Six months following his death I began having my father’s dreams. I hadn’t seen him in years, but to my surprise he left his house to me. It’s an understatement to say we were estranged. My father was a monster.
The house was a small bungalow built sometime between the world wars on Alphabet Row, where the homes are lettered rather than numbered. Twenty-six of them. I thought it peculiar, but quaint. Some displayed a large wooden letter by the front door. Dad’s place was #P. His P was a couple of feet tall and several inches thick, covered in cracked and peeling yellow paint. The fat loop on the P recalled the potbelly he had when I was young. I used to imagine he stored his considerable anger there.
When I first arrived, I heard the peeps and chirps coming from that letter, begging calls from a nest of fledglings stuffed inside the loop. No sign of the mother. The letter was an ugly, rotting thing, but I chose to leave it alone because of those innocent beings.
The first thing I did upon taking possession was to check the backyard for holes, cavities wide and deep enough to trap a little boy inside. Rotting squares of plywood were scattered across the ground, and I looked under each one. Thank God I didn’t find a single pit, or a body.
I had never lived here, but for the first few weeks I experienced this discomfiting sensation of déjà vu. Maybe it was Dad’s familiar old furniture, or the way he’d arranged things, or the clear evidence of violence in the damaged walls, doors, and woodwork. I could feel his presence, and his absence, his abuse, everywhere. He bought this house after I left high school and moved away. We never spoke after that.
I didn’t want this place, but money was tight, and I had no home of my own. He owed me for everything he’d done to me. The house was filthy and full of trash, rotten food, ragged clothing, broken glass, disintegrating furnishings. But it was a small structure, and it didn’t take long to make it more or less presentable. I threw a rug over the spot where they found his body.
The first few nights I didn’t sleep well. It was still a stranger’s home, and even after all that cleaning an unpleasant smell lingered. But eventually fatigue dragged me down into slumber, and then into dream. Normally, I don’t remember my dreams, but to my surprise this was about to change.
I’m a young boy in the nightmare, but I don’t feel much like myself. My body is naggingly different. My shoulders hurt, and there are burns on my arms and hands. That much is familiar. He used cigarettes, or sometimes just a lighter to toughen me up.
But I also have a limp. I never had a limp before. I remember my dad had a limp from a bad break which never healed. He never told me how he got it, just that it happened when he was a kid. So I’m like his twin in this dream, a notion which disgusts me.
In the dream I’m walking these dogs, two hulking, snarling brutes. They are so huge I can’t control them. They drag me wherever they go. Sometimes they stop, turn their heads and snap at me. Their massive teeth get a little closer to my face each time. I’m terrified. But my father makes me walk them every night. This has become both my chore and my punishment, although I have no idea why I’m being punished. He loves these monsters more than anything, far more than he loves me.
The path is dark and there are few lights. I rely on the full moon and these beasts’ sense of direction to guide me through the neighborhood.
Three mountain lions block our path. They have descended from the ridges high above us. They are even larger than my father’s dogs who begin to mewl and back up against me as if I might be able to protect them. I don’t know what to do, so I drop their leashes and run. Behind me, I hear their human-like screams and the sounds of rending meat.
Later that night, I sneak back into the house. I don’t know what my father will do to me, but I’m afraid it will be worse than what the lions did to his dogs. I stop in the hallway and look at myself in the mirror. I’ve seen that face among the pictures on the mantle. It is my father as a young boy. He is alarmingly skinny and nothing like the big man I remember. His face is so pale it glows.
A large bald man staggers out of the bathroom. I am frozen and cannot move. He is looking my way, but I don’t believe he sees me. This is my father, I think, even though I do not recognize him.
The next morning, I could hardly move. I felt as if I’d been beaten. I realized the large bald man in the dream had been my grandfather—I’d seen photos of him with those same ferocious-looking dogs. I couldn’t make sense of it. Bad enough my father turned my childhood into a nightmare, but now his nightmares had become my dreams.
But I didn’t want to read too much into it. Dreams are mysterious, their rules illogical, and they’re ultimately beyond interpretation as far as I’m concerned, despite all the books purporting to explain them. I was living in my father’s house. Echoes from his life were bound to appear.
That afternoon, I was up on a ladder on the front porch examining an area where the roof had leaked into the porch ceiling. I carefully peeled away some rotting beadboard, hoping it was something I could fix myself. I heard a distant rumble and then a nearby growl. I got off the ladder and looked around, keeping the prybar in front of me in case I needed to protect myself. The growling continued, and I looked out at the yard and checked the bushes on each side. The noise stopped. I waited, then climbed the ladder again.
The prybar slipped easily between the worst of the rotting boards. I exposed a discolored joist, but it appeared to be merely stained. I pulled down another section, and a large volume of dust exploded in my face. Or was it smoke? It was hot and smelled like smoke.
