Brian Hodge - Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Somewhere in our early teen years it’s inevitable that our parents become sources of great embarrassment to us, held accountable for everything they are and aren’t, could’ve been or should never be.

Before things can get to that stage, though, it sometimes goes the other direction. We realize, even if we can’t articulate it with the same sharpness with which we sense it, that once the bloom is off the earliest years of childhood, we stand revealed as something our parents are mortified to have created.

I always knew a lot more about the latter than the former.

It was spring when she moved into the house next door. It must have been spring, because my window was open, and, directly across from it, so was hers, and had been for at least a day, as though the neighbors were expecting her and had to flush the stale winter air out of the room or maybe the entire uppermost floor.

Everything there was to know about life on the third floor, I understood it inside and out by this point, and had for more than two years.

I knew she was there to stay because she sang. Not at first, though. At first there was just bumping and thudding, the sounds of luggage and boxes, and three voices, their words too faint to make out, but only two were familiar. I knew the sounds of my neighbors. This new female voice sounded higher and younger than the other, entirely unfamiliar, although for all that, it seemed to me that she sounded just as tired.

She only sang later, when she thought she was alone.

Whatever the words were, it wasn’t a happy-sounding song, not the kind of song you might hear sung by a group of people crowded around my parents’ grand piano downstairs and someone who knew how to play it. I listened awhile, then dropped to the floor and crept like a spy toward the window until I was underneath it, careful not to make any noise because she still had no way to know I was there, and I didn’t want her to until I’d had a chance for a closer listen and to figure out what she was up to. In the way her voice started and stopped and started again, as though she were pausing between each line or two, the song seemed to require effort. It made me think of a song sung in tribute of someone who has died, only not in a way that sounded, in my word at the time, churchy .

I popped up into the window only when she seemed to have quit, not so much finishing the song as abandoning it, and called to her across the space between our houses: “What’s that you were singing?”

Until now, all I’d seen of her was a silhouette, a thin shape moving around in a room and beyond the reach of the sun. But now she came to the window and smacked her elbows down onto the sill and scowled across at me. Her straight brown hair swept past both wrists as if to whisk her agitation at me, and one hand darted up to grab the bottom of the window and flexed as though she were going to slam it down, but then she kept looking at me and stopped herself, although when she spoke she sounded no less furious.

“Have you been there the whole time?”

“I was here first,” I said. “I’ve always been here first.”

“Well…you should announce yourself, is what you should do.” She told me this as if she suspected she might be speaking to an idiot. She looked very much older to me, twelve or maybe as old as thirteen, and this hurt deeply, because it meant she must have been very worldly and knowledgeable when it came to idiots. “It’s the polite thing to do.”

I told her I was sorry, then asked about the song again.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I’m sure you don’t speak the language.”

“What language?”

“The language the song’s in.” Now she sounded convinced beyond all doubt of my idiocy. Then her scowl lifted and she appeared to relent in her harsher appraisals. “It’s not from here.” After another moment, “It’s not for here.”

“Oh,” I said, as if this made sense to me. “Then what are you doing here?”

She seemed not to have heard me even though I knew she had, and I started to feel bad for asking it at all. While at first I’d found her not very nice to look at, I began to wonder if I wasn’t wrong, because now it seemed I’d only been misled by a trick of light and her annoyance. I wondered, too, if she might jump from the window, or lean forward and let herself fall. In that other world three floors down, the neighbors’ house was ringed with square slabs of stone to walk on. Nobody could survive a fall like that.

“I draw,” I told her, volunteering a distraction to save her life. “Want to see?”

I’d sneaked up some old ones, at least, even if I couldn’t make new ones.

“Later, maybe,” she said, and pulled away. Like before, her hand went to the bottom of the window, lingering a few moments, but as she moved back into the room she again left it open.

That night after the lights were out I lay in my bed and imagined her doing the same. I fought to stay awake as long as I could in case there were other songs to hear, or a repeat performance of the first one. Barring that, it seemed possible that she might cry instead, because that’s what I’d done the first night they’d moved me up here, but just before I fell asleep I wondered if the reason I hadn’t heard anything from her was because she was lying in the dark listening for some sound out of me.

The distant future I imagined for myself must have been inspired by something I’d seen on TV, which helped assure me that it was possible to turn my fascinations into a life that could take me far away, where I would be loved by thousands. For what will become obvious reasons, I wanted to be a magician.

I would spend many hours planning what my stage show would be like, and soon grew bored with the idea that I would merely escape from deadly traps and make elephants disappear. This admission seemed to unlock something deep inside, an openness to possibilities that would be mine alone to explore.

While I don’t believe they came while I was asleep, they were more than just flights of imagination. I began to experience long afternoons of waking dreams in which I would take stage assistants, full of smiles and trust and with no thought of doing anything other than surrendering to my will, and I would lock them into cabinets. The blades would come next, whirring and rasping through the cabinets and cutting them into four, five, even six sections, which I would separate with a flourish before moving on to the next. It would take a while, because my audience and I could never be satisfied with my rendering just one assistant into pieces. That would only be the same old trick.

Once the assistants were in pieces and scattered around the stage, smiling and waving and tapping their feet from the separate remnants of the cabinets, I would begin to reassemble them, although never the same way they’d been. They were meant for better things. I would start simply, swapping an assistant’s arms for his legs, and vice versa, or grafting her grinning head onto the middle of her body. Then, after I had basked in the applause for that trick, I would combine the parts of one assistant with those of another, and finally give one or two several more parts than they’d started with, creating human spiders, which would leave others armless and legless, to wriggle across the stage like caterpillar prey.