We snuck into the conservatory that evening when the caretaker forgot to lock the door before heading home. It wasn’t so surprising; we had seen the caretaker before, especially on these summer nights when we frequented the gardens, loitering well after the ten PM warnings. These were painted white on green metal backing, and in the dark they looked like eerie, insectile ghosts floating among the jagged pines. The warnings were everywhere. If you were out too late, was the general understanding, you would be in danger of encountering the beast. Not that anyone was apt to forget; the caretaker certainly didn’t. The keys which hung around his waist, secured by a gold ring hooked to his belt loop, barely managed to jangle louder than his heartbeat the moment the sun dipped behind the pines. He always arrived too late and left too early. It was a wonder he hadn’t yet been dismissed.
So he was bound to fuck up as he did tonight, hasty to get to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill, and so too here we were. Our hand pressed against the cool glass wall of the conservatory, on the inside peering out. “See anything?” Button asked, his warm breath tickling our ear, fogging up the glass.
He had entered first, of course. He always crossed those fuzzy lines between should we? and hell yeah! with ease, and we always scurried close behind because we could never bear to be on a side without him. We took one last glance at the darkness, but not a shadow stirred under the heady streetlamps. We shook our head in answer to his question.
“Do you want the goggles then?”
We hesitated but refused. There was splashing water somewhere deeper in that made us eager to throw caution to the wind, and while Button wasn’t always pleased with our choices, he never went further than the initial suggestion of doubt.
A path led us past a pair of albino parrots, one of them awake, the sheen of its eyes reflecting the glow of the moon, and the other one asleep—or so we had thought. Its head rotated according to our footsteps, but it did not once split open an eyelid. The splashes were getting louder. The path morphed into a short bridge, and at the end of this bridge, there was a small pagoda. We hastened to the edge of it and extended our hand below, into the inky pool that surrounded us. An orange blur ventured out and nudged our fingertips, burrowed against out palm.
“How does it like you so much?” Button asked, and we shrugged. This must have startled the carp, because there were only ripples from where our hand used to be. Why did we make mistakes so easily when Button was around?
◆
We first met Button while he was rummaging through the dumpster of our crummy Chinatown apartment. He looked over his shoulder to smile at us as if scavenging through other people’s dumpsters was a perfectly normal thing to do, and that was how we knew he would be the best thing ever. He couldn’t have been any more than sixteen, like us, and he wore these emerald, bug-like goggles, which he explained were for seeing the invisible people.
“Like ghouls and goblins?” we joked.
“No, the invisible people,” he said very solemnly.
We let him know that we weren’t to be made a fool of, and he said that was smart of us. He had found the goggles tangled in a storm drain in the next alley over, and he wanted to find trinkets to disguise the thin, silver crack running across the left lens.
We would have left him and forgotten all about him, but that day we wanted something to be different than all the other days before it. We grabbed hold of Button’s sleeve and tugged on it twice so he would know to follow as we bolted up the stairs into the building. We bade him wait outside the room so we could ransack Mother’s single blue suitcase, but we couldn’t bear to part with anything in it, not even the pearl earring that was missing its twin. There was nothing left but a pile of plastic bags at the foot of the mattress, which held the felt slippers Mother would take to the market and not return until she had enough money to fill our bellies for the week. Some of the slippers were decorated with plastic jewels and sequins. We tore them off and showed them to Button, who thrilled at the sight. We made a show of stuffing the crap into his backpack, but before we zipped it shut, we hung the goggles by their strap on our side of the doorknob, and as quickly as we could without raising any suspicion, we closed the door on him.
The red and blue lights stole through the window again that night and danced on the ceiling; we watched them while we lay on the mattress, toying with the goggles slung around our neck. A soft knock—we almost sat up—turned out to be the couple in the room next to ours getting up to their usual affairs. At midnight like clockwork a low warbling, frequently interspersed with static, would seep through the paper-thin walls, which did its best to mask the noises, the pants and grunts and squeals of the bedsprings. We used to be embarrassed about what we heard, but it excited us, too.
