Last night I dreamt I was in the matrix, on one of the ships crowded with a crew of people who had also escaped the programmatic prison setup by the robot overlords. My crew needed me to remember the life I left behind and I obliged. They plugged me back into the computer, jabbing the long metal needle into the surgically implanted port in the back of my neck. I awoke, gasping, inside a dream within the dream to see an odd structure looming tall before me. Every house I remembered living in during my computer-simulated past life; one stacked atop another. Like an aberrant, precariously balanced hotel. Fitting. When others come and go inside your living space all your life, your house is never quite your own.
I could sense an apparition somewhere within the structure, feminine and giggling without definite form or shape. Without thinking, I raced up to the front door, trying to get inside. The door to the first floor was locked, but looking up, I saw that the lights were on in the third or so story’s windows. I climbed the crumbling facade and let myself in through the front door, thirty or so feet off the ground. As I went in to find her, I noticed a small gecko peering out from behind one of the loose window shutters.
MCVI.
A small house, it felt big. I realized that I had become smaller by stepping inside, though others had become larger and the house itself seemed to loom around me like a vacuum. Looking out the back screen door, I could see the bamboo along the fenceline we used to hit golf balls at and a stain of my brother’s blood from when Nick accidentally hit him in the cheek on a backswing, brown and faded on the small concrete slab that made the claim of being a porch. Wandering around the house, I heard the moaning of an elderly woman slowly dying of old age in the room next to where my room had been. I heard the apparition’s giggling once again, this time from my own room. Stepping in, only my bunk bed remained across from the boobtube style TV with the antenna on top where I had first seen Dragonball Z. Surrounding the bed was the pea-gravel covered playground of the elementary school where I lost my first tooth. Literally lost it. I remember mom made me write a letter to the tooth-fairy, explaining the situation. Only got half price since I didn’t have the tooth in my possession. I heard the apparition giggling up ahead and I walked into the still full halls of the school, where I peered into classrooms between lockers and Fruitopia vending machines, searching for her. In the first, there was a long haired kid, straight blond hair, but the spiderman shoes gave away it was a boy, Logan. I pushed past him and caught sight of the apparition, curly blonde haired and smiling. But only just briefly. She dashed away crying. I didn’t hear my own words, but I glanced down and saw drawings torn in two. Personified little hearts holding hands. I could hear laughter from somewhere up in a high place and something trembled within me. I pushed through into the next classroom and could not see the apparition. A rotund boy built two symmetrical towers out of hexagonal yellow pattern blocks and smashed them down in front of me, telling me, “this is how they did it.” Looking out the window of the classroom, I could see explosions and smoke billowing in a large city as rubble and steel melted into an enormous pile, followed by the sounds of a nation weeping. I pushed further through, trying to get to the next classroom, nearly tripping over a RAD 2.0 robot a girl brought in from home. I was distracted. Country music started playing. Something about the courtesy of the red, white and blue. The other kids were singing along like they knew it. In this military town, all our parents fought for it it seemed. Finally in the next room, I became aware of the jean jacket I was wearing. It was my brother’s. There was something in the pocket, stiff and rectangular. I reached in and found my brother’s Blue Eyes White Dragon Yu-Gi-Oh card. I showed it to the kid next to me. But then a towering hand reached down and snatched it. I knew there was no recourse. No appeal. No return. The formerly giggling apparition was in the room for only an instant, but when I turned to pursue her, she ran off crying once again. The mouth of the towering hand scolded me, though I did not understand why. The confusion of this place was too much. I noticed, then, a string from the ceiling. An attic passage into the house above. The apparition no longer giggled. I could hear her sneering from atop us. I still felt the urge to pursue and climbed the wooden stairs into the next house.
MMMMII.
Scrambling up the stairs, this new house was close to the last, just a town over. I wandered from room to room, filled with people. I recognized one as my aunt, two as her biological daughters, one older girl as my step-cousin. They had moved in. The Christmas before, I got the new Bionicles. The Christmas after, I still can’t remember. Mom sold her Geo Tracker SUV. It was in her favorite color, yellow. Replaced with a drab minivan to haul more people. I could hide outside on one of my four bicycles or trudge through the thicket-filled field behind the house to search for crawdads, hiding under rocks in the shin-deep waters, but instead I ran off to my room for peace and quiet. As I had before, when I entered my room, I found myself at a new school. The apparition was here. I was certain of it. The place was a blur. Walking past the gym I could hear the sound of cup stacking and feet stomping along in an overly choreographed routine to a horrifically unedited cut of the Black Eyed Peas’, “Let’s Get It Started”. “Not here, not here, not here,” I thought to myself. Finding the classroom and stepping in, I was enticed by a blocky white Macbook with a flash game of Drag Racer V3 running on the browser, still lacking any form of site-blockers, but the smell of dissected squid filled my nose, making my stomach queasy. Then I saw her, the apparition, sneering at me. She ran off as soon as I caught a glimpse of her. Gone again. As I went outside, finding myself standing in the halls of yet a different school, I felt something in my jacket once again. This time I noticed I was wearing a zip up hoodie, checker-printed, a small tag on the pocket that read Off The Wall. In one pocket I found a phone. My first. Black and silver plastic with no camera. It could call, but texts were too expensive. Still, the thought intrigued me. I pulled from the other pocket a folded up note on a half-sheet of yellow legalpad. The note was written from my uncle on the battlefield. In it was folded a flimsy Iraqi 250 dinar, featuring Saddam’s face in faded teal and purplish-pinks. There was a hole in it, the size of my finger. The letter explained that it was confiscated from a soldier my uncle shot. He thought I’d appreciate it. I tucked the letter and the dead man’s money back into my hoodie and looked around. The classrooms weren’t worth investigating here. The apparition wasn’t in them. But she did seem to be near the end, where I could traverse up to the next level. I spotted her again, this time for just a second. Her expression was relaxed anew, half smiling, pulling me forward toward the next house. So I climbed wooden stairs into the next-next house.
