I close the door behind me and feel my way between a car and the nearest wall. I could key this car and then leave. Maybe that would be enough, would be a different kind of choice I can live with. Of course, I could key it after I sit with Eddie. I creep and edge forward, and I crouch in a corner used for garden-equipment storage. It’s not the basement, but it will have to do. I don’t close my eyes and I don’t build his house inside my head.

And holy shit! That’s it! The secret to control is loosening, disassociating from the illusion of control. Part of me pulls, stretches, then breaks away and enters the house. The rest of me stays behind.

Part of me flows through the house’s interior as a chill, a draft of cold air, wisping through the antiseptic kitchen and then the vaulted-ceilinged, wainscoted dining room with its expansive baroque table that never once has been fully seated, and then through a maze of other rooms to the black-and-white marble foyer with an avaricious chandelier satelliting above a split staircase that foolishly insists one has a choice of direction.

Back in the garage, my eyes adjust to the light starvation, but I don’t want to see. Within my cluttered nook, I find and quietly unroll a section of landscaping tarp.

The walls of the second and third floors are porous membranes that cannot contain this part of me, and I drift like time, and as I progress, the wood, drywall, fixtures, furniture, paintings, and family photos molder in my wake. Even if they are to be fixed or replaced, they would molder again because decay is the state of all things before me, during me, and after me.

I am gravid with exhaustion; the splitting and multiple existences drains me. I shakily pull the tarp over my body and head. It is dark enough and I am weighted down enough to easily imagine I am buried under the ground. The tarp will keep weeds and grass from growing over me.

The part of me I feared was never there, the part of me I feared was always there solidifies, and now on all fours, I ascend to a turreted bedroom on the top floor. The door is closed. The door is open. The door has always been open.

Welcome to Dracula’s castle?

Under the tarp I can’t see anything. I wrap my arms around my legs and I’m curling, shrinking, and I cry because I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to be here anymore, and I’m afraid this will last forever.