Eight Rooms

by Various

  As I turned to the window, I asked myself if these protective feelings that festered in a man were really necessary. Feelings that were hidden with various degrees of success, but which were doubtless present in every man. I knew that the most cunning of men would profess to not even having these feelings, as it would offer them an advantage. Would the most honest and virtuous man therefore wear these feelings on his sleeve? Was it noblest to be savage in expressing these interests? If a woman invests in a man, she needs to be sure that the man will not invest in another woman to her detriment. A man, on the other hand, wishes to know that his investment is to be protected, that he will not be investing in another man’s offspring. These are emotions that have been developed over millions of years in hostile conditions, where violence was the only medium, and there has not been time enough to remove them from our instincts. Society has moved faster than evolution, in requiring the man and woman to feign apathy towards how exclusive their relationship is, if only to be viewed as modern and forward-thinking. But evolution, progressing faster than society, has taken choice from the equation. The instincts of violence are still there, and a person can either sublimate them by finding a way to construct a feeling of exclusivity with a partner, or find a non-violent way to ensure that the partner is worth the investment. Without this feeling of exclusivity (often found in shades and points of principle), surely we are simply cast adrift among the countless ghosts of previous lovers?

  In the face of repeated evidence that the partner is not worth the investment or is too high a risk, the woman, or man, will no longer find value in the relationship. It was then that I realised Paul Reid was in my power. Paul Reid did not know what had happened between Tiffany and me before his arrival. I had the knowledge which suggested that she may not be an investment. But, similarly, Tiffany had the same power over Anna and I.

  You may think it odd that I took such an interest in the relationship between Paul Reid and Tiffany. But we cannot measure our affect on a lover without knowing the intimacy they have indulged in before us. Without this knowledge, we cannot know where the bar needs to be set to create a unique intimacy in the future. Without measuring our relative effect on another person we are therefore unable to measure our own worth.

  I knew exactly what intimacy had preceded me, and consequently exactly how to supersede Paul Reid. In superseding Paul Reid I would be able to keep control over The Visitors, and ensure that they would not become a more potent threat as Key Players.

  I suddenly felt a wave of fear pass over me at the thought of the ghosts I was contending with. How can a man leave his mark on the world if he is completely replaceable and transient? How can a man even remain in this world if in some way he is not made to feel unique? Surely, without a way to feel at least a trace of superiority, he will be cast adrift, with no point of self-reference? If he cannot leave his permanent mark anywhere, what does he have to draw certainty from? Without a guiding light, even a sense of worth in the universe, what use can a man be to anyone?

  I fell backwards. The ochre light on the floor grew stronger; it almost seemed to be warming and swelling beneath me. I could hear the wump, wump, wump of other bodies moving in the room, of people who had been here before me driving themselves, smashing themselves closer to one another. I could smell the stench of their bodies like raw meat, building and mingling and slipping over one another as they rose to some selfish crescendo. Knifing through that smell, more insidious and poisonous than any, I could smell the fluids of their bodies, secreted like snails, staining each other irreversibly, soiling pure flesh. I could hear the reckless, bold movement of a man and woman, of the soft cry of a woman welcoming a man into her. This roar filled my ears, a roar of disgrace at their actions and of how paltry my efforts to follow in their footsteps would always be. The roar of superior muscles, clenched deeper and more invasively than mine, of kisses wetter and fuller than my own. Of movements that changed bodies and the mental responses and the expectations of their lovers forever.

  The Key Players were laughing at me. I could hear their horrible, sickly laughter echoing inside my head, and I knew there was no way to get it out but to tear it open. I staggered forward, over to the windowsill, and the swinging, dark movement in my brain tried to clutch onto a way to drain this sensation off me. I clawed for the opening of the window trying to let in a shaft of something else, to suck some air in and to feel some semblance of nature to bring me back, but the thought that it was nature that had caused this made me twist in agony at my inability to escape it.

  I felt the laughter rise inside me, in my own throat. Suddenly I felt as if a knife was charging through my chest, buckling down from my neck. It seemed to plunge straight into the pit of my stomach and tear it open. I was completely abandoned, couldn’t even hold onto a concept. I was swimming in a void of mental tricks to see me through the next minutes that were tentative enough on their hold on reality. I could see sinews of other bodies, covered in black hair. White and yellow flesh twisting in saggy dragging shapes. I could smell the moisture of open glands as it filled my nostrils, making them smoulder. In that moment, as I swung back against the side of the window, I saw the car pass outside. I was sure that I saw it, and as I tried to focus I made out its shape, slightly blurred around the edges as it slowed down. It seemed as if it saw my silhouette in the starkly lit room above it, before accelerating and sliding fast into the distance.

  I tried to take a deep breath but the air buckled in my throat and I choked, coughing it out. I steadied myself, brought my feet back on the floor, pulled myself up with my arms. Breathed in, breathed out. Let the thoughts calm, kept them still with great effort. The car had visited again. I was still worth being watched. I still had a role to play. The feeling started to fade. I stepped forward and breathed in deeply, a deep breath that almost induced tremors in my body from the comfort it gave. I was back on my feet.