Wisps of vapor gathered into whiskers, then teeth, then huge milky eyes. The hound’s head jerked forward, snapping, and sent me flying off the ladder. I lay on my back, the wind knocked out of me, feeling for pain. I gathered myself and stood up again. I saw the yawning cavity above my head, with nothing protruding, not even smoke. But still I knew I was done for the day.
I heard the growling, or rumbling noise several times over the next week, but I never found a source, and of course I knew there was no vicious dog hiding behind my porch ceiling. Sometimes when you’re anxious you see things, and I’d understandably been anxious since moving into my father’s house. But it was my house now, wasn’t it? My house.
I knew I was spending too much time alone. I hadn’t planned it that way. I just hadn’t made any friends in the neighborhood yet. I’d gotten a new job working from home. The company required me to come in once a month for in-person meetings. Most people would envy me, but spending too much time alone, you get a little panicky. You lose confidence in your ability to hear or see things accurately.
The boy who is not me is in the pit again. Or I am. I can’t always tell the difference. But of course, I’ve been here before. I know what the inside of one of my father’s pits looks like. I know this setting so well: the slick muddy sides of the pit, that disgusting liquid texture impossible to climb. When it rains, even with the plywood cover my father drops over the opening, a few inches of water get in, and I shake uncontrollably, especially when he leaves me in here overnight. I don’t know what we’ve done to deserve such a punishment—probably nothing at all. I scream and scream, but no one comes. I don’t know whether they can’t hear me, or if they don’t care.
A flagstone covers the bottom of the pit. This is my father’s version of kindness. I can crouch on the stone and avoid most of the standing water. The boy who is not me is even skinnier than me, able to fold himself into a small, inconsequential package, where he can sleep and dream his dreams within dreams.
I know something which most do not: dirt has its own distinctive voice. If you know how to listen, you can hear its laments: how we bury our secrets here, how no one knows all the mysteries dirt contains, how weary the dirt is of our cruelty and murder.
Sometimes I answer and the dirt answers back. But it offers no sympathy. The dirt doesn’t care.
In the morning, the plywood is lifted, and I stare up into the face of my grandfather: his hairless head, his small dark eyes, his brutish jowls. Now I understand where my father got the idea for the pit.
In the days which followed I found small, muddy footprints on the back porch and in the kitchen, and once in a staggered trail leading to my bed. Muddy handprints, or paw prints, splattered the edges of my sheets. I thought it was possible they belonged to some animal, although I could find no other signs of the creature. It seemed unlikely they belonged to a little boy. But I still re-examined the backyard anyway looking for holes. Every morning a milky mist rose from the ground and filled the backyard. The bordering trees appeared as no more than streaks of charcoal on a white canvas.
Several mornings in a row I was awakened by a distinctive, sharp barking in my left ear. I received a reprimand for consistently not signing in to work on time. I had no idea what I’d been doing all those mornings. I hadn’t been sleeping. Or had I?
The growling returned sporadically. I tried to ignore it. Maybe there was some rational explanation for the sound I hadn’t yet discovered: air in the pipes, some loose boards, a mechanical issue with the refrigerator’s compressor. At least it gave me an excuse for continuing repairs and improvements—I figured during the course of the work I’d stumble upon an answer. Every spare moment I wasn’t on the computer for work I was doing something around the house: painting walls, replacing carpet, prying up boards, installing new flooring, tearing into plaster.
At the end of the day, I’d fall into bed exhausted, but sleep was fitful and full of stories. I never felt rested the next day. The dreams were more exhausting than my labors had been.
At some point the growling morphed into a kind of loud snoring, like some giant was sleeping fitfully in the next room. The hissing and the throat sounds were extended, and troubling to hear, as if this unseen behemoth were in a desperate struggle to breathe.
I always thought of the house I grew up in as a kind of cave, a man’s house, a manspace. A man cave. This place felt much the same, my father’s final burrow, a hole suitable for animals to live in, where some growls were to be expected. Missing a woman’s softness, a woman’s touch. I never knew my mother. If she had lived a little longer maybe things would have been different. If I could have seen her at least once, maybe I’d have some memories of her now. My father would never talk about her. He didn’t keep any photographs of her as far as I know. Was that why I was being punished? Because my birth had killed her?
Even on nights I couldn’t sleep, I lay unprotected from his dreams. In the dark, the dreams walked and wept. They filled the house and spilled over into the yard. Yet they brought me no closer to understanding him. He had been like the weather, elemental and unreliable. The smallest things would set him off: a dirty dish, a misplaced jacket, a Sunday newspaper left out of order. I failed him in every way imaginable, at least in his eyes. More than once he’d described his punishments as his “duty as a father.”
