top moving it!
I’m not moving it; you’re moving it!
“It” is not a Ouija, but my bed with six people on my mattress, though one of them is dead, a ghost both of Panarchy past and Panarchy present. Boarded up like a coffin, the cave where my bed rests snugly but not in peace squeaks under the strain of five sets of bodies and six sets of neuroses, one of which belongs to the ghost boarder of this coed college society. Dancing shadows on the walls of the cave illumed by my most Platonic and philosophical friends and the large candles on my bed surround the five living would-be mediums. The wooden panels creak—closed quarters of the crawl space where my bed and five crouching Panarchists clutch each other’s hands in the dead dark. The sagging mattress which lines the floor of this pent up room, aptly named the Penthouse, quakes beneath us as if trying to shake us off. The candle resting on the bed cannot in peace. We’re all restless. The two believers to my right with only the protrusions of their brows, lips, and nose glowing from the candlelight insist it’s the ghost while the two non-believers to my left, similarly sinisterly illuminated, insist it’s them. SQUEEK. CREEK. My right palm breaks a sweat. My left stays dry with an arid skepticism though it too trembles just like everything else on the bed at this moment. FLOP goes the corner of the mattress against the closed door and hanging sheet separating the crawl space from the tiny room at large. A tight fit for five people and one ghost.
We are open to listening to you. We want to listen and help if we can.
Let the light die down if you don’t feel like talking. Let it rise if you do.
We hold our breaths after this intonement. Smoky air lingers in our lungs. The ghost responds to our sÉance calls from inside a coffin-like room not as far beyond the grave as you would think. The light flickers, dances then dances more quickly, dances into the wick embracing it and resting. Then the flame attempts to break free, rises, and falls back.
Are you moving it?
My bed’s on fire. She shook it. The flame leapt, and now we’re all dancing. Our shadows don’t fall back.
Are you still there?
The fire’s out. Our curiosity to know her half as well as she must know us by now continues to flicker. If she dances in the dark along with us, we can’t see her. However, she makes the beds move, the pipes rattle, and old photos of the fraternity men who use to live here fall. This won’t be our last dance with the ghost. I know it. Right and left, we all know it’s not just a hunch, it’s a haunting.
***
It’s 3am, and a bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived specter of myself attempts to wake up a bit and shower. I stumble into the bright yellow bathroom, past the blue and white paint-smattered sinks and toilets. A low light and accompanying hum of ventilation fill the dark yellow bathroom. I’ve had three cups of coffee which makes me shaky and emotional. I ache all over as my mind wanders then stumbles over pains in my chest. Oh, the heart and its matters, its aches. This one doesn’t pass right away as I momentarily agonize over some fresh bruise, thankfully, not deep enough to draw blood. It’s just the caffeine girl-talking as the shower fills with steam. No deep or lasting thoughts and emotions but several fully felt pains; nevertheless, I lather the lavender soap on the sea sponge. It’s smelling warm and feeling soft as it dresses my shallow wounds.
Suddenly the pipes squeak, sound like they’re seizing. The water pressure fluxes erratically emitting a slow trickle and then pouring out like a scalding truck to the face. I choke on the jet stream. My eyes shut tightly, and I grasp blindly at the water dial. The bathroom stereo I certainly did not turn on at 3am blares static.
WHO’S THERE?
Then the CD mix lodged in the stereo starts playing.
My president is black. My Lambo is blue. And I be goddamned if my rims ain’t too.
An unstoppable couplet and the profane breath of the sacred?
Encounters with the ghost of Panarchy often leave me questioning my emotional sanity and her sense of humor. Why would she choose then to chat? Sensing my personal troubles filling the room, she tried to strike a chord but instead struck a Young Jeezy song. Then as the feelings dissipated and the steam escaped, she left.
The story goes that the original owner of the house locked his teenage daughter in the Bunk Room, which I live adjacent to, because of “mental illness” around the turn of the century. The Bunk Room’s wood paneling and half portal window makes you feel like you’re living in a barrel crate of wine sawed in half. Perhaps you’ve drunk half the barrel as well because the uneven floors make you feel slightly tipsy and confused when your perspective is challenged by the good three inches one side of the room is inexplicably raised up on. Over this crooked floor and from its crooked pipes, she hung herself.
