1. THE MESS

THREE WEEKS LATER I was driving out of Haverhill on my way to meet Woody at Paul’s house in New Hampshire. I’d walked through the house by myself that morning, for the first time—the parts I could walk through—and still felt coated with slime. I’d tried phoning Woody to cancel the meeting, but no one had answered. After the funeral he’d sent me a letter reiterating his interest in the house, and I had the letter with me, so I drove the twelve miles across the state line to Haverhill, found the return address on the envelope, and knocked on his door. No response.

The world seemed flat and odd. Woody’s street was a catchall: old houses, three-deckers, a 7-Eleven, a brick warehouse down the road, another across the street. Then I took a second look and saw the warehouses were churches. I’d been inside plenty of industrial-era New England Catholic churches, and knew that each of these could have contained its own exquisite cosmos walled against the outside world, with hand-carved hammer beams, domes of pure blue flecked with gold stars, and Gothic stone baldachins. Designed to fit the cubes of empty space between cotton mills, the churches had been built as retreats from the world their façades appeared to duplicate. But now they were probably three-quarters empty on any Sunday morning.

I climbed back into the van. Down the hill, across the river, the narrow streets of downtown Haverhill, the mill buildings and warehouses, inclined toward where I was parked, like a medieval map. Behind me, up the street, stately old white houses and quaint saltboxes curved toward a Church of Christ with regulation white steeple and, opposite its entrance, a green common at a crossroad. Woody’s street was more or less a transition between the grimy and the picturesque, the two sides of New England. Actually, since the mills are old now—their power looms long gone, some converted to shopping malls—they qualify as picturesque too. Choose your route to nostalgia: the Saltonstalls or the Murphys. More than two centuries ago, the Wasp founders of Haverhill owned lots in town, on which they built houses, and commuted to farmlands in surrounding hills. Later the mills came, attracting Catholic and ethnic laborers, and genteel people removed themselves out toward their ancestors’ fields, and Haverhill became a sinkhole walled by wealth.

I’d been going through Paul’s papers in Boston for the past few days. As executor of his will and one of two legatees—Hannah was the other—I was legally accountable for his possessions, including his house. Accountable for his debts (though I hadn’t found any), for the things he’d left behind, for his assets and even his life, it seemed—for his blister of existence, now broken. I’d heaved tons of junk mail; he seemed to save everything. There were certain papers crucial to find—his insurance policies, his IRA beneficiary designations, his stock certificates, maybe even his last wishes—and not having had luck at my mother’s in Boston, I thought they’d be in his house.

Fat chance. I took one look and fled. How on earth could I show it to anyone? But I couldn’t find Woody and he’d be there at noon, so I had little choice.

Cities like Haverhill are cobbled together by successive generations across planks of time—jerry-built, like the human body—so the old and new stand side by side, oblivious of each other. Driving through this stone soup was like driving through a ragged sequence of minds with their meshwork of plans and eccentric bookkeeping. Below me, downtown Haverhill looked rubbery and squeezed, as in those preRenaissance paintings where three sides of some buildings are visible at once, and a roof tipped toward the viewer threatens to spill its cow, but doesn’t. It occurs to me now that I wasn’t just driving through a corner of Massachusetts but through a cultural screen that sifted out the material. I saw volumes and planes, not streets and buildings. A waffle-iron space held crosses of air between its gridded cubes, making grooved streets and alleys. I was driving through ancient Greek and Roman city plans, through Euclid’s geometry, Renaissance optics and perspective, Newton’s concept of space as an empty container, and grids set down in American frontier ordinances.

Haverhill’s either a small city or a large village, hard to tell which. On its outskirts, it was impossible to know whether I was in the suburbs or the country. Transitions were subtle—a field, a patch of woods. I crossed the state border into New Hampshire, and here everything backslid. Strip malls, gas stations, car dealers, stores. Massachusetts has a hefty sales tax and New Hampshire has none, so the border between them, on the New Hampshire side, is thick with such weedy commercial growth.