A forest has taken over the living room. A white vapor passes slowly through the trees. Deep within these woods, I hear a monster snarling, but I cannot find the creature responsible. I sweep up the pinecones and leaves and needles and the other debris the trees drop and take them out to the trash. This house will never be entirely clean, completely tame, nor will it ever be fully mine.
It begins to rain. The windows are shiny with tears. Periodically, I have to scrape the remains of suicidal birds from the floor.
I follow a path into the bedroom, intending to rest. Life in the forest takes a lot out of you. It is not the same bed my father slept in; I was wise enough to replace it. But it is in the same spot. I start to lie down when I notice blood has permeated the bedding. I search the sheets and blankets but find no signs of a corpse, and no signs of a wound.
The phone cries out.
I go to pick it up, but it has hidden itself, not wanting to be touched.
Each day I woke up more tired than the day before. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Lying down for a nap only gave my father’s dreams another opportunity for access. Every time I closed my eyes, I was pulled into another dream, losing any possibility for calm.
After many of these dreams, I woke up to an overwhelming stench of booze and urine. It was a smell I knew well from my childhood living with my dad. This stink eventually faded, leaving behind a devastating sadness.
I think I have awakened, and perhaps I have. My bed is in the backyard beneath an overcast sky, surrounded by withering trees. I know they are dying, but I have no idea why. Some turn into smoke even as I am watching them.
The bed begins to sink into the ground. I try to get off, but the sheets are wrapped around my legs holding me down. I can barely move.
The bed continues to sink with increasing speed. Walls of mud rise around me, and as the bed descends into the pit it begins to shrink in size. Finally, I am able to kick the covers loose and stand at the center of the ever-diminishing bed. I try to leap for the opening above me, but it is now too far away.
The bed continues to dwindle until it is less than two feet on a side. The walls are closing in. I spin around seeking a solution and come face to face with the skinny little boy again, this early version of my father. This close I can see just how thin he is, so sickly, pale, and trembling from the cold. He is shirtless, and his torso is layered in bruises. Despite our proximity, I try not to touch him.
“Am I going to die now?” he whispers. “I think I am going to die.”
I interlace my fingers in front of me, palms up. “Step into my hands. Hurry! I’ll boost you up!”
He steps into my hands, and I am shocked by how light he is. He weighs no more than a dream. I jerk my arms upward and he is flying. A few seconds later, his head appears in the tiny opening above. “But how will you get out?”
I sit down on the tiny patch of bed, close my eyes, and try to wake up.
I can feel the rumbling beneath me, a steadily building pressure which makes my ears pop. Within moments I am rocketed upwards in an explosion of mud and water. When I open my eyes again, I’m lying in the muddy field, this diminutive version of my father hovering over me.
“Thanks,” he says. “Are you okay?”
I don’t want to speak. I struggle to my feet and look around. I am surrounded by shadows, shimmering as they breathe. Above us the sky rolls by so quickly the clouds begin to smear, creating white streaks across my eyeballs. A storm is rapidly descending, full of ragged, squawking birds.
“We should get inside the house,” he says.
“Just so you know,” I say. “Even with understanding, I can never forgive you.”
He stares at me blankly. Of course. He has no idea what I’m talking about. He turns and starts toward the house, and I follow. We cross over numerous holes with their little boy heads protruding. Like eggs, I think, and perhaps just as fragile. I accidentally kick one or two.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, but none of them answer.
In our father’s house, there are many doors. We’re both confused. But finally, we find the front door, the one which leads outside. I race ahead of him. When he doesn’t follow, I turn around.
“I can’t. I just—” he says, fading into the light. “This is where I live.”
After many months, I felt settled in. It seemed as if I had lived in this house forever. And after weeks of seemingly dreamless sleep, I had my father’s final dream.
The big man is giving me a bath, but he always forgets I can’t breathe underwater. Perhaps other children can—I don’t know—but I sure can’t. Maybe the big man has made an honest mistake.
The big man holds me under and holds me under until the giant black bubbles arrive. The black bubbles take up more and more space until I can’t see anything else. I close my eyes. They aren’t doing me any good, anyway.
When I open them again, I am at the bottom of the sea. What a wonderful place!
There are caves full of eyes! Trap doors in the seabed hide creatures which peer at me with curiosity. There are fish which are all skeletons, with enormous eyes and teeth! They have the oddest appendages imaginable. If I am going to die—and surely this is what is happening—I might become one of these strange fish myself, if I am lucky.
Sometimes I am chased by bigger fish. There are creatures within shells, and I want to join them. I hide inside a large one. The big fish swim back and forth looking for me.
When the world looks a bit safer, I swim out from the shell, and I swim as far as my diminutive fins will permit. Below me lies the vast ocean floor, and the bodies of the pale little boys who came before me.
To be yourself you must remember who you are. It’s not as easy as you think it’s going to be.
Originally published in Never Wake, edited by Kenneth M. Cain & Tim Meyer.
