Subdivision, p.3
Subdivision, page 3
If she was offended by my appraisal of her body and clothes, she made no sign. And now that she was no longer absorbed in her yard work, she spoke in a direct and friendly tone.
“Did Clara and the Judge send you?” the woman said.
“Yes. I’m new in town.”
“Well, I’m Justine,” she replied, gazing over my shoulder. “I own the Tess.”
I followed her down the driveway and back onto the porch. The unlocked front door opened into a small vestibule that gave way to a steep staircase bounded by an ornately carved wooden balustrade. We climbed together, Justine leading the way. Her shoes stuck and unstuck themselves to and from the stairs with a wet, gentle sound; if I closed my eyes I could imagine her walking on water.
On the second-floor landing, we paused before a plain white door marked by a brass numeral 2. Justine turned to me and said, “This apartment has the most rooms of any apartment in the Subdivision.”
I was momentarily confused, as the building hadn’t looked that large from the outside. “Impressive,” I said, and her response was a satisfied nod. She turned and opened the door.
For a moment, I thought she had chosen the wrong door, by mistake. The entryway had the feel of a shallow closet, rather than a foyer. I turned to Justine and found her beaming at me. She stepped into the closet-like space, then turned right and disappeared beyond the door frame.
“Come on!” she shouted from somewhere inside.
Reluctantly, I followed, and peered after her. The hallway was extraordinarily cramped, barely as wide as my shoulders, and was interrupted by a number of very narrow doors. Justine had opened one and was sidestepping through it; in a moment, her orange shoes disappeared into the room beyond.
My movement through the apartment was obviously going to be awkward. I decided to leave my bag in the hallway. I let it fall from my shoulder to the floor, and almost as an afterthought unzipped it partway and peeked inside.
“Charging,” Cylvia said. “Please expose me to light.”
“I will,” I whispered, and zipped it back up. As I set off down the hall, I could faintly hear the device repeating its request.
I didn’t see Justine when I passed through the doorway; it simply opened onto another hallway, somehow even narrower than the first, that was punctuated by several more very narrow doors. One of them, however, was split, like a Dutch door, and the top half hung open. I shuffled over to it and peered inside. Here, the space had been divided vertically, creating two tiny cubicle rooms. Justine sat cross-legged in the top room. Its floor was parquet; a miniature chandelier hung from the ceiling. The walls on either side of Justine were interrupted by half-height doors like the one I was looking through, and a large painting completely covered the wall behind her. It appeared to be an oil painting, and resided within a baroquely decorated gilded frame.
Justine leaned to one side, so that I could see the painting clearly. “Do you like it?” she asked. “I made it.”
The painting at first appeared to be a rendering of one of the cards in a tarot deck; it had the same flattened cartoon style, and depicted a character resembling a queen, seated on a golden throne and dressed in a white gown. But closer examination revealed a few key differences. This queen was pregnant—about seven months, judging from the shape beneath her gown. In addition, the gown was parted, exposing a single full breast, and she held an animal in her lap—some kind of gerbil or weasel, it seemed—which she was attempting to nurse. But the animal had bitten the breast, which bled bright red from the wound, and instead of drinking the milk, the creature was licking, with a curved, almost prehensile tongue, at the oozing blood. This scene was backgrounded by a blue sky, where two cherubic angels, one black and one white, hovered, one in each corner, their brows furrowed, eyes closed, and arms outstretched. One might have expected the queen to wear an expression of suffering, but this wasn’t the case. Instead, the queen’s face was a blank oval, devoid of any features at all.
I didn’t know what to tell Justine. In truth, I found the painting disturbing, even obscene. So I said, “Oh, it’s wonderful. I love it.”
“I did a bunch of these on commission. They’re all over town.”
“How exciting for you.”
“They’re based on dreams I had.”
“Fascinating! That’s very creative.”
“I think the stoat represents fate. What are you doing down there?”
