Dad?
Yes?
Do you like this hotel?
Yes, I do. I love it. Don’t you?
I guess so.
Good. I want you to like it here. I wish we could stay here forever… and ever… and ever.
— The Shining (1980)

Jack Torrance: [staring at the drink in his hand] Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon, and all the irreparable harm it has caused me.
— also The Shining (1980)

Watch as the eye inside the camera, twitching and fresh from that hollow place that appears on a stripped clean skull, pans over the scene. It is a beautiful one, despite itself: green everywhere with high, tree-covered hills sloping across the horizon, moseying further and further away. It is not an untouched place, of course, nowhere is anymore, but the fingerprints are not so deep set, not so close to the surface, as they are in other places where people find themselves, perhaps surprisingly, alive.

Who knows how much time has passed when the eye finally rests upon the dilapidated house. The tick of the watch and the flipping numbers have disappeared, and one is left only with the constant buzz of the cicadas, the odd hunting dog’s bark, a faraway but very bad domestic dispute, the train whistle, that thick wall of impenetrable silence.

The more the eye stills, not twitching quite so much now, the worse the collective dread of the audience grows. If not a jumpscare, then something else, something harder to shake. What once felt like a calming picturesque glimpse into provincial living mutates. There is something in the house, yes. There is something in the woods, yes. There is something in the barn, the red half-finished tree house, the dirt. There is something behind you, yes, getting closer and closer. It watches you with eyes that reflect a dim flashlight, for there are no floodlights here, the darkness of evening like a cloak, and the porch lights are burned out, and you do not dare light a candle here, at night, outside no less, lest you call something worse than the thing that watches you from the wooden fence line, smiling now, for your fear is a beacon.

What is worse: to walk into the woods or to go back into the house? You are merely one inhabitant of either.

In the distance, though not the far distance, something starts to scream.

And so you go —

Horror movies, like many genres of entertainment, are deliciously, or not so deliciously, depending on where one sits, populated by tropes. Playing into them, subverting them, reinventing them. Of the myriad of horror movie tropes, the ones that call to me most are that of the alcoholic parent or parental figure and, separately or intertwined, the haunted house. Perhaps you can guess why. The Shining and Nightmare on Elm Street. Hellraiser and The Craft. The Conjuring and The Evil Dead. Poltergeist and my own life, playing before you, again and again. Oh could I be rid of these memories. Oh could I say it was all a creation, an artistic endeavor. Oh could I wake one morning and stroke my own cheek, comforting, for it was only a nightmare. Only a dream.

Say one thing for the haunted house generally, say that despite it wanting to claim life for its own, say it also instilled a temporary drive opposite to that of the death drive inside of me.

What Freud posited, roughly: the death drive is the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.

Me, the weary, so close to the dead always, so untethered to this life that I am. Me, the obsessive-compulsive.

This new haunted house feeling made me say: I will not die here, constantly. I will not die here.

I will not.

Here is the wide, golden wheated field, surrounded by trees. There are the white clouds. There is the dark sky. There is the moon in its changing phases — though never the same phases as when your eyes are open. Sometimes a woman comes, though never the same woman, to tell you truths. Her voice is terrifying in its beauty, a one hundred-sided kaleidoscope. Like God’s voice, in another kind of dream. But in this dream, the kind you do not understand (you will say it again: a child lost in the woods is a teacherless child. You will, in the future — see it, see it glisten like dew on the backs of your eyelids? — meet a teacher. But you will already be a man grown. Man? Oh, you can only wish. But you will be, and the most painful lesson to learn are those you should have learned when you are just this tiny, speck of an age —) and in this dream she asks are you scared and you say yes and she says simply, but not cruelly: you should be.

Because this is a special dream, a recurring one, you will be asked this question many times.

For many years, your answer is yes. And then one day, or many days, you can never tell, your answer is no. And it’s true. Over the years of your life when you are awake — who is to say it is your Real Life, a terrifying question, and it will take years of your life to train your mind to even recognize the question being asked — over the years of your life you have lost some of that fear, it has been bleed out of you, painfully. Repeatedly. Though there is always some left, so bottomless is the well of your fright.

Yet repetition, they say, is the best teacher. So, too, is fear. Live with enough of it and some spirits will greet you as an old friend. Be careful with your blood, though. Do not give that away so freely.

For there are other worse spirits that exist. Yes there, behind you in the mirror. Yes there, under your bed. Yes there, yes there.