Back when we had first settled into this apartment, when Mother had still been too frightened of the beast to wander the streets in the twilight and she had slept with her back to us, we would shut our eyes and lie rigid until our turbulent thoughts were at last interrupted by her gentle snores, and then, ever so slowly, we would turn to the side and press our ear against the wall. If we could have stopped breathing, we would have. We pictured the woman on the other side of the wall as curvaceous and tall, even though we knew her to be doughy and meek. In our mind she would be the one to switch on the radio and climb into bed where he waited impatiently, eager after a long day’s work, and then he would roll her over, slide a sweaty palm under her dress and run it up along her side…
But eventually even the loudest of moans could not satiate us, and now we used the racket to mark the onset of a new day, even though we knew this day would only ever be identical to the last.
We sighed. Mother wouldn’t be coming home tonight, either. We put on the goggles we’d taken from Button. The world turned emerald and bloated, but everything remained as it had been: it was just us on the mattress, alone. Eyes to the ceiling again—light green/dark green/light green/dark green—so nothing dangerous could leak out.
We wore the goggles around our neck the next day, so there was no denying what we had done when we saw Button. We plopped them into his outstretched hand, chagrined, but his smile was as big as ever, as if it had all been according to plan. Later we came to realize that if Button hadn’t wanted us to keep the goggles, it would have been impossible for anyone, not even us, to steal them from him.
◆
There was a rustle among the nearby ferns. Button slapped a hand over our mouth. “It’s just Lizard,” he said, and Lizard, disgruntled, emerged from behind a feathery tree trunk. As we passed him to go back over the bridge, he half-pounced on our back, eliciting his desired shriek, and afterwards his hands lingered too long on our shoulders, the worst of it all. Lizard was always trying to touch us. We wish he got the message that he was never not going to be a tag-along when it came to us and Button. It was Button who had said it was okay for him to follow when we had left that house, and Button never went against his word, no sir. Of course, neither of us expected Lizard to take the one-time offer to mean forever.
The last day of June when the landlord knocked on the door of our apartment the fourth time that month to tell us, “I know you’re there this is the last warning could you pay the rent already this honestly is your last warning,” and Mother had not yet returned, we decided to spend a week’s vacation at Button’s. We found him sitting on a bench, shredding bread crusts to the pigeons, but he was pleased, we think, to see us.
We spent the day together and when night fell and we feared the coming of the beast, he brought us to an abandoned house, which looked like a montage of peeling paint and blue-grey mold on the outside and for whatever reason had an overturned bathtub in its backyard. Ivy grew frazzled around the tub, pulling it into the damp earth. Part of us wanted to ask Button if we could camp out under it instead, but an image of a claw sliding underneath the rim, its sharp talons clacking against the stained ceramic, silenced us. We snuck into one of the boarded windows where the wood rotted just enough for us to pry the planks apart and push them back together.
As we navigated through the dim halls, Button filled us in on the gossip. “You know, they say that the owner’s daughter died in this house, and out of grief he left to who knows where.”
“Of course,” we said. That’s what people do when they can afford it, after all: escape.
“Okay, but sometimes,” he added, “you’ll get people prophesying his return. Don’t listen to them. The guy’s never coming back.”
Button steered us into a room hosting half a dozen body-sized cocoons; a teenager’s head, sometimes in a beanie, poked out of a few of them. We asked him if he had really meant it if we could sleep in the closet, and when he said, “Yes, what’s wrong with it?” we gestured to the mop-haired boy snoring inside. Lizard. In the subsequent days he would latch onto us like a needy puppy, hoping our common newcomer status would cement into reality the relationship he had been fervidly formulating in his mind, but we had no intention of making new friends. We did indulge him the occasional smile, but this turned out to be a grave misjudgment.
Once, Lizard had conned us into sitting alone with him under the stairs, where he had moved to after Button had resolved the closet mishap, had scooted right next to us so that our arms touched whenever we fidgeted, which we couldn’t help but do. He showed us his collection of postcards that he had pilfered from various convenience stores. They were of a predictable sort: Big Ben stretched up to clouded skies, the Eiffel Tower as it sparkled at night, and the Statue of Liberty surrounded by boats treading sunset-lit waters. If one had been of the Leshan Giant Buddha, maybe then we would have been impressed. Lizard wrote poetry on the backs, such as this one:
LOST BOY IN THE CITY
once i misplaced XXX
my heart. i XXX found
a new one XXXXXX
in some other’s boy’s chest
who was XXXX me and also
not.
