I put an arm around her shoulders.
“I couldn’t find my pin, so I took something.”
“What did you take?”
“I took something precious,” she said, revealing a small set of inky pens identical to my mother’s. My eyes widened.
“Where did you get those?” I asked. I said it louder than I intended.
“From the kitchen drawer,” Anna said, pulling them away from me. “I thought we could use them to doodle in our planners.”
Why were my mother’s pens in one of Anna’s drawers? I ran back to my house to close the doors again. First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the third. The bathroom door and the door to the basement and the front door of the lovely little house. I searched everywhere for a set of pens of my own, for more of my mother’s things. Her stockings folded in a dresser, or her car parked on the street behind my house. I watched Anna’s windows through my windows—a figure waltzed upstairs, then back down through the living room. Of course, the figure wasn’t my mother, only Anna. Of course, pens can belong to anyone. Of course, there were many pens in the world, I thought, sitting on the floor with my legs crossed. But I was tempted to give my mother a call. Tempted to go home, which of course, for a temp, is not an option.
Later I found Anna at the end of my driveway, her pens arranged neatly on the concrete.
“Can I draw with them?” I asked.
It looked as if all the color had drained from her face, her shirt, her pants, and into the inky pens. She had a translucent quality.
“Here,” she said faintly, and her hand barely registered as skin against my fingers. I tried the pens, but they were dry.
“They’re dead,” I said. Anna grabbed the red pen in a sudden burst of energy and pressed it to the paper so the felt pushed flat. She pulsed it several times, applying force and releasing, like squeezing a heart for a beat, until a small dribble of ink bubbled forth. The droplet sat atop the page in my planner, wet and wide, not sinking in or spreading out as ink is meant to do. When Anna couldn’t produce another drop, she pulsed the pen once more, then, with a slow shake of shoulders, she began to cry. I squeezed her shoulder once, twice, three times. I didn’t know what to do. After crying for just under sixty minutes, she lifted herself up and away, and floated inside her house to open the drawers. The skies opened, and the rain fell.
First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the third. The bathroom door and the door to the basement and the front door of the lovely little house.
Anna took more things. She amassed a small pile of stuff. Hairbrushes, photographs, jigsaw puzzle pieces. Lone buttons. Lone items on loan from every single drawer.
“I’m worried,” I said. “Should we consult your laminated instructions?”
But Anna didn’t respond. She stacked her things in a small suitcase outside, which she had stolen from a deep drawer under the bed. She hid the suitcase under the hydrangea bushes.
“If I take enough from the house, maybe the house will give me back my pin.”
The house didn’t give back her pin. Anna was sitting in her driveway with me, writing with chalk, and she stood to go inside, to open the drawers on schedule. The house was locked. The back door was locked too. We didn’t have keys, and we weren’t the ones who locked the doors. Anna ran around the house in a frantic circle. She ran so fast it looked like she was flying.
In a moment of desperation, on behalf of my only friend, I removed my shoe and threw it against a low window. It bounced back, barely leaving a mark. I picked up a rock and tried the harder, jagged solution. The rock bounced back like rubber without a sound. Anna saw my attempts, and before I could grab her, she threw her fist through the window.
“No!” I yelled. But her fist didn’t go through. We both knew she had hit it hard enough to break her skin, to break glass. She tried it again and again, and then she used her head. But nothing broke, and nothing shattered, especially not the window.
Anna’s jaw hung open. Mine did too. We looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then she adjusted her shirt and dusted off her pants. “I think I’ve been released from my employment,” she said.
“You can stay with me.”
She could not stay with me. She tried to enter through the front door of my lovely little house, but her feet stuck to the welcome mat. Whether she couldn’t or wouldn’t cross, I was never completely sure.
Anna slept in her driveway, no longer concerned with the schedule of drawers. I brought her a slice of bread every morning, and she lined up the slices by the bushes, for the birds. She let her hair go wild and tangled and left her leather planner unattended. I searched my house for contact information, for a phone number or an emergency procedure, but there wasn’t a thing available to me.
I once spied the delivery truck parked in Anna’s driveway. Then I spied it again, and more times after that. I would wait and watch until the driver emerged from behind the hydrangea bushes. Then, in close pursuit, Anna would stumble through the bushes behind him. Oh Anna, I thought. But the driver is so very old! Then again, watching him, I changed my mind. No, he wasn’t very old at all, not much older than us. He might have even been younger, by a minute. And how handsome he was, how his shirt stretched against his chest.
“Anna, here,” I said, and I gave her my collection of found coins.
“For what?” she asked.
“For something, or for anything.”
“Thanks, really.” She smiled and tucked her shoeless feet into the long grass of the lawn.
Early on a Monday morning, Anna took her suitcase and boarded the back of the delivery truck. I watched from the window, too stuck in the midst of opening doors to come downstairs and say good-bye. I pressed my sweaty hand against the glass, and it didn’t leave a mark.
First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the third. The bathroom door and the door to the basement and the front door of the lovely little house.