For a long time, I knew not how to quiet my head. The backs of my eyes constantly ached. Not even sleep was a reprieve.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to dull the noise. Horror movies can teach you that. One can write the same sentence ad infinitum, engage in premarital sex, practice increasingly high-stakes sadomasochism, let their toxic friend group slip into badly planned out witchcraft, read from a terrible old book and be terrified in the wilderness, hire a couple of charlatans to exorcise them or their loved ones, get strangled by a terrifying clown doll, die. One can do many things, with the proper motivation.

Because this is a movie, because this could never happen, because I am vulnerable here, laying on my side, my dark hair blending in with the night, I am going to tell you a few things, but remember that everything that happens from now on is just a dream. Just a dream.

This level of self-pity is nauseating. To medicate it, among other things, in another life of course, I used to chug two cheap bottles of wine a night. If not wine, then something else. Only then would the ruminating quiet, the terrible looping thoughts silence, the guilt over the bone deep sadness that locked me into patterns of laziness previously unknown and shocking to me taper down to a simple mutter. Even my dreams were slurred, inchoate. The ghosts inside of them looked sadly on from the periphery. Awake, I would run my slowed tongue over the long, jagged seam on the inside of my cheek, still scarred from the time as a child I was so agonized by my own thoughts and visions I bit into my cheek hard enough it bled copper and salt down my throat for hours. Earlier that summer, I had gotten in trouble for beating my own head hard with a curled up first, nearly possessed with the need to make it stop, make the horrible images end, and perhaps, in that the dreams, too, but what did the ghosts say to me if not that death was one everlasting slumber and if I was not fortune’s fool perhaps I would know it before everyone I ever loved died before me. A nightmare, to be frank.

That bliss, that cottony envelopment of the mind, I could live in it forever, anything was worth it. my sanity, my liver, my — I wished I could fit it over my skull like a saddle. I’m begging for it, tongue out, put me out of my misery, please. Please. The only thing would release my dignity for, even fucking. Isn’t that embarrassing?

The horrific truth: there was no vice I could have chosen that my father had not sullied. And I who actually needed it was left with a beggar’s choice indeed.

Hush, hand over your mouth, over my mouth. My teeth sinking into your/my palm, tearing. I ought to be shot, wild fucking animal, can’t be trusted.

Pain brings us closer to that endless cycle and it’s never gonna end, bub.

Okay, I’m sorry about that, sometimes it gets the best of me, you know.

A short moment of optimism: Am I really that bad? I ask the camera. Don’t the majority of less than stellar qualities eventually come out in the wash? The shot pans over to a long line of people I have disappointed. They answer in a montage sequence, easily, answers slipping off their collective tongue, listing some of my finer attributes: depressed asshole, unsatisyfying performer, self-hating shithead, owner of severe commitment aversion and mommy AND daddy issues, brooder, sad fuck, clings to an image of a tortured artist-genius but does not produce genius nor art, the refusal of enjoyment, sloppy workaholic unless on the precipice of self-harm, the weird quiet coiled way you experience an orgasm like you’re too good for what is happening to you, like seriously what is that even about, the need to medicate out any emotion that makes you feel like you’ll lose that cool-calm-collected exterior, angry, mean, not very comforting, sucks at communication, rough speech, and don’t get me started on the suicide jokes that no one thinks are funny because everyone knows you always mean it a little bit and how you tell everyone he was a horrible father to make yourself feel better but really you know, and we know, that you are worse than he could ever have been because you know better, you half-rate storyteller, sitting there while we pour our emotions out and you think of nothing but a cold fall day on a hillside above a river full of water and memory and your favorite fish which you never even told us the name of and a silver, glinting flask full of bourbon and being anywhere else but here. Etc, etc.

Semi-redeeming qualities:

For those horrible long hours I am sober I consider things — this is perhaps making me worse, though one could ask given the lines above if there is any worse place to go. An echo of words said in a thousand different ways: there is no help for you. If I could make you better I would. You choose this. You choose it.

But how else to survive the pain?

Nevermind. Let’s go back to the movie.