At last, the road to Kingston ran past white pines and even some stretches of unmended stone fence. I drove past Jud’s Mobil and turned up Twist Run Road. It wasn’t that long ago—a hundred years at most—when only farmers lived in the country. Then came automobiles and rural electrification and the machinery of domestic comfort, and the country gradually lost its status as the city’s antithesis. By the 1940s, suburban ranch houses like Paul’s were being built on country roads. His road still had a few empty spaces, still showed relics of its rural past—barns, chicken houses, an apple orchard and a field—but all were abandoned.

Two people, not one, were waiting outside. With Woody was a friend named Alex, who lived down the dirt road that ran behind the house. As it turned out, Woody wasn’t the one interested in buying Paul’s house, Alex was.

Woody’d known Paul for ten or so years. Until a year ago, he’d lived in Kingston; they were fellow hams, and both had volunteered at the town fire department, Paul by manning the two-way radios, Woody on the ambulance crew. Stocky and short, with a pipe-bowl face and padded eyes and smile, Woody seemed the sort of person anyone could like. I felt bad that I’d seen him at the wake as a venal opportunist. His face was very ruddy. Both of his meaty hands shook my one. I understood this as a reference to Paul’s death. “How you holding up?” he asked.

“Fine. You?”

“Terrific.” He introduced Alex, a tall, jumpy enthusiast with a handlebar mustache and navy cloth cap, who explained that he’d never known my brother, just seen him to honk at when he drove past and Paul was mowing the lawn.

“Hasn’t been mowed in two or three years,” I said.

“I know.”

“He was living with my mother,” I explained. “He more or less abandoned this place.”

Woody beamed, Alex fidgeted. We were low on the property, where it dipped toward a hollow outside the drive-in basement. The March day had grown warmer, and the sky was now blue with a touch of whitewash, but the air still felt crisp. Old weeds and thorn shoots lapped at the garage door, which apparently had remained shut for decades. Pieces of aluminum antenna lay on the ground or were propped against the house. To our right, twenty feet away, a rusty barrel with holes around the bottom stood on cinderblocks—the rural incinerator. Beyond it, underneath a white pine, sat Paul’s old Dodge van and his ride-around mower, each on flat tires. The van’s windows were broken. Three more junk cars were parked in the brush in a neat row down behind the van.

A padlocked door beside the garage was the only way I’d found to enter the house. It lacked a doorknob; instead, a clothesline snaked through the hole, looped to a spike on one of the antennae leaning next to the door. I fooled with the padlock hanging from a hinge bolted to the sill—the key was hard to turn. “I have to warn you,” I said. “The place is really a mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.” They stood there nodding and smiling, uncomfortable. Why did I think they were acting guilty, that they’d been inside the house and already knew?

The whole house heaved with a large hollow sound, like a dying whale, when I pushed the door open. The basement’s dirt floor smelled wet and vaguely rotting. In the fading light admitted by the door, we made out water pipes and octopal heating vents and heavy-duty wires stapled to the floor joists. Deeper in the basement, running into the darkness underneath the joists, the only thing that caught the light was the central heating’s cold-air return, its sheet metal ripped open. Directly in front of us, open stairs rose to a landing, turned, and disappeared.

I switched on the light. A kind of alluvial fan of empty orange and white milk cartons spilled down the stairs to the basement. Also, empty green bags of dog food, and red ones of cat litter. We looked around the basement. Bed springs in a stack. Mildewed cardboard boxes, an old bookcase filled with rags and soiled underwear leaning back against a pile of junk. Hubcaps, motors, a weed whacker, countless plastic bags of trash, junk wood, good wood—two-by-fours and lengths of painted hardwood with nails sticking out. Piles of angle irons. Junk TV sets and insides of radios with their cities of tubes, plastic basins, metal boxes. To our right, nearly buried in trash behind the garage door, sat a white sports car pitted with rust whose cloth roof hung in ragged strips. Perched on its hood was a wet cardboard box and, of all things, a new Sears shop vac of red and black plastic. Woody waved the back of his hand at the car. “MG,” he said. “Might still be worth a penny or two.”

We walked up the steps on a path through empty milk cartons and bags of pet chow. The kitchen door hung from one hinge. Through it, we squeezed inside the house.

Woody muttered “Jeez,” shook his head, and smiled. Alex said “Whew!” and kept scratching his chin. His exclamation may have been prompted by the smell or by the sight—it was hard to know which. Maybe I was wrong, I thought, maybe they hadn’t seen it before. The smell seemed even worse than it had that morning, but people were with me this time. That made everything worse.