  I knew that this sudden overwhelming sensation had been a sharp reminder of what I was fighting for. It was the threat of The Visitors and The Key Players taking over my mind that I was fighting against, and I had to work harder than ever not to let them succeed.

  I had always known this sensation was somewhere in me, ready to burst out. I had occasionally felt it twitch at the back of my mind, but it had never engulfed me with such strength before. From then on, things started to unfurl. Perhaps because this feeling had taken me so by surprise and had been so overpowering, I felt driven by a need to act quickly to halt its return. Perhaps I neglected to use my ability to analyse, the ability that had previously been my one strength.

  My attempt to seduce Tiffany again, in order to supersede Paul Reid, was a failure. I did not plan as I had planned before. I did not wait for the right opportunity; I made the mistake of using my heart and not my head. My heart had always failed me in the past, with its egotistical lunges, and my head had always had to make up for its failures. But now my head was consumed with this fear or, more precisely, the fear that this fear might return. I am almost too embarrassed to recount my failed attempt to seduce Tiffany, but always remember it as an attempt to regain control over my mind, to reclaim my home and my body, and nothing more.

  I spent a couple of days planning my seduction. The first time I had spent at least two weeks but these fears were now on my heels and they were ready to overwhelm me at any point – and so I had to act fast. I had to also feel that I was acting fast, and that a solution would be in place soon so that I could return to normal. Over those next few days I started to cut corners in my research. I went with what I knew. That pretending to be fascinated by some aspect of Tiffany’s work would again give me access to her. While she was out I read through her recent essays and formulated some new lines of enquiry. Perhaps because I was compelled to act fast, I didn’t leave her papers in exactly the way they had been.

  It was one evening in the kitchen, while Anna was still at work, when I raised an interest in Tiffany’s work again. She was chopping carrots on the cutting b
oard, with an urgency in her movements that in retrospect suggested anger with me. My first line was greeted with what was almost a sigh. When I raised a question about her work, she wanted to know “where this was going?” She said, outright, “The last time you were interested in my writing, your sudden fascination disappeared as soon as you’d slept with me. It’s back again now, is it? Now you can see that I won’t fall in love with you?”

  “It was always there,” I insisted, gently stroking her arm, the arm that ended with a knife. “It was just that I felt bad. I felt guilty for Anna and I felt that I was putting you in a difficult situation. My fascination with you has not receded at all.”

  There was silence for a while, while she continued to shred the vegetables with a ruthless precision that seemed to imply some pain in her that I hadn’t predicted. Perhaps I hadn’t thought too much about her feelings over this, and now I had to think very fast about them if I was to avoid being beaten. I moved closer and held her elbow. The chopping stopped, the evening felt suspended in mid-air. She looked up, her hair hanging slightly lank as she stared straight at the wall.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said, with a slight aftertaste of hatred in her words. “I know exactly what you are doing, and exactly what you have done.”

  “No, you don’t,” I retorted, grabbing her elbow and pulling her round precisely as Paul Reid had done. “You don’t know the first thing that’s in my head,” I shouted, before I even had a second to think about what I was to reveal.

  “You may well be surprised,” she sneered (so much less attractive now as she began to chop again, ruthlessly), “that I know all about men like you.” She pointed the tip of the knife at me.

  “Don’t forget,” I warned, looking straight up at her. “This is my house.”

  “Yes, I know all about your house. Your possessions. You like to think of me as another of your possessions, don’t you?” Her voice was almost shaking now.

  “I would never think like that.”

  “Well, how else do you explain it?”

  “Explain what?”

  “Explain your sudden powerful, yearning interest in me, which blinks off like a light as soon as you have slept with me. You may be master of your work, but you are not master of everything in this domain.”

  This slight wounded me in a manner that surprised me. I grabbed both of her elbows and pushed her round, and she didn’t look surprised.

  “Tiffany. How can you be so wrong?” I pushed, furrowing my brown in false concern.

  “You want the women in this house to be at your beck and call. At your command. Because you are the great translator. Because you think you are so attractive.” She spat the words, as if they were more my own than hers, draining them of any pleasure. “Well, you have weaknesses other men don’t have, and you are more unattractive for them. You only want me here so you can make me your own, when you want to.”

  “That isn’t true, I –”

  “Prove it.”

  “What?” I took a step back.

  “Prove that you don’t just have me here to control me. To use me when you want. Prove that I am still here because of a genuine fascination, that that is what all… all this is about.”

  “What? You are being absurd. I didn’t use you, what are you –”

  “If you can’t even prove it, or even pretend to want to try and prove it, then there is even less to you than I already thought. I wonder what Anna would do if she knew that there was even less to you than she realised?”

