads of conversation or conspiracy, unseen rodents at the corners. A hitched sob stopped me where I stood. I spun to my left—a hallway ran like a subway tunnel into infinity. A tall, thin man brushed by me, muttered either an apology or a curse, and pointed into its maw. I entered.

The tunnel culminated in candlelight. A kitchen. “The electricity, hot shot, is not for us,” a woman barked, wrestling with a rolling pin. She blew a damp strand of hair from her face. “I know what you were thinking. You didn’t have to say a word.” She stopped and straightened. “I hadn’t thought of that before—the whole ‘seen and not heard’ thing.” She shook her head. “Peculiar place.”

I ventured to speak anyway. “Where is this, exactly?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. She was almost attractive in a flinty way, like a jagged mountain. “The world, hotshot. The world is a peculiar place.” She went back to the rolling pin.

“Why do you keep calling me ‘hotshot’?”

She stopped her work again, clearly annoyed. “Well, you’re here now. Make yourself useful.”

I didn’t want to answer this woman with another question—I just wanted to keep myself busy and out of harm’s way. But, scanning the kitchen, I had no idea what was expected of me.

“The juice,” she barked.

“What?”

She glared at me as if an untrainable dog. “Take them more juice,” she commanded, enunciating each word like molasses on her tongue. She nodded toward a far counter, where fifteen or twenty bottles sat upright as schoolchildren, catching the candlelight. I walked over, took one in my hands.

“This is Bordeaux,” I called over my shoulder. “Good Bordeaux,” I whispered to myself.

“Like I said—juice. Take it to them if you want to steer off trouble.”

Whoever they were. I took the bottle by the neck and started back the way I came, toward the tunnel. The rolling pin cracked against the table, like a skull.

“Where the devil do you think you’re going?” The woman was incredulous. Nothing seemed to enrage her so much as my mere existence.

I blinked at her, my arms outstretched in a kind of surrender, the bottle hanging from my grip. With the monkey suit and the wine sloshing around, I probably looked exactly as ridiculous as I felt. “I’m assuming they are upstairs, and I’m going to go up the stairs to take it to them. Their juice.” I felt a flicker of pride at the backbone I was exhibiting, the mettle coursing through my words. Eye for an eye and all that.

The cook’s eyes narrowed to slits, like a house cat’s. “Wrong stairs, hotshot. Those are for them.” She gazed down the tunnel, then flipped her head, beckoning behind. “Our staircase is this way.”

#

The servant’s flight rose steep but uneven, wrapped in a spiral inside what felt as tight as a dumbwaiter. The stairs tilted sometimes toward the wall, sometimes away. There was no light save the pinpricks that escaped from the irregularities in the construction—mistakes in the woodwork like fireflies in the floorboards above. The music thundered down between the studs holding the whole contrivance together, dust shivering off the awkward angles around me with every thump of the bassline, kissing my cheek. A narrow door vibrated at the peak of the climb.

I pushed the door forward as slowly as I could manage; regardless, the light from the second floor proper forced a squint—as if I were looking directly into a hollowed-out gold bar struck by raw, naked sunlight. None of that was there, of course—the walls painted in subtle, if out of fashion, hues, the sun asleep somewhere below the horizon below this one; the shock was a matter of contrasts, the difference between where I’d been and where I seemed to be going. It took my brain a moment—maybe two—to adjust in accordance with my eyes, and catch up to the scene that played out before me.

The great room was packed with children dressed in evening wear, a sea of ill-fitting tuxedos and sparkling gowns. To the nines came to mind, and though I knew what the phrase meant, I was not sure how it came to mean that. There was almost no beginning nor end to the crowd before me, heads thick with hair thick with grease, boys and girls alike; the latter glanced over me with bright eyes raccoon-ringed with crusts of mascara, if they bothered to look at all.

Most didn’t. They danced with abandon, or drank with abandon, or conspired with abandon, or smoked with abandon. They were laughing and screeching and flirting. A heavyset youngster, red-faced and stumbling, belched so hard, wine flew over the lip of his chalice.

Chalices were indeed the cups of choice for this soiree. Silver or gold, it was hard to tell—three enormous and complicated chandeliers were spaced across the room, so all-consuming as to fling distilled light in every direction, every corner. No thing or one could actually cast a shadow; they simply emanated patterns.

