ACT ONE: AWAKENINGEasier, when the house looks like it ought to be haunted. Falling apart, decrepit. Cobwebs and cracked concrete and the palpable film of the people that came before. Easier, yes, when the house is the last one on the left, or in the hills, or with nothing else but the trees for company. Easier still when there can be no fingers pointed — it’s you, you brought this here — and instead outside forces can be blamed.

But this isn’t how this story goes, not mine and not others.

Once your eyes are open, you cannot just simply close them.

***In Insidious (2010), we are presented, first, with a peaceful, suburban idle. A married couple who are better than average looking, three children, a new house. Nothing is, visibly, wrong. Just a normal family. A good one.

But can any peace last so long? Soon, the film informs us, everything will be different than we want it to be. A haunting will occur, the sighting of any entity. And, even if we flee it, it will follow us. For it is not the house that is haunted, no, but us.

And even when we think it’s gone, well. Can’t you feel it?

***There are plenty of things in my childhood I would like to forget, sure, who wouldn’t.

The dreams of the Red House, the no longer enterable treehouse that stood too high up in the middle of the woods. How I’d thought I’d simply imagined it until I walked past it in those months when I still lived in the place where my father had died and shook with horror, stood mutely and looked, and then fled as fast as my feet could carry me. The way I refused to use the bathroom in my grandparent’s trailer unless my grandmother went to flip the light on at the end of the hallway first and then waited for me there. Waking myself up weeping but only because my mother shook me. Did you have a bad dream? she’d ask.

I think so, I’d say.

What I couldn’t bring myself to say: Is that really you, momma? 

***In Insidious, both father and eldest son possess the ability to project their consciousness elsewhere. The father does not remember this. He does not want to remember this. He has lived his life in such a way, these myriad layers of forgotten repression, in order to preserve a kind of normalcy. That is what he wants, not this psychic gift, this swirling miasma. But sometimes it doesn’t matter what you want.

Is it a gift if you want to forget it ever existed?

ACT TWO: VOYANCEI could show it to you, if you wanted to see it. That country church, thirty-five people, twilit evening, hum of the cicadas and the crickets, the flood light and big oak tree, suffocating because there were only one or two windows, nowhere to escape, nowhere to go except deeper inside, wood floors and walls.

I hated to be back there, alone in the bowels, in the eerie empty Sunday school classrooms, though occasionally I was required to fetch something. They didn’t trust any of the other children to go there and come back. Why would they when I was so obviously broken in by a strictness that comes from somewhere beyond fear — desperation. Sometimes, though, I’d linger, for five seconds, ten. My own private rebellion. Listen to the voices of the choir through the shoddy little hallway. It was dark behind me, and I shivered with it. Then, a phantom caress on the back of my neck, a heavy hand, pushing me forward. Run along now, little seer — didn’t your momma teach you not to eavesdrop?

***The Further is the film’s conception of the Otherworld, the Summerland, the Beyond, the astral plane, Dreamland, the spirit world, the Other Side. It is terrifying, the Further. It is filled with bad things and long corridors and screaming and silence and pain. When you are there, it is hard to come back. You can learn, of course, but at what cost?

I used to go walking after midnight as easy as anything. Up and out of my body in a flash. Dangerous. No rope. No tether. Not to the Further, thank god, but somewhere else. It looked like this world but not. It looked like a dream you remember for the rest of your life in vivid and shaking detail. There were fearful places there, too, of course. They called to me, but I did not yet speak their language.

Small mercies.

***The story goes that as a child I hated clothes and shoes. There’s photographic evidence of both of these things; I was heavily documented for a span of years and then refused the camera. I suppose the one that strikes me most is myself amongst the trees, pantsless, about to hurl my socks and shirt off, too. There’s even a picture of me at a small family reunion, sitting near my older cousins, sans pants again, in a big t-shirt, scowling at the camera. I used to roll myself around in the grass like a dog even though my mother would scold me about my breathing, the nebulizer up in the closet for my albuterol treatments. I used to fling my arms around the sycamore and rub my face up against it, putting my ear close to listen for its heartbeat. When I went to preschool, already having learned to read, I cried and cried to have my feet so confined. When it rained, I begged to sleep on the porch with its tin roof or, at least, with the window open. When allowed to dip my hands in the brisk bite of the creek on our walks, I always ended up with soaked sleeves.

