Starting again, late in life
At the edge — literally with toes on the door’s sill, heels still in the yard’s dirt. It’s as close to perfect absence as I can get.
The door itself is swung open. In the empty square-footed workshop, the 4 windows drip sun, each lower glassy lip above head-level, the windows reach just short of the uninsulated wooden roof. One bright eye for each wall, the consequent mutated squares light up the dust on the wooden floor. Without moving, I begin populating the space with thought furniture.
I begin by imagining a single chair in the middle of the room. It has flat wooden arms, a padded back, plump in green tapestry. The seat, the same fabric, sags enough to display its history with a wide variety of the bums of humankind. But then, in an almost invisible flashing series of watery stills, various torsos, legs and arms start spouting from the sagging seat’s history. I press my hands, momentarily, against my eyes to stop the human surge.
The chair does not sit square in the square room, but with its back angled to the rear right corner, so that anyone — me for example — sitting there would face the door where someone — me for example — might stand staring into my solitude.
Behind me (the me that’s in the doorway), in the long grass, the car sits ticking away its engine heat. My gear piled in the back seat; the closed boot of the car. Other than the car, there are no human sounds, and won’t be for many miles. I return to contemplating my empty thought chair.
Clinging uncomfortably to the door’s entryway as they are, my toes begin to tingle before I pop into existence, the bookshelves. And then pop them out again with haste. I don’t want the lives of all those dead, and never-living taking up the space now occupied by free-floating dust particles and my single chair.
Perhaps a coffee mug on one flat arm. One book bent, sleeping, over the other. I make the book jacket a generic yellow. No title. No authorial blaze of “I did this.” One book seems OK. I don’t get that panicky feeling with just one book and, now that I’ve created it, I wouldn’t mind the coffee to be real, that imaginary curl of escaping heat to be headed up alongside my nose.
Momentarily, I let the empty chair evaporate with its book and coffee mug and consider unpacking my single gas burner, kettle and coffee supplies. But I have not decided where to put anything, whether even to stay.
The thought kicks a splash of recklessness. I return the tapestry chair to imaginary existence. I pop a sink onto the back wall, the grey-water drain slipping past the wooden barrier into the drain-field 12 feet from the edge of the building, slope it down into the birch wood. The percolating dirty-dishwater of my imagination meets up with a standing pool in which skunk cabbage grows some 30 yards into the clearing beyond the birch. The chair in the middle of the empty building now provides an occasional whiff of skunk along with the more potent French roast. Then there are the associated sounds, the chickadees, chick-a-dee-dee-deeing, the pileated woodpeckers have taken up raucous residence in the dead birch, the local feral cats have started to creep toward me, meowing, looking to see if I am one of the ones that leave food untended.
In disgust, I wipe the floor of the chair, the sink explodes and the ceramic shards melt into the air returning to dust in the afternoon light. The birch wood burns up, and all the critters poof-out like over-pixelated images made too big.
Stretched uncomfortably because my feet are half on the door sill and half on the earth, my legs are starting to ache. I stare inside the empty building, looking for traces of what had actually been there in the past. There are no discernible traces, no scuffs, nor scratches where something heavy was dragged. This calms me, but it is too much to hope for that a building of this age could have remained perfectly empty.
Standing in the doorway, facing the building interior’s deranged light, back to the car and the moving sky, the door remains swung open, and because of that the moth can stumble inside. It tumbled along right over my head and, righting itself, fluttered in and out, windows’ projected light.
I pop in a cage of hunting birds — a gilt cage, and its door too swings open. The birds blert against the light, shattering it, spilling it against the walls and floor; never eat the moth as was intended. I pop them out. Pop out the gilt cage. The moth, ignoring my thought furniture, makes for the window, clasps the window-sill with dainty moth feet and stays there beating its wings against the still air.
My feet are now aching. I think about the real chair folded up in the boot of my car. I think about moving it into the empty building, but it makes my head hurt much more than my feet, so I stop and go back to thought furniture.
Instead of the green tapestry chair, I add a black iron bed, wide and soft with white goose-down comforters and pillows. The comforter has white silk embroidery on white linen fabric. The pattern rolls up and down the waves of soft — silk bargello spikes that break on the linen waves. I keep that for a while, an empty bed in the otherwise empty room, but then a red camellia tree in a burnished clay pot sputters into existence under the rear window, a parrot squawking on a stand comes next, and then there’s a wooden kitchen table set with silver, sliced pears and brie and even though I wipe them out with an angry scowl, I know I’ve already begun to lose my own absence.
My legs are aching and my feet tremble against their pain. I back away from the open door, return to the car to pull out the camp chair. I still haven’t decided where to put it, so for now I’ll just stay outside, near the car, where I can see the building’s open door.
First published in Black Mirror Magazine, 2014
