The Dollhouse

Thomas Walton

 

There’s gunk in my ear. I picked it out, but I don’t know, these things happen. It’s just who I am. Every school has its student who smells like bacon. I’m the gunky-eared kid, I guess. I’m in a wheelchair too, but so what? It doesn’t matter here.

 

Of course, this isn’t a school. Patrick says it’s more of an, um, innoculum. A body, a body for serum. What’s the serum? I don’t know … maybe Jenny. Jenny’s the serum.

 

Jenny’s my best friend. She was born with an ear on her neck. She has the other two too, and says she can hear fine. The third one’s not really an ear, I don’t think. It just looks like one. Patrick says it’s residual, whatever that means. She can’t hear through it, we’ve tried.

 

So you see we’re connected by a kind of aural malady, Jenny and I. I’m the insufficient and she the overzealous. Of course, there’s more than that between us. That’s just how we started talking. Sometimes I put some of the gunk from my ear in hers but that doesn’t work either. I didn’t really think it would.

 

Other than that, not much goes on here. Other than us, I mean. Sure, there are others. Patrick is the worst. And Anne Parasol, who has that thing on her head. Some kind of machine, I guess. It keeps her neck from twisting. She’s wall-eyed too and a total snot. The other day she took Steven’s prosthetic arm and hid it under the apricot tree. Everyone saw her do it. Patrick says she’s thin in innerness.

 

Patrick … I don’t know. I guess he’s not that bad. Intelligent really. Horrible. There just shouldn’t be boys.

 

It’s really just Jenny and I anyway. Jenny and I and Patrick and maybe Anne Parasol but no one else. No one. Just Jenny and I then. Or maybe not even us. She says, “nibble my ear when Patrick walks by.” I don’t really get it.

 

The dahlia garden is just outside Jenny’s window. She knows each kind and watches every plant cycle through its blossoms again and again. Last night she was crying. What is it? I asked. You see the orange ones with the white streaks? (I did.) You see the one hanging down, touching the path? (Umm, the dead one?) Yes, the dead one, except it’s not dead. I saw it when it was just a bud. I’ve been watching it. (Uh huh?) Look at it!

We stared at it for what seemed like a day and a half, in complete silence, until she stopped crying. She’s so weird.

 

Jenny had her operation today. Not to remove it but to “minimize its effect.” She came back with gauze all around her neck. I tried to talk to her, but she just cried.

 

This place sucks. I’ve been here 10 months, but it might as well be years. And I feel worse now, worse every month. Like quarantine or chlorine. I mean, yuck! The smells from the third floor! Putrid! And Anne Parasol haunts this place like a half-flat balloon.

 

We’re not allowed to talk to the adults.

 

From my window I can see the clouds drift slowly over the blackberry fields and then to Laughter House S where they disappear, swallowed smoothly by its pale brick and wails. Even the sky isn’t safe from them, the wails.

 

Anne Parasol has a wicked lip. Recently she accused Jenny of heart wrenching. Nothing could be further from the truth. Besides, we’re all wrenches here.

 

Laughter House S is where you go when they’re done operating on you, or if you’ve just been here too long. That’s what happened to Alex. He was fine: funny, smart, his shoulders no longer leaking. Then one morning, gone. Just gone, no explanation. Jenny and I went to his room, but no Alex, just his box of colored pencils and a stack of sketches, mostly of the flowerbeds in the courtyard outside. I still have them. They’re amazing. Mostly I keep them because they remind me of his hands. He had great hands.

Now Patrick has his bed.

 

They removed the gauze. Jenny came to me crying with her hands on her neck. She wouldn’t show me for the longest time. Then, finally, she did … Wow. Like a baby mouse or something, all thin and membranous. It was trembling. What the hell’s going on here?

 

I think they’re trying to make it into a hearing ear. Instead of removing it, they seem to be making it look more and more like a real ear. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get it. Either way she still can’t hear through it. We tried again last night, this time with tubes.

 

Jenny lets me clean the ear out. I love it. She never used to let me, but now she does. I consider this a great honor, and proof that we’re friends. We get under the covers with a flashlight, some water, and a handful of cotton swabs. I run the swabs around in her while she lays there humming, smiling. “I hope Laughter House S is full of dahlias.” She says this!

 

There’s a wheat field behind Laughter House S where Patrick says you can find bones and skulls and pieces of clothing. I don’t believe it, but he said he’s seen it himself and it’s true, even some of Alex’s sketches have gruesome things in them, like the autumn maple hung with clavicles. But then again, maybe they’re seeds.

 

I never liked dahlias before I met Jenny. Patrick says they should name one after her: Dahlia Triauricles, or Dahlia of Grim Inocula. I think just Dahlia Jenny’s fine. I don’t know, maybe they’re killing her like they killed Alex and Messy and Nohead. She told me last night that when she came here she was fine. There was nothing on her neck at all, and that her parents sold her.

 

Of course we have parents. Mine went overseas, so they sent me here. You can’t just go overseas with your parents. They were sending letters for a time, but it’s been a while. My dad said in the last letter that the post offices are very bad where they are. He wouldn’t lie, so I guess it’s true.

 

I don’t believe Jenny’s parents sold her. I think she’s just upset about the ear.

 

These diaries were Jenny’s idea. She’s keeping one too, and we read them to each other some nights. Jenny said not to mention anyone but her in these, but it’s difficult. So much of us is in others. Still, it’s only her and I by flashlight under sheets or wheeling me around the courtyard choosing which flowers are our favorites. Today it was the giant clematis hanging off the gardener’s shed for me. Jenny picked an unopened thistle.