A flicker and crash—at first, I mistook the disturbances for the piano, but this was a different kind of music, confused and more true. I studied the room, landing on a serving dish shattered on the polished floor. A collective groan, a sadness that quickly morphed to jeering. until, suddenly, the tallest black-clad child waded through the catcalls to bend down and investigate. It was in the bending that I recognized a fellow traveler—not one of the kids at all, but another adult, a woman, formally draped and a fair bit younger than myself—maybe the literal split difference between the congregation and me. I watched her gently pluck up the shards of glass with her thin, bare fingers.

“You make a better door than a window,” a weathered voice bellowed from behind and below. “And you’re not much of one of those either.”

The man’s severe combover manifested first, caught by the light of the great room, the rest of him emerging after from the dumbwaiter stairs. He balanced a covered silver tray on the palm of one hand. I stepped aside.

“Carrion,” he hissed, viscous as motor oil, as he passed. “For the insatiable vultures.”

Though as far from being a child as one could be, the man was nearly as short as those enjoying the festivities. They mobbed him on his trek toward a long table across the room—an annihilated spread—and he had to stretch the platter as high as he could manage so it didn’t get nicked. The glistening half-egg aped a kind of alien periscope cutting through a sea of wet tongues, grubby hands. Urchins, disciples.

“You look confused, my good man.”

I spun around at the sound. A boy—he couldn’t have been more than eight years old, if that—beamed up at me, the chandelier catching the lens of his monocle. On the surface, it was positively cherubic, that smile, but the word that scratched itself across my mind was rancid.

“Is it that obvious?” I muttered.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “I mean—do you think it’s yours?”

I appraised him, his strange wide stance, trying to decipher the words until he gravitated his stare to the bottleneck in my grip. The juice. “No, I—” My voice faltered. “I was asked to carry it up.”

The boy nodded, condescension layered over condescension. He might have even clucked his tongue. “Well, I’d say you’re just about halfway there, chap. So bully for you!”

“Halfway there?”

The boy’s face darkened around the glinting monocle. “Will it do me much good caged in the bottle like that? In your hand?”

I stared; he didn’t so much as flinch. It’s a peculiarity, to literally look down on your judge and jury. I held out the bottle.

The boy grabbed it with two tiny hands. “Capital,” he murmured, flat as a cracker, marching off, the bottle bouncing over his pomade crown like a prized goose.

“And now you can go,” a youngster in pigtails sneered, grinning wide. Her gown shimmered down her straight edges like rain. An incongruent boy bearing freckles and a massive cowlick chortled. “Icy,” he might have said, but I couldn’t be sure. He was very drunk and soon tripped over his own feet, falling face first on the edge of the dancefloor.

A full-sized woman came running, grumbling about a tantrum to be avoided at all cost. “Get more medicine,” a drive-by order as she passed.

“Medicine?”

She crouched on all fours to attend to the patient, who was working up to a sniffle. “Gin,” she prescribed to both him and me. “The nice man is going to get you some medicine, Master Winston. For the boo-boo.”

I turned, still in my daze. Another steward barreled up the entryway carrying ice, but no gin. Not even the ubiquitous juice.

Beyond him, a woman almost familiar, strained curves in this curve-less room, made herself as small as she could muster, backed up into a corner. Her cheeks too caught the chandelier light, glinted, glistened.

I tried to reach her but bumped into one of the children instead. “Watch it, scum,” rose from below in a high register. I pushed through, stretching for the woman, who reminded me of someone I once knew, perhaps even better than I knew myself. She burrowed even further into her wedge. I dropped my hand.

“Are you alright?”

Her nod melted into a shake.

“Are you hurt?”

She sucked in a breath. “He bit me.”

“He bit you?”

“Yes.”

“Who bit you?”

She seemed perplexed by the question—I was missing the point, focusing on the wrong thing. I pivoted. “Bit you where?”

She flushed, swinging her head down, behind.

“Your . . . ass?”

“He tore straight through the fabric. And,” she faltered, sighed, “my underwear.”

“He bit you in the ass?”

