I Will Be Her Forever

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On what began as a fateless trip to Prague seven years ago, in the dusty half-sleep of jet-lag, I looked out a bus window to see red graffiti on the stone of the river wall. It read: I WILL BE HER FOREVER.

At the time I thought it was funny. They forgot the “e.” The artist meant they would be here forever. Morbid maybe, or glad too, I suppose. I took a blurry picture, useless. I wouldn’t show anyone, I wouldn’t look back on it. It would sit in my camera roll for years.

My last night in Prague I met a Czech metal singer. She was the lead in a band who’s name I could never hope to pronounce. Her hair so bleach white it glowed, her face a constellation of piercings. I liked her alienness and the way she said my name, Eem-i-ly. She took me home and though the sex wasn’t memorable she managed to remember me, my molly-ragged speech about sound, pretentious audiophile rantings, and later tender hopeful musings on a future where I wouldn’t return to my hometown after all. One in which I wouldn’t come back to my parents’ empty house. Where I wouldn’t return to my high school boyfriend who I knew was waiting with a ring in his sock drawer.

The singer looked me up when she got to New York, three years later after I’d actually left home, divorced at twenty-five and orphaned to boot, my parents drowned in a diving bell of their own making in the lake behind our house.

She had a new name and a new sound, called herself a hyperpop-horrorcore artist. Her name was 88088 now. She moved directly into my apartment, made herself a room out of the hall closet. We didn’t sleep together again. It never seemed to cross her mind and I was both love-scarred and embroiled in a safe romance that was really farce with my upstairs neighbor. When I asked her one night how to say her name she whisper-sung me a little song “eight eight, oh eight is great” then flashed me her teeth and slunk off back to her nest.

She plays medium-sized venues across the city and I am her shadow, her sound-bitch, her lapdog. And how good it is to drift behind her. Through venues drenched in piss and beer, girls in fake blood and scream masks, rubber muscles and barbed wire halos. Me on stage behind her, my soundboard the only thing keeping me afloat. I don’t look at the crowd. 88088’s hair flies like a moth in the corners of my vision. Blue-white, blacklight. I wear my headphones and turn my dials.

I’m freshly stung from another upstairs neighbor break-up (I was spying through the peephole and I saw him lead another girl up the stairs by the hand, she was wearing lederhosen, which stuck in my mind as perhaps the key to understanding my brokenness) when I get the notice delivered by messenger.

The tenants who have been living in my house—their house, my ex-house, my Ex’s-ex- house—are leaving. They already left actually, they say. They’ve been trying to call for weeks, they’ve given up. The house is vacant and I need to come deal with it.

I haven’t been back since I left.

I drag my feet as best I can.

We play an underground show where someone throws a glass bottle at us. The video blows up online, dim footage that paints 88088 as glorious alien-martyr-angel, pale with a perfect slice of blood on her cheek. Her single “the grave I inhabit” goes viral. We book a show, bigger venue, better paid. We book another. There’s enough money for an album and 88088 says she needs to go into hiding. She tells me go, you go Eem-i-ly. I will send you things, she says. She doesn’t need me here for inception, in fact needs me gone. She needs me only for molding, for pounding her children into shape with my fists.

So I have to go. I book my ticket to Colorado.

I get an email from my high school history teacher, Mrs. Taylor. You should have told me you’d come home! Let’s meet up for coffee. I would love to hear what you’re up to!

You’re mistaken, I tell her, I haven’t come back yet. I get an email from our old neighbor, he tried to catch me yesterday but I had my headphones on, I must not have heard him. I feel like I’m dreaming but out the window is still the raging hot glass of summer in the city.

My teacher never emails back but my neighbor does. No, he insists. I saw you. I saw you by the river. He must be getting on in years, I resign myself to checking on him when I get there.

Several more neighbors email but I only skim them. They’re angry. We saw the light on in your office, they say. We saw you walking down the alley. You were staring in my window. You were looking unwaveringly into my window.

Before my parents died and my relationship turned to an inferno and I flung myself far away into this red bull-vodka-and-sweat flavored life, I loved sound and even more I liked research. I thought I would be a field recorder. I thought I’d follow herds of bellowing elk and wait hours with my microphone for migrating birds to pass overhead.

There wasn’t a lot to do in our town, far up in the mountains, away from so much. I read a lot of Poe. It’s something 88088 and I bonded over, a cliché maybe, probably all androgynous emo queers in NYC go through a Poe phase.