My fingers, unbidden, gripped the edge of the parquet floor. “Oh, it’s a stoat?” I said.
“I don’t know. Capybara? Jerboa? Tuco-tuco? I just did what the dream told me. Come on up here.”
I didn’t really want to share the tiny room with Justine, but politeness seemed to require it. I hoisted myself into the room and scuttled over beside her.
Justine scowled. “How long have you been here, again?” she said.
I had to think about it; I seemed to be confused about the passage of time. “Just a day or so,” I said.
“Hmm,” she replied. “Maybe we should continue the tour.”
She opened one of the half-height doors and led me, on hands and knees, through a series of rooms, most of them even smaller than the one we’d just left, which Justine kept referring to as “the gallery.” A bedroom housed perhaps one-third of a futon, roughly sliced and sewn up on one end; it was hard to see how anyone could sleep on it. Perhaps curled up fetally. A kitchen featured a hot plate and a mini-fridge; the bathroom was divided into three separate spaces: one for the toilet, one for the sink, and one for the shower. Another section of the apartment was further divided into three levels. We didn’t try to enter any of these tiny rooms together, but one of them contained a miniature television set. At one point, we took a break in an area that consisted of several full-height but extraordinarily tight spaces, connected by doors no wider than dinner plates.
“I live downstairs,” Justine said. “My own apartment is more conventional. But I come up here to think and dream.”
“I could see this being a good place for that,” I said. We were standing very close to each other: practically touching, in fact. Justine smelled of grass and sweat and shampoo.
She said, “Did I hear you talking to Cylvia in the hall?”
“Not really,” I said. “I just got it. It wants to be charged. Do you have one?”
“No. I don’t like things like that.”
I wanted to ask her what specifically she didn’t like. Computers? Cylinders? Gray things? But I suspected that conversation would go nowhere fast. I let the silence stretch out for a bit.
“So,” she said. “Do you want the place?”
“With all due respect, I don’t think so. It has a little too much character for me.”
She exhaled loudly. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, her tone implying the exact opposite.
“Well … I think I’d better go.”
“Oh, sure,” Justine said, pushing past me. I followed her through a seemingly endless series of constricting rooms and corridors, most of them unfurnished and undecorated, until we arrived at a narrow hall I recognized as the entryway. I collected my bag and stepped onto the landing with relief.
“Thanks!” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Maybe.”
Justine was strange, but I didn’t know anyone in the Subdivision except for Clara and the Judge. Perhaps it would be good if I tried to make friends. I cleared my throat and said, “We could get coffee.”
“No,” Justine replied.
“Okay,” I said.
We looked at each other for a moment. Eventually she turned and walked down the stairs and out the door. I followed. After the confines of her subdivided apartment—a subdivision within the Subdivision—the staircase felt extravagantly large, and by the time I got to the street, I was nearly gasping with relief. Justine had disappeared, but I knew where she was: I could hear her muttering to the lawn again, out behind the Tess.
Five
I wanted to have a look at the house the ladies had marked on the map—the one being rented by someone named Jules. Or perhaps, I thought, standing in the street outside the Tess, the house itself was known as Jules. I experienced a fleeting moment of pride at having already absorbed some of the serendipitous logic of this place. Maybe all the houses had names? Maybe that was what made street signs unnecessary?
First, though, I returned to the park to take a breather and to give my cylinder a little bit of light. The park was empty, as it had been before, and the swings were still. But when I sat down on the bench I’d occupied earlier, the one beside the water feature, I noticed a set of wet footprints leading out of the play area and across the concrete verge. As I watched, they evaporated in the sunlight and were gone.
I unzipped my bag. Cylvia said, “Charging. Please expose me to light.”
“I know, I know,” I said. The bench was half-sheltered by a nearby maple, and I’d chosen the shady end to sit on. I reached out and placed the cylinder upright on the sunny side.
“Charging,” Cylvia said, and left it at that. Clearly it found its level of light exposure to be adequate. I set my bag down on the slats beside me, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes.
