Katherine Damm

 



*Lepidoptera*



Butterfly traps are constructed by suspending a dish beneath the mouth of a long column of net. The dish is full of the most revolting bait—chiefly rotting fruit and bad meat, although animal waste will do. Some people find this surprising, given the beauty of the butterfly. I do. But in any case, you are free to go off and swat other specimens with your own net while the trap blithely collects butterflies and other hapless insects—maybe even a bird. I learned that the traps work because butterflies do not fly down in times of distress. When they think their lives depend on it, they will knock their heads a thousand times against the mesh roof without ever turning around. How stupid. But who has not been in the butterfly’s place?



*Camouflage*



There are several different techniques for camouflage. There is mimesis, as when a moth looks like a crumpled leaf or when a stick bug lives up to its name. This decreases the odds of being preyed upon but increases the odds of being stomped. The dizzying zigzags employed by zebras and some warships in the First World War are known as dazzle patterning. This works better in motion, and in the case of the former, it helps that lions are colorblind.



The most famous type of camouflage is crypsis. We see it in leopards and military uniforms, or in arctic mammals and birds who change from brown to white in the wintertime. The chameleon, too. But the best camouflage, perhaps, is the tiny *Allobates zaparo*, which has the mottled red back and blue belly of a much more poisonous frog. The beautiful can get away with almost anything.



*Zoos*



Who can forget the smell of a zoo? Beneath the stench of the primate house, the lizard rooms, the penguin pool, and the muggy tropic zone, there is a stale animal pungence. The smell is uniform not just throughout the zoo, but throughout all the zoos of the world. The oldest zoo in America is in Philadelphia. That’s where I first smelled it. The oldest zoo in the world is the* Tiergarten Schönbrunn* in Vienna, founded in 1752 as a menagerie. I have never been there but I know its heady stink. Apparently the *Tiergarten* exists for the purpose of science, but we all like to look. In the future everything will be different but zoos.



*Charley*



I had a dog who was fundamentally changed by the death of his friend. When he saw her body he retreated to a corner and moved only his eyes; his chin was planted firmly on the floor. For weeks afterwards he surrounded himself with every one of his toys no matter where he went, even if it took several trips to reconsolidate his holdings. He whined when he pulled out the cotton stuffing as though he were narrating. Grief, then, is not what separates us from animals. Nor mourning.



*Flies*



If you want to kill a fly, wait for it to land. It will clean its front legs as though keeping warm. Hold your hands just above the fly and clap. A friend advised me on how to do this as a fly sat in front of us on a table. When I skeptically clapped, the fly fell dead on the gingham plastic. There is no moral here, just practical advice.



 



 



 



 



 

  Growing up, my family had a set of dishes for daily use and a set for the holidays. It’s a fairly common phenomenon. Couples ask for  fine china pieces as wedding gifts, and registry requests for gravy boats in expensive patterns can be listed online with bedding and Home Depot gift certificates—as if porcelain were a key material in the foundation of a home. Or as if optimism were this: the belief that there will always be the possibility of a beautiful and fancy life.



  Growing up, I liked my family’s weighty everyday plates, which had black borders and pictures of vegetables with their names in French script below. There is something whimsical about eating food to reveal a painted image of more food, especially when you are a child. I liked our nice plates, too, which were light and delicate and stacked behind glass, with doilies between them to keep the pattern from chipping. Of course we almost never used them. Years might pass if we happened to neglect them at a Thanksgiving or Christmas, but I don’t think a single one ever broke.



  I grew up in Philadelphia, which sometimes bills itself as a City of Firsts: the first capital of the nation, the  first city with parks, the first big cracked bell. Not to mention the signings of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, downtown in Independence Hall, which went by the less assertive name of the Pennsylvania State House. If you go down to Society Hill, you can take a horse-drawn carriage ride around streets built for just that type of vehicle and see it all for yourself.



  The Philadelphia Dancing Assemblies were created around that time with a winter season of regulated weekly dances for the elite and their guests. The Philadelphia Assemblies were the oldest of their kind in America, and in the 1780s and 90s the weekly dances were at the center of cultivated society. They are the only assembly from that era to remain, although they are held only yearly now.