Without Anna, I was sloppy. I almost missed the schedule by a minute one afternoon, busying myself with daydreams. I felt immaterial and light. I tried to make eggs sunny-side up and broke the yolks in the pan, then scrambled them instead until they formed a thin, papery layer underneath. Sitting with the plate of uneaten eggs, I realized I hadn’t been hungry in a very, very long time. The refrigerator, to my horror, was full of bread and eggs and cheese, untouched. I fell asleep at the counter and woke the next day having missed three separate door openings and closings. The smell of old egg filled the kitchen.
What should I do? I panicked. What should I do? What would Anna do? I tried to work backward and consulted my shiny watch. I figured out the doors, at that juncture, should have been closed. I went around as quickly as I could to close them. First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the third. Everything was going to be fine. The bathroom door and the door to the basement, but the door to the basement was somehow already shut.
I had never been in the house this way, with one of the doors arranged in a different state than the others. Something felt thick and horrible. I had failed. The room conspired and shifted against me, and my cheeks itched, and I could barely stand straight. I reached forward with a long, queasy arm and opened the basement door a crack to correct the inconsistency, then closed it once again. Success.
And there, in the corner of my eye, a shadow darted out of view.
With the doors adjusted, I regained some composure. I could walk again. But the house wasn’t lovely anymore, or little. I felt it expand, though I had no proof. I felt the corners darken and deepen, like a drawing smudged with charcoal. My error had upset the house, and the house now upset me. With every opening and closing of the doors, I could see the edges of something leaving just as I arrived, the door a proscenium framing a departure, me witnessing the halo of an image exiting the room. First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and
the third. The bathroom door and the door to the basement and the front door of the large, haunted house.
I concocted a bowl of oatmeal and left it nestled in my lap, steaming hot, unconsumed. I sat on the floor outside the bathroom door and waited to see who or what was inside. I closed the door on cue, and at the moment it shut, I glimpsed a towel swinging back and forth. My nose filled with the fresh, damp smell of shampooed hair. Then later, to the master bedroom, where upon turning the knob and slowly pulling forward, two entangled figures scattered in opposite directions.
I leaned against the doors to the second bedroom and then the third, hoping to hear a creak or a scratch, a murmur of conversation, a clue. When it was time to pull the doors ajar, the bedrooms smelled messy and busy. A mug of tea and sour milk. A pile of books filled with book smells. The scent of a leather glove, the edge of an arm pumping the air in a cheer, or some other quick, half second of choreography. A single riff of music abandoned and lingering and stale.
Finally the small blue door at the other end of the house, opening only a smidge, revealing the leftover glow of a wet nose and shiny fur, floppy ears and marbled eyes. I ran to open the front door of the house and saw the flash of a completely different street, with cars, with fences, with a different house, not Anna’s house, just across the way. Then the flash subsided, and the street as I knew it returned.
I sat on the curb for what felt like hours, but it could only have been forty minutes. It took a few tries to get there, but once I arrived at the thought, it was inescapable, as inescapable as the coins that had cluttered the carpeting. Who dropped those coins for me and Anna to find, and later, who forgot to collect them?
The house was a house for a family, and I was filling in for a ghost.
Years later, I tried to describe the way I came to know my placement had ended. I was sitting on the sofa with my frugal boyfriend, and he had made me a microwaved brownie in a mug. I described the day in question, and he listened, eyes wide. But I knew my words were falling short. I couldn’t explain, for instance, how I had one foot in the door, and how one foot wasn’t enough. I couldn’t admit to having watched the family’s edges for so long that I was able to construct a collage of their true nature in my mind. I couldn’t, at the time, describe the slice of light that glowed between door and floor, how the promise of this light was actually a slim, dull weapon. I couldn’t admit my deepest hope: for the family to finally reveal themselves in full, and for me to join them. But the family wasn’t my family. At best, they were my neighbors. Every mother has a set of inky pens hidden in a pocket or a drawer for her daughter. Just because something is familiar does not mean it is mine.
The feeling of ending was the feeling of a new season. My complexion changed, and birthmarks that had gone into permanent hibernation once again rose to the surface. I was suddenly famished. The house unfolded around me like a paper swan laid flat, and the spring air came rushing across my shoulders, and I knew the job was complete. I know this isn’t how houses work, but this is how it felt, and it’s the only way the memory exists for me now. I packed my leather planner, soon to overflow with meetings, interviews, endless interviews. I collected the envelope of payment from the mailbox at the end of the driveway, closed the front door one final time, and went off to claim my palimpsest career.
I do not drown. I come alive on the side of a large rock, coughing up water that burns on its way back out and over my lips, holding hands with other rock dwellers, all of us flat on our backs and strapped in place under a large net.
“She’s awake!” my rock neighbor says.
“What’s happening?” I ask, my throat raw. “What’s happening?”
“Don’t strain your voice, dear.”
“Who are you? Where am I?”
“You’re on our rock, sweetie. You’ve been enlisted as a human barnacle by the Wildlife Preservation Initiative. Remember?”
My rock neighbor is an older woman with shells cluttering her hair. She notices me noticing her shells.
“I’m Barnacle Betty, but you can call me Joan. I’m trying to build a convincing crust.”