On the other hand, the fact of other people seemed to absolve me. It wasn’t me who did this, my expression said. I too shook my head.

Dried grayish logs of excrement from large cats or small dogs were piled along the walls, especially in corners. The kitchen sink was filled with cat shit to its rim. More empty bags and cartons, more rags and magazines, more dirt and filth everywhere. Oily black threads of cobwebs hung from the ceiling and walls, and moved as we moved. The stove and refrigerator had been pushed to the middle of the room, and the refrigerator door gaped open. It was filled with food—rotten meat spilling over a shelf, still pinkish but withered and dry, cartons of milk, jars of salad dressing, cans of soda and beer, jars of mustard and mayo, all with faded labels. Something yellow and black the size of a chestnut on a box of butter may have been half an onion.

The smell in the house was also yellow and black. It was dirt, moldy towels, urine, excrement, and fine living dust, almost like pollen, and it seemed both wet and dry, both ripe and dead, and kept peeling off every wall and every surface. The house felt cold—the cold of the dead. The boarded-up windows made it feel like a cave. “Jeez,” Woody muttered again. Alex met my eye and smiled and shook his head. I caught his cue. “I never knew he was like this,” I said. “My grandmother raised him,” I added. “I didn’t know him that well,” I said, and felt myself backing off, as though from a car wreck. Alex, meanwhile, nodded as if to say, We’re all tourists here.

The way to the back porch was clogged by mounds of trash—no sense in even trying. Instead, we climbed into the hallway toward the bedrooms, me switching on lights as we proceeded. The house seemed to drip, although everything was dry. Walking in this hallway was pretty difficult. Piled on a one- or two-foot layer of excrement were hundreds of discarded Pepsi bottles—the kind that look like carafes—and we had no choice but to walk across them, like eggshells. Each bottle was crammed with cigarette butts.

I couldn’t open the bathroom door, there was so much trash behind it.

One bedroom door also was blocked, but someone had ripped it in half—vandals, no doubt—so we could see inside. “One cannot speak anymore of being,” Samuel Beckett once said in an interview, “one must speak only of the mess.” This room, wall to wall, was five feet deep in trash bags, milk cartons, boxes of documents, empty cartons of Kools, Pepsi bottles, empty bags of cat food, a Hitachi TV, eviscerated radios, model airplane kits, audiotapes, over-the-counter medication—Dayquil, Alka-Seltzer, Dimetapp, Bayer aspirin—and small, ubiquitous cardboard boxes of videotapes with red and yellow photos. This was the room whose walls had been covered by the previous owner with carpet remnants. Their zigzag designs and faded colors emerged above the trash. “Hey, put that light off again.” I switched off the light. Woody and Alex were breathing down my neck. “What’s that?”

“Clock radio, it looks like.”

“Still plugged in.”

I switched the light back on. The radio sat at a cockeyed angle on a pile of trash, its cord like some sort of hellish umbilical worming down into the depths. “Fire hazard,” said Woody.

“It was like that this morning. I guess it’s been on for two or three years.”

“You ought to turn off the main.”

“Good idea.”

We talked like normal people planning reasonable acts. Backing out of the doorway, our feet caused the Pepsi bottles to rub and scrape against one another with a sound something like fingernails on blackboards.

I suddenly remembered Paul washing his microbus outside our house in South Boston, and felt my throat form a fist. He’d worn an old sock on each hand and dipped them in solvent to clean off the engine. What happened? Why were there hundreds of bottles filled with cigarette butts, why all this filth? I’d been standing off from things as much as I could, but now the horror came back, and I pictured Paul transporting objects, new things and junk, the useless and the useful, in a diabolical parody of intimacy and security—transporting them back to his house and pressing them in place with his back, arms, and chest, like a mother robin building a nest.

