by Adam Greenberg
When the front entrance falters, and shortly thereafter the back, naturally we MacGyver all manner of workarounds. The architect, bless him, runs around like Noah plugging holes in his ark. But when the windows pose a problem, and when even the chimney proves impassable, my wife and I go out of our way to reassure him that we’re not mad, that really, we understand.
“We have everything we need right here,” I insist, putting the architect on speaker and setting my phone on the kitchen counter.
“It’s like we’re camping,” beams my wife, ever the optimist. “The great indoors.”
“Bug spray?” I ask my wife from head to toe. The pretend smell makes her pretend cough. It must have something in it because my wife gives me the look. I hang up the phone. We don’t even make it to the bedroom. On the landing, we roll around as though enveloped by tall, lush grasses.
We don’t know how long we’ll be inside, so we try to keep busy. Sometimes I make the mistake of contemplating our two-ness, that is, our less-than-three-ness, but I know better than to mention it out loud. I distract myself by exploring the house. It’s so large that I joke that the rooms are fucking like rabbits, hastily multiplying. Whenever I discover a new one, it’s like stumbling onto the spectral plateau of a foreign planet. I keep a map on the back of the fridge. “Look, honey. Another one,” I say, excitedly marking a new wing on the third floor.
“That’s nice,” she says, but I can tell she isn’t really listening. These days, all she seems to do is bake bread. The frustrating part is how little she eats. Loaves pile up like newborns in a maternity ward. When I’m worried she isn’t looking after herself, I wrest the spoon from the bowl where it’s sketching lazy circles. I toss it in the sink with a hollow thud. “For fuck’s sake!” I say, but by the time I turn around there’s another spoon in her hand, its motion fluid and repetitive, as though it has a mind of its own.
So, I go on discovering rooms.
That’s how I find the delivery guy wandering the halls, bleary-eyed from thirst, weak from hunger. His hat is blue and red. His pants are crusted with marinara stains. It’s lucky I find him when I do.
“My god, are you okay?”
He stares right through me, like I’m a pane of glass.
I let him collapse into my arms. He’s heavier than he looks.
“How did you even get in here?”
I help him into a room I’ve never seen before. There’s a green sofa that looks like it’s from another decade. An old box TV is playing The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I set him up on the couch. Already, the episode seems to relax him.
“Wait right here,” I say.
When I’m back, he’s sound asleep. His chest rises and falls like a finely tuned accordion. For a few days, he’s mute from the trauma of his ordeal. When he’s ready to speak, he has no memory of ever having lived anyplace else. “Outside?” he asks, stretching the word like a never-ending strand of mozzarella.
I decide not to tell my wife, but I can only keep her in the dark for so long.
“Have you seen this?” she asks, huddled by the fireplace, flames licking at her back. She thrusts our wedding album in my face and retreats back into her blanket.
“I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,” I say, rapidly flipping through the laminated pages. Sure enough, the delivery guy’s face is in every photo. Here’s one of the delivery guy doing a keg stand behind the bar. Here’s one of the delivery guy kissing Great Aunt Kitty on the lips. Here’s one of the three of us exchanging rings in a nifty triangle, a shape—as the architect would gladly tell you—as strong as they come. Initially, I’m sketched out, but then I see the humor in it. His weak jawline and acne scarring. The blue and red cap riding his skull like a big fuck you. I can’t help but chuckle. Before long, I’m belly laughing, and I can’t catch my breath.
“It’s not funny!” says my wife, but once I explain everything, she calms down some.
I squeeze my way under her blanket. The wood fire crackles, light flickering organically.
“Do you think there are others?” she asks.
All that matters is we have each other, I want to say, but the words, I don’t know why, just won’t come.
One night, while everyone is asleep, I find a door in the basement with a sign taped to it. Back in 15, it says. I pace the hall for ten minutes before picking the lock. “Hello?” I ask, but my voice is an echo. Inside is a vast carpeted oasis with enough LCD screens to fill a Best Buy.
“Did you call the architect?” asks my wife, when I finally manage to drag her from the kitchen. As I pull her by the hand, her whole body seems lighter than it used to. I try to remember if she was always this thin. As I drag her down the stairs, I’m worried she’ll float away like a balloon.
“Does he know about all this?” she shouts. “Is he watching us? Is this a game to you?”
“He won’t return my calls,” I say.
“Where did all these cameras even come from?” she asks. She peers into one screen after the other, running around the room, dizzy with nerves. There are dozens of live streams, giving us every imaginable vista of the neighborhood. Here’s old Mr. Sanders mowing his lawn, his liver-spotted head shining like a lightbulb in the sun. Here’s Mrs. Kettle just next door, pulling weeds in her vegetable garden. My wife waves at the screen.
“She can’t see you, honey.”
“I know that,” she says.
“Look at this,” I say, pointing to a different screen.
“What?”
“Come see for yourself,” I say.
Pale blue sky floods the screen, interrupted only by the slenderest branches of the cherry tree out front, swaying in the breeze. An oriole flits by, its plumage oranger than cold-pressed carrot juice. That’s when I see the nest.
“Look how many!” I say, counting the brood of speckled eggs in their sock-shaped nest. In total, there are six.
“Would you look at that,” says my wife, and I hold her tight, her rib cage pressing uncomfortably into mine, her jaw bone sharp in the cradle of my shoulder.