Her shells extend through her braids, down her arms, and over her sandy, pruney hands, one of which encloses my palm in a delicate, crumbling carapace.
“We’re filling in for a species on the brink of extinction!” says the man next to Barnacle Betty, or rather, Joan. “Coastal degradation,” he adds.
“Oh?” I say, polite as ever, regaining a sense of geography, reality. A school of fish swims through my legs, tickling my ankles.
“I signed up on account of the rumors about barnacle dicks,” he says.
“That’s his way of saying he wants you to ask him about barnacle dicks,” Joan, or Barnacle Betty, says, a wave splashing over her head.
“OK,” I say, and I look at the man expectantly. “Tell me more.”
The rock produces dozens of groans and sighs and not-agains. I tilt my head back and see human barnacles stretching out in the distance on our rock, which spans at least a hundred yards.
“Barnacles have the largest dicks in the animal kingdom. In relation to their size, I mean.”
“It’s good to keep your aspirations lofty,” Joan says.
“Laugh all you want. I’m an ecological savior. The name’s Harold, by the way.” He turns to me. “But you can call me Barnacle Toby.”
Joan squeezes my hand, and I look under her seaweed wreath and into her eyes.
“I signed up because barnacles don’t have hearts,” she whispers. “Mine beats fewer beats every day.”
Small waves beat against my thighs. The sun beats down hard, and I hear seagulls in the distance. Beats marking out music. Music and voices and sunscreen. We’re not far from shore.
“The thing is,” I explain, for anyone listening, “you signed up for this job, but I did not. At least, I don’t think I did. I don’t remember.”
“What?” says Joan. “Of course you did! We were expecting the new arrival yesterday, and there you were, pretty as a picture, floating toward our rock.”
“I walked the plank of a pirate ship. Your misunderstanding saved my life.”
Joan smiles but seems concerned. We hold our breath for a wave.
“If you’re not supposed to be here,” she asks, “then who is?”
I imagine a would-be human barnacle sinking to the bottom of the sea for want of a rock. Joan and Barnacle Toby must imagine something similar, because they grow as silent as their chosen species.
“I need to speak to my agency,” I say, but my voice trails off at the end. There’s not much hope for a phone.
“Well,” Barnacle Toby says, “you’ll get paid just like the rest of us. No different than filling in and growing roots at a desk, really. Might as well stick around.”
I haven’t known many human barnacles in my life. I haven’t known many people who stick around. The thing I admire about the arthropods is the way they live in small, crispy houses and cement their houses to sturdy spots for good. When and if they break away, the foundation of the house stays put, so strong is their natural adhesive.
“One day I’ll be promoted,” says Joan. “I’ll be the barnacle that rides the back of a whale. A special kind of breed.”
In the distance we see other rocks, other people filling in for other species. Barnacle Toby points out the mussels, the clams, the whelks, a woman struggling, desperate to shrink into a shell. And farther in the distance still, halfway around the world, the reef that stopped living long ago, now renewed with life, a species replaced, then another, another. People earning a living perched on the dead coral, adapting and developing new, aquatic characteristics. One man claims his hand has sprouted a hard, pink skeleton, or so I’m told. A temporary evolution.
“It’s the least we can do,” says Barnacle Toby, who in his former life was known as Harold. The new name uses his new species as a title, as if to speak his new identity into existence, and I wonder, if he had been called Human Harold, if we were
all addressed as Human first, would it somehow enforce our humanity? And when we’re gone, will there be anyone left to fill in?
“Nice necklace,” Joan says, and I realize I’ve completely forgotten my possessions. But there they are, taped to my chest. My eye patch still covers my eye, adjusting my vision for every change in light.
Low tide, and the water leaves us for a moment. So this is it, I think. This is where I stay, facing south until the end of time. How long is the lifespan of a barnacle? I ask, but I forget to ask out loud. I’m already turning silent and still, the species rising within me, the tide rising once more. Perhaps my tongue has already stuck to the sides of my mouth, hardening into a single layer of flesh, urging my body into the creature I’m meant to be.
Evening falls on a sleeping layer of human barnacles, and I hear a splash near our rock. Another splash, and a sigh of relief.
“There you are,” says the man who, in another life, I knew as a parrot. “I’ve been looking for you.”
He cuts me free and, kicking under the cover of night, gently swims us ashore.
We wash up on a beach, and the man with the long hair says, “This is where I’m from. I’ve brought you here to start your next placement.”
He lets me cough up brine and dump plankton from my stolen boots. He untangles algae from my necklace.
“My necklace,” I gasp, and I check that the Chairman remains intact.
He escorts me to a phone so I can confirm my new assignment with Farren. We trudge past abandoned anchors in the harbor and I think, This isn’t a place that books round-trip tickets.
“Farren?” I say. “I’ve completed my assignment.”
We stand at a pay phone on a deserted road. The man squeezes out his long hair onto the gravel until he stands in a small body of water.
“Oh, that’s great to hear!” Farren says. The sound of her voice is such a relief, I nearly start to sob. “They were very pleased with you, missy,” she says with a laugh.
“Thanks for the feedback, Farren. Really, thanks.”
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