Reasons do have a limit. Shall I offer a history of the Pepsi bottle, the cigarette, the milk carton, the rag? A history of bad smells? Even now, in memory, I feel buried like Paul, trapped in his house, surrounded by a waste of unexplained things. To be fully conscious of everything, of course, from the rivers of microorganisms we breathe in and out to the history of the shoehorn, would be a form of insanity. “It would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence,” said George Eliot. Fortunately, she added, “the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

I reached into the second bedroom and switched on the light. This one we could just squeeze inside. The trash bags made a mountain at one end, but left a passageway to a desk piled with ham equipment. Here, ceiling plaster had fallen on everything, making it difficult to distinguish the equipment from the junk. It was all junk, I knew: the Morse code clicker, the mikes, the maze of wires and antenna leads, playing cards, a globe, empty packs of Kools, pennies, keys, magazines, a photo of Grandma—the one on my desk now—coffee cups, doodads, little boxes of screws, damp envelopes, more Pepsi bottles stuffed with cigarette butts. The desk was a board across two filing cabinets whose drawers I’d pulled open that morning. In them, and in the dozens of mildewed boxes piled nearby on the floor, were every bank statement, receipt, electric bill, oil bill, phone bill, pay stub, every QSL card, every letter and birthday card (some unopened) Paul had received while living here—more than twenty years’ worth. I despaired of ever going through them all. Everything was damp and mildewed, everything soiled, all of it smelled.

Beside the desk, a mattress lay on the floor with some blankets. Old paper bags crushed shut were scattered here and there, on the floor, on the desk. I’d found similar bags in his van outside, stuffed with underwear, socks, sometimes pants or pj’s. I realized later that each represented a trip he’d taken.

The mountain of trash bags, cardboard boxes, videos, and Pepsi bottles seemed almost . . . composed. Some bags had burst open, and the junk spilling out wasn’t very different from the junk in the room, though cigarette packs seemed to be in abundance, also the usual eggshells and coffee grounds.

Some bags on top, knotted shut, displayed Wal-Mart logos with yellow happy faces.

“Looks like he started cleaning it up, don’t you think?” asked Woody.

“You mean because of the trash bags?” said Alex.

“Yeah.”

No, I thought, it looks like he gave up, let everything go. But I had nothing to say. Some emotions go beyond words, and maybe beyond human feelings too. I felt a powerful impulse to crawl out of sight and huddle in a corner. Paul hadn’t begun to clean up the house at all. Just the opposite: his home was the place where he threw things away, as if lining his nest with his own waste. And he’d been doing it for twenty-odd years, since moving into the house. Some of the stuff he bagged as he went along, some he just left where it was.

As though reading my mind, Woody said, “Looks like he couldn’t throw nothing away.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Just the other way around,” he said. “He threw it all away.”

“Then lived in it.”

“Yeah.” They’d forgotten I was there, it appeared. Then Alex turned to me. “Did he live here like this?”

I shrugged. “Beats me.”

But I lied. That morning I’d found a little diary he’d kept, in an appointment book. It was dated two years ago, just before he’d moved to Boston. I remembered he’d been hospitalized then for a bronchial spasm and heart palpitations. The diary detailed every pill he took, every hour he didn’t sleep, every symptom and worry. Never in my life had I found anything more painful to read.

 

I AM NOT GETTING MUCH SLEEP! WORRYING TOO MUCH I GUESS, ABOUT EVERYTHING!! I DON’T EAVEN KNOW IF I CAN MAKE IT OUT OF THE HOUSE TOMOROW BY MYSELF?? I HAVE TO GET OUT, BY HOOK OR CROOK. TO GET MALE & FOOD FOR MYSELF & CATS!!

I HAVE TO GET RID OF CAT’S!!

TOOK 2ND THEODUR PILL @ 6:30 PM

 

02/21 SUN. AM.

TOOK ONE EACH OF PILLS <® 9:30 AM APROX. I AM FEALING BETTER BUT STILL TAKING IT AN HOUR AT A TIME! GOT SOME SLEEP LAST NIGHT, BUT NOT A HELL OF A LOT!!

 

02/22 MONDAY

TOOK ALL THE PILLS I NEED TO TAKE. NOTHING TASTES GOOD EXCEPT ICE COLD WATER, AND SOME FLAVORS OF ICE CREAM! CANT SLEEP GOOD UP TIGHT AT TIMES! PILLS? NO SMOKING? MABY SOME OF EACH??

I AM HAVING SOME WILD DREAM’S!! DUE TO PILL’S, I SUPPOSE??

WHY DID THEY TAKE THE PATCH AWAY?? WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT MY HEART STARTED POUNDING?

