My cousin Eldie lives in a 4,000-square-foot house that took twelve years to build. A mad framer called the shots, redrawing the plans at will and tucking treasures — river rocks, top-end screws, his ex-wife’s jewelry — in the rafters to be found … by whom? Why, the equally mad electrician, of course, who arrived too late, too late, and ripped apart the vapor barrier and the stiff needled clouds of pink insulation. This electrician believed the others who had come before him, who did not know him, who did not even know he’d be hired for the job, had conspired against him, making his job “a living hell.” He bound himself in wires and nearly set the place in flames, right-wing rants blaring from his car radio. A mad plumber ran pipes in and out of walls and tuned them so the house would sing dirges as water heated and the tub filled. Closets vanished off the plans, electrical outlets appeared on ceilings, a thin line of mold appeared beneath the torn vapor barrier before the mad sheet-rocker arrived and sealed the ruin tight. The tile guy, highly recommended, scrapped Eldie’s subtle design and claimed artistic license, floor to ceiling, so that two steps into the bathrooms, a visitor, dizzied and disoriented, might end up mistaking a tiled dip in the wall for a quirky urinal. Finish carpenters went crazy in that house, held their breath, installed cabinets with manic speed, then fled. Insanity all round, and I haven’t even talked about the well-digger with the voodoo stick, the roofer with the reefer, the trio — frightened by a moose — who refused to step out of their truck and instead delivered two woodstoves up the neighbor’s rutted gravel road, leaving them beside the woodpile with a caustic note.
(Did I mention this was in Alaska?)
But the house, eventually, was finished. And Eldie, her husband, and the three kids moved in. Were they mad before? It’s hard to remember, but once they took up residence, the entire family began scouring the recycling bin to collect drinking containers — empty salsa containers and yogurt cartons and filmy jam jars — and ate off the battered dishes they shared with two dogs. Unpacking that wedding china, even the pots and pans they’d used in their old cabin, seemed too much of a task. Boxes of carelessly sealed possessions were carried off to a storage unit they’d visit perhaps once a year. Over time they covered the walls with outdated maps and the fine wood floors with twelve lost seasons of discarded shoes. Now, on Friday nights, like any normal family, they eat takeout pizza and watch movies, the five of them swinging from hammocks strung across the crooked corners of what was meant to be a great room but, altered by a mad contractor, instead resembles the deck of a famous ship that failed to reach its destination and instead was forever becalmed, ghosting on an orphaned sea.
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[“Madhouse” is included in Adrianne Harun’s new collection of stories, Catch, Release, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2018.]