The Pink House
This is, quite simply, my favourite short story I've written.
In the pink house, wisteria climbed through the kitchen window and a German boy lived in the basement. He had just turned sixteen and never came upstairs. No one else seemed to mind. At night, I heard rustling and the clink of what could have been champagne glasses. I ignored it: I had bigger fish to fry.
The place on Alma was the third I’d looked at upon arriving in Vancouver. The first was an immediate no: mildew crept from ceiling to window to ground in dizzying storms, and I immediately foresaw two years of coughing and weeping and wasted begging with a landlord. The second rejected me: three astrophysicists sharing their place on Yew thought that I seemed a tad square. This accusation was particularly galling as they had affixed electric guitars to their living room wall. Me? Square? I wore Doc Marten loafers. I had a small tattoo on my ankle. I had once seen Lana del Rey in concert. Is all of that square? I wanted to die.
My postgraduate colleagues thought I should have chosen a place closer to the city itself. The pink house was too close to campus, they thought, and I’d get trapped in the neighborhood, half-asleep, half-drunk with student commuters zipping back and forth on the B-Line. I wasn’t too worried about that initially, instead struggling with even more hyper-local issues: was my laptop charger too far away from the bed? Where would serve me the best cortado without making me feel like an asshole for ordering a cortado? Why did my new roomies keep hanging up the bathmat on the shower-rail?
Speaking of new roomies: I first saw the German boy from the top of the stairs as I stood in the kitchen, scrolling on my phone. There was a flicker of silver, that of a fish’s scales, darting through the scrap of basement that I could just about see from the stairway door. I got a glimpse of his huge teeth, their sharp edges. I sighed. Kids were so weird and awkward. I made myself a grilled cheese, carefully nudging a pickle into its gooey middle, and went upstairs.
I called my father the week after I moved in and watched him as he tried to work out how to connect his headphones. I told him struggling with technology was a stereotype of the invalid elderly, and he told me that he’d intentionally dropped me on my ass as a child to see if I’d bounce. We chuckled. Then I had to go back to my part-time job: I’d picked up a work-study gig on campus, portioning pinto beans, ground turkey and rice into plastic tubs. I once left the German boy a tinfoil-wrapped burrito on a tray, lazily wondering if he’d creep up the stairs to eat it, but he didn’t. A few hours later, I ate it myself, and felt the cold guacamole coat my throat.
The other roomies were okay. Mei was a radio producer who thought a master’s in social work was “a huge fucking waste of time”. I looked down at my ankle when she said that and wondered if I should have shown the astrophysicists my asshole, showing them a puckered promise that I would have been a good person with whom to share a home. Colin was Mei’s ex-boyfriend turned gay best friend, a marketing executive from Winnipeg with a large bulge that he kept wiggling towards me when we were alone upstairs together. He took very quick showers, so fast that I wondered if he had time to soap his whole body. I don’t know if the German boy had a shower. Was there a bathroom downstairs, in the hungry belly of the pink house? I couldn’t help but not really care. I had essays to write.
The purpose of my qualification was to return home and look after the public, take in the masses, help them as best I could, and try to convince myself in the process to stop thinking of them as any different from me. I wanted, essentially, to be good. Whenever I thought anything negative about the people I wanted to help, I would snap a rubber band I kept on my wrist and switch it onto the other wrist, hoping the elastic crackle would somehow trick my brain into being kinder, sweeter, an angel of social work. It didn’t seem to do much.
In bed one night, I heard a dull creaking sound, and saw a tree outside kiss my window with its branches. My room was large, enough space for a queen-sized bed, a desk, a cupboard, and a yoga mat on the ground, and the twigs outside were casting intricate shadow patterns across the wooden floor. I pictured doing pilates poses, the patterns from outside turning me into some kind of tree-creature myself. I texted my dad asking him to loan me a hundred bucks, but the time difference meant he’d be dead to the world. I was a bad son.
And then I noticed the German boy standing just outside my room. My door was slightly ajar, and I could see him standing there, in a ratty loincloth, something metallic weighing heavy around his neck, his eyes burning towards me. I yawned performatively. The little fucker. I was not some babysitter, and he should have known that. I rolled over and shut my eyes.
Whenever I mentioned the German boy to my classmates, they thought I was doing some elaborate bit, and so I learned to drop it. Colin found the topic deeply aggravating, and Mei would just shrug languidly. “He’s German, they're famously weird people.” She had a point, but I still struggled slightly to understand why this teenager lived with us – or, more correctly, lived under us. Did one of them invite him to stay? Did he have to supply three past landlord references like I did? How did he get from Berlin or Cologne or Munich to Vancouver? Looking back, I’m not sure why I wasn’t interested enough to follow up on any of these topics. I had so much to do, so many short little coffees to drink, and so many boys to follow from one end of the library to the other, hoping they’d notice me.