***
It’s midnight and fifteen brusque Phi Psi men, or brothers, pile into your room. They toss off their fedoras, unbuckle their suspenders, and change into long underwear. There’s nowhere to avert your gaze! They toss off their fedoras, throw off their oxfords, and leave nothing on but their boxers or briefs. There’s no way to beg them to stop! You’re a teenager, and you just want to act like one. Difficult when you’re dead. Impossible tonight and every night for seventy years. Scores of young men spend the night with you for decades. The “Bunk” Room earns its name and you struggle not to earn a reputation.
***
The not so plaintive cries of this average dead teenager reach my ears or I channel her angst and absent lovelorn longing. Terrifying, but also vaguely tender. She wants to whisper secrets and gossip while I wish I had deeper secrets to tell. I’ll question her some more after I finish this paper. However, “this paper” turns into “that portfolio” which magically becomes a year later. I’m in bed with five other souls desperately searching for a sixth. The bed quakes.
Who am I?
Whom do I haunt?
At the beginning of Nadja—the seminal Surrealist novel written by the father of Surrealism, Andre Breton, the author and leading man asks the streets of Paris to tell him who he is. Upon reflection, he rephrases the question as, “Whom do I haunt?” knowing that this more appropriately answers the question. Flashing back to imagined scenes with the ghost and various housemates I’ve never met but continue to feel the presence of sometimes crowding this house, haunting holds answers to so many of my questions. Questions asked and wondered or wandered upon in this house alone find their own answers in the concert of these walls. Breton encountered his Nadja. I found myself inside Panarchy. I encounter the ghost.
Why am I here?
Did I find Panarchy or did Panarchy or her ghost find me?
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Ice Palace,” a Southern belle travels north to have her delicate sensibilities “unjustly spanked” and frozen within the rigidity and literal coldness of an ice palace, a building constructed as a metaphor for Northern culture and its aggression or latent antagonism for the south. Panarchy, 9 School Street, is a Southern belle in house form. Transplanted to New England, this white, Southern plantation mansion—think Gone with the Wind on mescaline, sits frozen on a snowbanked hill, fortressed by icicles like the bars of a transparent prison. I happily call this prison my home. I walk, hurry each day up the slippery path to get inside. This was not always the case.
A postcard sits taped on the 100-year-old fireplace inside. A crinkled postcard, faded and curled, dog-eared or frost-bitten as of late, captures a vignette of the house, pretty as
a debutante circa early turn of the century. A fresh coat of lily-white paint beckons callers to the house after they first admire its charm. Why are you here? Have we invited you to one of our throwback parties? Every object you see attempts to answer these questions for you. If asked, I’ll proffer up answers more readily than the objects and less cryptically than the ghost. I can tell you about the unassuming panoply of characters, philosophies, and styles which constitute the organization or disorganization that is Panarchy. We don’t haze, unlike many social groups on this campus. Despite the traditional façade, once inside, the old traditions fail. You can hang out. That’s all that we ask of you.
Why don’t we haze? Because we’re not Greek. Though this has not always been the case.
***
Opposite the tomb room replete with odd ceremonial furniture, including an altar located in Panarchy’s subterranean level, the basement houses a pong table, the altar of the frat boy and thus the sanctimonious foundation of the entire Dartmouth social scene completely totalized by fraternities since time immemorial. They occur everywhere, just springing up whenever someone finds a large piece of wood to cover two trash cans, modified ping pong equipment, and beer which tastes of its exceptional economy. A pong table is the province and provenance of fraternities.
VROOOM SCHLIIIIIIIK
A chainsaw glides through the beer-drenched wood of the pong table. The worn seams buckle and try to dodge Tim Soltan 04’s hungry chainsaw as its teeth, in a very Freudian and literal sense, eat away at the plank of masculinity at Dartmouth. Shards of wood fly everywhere and rain down on the stale beer covered floor. An explosion of pine scent masks in its fallout the cheap beer.
What the hell? Tim, what do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy?
