An Idea

By N.S.

“Ok, so what’s the idea?”

“Well, basically this. You find an old house. Maybe you rent it or something, but you don’t live in it. Well, I guess you could live in it, but you’d have to restrict your living space to a very small part of the house, and eventually you’d have to phase yourself out.”

“Okay…”

“Okay, so you decorate this place in a particular way. Maybe everything you furnish it with comes from thrift stores. In my version I make everything look like it’s from some bygone era, like a lost seventies dream. Shag bathroom mats made to look like rainbows. Weird candles melted onto a heavy wood table. Old telephones, green walls, shit like that.

As you furnish it, you start to create an imaginary family that lived there. You designate rooms for certain people. Maybe Mom and Dad had the largest room, and then there was one room for Brother and another for Sis. Maybe this place had a broken family living in it, maybe some deadbeat parent never came home and his kid just took over the place, inviting all his friends to stay there and trash the place. Then again, maybe he cared about it, and made it into his own private teenage paradise.”

“So you’re furnishing the place according to who might’ve lived there.”

“Yeah, but since you’re buying everything from thrift stores, you’re getting this nostalgic, weathered effect, which I think is important…I don’t know. I guess you could buy all new shit, which might be even more interesting…anyway; I’ll get back to that.

So now you’ve created a living space for these people. Now you have to get to know who they are. You have to create an entire life for them—letters, diaries, old telephone bill stubs…everything. You have to create this family out of thin air.

They will have secrets, and you will know all of them. The youngest son will have a trunk full of things that are important to him, but only you will know why they are important. To everyone else it’ll just seem strange, enigmatic. But you’ll know. You’ll write a journal for him, you’ll write his life. You’ll create his birth and death, but more than that, you’ll create the daily mundane reality of his everyday existence. The first porno mag he found. Who picked him up from school last Monday and the school trip to the roller rink. Everything.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Yeah. Now the parents, you need letters to them, so you need to know the whole background of this family. Where they’re coming from. Where they’re going. Letters that they wrote but never sent. Books that they underlined passages in. Why? Things, so many things that one accumulates in a single life.

And secrets. Interpersonal relationships—the deeper, the better.”

“Okay. So what does all this add up to?”

“I’m not sure, but wouldn’t you want to see it? Once you had it all created, all laid out, you could invite people there. Or just leave the door open and let people find it. Let people snoop through the detritus of this imagined life, let them pick and prod through these people’s things and get to know them, create this grand epic story that you’ve conceived only through what you’ve left behind, these certain clues, pieces to the puzzle.

It would be meditative. It would be voyeuristic, for sure. The house would be quiet, but you could put on a record, if you wanted. The music would sound through the dead house. The silence would be key. This is technically a place you are not supposed to be in—you are an intruder, but you are also the key to keeping all of this alive. It doesn’t exist without you, only you can put it all together and bring these people to life.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Well, in my original conception, the house is messy, like a Gummo house, just gorged on stuff, filled to the brim with things left behind.

But let’s suppose, like I’d mentioned before, that you make this into a contemporary story, a house with all modern furniture and new settings. That might make it even creepier. Secrets would be even more hidden, more heavily buried. You’d feel like even more of an intruder, creeping around perfectly shined and polished places, looking into drawers, trying to draw clues from Master Shopping Lists and Wal-Mart receipts.

Things would be buried in the garden, there. Holes in the floor. Cobwebs when you lift up the cellar door. Yeah…I like that…”

“So what does it all mean? I mean, you seem like you’re getting at something, maybe the way our lives are just a construction of certain things, stuff and memories, and that when we’re gone it’s only the stuff that remains?”

“It’s something like that. Only I think memories remain, too. I think, if done properly, you’d be able to feel the people in the house. You’d give birth to a ghost. The hairs on the back of your neck would stand up, there would be a presence there. You created a story, a life, and not a virtual one. A tactile one. One you could feel.”