Claire Laine
New Voices Award Finalist
Intrusions
The third ghost sent us clues: the half-eaten chocolate bar on the dining room table; a torn bag of lentils in the pantry; droppings under the radiator; the sound of distant and unlocatable rustling in the walls; the sense, in every room I entered, that someone or something had just turned the corner out of sight, too quick or transcendent for me to catch a glimpse. The house, which had only become our house the year before, was sending us a message: that it knew us far better than we knew it.
The strange thing about having mice is that people (men) are eager to tell you how to kill them. My neighbor leans across the fence and describes placing three traps in a row along the wall. The first one comes along, goes for the peanut butter, snap! The second one sees his friend, walks right on by, snap! The third one walks past two dead mice, and what does he do? The neighbor shakes his head and holds his fingers in front of my face. Snap. Poison, drowning, entrapment. The options for extermination multiply with every conversation. His shrug tells me that I shouldn’t feel so bad for a creature who can’t see death coming, who marches into an open mouth in search of food.
My wife and I are less composed. We hire an exterminator to assess the extent of the problem (a medium infestation, he says, as he shines his flashlight into the cobwebbed beams of our basement ceiling, checking for chewed-through wiring). We seal every conceivable edible object, spray peppermint oil along the door frames. We watch YouTube videos produced by a man named Dave as he instructs us how to set a snap trap, the camera magnifying his weathered hands cradling the tiny guillotine. When the first trap goes off—while watching television on the couch—I pour two tall glasses of wine. Then, we call my father.
*
Several months before the mice appeared, and several months after we moved in, we arrive home one dark, November evening and notice that a light is on in the study. Strange, I think, given how neurotically I turn them off (Ghost watts, I mumble to my wife, every time I unplug the toaster or switch off a lamp). I bring my face to the window, my breath forming a small cloud on the glass, and see papers strewn across the desk, books pulled from the shelves and scattered across the floor, backpacks and jackets piled in the center of the room. We walk around to the front as the event starts to solidify in my gut. The screen door sways on its hinges, the year’s first snow beginning to collect on the sidewalk. Glass litters the porch where it had been carefully cut out of its frame in the second door, allowing an arm to reach inside and unlock it. The wind finds these openings, pours straight through the house’s middle.
Earlier that night, my father lay with his chest open on an operating table. He had recently been diagnosed with subventricular tachycardia, a condition that made his heart beat rapidly for a span of several minutes, leaving him dizzy and tired. It wasn’t painful, he said, just unnerving, to feel your heart suddenly galloping ahead of the rest of your body.
I imagined a surgeon peering over his magnifying glasses as he sawed through bone and muscle to get to the heart, prying open the ribcage to expose the tender, pulsing organ, like a bird’s egg cocooned in its nest.
In reality, the surgery was performed by guiding a microscopic catheter through my father’s blood vessels and destroying the area causing the electrical malfunction, eliminating the need for any kind of open-heart procedure. The surgeon’s first attempt—through my father’s groin—was unsuccessful, and he had to reroute through his neck. If he were a thief, we might say the front door gave him too much trouble and he resorted to smashing a window. Several weeks earlier, he had proclaimed that he had a 99% success rate, and I was disillusioned by his confidence, which seemed to belie and flatten the differences between bodies, the knotted mess that hides beneath the skin.
Once my father was allowed to receive visitors, I drove my mother to the hospital while my wife stayed at my parents’ house with the dogs, thereby leaving our house dark and vacant. We walked through a maze of humming, brightly-lit hallways trying to find the right recovery wing. It occurred to me that this would have been the perfect time for my father’s help, a man whose favorite pastime is poring over obscure parts of the world in his atlas, who drew maps of intersections and landmarks in faint pencil to guide me during my childhood, in the time before Google Maps rendered them unnecessary.
When we reached his room, he was sitting upright in bed watching an unimportant football game on the television on the wall. He was experiencing nausea, he said, and clutched a paper bag in one hand. A perennially cold man—having relocated to Minnesota from Texas in his thirties and never recovered—he kept most of his body tightly wrapped in the thin hospital blanket. A curtain partially separated him from the other patient in the room, a man whose pain kept him pacing and swearing until the early hours of the morning. Every time he walked more than a few feet from his bed, the alarm sounded and nurses appeared to coax him back.
