It stands to reason that the week one decides to sell one's house is the same in which the economy sputters, interest rates rise nationwide—putting borrowing costs out of reach for many would-be buyers—and one discovers all the insidious creeping problems about one's property that one never noticed before.
As much as one might like to see in all this a cruel jest of providence, however—or a just retribution for having benefitted for so long from artificially inflated housing prices—the correspondence of the last of these occurrences with the decision to sell is not wholly coincidental. After all, it's perhaps not strictly true that I had never noticed the mold growing around my HVAC system before. It's just that, so long as one is not actively trying to sell the place, and mold's presence or absence can only matter to oneself, one settles for convenient fictions at the expense of truth. Only the act of selling makes it necessary to confront what one would rather leave unacknowledged.
In truth, I had noticed that there was a strange black spongiform substance collecting this summer in the hole the original contractors had left between the door post and floorboards of the HVAC closet. It's just that, in the absence of positive proof otherwise, I was able to convince myself that it had probably always been there: that the cracks and interstices of every house are full of strange unidentifiable essences left there by the original builders. It was probably some sort of foam insulation, I said.
What made it impossible to entertain this pleasing delusion any longer was when, in walking past the cupboard door, I noticed a marked elevation in the floor that had not been there before. I shuffled back and forth across it several times to make sure, but it was unmistakable now: there was a bulge, where there had never been a bulge before. I turned on the room lights and squatted down to behold it. At least two boards of hardwood flooring had buckled upwards, the consequence of at least a month's worth of accumulated water damage from an HVAC leak I had also been doing my best not to observe.
Was it just a warping of the boards, or something even more sinister? I looked back at the black spongiform substance by the door post. Foam insulation? It could still be. But foam insulation doesn't typically grow. I got out some Clorox and squirted it onto the stuff. It began to whiten, wither, and retreat. I couldn't deny it any longer: I was dealing with some kind of living fungoid substance. Then, as I bent down to peer at the floorboards, I noticed something even more unsettling: the bulge I had felt was becoming an eruption, like a burst pustule or boil.
In short, something was underneath the boards and causing the bulge, and whatever it was had grown so big that it was beginning to send shoots upward. Peering down at the crack between the two boards at the center of the bulge, I saw tiny white hairs beginning to peak through. The impression created was of a furry creature that had installed itself inside the flooring and was beginning to grow. Something like the "Trouble with Tribbles," but less adorable. Tribbles, if they were made entirely of fungus.
There is an indelible scene in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest—a childhood memory in which the young protagonist finds and ingests a patch of mold growing beneath the furnace. His appalled description is the only thing I could picture when trying to imagine what exactly it could be that was now incarnating itself inside the gestational pouch of my floorboards: "a rhomboid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. Underline big and old [...] a sort of nasal green, black-speckled. Hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange speckles. A patch of very bad-news-type mold."
That is what I saw when I tried to envision what rough beast was down there inside the belly of the bulge, waiting to be born. New England is a small place, and I could not deny that whatever visitant Wallace's characters had received, and which he recollected (the scene has too much the pungent taste of reality to have been made up just for the novel) could have taken up residence inside the wooden cocoon of my floorboards as well.
I put all the cavalry in gallop to try to beat back this creeping menace. Call it the Battle of the Bulge. I phoned the HVAC people to deal with the leak. I descended on every micrometer of exposed mold follicle with the Clorox spray and a paper towel. I ordered an extra dehumidifier on Amazon, and prayed that it would wing its way to me swiftly so that I could starve the fungus of the moisture in which it throve.
Despite all my efforts, however, I still went to bed that night with the sensation of crawling skin. What if the mold I was seeing through the bulge was really everywhere? What if it had already silently crept through all the flooring, walls, and ceiling, and the patch visible to me was only the proverbial elephant's trunk felt by the blind man, indicating some vaster, unfathomable creature? The kind of alarmism one can find online from mold removal services did not alleviate my fears. The molds "have built their palace beneath us," to quote a line from Millay I am fond of citing—"we have not far to fall."
The image that came to me was of my house as a kind of superficial overlay—the merest apparition of a sound building, painted atop a rotting fungal infrastructure ready to collapse inward. I thought of D.H. Lawrence's description of the English bourgeois: Nicely groomed, like a mushroom/ standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable–/and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life[...] And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long./Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside/ just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow/under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
This is almost certainly not the literal truth of my house, of course—as I realized when the next day dawned and light and life had begun to beat back the forces of fungal decay. But it occurs to me that it does symbolize something of our present economic reality—in the housing market, but not only there. Like Lawrence's bourgeois, we have been enjoying the appearance of unearned prosperity. Massive fiscal and monetary interventions supercharged our economy's demand even as the coronavirus, structural barriers to housing development, and other supply shocks were devouring it from within.
And so the fungus in my floorboards represents a kind of truth, if not the whole truth. Asset prices in this economy have been built on nothing. They have been sky-high, and now are merely treading air, like a cartoon character who hasn't yet looked down to check beneath their feet to realize they've left the Earth. On the day I found the fungus, I finally looked down. And, with all respect to Millay, perhaps we do have far to fall.
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