  A furious anger was rising in me. The best alternative seemed to be to throw Tiffany out of the house, her and her new lover. To take on new Visitors that I would be able to manipulate in a way she seemed determined to resist. But something about this idea stopped me, perhaps something in her genuine hurt. I was cut by the accusation that she knew what I was up to, and I was concerned at what kind of power she may have over me if I threw her out. I also wanted to beat this Paul Reid and seduce her in a way he never could; however distant a possibility that seemed right now. I wanted to erase his ghost from these rooms, from being anything that could be a threat to me. I realised that the only way I could do this would be to humour her, or at least pretend to.

  “Prove it then,” she said again. “Prove that your interest in me is as wonderful as you say it is, that you don’t just want to use me as you use others.”

  “How?”

  I moved closer, stroking her arm again. For the first time her muscles relaxed.

  “Let Paul live here with me.”

  Something rose in my throat.

  “What?”

  “Only for a week or two. After that he is probably going away, on business. And perhaps that will convince me that you are real.”

  “No way. I’m not –”

  “Remember. Remember what I know about us. Remember what Anna does not know. I can move out of here at any time, and my passing comments can be anything. Absolutely anything. Remember that.”

  “There’s no need for that. I don’t mind if he stays. But not for long.”

  She smiled, and cocked her head to one side. I felt how fast my heart was pulsing in my body, echoing through my head. Then she turned her body and held the knife against me. My heartbeat rose. The tip of the knife was pressed between my neck bones, at the opening of my shirt. I felt the tip part the cotton, and push against my flesh, squirming to cut it at any second.

  “It won’t. Be. For long,” she whispered, pouting slightly at me at the end of each word.

  I spent the evening alone in my room. At the start of the night I spread out the papers for the Lefèvre translation but soon realised that the work required a dedication that my mind couldn’t allow at that moment. I spent at least on hour looking at the blank page. To its right, emblazoned in neat, sloping handwriting was the original text, twitching with innovation. But my mind could not leave Tiffany alone. In relationships it seems that plans as elaborate as cathedrals are constructed only for the briefest wars to destroy their underlying faith. I had slaved over Tiffany as I had slaved over my translations, but I was unable to translate her language into the simplest sentences. My designs on her were merely the start of an attempt to deal with the apparitions that plagued me, and yet now I was further back from dealing with the poltergeists than ever. I felt like I was teetering on being swept away again merely at the thought of Paul Reid moving in. The whole plan had been to manage her intimacies and to slowly become familiar with The Visitors that occupied these rooms. At least a familiar evil would not be able to surprise me. Now a Visitor was coming in who was becoming more powerful than all my most intricate designs.

  At times of turmoil I could never help but return to comforting thoughts of Anna. Deep in my mind, were the knot of feelings I had for her that had caused all of this to happen. My emotions for her were what had caused definitions of The Visitors and The Key Players to even come into existence. They were the reason I’d had to manage Tiffany and her lover, and the reason I had been engulfed in that feeling that had almost poisoned me.

  Anna would be home at any moment, and as I waited for her I thought of the way it had first felt to touch her dark blonde hair, which had grown black as we had drawn closer. I thought of the first time we’d met, her as a student of mine, and how a discussion had led to a drink and a walk along the river. I thought of what passed between our bodies as we spoke directly into each other’s faces without any self-consciousness, realising that we were creating a maze that we would inhabit together. Wasn’t that any relationship? An attempt to construct a maze for you to both lose yourselves in? An attempt to create a web of sanctuary full of reference points you could draw comfort from by mere allusion?

  I remembered the channels that had been created between us and how, in realising its presence, we had been drawn closer into that first crushing kiss. Blazing into my mind in vivid, potent colours, kaleidoscopic with emotion, I remembered how this had led us to pour our bodies out to each other on that first evenin
g, to smash our limbs together. I remembered afterwards the realisation that we had left a tangible atmosphere in the room that even other people would recognise. That as lovers we had created a mist that we would dwell inside as long as we were together. That in those opening days and weeks she had talked so confidently of what I would become, of the abilities I had. That she had spoken of them not as if they were hopes or conjecture but as if the fantasies I had imagined for myself were a reality somewhere behind the scenes, waiting to be found.

  In Anna’s presence I embodied all of the attributes I had dreamt I could have. That rush of recognition, recognition of what I could become, had turned to longing whenever she left. In the times that we smashed our bodies back together I had wanted to embody her flesh absolutely, to move inside her in a way that would make us inseparable. The way she opened herself to me absolutely in the moments that we had alone together became so addictive. The longing soon took a darker turn as I realised that when I kissed her I was wanting to change her mouth so that another man’s lips could never fit with it again. I started to dream of sculpting her body so that it could only ever fit with mine. After that I thought of how I had laboured to protect that wonderful mist, to keep that unquantifiable space sacred for us. I thought of how I had bargained for it when circumstances had changed, agreed to make allowances, and how Anna had so cleverly agreed what was sacred and untouchable between us and what we had to leave for the world.

  I was still dwelling in the comfort of that imagined mist when Anna returned. She shut the door quietly and moved into the room, her back turning to me as she placed her handbag and keys on the side.