The room was small and cramped and there were no chairs for visitors, so my mother and I occupied ourselves by tracking down a cup of coffee. A kind nurse led us back through the fluorescent passages to the machine, where we puzzled over the touch screen options until we managed to produce a thin stream of hot, caramel liquid. When we delivered it to my father’s bedside—the other man still walking in circles—he swallowed two painkillers with the coffee, looked up at my mother and said, I want to go home. She rested a hand on his forehead, said tomorrow.
*
Eventually, we called the police, knowing that a report would be necessary for the insurance claim. As the cops toured us through the ransacked rooms, we remained mostly silent, unable to reconcile the house we left several hours earlier with the image of the one before us. It became clear that they had entered through the front door and exited through the back, overturning every drawer, closet, and pocket in between. Everything of value—from laptops all the way down to a sheet of stamps—was gone. I’ll never know exactly how long they spent in the house, but a sense of urgency lingered in the air and in the haphazard wreckage they left behind. Still, when I noticed several of our friends’ paintings missing from the wall, I wondered if they had paused in front of the art, weighing its incalculable value against the items more obviously cashable. I asked myself why they had chosen to take the paintings they did—if in the midst of their frantic search, they simply wanted to take something beautiful.
We were too on edge to sleep in our house that night, so we walked to my parents’ to stay in their guest room, our footprints mingling with the thieves’ on the snow-covered sidewalk. When we reached the top of their staircase, the dog peed in the middle of the hallway, a lake gathering at his feet. All of our rhythms were off.
Things disappeared en masse, then slowly over the course of several weeks. The immediate thefts were obvious and easily tallied. It wasn’t until I went to grab a pair of socks later that month that I noticed the missing garment bag at the back of the closet, which stored my wedding suit and was the only item of clothing they took. A fresh anxiety settled in—that I might not even know the extent of the loss, that the missing items might remain permanently struck from my memory. Our stolen possessions became phantom companions in the house. We never knew when they would announce their absence.
*
The thief, my father’s errant heartbeat, the mice—I came to think of these ghosts as three limbs stemming from a central nervous system. I sensed their shared vocabulary but was left grasping at their meaning. What was the substance of their connective tissue? In my search, I read Sloane Crosley’s memoir Grief Is for People, which recounts the month her jewelry was stolen from her apartment and her best friend died by suicide. Their proximity in time and their proximity to loss forces her to see the events as “hideous sisters.” She writes, “They are in conversation with each other. Sometimes I’m privy to the conversation, sometimes I’m not. They have their own language.” Crosley experienced a trauma of great magnitude, whereas I experienced, what exactly? A temporary sense of danger? A realization that the bodies of everyone I love are, indeed, like every other body, fallible? One bad night? I felt trapped inside nesting dolls of illusory boundaries, the walls of the house and the borders of the body melting away to reveal my ignorance. This isn’t trauma, I think. This is growing up.
*
The body is like a house you’re born into, with machinery that runs without conscious direction. A cursory Google search tells me that there are 2.5 billion heartbeats in the average human lifespan and I think about how many of them go unnoticed, the heart’s quiet work traveling to the ears only at the height of emotion. When something in the body goes wrong, it reveals itself as a terrible secret: while your mind was faced outward for ten or thirty or seventy years, your cells were mutating, multiplying, becoming unrecognizable. A one-way mirror, the action happening offstage.
This is when my mother, a philosopher and a yoga teacher, would warn me against engaging in mind-body dualism. She lifts my sternum to correct my posture, reminds me that a closed chest is the emotional landscape of sadness. Within the first few pages of her book about cancer, The Undying, Anne Boyer confronts the fissure of illness, refers to her tumor as her own but adds that “a diagnosed person is liberated from what she once thought of as herself.”
“Self-love under these conditions,” she writes, “appears to require you to love the cancer in yourself and to hate it as a threat to yourself, too.” I place a hand to my heart, tell myself with every beat that it’s me, it’s me, it’s me. Or maybe I’m saying, I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.
*
In the process of parsing the shared language of my ghosts, a fourth “hideous sister” tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me that another kind of invasion occurred that autumn. In the first few months following our wedding, my wife and I began the process of applying for her marriage-based green card. I devoted myself to building our case—or more accurately, our cases—proving to the insurance company that we were robbed, proving to the government that we were truthfully in love.
Our days were organized around paperwork. If the insurance claim for the burglary was a catalog of losses, this was one of accumulation—photographs and documents that proved a steadily growing commitment. How do you prove the truth of one’s love? You tell a story, and you tell it with money. With a mortgage, joint bank accounts, shared insurance policies, tax returns. I can only imagine what happened during the hours we left our house vacant on the night of the break-in, and I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with my wife. We built bodies of evidence to authenticate what were essentially mysteries, to make them legible to the governing bodies that were allergic to any and all ambiguity.
As we compiled our stack of papers—our faces smiling back at me from a photo taken months earlier—I wondered if the agent assigned to our file would become caught up in the romance, imagining us walking around a frozen lake on our first dates, laughing over beers at dusk in the summer, throwing a chaotic and marigold-strewn wedding in the fall. The cold, bureaucratic nature of the process collided with the intimacy with which I inserted our account. It was a kind of mental gymnastics that allowed me to feel a sense of narrative power, all the while knowing that the decision was in the hands of others. I remembered the urge I had in the first days after the break-in, to take every photo of us in the house and turn it face-down, to cut up the Polaroid of me in my bra (taken as a joke), which peeked out from the papers they had rifled through. What I wanted, in the aftermath of both the burglary and the green card application process, was to recover the power of my own gaze. I wanted to look back.
Love is transformational; it turns the anonymous into the specific. At least, this is how the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero defines it, and it’s the definition that has always felt the most right to me. In her book Relating Narratives, she writes that “the joy of love lies indeed in the nakedness of a shared appearance that does not tolerate qualifications but simply exposes two uniquenesses to each other.” As I dragged documentation of our marriage into the Dropbox folder we shared with our lawyer—trying to fit our story into a recognizable script while also highlighting its uniqueness—I got stuck on Cavarero’s verbiage, “exposes”. Falling in love can feel like a molting, a process of building a private world with only two citizens. But for my wife to be allowed to stay in this country, we had to trade one citizenship for another. The insurance claim represented the privacy taken from us. Our green card application represented the privacy we were willing to give away.
All of this was complicated by the fact that my wife does not have a last name, making it difficult for her to obtain a driver’s license, file official forms, pay for things, get paid for things. Though she could have taken mine when we got married, she stayed loyal to the naming conventions of her South Indian community. Where I saw a future of frustration and inconvenience, my wife clung to the possibilities that anonymity provides—an identity inscrutable in official manners, but specific to her person, the person whom I specifically love.
*
My father, a religious studies professor, knows all about believing in things you cannot see. (“Because what is the idea that something exists, even if you can’t see it, if not the very definition of faith?”—Crosley, again). The morning after his surgery, he chats with the nurse during her morning rounds, answering her questions about what he does for a living. The curtain now open, the pacing man begins to apologize, mistaking my father for some kind of confessor. He apologizes for swearing in his presence, and indirectly apologizes for the narcotics addiction that keeps him awake all night, and for the pain that never abates. I can’t believe I said fuck in front of you, he says. I’m no boy scout, my father responds.
They spend the morning talking over coffee and hospital pancakes, their pale calves poking out from their papery gowns. The man tells him that he is an anonymous street artist, known for leaving vibrant, large-scale paintings of flowers in public spaces. Everywhere, little bits of life. Maybe I just met Banksy, he said to me later. I remember the man every time I pass graffiti on a highway underpass or drive by an unsigned mural. I begin to think that nameless art might be the most honest. Death of the author and all that.
When my wife begins a new sculpture, she tells me she can’t wait to find out what it’s about—the form coming to her before the meaning. I feel the same way about writing, that I start with a kernel of an idea but am often redirected by the page’s beckoning. In her book of diary entries, The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits admits that when she writes, she is “trying to build a word ladder up to my brain. Eventually these words help me come to an idea, and then I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite what I’d already written (when I had no idea what I was writing about) until the path of thinking, in retrospect, feels immediate.” The words—like a heartbeat, sometimes steady, sometimes stuttering—seem to arrive from elsewhere. People call this inspiration, the creative spark, divine interference. I stare at the sentences I’ve just written, wonder if I’m the marionette or the puppeteer.
*
In truth, I resisted calling the burglary a violation. If they had committed the sin of stealing, I had committed the sin of possession first, and the list of objects I once called “mine” stared back at me accusingly. I see my response reflected in Crosley’s: “At first, I insist there is no trauma.”
I accepted the sympathetic words of friends and colleagues, but tried to move conversations quickly to it could have been worse territory. We had kept our composure so well that when the mice appeared, we lost it. Through no fault of their own, they became tiny, mostly harmless projections of the original vandals. Their trail of food and droppings alerted us to their presence before we ever saw or encountered them, reminding us that the house was permeable to hauntings, that the more we tried to seal it off, the more we trapped ourselves inside.
Fear’s twin is guilt. As I kneeled on the winter-hardened ground outside the basement window, shining my phone’s flashlight into cracks in the foundation—looking from the outside in—I couldn’t shake the sinister feeling that we had become shadows of the system that held our future in the balance. Staking a claim to a home, delineating who and what belonged to it, or didn’t.
*
Every time I open the front door of the house, I see a yellow, weathered sticker that says “Occupants of this residence are assigned to shelter at,” followed by a faint, typewritten address and the words “Listen to your radio for instructions.” A relic from the Cold War years, I assume, and a reminder that the house existed long before us and will probably outlive us, too. I tend obsessively to the peonies in the front yard, imagining the house’s previous owners driving by to check on the life they left in our care. The house, more than a static figure, becomes defined by its thresholds. “You can’t retreat into yourself for safety from what is inside yourself,” Boyer recognizes, “or run from yourself for safety from yourself.” Health, safety, permanence—all things that can leave as quickly as they came. But to live, to create, this too requires an open door.
In the end, my father’s surgery didn’t fix his broken heart, but medication kept it going. We replaced the locks and the glass in the door and the paintings on the walls with new ones. The mice left; we stayed. Our season of precarity was minimally invasive. Everything in its proper place except the dull nagging that my ghosts had a message for me. There are moments—snap—that remind you that life is pretty much a one-way ticket towards the trap. With the knowledge of that fact, I am sure of very little. But I am grateful to have a father who whispers an apology to the mouse as he gathers its body into a plastic bag, who hears a man in pain and listens, who lets himself be opened up again and again.
Two years have passed since my wife was approved for a temporary green card, meaning it’s time to apply for her permanent residency. If approved (I want to say “when”), it will be up for renewal every ten years. I see the decades laid out before us like mile markers on a highway. Our lawyers ask us to collect evidence once again—proof that our relationship has continued over the past two years, as well as proof that it’s weathered change. It’s endured visible transformations (new jobs, new haircuts) and invisible ones (disagreements, but also new and deeper forms of intimacy). Our file tells a story of time passing and of us borne on its current.
My therapist once told me a story to help me understand how fear operates on confirmation bias. “Have you heard the one about the man with the elephant gun?” she says. The fable goes something like this: You see your neighbor sitting outside of his house with an elephant gun. You approach him to say, “But there are no elephants here,” to which he responds, “Exactly. It’s working.” You think fear is protecting you, she says, but it’s separating you from reality, from existing in the present.
I have been trying to remind or convince myself that vulnerability ultimately tends towards the good. I don’t want to be the one with the elephant gun. I want to be the one asking the question. On a sweltering day last July, the old man who lives across the street stops by to offer me his spare air conditioner. He leans on his cane as he squints into the sunlight, drops of sweat beading under the white hairs swept across his forehead. “The house was actually my daughter’s,” he tells me. “She was an alcoholic. We moved in to help.” He tells me his daughter is no longer with us. “My wife wants to move.” Waves his hand in the air above his head. “Too many memories.” I see the wife’s silhouette in the kitchen window watching us, the weight of the house bearing down on her. He tells me he’s getting a new knee next week. That he has an amazing doctor. He tells me his dog’s name. He tells me his own.
Claire Laine is a writer and book publicist from St. Paul, Minnesota, where she lives with her wife and dog.