Uninvited

“lobelia erinus cyclone in black and white” by Robert Fleming

Terror roots me in place, I cannot move. Someone is pounding on my door. My friend S is on the phone with me. She lives in California and I am in Pennsylvania. There is too much space between me and the people I love. It is a late October. Friday night, 9pm. It has been dark for hours but the autumn weather is mild. An hour before, I made a cup of tea, got into bed, called S. And now the pounding.

Maybe you should get the door, she says.

Oh, I’m not expecting anyone, I say.

I never answer the door if it’s a stranger, especially not after dark.

What do you do when someone uninvited shows up at your door? A violation as violent knocking, transforming solid wood to porous vapor, an accidental alchemy? The pounding continues. S can hear it through the phone and now I am out of bed, creeping towards the staircase. From the top of the stairs, I will be able to see the door and the thin windows that run alongside it, making me feel bare and exposed when I’m downstairs after dark. While I have lived in this house for three months now, I have not yet fixed the porch light and so, from the top of the stairs, I only see a man’s shadow in the darkness, pounding. He is shining a light through my window.

Now I remember I am an animal, vulnerable and filled with blood. There is so little keeping that blood inside my body. I imagine it spilling onto the floor. The hallway before me is full of red.

The pounding continues. My ears thrum.

What do you want? I say to the man, as loudly and bravely as I can. S is still on the phone.

Police. Open up, he says.

I didn’t know a cliché could sound so scary. And still, the pounding. He won’t stop pounding. On the door, in my ears.

What do you want? I say again.

Are you alone? he says.

No, I say, I am not alone.

I am alone.

I am alone but not entirely alone. S is still on the phone with me. I have a witness that hears everything and sees nothing.

I’m here about a domestic disturbance, says the man, still pounding on my door.

I didn’t call anyone, I say.

Come to the door, says the man.

No, I say.

I can feel my body shaking on the staircase, the phone clutched in my sweaty hand. I must be breathing, but I swear I cannot breathe. The magic of terror transforms me. Turns me animal.

Now I think I should have asked him what address he was looking for. But crouched on the stairs, phone clutched in my hand, I could not think. I know (I think I know?) I asked to see his badge and I know (I think I know?) he laughed, said, I’ll show it to you if you open the door. It seems to me now, remembering an event now weeks in the past, that I asked him to go away. I remember he shined his light on his jacket. I distinctively remember that, from where I was crouched on the stairs, I could see POLICE written on his chest. But it’s a week before Halloween and every year I see people dressed as cops, these costumes are easy to find. I probably asked to see his badge again. And then the memory fades. Dims. Goes out.

 *** 

Mars is in Scorpio and I cannot sleep. I listen to the chatter of my house and watch the red shadows move across my walls. I am full of water and chaos and all my borders have been breached.

My astrologer, B, lives in Portland, Oregon. We first met in 2015, at a writer’s camp in Northern California. We slept on air mattresses on the floor of a shared room, which made our presence at the otherwise luxurious retreat center more affordable. The next year, back at camp, we sat at a wooden table overlooking the Pacific Ocean, coffee mugs clutched in our hands. I imagined she was the kind of person whose generosity and insight were often turned into resources to be extracted.

As if reading my mind, she said, You are an incredibly empathic person.

I flushed. I am always looking for recognition.

I said, like you? She nodded. I said, I imagine it’s depleting for you. There were tears in her eyes. I was speaking to her, but I was also speaking to myself. B said empathic but I imagined what she meant, or also meant, was porous.

I thought about B for two years. Finally, I emailed her. Would you be willing to do an astrology session over Skype? Over the years, Skype turned into Zoom as the tech infrastructure shifted. Now we meet several times a year. She reads my chart and tells me things I didn’t know I needed to hear.

The first time we met, in March of 2018, she said, Your chart is ruled by Venus, you express love unconditionally and you give it far more than you receive it. She told me my relationship to love was tied up with saying yes. She told me I needed to start listening to Mars, to go after what I loved and desired, to say “no” in order to make my “yes” mean something.

She said, In the absence of no, yes doesn’t mean anything. She said, Mars is the planet that stands between us and the rest of the world. It’s the sentry, and women are not taught to honor their perimeters. We’re not even told to look for danger. She said, Your Mars is screaming, but it’s so far away and it’s used to not being listened to. But it’s really trying to get your attention.