Plenty of movies have haunted houses — and there are plenty of houses, outside that silver stream of film, that are haunted, but not like this one, for sometimes you step into a haunting, and sometimes you are born into it. The night I woke up on my hands and knees in the field, my feet terribly cold, in only my nightshirt and underwear. The night I sat on the kitchen tile, the coolest place in the house, and thought of air conditioning, my fear running sloshy and hot through my body in something like nausea. The night I was halfway to the woods, only a lighter in my hand to guide the way, before I shook myself out of it.

The night I tossed the shocking abalone shell and bone that I had found in the primitive front garden bed over the fence, only to find them rearranged in a row on the concrete porch, waiting for me, the next morning.

Perhaps you think me pathetic for leaving, for all of it. Perhaps you think you could have done better. Perhaps you could have. Perhaps.

But then again, I know better. For you are most likely thinking nothing so hateful. You are always kinder to me than I deserve.

I could show you what I see. I could open up a little more. I could practice vulnerability. I could let you in. For you know and I know that I am simply telling a story. That this narrative has been constructed. That I always hold something larger and more valuable back for myself. I learned early that many people do not take kindly to visions. To people who see them. Even if they say they do. Even if they promise.

It may not look like it, kiddo, but I’ve done a lot of work these long years — to get better. To be better. And yet.

Those might be tears, acrid, hot, carving a bloody path down my face and neck. Or perhaps not. Perhaps.

A brief moment of respite: Of all the visitors, welcome and unwelcome, the cowboy who visited my dreams was my favorite. I could tell he was bashful about the whole thing, stumbling into a lady’s private affairs, but I didn’t mind. Oklahoma is cattle country, to be sure, but not on the far east side of the state, the tree filled side. Places too flat make me nervous, while places with hills I am endeared to, even after all this time. How’d you find yourself here, friend? I wondered once.

He had been headed to Fort Smith, Arkansas, a town along the river, now a city. My mother had been born there, albeit in a different century.

Is this all yours? he asked, looking both at the house and the land around us.

None of it, I said. I think I would panic if it was.

Oh you’re one of those types, he said, smiling, smiling.

Themes emerge for a reason, we’d like to think. But why the alcoholic parent, then, in the horror movie? Why the haunted house? Aside from the obvious, that is.

Well because we always want something to blame for our troubles. We want to know that we stumbled upon this parent, that we stumbled upon this house, we didn’t choose it. There is nothing we can control, though there is something to survive. It is the most universal of feelings: to fear your father, to want to sleep with the closet door closed. We are simply victims of circumstance. It could have been any father. It could have been any hovel, or mansion, or regular suburban prototype. It could have been any life. We want a final someone at the end. We want to survive. Traumatized, yes, but alive, alive. We want to think that there are outside forces at play, that we did not do anything to deserve what is infesting us. Addiction, ghosts. Would you think me savage to say that sometimes they are one in the same?

Ah, enough of that. That is one trope I don’t have in me today.

A catalog of visions, if you’d like, from that space in-between: The ghost who pet my hair, the ghost who touched my mouth, the ghost who whispered in the night, the ghost that walked the hall, the ghost that wailed, the ghost of the terrible man, the ghost that sat on the couch, the ghost at my desk, the ghosts of the porch, the ghost children who called me brother, the ghost children who called me sister, the ghost children who called me by an older, darker name that made me flinch, the ghost of the panther, the ghost of the woman who thought I was my father (another flinch), the ghost of the hornet’s nest, the other ghost who thought I was my father, the ghost of an old uncle, the ghost of — ghosts are easy to dispel. If you are unpracticed, unsighted, you may simply say: Leave me in peace. But you cannot whisper. And you cannot stumble. What does it tell you in all my practice, all my relative sightedness, there were things in that house which were not ghosts and which would not leave and which —

I have had two major OCD relapses in my life — once, in college, and once, in grad school. I choose not to believe in the pattern, however loose, this establishes. Before I decided to live in my dead father’s haunted house for an entire year (I made it less than nine months, though to my credit I could have given birth to some hideous hairy creature in that time), I thought I would go to the PhD program I had chosen that spring because out of my options they gave me the most money. My brain thrums in, then sinks, into reading. A compulsion in itself. But I did not go. Instead I stayed in the house where my father died. For months, I dreamt of cutting my hand with a grain liquor glass shard and going into my father’s yard (was it a yard? Or a field, a forest) and doing rituals, dark and something like what my father was doing (amateurish) that last time we were at that house for my grandfather was there the next morning with his trailer and his wiry mustache and his calling me baby doll and Little Victoria.

