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House of Woo

Linda Andrisan

    I crossed the impoverished threshold of that Capitol Hill rowhouse and sniffed a painful residue of past stories discarded into the backyard metal shed. Outdated books on Russian and Chinese history were strewn about the soiled floor. There was evidence of political has been’s of that town with their curiosity meddling mounted in dirty, neglected piles of that catch-all crusty cache of unclaimed possessions. And he gleed through his barely visible smirk as he turned his back to me and closed the rusty, sliding doors.
    “Your rent is due the last day of the month,” he said coldly while I accepted his terms with slight uneasiness. It was cheaper than the last place and located closer in to Capitol Hill.
    What was I doing there? I never thought about it then. It was merely a place to stay for the cheapest price I could find within the confines of that empowered zone.
    “This is known as the Jefferson house,” he told me with a Bengladesh accent disguised through years of practicing American English.
    I admit I was as green as they come so I didn’t ask, “What does that mean.” And he didn’t bother to explain. He just grinned and left.
    There were five bedrooms. Three upstairs and two down. I took one of the downstairs and settled in with my books, computer, clothes and guitar.
    One day would go by and nothing happened. Not that I waited for nothing, like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But I was there day after day with no clear meaning as to why. Eventually she was fated to come down from the locked room and break the silence.
    “Hi. They call me Woo.”
    “Glad to meet you,” I said with my usual unassuming politeness.
    I guess I wanted everyone to like me and be my friend.
    Her closely bobbed Afro framed a stately pose imaged into a lean, mean body. I liked looking into her commanding eyes set in a smooth, light black face. I understood without knowing that she was making her final statement in life.
    “I just got back from the dialysis clinic where I go every Monday and Thursday.”
    Need she explain? The main artery in her left arm puffed out like an inserted hose with running water, which she made no effort to hide as she insisted on wearing tank tops that summer to expose her situation.
    Her friend in the other room moved out, leaving a vacancy behind. Shortly thereafter, I heard or imagined I heard a voice out of nowhere say, “She’ll get her diploma.”
    I remained polite and nice and got involved with the library downtown, back and forthing it with no real purpose. Time moved on and I kept paying rent. One day I got a sudden inspiration to drive to another town where my old high school buddies were. I invited her to go with me. She eagerly accepted. On the day of departure, she was not there. So I waited long enough and then left without a note. Made it to my destination and called back in to my landlord to see about her.
    He said, “What did you do to her?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She’s dead.”
    “What?”
    “Slit herself and bled to death.”
    “So it’s suicide.”
    “Well, we’re going to report it as a homicide. You just may want to come back for her funeral.”
    So I did. The church was packed and I sat in the back with one of my housemates. It was closed casket but the photograph on the program had Woo in her earned cap and gown.
    The next day Tom marched in with an abrasive air of I know more than you authority and said, “So how’s Woo doing?” He moved into her cleaned up room and took charge of the household politics. Louie joined us shortly thereafter. I found it strange that Tom would leave the house every morning at 8:00 with a backpack over his shoulder and meander down towards the Capitol. It was almost as if he were “politically inclined” in that town and had some important business to take care of, yet wouldn’t tip his hand on what he was doing. And Louie kept visiting the veteran’s hospital. Then he’d come back and shut himself up in his room with a bottle of whiskey and a whore he picked up off the street.
    Slowly I realized I was sandwiched in between a mental patient recently released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and a mentally deranged Vietnam War veteran turned alcoholic and drug addict. Were they trying to say, “Which are you?”
    It seemed like Woo had left behind a suffocating spirit taking its revenge in death that life here in this house couldn’t quite sustain. They took a risk. I kept quiet, for several years to come. The yellow bulldozer across the street broke through the tar façade in front of our house and began plunging deeper and deeper into the impacted earth beneath. By nightfall all activity had ceased. They were still there and I was still in here.
    Suspension between here and there. And I couldn’t help but think, “With or without pay?” An open-ended question they couldn’t resolve. So they brought her up from the ground. And I was afraid to go on . . . .
    All these years they’ve called me “gutless” and “a piece of chicken shit.”
    So I gave away my books, sold my computer, abandoned my red car with its flat tire on the curb side and walked away. Either way they forced me to confront them. . . the “they” that seemed to follow me for years, ever since I left him in that Arlington townhome community some time ago and ran from the politics he was so immersed in. I guess I felt like Woo would understand better than I why I had come there again. Indirectly, perhaps I was looking for him and didn’t know where else to find him.
    In just a few days after her death, I felt like she was haunting me through all the winding, dank streets of that bleak, oppressive local winter and wouldn’t let go. All the while, I was trying to hold on to my resume, my ticket to another dream . . . one all of my own. Seemed to be it turned into a cock’s fight of will. I was among the living, still. She was not. Yet she had the power and unity of that town which cornered me in its enclosing circumference. She was teaching me a different reality from the one I had known with him. The stone and steel buildings jutted up high from the cement like multi-leveled spaceships and an ultra violet haze descended, snarling between the locked spaces of my cavernous path. Night lanterns lit deep below the sidewalk grates paralleled a glowing existence in the Capitol dome . . . waiting, waiting, waiting. Where was I in such a place that transformed before my eyes into Alice’s Wonderworld, with no one else on the street but I. Like a deserted ghost town. No engines whirring. No pedestrians walking to and fro. No lights in the downtown bureaucratic offices. And no way to run from.
    I frantically sought him in an ubiquitous search. I knew special places – the in’s and out’s of meeting spots, exchanges, if you will, where promises were kept. The cloud flow of a domestic sky encapsulated that silent city. But she wouldn’t let me find him.
    In that momentless space between two worlds, I fled back into the reality I was familiar with and re-entered her house. They were left in their political paralysis and I remained paralyzed in an imposed, shuddering fear that succeeding years only tantalized and hushed.
    Rock-a-bye baby . . . the cradle will fall. As always. Sweet dreams scattered all over the ground and supposedly reassembled by picky exploiters who advertise on E-bay. Something about “flying machines and pieces . . . .” Is this Humpty Dumpty all over again? A nursery rhyme I can’t quite get out of my mind.
    Hate doesn’t heal this dilemma. I’ve tried it. I know. Half-suspended. With or without pay, I demand, and, like the school kids, rebel with an “It’s not fair” attitude which triggers mental contortions of past injustices and the sources behind them. Bottom line. Some cock’s fight of wills. I am not amused, we used to say to each other in our childhood . . . and then . . . we said, And they call this Love?
    Air. Can you fly with it? How high? Higher than they ever imagined? Nothing but a big set-up. Icarus fell so hard as his ancient wax melted into the crippled tears of Olympic agony. What would have happened otherwise? He pissed on his wings and handed them to the next bidder. And now? Are they better than he? She thinks not. Otherwise, she wouldn’t need me back in her house.

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