“Please—I don’t want to make a big deal about it.”

“Are you just going to stand there all night?”

“Sir!” It was the woman attending the fallen drunk boy. Both seemed to still be teetering on the edge of crying. Winston had a nice knot forming on his forehead, beneath which he was glaring at me. “The medicine.” The woman pressed the words flat through clenched teeth.

I turned back to the bitten serveuse. For a moment, I felt a rush, as if I were toggling through time, a different me, a different her. I swallowed, centered. “Hang tight—I’ll be right back.” I rushed down the servant’s entrance like an oversized white rabbit—late, very late, for a very important appointment. Madness at every table. The shadows of the stairwell overtook me as my step hammered down, my hand barely glancing the rickety railings. Things go sideways, then sideways again.

On that black canvas, I recalled her face, every detail I could muster. The tears, yes, but even more jarring, the flatness behind, under, their shimmer. The edge of acceptance, of station. It burned me, and I couldn’t remember why. She was beautiful, and no one would ever know. They’d just take their bites out of her all the same.

By the time I breached the kitchen, my forehead was drenched. My pits and jockeys soaked through, too. My feet stopped, but not my heart, still pumping at full velocity, keen to the lower depths always yet to travel.

The nasty cook hacked at some giant shank with a dull, square knife. Inferior tools to leverage the bottom line, I figured. To pay for more delicious juice. The tired blade struck against the butcher block. She glared at me.

Delicious juice. An endless supply of medicine. The party can’t, won’t stop.

“Gin.”

Her eyes widened. “It’s too early.”

I heard the chuckle rattle out of me. “Too early to give children gin?” I spread my arms in exasperation. “Careful now!”

A young maid—probably a gopher for the cook—seemed not to grasp my sarcasm, answered me earnestly. “It’s a double-edged sword, sir. Some of them go to sleep, but the ones who don’t . . .” her voice faded into the recesses of the kitchen.

The cook rolled her eyes and swung the knife down again, against meat, against bone that had lost its purpose. She snapped over her shoulder but held her eyes on mine. “Everybody’s got a lot of high ideas tonight, don’t we?” Her voice rose and warbled, like she was mocking her own shrillness. Like she couldn’t stop. “About what is and what should be? But the world is the world—fussing with it doesn’t ever change a thing.” She scrutinized me up and down—my ever-thinning widow’s peak, my slumped shoulders—and found me as wanting as before. “Some people should know better.”

“Some people have been holed up in this kitchen too long.”

Dark as it was, the rush of red to her cheeks still flashed a warning. “Excuse me?” Her face almost collapsed on itself, tapering to some infinitesimal point at its center.

I read a room I could hardly see. Light and dark. Light and dark. That’s all there is if you accept as much. “You’ve all detained yourselves.”

The cook clicked her tongue. “Just what I needed in the middle of a moonlight fete—another righteous indignant, come to save us all.”

“They’re children.”

“They’re not ordinary children.”

“None of them ever are,” I hissed back, betraying a bitterness I thought had long since broken off. I took a breath. “Has anyone even ever tried to tell them no?”

The churn of the kitchen slammed to a halt, all its clockworks gummed for a heartbeat’s span, two. The cook and I had been bickering splinters for a full minute but this obvious question, of all things, gave the room existential pause.

The maid spoke up. She couldn’t have been more than a handful of years older than our lords, yet existed worlds away. “We mustn’t do that, sir. We must not even think it. They can hear them, you know? Our thoughts.” She inspected the vibrating ceiling. “At least when they’re paying attention.”

“So what?” I watched the cook; the red pocking her wide face had drained away. Now she was shaking her head slowly. I threw mine back. “No, you ungrateful brats!” I yelled. “No more juice for you! Pharmacy’s closed!”

Her face twisted as she tried to shush me; what escaped was so much deeper than the words she had been stringing, a primal whine, like a stopper pulled from some inexhaustible fear. She gathered her breath back into her chest. “Stop!” she hiss-whispered between bared teeth. “You’ll ruin everything.”

“Ruin?” I again stretched my arms wide. “This?”

“Yes—this. You stupid man—they run it all. If something were to happen, everything goes away. They’re more skittish than they seem.” She was changing tactics right in front of me, painting over the existing lines to fashion new victims.

