When last I looked at the table, I had left my tools in their usual order–the pencil, the pad of paper, a sharpening knife for the pencil, and a try square. Just now, when I looked again, a paper cup had been placed next to the knife.
I have been working on my place for what now seems a lifetime and my habits are well confirmed. I know my pace, I know my goals, I know not only what I want to accomplish–little victories carry the day–I know my methods. One thing I will not use is a paper cup. To be emphatic, I will not use a paper cup near my tools. I will not place a paper cup near my work.
Someone else placed the cup there. But who? Never mind why–there can be no good reason!–or how. But perhaps when is important. Because it happened between the time I left the room and the time I returned, perhaps a minute later. It seems an odd trick for someone to enter a house unbidden, find and place a cup near my work and leave again unseen. Nevertheless, it happened.
The house, the unending project, is precious to me because of my forebears. I attach to them through the house. They are my imagined forebears, actually; I didn’t know them, though I met the owners by chance before I moved in. As time has passed, I feel I have begun to understand them.
Construction is a result of certain thoughts and ways of thinking, and the different methods of construction might comprise a language. In an indiosyncratic building such as mine, built by different generations with varying degrees of skill and familiarity with the processes, it may seem a private language, one that is spoken only by the few who inhabit the building, spoken to them, their families, and their friends alone. A lot of the language in my house is gibberish. But I have been concocting a grammar and lexicon more suited to the long term inhabitation of the house.
Someone placed a cup near my tools, a cup of water. It’s as if someone had placed an eraser at the top of a math problem on a chalk board or put up a sword overhead with string. It’s both a threat–a careless one–and a problem. Who did it?
I have a theory but I try not to indulge it. Too much. I believe it may have been a ghost.
I will not trouble myself with the thought that it is an outrageous suggestion. I do not know any seriously introspective person, which is to say, anyone who gives their life or the lives of others serious thought, who has not encountered the ineffable and come away convinced that some things that are unknowable are at least partially explained by a brace of theories that includes ghosts. Everyone knows of them; they are plausible.
The fact that talking of them openly is not condoned simply because they cannot be summoned at will does not make them impossible. The works of ghosts surround us; words are the ghosts of our fathers’ tongues.
Why therefore should I not think of ghosts when something as unexplainable as a paper cup of water should suddenly appear near the appurtinances of my work life? If that is not proof, explain, if you will, how the water then disappeared from the cup?
It did. Now a soggy paper cup sits next to my marking tools. I gather them, I commence work upon the house, attempt to forget about the cup. After all, how can one stop a ghost—why should I, being one, or only one, I might say, stop a ghost?
And yet perhaps not only one. Perhaps one of dozens.
At any rate, I am not as concerned with the possibilities as with the concrete realities. And is it necessary to be as punctilious with the construction of something that in almost any scenario is likely to outlive us anyway but we’d prefer be forgotten? In one case, the fortunate case where goodness and common sense prevail, the structure remains unused, sits in wait, never gets used, receives an occasional visit. In the other case, well. It is used a lot. We spend a lot of time in there.
In either event, should I care about the details of its decoration? How the water is stored? the condition of the shelving for the canned foods? Do the shelves need paint? Isn’t a butt joint sufficient? Won’t the sight of a tin of nails be forgiven if it ensures a life after?
We worry about the Russians. We are right to worry about them. They threaten annihilation, send their boys to pointless wars. As we speak, they are massing on the border. They are not reasonable. And our leaders do not know how to stop them. All they do is talk about the wall.
So. The now empty cup–proof!–dry and sitting next to my tools. It’s time to get to work. There is no time to waste. No time to fear ghosts, no time to cavil at my own shoddy craftsmanship.
A voice approaches. A man, in the house. A woman. His clothes are thin, his posture poor, his complexion wan, his skin shiny, as if he’d eaten the wax fruit centerpiece from the drawing room. I need to check that, now, too. She is dressed in a slip and a pantsuit.
I move behind the shelves. It is difficult to tell if they are ghosts or if they are real. I don’t want them to see me. It’s irrational, I know. Nevertheless.
“I never saw this before,” he says. “Look at these old tools. Wonder who left these here.”
She says, “Mmph. There’s already shelves here. We can clean this crap out and put in food, enough to last a few months. If that’s enough. And water, we need water.”
“We need power,” he says, “for the internet, for the radios, to know what’s going on.”
The way they talk! It’s gibberish.
“Honey,” she says. “There won’t be any internet. There probably won’t be any radio, either.”
He looks at her. His face looks questioning. He is drinking a cup of water. It is a paper cup!
“You’re right,” he says. “Probably not. A book? I haven’t read a book in, what, five years?”
“I put in the order last night. For the food. It’ll come in boxes, so we don’t have to open it. I’ll get some water, some bottles. Sixty gallons, how many cases is that? Hello? How many cases? Never mind.”
The man has picked up the square. My square! He handles it with his wet fingers, smears it with grease.
“What the hell, though. I doubt anyone’s been down here since the sixties.”
“Probably,” she says. “I’m surprised the lights still work. Seems fine, though. For an apocalypse. If it happens.”
“Yeah,” he says. “If it happens. Fucking Russia.” The man looks around and I knock the tin of nails from the shelf. He looks over, startled, but he doesn’t see me. “Well,” he says. “Let’s hope it’s nothing.”
–
Duncan Raymond has written nonfiction and humorous essays for a number of magazines and was briefly a reporter for an online newspaper. His novel, Tiny Vampires, also mostly humorous, is available on Amazon.
© 2023, Duncan Raymond
Halfway Down the Stairs 
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