Douglas Milliken & Vivian Hua

Notes from a Safe House

1. Signs of you are everywhere, little man, and all they all say is no.
2. Take this plywood door of yours, for example. Certainly functional and in fact wide open yet swollen lock-tight to the floor by how many centuries of swamp gas and humidity? So in blows the whack of storm and wind and in blows the fetor of the fermenting black bog putrefying at the feet of these warlock trees. Sure, I’m inside. But so too is the outside. So now tell me, what about this scene speaks of a positivity?
3. Okay, there is a screen door keeping the bugs at bay.
4. One-zero.
5. Though to be fair, the zero in question? Way outweighs your one.
6. I’m assuming this is a “creative” interpretation of the crown molding concept, how you’ve run yellowed light bulbs around the ceiling’s edge, as if this room is a vanity or a stage set for a play but no, this is just a room and it’s cramped and drafty and smells like last week’s failed Hamburger Helper left to congeal in its pan.
7. From one manipulator to another: yellow lights and grease? Do not work for a most restive ambience.
8. Forget the smells, the minimizing shadow-play alone is enough to nauseate.
9. Your scratch-and-sniff sticker plastered pinball machine doesn’t work either and I’d put my money on it never did, dull and useless and taking up so much space that’d be much better occupied by me, but you and it together have conspired to shove me instead at your busted table with my sticky thighs sticking to the least offensive of your set of pleather kitchen chairs while I finish this box wine alone.
10. And I’m praying to your sloe-eyed velvet Jesus painting that I won’t have to try my singular other option vis-à-vis furniture and come to learn the distinct feel of my sticky thighs sticking to that surplus Army cot jammed into the corner like the very definition of an afterthought. But I guess that all depends on how long you plan on leaving me here, thumbs twiddled and waiting like a nervous bride.
11. Although man, that is exactly the wrong simile to be conjuring.
12. How does the drab canvas of an Army cot get so thoroughly saturated in grease anyway?
13. You know what? I really don’t need to know.
14. It would appear that your curtains are all the same exact little-girl dress, rods running through sleeve to gingham sleeve, and that is profoundly unsettling.
15. Can’t help wondering: how related are those little-girl dresses to the grease you’ve got glossed across everything?
16. Again: I really don’t need to know.
17. So let me ask you this, little man: have you ever tried to drink box wine without a glass? There’s quite literally nothing like it. Straight from the plastic bladder. Gonna have to shift that one over from the never would i column to the never thought i’d have to.
18. Hate to admit—in fact, it feels unprofessional—how one list shrinks while the other only grows. Measuring time by means of concession. One compromise at a time.
19. Though I do suppose that’s the nature of the job.
20. Your outhouse? Leaves a lot to be desired.
21. Which isn’t to say I’m above using an outhouse. I’m not.
22. Especially after today.
23. You know to what I’m referring.
24. Something else to shift from never would i to never thought i’d have to.
25. And given the amount and steady rate of the rain versus the tarpaper-and-spit aesthetic you’ve got going here, I’ve got to hand it to you, little man, I’m impressed I’m not currently wallowing in a beige overflow leaching in from the ceiling, dripping a boring tattoo in my hair. And I really do mean that as a compliment. After all, shouldn’t that be the hallmark of our trade? To remain unsuspecting? To in fact be secretly effective?
26. Which leads me inexorably back to this box of wine.
27. Which I have to admit, is helping the time creep by.
28. The creeping time creep by.
29. Given little more than my own subjective powers of estimation, my guess is it was, what, just before dawn when I rolled up through these swampy woods under the chaperone-ship of the Florida Man? His baggy jeans and too-small tank top, face full of orange bristles and drawling in a permanent falsetto. Parading like a rooster yet cooing like Michael Jackson. How is it you Southern Boys can pull off being both mucho macho chauvinistic and deeply effete all at the same time? Aren’t you ever tempted to gay-bash yourself whenever you pass a mirror? Questions for another time. Florida Man dropped me here at your rusticated dump in the woods and splashed his escape back through the wet dimness—I guess the word for this light is crepuscular although that’d be suggestive of something lighter or darker on the way, now wouldn’t it?—then you fried for me the world’s grossest egg in what I suppose was your misguided attempt at hospitality. You, looking like the confused and unlikely intersection between a park ranger and a 50s greaser—sloe-eyed as your velvet Christ and just as uninspiring—abusing your skillet while pronouncing with smug authority the details of my situation as though you know it better than I. And who’s to say you don’t? (I’m to say. You don’t.) You waited and watched with hound dog intensity until I’d choked down your slimy egg (which maybe was a blatant setup for your surprise in the outhouse?) before announcing you were heading into town and wouldn’t be back until after it was safe for me to leave and it’s been how long now? The light’s barely changed and neither has the rain and all I can do is wait for your return and catalog the fragrant wonders of your hovel.