At the time, in 2018, she was one of the only people who knew that I had been, off and on for over a decade, involved in an affair. I was queer and he was married and so we forged this thing in secret, a toxic cocktail of power and shame. It began when I was a first year PhD student, and he was already an established professor and scholar. He told me I could not tell anyone about us and, for years, I didn’t. I still don’t. Writing these words fills me with terror. He trained me well – even now, years later, putting words to my own story feels like a transgression. That which should be kept inside, placed outside. Matter out of place.

At the time, I did not see our relationship as coercive or abusive, even though it almost always made me feel awful, full of self-loathing, scared. This man crossed every boundary I set. He was never overtly abusive, never recognizably cruel. Instead, he would simply identify my limits, apply pressure, and watch me squirm.

 ***

At night I dream of houses. When I was a child, my dreams always began the same way, with me standing on a landing between floors. Sometimes the staircase I followed led up, towards the attic. Other times, it led down, towards a basement. It didn’t really matter, up or down. Eventually I found myself in the same cluttered expanse. A space that went on forever, full of the junk and treasures of previous generations. Photographs and furniture and toys and boxes of letters and journals and trinkets and costume jewelry, valuable only because those objects once belonged to someone who infused them with memory and meaning. I would walk through that junk, which was also treasure, looking for something in particular. But I never knew what that particular thing was.

Before I fall asleep, I listen to my house – it speaks to me when the world is dark. I struggle to understand what it is telling me. Stories of aches and pains, complaints that lead to chattering as the wood and stone around me settles. When the darkness loosens the tongue of foundation and floor boards, I am terrified even though I know I am afraid of all the wrong things. I am not afraid of ghosts, I am not afraid of mythical monsters. I am afraid of being a woman, alone, even though I know all my doors are locked tight. Still, this fear is not something I can out-think. Terror sits inside of me, a dull haunting.

The haunted house of gothic horror is an uncanny space. The home becomes “unhomely,” as creaking floor boards and ghostly wails reveal the gaslighting of domestic servitude, the danger of being unseen, the reality that homes are often unsafe if you are embodied in non-normative ways. As a child, I loved haunted house stories for all the ways these tales gave words to feelings of alienation I could not yet articulate. Sensations of unhomeliness I had not yet identified within myself, even as I could feel this estrangement building inside me.

 *** 

The man at my door is finally gone. The pounding finally stops. The dark returns, the hallway is no longer red. S is still there, with me, on the other end of the line. I tell her I will call my neighbors and I do. I live in a rowhouse and share walls on both sides. I can hear sounds all around me. Creaking, thumping, cracking, slamming. Sometimes my neighbor opens his door and it sounds like someone is opening my door.

My neighbors to the right are out of town, their house is dark and quiet. My neighbors to the left heard the man pounding – relief, another confirmation that I did not imagine it - but did not receive a similar visit. I call the 14th precinct, ask if they have any records of a domestic disturbance near my house. The man I speak with is curt, tells me an officer would never speak to me the way I am saying the man at my door spoke to me, asks, Are you sure that’s what he said? The man on the phone says it sounds like someone was impersonating a police officer and trying to gain entry to my home. He tells me to call 911. I do not think I have ever called 911 before. Why is this my only option when I am alone and afraid, late on a Friday night – to call 911? I am furious. At myself, at the police, at the strange man at my door. I call 911.

The 911 dispatcher answers the phone, asks me what the problem is. I tell him a man was at my door, possibly trying to gain entry. I tell him I don’t know whether he was a police officer or not. I tell him I am scared.

What did he look like? he asks.

What do you mean? I ask.

Was he Black, white…. he says.

I couldn’t see him, I say, I never opened the door. I don’t tell him about the windows.

What about based on his voice, he says. What did he sound like?

I don’t know, I say. I don’t know what he looked like.

And I don’t. I certainly could never pick him out of a lineup. Does it matter that I am a white woman and the man pounding on my door was Black? I don’t think it matters for the story I am trying to tell. But of course, it always matters. And it matters for the story the 911 dispatcher wanted me to tell.

The man on the other end of the phone tells me he can send more police to my door. I say I do not want anyone at my door. I do not want any more cops. He says, it sounds like an attempted break in. We’ll send a car to your street, just to drive by, but we won’t send anyone to your door.

OK, I say, terrified and flushed with shame.

I call S back. We talk for another few minutes but all I hear is pounding. We say goodbye, I return to bed, I turn off the light, I do not sleep. Every thump is a man pounding on my door. Every scrape is a man picking my locks. I wrap my blanket around me, creep back to the top of the stairs. Train my eyes on the darkened door. Watch. Wait.

