In the Dream House

What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence.

I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying. If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you.

You were not always just a You. I was a whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.

Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

Despite the fact that you were the same age, you felt like she was older than you: wiser, more experienced, worldlier. She’d worked in publishing, she’d lived abroad, she spoke fluent French. She’d lived in New York and been to launch parties for literary magazines. And, it turned out, she had a weakness for curvy-to-fat brunettes in glasses. God herself couldn’t have planned it better.

“What should I do?” I asked him, the question slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it. Until that moment I’d been, secretly, excited, bolstered with the newness of a man’s stubble across my face, hands that went where I wanted them to. But in Joel’s silence, which carried a whiff of disapproval, I recalled the sin of it.

She unbuckles her seat belt, and leans very close to your ear. “You’re not allowed to write about this,” she says. “Don’t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?”

You don’t know if she means the woman or her, but you nod.

Fear makes liars of us all.

As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings.

Bloomington: even the name is a promise. (Living, unfurling, soft in your mouth.)

“I know we were doing the polyamory thing when I was with Val,” she says. “But I don’t want to share you with anyone. I love you so much. Can we agree to be monogamous?” You laugh and nod and kiss her, as if her love for you has sharpened and pinned you to a wall.

“I’m okay driving,” you say.

“You’re tired,” she says. “Too tired to drive.”

“I’m not,” you say, and you aren’t.

“You’re too tired, and you’re going to kill us,” she says. The timbre of her voice hasn’t changed. “You hate me. You want me to die.”

“I don’t hate you,” you say. “I don’t want you to die.”

“You hate me,” she says, her voice going up half an octave with every syllable. “You’re going to kill us and you don’t even care, you selfish bitch.”

By the end she is a mere husk, floating around her opulent London residence like a specter. He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison.

She says she loves you. She says she sees your subtle, ineffable qualities. She says you are the only one for her, in all the world. She says she trusts you. She says she wants to keep you safe. She says she wants to grow old with you. She says she thinks you’re beautiful.

Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand?

I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn’t want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.”

The story was simultaneously salacious and utterly baffling. They were… engaged? Alice had given Freda a ring, along with promises of love and devotion and material support. Should they execute her for murder, or put her in a hospital for her unnatural passions? Was she a scorned lover or a madwoman? But to be a scorned lover, she’d have to be—they’d have to be—?

Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say. I waxed poetic on those scenes in a novel I could visualize clearly, instead of striving to evoke the ones I couldn’t.

[…]

Let it never be said I didn’t try.

One day, a bird slammed into my studio window. I was sitting on a yoga ball and tumbled back in terror. Almost every residency I’ve had since, I’ve found at least one stunned bird sprawled on the ground outside my workspace. I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.

As you’re washing the dishes, you think to yourself: Maybe I could tie my arm down somehow? Maybe put a tack on my forehead? Maybe I should be a better person?

And then you are out. You do not dream. When you wake up, the movie is over; you’ve missed the entire thing. And yet you feel so content there, in that space, in the moment after waking, and before you remember your cell phone.

Like Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt, but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes […].

Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest.

You try to imagine sex with other people and struggle to visualize it; masturbation is near impossible. You wonder if you will ever be able to let someone touch you; if you will ever be able to reconnect your brain and body or if they will forever sit on opposite sides of this new and terrible ravine.

Suddenly the phone goes off again, vibrating like a maniacal insect, and you almost drop it on the floor. You sprint out to the parking lot. The whole drive home the phone is ringing, ringing. You run into the house where John is reading, and show him the phone.

He leaps into action, attaches his computer to the elaborate speaker system he’s set up in your house, and begins to play some sort of chaotic noise metal.

The recorded sound waves of her speech on one axis and a precise measurement of the flood of adrenaline and cortisol in my body on the other. Witness statements from the strangers who anxiously looked at us sideways in public spaces. A photograph of her grip on my arm in Florida, with measurements of the shadows to indicate depth of indentation; an equation to represent the likely pressure. A wire looped through my hair, ready to record her hiss. The rancid smell of anger. The metal tang of fear in the back of my throat.