No response. The saw’s mouth is full at present, and Tim doesn’t talk while eating. Tim doesn’t talk much at all. A man of science and industry, notably, but also of altered states of consciousness and liberalism, Tim doesn’t speak out against much. However, his chainsaw seems to say a mouthful at times. It once decided to share a secret or create a secret passageway between two rooms in the house. Now a small door connecting two private spaces lives on to tell the secret whenever two people share that passage together while living in the house, in it of itself a journey best taken with friends. Six years ago, the chainsaw tried to call back some Panarchists who had lost their way and almost transformed a social space which strove so hard to break free from fraternity normativity into the very thing it defined itself in opposition to.
Housed under the same uneven roof, but frankly the arch nemesis to Tim Soltan and others in the house, Trent (see: slicked back ginger with a stiff polo collar and stiffer posture presenting a medium build) began playing pong with the zealotry of a frat boy, which regularly wouldn’t merit a chainsaw massacre except for the ways in which he treated women in the house and those he invited over to play pong (see: misogynise). Not one more game (see: oppressive performative production of heteronormativity). He would not silently let Trent retrogressively use the house in the fashion prior to Greek system extrication. See: Tim Soltan, lanky and fleece-flannelled on top of Carharts with a sideways smile surrounded by stubble. Oh, add chainsaw. Let’s eat.
Multi animi, sed unus animus – Many souls, but still one soul.
The old Phi Psi motto more aptly describes the current spirit or spirits of the house today in addition to equating the ghost and the house transitively as only Latin can. A cold, slippery trek up to the house of old, prior to its western addition and half a century before coeducation, would have welcomed a woman, hugging her furs close to her pearls, linked to a tuxedo-ed arm, into the dining hall ready to serve her champagne or according to old party menus, “frozen egg nog.” Save room for the rest of the menu: brandy jelly, blue points, soup sticks, fancy cakes, and cigarettes.
Tastes change but not as much as you think. Fur and pearls made way for faux fur and ironic pearls. Women and men wearing leather everything and tie-dye moved into the house and still line the walls with their likenesses in the composite photos. Coeducation and the shedding of the Greek toga for rainbow flags and the less visible (or more visible, see: DaGLO (Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Organization) T-shirts, but ever-enveloping robes of queer acceptance have draped the house and its members with momentary lapses–VROOOM SCHLIIIIIIIK—since the’80s. People still scurry up our driveway for roaring parties wearing fur and pearls, and I’m notorious for bumming blue points off my friends at parties.
So one of the latest versions of the ghost story goes that the daughter’s “mental illness” translates to lesbianism. Recall how she shared the Bunk Room for the better part of a century. These other rooms house ghosts who remain the only nonliving witnesses to hazing ceremonies employing paddles, altars, and other performances of masculinity not involving fur or pearls. Blue points were not served. Perhaps the original ghost is more entitled to her angst than most teens after all. So, including her supernatural presence, have the many souls of Panarchy always been coeducational and kind of queer?
Who am I?
Whom do I find myself attracted to?
I admit my crush to no one.
Nadja haunts Andre Breton in his search for himself in Paris. His desire and attraction to her haunts him even more so. Disturbingly unbalanced, Nadja as femme enfant tells Breton more about himself than he cares to admit. Perhaps Panarchy or its ghost acts as the residents’ collective Nadja. We write our own history, our own novels telling the house’s story and the ghost’s, while often failing to see it’s really our own story.
She knows.
***
According to his obituary, the original owner of 9 School Street, Dr. William Thayer Smith, died in’09 of a cerebral embolism. “Dean of Dartmouth Medical School and Widely Known Author of Text Books” was survived by his two sons. Dr. William Thayer Smith did not have a daughter. Staunch portraits of the old Doctor, his wife, who died in’02, and vignettes of two young boys smiling up from an old house hide neither ghosts nor affected teenage daughters locked up in the attic.
The best kangaroo sÉances and unexpected communications predate this discovery. Perhaps I’ll keep these records to myself for a while. I keep secret ghosts I won’t ask too much from except for their silence. I need the silence to yell hungry questions with a proverbial chainsaw in hand at the fraternities, to ask my emotionally unbalanced teenage neighbor with friends’ hands held tightly on uneven floors about my own wants and needs, and to listen when she replies in her way, coaxing my neurosis as I construct hers.
Why am I here?
Panarchy invites me to question.