I had made exactly one friend at UBC, a former jock called Kyle with eyebrows like snoozing millipedes. He had huge feet and a lisp that I found at times adorable and at times affected. We would go to the beach together and dip our toes in the cold Pacific blue, and then I’d jerk him off in the bathroom of that tea shop that overlooked the water. We went to his apartment once, but the thing living in his attic kept screaming, and we weren’t in the mood to listen to that all night.
I have to confess, I would have liked a boyfriend back in those days, but I wasn’t in the right headspace. I had what felt like the wrong body, the wrong haircut, and the wrong mind. I wanted to be more beautiful. I wanted to be new. I had a little mantra I would hum to myself along those lines before I slept each night. The German boy groaned back to me every so often, his voice rattling through the house’s air-vents, but I just told him to be quiet. I couldn’t and didn’t want to relate to a teen. I was an adult, though admittedly one with terrible hair.
The sun kept setting earlier and earlier. I would sit on a bench near Kitsilano’s swimming pool and watch the Pacific melt into shadow. In the cooling sky, I would see fauna dive bomb into the ocean, pulling up fish to tear apart mid-air. Is this how I really knew I was lonely? I was blue-balled and three of my assignments were returned without grades. The first day of November, the sun didn’t rise at all, just sat there on the horizon, with some terrible rose-gold glow. The newspapers the next day didn’t mention it, although I can’t pretend I read more than just the headlines. On the streets, people kept trying to make eye contact with me. I wondered if I should try to learn a foreign language. I wondered if I should travel. I wondered if I should take off all of my skin, piece by piece.
One night, I was getting the bus back from the queer barbershop Kyle had recommended, and I watched as a group of rich kids in cardigans and disposable masks videoed a drunk man vomiting on his own chest as he sat opposite them. I didn’t help him. I didn’t really reprimand them either. I tutted slightly at the state of the youth of today, moved the elastic band on my wrist onto my left hand, and got off the bus a few stops early.
When I got home, Mei was asleep in the kitchen, a tendril of wisteria creeping towards her, a trail of saliva dripping from her lips. I could hear downstairs that Colin was feeding the German boy from a bowl. If he was using the terracotta one my parents gave me, I was going to scream. This town was exhausting. Bars and shops in Vancouver closed so early, even on weekends. And everything was always wet with moss. I missed my friends from home. I wrote “ouch!” in a phone note and then followed it up with that emoji with stars in its eyes. I texted Kyle a picture of my cock and he didn’t reply.
A big project was due and I holed up in the library for a few days, only going home to shower and catch a few hours of sleep. I survived off squishy bananas and packets of instant pho. I didn’t see a single soul on campus. It was snowing upwards, flakes gently lifting through the trees’ canopy outside. I could just about see the beach, where the coast was afire. Even the world was desperate for attention. When my laptop broke, I went to the front desk and waited, but help didn’t come, and I vaulted over it to find the how-to tech-repair guide myself.
On the B-Line back to Alma, the bus driver kept looking back when paused at red lights to take quick videos of me, getting blurred footage of me shaking and sobbing. I told him, louder and louder, to keep his eyes on the road. My phone beeped. My thesis proposal meeting had been moved to January. My camera app kept deleting and redownloading itself. My dad sent me an image, a blur that was ultimately undecipherable. I didn’t seem to have other contacts saved. The entire cosmos was becoming unsteady.
Days never seemed to begin, nights to end. All of our cutlery went missing, and then the rest of the kitchen too. When I packed up to fly back to Ottawa for Christmas, I popped into Colin’s room to say goodbye and he wasn’t there. Mei wasn’t in her spot either. It was raining. My shoes were too tight. The rideshare app said the next car would come in forty-seven hours. I sighed. Public transport? In this economy? I laced up my shoes, the ones with the holes in the soles.
I heard the tell-tale creak, the one I had grown to know so well over the four months of living on Alma. Maybe I should have sucked it up and moved into the fungal home, dealt with the constellation of mildew kissing my lungs. Maybe I should have poisoned one of the astrophysicists. Adulthood was a darkening door. I still hadn’t signed a lease for the following month. I walked downstairs to say goodbye to the German boy.
On the plane, I moved the elastic band from one hand to the other, endlessly. My ginger ale had gone flat almost immediately. The air conditioning roared. My wounds itched. I looked out of the window, and the clouds below were pink.