The Only Novel Ever Written

FOUR

A sizable puddle had formed on the cellar floor. I hurried down the stairs to place a bucket underneath it. Then I stood and listened to the droplets reverberate with a hypnotic plunk, plunk, plunk. I shut the door to the cellar behind me.

The house I lived in was my father's half-baked parting gift. Of course, no one ever said that aloud. It was the ugly kid on the block in a middle-class neighborhood. On either side, I was flanked with successful nuclear families who drove their kids to soccer games in minivans and trained their retrievers to fetch the newspaper. I was a constant reminder that they had figured things out.

There were no major issues, but there were a multitude of small issues that were beginning to add up. My father had managed to purchased the house at a low cost because (wait for it...) there had been a murder in the living room. I didn't know the whole story. I did know that two drug dealing renters had formed a sizable operation in the center of suburbia, and somehow an argument that began in the kitchen ended in the living room with a butcher knife plunged into one man's heart.

By all accounts, the two were nice, normal people. Sometimes they even watched the neighbor's dogs. When my father saw the news, he set out to buy the house, made a lowball offer and stole it out from the owner's nose. (You can imagine the awkward conversation my father and I had when I learned that I was going to be living somewhere that had recently been a crime scene.) I had my father's practicality. I figured that murders had happened in all sorts of places, and people only scare themselves when they focus on it. Of course, that didn't stop me from keeping a Louisville slugger next to my bed and jumping at the slightest sounds heard in the night.

The house was a three bedroom, full of nothing. My bedroom was more-or-less an urban campground. In one corner of the room, a mattress and boxspring with a simple navy bedspread rested on the floor. There was a tall wooden dresser, chipped on the corners from a recent move. There was a plastic laundry basket and a small trashcan.

I had no nightstand, couch, or kitchen table, though I did have an old card table I'd found in my mother's garage. I did not own a TV or lamps or art or bookcases. But I had plenty of books. When I first moved into the house, I'd rented a pickup and filled it three times with boxes and boxes full of books. That was before I'd accepted that there simply wasn't enough room anymore. After that I did my best to purchase books digitally, save for the ones that I just had to hold in my own hands.

I'd chosen the larger of the two unused bedrooms to be a reading room. I dreamed of outfitting it with inset bookcases and comfortable chairs, but for now it was just a single padded chair I'd found in mother's garage, surrounded in every direction with towering stacks of books, organized by author and genre.

Around that time, I'd developed a dangerous combination of attributes: a love for interior design, matched only by an extreme deficiency in financial sense. Everything I wanted was far too expensive to own. As a result, the house contained only one other furnishing - a splendid 15-foot rug that could have passed as a painting if it was on canvas. I'd maxed out my credit card to purchase it. It was the center of my living room. A vibrant sun in an empty universe. Some nights I would lay on it and stare at the ceiling, imagining what it would look like if the roof was made of transparent glass.

That day I'd decided the third room would become my office. I stocked it with protein bars, sugary snacks, water jugs, and I'd even set up an old coffee maker that my mother no longer had a need for. The light blasting in through the window cast a glare on my screen, so I took an old dropcloth that was still around from a time when I planned to paint the entire house, and taped it up to cover the window. I took down every obscure piece of art my mother had demanded I hang on the walls. I covered the floor in pillows and blankets and sat with my back against the wall.