I would have none of it. “You crawl around the edges of your own lives like rats. What terrible fate do you think will arrive if you break the game?”

“It’s no game. We would be thrown back out there.”

“Back where?”

“Out of the house.”

“Good!”

The cook started, narrowed her eyes to slits. She studied me, and her lips broke into an expression that split the difference between a grimace and a grin. A wide stance, a bracing. “You don’t remember, do you?” A flicker of recognition. “You don’t remember what’s out there.”

I stepped forward to challenge her, but froze, if only for a futile moment, realizing she was right. I didn’t.

#

The only surprising thing, in the end, was how no one stopped me. I didn’t even rush. Didn’t clamber back up the servants’ steps. I took my time to get there, navigated the kitchen, opening cabinets until I found the one holding the handles of imported gin, straight from the motherland. And then I strode by my silent chorus, mouths not agape, but registering that same expression as the cook, that bracing. Equilibrium—exactly how the universe will end. Not cold—just the utter absence of heat.

They looked to be sinking, a funeral at sea, as I alighted the steps. It was easier if you took your time. It was easier if everyone had long since learned their part.

At the top, I strode to the injured beauty and handed her a folded linen tablecloth in which to wrap herself, a makeshift sarong. I nodded toward the exit, and squeezed her wrist, a liberty. She must have caught my intentions in the runes of my face, because she didn’t hesitate, disappearing down the staircase’s cavernous dark.

I walked to, and then past, the woman nursing young Master Winston with a knot on his head. He squirmed in a half-awake tantrum, fickle and impotent, a skinny bird shaking itself at the sky like a fist. I watched her face shift from relief, to confusion, to rage, to fear—all in a moment. All life’s seasons accounted for, if not in strict order. I walked among the dancefloor’s throng, jostled past them, displaced their little bodies like unstable molecules. I caught their scatological and inexperienced curses in my wake. Around me. Catching the room, like fire.

Just so, in fact.

I twisted open the handle of gin, spilling its contents along the farthest corner of the room. Up and down the curtains, as high as I could toss it. The antiseptic stench coursed up my nostrils, cleared my head and dampened the catcalls quickly turning into something else—threats. Panicked, crude threats. Against me. My mother who bore me. Anyone or anything a silly little insect like me might hold dear. I could hear only them and not the curling, alien thunder of the Pacific; when I tipped over a lit candle in its skeletal stand, I acted without prejudice.

The fire did what fire does, jumping up the wall, then lapping, a tongue of tongues, onto the high ceiling. The curtains went up like a dragon’s sneeze. The children, being children, deserted first. Climbing over each other, themselves, a waist-high stampede that split in two directions—one rivulet down the austere main staircase, and another crowding itself into the servant’s way, tumbling down. They were screaming. I could hear those still in the room, but I could also hear those in the banisters, as well as the pioneers who had already made their way outside into the gardens, the front yard. An infestation in reverse. Through a front window—where the curtains had not yet caught aflame—I looked down on them, their little shadows now manifest, scattering down the drive. After I was sure everyone else had evacuated, I made my own way down the big stairs, a rag to my mouth.

The cook was standing at the bottom, brandishing the dull butcher knife. I assumed she would come at me, but she just held the blade flat against her chest. “You fool,” she whispered, and I saw through the developing haze that she was crying. “You goddamned fool.”

I staggered out through the front entrance, the crisp punch of fresh air betraying how quickly that inside had turned stifling, how fast the fall. You don’t notice, even when you’re noticing. It just ratchets up.

The children still screamed, but the melody had shifted. They sounded like banshees now. They careened through the bushes and over the asphalt. Along the road. Off the road. All charging maniacally down the hill to the valley below. The old, old city, worse for wear. I took the driveway myself at a kind of saunter.

It wasn’t long before I heard another change, a third kind of scream—a woman’s shriek. And then another. And again. Cries of surprise, and then torment. Shattering glass. Frightened animals. It stopped me cold, the old cook’s admonishment ringing in my brain. I halted somewhere halfway between the ridge and the valley—equilibrium—and understood for the first and last time that we, the indentured, were never the veritable prisoners of the big house after all.