Room by room, we find that we are not alone. No one who lives in our house believes that this is not their home. For the first time since we moved in, we lose patience with the architect. We want to give him a piece of our mind. When will all of this end? When will he find us a way out? But he’s stopped returning our calls.
“I told you we couldn’t trust him,” says my wife.
“Fucker,” she mutters under her breath.
“Calm down. We’ll be alright,” I say, but I’m not sure. I haven’t felt fresh air on my skin in so long. I’m starting to forget what it was like.
There are awkward moments in the halls. The ornithologist walks in on me while I’m taking a shit and lingers with his binoculars for a moment too long. The bus driver mistakes me for her husband, her hand halfway down my pants before I have the wherewithal to shake her off and tell her to go jerk off one of her passengers if she’s so goddamned lonely. I don’t know how many of us live in our house exactly. Fifty? One hundred? Sometimes I get so angry, I can’t see straight. Other moments, I just feel lucky to be alive. It takes careful mapping and weeks of collaboration with the geographer, but I find routes that are my own. Halls that no one else knows about. Rooms that no one else seems to bother visiting.
Then one day, it happens.
“Everybody, come quick!” shouts the ornithologist, sprinting from room to room, sliding around in his socks. We all gather in the basement, the buzz of chatter electrifying the air. There must be dozens of us staring up at the humongous screen in the command room. Up there, the oriole eggs are as big as planets.
“Shhhh,” someone says, “it’s starting.” The room falls silent as the first egg quivers up on screen. The shell wiggles, wiggles, then cracks. The baby bird thrusts its head through the gap, pointing its soft beak to the white dawn, like a miniature dinosaur. A collective cry rings out. I feel warm tears sliding down my cheeks. My heart breaks as, one by one, the rest of the hatchlings fight their way into the world, looking like half-finished knitting projects in their splotchy white down. Everyone cheers, grabbing the person next to them to give them a kiss on the lips.
“I love you, bird,” I whisper into my wife’s ear.
“Cheep cheep,” she says, and she lets me pretend masticate some pretend worms before she pretend nourishes herself on the pasty pretend substance.
For a few days after, my wife eats with a vengeance, as though making up for lost time. But then, in the blink of an eye, her hunger reasserts itself with the most terrifying clarity. I try everything, but none of it works. I can barely get her to eat a single bite of food. Her hunger is a force of nature. It’s out of our control.
“What is it, honey?” I ask. “What’s the matter?”
She stares at me like the answer is unspeakable. Like I’m an alien from another planet. Like, if I have to ask, then how could I know?
Room by room, my wife confines herself to smaller subsections of the house. I don’t want to let her out of my sight, so I give up my exploring, shoving the map into the stuff drawer. I think that I’ve picked up cooking rather well, but she rolls her eyes at my efforts.
“Here comes the choo choo train,” I say, feeding her mushy peas or, her favorite, papaya with lime.
She’s too weak to feed herself anymore. Every night, I say a prayer that she’ll turn the corner. “Tomorrow’s the day,” I whisper, as I tuck myself into my sleeping bag and fall asleep at the foot of the fridge, its gentle whir as soothing as the amphibious sounds of the womb.
Some days, the house seems chaotic as a zoo. Others, it’s so quiet I think that maybe we’re alone after all.
In the sweet warmth of the kitchen, my wife’s shoulders take on a golden glow, and I kiss them relentlessly, tenderly, every chance I get, just so that she won’t ever forget how much I love her. I thank god and the architect daily that, though we are confined to our kitchen now, I still have the screen on the back of my fridge on which to monitor the highest branches of the cherry tree as new generations of orioles are laid and hatched, laid and hatched, year after year. My wife and I watch them grow old, as though they are our very own young.
“Did you always have this?” I ask, kissing her shoulder one morning, here, and here—and here.
My wife’s hair is gray now. My skin sags like badly worn leather.
“Have what?” she asks.
“This tattoo,” I say.
I drag her to the mirrored backsplash, propping her up so she can stand upright. Peering over her shoulder, she sees it too.
“Take a picture?” she asks.
I snap a pic on my phone, and together we look at the photo of her tattoo, which seems faded, as though it’s been there a long time.
“It’s nice,” she smiles.
In plain lines, it’s a blueprint of our house, sketched out with perfect clarity. As time goes on, she swears that she’s always had it, though I have my doubts. Sometimes I think it resembles an eggshell that’s been cracked open only to reveal more compartments, and more.
When the black cherry tree comes down in a storm one day, I nearly do something drastic. I imagine detonating a hole with plastic explosives, or bursting straight through the wall like the Kool-Aid guy. But of course, this is impossible. There is no way out of our house. There never will be.
I feed my wife some more papaya. Some of it dribbles down her chin.
I mourn the cherry tree, remembering those first five hatchlings. Maybe they’re still out there, hurtling through the air in elaborate formations, building their nests, twig by twig.
Adam Greenberg has published poems in Best American Experimental Writing, The Brooklyn Rail, Prelude, and more. He holds an MFA from Brown University, where he received the Edward Honig Memorial Award. He lives in Washington, DC and teaches composition and creative writing at American University. He is completing a novel called Mirror, Mirror, about a boy with an eating disorder.