Page 88 of The Staircase in the Woods

Though that was bullshit, wasn’t it?

Jennifer, his wife? Well, he loved her and she loved him, but then why was he cheating on her? Why had he cheated on her with three other women in the past? He told himself it was fine, that the cheating was justa thing men did,that what he had with the other women was purely physical, not emotional or spiritual, and those types of cheating were therealtypes of cheating. Physical cheating was like, well, it was like cheating on your diet. You ate ice cream when you weren’t supposed to. Oopsie-doodle. You’d get back to being good tomorrow. It wasn’t like you were married to the ice cream. It wasn’t like it was part of you. You didn’t love it. Didn’t give yourself to it. It was just a small pleasure resulting from a momentary lapse of judgment. It was like masturbating, but with a friend.

And his kids? If they were so great, why didn’t he understand them? They seemed so selfish. He loved them, he was proud of them, but he didn’t alwayslikethem, not really. He told himself that was fine, too—they were teenagers, and he had been a teenager once, and washelikable back then? No. Not at all. He was a dopey shit back then. High all the time. So he wanted to grant them mercy. But damn, it felt like the kids were just using him and Jennifer. Mostly her. Healways made the joke to people,LOL, it’s like we’re just an Uber for the kids,though of course what he never said was, he never drove them somewhere unless he really, really had to. It was Jennifer. Always Jennifer. But he told himself,That’s what dads are for; we’re not there for the administrative details, we’re there for the big stuff, the life stuff. But did he even know his kids well enough to know what their big life stuff even was? His children were mysteries to him. They were like those Russian nesting dolls except he never saw the smaller dolls inside, only the one on the outside. The one they showed to the world. He never bothered looking deeper.

And now, in this moment, in this place, it made him revisit that sermon from Pastor Greg, the one about Hell.

Hell being a place of absence.

He was absent from the life of his family. Not just because he was here. But in the bigger way. The worse way.

And they were absent, too. Gone from him as he was gone from them.

And he’d never see them again.

He loved them. He was awful to them.

These were the thoughts.

Around and around.

Like that bottles of beer on the wall song, except an endless reiteration of how much of a fucking epic piece of shit he was.

He wanted to die. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe he died in that bathroom and never really woke up in the hospital. Maybe Hell constructed for him a life, an imaginary one, that it would rob from him, and this was the manifestation of that. Maybe this wasn’t where Matty went. Maybe the others were just hallucinations. Or demons. Or synaptic flares as his mind died.

—

It was in the Bottle Room that Hamish lost his shit.

The Bottle Room: a mid-century modern-style living room. Late seventies, maybe. A boxy square cathode-ray tube TV in a wooden console box sat next to a hi-fi stereo cabinet with the turntable and aneight-track player. In the center of the room was a sunken area of three chairs, a coffee table, and a burnt umber orange couch. An area they used to call a “conversation pit.”

Bottles were everywhere.

Liquor bottles.

A hundred of them, easy. Some knocked over, a few on the floor, but most covering every flat surface available—the TV console, the top of the stereo, the armrests of the chairs. Lore went around sniffing them. “Booze, all booze,” though then she sniffed one and made a rankled face. “Jesus, I think this one’s piss.”

Hamish nodded and mumbled wordless words at her, because he was only barely listening. Because his brain was preoccupied, the same way Owen would chew a hangnail or gnaw his lower lip—it kept all the bad thoughts orbiting. How he was a piece of shit, how his family was better without him, how this place was endless and they’d never get out, how this was a Hell he deserved, how he was dead and all of this was just part of his afterlife torment. He’d been sober now for years. And these bottles made him want to drink so bad. And not just drink, but worse—pills again. Coke, if he could find it. Anything. Stick it in a needle, cook it in a spoon, suddenly he wanted it.I could go out the old-fashioned way. I could die easy. Maybe wake up again out of this place. A third chance at a new life.

Then he passed by a mirror.

It was a sunburst mirror—the mirror itself a circle in the center, and radiating out were golden spokes, some shorter, some longer. A stylized sun.

In the mirror, he looked like a ghoul.

His flesh was gray-green and pocked with rot. His teeth, the yellow of flu mucus. And the face itself was bloated and jowly, patchy with tufts of red beard going gray. The eyes were purple like popped grapes.

This face,hisface, grinned big and broad. Fat and greasy and wretched.

One of those burst-blood-vessel eyes winked.

And that did it.

Hamish drove a fist into the mirror. The glass shattered around him. Everything went white—a wave of rage bleached anything and everything. All he could see was the motion of his fist. All he could feel was the burn of his shoulder as he threw punch after punch, his knuckles crunching, skin tearing, the sting of blood. Then someone was on him, grabbing him, pulling him back—

He roared and drove an elbow backward.

His attacker’s face racked back. An arc of blood in its wake.

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