On the plane I dream I am reading Poe’s “William Wilson” on the couch in the living room of our house when it was our house. My “husband” is leaving, he’s putting on his coat. I can’t move. I try to speak but I can only whisper. He leaves the house and I’m shouting and shouting but only a whisper comes out.

I wake myself up on the plane whispering. The woman next to me gives me a look. The word I am speaking as I wake up is “Elvis.” I try to make sense of this like it is an important clue for the rest of the flight but forget all about it by the time my bus pulls into town.

The house is the same as it has always been. There could be new landscaping but the stark sameness of the house is so loud I wouldn’t notice anyway. The house has always looked old and it has always looked solid. A flicker of movement in the office window, I look, cat eyeing a fly. A phantom fly. There’s no one home.

Inside, even the furniture is the same. I left it all behind and it seems the family didn’t mind.

I try not to think unkindly of them. I try not to think of how they’ve rubbed themselves against our things and worn through our couch, threadbared our rugs. They seem to have yellowed the bathrooms too, crisped them to old.

They’ve left me a letter on the kitchen counter along with several dead ladybugs.

Dear Emily,

We are sorry to be leaving like this. We have enjoyed living here and thank you so much for your generosity over the years.

It’s hard to come to some sort of explanation. We suppose we don’t have to, but it seems kind. We’ve had a daughter and have expanded out into more of the house than we used before. Though we have never set foot in the office. I (this is Susan now) went in once but never again. I can’t tell you why. It seemed occupied. You will think we are strange for saying this, as if we are implying your house is haunted.

There is a strange space, pencil erased, written, erased. Long hesitation, then only this:

It came to be that there were whole areas of the house we were avoiding completely. That is the long and short of it.

Thank you and good luck,

The Chet Family

I resent the “good luck.” This family’s implications leave a lot to be desired.

I do my best to forget about it.

I reward myself for all of this hell by going to my favorite grocery store and buying whatever I want. The place smells the same, like bleach and stale bubblegum. There used to be bins of it at the front of the store but they’re gone now, so I guess the smell is a ghost.

When I get back to the house 88088 has messaged me twenty times in a row. This is her way. The messages don’t need replying, not yet.

“track 4 ‘Baquila trifoliolata’ want you to make loop that feels like when you get a fever on a class trip. More reverb?”

“Where did that folder of screams go?? My screams Emily, i need them.”

“Find me an effect that feels like sour warheads, do you remember those? The blue ones.”

“Rents due.”

I don’t know where to sleep. What was once my teenage girl room became the office. I definitely can’t sleep in my parents’ room, which became our room (the Marriage Bed).

So I get ready to sleep in the guest room and realize I forgot to bring pajamas. In the laundry room I find the old bin of clothes still on the high shelf where I left it.

I find a linen pajama set of mine, salmon-colored and worn. I loved this set, I wore it every night all summer long. They smell like our old laundry detergent still, which floods me so completely with feeling that I have to look outside into the trees for a long time to cleanse myself.

All my careful set up, all my tiptoeing around the nostalgia and rejection of memories falls apart when I put on my old clothes. Of course it does.

I haven’t spoken out loud in hours. Maybe all day. The house is quiet. I lie in bed and when I try to speak it comes out as a whisper.

The realtor calls and pushes back our meeting as I’m leaving for it. I sit back down on the couch in my jacket and shoes and stay there for a long time. The house groans from the wind coming down hard off the mountains.

I put on the new mixes from 88088, crank them up loud to drown out the wind and try to be efficient. I need to get anything left in here out, into a storage unit if not into a trashcan. I can feel the heat and heft of it all above me, around me, claustrophobic, hard to breathe.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I rented out the place. Our things are jammed in the rafters and in the basement. Mine, his, my parents’. And then there’s my office over the garage. Where I fell in love with sound, learned how to smoke weed, and masturbated to videos of women reading Chaucer while someone goes down on them out of frame.

I descend instead into the basement. The door has swollen shut. I try in vain to yank it open. The walls weep moisture.

When I call for maintenance the man on the phone seems so unhurried I’m lulled into complacency. The rains, he says, the rains have been strangely heavy these last few months. You should see the lake, he says. It’s crept past its edges.

I hang up on him. I’ll call someone else tomorrow.

I make pasta from the box the family left behind in the cupboard. It looks dark outside even though it’s early, so early. I’m exhausted, suddenly. A girl flicks past in the corner of my vision.

I fly around the corner, holding back a yelp, hoping to catch them quietly but there’s no one there. There’s no one anywhere. I search the first floor. I listen at the foot of the stairs for feet on the floor above. The front door is locked. The back door is locked.