Some time later—perhaps a long time—a voice woke me. “Charging complete,” it said. “Would you like to begin?”
“Oh!” I said, rubbing my face. “Hello.”
I hadn’t been mistaken about the favorable effects of light on the device’s appearance: its gray cast had vanished entirely, and its casing had taken on a pale pinkish-orange hue. Its colors pulsed faintly, slowly, shifting toward pink, then toward orange. I reached for it, then hesitated. Was it supposed to be held? Or did you leave it standing somewhere in your home, and merely speak to it?
“Would you like to begin?” it repeated. The voice was female, with an educated American accent. Its tone was neutral.
“Sure,” I said.
“Is this your home? Admiral. Kilmeade. Municipal. Park.”
“No, no. This is a public park.”
“Is this your place of work? Admiral. Kilmeade. Municipal. Park.”
“No.”
“Please state your home address.”
“I’m not … I don’t have a home or a job yet. I’m looking.”
Cylvia said nothing for several seconds. Though I didn’t know what its powers were, or how it operated, I had the impression that it was “thinking.”
“When you reach your home, please say, ‘Cylvia, I am home.’”
“Okay.”
“When you reach your place of work, please say, ‘Cylvia, I am at work.’”
“I will.” I made a mental note to tell the cylinder these things, though I was already finding the obligation burdensome. Perhaps it would just ask me again, at a more suitable time. “So, am I supposed to leave you at home, generally? Or should I bring you with me when I go out?”
“You may leave me in one place if you wish, but I am portable.”
“I want to carry you in my bag right now. You didn’t like it before, when you were charging.”
“I am portable. I am charged.”
I took this to mean that my bag was an appropriate place for the device. I picked it up. It was warm, and seemed to shudder, ever so faintly, with the shifting of its colors.
“Your colors are quite striking,” I said.
“Device colors are customizable. If you wish to change my default colors, say, ‘Cylvia, change default colors.’”
“No, I like them.”
“Thank you,” said Cylvia.
“You’re welcome.”
Cylvia didn’t respond, so I decided that the conversation was over. I placed it back inside my bag and zipped the bag shut.
●
The house marked JULES on my map lay on the opposite corner of the Subdivision from the park, but it wouldn’t be a terribly long walk, I thought. I decided to go all the way east, then south, to check out the edges of the neighborhood.
Most of the streets in the Subdivision ended abruptly at a house or place of business, but some continued out into the rough terrain beyond and dead-ended there. There were dark, hazy hills in the distance and, between them and the Subdivision, dense woods. A weedy verge extended between the streets and the woods, passable on foot, it appeared, but unpleasant-looking, with many rocks, irregular patches of ground, and burr-covered scrub.
Eventually, I reached the road that, on the map the ladies had drawn for me, led toward the City proper. This road descended into a tunnel that burrowed under the Subdivision’s easternmost street. If I peered into it, I could make out the light on the other side, as the road rose to meet the weedy verge. But the road was closed, the tunnel entrance blocked off by a length of snow fence and a sign marked DANGER. A backhoe was parked nearby, beside a cluster of orange plastic traffic drums imprinted with a white prismatic stripe pattern. The pattern seemed to shimmer and undulate as my angle to it changed, making the drums appear somehow blurry to the eye. For all that, though, it didn’t look like much work had been done here for some time. The drums and digger were hemmed in by a skirt of dead leaves and other debris, and they were spotted with dirty splashes from some rainstorm of the recent past. Up at street level, I thought I could make out the City in the distance: an irregular series of blocky lumps, any of which could be interpreted as a parking garage, a church, or an office building. I didn’t know when I would get around to visiting, but it wouldn’t be today.
