HOUSE OF ALL SENSES

There is the wind.
It bellows in the void, the big empty abyss. It tumbles upwards out of it, spilling up into the world, silent and mysterious and searching. It comes low over the Roanoke hills, tumbling across the cold banks of creeks and rivers, through the high valleys and around the ridge.
There is the wind moving.
It rolls over the flood plains and the leaning fields of dead wheat grass, its hollow laugh echoing out of the long empty straights of the two lane highways. The wind is whipping, wandering along the slender spines of old forgotten roads, besides the beaten foot paths, past abandoned train yards full of corrugated cars and ruined iron stacks, rusted metal all warped and ruined.
There is the wind moving along.
Scratching the doors of the solitary shacks and the shotgun houses, whispering through the windows of the battered brick apartments, the wind claws across the mud-soaked walkways littered with planks of plywood. Through the clotheslines and the kids drinking beer on the big backyard cellar doors, over the strips of package stores and gas stations, coffee shops and red-light intersections.
There is the wind moving along, rising.
It comes shooting under the highway overpass and into Downtown, its big hands spreading, gathering everything up, everything from the empty office-buildings to the side-street-vendors calling out their prices, the parking garages filled with the midnight hipsters and the lines of traffic jammed down every street like dominoes.
There is the wind.
Somebody opens the door and it follows them in, and sitting alone at the tiny table near the bar I can feel its long lone gust of exhaustion. A last gasp, a collapse. I wonder how far it’s come to find me, this wind. I look around the room.
It’s a bar, a long hollow chamber of a bar. Huge chandeliers dangle from an angled wood ceiling. Everything is stained red velvet and maroon, the light gleaming off the wood paneled walls and floors. The tiny round tables scattered like little islands are all nearly empty.
The place is nearly empty now, and I lean back and flip a quarter in my hand. I light a cigarette. I listen outside to the wind. There is something wrong in here, but I don’t what. I don’t why or when it happened. I feel sick and afraid. I smoke my cigarette and wait.
Behind me there is a woman walking towards the jukebox, the double tap of her heels over the red-wood gleam. The dead empty clicks of her coins dropping into the machine.
Then silence.
Just the wind.
The theme from ‘Cape Fear’ blares out so loud I turn around in my chair.
She is there, standing against the jukebox. She is wearing red. Her face is familiar. I’ve never seen her before. I turn back towards the bar for a moment but everyone else is gone. Trying to think, my thoughts swimming through the music’s overwhelming blare, I turn back to her.
She spits into the air, the music swirling and growing around her, covering her like a shroud, no other sound now save for the blaring horns of the ‘Theme from Cape Fear’. I can’t even hear her heels as she comes to me and sits, the chair scraping against the floor.
She leans in and opens her mouth, as if to speak, and the music stops.
There is the sound of the wind.
She doesn’t move. Nothing moves at all, save for the smoke rising from the lit end of my cigarette. I turn in the chair, I look everywhere. There is no one else here. The wind moves outside, screaming, falling and rising like the breath of some long buried creature, and suddenly the woman blinks.
She blinks again, and again, and again and again.
She blinks ten thousand times.
The wind grips the door in the entranceway and shakes it, and for the tiniest moment my eyes turn to see, and in that moment or maybe the next, the place is full. Full of people, full of sound. The laughing clash of crashing pint glasses, the rising smoke of a thousand cigars. A Jazz band plays off at the other end of the bar, people dancing and shouting, the waitresses darting like flies.
The woman sits across from me, digging through her purse. The lit cigarette is still in my hand.
“Are you ready to leave,” she says, not looking up at me.
“Yes.”
“You know,” she says, staring at herself intently now in her make-up mirror, putting on lipstick. “It isn’t like those boys from Winchester. It doesn’t have to be like that.” She shuts the mirror with a crack and purses her lips. Eyes flicker up at me. “We can do it slow.”
“Slow is no good,” I say, taking a drag off the cigarette. I’m looking around for the check.
“We only have the one knife,” she says.
“So?”
“So why should you get to be the one?”
“You think you should do it?”
“No,” she says, leaning in. “We’re a team. I think we both should do it. We’re in it together. We do them together. This isn’t like Winchester.” She sniffs and looks around. “We’ll take turns.”
“Together,” I say.
She opens her mouth, as if about to speak, but instead she just starts to scream. The theme from ‘Cape Fear’ abruptly blasts back on, making me jump, making me drop the lit cigarette that’s been in my hand, making me turn back around towards the jukebox and in that moment everyone is gone again.
The bar is empty again. I’m turned around in my chair. The music is blaring and furious and full of fear.
I turn back around and the woman is there. Smiling and smoking, leaning back in her chair.
I lean back in my own chair. I light another cigarette, that blaring music swirling all around me. I look down at my hand and that’s when I become fully afraid.
It’s disintegrating, my hand. It’s coming apart at the seams. Up my arms, my tattoos, my shirt sleeves – of it is decomposing, crumbling. The wind is moving feverishly now, coming under the door, invading the room, coming for me, taking me. The music is blaring, getting louder, droning on and on and growing.
I look at the woman across from me, I try to speak but my mouth is gone, my eyes are going, it’s all decaying and stripping away, and the woman starts to laugh a little to herself, as if she’s embarrassed for me.
As if I made a bad joke, or something.
The music stops. There is the sound of the wind.
The pieces of me are blowing all around the room in the wind. The woman stands up, her chair scraping the floor, and she dusts herself off and goes to the door. The wind coils around her like a snake, like an animal it purrs in her ear. The wind rolls through the room, collecting me up, my dust and ashes, my scattered fragments.
With the wind I blow out the door. I am scattered through the innter city streets littered with cars like dominoes. Past the side-street-vendors and the empty-office buildings. I’m all gathered up in the wind, all the pieces of me. I rise along.
There I am.
Over package stores and gas stations and intersections. Through the kids drinking beer on the big backyard cellar doors, through the clothes lines. The wind carries my dust across the mud soaked walkways littered with planks of plywood and the battered brick apartments, the shotgun houses and the solitary shacks.
There I am, in the wind.
My dust is cradled in the wind, past abandoned train yards and beaten foot paths, the slender spins of old forgotten roads. I am whipped along, wandering, these fragments of me spread out along the long empty highway straights and the leaning fields and the flood plains.
There I am in the wind, moving along.
Back around the ridge and over the high valleys. Tumbling across the cold banks of creeks and rivers. Silent and mysterious and searching. The wind carries my dust into the big empty abyss.
It throws what’s left of me into the void.

There is the wind.