Maybe it was just my reflection. I go back to where I was standing in the kitchen but there are no reflections I can see. I don’t put on any music. I cook with my hip leaning against the counter, turned out, reluctant to turn my back.

It takes two days to clear the living room, the dining room, the entryway. What I can stomach to save I put in the garage. Art, lamps, a little side table, cast iron pans and a ceramic chicken. My parents’ things. Anything of his, fancy blender, plasticky workout equipment, art books with uncracked spines, I put in the garbage unmercifully.

My stomach has been painful all day, sour and tight.

I call the real estate agent and get no answer. I call every handyman listed and get no answer. I go into town to prove there hasn’t been some rapture or Chernobyl-level abandonment. There hasn’t been but I feel like everyone I see gives me a wide berth. At the hardware store a man promises to come look at the basement tomorrow.

Too soon there’s nothing left for me to do but to go upstairs.

The same steps creak that used to creak. I find myself returning to an old regular cadence as I go up and down, hauling the scant hall furniture.

Eventually I have to go into our-their old room.

I can’t tell if the feeling upon entering is relief or pain. This space is the most transformed. The walls are painted, the furniture is gone. The heavy curtains have been replaced with light ones. The rug is gone and even the hardwood shines with new varnish.

All that is left of me or him or them in here is the one piece of art that hung on the wall when my family moved in. A five by five piece of wood painted with a flower vase reflected twice. I used to wake up in my parents’ bed when I was little, alone and tucked in. The sun would come through the window and hit that painting and I felt safe. Surrounded.

I have to go into my office because now I am seeking the wound. I am looking to press in on memory. This will be the time capsule I imagined.

It is, the sameness so vivid I think I see myself huddled in the cracked leather desk chair for a brief moment as I open the door.

The chair creaks, swings slightly on its greased hinge.

It must just be the pressure of the door opening. The chair is empty. Of course the chair is empty.

Faded printouts of concert tickets, dated musicians, and lost track notes cover the walls. The chunky old desktop computer has a sheet of dust over the screen but it groans to life when I turn it on.

My old recording software is open, the whole screen clicking slowly brighter, clicking from blue to full color, loading, loading. I see all my old recordings: “Lower Meadow, Field Mice - June,” “Elk Call, mate answers - August,” “Great Horned Owl, cemetery - September.”

Then there are dozens of “New Recordings” on top of the old ones. Did I make these? I couldn't have, the field mice in June was the last time I was here. The family said they never went in here but maybe Mr. Chet was playing DJ at night when the baby couldn’t sleep.
I check the time code on one, it lists the date created as only a few weeks ago. The first new recordings are from three years ago. July, just after I thought I left here for good. I play one, clicking to the middle.

The scream flattens me.

The scream echoes out the open office door. Through the house.

The speakers, at full volume, ache with noise. I hit the mute so hard I send the speaker to the floor. I am too stunned by sound to move. I swear I can still hear the scream echoing into the basement.

Once the fear and sound have left my bloodstream I turn the speaker back on and dial the volume way down. I play the recording again from the beginning. It starts with the loud crackle of static. Not just static, the crackle of wind, of sticks. A bird in the distance, low and sleepy. Rustling trees, bushes. Then again, a scream. Chilling, awful. Female. I click through more tracks.

Each scream is worse than the last. My heart racing, I wonder if humble Mr. and Mrs. Chet were playing the Most Dangerous Game. I wonder if my ex was a secret American Psycho. The image of him sneaking back here, sifting through my things, tinkering, makes sour spit pool nauseously under my tongue.

Only when I reach the bottom, head piled high with bloody imagery, do I see.

“Caterwauling,” the folder is named.

The screaming isn’t human. It’s the love call of a mountain lion.

In between the screaming is the forest noise. So alive it crackles. I wonder if it’s the forest outside, beyond the lake.

Less frozen by terror now I open the details of the tracks. I find the notes.

“I love the forest quiet here”

“Late June, I caught a glimpse of her”

“I heard them find each other after midnight, is it weird it made me jealous”

“The forest quiet here is my favorite”

It doesn’t sound like something Ex would write. He was surprisingly unsentimental. No, he wasn’t sneaking back here. He was too uninterested in all of it to ever even think to.

In bed with my laptop I see 88088 has sent me the stems of her latest track, “listless amongst the total destruction”.