When I came around the appointed corner and apprehended the Jules house, my heart leaped. It was adorable—a small, modern, freestanding home shaped like the letter L. The “elbow” of the house sheltered a cheerful brick patio, complete with comfortable-looking chairs and benches and a charcoal grill, all underneath a large, colorful umbrella. A man was holding a garden hose and using it to spray the flowering shrubs that surrounded the house. He looked up as I approached and greeted me with a wave, letting the hose fall to the ground.
“You must be the one Clara and the Judge sent over,” he said, extending his hand. I took it and we shook. He was tall, perhaps a few years older than me, and rather handsome—seasoned, but not worn or weary. His long face had a chiseled look, but his large hands were soft, and his broad shoulders implied strength.
“Are you … Jules?”
“Yes!” the man said. He gestured behind himself with an expansive wave of his arm. “I’m planning to leave the Subdivision for a time, and need to rent my house.”
“It looks beautiful,” I said.
“Yes! It’s a great house!” He winked, for some reason. “Would you like to come in?”
“Yes! I would!”
The interior of the house was just as pleasing to me as the exterior: a tidy kitchen, with everything in its proper place for a single person’s efficient, comfortable sustenance; a living room with a plump sofa, a reclining armchair, and an agreeable view, through three large windows, of the hills to the east, the neighborhood to the west, and the streets to the north. An equally bright bedroom contained a king-size bed and a spacious closet, and the bathroom was large and inviting and tiled in blue. The floors throughout were wood, and tasteful photographs and paintings of nature hung on the walls.
“It’s very nice,” I said. “I’m interested.”
“Excellent, excellent,” Jules replied, rubbing his large, strong hands together. “Let me just show you the back yard.”
I followed, trying to avert my eyes from his muscular, jeans-clad behind. He really was good-looking. Perhaps he would need to come back to the Subdivision from time to time, for business. He might want to stay in the house—on the sofa, or even in the bed, if he wanted. I could make him dinner in the pretty kitchen, and perhaps we could chat on the sofa while the sun went down.
My bag began to vibrate. I was alarmed for a moment, then remembered that Cylvia was inside. It probably needed to be charged again already. I ignored it.
The back yard was beautiful. Bordered by roses, it featured a free-standing swinging bench, a fire pit, and a croquet court. On the low stone wall that encircled the fire pit, a crow stood, gazing up at us. An apple tree bore shining red-green fruit, though it wasn’t yet autumn. Jules plucked one off a branch and crunched into it. I watched the little droplets of juice spray through a ray of sunshine. He smiled. “Help yourself,” he said.
I reached up and took hold of an apple. Its branch was supple, and it bent with a faint creak; when it released the fruit, the branch snapped back into place in a flurry of verdant leaves. My bag vibrated. I ignored it.
Jules was walking around the side of the house; presumably we would return to the front yard and discuss the terms of my lease. I couldn’t stop thinking about the apple juice on his lips. Perhaps I should reach up and wipe it off, with my thumb. Afterward, I might even flirtily pop the thumb into my mouth. Maybe life in town wouldn’t work out for Jules, and he’d have to move back here permanently. He would be too ethical to evict me, though. We would have to share the space. A house this size probably didn’t have a very large water heater—there would be only enough hot water for a single shower each day. It would likely become necessary to shower together.
As we came around the side of the house, I turned for one last glance at the lovely back yard. I could already imagine myself painting my toenails Smoky Aubergine, there on the swing. My gaze, however, instead fell upon the western window of the living room, and then out to the yard again through the eastern window.
What I saw puzzled me. The living room appeared normal, with the sofa and chair as I remembered them. But, as seen through both windows, the back yard looked different. The apple tree was dead—blackened, in fact, as though it had been partially consumed by fire. The fire pit and bench swing had been destroyed, their pieces scattered about on stony, weedy ground. And from the hills in the distance, smoke rose.
The only thing that was the same—that is, between the winsome world I accepted as real and the ruined one visible through the two windows—was the crow, which remained perched on the only persistent chunk of fire pit wall. It cawed as I watched, and I could hear it from around the corner.