“Most of the poems are for my uncle,” said Lizard, and he laughed softly, a little embarrassed. We recoiled. We did not want to be privy to this part of him; we did not want to open ourselves up like he would have expected from us afterwards, a tit for tat. “He left a box of manuscripts in Mom’s attic before he went to sell cars in Mexico. I don’t know why she doesn’t bring them down, but she doesn’t throw them out, either. She throws nothing of his out, even though he has a different telephone number and hasn’t replied to any of our emails in years. But when I found the box, it changed my outlook on him, you know?”
He pushed a crumpled postcard into our hands. “You can keep that one.” he said, and now we had a sepia-coloured photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa we felt too guilty to throw out but which made us so irritated whenever we glimpsed it wedged in the hinge of the closet door.
Button took one glance at the postcard and said. “I think he likes you.”
“We are going,” we announced abruptly.
“What?”
But by then we had stuffed what few belongings Button had lent us into his backpack and slung the backpack over our shoulder.
We were met with ill luck; Lizard intercepted us crawling out of the window, and Button, not yet understanding the gravity of the situation, told him he was welcome to come along with us to… “Uh, where are we going exactly?” Button asked.
We did not reply.
“The botanical gardens?”
We shrugged, too irritated to speak.
“Maybe he’ll take some time to raid the convenience stores along the way,” Button whispered to us, the skin around his eyes crinkling as Lizard went off to fetch his coat. We glared, but Button remained impervious.
◆
We had long suspected the house to be haunted. Sometimes when we felt too dejected to leaf through the magazines in the library with Button, and while other residents were either smoking weed by the overturned bathtub or copulating in the dank basement, we built a nest of soft things in the closet—Button’s ratted baby blanket, Button’s scarf, Button’s fur-lined jacket—all of which he stored in his backpack for winter—and tried to smother ourselves in the softness until we became lightheaded, until we were sure we were not splintering apart, or if this fracturing was somehow too severe, too inevitable anyhow, at least we could manage to keep all of the pieces in the same place, because this was how it felt like when we wished to go home.
And not home as in that apartment with stains for a carpet and walls so thin you could hear the couple next door grumble and then bicker and then scream at each other after the radio started to play only static, infrequently interspersed with a high warbling, until—whump!—it was only the man speaking. Home as in the tiny village an ocean and hundreds of thousands of footsteps away from here, where after school we would walk with our friends along a thin, muddy river that snaked around our house and disappeared into the next village over. As we recalled that time we fished a notebook out of this river, a slim blue volume identical to the ones in our school bag, the closet doors would rattle—gently, at first, and then in a thunderstorm kind of fury. We would shout above the noise, “Quit it, Lizard, leave us alone!” but then the door would ccrrrreeeeeeeaaaaakkkkk open, and we would find ourselves in the company of mere dust motes.
There had also been the incident in the bathroom. We had awoken in the shadowy hours of the morning needing to pee. We were so groggy we didn’t notice it at first, but when we saw the first few fireflies twirl past us, we finally registered the voice. Feminine, muted. It called our name, and we were terrified. The voice spoke from behind us, and right when we felt a cool breath on the nape of our neck, we dashed into the bathroom and locked ourselves in it.
“You’re going to have to do your business elsewhere,” Button had said when he had first toured us around the house. “I recommend the community centre a few blocks that way, when it’s open. Electricity, water…none of the basic utilities work. See?” He twisted the tap of the bathroom sink, and for a heartbeat nothing came out. Then: plip. Plip, plip, plip, plipplipplipplipplip—and as Button kept turning the tap, water kept gushing out, but it was only ever cold. “How interesting,” Button murmured. He slipped the goggles perched on the top of his head over his eyes, and by degrees his gaze left our face, wandered upward, and fixed on something slightly beyond us before snapping back to meet our bewildered expression. “Why,” he asked, “do you think that is?” And embedded in the question had been a kind of expectation, as if we should have known the answer.