 

02/24 WED

DONNT FEAL GOOD, WEAK, CANT BREATH GOOD, BUT I DID NOT SMOKE YET TO DAY! 48 HOURS PLUS, AND COUNTING.

I HAVE GOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT GETTING HOUSE CLEANED UP!! I DONT KNOW WHAT??

 

It went on like that for nine or ten pages, then abruptly stopped. He’d moved out of the house by the end of it, I guessed. I couldn’t begin to imagine the depth of depression it suggested, the fear and horror and something else—self-loathing and disgust. I stood there that morning next to his desk, reading this diary, alone in his house, feeling more and more like an animal in a hole. When I closed the thing up, a piece of paper fell out. I bent down and retrieved it. I was shaking, I realized, partly from the cold. It was that newspaper clipping of nine-year-old Paul holding a branch of half apples, half blossoms. The branch had excited much talk in the town, said the little article underneath the picture; no one had ever seen such a thing before. “Miracle Blossoms,” the caption read. A fragment of the page above the photo gave the year: 1938.

Later that morning I phoned Hannah from Jud’s Mobil station. I had to tell someone about the house, but broke down sobbing. It was one of those gut-wrenching inside-out cries, in the back of Jud’s store, near the coffee and bathrooms. I faced into a corner so no one would see me. “What’s wrong?” she kept saying. “My God, what happened?”

When I started describing the house, I gradually stopped crying and regained some control.

Now I stood in the same bedroom with two strangers, wondering why I’d agreed to meet anyone here. I’d made the appointment before seeing the place, a stupid mistake, I realized now. I tried moving on, and started for the door. But it wasn’t so bad. I was like them, I made myself think—like Woody and Alex, not like Paul. I was normal, like them, though I didn’t even know them.

The boarded-up windows in this room were broken, and the window frames rotten. I’d found among his papers in Boston a letter from the Kingston town board warning him that his house had become a public nuisance. That’s when he hired someone to board it up.

“What’s this?” Alex asked. We were back in the hallway. I knew what it was but pretended surprise. We stood there looking down and shaking our heads. An old suitcase with straps lay floating like a raft on the Pepsi bottles, and on it sprawled the corpse of a cat. It looked mummified, head larger than the body, the skin on the face stretched tight and thin as nylon, making it resemble an underfed child. The torso, however, was rags made of dust.

As we walked through the house we found other corpses, most of them cats. One was a bird or very large bat. One could have been a puppy. Two or three lay in the living room, which in contrast with the bedrooms was fairly empty of trash. Although not of excrement. Here the yellow rug reeked, the couch boiled over, a pool table was covered with dirt and fallen plaster, and an old-fashioned cast-iron bathtub had been lined with bright pieces of carpet and opened on one side to make a kind of love seat. It too was filthy.

Woody tried the thermostat on the wall. “Doesn’t work,” I said.

“What about the plumbing?”

“You saw the sinks. Filled with dirt.”

“Filled with cat shit.”

I noticed scratch marks on the wall. They were everywhere in the living room. In the kitchen too, as I’d seen that morning, not registering what they meant right away. Now I put two and two together, and the house suddenly struck me as a torture chamber.

Looking down at a dead cat, Woody said, “Guess we didn’t get them all out.”

“We?”

“Like I told you at the wake, we took him to the hospital.”

“Who’s we?”

“The ambulance crew.”

“You were with the crew that took him to the hospital?”

“I told you at the wake!” Woody’s face was glowing red. “Bronchial spasm. He couldn’t hardly breathe. Never called us neither. He used to show up every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights at the VFD.”

Alex leaned between us, waving his hands. “Volunteer Fire Department.”

“When Thursday night comes and still no Paul, me and the crew get together and come here,” Woody said. “None of us was ever inside this place before. We had to force the door. Found him on that mattress in the bedroom, took him to the hospital. Come back and tried to round up all the cats, but I knew there was quite a few that we missed. Some run off, some was hiding wherever. Jeez, what a stink. Some of the guys, they wrote him off right there. He never came back to the station after that.”

“He moved to Boston after that,” I said.

“We put him on oxygen. He was pretty disoriented. Guess he pulled through okay. This aneurysm wasn’t related, was it?”

“I have no idea.”