 

We made a tent with a sheet and some chairs and crawled into it. Inside it was so wonderful that I felt immediately we’d entered another world, one where anything could happen. Anything. Maybe we’ll get out of here after all. I said this, and then she kissed me in the mild yellow light.

 

‘The Sedlec Ossuary.’ These words are written on one of Alex’s sketches. I’ve no idea what it means. Also: ‘as I become a child again / and they take from me my insides.’ The sketch is of a row of tulips. Alex was such a freak.

 

I don’t know what you’re thinking about this place. Whether it’s grim or cold or bright or made-up altogether. I don’t really care. Jenny and I are the only ones that matter.

 

We’re not orphans, but we have no one really to take care of us. Who does? Patrick says dying is the mother of us all. Jenny says mother lives in Laughter House S and is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous!

 

Anne Parasol gave me a box today. Inside was a picture she had drawn of Laughter House S in black and gray crayon. Beneath it was a single word: SOON.

I hate her so much.

 

Jenny has a record we listen to sometimes when we’re under the sheets. It’s an old recording with a very soft saxophone and piano. It’s gravelly, like maybe it comes from a little bird cage swaying in the wind. She says: listen, do you hear what heaven’s like? And I answer: yes, I do.

 

I want these diaries to be beautiful for Jenny. Not gruesome or macabre in any way. There’s enough of that here. But words can’t be pretty enough. This wasn’t my idea. We should be playing clarinets instead. Then at least there’d be no questions.

 

If I’m alone, I try not to be awake at night. It’s best to sleep while it’s dark. Laughter House S is up-lit and there’s an odd glow about it. I’d rather not have to see it floating there in the tin night sky. The groan of its generators is bad enough.

 

Alex could’ve gone to art school. His sketches are amazing. There’s one of a face neither Jenny nor I recognize. It was hidden under his mattress, separate from the others, so we hid it under Jenny’s mattress. I don’t know why really. Something about it is frightening. Terrific. Secret. Jenny said she thinks it’s his dad, or maybe even God. Whatever. Alex didn’t know his dad.

 

I think Jenny’s getting sick of me. I don’t blame her. There really isn’t anyone but us. I’d be sick of me too. Of course, I’m not sick of Jenny. Nor am I crazy, insecure, or “prone to delusions.”

 

Jenny’s ear is leaking. She went in again, and when she got back it was red, then this morning: sploosh! Like mayonnaise left out though it doesn’t taste like that.

 

What if you could make, surgically, a passage into the afterlife? What if you could sew that into someone? Patrick said: you mean a Shangri-la incision. I don’t know what that means but I think that’s what they’re doing. It’s probably not an ear. It’s a gate.

 

Still, I’d go for it. I’d like two, two ways in. Maybe more. I’d find a rowboat and take Jenny with me, rowing gently down, very far into her neck where there’s an avenue of vines, flowering vines, jasmine vines. Like those pictures of courtyards in Mexico. Bougainvillea vines. And in the corner of the courtyard a banana tree growing in a big clay pot. We’d sit there for a while, watching its huge leaves bend, then walk down some stairs to our boat. We’d float then in unrowingness, just laze, listening to the grackles and mynahs and fruit dropping from the trees along the banks. I can see the dragonflies filling the warm morning air around us, one caught in Jenny’s hair that I carefully remove. Hold still, I whisper, I think we’re gonna make it.

 

Jenny’s gone. I went to her bed tonight and she was gone. I think she fought it, the way her sheets were, and the record player open. I crawled under the sheets anyway to see if she … I don’t know why I did it. To see if I could find her. I know they took her to Laughter House S, but I’m not going there.

 

It rained today. The apricot tree couldn’t keep its leaves. They fell in a wrinkled puddle beneath it. It looks half dead, the way the trunk twists up to the sky. I’m not crazy. This place is real.

 

It’s been two days. Patrick thinks now that Jenny’s gone he can just crawl into bed with me. Gross. I went walking through the dahlia garden, but they’re all bent over, browning. I’m going to Laughter House S. I don’t care anymore. Let them cut me into pieces, at least there’ll be more me’s then to find her.

 

She’s nowhere. Patrick says she’s become an “ethereal succubus.” I wish he’d speak English. All I know is she isn’t in the boiler room or the showers or the ‘hole’ where we found the white dress and cameras. Even Ann Parasol seems to be closing up. I hate this place.

 

Of course I didn’t go to Laughter House S. Are you crazy!

 

Jenny, if you ever get this, if somehow you make it and I don’t, I want you to know how much I love you, how you never can grasp, truly grasp, the things that you love. How once you have them they’re gone. Like mints. It’s torture, but I’m glad I found you here. I’m leaving now. If I don’t find you, well …

 

I don’t want to grow up. I know it’s hopeless. I have to go to my operation now. Patrick thinks it’s tonsillitis.

 

Good news! I found Jenny. The dog had dragged her under the bed.

 

© 2018 Thomas Walton

=====

Thomas Walton‘s collaboration with Elizabeth Cooperman—a book-length poem in prose entitled The Last Mosaic—will be out this spring from Sagging Meniscus Press. His lyric essay on Gertrude Stein—The World Is All That Does Befall Us—will be out this Fall (2018) from Ravenna Press. He is author of the micro-chapbook A Name Is Just A Mane (Rinky Dink, 2016). His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Delmar, Timberline Review, The Chaos Journal, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Bombay Gin, and other magazines and journals. Some of his poems were anthologized in Make It True; Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015). He edits PageBoy Magazine and raises dairy pigs in Seattle WA.