Too scared now to return back to the hall, back to the voice, we curled up on the icy tiles and dozed in and out of consciousness until it was past noon and a girl was hammering on the door, asking if we were done shitting or what. We took our time responding. We examined our clammy appearance in the mirror above the sink, our reflection distorted by the extensive cracks branching out from the lower left hand corner, the delicate veins of a butterfly’s wing obscuring our face.
We had assumed the ghost was the owner of the house’s daughter, pissed off, maybe, at the bunch of teenagers loafing around what used to be her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom, but she wasn’t ever malicious, we were sure of it somehow, and as long as she wouldn’t use our name, we could tolerate her. So it was really too bad that when we left the house and realized we were still being haunted, it was Lizard who was doing the haunting and not her.
◆
There were figs in the conservatory, we discovered, after wandering through a thicket of gnarled roots and zebra-patterned leaves and blue tulips. None of us bothered to stick to any preordained path anymore. We reached up on our tip-toes and plucked the ripest figs off the branches. We splurged until our molars felt grimy with sugar and the hunger in our stomach quelled. Lizard scrambled up the tree with Button’s backpack and began stuffing it with figs, but something tumbled out: an emerald flash, a shooting star.
“Watch it!” said Button. It was one of the rare instances where he sounded irritated, but for good reason. We scooped the fallen goggles off the ground and were relieved to find no more cracks than the one that had been there originally. But there was a glimmer now in the corner which skirted from lens to lens. It was a reflection, we realized. We turned around. A tiny, glowing speck—a firefly—weaved about the gloom of the leaves where the moonbeams did not reach. We followed it to one of the darker glass panes of the ceiling, where it joined countless other fireflies in arranging a message:
Button nudged us as fireflies filled the conservatory, expanding and contracting and dispersing in luminescent, nebulous clouds. They split our shadows apart and caused them to flicker and dance along the ground. It was like we were back home again, on that night we had curled onto the futon with red, puffed eyes because we couldn’t be perfect, and everyone at school told us we had to be. We wanted to be. Our mind was an agitated reel of dreams: whorls of colour, paradoxical plots, comedy becoming tragedy becoming comedy, and then Mother called our name, and the reel snapped, receding into some mysterious place at the centre of our brain. We opened our eyes to see Mother’s pale face hovering above ours in the darkness. “Put your shoes on.” she whispered.
We followed the footsteps in the mud until they stopped at the edge of the riverbank where Mother was waiting. How much time had passed with her, listening to the lapping water, the occasional howling of the wind? A minute? An hour? Together we have always lived in small spaces. Often we only had to turn too rashly to bump elbows, but we were careful and operated as if we lived in two different dimensions, sometimes on the brink of convergence although never quite making it. Yet now, on this patch of earth we could pretend was boundless for our exploration, we chose to sit down beside Mother, because we felt that maybe (in this moment at least) it was okay to want the warmth that came from when our knees touched.
“Look,” Mother said. A mini galaxy had come into being while we had been watching the silver streaks—pieces of the moon—slither down the river. The constellations that used to mock us with their imperious distance were now within a hand’s grasp, and it was like witnessing a time lapse of the universe from its inception: stars constantly orbiting, morphing, blinking in and out of existence. And for a fleeting second we understood it all, that the universe was an aggregation of consciousness, that which could be divisible into smaller parts, and those smaller parts into even smaller parts, and those even smaller parts into the one that was us, who was slowly showing our first cracks, even though we had tried so hard to smooth them over. So the question was: how much could be taken apart from the whole until it was no longer recognizable as the whole, who was to say we mattered when pieces could be subtracted, just like that, and no one would notice?
How many fireflies would have to vanish before this scene became something else entirely?
We chased the insects while Mother observed the calm flow of the river washing away the dirt and the trash the villagers threw into it during the day. We needed only to glance at the flatness of her expression, the soft round of her shoulders as her back curved ever so slightly, to understand that something inside her was leaving with that river too, and maybe that was when she had first conceived the notion to leave.