The next few days progress slowly, achingly. Each night, I place a chair in front of my basement door. Then I check the front door, lock the deadbolt, pull at the handle with all my weight. I think I feel safe. Or safe enough. Sometimes I get into bed and then rush to check the locks again.

Once I’ve turned out the lights, the house begins to speak, to creak, to move. Its choreography is terrifying. I hear my neighbors. Car doors slamming, voices drifting along the back alley, which my bedroom window overlooks. I am convinced someone is trying to gain entry to the basement. I am sure someone is at the door. I take my phone and a blanket to the top of the stairs, watch the door, and wait for the man to come.

On Wednesday at work, a colleague, who is also a friend, can tell I haven’t been sleeping and asks me why. I tell her about the pounding. She says, That was definitely an attempted break-in. Philly is getting so dangerous. She tells me I should get cameras, light sensors, an alarm system. She tells me not to get home after dark, says, It sounds like someone’s been watching you. It sounds like someone knows you live alone. My panic grows.

 ***

I have lived among strangers for six years now, ever since leaving San Francisco, the last place I lived that felt like home. I used to be surrounded by my chosen queer family but then, after three years as an adjunct at a college on the brink of closure, I got a tenure track job, broke up with my partner of seven years, and moved to a small town in Pennsylvania. Alone.

I made friends, but not many. I found myself lonely and isolated and so I fell back into that secret affair, begun when I was a graduate student. And over the years, the person who shared my secret told and retold his version of our relationship. It was different from the version I thought I knew, but it felt too hard to fight for my own story. I started to agree with his version until I could pretend it was also mine. He never let me have a story different from his own.

I wanted my astrologer, B, to tell me to end the affair, an affair in which I felt like a hostage. I also wanted my therapist to tell me to end the affair, an affair that felt like an addiction. Yet I never told any of my friends, who would have surely told me to end it. Instead, I sustained my secret. I minded its edges. And instead of telling me to end it, B and my therapist asked me to tend my borders.

The man who shared my secret would often tie me up when we were having sex, which was something I wanted him to do. Once, after he fucked me, he did not immediately untie me. He did not hold me. He did not provide care. Instead, he left me while he went to the bathroom, pissed, cleaned himself. When he returned to the bedroom, he leaned against the wall and watched me. Even then, hands tied behind my back, watching him watch me, I understood how calculated he was. He knew I felt safely contained being tied up when he was near. He also knew how vulnerable and uncontained I felt when he left me alone, trapped and tied, bound on the bed and unable to move.

I could feel myself unravelling. I was afraid, as always, that if I said anything that he didn’t like, he would leave me. Our relationship was that precarious, and my discomfort was nothing compared to his need for my reassurances. My task, over and over again, was to give him permission to hurt me and then to console him when he felt bad about it. And anyway, I knew he would only hurt me enough to leave me questioning myself. Never enough to question him. He was clever, my ex-lover. He knew how to make his way past my threshold. For years I believed I would not exist outside of the frame he built around me. But eventually, I could no longer endure the confinement of this story and so I left him.

 *** 

At night I dream of houses. As a child, I could feel the house was on the verge of collapse and my time was running out. Somehow, I knew I must find the thing driving my search before the house crumbled, disintegrated, became reclaimed by the earth.

In the dream, I was also scared. Basements and attics terrify me, liminal spaces that feel too porous to the outside world, not quite of the home. Underground or in the sky, these are not home spaces for me. Yet, in my dream, I knew I had to stay in this liminal space, I knew I had to continue looking for the one treasure that would somehow loose me from the dreamland, remove me from the cycle of return. But I never found it. Instead, I returned again and again, for years, until I grew up and moved out of my parent’s house and no longer lived in my childhood home. After that, the loop of return was broken. Not because of my triumph, but because of a completed life cycle – the end of childhood. The first dream house never returned to me and I was bereft, I felt as though I had failed it.

As an adult, I have always preferred small bedrooms, spaces of sleep that just contained me and my bed, with little space for anything else. This is how I feel safe. I grew up in a house that could not contain me. It was too big, too unwieldy. My childhood bedroom felt too big for my small form. I wanted to live in a cupboard, a cabinet. Somewhere I would not dissolve.