30. There was this one time in a different safe house lodged deep in the Shenandoah Valley—I was running protection that time, guarding instead of guarded—and there were these truly enormous wasps that only came out at night. Never before have I seen such single-minded villainy on the wing. A whole slew of little armored Dick Cheneys trolling for victims in the dark. So I’ve got to wonder: are there night wasps, too, in Southern Alabama?
31. Though I suppose it won’t help me, whether I know or not.
32. Seems to me the worst thing, though, about a safe house is the name. It succinctly states its purpose, obviously, but it just as succinctly misdirects. After all: who is safe? and from whom?
33. This shack of yours—resplendent in opportunities to contract tetanus and staph—exemplifies my point perfectly. Although I do suspect that so much of this trash and grime is pure pageantry. A bit of theater for you and you alone to enjoy. Seriously, how long have you been maintaining this shelter? Long enough for everyone in our family operation to know this is your safe house, confused with no other. And who would willingly live in such squalor? With a busted pinball machine and a soiled bed? A splinter-seated outhouse infested with termites and skunks? No one, that’s who. Not willingly. Not even you. Because you don’t live here. I have it on good authority that you’ve got a condo in the next nearest town. River views and clean carpets. No, this shack and its too-specific upkeep is for your singular entertainment. To know the people who our employers decide need help get the help they need with as little comfort as possible. It’s as though you’ve forgotten where precisely on this totem pole you reside.
34. Although maybe that’s exactly it. You’re perfectly aware of our established hierarchy and your low station within it and are intentionally flipping the roles of authority for a rare and pitiful taste of power. Making a body squirm simply because you can. An omega trying to mount an alpha.
35. Or perhaps you’ve merely never heard the words mop or sponge in your life.
36. All that said, I really do like your taste in flooring. Just random strips of linoleum stapled down in a backward rainbow of polymer blues, polymer yellows, polymer greens. A Modernist touch in a Restoration structure.
37. But back to safety. This twelve-gauge you’ve left propped in the corner near the stuck-open door—already loaded (I checked) with an extra seven shells lined up like soldiers on this crackling and (what other adjective have you left with me here in this shack of yours?) greasy Formica table—this twelve-gauge you’ve left me for my own safety and protection: who did you imagine I’d need protecting from? Whose safety did you seriously believe would be threatened by whom?
38. You didn’t honestly think I’d bungle the score so bad I’d need your protection, did you?
39. Certainly you know better than that.
40. Certainly I know better that you don’t.
41. And you know, it’s exactly that kind of uncritical assumption that’s led me here today.
42. In your safe house.
43. With your safe gun.
44. Uncritical and proud.
45. Too proud even to give a woman a clean glass for her wine.
46. We probably shouldn’t neglect the issue of evidence, either. How we ought to leave so little. And here you’ve collected so much. Even under the guise of a hunting camp: every nuanced inch of this filthy heap is conspicuous. With soiled kids’ clothing hanging in the windows and the rank stink of decay, my lord, this place begs—screams—for a kidnapping investigation. Or worse.
47. Whatever gave you the idea this was safe?
48. What makes you think anything is safe?
49. I suppose some lessons require hard learning.
50. Once you’ve finished arranging for my benefit all my clandestine particulars—placing the calls to secure my next contact just over the Arkansas border, the next exchange that won’t look like anything more than two people sharing a meal in a truck stop or walking in a park, hitting a carwash, whatever—you’ll arrive back here with a clean clean car all set to ferry me away.
51. And away is exactly where I’ll go.
52. Alone.
53. Although I do worry about all this rain and if it might affect how well this dump will burn.
54. Perhaps this hard-earned greasy patina will play me an assist.
55. I guess we’ll both find out.
56. Little-girl dresses curtaining the windows.
57. A pinball machine without paddles or ball.
58. Spent scratch-and-sniff stickers.
59. Lick each one with flame.
60. But this box wine, though!
61. Thank you for this box of wine.
62. You’re really not so bad a guy.
63. No matter what they say.
64. After all, little man, yours is the only say that matters.
65. And signs of you are everywhere.
66. Too bad all they all say is no.
67. The rain keeps falling.
68. My thighs keep sticking.
69. Seven shells lined up like soldiers.
70. Two more in the breach.
71. One-zero, little man.
72. A night wasp is tapping at the door.

by Douglas Milliken

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photo installation by Vivian Hua

individual photos: