PAVEMENT
Going for a walk was Russo’s idea. He liked the idea of exercising without much effort. We walked alongside matching houses, like triplets dressed by their mother, with flattened grass and leaves in symmetry. Every face and fence was picket-white, or six feet tall with a natural-wood finish, keeping the ceremonial playing on the lawn one big, fat secret. Overhead, the clouds drifted dreamily beneath an explosive sky, pink and orange debris painted on massive windows that walled the smelly asphalt. A car sped through the oasis and a barricade of blinds twisted shut, swift as a camera’s shutter.
Another car puttered behind it, followed by another, a silent, electric car. The wheels turned, the engine hummed clean without a break. No gasoline-meeting-spark, no piston smashing down and forcing a sky-like explosion of energy and chaos and beauty and motion.
Just humming. A sound so near to silence, but terrified to touch it. It is the type of noise you hear even when it isn’t there.
We rounded the corner, and a collage of engines collided, their pistons firing like a chorus of voices rehearsing low harmonies, and each engine became part of a sonic body of indistinct humming. They sound like one giant electric car. Tires pulled off the pavement with a sound like stickers pulled from a metal lunch box, the traffic lights clicked, ever so quietly, with each change, and wires buzzed from every side as we rounded the next corner onto a broken sidewalk. We’d walked for about ten minutes, but only then did we cross over train tracks.
“Looks like my old street in Chicago,” Russo exclaimed with a coarse sigh.
“Feels like my old street, too,” I mumbled. We were in California.
We passed two houses that were falling apart, products of a better time, the Roaring Twenties, when people worked hard and built homes that would last for generations, for families who would stick together.
“Is that a good feeling?” Russo replied to my rumblings.
I had no ability to describe my feelings towards the houses and yards, or lack of them. I was tired, too tired. Too tired to walk and talk and care about the conversation, but I did all three for Russo. There was so much going on in life and all of it seemed to be crumbling around me. I couldn’t take describing the outside of these pitiful houses, when I felt trapped inside of one myself. There I am, closed in the bathroom with the door locked, stuck after looking at my phone for so long that I no longer want to go out with friends, anymore then I want to go to bed. The darkness forces the lights on, or maybe I just never turn them off? Either way, I didn’t know what to say about the outsides, I only knew about the insides of the bathroom.
I guess that’s it then. It feels like scars and rotting baseboards, and sometimes a handyman comes through and makes you feel good for a couple weeks, but every time you have any success, people flood in and take advantage of it, I thought.
Russo glanced away as though he’d read my mind, and he described his house in Chicago. He hated it. It smelled. It broke every dish and never had any grass on the lawn. And the floors creaked so loud, he told me, that when you tried to get water in the middle of the night you would wake up every one in the house.
“And then! And then!” He breathed so heavily between. “The house would yell and scream and hit; hit you hard sometimes, and you wouldn’t ever get up to get water in that house, or pee, or cough. You would piss yourself before you got it kicked out of you trying to use the bathroom past eleven.”
Russo had tears behind his eyes, and I looked ahead pretending only to notice that he’d ended the sentence trying to laugh.
“I don’t know,” he reopened. “I just hate to see houses break down over time. It makes me think of pain, hurt, and remodeling, which is really only just a band aid.” He kept going, “And you want to know the worst thing about that house?”
His hands were red with anger as he pointed to the dying house in front of us like it was the very house that hit him, “I hate that I love that house,” he cried, not the teary kind though.
That rotting wood and stucco was the only proper house Russo ever had. Because one day, some guys in white trousers came through and dropped off their gear. The bathroom had flooded and part of the laminate floor was buckled, but the landlord wanted to order big while the insurance had its card out, so he painted the whole place, good as new, and for the price of a two-hundred fifty dollar deductible. Even the baseboards, even the trim, even the notch marks on Russo’s door he’d cut and labeled after every baseball game they’d won. They lost every game that season after that.
The landlord’s name was Mr. Woo. He evicted them himself with an unloaded gun tucked into his shirt, which was tucked into his pants, which were high-water fade jeans on top of white new balance shoes from the women’s section. He didn’t want to spend his million dollars too fast, I guess. Mr. Woo now lives in California somewhere in a neighborhood full of other people who wear white new balance shoes and carry unloaded guns.
