The House

Nikki Barnhart

When my childhood was over, I moved out. There was a big, old house on the far end of town, convenient to nothing. No one wanted to go over there, much less live, but I could afford it, everything that it had to offer.

I liked its long hallways, its multitude of floors: the gaping skylight on the top one, the cool darkness of the rest. The whole house seemed on a tilt. Every move felt precarious, as if I could slide off my fragile new axis at any time. My room—the second life of a former closet—was small, redolent of phantom fumes. But I liked how I could keep it clean, how I could keep everything in order, myself included. There was one window, an octagon newly punched into the wall, through which I could only see the jutting angles of the house as it wrapped around itself; even when looking out, I was still encased.

Throughout the house there were doors; so many doors that the landlord told me not to open. I listened because I was afraid of what might be behind them. Then I grew to like the fact that I didn’t know the entirety of what the house contained. It felt infinite, in a way I had just learned that life was not. So my room became the world, and the house became the universe.

There were things in life I did not have, would not have. But the house, in its immeasurable abundance, I knew, would give me everything I needed. I was more sure of this than I was of anything else, then or ever.

There was another girl living in the house, but I never saw her. I wasn’t even sure which one of the locked rooms was hers. I didn’t know if she was above me or below me or down the hall—I would hear her footsteps everywhere, it seemed. It was always when I wanted to be most alone that I was most aware of her.

At first, I thought maybe I wanted to know her, my constant unpresent neighbor, but then I heard the unrelenting gush of her need. I would hear her crying through the walls, her voice moving urgently. I could tell by the cadences that she was not talking to herself but to someone else; something was always pouring out of her and into another vast receptacle that seemed to yield and yield. I could never make out her words; their contours would seep and bleed into each other.

Before I lived in the house, I had been taught to fear strangers, but she was not one; she was the opposite of that. She was too familiar, too close; her existence pressed too hard on my own. Her loneliness was so much louder than mine. It repelled me, the open ooze of it. I had recently learned to quell my own particular ooze, had taken great care in the design and craft of my personal stopgaps.

It wasn’t as hard as you would think to stay away from someone in the same house, not a house like that. It’s like it was made for it, that kind of avoidance; the windingness of it, the different floors, all those locked rooms.

I lived like that for a long time, alone in my four corners within the infinity of the house, alone but for the sounds of the girl. I learned to coexist with her cries, tuned them out as a type of white noise. I would wonder, though, about the girl’s repository, the voice on the other end of the line. The depths of their magnanimity were surely some kind of wonder of the world, some remarkable canyon. From the stillness of my room, I pictured myself from the edge of it, looking to a bottom that didn’t exist—just a gaping expanse. It was exquisite, that plunging void, more beautiful than anything I could ever imagine seeing, out in the world. I would think about what it would feel like to be that capacious, as endless as the house.

Time in that house became a type of myopia: a visual abnormality, light-sensitive, hard to discern from far away. So I don’t know exactly when it was that I started not only hearing her cries, but receiving them. Embodying them. I realized I had to give, too, in that house. Maybe it had been me all along that she was speaking to, I thought; maybe it was me that was that inexhaustible vessel.

Through the walls, I began to match my rhythms to her own. Her blurred words became a landscape I learned to navigate. A terrain I cartographed. When she cried, I breathed with her like a meditation. A liturgy. “I hear you,” I would say. “I’m here.” With every inhale, I felt myself expand. The whole of me stretched and stretched. I started to see myself as a container, instead of just something contained. I became bottomless. Immense. As large as the house—larger. There is no limit to what I can now hold.