DCIII.
The ugly brown shag carpet. The wall of mirrors in the dining room. The converted garage framed into a bedroom. How could I forget this place? Hours and hours and hours south of the last two. Right on the Mexican border. Just upriver from The Island. I finally stood near my full height, able to jump and touch the ceiling. It too was filled with strangers living in it. No longer aunts and cousins, but instead the moans of another aging woman dying of terminal illness haunted the corner near my room. As I backed away I heard the screaming of a girl. Not the apparition. Not the old woman. Another. Younger. I covered my ears, knowing it would be over soon. I backed into the converted garage where I found a Playstation 2, a TV and walls covered in Lamborghini and Nissan 370Z posters. The screaming died off, but was replaced with the sounds of rats scratching in the walls. Horrific. I pushed through the back door and found myself wandering the halls of a school again. It was like three schools put together. Half outdoors, half indoors, with a church in the middle, palm trees all around with a dense, thick humidity you could slice with a butter knife and bottle up. The apparition was here. I could sense her. She seemed to take multiple forms in this place. Appearing in a string of texts on various flip and slide phones with full qwerty keypads. In quotes of Chris Brown and Jordin Sparks lyrics. In some instances she seemed to dance with me, pulling me onto a basketball court where we pushed and shoved competitively. A moment of embarrassment as if being caught in an embrace drove her away, but she was back again just as soon. The text messages racked up beyond the billed limit and I found myself pushing a lawn mower in the hot sun, earning a wage to pay off my debts to pay for more texts to send and receive. Again. And again. And again. All along hearing the words from the radio discuss fraud and bailouts and market crashes that meant nothing to me other than the fact our car had no gas in it to get to and from school. The friendly apparition, smiling in a new way now, sat across from me as an English teacher taught about The Giver and we watched The Village. I slid a pickup line on folded up paper to her to which she responded, “LMAO.” I thought it was some Asian-language expression the first couple of times. I was sheltered to say the least, despite having figured out every swear word and slang phrase in Spanish. The apparition giggled and coyly maintained some distance at first, but she was the first to begin to take on nearly corporeal form. I pursued her intensely for what felt like months between rooms and theaters, streetlamp lit streets, drawing me to the second to last section of the schools where she disappeared once again, leaving only a trail of emo music tracks on a cheap SanDisk Sansa MP3 player. As I wandered into the final stretch of the school, this section far more vast and densely packed with teenagers than any I had known before, I was caught up by the big brass of classical music and buses. I caught peeks of the apparition briefly twice, thrice then four times more, but never long enough to measure it in real substance, though the lines in the changing cellphones continued to change and evolve, knowing it was the apparition in every instance in both lines received and in silence endured. I had a sense that from here on, there would be vast emptiness from the apparition, appearing fleetingly in texts now unlimited. It was time to ascend to the final house. I climbed up once more, for the last time.
CV.
This house at the top of the stack, the one I was largest in, was the smallest of the four, the most peaceful, the least invaded. Back in the state from whence my parents and their parents and their parents’ parents were from. I could sit in the living room and game on the Wii while my dog, Hercules, rested on my lap. It could be too close quarters at times. My room was right across from my parent’s room. The proximity was cause for my father’s concern one night when Emma Stone in “Easy A” on HBO did her infamous fake sex scene on my bedroom TV, echoing down through the floor vents into his room. “What ya watchin’ in here, son?” “Don’t worry. She’s just pretending.” I was almost content to forget the apparition as I stood on the dusty hardwood floor and took in the shape of the place, practically a single-wide. But she appeared nonetheless, taking on more and more of a corporeal form with each iteration. Each time, not quite right, I chased after her, across freshly cut football fields, climbing into my red Silverado and dashing around ponds filled with largemouth bass, perch and catfish, and across a single high school hallway that comprised the entire school, sparsely filled. Like a woodland nymph, she would appear in flashes, only to dash off once again. Still in streams of texts, I noticed now I could find her too in the screens of computers with emojis and images made no longer from punctuation contorted and filled with emotions to display. The songs were lighter here, less grungy, more rap-bars and bright, sparkly pop-y hues, blasting through the glasspacks on a buddy’s singlecab pickup truck as we sought out the perfect bassline on dusty dirt roads. Dropped off at home, reeking of the chicken coops at the high school, I walked back to my bedroom, seeing myself face to face as a memory in this place the one and only time, packing up belongings on the night of my graduation into a blue station wagon, hugging my parents and taking off that very evening, never to move back home again. I sat back on the couch after I had driven off. The apparition, not the same apparition I had pursued all along but a new one altogether somehow came and sat beside me. “What he’s chasing after won’t be found,” she started, “there’s another and another and four more apparitions that he’ll chase after, each in a new way, but you’ve found me and it wasn’t in any of these places.” I smiled and leaned back into the couch as she handed me a soft bundle, swaddled up. I looked down into blue eyes, almost grey atop her toothless smile. I looked over at her mother and then back down at the little girl before whispering to her, “she’s right. She always is.” We gathered our belongings up and walked out the door with our daughter, heading off to a house unrelated to the mound of crumbling lumber and vinyl I had crawled through for two decades to get to this moment.