Could he have seen me now, his only dark-eyed grandchild, one of his favorites. Able to do a ritual better than my father (dead, dead) could ever hope to. My grandmother said he was never worried about me one day making money, for out of my entire family, the only family I knew, I was the only one he knew would make it out. But, she said, he said, I want █████ (he never called me █████, not once) to find someone who loves her like she deserves. I laughed. I am worried you will stay alone, she said, and I laughed again, though not harshly. What a poor creature, I thought, to have done something so awful as to deserve me.

Of course I feast on patterns, for in many ways my art is an ouroboros, she is my tiny bit of romance, my long lived partnership. But we have gnarled children, grief-stricken ones, my love and I, and this life is so long. (Do not think for a moment of another love, her eyes crinkling in laughter, her kindness). Sit with me then, a safe distance away. Let us imagine the haunted house going up in flame and smoke. The barn, too. The way it should be.

While we watch the ever growing embers, let us talk about kinder things. I will let you trace the scar on my hand from the tumble I took on my bike on the dirt road to my great Aunt Viola’s house. I will tell you of the fish and the river and the trees and why I am named for such a season as this, if you’d like. As a child I would nap in the field, my back to the wind, like a herding dog might. I was odd and somber. Still am, but oh how I love to laugh. If you do not mind, maybe I’ll nap like that now, in the dirt and the grass, in one of my grandfather’s Wrangler shirts. God knows I always need the sleep, despite having passed the worst of my insomnia in the early days. Best to store up when you can. You never know when, though you know it will, because it always does, get bad again.

That infinitely tricky space — a memory, a dream, a dream of a memory, a memory of a dream. Watch as my child’s mind casts forward, into the ether, untethered. No one to stay my hand. No one to teach me.

I see it there in the distance, my own death. A version of it, at least. So tricky are these things, so easily manipulated.

But wait — when I wake, slowly, it is a peaceful waking. I have dreamt of nothing but a memory, one that I had forgotten until just now. I am eight or nine. My father and I walk from the house in the woods, slip through the fence, and walk a mile across someone else’s land to a pond. We fish for awhile, though I don’t remember what we talk about. If we ever talked. We walk back slowly, having only caught and released. I am tall, but my pole is taller, and I am tanned deeply from the summer sun. I do not like the house, of course I don’t, it is dark and sickly seeming once the door is cracked open, but we don’t go inside. Instead he brushes down my arms and legs with his carpenter’s hands to make sure no ticks are there, and then we sit in rickety camping chairs and wait for my mother to come and take me home to our little trailer with my Calvin and Hobbes comics, and blue mushroom chair from Walmart, and short walk to the creek from our yard. He names the trees lining the rocky path up to the house, and tells me of a great panther that stalks the woods that I enjoy walking through on the very rare occasion he is not too drunk or high or crazy for me to visit. I like stepping over the occasional green snake, meeting the odd new friend who inhabits the rocks and the brush, and listening to the voices that filter down from the wind, though I tell no one of this. Not even him, who I realize too late might understand, if only minutely. A fraction. Not enough to make a difference, but comforting still, I suppose, in its way.

My eyes have surely widened during this story, but this big man just laughs.

Don’t be afraid, maple leaf, he says, smiling, kind, even. Don’t be afraid.

The sun is slowly fading away, a cowpoke’s lope. The chair underneath me is tattered and falling apart — stripped by wind and rain and beams of light. My father is beside me, but for only a moment, and for one of the last times. No wonder that he echoes after his death, becoming more than he was in life. A painful reminder. He did not protect me. He could never protect me. He would not protect me, maybe even if I asked. Though I would never debase myself to ask. Remember, maple leaf, that you are alone in this.

Yet what threads itself around my ankles, then? What walks itself up my shoulder to whisper in my ear? What calls to me from the darkness? What snaps a twig in the night? What reaches for my throat with a strange howl? What grabs my hand from the dirt?

I’m not afraid, I say, of it. Or of you. And to two people such as ourselves, that sentence is almost a caress. A declaration of love. Soft meaty bits on display and all.

Well, it hardly matters, anyway. The rest is lost to time, to the dead, and I ain’t dead yet. Pity, that our runtime is almost over. Here, now, I want you to remember that you always have a choice, no matter what happens next. Remember that for me, won’t you?

That’s good, thank you.

Alright then, partner. So what’ll it be?

The house? Or the woods?

---