She’s inserted some old effects of mine but now it sounds too much like something she’s already released, “stunted by grime (sword swallower remix)”. I take out the hack job she’s made of my audio. I try to fix it but nothing is coming to me.

I open a bottle of wine, hoping to reach a state of looseness where I will forget I am in this house and maybe taste a piece of artificial artistic inspiration. The wind is trying to get inside again. I decide to give in and open all the windows. Now I can’t see outside, the gray screens on the windows glint with the living room light. It gives the effect of being in a cage. I can hear every sound outside when I pause the music.

My cup of bacchanalia does its job because I find myself thinking, what screams have I heard lately that would sound just right here?

I take my laptop up to the office. It looks crisp and tiny next to my old computer, which was already old when it became mine.

I upload the mountain lion caterwauling onto my laptop. Instead of 88088’s screams, I insert the lioness’. The effect is instantaneous.

I listen to it once, twice, again.

Unhinged, I think, the emo-glitch girlie’s will go wild. Yes, I save it.

Still, it has the cheap tang of commodification that I can hear in 88088’s newer sound. I’m sure it’s the label pushing it. I think it can be better.

What 88088 really needs is some forest quiet.

Quiet isn’t what it is, exactly. Listening over my noise canceling headphones I feel as though my entire body is crackling with fire. The trees. The ceaseless breaking, eating, sticks and dirt and leaves and bone.

88088 once played me the work of composer Alvin Lucier. He created a piece called I Am Sitting in a Room. He did just that, sitting in a room and recording himself speaking. Then he played it back and re-recorded it. Then he played that back, re-recorded that. He did this again and again, tape after tape. Until, by the end, all that was left were copies of copies of copies, leaving only the sounds of the room, the sounds of the tape, the tape, the tape...

We were sitting in 88088’s closet mess because it was the quietest place in the apartment, insulated away from city noise. By the end of the album, I felt hypnotized. I couldn’t decide if the static that was left was really the essence or if it was something unbound, untethered, the leftovers of experiment or surgery. Viscera left on the table.

It’s near two am when I finish sifting through all the screams, echoing them like a refrain through 88088’s tracks, weaving the disparate songs into one album. My favorites are “la double V: printempts” and “sublunary visions”. I leave “make out to mazzy star” as plastic as it is, for the noise-adverse pop leaners I know 88088 made it for.

The air in the room is thick with dust and baking hot, the old computer nearly coughing out grime and radiating heat. I feel sick, my stomachache and the bottle of wine mixing dangerously.

I go out on the back porch to get some fresh air but the wind is still trying to get in and it leaps down my throat and chokes me. The wind tastes like the lake. I’m sick off the side railing, it’s red going down into the dirt.

When I turn back to go inside I see myself at the window.

Upstairs, standing at the office window, looking down at me.

She lifts a hand.

I race inside. I’m at the stairs in a second, there’s no way she could get down. Maybe it’s a neighbor, I slam back inside the office.

I think I know it will be empty though, before I even get there.

The computer whines brightly, open to a scream.

I stand at the window where she stood. I stood? Staring at my watery reflection. There is no denying that it was me. She is me.

I am, someway, somehow, being haunted by my self.

Why is she only here, in this house? Maybe she is like the snake skin I shed when I left.

Or more like my lizard tail, caught and torn off, left behind so I could scuttle away.

It’s true that I dragged myself from this house like it was a part of me. As if with every step a floorboard was pulled from my skin.

I surprise myself by going straight to sleep with the strange relief of having named my demon.

I wake up to a phone call from the real estate agent. I try to speak brightly to keep the sleep and the dark sweep of a sugary hangover from clouding my voice. He says he hasn’t made any progress with his schedule. He asks me what to do with the shed.

The shed by the lake, he means. The shed that contains the diving bell that drowned my parents.

I tell the real estate agent exactly what to do with the shed. I ask him if it’s possible he could do the same with the fucking house actually. I hang up on him.

The house feels even heavier around me. The weight of my parents’ abandoned projects shoved up in the attic. The computer in the office, heavy with things I used to love and left to bit-rot. The walls and furniture soaked with the sweat of He-of-the-false-promise.

I think of all the stupid ambition. All of his and all of mine but mostly all of my parents’. Build it, it will float, they said. Build it, it will keep us safe. What’s contained within us cannot fail us.

There is still so much here and there’s only me.

I stay mired in bed until it’s nearly dark out again. Weighty dark clouds make night come faster. The desperate need to shower is what finally gets me up. I can feel the grime of wind and sickness and sweat shelling my skin.