◆
“Wow,” Button gasped.
Lizard hopped down from the fig tree. The fireflies swirled around his feet as we drew closer to the base of the tree, and Button noticed that behind Lizard’s heel was— “Hey, it’s a handle!” The fireflies again:
Button crouched down to grab the rusted metal o-ring fixed into the ground, camouflaged well by the scraggly roots and clovers, and wrenched the hatch open, landing on his butt in the process. A faint, citrusy scent greeted us from the pit below, like orange peels left to disintegrate in the sun. We wrinkled our nose, not too sure what to make of it. We snapped on the goggles, saw only stone steps descending into an unfathomable blackness, and shook our head at Button, who had been staring at us anxiously.
The invisible people were not ghouls or goblins, Button had said to us once. They were ordinary people who somehow, one day, just woke up invisible. And maybe these people were your mother and younger brother, and just yesterday they were all seated around the kitchen table for supper. And so what if there was an empty chair where your father should have been, because he had been caught with terrible people again, and your mother cared more about this than the fact that for the past week you and your brother had nothing to eat but powder that came in boxes? “Yes,” we said, “so what?”
But we thought about the many different faces Mother wore since arriving in this city. There was the unbearable face she presented to her customers, the one where her eyes almost melded shut and her cheeks were pushed as far apart as possible to make room for that sycophantic grin. Then there was the scary face she showed us when she returned, haggard, disheveled, to our apartment after not selling enough slippers. A deep crease would form between her brows, and the sharp look in her eyes would shut us up real quick, because sometimes in her absence a fatal tenderness for her would creep in and we would become prone to babbling. Then there was the terrible face we could glimpse if we caught her by surprise, the kind that held nothing underneath and reflected everything back. None of these faces were Mother’s true face…at least, we didn’t think so. It might have been that we had forgotten her true face, and maybe Mother didn’t know it anymore, either.
Of course, soon afterwards she stopped returning to the apartment in the evenings, and not too long after that, we stopped waking up to her snores and her soft body pressed inadvertently against our curled back. So we didn’t doubt the existence of the invisible people, but we disagreed with Button on the one thing—people did not, all of a sudden, one day just wake up invisible; it was a process, and there were signs.
Perhaps worst of all, although we could never tell Button, was that this person probably knew they were disappearing, the way everything clicked for us one day when we glimpsed our own reflection in the grimy window of a subway train and could not recognize the pallid face, saying, “Don’t look, don’t look,” that was staring back.
Often we wondered if what we had seen in our reflection then was what Button’s mother had seen in hers as she glanced in the rearview mirror of her car.
“She wanted to go on a trip,” Button had whispered, once and never again, about what had become of his mother. It had been dark outside, according to him, when she ushered her sons into the car—they were still in their pajamas, which was odd because she was usually so uptight, always so worried what the neighbours would think. He asked where they were going as the city smeared across his window, and as the car veered off the road into some lightly wooded area, he asked again because she would not answer. But he was sleepy, so sleepy, then, and all he could recall was watching her lips in the rearview mirror open and close, open and close, like a fish going blub blub blub blub blub. When his eyelids lifted next, the car was idling, but his mother and brother were nowhere in sight.
◆
Button went down the hatch first. He did not ask us to follow. There were no invisible people in the pit, but it was like ice was forming under our skin when we thought about the darkness gnawing at the edges of Button. Our toes curled at the pit’s brink, and despite a dull throbbing in our chest that made it plain we needed to walk down those steps with him, we could only watch Button’s back shrink into a blue, floating smudge before Lizard hopped in and blocked him from sight.
He offered us a hand. Although his palms were sweaty and he flashed us an awful grin, we grabbed his hand anyway because Lizard’s loathsomeness actually served a purpose for once: it distracted us from our mounting unease, and Lizard was a tiny sacrifice to be made if we could stay with Button.