In my childhood bedroom was a closet and in the closet was a small door. The small door led to a passageway and the passageway led to the attic, which sat right above my bedroom. A border-region, a wild space. I crammed the passageway in my closet with boxes and magazines, I stuffed clothes and blankets under my bed, I lined the space between bed and door with toys and books and other objects that made the path leading to me precarious, too dangerous to tread in the dark. I needed to make my space smaller. I needed to fill in the border-regions. I needed to transform a place of danger into the safe place I desperately craved.

Now I am neurotically neat – I cannot get up in the morning without making my bed, I cannot leave my bedroom if the blanket is not perfectly even, the pillows symmetrical, all my clothes put away. If a picture hangs crookedly on the wall I feel unsettled. If the spines of my books are not straight, I must stop my activity and attend to them. This, I understand now, is who I am. But as a child, I was seen by my parents as messy. They often punished me for my messiness, but they never asked me why I filled these empty spaces with things.

 ***

On Thursday morning I wake in the dark. Pounding at my door. 5am. My mind buzzes but my body refuses to move. I cannot get up so I curl into a ball and wait for the pounding to go away. Eventually it does.

That afternoon I call the 14th precinct again. I talk to another man, tell him what happened. Again, he tells me nothing was called in at either time, not on Friday and not on the following Thursday. He is the second police officer who tells me it sounds like an attempted break-in. He is not friendly or helpful. He tells me to lock my doors. I have always hated the police.

I make it through Thursday, I make it through Friday. I am so tired. I search online for security lights and cameras. They are expensive and my credit card balance is already too big. I close all the tabs. Maybe this will all go away, I think. Maybe someday I will sleep.

On Friday night I stay up too late and sleep badly. And then, Saturday morning, the pounding. The loud, insistent pounding. I look at my phone. It is 6am. I see faint autumn light through my curtains. I get out of bed, pull a blanket around my shoulders, creep out of my bedroom door.

All I see is red - red light burns through the window at the front of my house, spinning through the hallway. There is an ambulance outside, there are EMTs pounding at my door. It is 6am and I am hung over from CBD oil and melatonin and a week without sleep. I slide to the floor at the top of the stairs and wait for the men to leave.

Finally, they leave.

Once again, I call the 14th precinct, I have the number saved in my phone now. A woman answers this time, tells me her name is Officer K. I tell her what happened. This morning. On Thursday. Last Friday night.

She says, This sounds very strange, and also scary for you. Let me check this out.

She puts me on hold. Still sitting at the top of the stairs, I wrap my arms around my legs, cheek on my shin, and wait. After a few minutes or perhaps an hour I hear her voice again. She tells me there is a street with only one letter different from mine. The street is just a few blocks away. She tells me there have been so many calls, three just last Friday night. She tells me the police, the EMTs, have all been pounding on the wrong door, my door. She tells me she will make a note for officers to double check the address. She tells me she is sorry. She tells me she understands why I was so scared. She tells me to write down her name, remember it for the future. I do.

I want to cry. I want to hug her. I want to sleep. Instead, I laugh, maniacally, say, So no one has been trying to break into my house?

Well, says Officer K, I think it’s safe to say no. I think it’s safe to say this was all a big mistake.

But now I know something terrible has been happening somewhere else.

 ***

A year after I ended the secret affair, we encountered each other at an academic conference. Earlier that night I went to the hotel bar, ordered a bourbon, neat, and tucked myself into a corner with a few friends. I was anxious, I didn’t want to see him. I was anxious, I also wanted to see him. I drained my glass, hugged my friends, made my way towards the exit, the elevator. And then I saw him, sitting in the corner with someone I didn’t recognize. I didn’t acknowledge him and I didn’t think he saw me. I thought I slipped by unnoticed. I pressed the up button, waited. When the elevator finally came, I hurried in alone, pounded on the button until the doors slid closed. Relief not to run into him in the elevator. The things we used to do in elevators.

Three stories up, the elevator stopped, pinged, the doors slid open. I walked out onto my floor, began moving towards my room. Then I heard another elevator open, then I heard someone else get out.  

Good night, I heard him say.

I turned around and there he was.

Good night, I said and turned back around, continued to my room. I could feel him watching me. I could feel his pause. I could feel a question, which was also a demand. A silent command that I stop, turn around, offer him what he wanted, which was everything and nothing.

I kept walking. He did not follow.

In the room. The door clicked shut behind me. I leaned my back against it, solid, and slid to the ground. Waited. I knew he would never follow me. Knew he would never knock on my door, knew there was no reason for me to sit there, on the floor. A sentry. The door was never the vulnerable point of entry. Always I knew. Someday I would close a door and he wouldn’t even knock. Just like that, he would be gone.