After I dry off with the beige towel, which used to be white, in the beige bathroom that used to be white, I realize all my clothes are gone. I’m shivering, I can see myself clearly in the bathroom mirror. Despite the burning hot shower I took, the room is clear of steam.

It’s all been sucked out the crack in the door.

My shirt is stuck in the crack. As if it tried to escape, or the door slammed shut on it. Like it is a live thing, I tug at my shirt. Stuck fast. Holding onto it still, I open the door, slowly slowly. Twisted like a rope and tied onto my pants which extend taut into the darkness of the hallway. Like there is someone there, right in the deepest shadow of the hall, holding the other side of it.

I’m still holding the other end of my shirt, my forearm shaking with effort now. I can’t let go. I can’t step forward. Naked, I stare into the darkness until I can see her, staring back. As naked as I am. Eyes shining, a live wire. The rope goes slack as she steps forward. I drop it and slam the bathroom door shut.

I stay in there with the door locked, wrapped in towels and slumped in the bathtub, until morning. Nodding off. Shivering.

I Will Be Her Forever.

It echoes in my head. I search my camera roll, my old Facebook, my old Tumblr even for the picture I took of the graffiti in Prague.

I look for it all night. I find the photos around it, the slope of the river, the blurry outline of a castle. The picture is gone. Like I imagined it.

I will be her forever.

Is this doppelgänger really a ghost? My shadow come undone from my feet like Peter Pan’s? Or is it something worse?

I find a new fear under this one, buried tick-deep in my skin. It’s the fear that the self I am now is the ghost.

That I am the other and she is the she.

The real estate agent leaves a message thanking me for my “kind note” and to tell me the shed has been dealt with as I asked.

On the computer in the office I find the message in the sent folder of my old email address. It is kind, with a nice, professional apology. It’s signed, All the best, Emily.

I want to look further, look into the drafts, see what else my ghost proxy has written, but the computer cracks loud like an ice floe and goes dark.

I sit there with the body until it’s cold, a vigil. The computer is dead and with it all my old recordings. I feel profoundly alone. All I have left are the mountain lion’s screams.

I find the next night that my clothes have been laid out on the bedroom floor in a perfect shape as if I had fallen there. I leave them where they lie and I sleep on the couch.

When I come back the next morning the clothes are gone.

I roll over in the night and my face presses against hers. It’s her face, my face. My lips touch my lips, our mirror noses smash together. I open my eyes to her face, her face in my arm, my face. My face. I wake up fully and it is just her arm. My arm. No face.

By morning it’s still raining hard. Rivers down the windows through the dirt. I can see the lake from here, gray lashed by rain. It’s rising up to meet the house.

A message from 88088, a reply to the album I sent her in my late night fugue state. I realize I sent her both versions, the screams and the forest quiet. I don’t remember doing that.

Don’t be mad, she says, with a link. I click it to find that she’s leaked one song from each. My forest quiet is running rampant. It’s everywhere I click. Is it good, bad? I check if my nose is bleeding. It feels like it’s bleeding. It’s not.

In the office I tear my photos off the walls and lug the computer out to the dumpster. There is nothing left to do but to climb up to the attic. To find out how bad it will really be. I rise up the stairs, surrounded by the smell of raw wood and uninsulated heat.

It’s empty. There’s nothing here of what I remember. My parents’ failed projects, Christmas ornaments, my grandma’s clothes, and my old rocking horse which was really a rocking fish my dad carved and my mom painted. They aren’t in here. They aren’t anywhere.

I wonder if I could manage logging back into my old email, I’d also find receipts for junk haulers, thrift store donations.

I wonder if my other self, monster that she is, took it all. Took care of it all.

It’s raining and the power is out. The house is empty and my bags are packed.

I go down to the basement to flip the breaker. The handyman never came, I realize. I yank on the basement door, expecting the swollen resistance. The wood comes away pulpy and soft from the frame. The door is falling apart.

Black water slinks around my ankles. I wade into it. I pass under the living room, then the kitchen. The breaker is on the far wall. I am underneath the guest bedroom.

The water level is rising.

Something bright catches my eye. My clothes that lay on the bedroom floor now lie on the ceiling. Tacked up as if someone nailed them there.

Waterlogged, they hang as if they hold a body.

I ease myself to my knees in the water. It’s cold and smells like algae. I lie down and it eddies around me. I lie under the clothes in mirror image. In the dark, it is hard to tell which of us is the shadow.

Volume 15.1, Winter 25

Sofia Drummond-Moore