The air was denser inside the pit and the smell stronger. Button called over his shoulder, “Do you hear that?” and quickened his pace, although it was difficult even now to make out his voice. We wanted to holler at him, “Wait for us!” but we kept descending in total silence, ruined only by our ragged breaths. We touched the walls of the pit gingerly with our fingertips, trying to keep our balance. It occurred to us then that
SOME STAIRS
NO MATTER HOW
YOU APPROACH
THEM ONLY
EVER DESCEND.
As we tripped yet again over the steps, a glint of gold struck the ground and bounced away. We recognized the object more by its delicate jingle than the tiny keys adorning the ring—it was the caretaker’s ring. We bent down and a wave of nausea crashed over us. The keys had left a trail of dark flecks, and when Lizard pressed his finger to the mysterious substance, it showed up as a deep red on his pasty skin.
“Did you close the front door?” we hissed at Lizard. He had been the last to enter the conservatory. From the ghostly whites of his eyes, we had our answer. A growl came from above; the beast had arrived, and even if we wanted to, it was too late now to retreat.
“B-Button?” said Lizard. “Button!” He turned to us, his bottom lip trembling. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to go home.”
As if we had a choice?
Lizard liked the thought of cheating convenience store owners, sleeping in haunted houses, and slinking around the city not giving a care about boundaries and curfews—believing, not-so-secretly, that his runaway status would give his poetry edge—but he liked all these things because at any point he was free to deny them. If he grew tired of all of this, he at least had a mother to return to, to stay with until he got bored and left again. We wanted to go home too, every waking second and in the most vivid corners of our dreams, but we had to compromise with that Chinatown apartment, and it was apparent from the start that this would never be enough.
This morning we had passed by the apartment. Loitered around the dumpsters feeling reckless, thinking we could be braver than we actually were. We looked up into our cracked window fixed with duct tape, and tried and failed to steady our beating heart, which floundered in our chest like a suffocating fish. Because maybe this time Mother would be inside, nursing her blistered feet on the mattress, and when we entered the room she would look up and say, “Help me count the coins.”
We did indeed see someone stir in the window that day we swore we would never return, but it wasn’t Mother—it was someone who could pay the rent. Button tucked us into him and whispered in our hair, “I’m sorry.”
◆
There it was—the growl again but louder, closer—and stranger, as if it was peeling apart into distinct layers. Why did parts of it seem so familiar?
Oh.
It was as if a woman was calling out to us, calling from inside the beast.
Or perhaps this woman was the beast, her words gurgled, as if she was speaking our name underwater. The name Lizard avoided because it was too hard for him to pronounce, the name Button thoughtlessly said made us sound like several people. The name Mother eventually stopped calling us after we made the mistake of asking if we could be an Alice or Becky or Claire, although she would not use those names for us either. Our hands tingled the way they did when we had leaned over the edge of the pagoda and let the carp nibble at our fingers, ghostly blurs reaching out to us from the bottomless gloom.
The last we could ever remember Mother speaking our name was when the red and blue lights had returned to the apartment, but unlike the other times, they swirled on the ceiling for an entire hour before scurrying away with the shrill wail of sirens. Mother held us close as she periodically pried back the curtains, watching uniformed men escort out a family of three from a neighbouring building. The woman yelled and struggled against them, biting them, and the man could not have walked any slower. The child, no older than seven or eight, stumbled along with an expression so blank it was difficult to tell who was in that shrunken body; a boy or nothing at all. We feared for him the most.
The uniformed men had come to take them back, but having left their home for here like us, we suspected that what they would be forced back to likely wasn’t the home they had missed.
“Good riddance!” someone shouted.
◆
Sometimes places become invisible, not just the people. The home we missed, we were beginning to understand, existed within the murky stuff of our memories, which made everything worse. When we closed our eyes, we imagined ourselves by that lazy river, pinching the notebook between thumb and index finger, the pages dripping with blue ink. “What does it say?” our friends chirped as they clambered around us.
We were about to answer when a large lump up the river caught our attention. It floated facedown among the crumpled sheets of paper and broken pens leaking ribbons of ink. A backpack rested on top of it, where all the junk had spilled out. Before we could speak, Mother ran out of the house, yelling, “Don’t look! Don’t look!”
But we had, and it would not have made the slightest difference.