I stood and walked to the oversized hotel bed, covered in white sheets. I pulled the comforter over my head and fell asleep alone. The conference room hotel buzzed and whirred but the door remained quiet.

For the next three years, I placed my body in lockdown. Tragically, conveniently, for two of those years the entire world was in some sort of lockdown, too.

 ***

Now I live in a new city, where I am not so alone. I am trying not to keep so many secrets. Sometimes I believe I am doing well. Still, I feel a chronic sense of loss. Many of my own stories are gone now. I have forgotten what community feels like. I have forgotten how to ask for help and so I didn’t know who to call at 9pm on a Friday night when a strange man was pounding on my door.

What do you do when someone uninvited shows up at your door?

Crouch at the top of the stairs, watch the door, and wait.

***

At night I dream of houses. As I grow older, the dream house transforms. Now it is abandoned and empty. My job is no longer to find a lost object, but instead to make the house habitable again. I move in. I choose a bedroom and unpack my things. I seal the broken windows and turn on the electricity. I build a fire in the fireplace and begin the work of making myself warm.

Days pass. Maybe months. Suddenly, a shock. I remember there is another wing of the house, one I forgot to check. I run down stairs, through doorways. A maze of a house, defying architectural logic. I enter a large room, a basement that is, strangely, not underground. Instead, it is lined with glass windows that open to a field or a forest or the sea. There are doors everywhere, and all of them are unlocked, cracked open to daylight and wind and rain and anyone who might be walking by, who might be walking in. Usually this is when I panic and then wake up.

***

I am paranoid but not without reason. I am always listening for sounds in the dark. But what I tend to forget when I am scared in the dark is that the most dangerous night, twenty years ago, was the night I let the danger in, the night I let him sleep on the couch in the living room of my shared New York City apartment. The night I gave a man I thought was my friend blankets and a pillow and then stumbled, drunk, into my bedroom, where I closed the door and fell into bed. The most dangerous night was the night I was awoken minutes or hours later, when a man I thought was my friend decided not to be my friend anymore.

I thought I was safe with that man in my house, I thought I was safe when I closed my bedroom door. I was wrong. He forced himself into my bedroom but he did not force himself into my home. I let him in. Welcomed him and gave him a place to sleep. He did not sleep.

It took me so long to tell this story. I told myself, for years, that it never happened. For so many years, no one else knew. And then I told myself, for years, that it was just something that happened. To someone else. A different version of me. A long time ago. Past tense, never present. Second person, never first. I didn’t want it to be anything more than that. I thought I was controlling my story. Domesticating it, making it tame. Instead, it became an unwieldy secret, haunting me.

I need to see the other house, the one on the street so close to the name of my street. I could walk there. Google Maps tells me it’s 15 minutes on foot and the day is beautiful and bright. But I am too scared to walk by unprotected, I tend to forget that my danger has always been inside. The drive takes three minutes.

The house looks like any other house on the block. Unremarkable. Cared for. A stone double, attached to a mirror-house on the left side. On the right side, garbage and recycling bins are lined neatly along the walkway leading to a backyard. Smoke seeps from the chimney. Inviting. The lawn has been recently mowed. The glass in the windows is intact and framed with straight solid shutters. The driveway is smooth and well maintained. It is this normalcy that scares me the most. The way this house can be overlooked, assumed to be safe. Disoriented, I check my GPS, check the address. I am at the right place. I barely slow, take in the exterior of the house. Then accelerate, turn the corner. I am gone.

About the author

Maura Finkelstein is a writer and anthropologist. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her essays have most recently appeared in Electric Literature, Post 45, The Markaz Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, and Al Jazeera.

about the artist

Robert Fleming (b. 1963) is a visual poet and digital artist from Lewes, DE. He is an editor @Old Scratch Press and Instant Noodles magazine. His books are White Noir, an Amazon best seller, and Con-Way in 4 in 1, #4. He is an award-winner: 2022 San Gabriel Valley CA-broadside, 2024/2021 Best of Mad Swirl poetry, Delaware Press: poem (third, 2 honorable mentions (HM)), graphic design: 4 HM, photography: 1 HM; nominations: 2025 best of short fiction; 2023 Blood Rag Poet, and 2 Pushcart/Best of the Net. Follow Robert @ https://www.facebook.com/robert.fleming.5030. https://artleagueofoceancity.org/artists/robert-fleming/.