“I swear that’s why we lost all those games, too,” Russo continued. “He sold it that fall, and they tore it down and put in apartments. I guess either way it was going to be ruined,” he said emotionally, his eyes wide with wonder.
“Or maybe you just sucked at baseball?” I teased. We laughed hard and kept walking, then we high-fived each other like we’d done something.
Then I started thinking. I thought about that house, that very house as though it were Russo’s. “My grandma died last week” I told him.
He apologized as though it were his fault.
“Don’t apologize, the ceremony was beautiful. I don’t know, what you said about houses breaking down, I may disagree.”
“What’d you mean?” he asked.
“Well, I think old houses represent a good life, a life well lived. When you think of houses like people, I guess a natural disaster to a new house is like terminal illness in its youth, rather than dying of natural causes. Both are ugly, but one seems more appropriate.”
He didn’t respond, but I kept thinking in my head as though he did. I thought about death and grandmas, grandmas and aging, aging and greatness, greatness and death. At the end of my thought, an idea spread like mold. An idea about the truth and irony etched in our society without a thought; that we label people based on their age, and the more removed from life and birth they become — the more they forge ahead to death — the greater they become. I thought about my great-grandpa, who is blind and ninety-three. I asked Russo what he thought of that, but he didn’t know what he thought about it.
“I think that if you want to be great you have to get close to death, regardless of your age,” I told him. The television from a second story bedroom blared, the sound of muffled newscasters reporting on the weather for the upcoming week. It was going to be sunny. Russo paid no attention to the information.
“A lot of people have died that are not so great,” he stated dryly.
“That’s because too many people prefer mediocrity. They prefer safety. They don’t care if they’re great. They don’t care if they go down in history for doing something great, they just care about keeping the house nice and cutting the lawn.”
“But we’re not houses, we’re people, and right now I’d rather be a mediocre human than an extraordinary dead person. I don’t want to pay the price of being great if it costs my life.”
“Exactly Russo! That’s the problem,” I exclaimed.
The conversation had turned, but I liked this street too. “No one has become an extraordinary ghost by being a mediocre human, and I can’t stand the thought of being a mediocre ghost!”
“What’d you mean?”
“I mean that I would constantly have to explain myself!” I explained, a laugh welling in my throat like a tear. “I’d have to say who I was, and why I came, every single time I entered a haunted house, or hovered over a group of college students walking through a cemetery during pledge week. I’d be stuck haunting city apartments, or other places where people don’t believe in ghosts. I’d be reduced to a creaking staircase, or a draft from an old vent. I’d spend the afterlife fighting for people’s attention, something I can barely handle when I’m standing right in front of them! And I would rather be dead, than live in a world where I can’t be seen or heard.”
I sheathed my hands back into my pockets as we walked onto the street from the other side of the neighborhood. I was finished. Russo laughed and clapped his hands together. I laughed after he laughed, and then we both laughed together. We high-fived again.
Exiting the neighborhood, we crossed the dimension of the habitable, and into the inhabitable, from streets with driveways to ones with drive thrus. There was a signal down, traffic had passed, the next herd of cars was waiting a half-mile away, planes were nowhere in sight, there was no one around, and a moment of silence bloomed cautiously.
“It doesn’t sound like you want to be great,” Russo broke in. “It sounds like you want to be alive.” The words were light, his voice clear and deep, moving up and down, breaking and starting up again. They helped me think clearly.
“No, that’s not enough, though, I want to be heard, too!”
“Isn’t that what it means to be alive? To be heard? To be seen?”
“You can live in isolation, you know?”
“But is it really living?”
“Your synapses fire, your heart beats.”
“But it will never break.”
“Now that sounds like a ghost.”
A car scraped into another and both drivers got out furious, taking all sorts of photos of their cars and of each other. The other cars sped around them. It had been almost thirty minutes since we left, but there was still a little ways to go. We started up again, and continued home in the thick buzzing of a sticky afternoon, our ears numb to the noise.
Thank you for reading!
Austin Lack