***In my first conceptions of this essay, I thought to chronicle the entirety of the Insidious franchise, five films in all. The way they unsettled me but in a ridiculous way. None of the other films stand up to the first film’s truths. Its themes. Its horrors. If I recognize myself anywhere in the latter installments, it is obliquely.

It wasn’t that bad for me, of course. Not as dramatic. But then again, sometimes, in my worst dreams, it was.

And, of course, I did not have the luxury to forget.

ACT THREE: MANIFESTATIONOnly children born in wedlock are born ensouled, he said with a shrug. At least that’s what they used to say. His brother laughed. It was a good laugh — and it made you want to hear it. I was perhaps never as funny as I was that handful of years. My mouth acting without my consciously deciding it.

In the years after my mother married her new husband, I barely said a word to anyone. I was eleven then, and now eighteen. I did indeed feel different, like something had just barely begun to open up, a tangible feeling of possibility, that heady rush of freedom. I liked that my family had begun to look at me like I was a dog they were afraid to muzzle.

Too bad for you, bunny, his brother said, the lack of a laugh removing the kindness from his face.

Don’t call me bunny, I said, blushing though I didn’t want to. And I was born in wedlock.

You weren’t. Your parents were married in March, and you were born in September. You’re a bastard.

Don’t say that, he said. Bunny has a soul.

He looked at me. Don’t you, bunny?

***The question of inheritance of trauma is perhaps the film’s most obvious theme. Even if we forget what has happened to make us the way we are, it does not absolve us from our missteps. Father might have helped son, in another world where he was stronger. In a world where he had never been a child with a monster in his closet. A father of his own.

***For the first eleven years of my life, I slept beside my mother, or with my grandmother, my grandfather wedged on the other side of her, and never alone. That is, of course, until my mother married her new husband. It was much easier to hear the whispers in the dark without the sound of my mother’s honking snoring, so soothing to me that, years after, when a friend spending the night asked if she’d snored, if it kept me up, I simply replied that she had, but it had put me quickly to sleep. The flood light was outside of my window, which brought a relief. You must remember the road was dirt, and there was traffic so infrequently that on hot summer afternoons I would lie in the shade of the snowball bush, directly in line to be crushed by a car, if any had come. They didn’t though, and sometimes I’d nap there until my mother called me in, though she rarely did. She indulged me, in her way. It was easier to sleep in the light.

***The father confronts his fear, his trauma, his ghosts, his demons, his pain. He remembers it all.

Fine. And now what?

ACT FOUR: LINGERINGYou can only see me as I am now, but I was different, an age ago. Or maybe you knew that. Maybe I can show it to you. Maybe I already have. Sometimes, the people I love most show me things that they don’t mean to: a headache, a craving, an urge. Or maybe it is that I do not mean to see it. Him, once, our heads pressed together in the dark, the quilt laid out underneath us, his breath hot on my cheek. What did he say? Don’t eavesdrop. Be sweet. Open your mouth.

My devotion levelled me. The spirits promised me they would be back for their pound of flesh and, at first, I didn’t believe them. And then I did. I had no choice. To regret it would be pointless. It was always going to happen.

At Aunt’s house, the clouds moving fast over the perfect blue expanse of the sky, large and imposing, you could imagine God looking straight down from heaven, his one good eye, the stretch of an angel’s hand, a fractal, terrifying. Long summer evenings made me weep — was it the beauty or the loneliness? I’m still not sure. Inside, something in the pit of me shook, knocked me off balance. The creek held its own melancholy, every shade of green and brown. I didn’t know water could be azure until I saw the sea for the first time as an adult. That made me weep, too. It seemed impossible to me then that a past version of myself, of the Ghost, had not done the same thing.

Another thought: That we would again.

***The film does not end happily, but it ends honestly. Father and son wake back up in the “real” world. Nightmare over. Except now, the membrane is less defined. Don’t let them tell you different — if you want to go, you’ll come back changed. You are not the exception. Think of Orpheus, Gilgamesh. All those crossings.

Changed, yes.

But not dead.

***What the ghosts taught me when I was young: To cover my tracks. My back. To want nothing. To stop crying. To listen. To refuse speech. That everyone I loved would one day be dead.  That it doesn’t matter what you want. Inevitably. Fate. How to read the room.

What else?

It’s a hard life.

But see, through the fog, the terrifying paths, all the wonders.