Some Information Concerning an Endless Series of Improbable Coincidences
by james bezerra
Bartleby’s shower door had been installed backward. Not the door, just the glass. Although - come to think of it - yes, it was the entire door, not just the glass. Though it did hinge outward properly, it did not hinge inward into the tall narrow tiled space of the shower itself. So it must have been hung upside down, which is both more and less odd. Less because it is understandable that the door might be hung that way by mistake, since the hinges would still line up. More because it meant the men who hung the door might have had to pause to decide which side went where. One side of the glass shower door was smooth, the other side was grooved. The little grooves were meant to channel the water downward. The men who must have hung the door must have thought that the grooves went on the outside. But why - Bartleby would often wonder while showering before school - would they have thought that? Were their own shower doors hung upside down as well? Had these men grown up trained by life to misunderstand shower doors? And if so, why had no one pointed this out to them when they went into the shower door hanging business? An endless series of improbable coincidences always seems more credible than admitting the possibility of a mistake. Or so thought Bartleby, back then.
The entire house was a bit of a camel - a camel being a horse, assembled by committee - and was littered with similarly Winchester-Mystery-House-ian peculiarities. The hall closet outside of D’s bedroom had a trapdoor. D had shown it to Bartleby once when she was hiding kittens under the house. She had rolled back the irregularly shaped patch of green shag carpet that was left over from the carpeting in the room Bartleby shared with R. Then she’d jammed a flathead under the lip of the door to lever it up. Technically it wasn’t a door because it wasn’t hinged. It was just a square of wood placed over the square hole in the bottom of the closet. The hole existed for easy access to the underside of the house. Though there was seldom snow, winters were cold enough to freeze the water in the pipes. If the water froze the pipes might burst. At the end of fall, shortly after the end of cotton-picking season, Dad would crawl down there through the hole to check the insulation on the pipes. The space was less than two feet high, but it ran the entire underside of the house. Once - some time later - Bartleby had crawled all the way to underneath the kitchen. Along the way he’d found the dry gray carcasses of birds. They were the first dead things he could recall having seen.
He’d known he was under the kitchen because by the time he was eight he knew the layout of the house, but also because he could hear the long low thruuummmm of the washing machine. The washing machine was the kind that would move around on casters and connected to the kitchen sink with a plastic and rubber hose. The whole kitchen had been like. The stove itself wasn’t crooked, but the floor under it was and Dad had leveled the stove out by shoving a couple of red wooden blocks under the right side. This was a constant childhood annoyance for Bartleby because the red blocks were rectangular and perfect for building the walls of fortresses on the floor. The lack of those red blocks meant he had to build sections of his walls with the smaller blue squares, which were crap by comparison This left dangerous vulnerabilities in his fortresses. Eventually he started building them smaller so that they would be stronger. Bartleby had been small for his age, so he’d had to learn to think laterally so as to outflank his problems.
He had vague memories of Dad sitting there with him in the corner of the kitchen and showing him how to build with blocks. Dad was a tinkerer himself, hence the camel house. His degree was is Ag Science, but he’d been accepted into a graduate program as an architect. That was in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War. The same year Martin Luther King was shot on a balcony, the same year Robert Kennedy was shot in a kitchen, the same year Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, the same year North Korea took the USS Pueblo. It was the year that America inexplicably elected Richard Nixon President, it was the year of My Lai, it was the year Marcel Duchamp died. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, but Dad’s parents said he couldn’t go to grad school, because they needed him back on the farm. So Dad left grad school behind, left the student deferment behind, and moved with his pregnant wife back to the farm. That’s what Dad’s parents had been like.
The tinkering never went away though. He’d built the strangely skeletal, unmistakably ‘70s bookcases in the room Bartleby shared with R. He’d built the fence around the pool out back after designing the pool out back. He’d also built the entire house, though not really. He’d bought the house when it was forty-five minutes north up the 41 freeway. He saw it there on the outskirts of Fresno and bought it and immediately had it cut into pieces and put onto flatbed trucks and hauled out to the farm where it was reassembled, with numerous alterations.
The built-in linen closet just outside of Mom and Dad’s room had a bottom drawer that was filled to spilling with all of the family photos. Just overflowing shoeboxes of them. Nothing in order. Just a jumble of people and ages and places and faces from decades apart would be pressed together in there. Relatives who hadn’t lived long enough to know each other might be staring right into one another in that drawer. Those photos could prove anything. Once when Bartleby had been terrified of the face NASA found on Mars, Mom had taken him to that drawer and rummaged around until she found pictures of her honeymoon. She’s shown him a picture of a ridgeline in Hawaii that looked like a giant man laying down; like a god rendered in volcanic rock. She’d run her finger along the shapes of the man’s face and said, “See? Sometimes things just look like other things.”
There were pictures in the drawer of the house all cut up into pieces. There were pictures in there of the backyard before there was a house in front of it. Dad had taken Bartleby to the drawer once to prove that the house had not always existed where it was today. It was a monumental and god-sized thought for the little boy Bartleby had been at the time: impermanence.
It is not much of an intellectual leap from impermanence to death and when he was seven Bartleby used to throw up at school and cry all day from the stress of having realized that eventually everyone he knew was going to die. A decade or two later Mom would tell one of Bartleby’s girlfriends that, “he was always the sensitive one.”
Death is complicated in the country. When D went to college Bartleby got her room. He would lie in bed, about twelve years old, and listen to the coyotes yelping in the slough on the other side of the field. They yelped like that after a kill. The braver ones would sometimes creep right up to the house. They’re pernicious little bastards, coyotes. Some of the farm trucks had cheap .22s behind the seats, just for scaring off coyotes. So sometimes death was a spectre. Other times it was commonplace. Sometimes very young Bartleby and older D and much older R would have to wait for the school bus next to the carcase of a downer cow from the dairy. Cow corpses would be scooped up by the tallow works truck as it made its regular route around countryside. Sometimes death was allowed to be a sad thing. Bartleby caught Mom crying once in the little bathroom next to Dad’s office. One or another of the dogs had been hit that morning. The dogs were always getting hit because that is what dogs do in the country.
That little bathroom was only vaguely rectangular, it had been one of Dad’s additions. It was just a small sink, a toilet, and a shower. The shower was lined with blue tile. The shower door had been installed properly. It was a good room for crying; very small, very private and the blue of the tile seemed to deaden the little bit of light that came in through the little window. It would always feel like an afterthought of a room and so it was a good place to feel all the things that didn’t have their own rooms to be felt in.
Dad had been bad at designing bathrooms. Yet it was the simple unfinished feeling of that bathroom that gave it its purpose; it hadn’t been designed as a dank little mausoleum. In his defense, Dad had at some point realized that he was bad at bathrooms. The drafting table in his office always had sketches on it. When he turned the garage into a game room and then built a new garage, it started on that secondhand drafting table. Mostly though the sketches were of places that didn’t exist and wouldn’t ever. Mostly they were of other houses. They were also always the same house. They were houses vaguely like the one they all lived in, but slightly straighter, slightly calmer. Mostly they were trial and error houses. Mostly they were the houses that he was trying to design around their lives. Mostly they were houses that he thought might work a little better. Houses where the dishwasher didn’t have to be rolled across the kitchen, houses where the stove didn’t require even one red block. They were houses that very softly called back to 1968 and to a sense of loss and to a feeling of fear. They were houses maybe he imagined very far away from the farm and from the dairy and from this dusty part of the Valley where the dead get left out next to the road and no one bats an eye.
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