  I was invited last year by a friend and his family who are long-time attendees. In the evening we drove into the city with dresses and tuxedos packed in the trunk and, after several wrong turns down Philadelphia’s many one-way streets, arrived frazzled. But we quickly went about making ourselves glamorous with hair curlers and (in my case, loaned) jewels, and fur coats and makeup, and tails which had lain dormant since that time last year. Then hurried photographs in the rooms and down the long hallways of the Bellevue on the way to dinner.



  Although the meal was held in a neighboring hotel, the setting could be mistaken for an aristocratic home’s receiving room in this or any bygone era. It was decorated with portraits and mirrors with heavy gold frames, heavy rugs, heavy curtains, side tables with knickknacks, a Christmas tree–and on one wall, a glass-doored cabinet of dinnerware. Only the compulsory exit signs above the molded doorways interrupted the effect of inherited charm. After eating for what felt like just a few minutes, it was over to the dance itself.



  At the entrance to the ball, the organizers addressed me with “Hello, Katherine Damm,” and whispered “This is Katherine Damm,” down the receiving line while I stood there, awkward as a doll. The only thing of my own I wore were my shoes, and only because you couldn’t see them past the foot-long feathers on the train of the borrowed velvet dress that my friend’s mother stitched to fit me that morning—a morning which anachronistically combined waltz lessons with meatball hoagies and television and naps. The ball itself was a mixture of seasoned dancers, and their children and guests. Some older couples whirled in promenade position as though in a painting, while younger couples stepped on each others’ feet and grinned at each others’ outfits. By then it was as if the adrenaline had worn off; the most charming parts, really, were before the ball took place at all. As a non-member you can only attend one time, and there are no photographs allowed once inside; it is an experience which is difficult to keep hold of.



  At the turn of the twentieth century, Philadelphia dominated textiles; once that became outsourced the city began to lose its industrial luster. The line of cars on the outbound side of the Schuylkill Expressway at 7 a.m. describes the situation more eloquently than words or numbers, perhaps. My own family is split and gone, or leaving. A few years ago, everything in the old house was packed up or thrown away: the good plates packed up, the daily plates thrown away. It’s funny what we decide to hold onto.

    Giacomo applies a pen to the paper napkin, sketching a circle and tearing the tissue at the ends of his marks.

    “And like this?”

    “We’d say full moon,” I tell him.

    We are at a house in L’Aquila, and it is the end of the summer.

    “*Plenilunio*,” he responds.

    Giacomo is my host father in Italy the summer I turn seventeen. We are all spending a weekend in a city some distance from the family’s hometown of Rieti.

    Giacomo was not really his name, I should say. I could only remember that maybe it started with a G, so I’ve named him after my father’s grandfather.

    “And this?”

    “That’s a crescent moon.”

    It is a warm evening and we have just finished dinner out behind the house. Maybe the town is not L’Aquila. This morning I asked the old boyfriend from those years if I mentioned the town or the man’s name in any of the emails I sent him that summer, which I’ve lost.

    He said I hadn’t, but recommended the name Giuseppe.

    Giacomo, or Giuseppe, draws another crescent moon.

    “And this?”

    “That’s a crescent moon,” I repeat. 

    He indicates that I had said that about the other one.

    “They’re both crescent moons. They’re the same.”

    “They are not the same.”

    We must be speaking a language between English and Italian. It’s likely that he is speaking English and that I am speaking Italian, except for the translated lunar phases. My host mother would often chide him for practicing his English with me, since I was there to learn.

    The two images look the same to me.

    “They are not the same.”

    The two moons he has drawn are mirror images, a fact I overlook because there is no linguistic distinction between them in common English. I feel foolish when I realize. They had seemed truly identical to me.

    In Italian, the one bowed towards the right is a luna crescente, like ours. The left is a luna calante, or declining moon. We would say waxing and waning. The Italian terms make more sense: crescent, like crescendo or increase, implies that the moon is inflating towards its full circle. *Waxing crescent* and *waning crescent* are respectively redundant and contradictory.

    I double-checked with my father that his grandfather’s name was Giacomo.

    The point of this story is that you can stare at something for a long time and overlook its obvious qualities.



 



*    So, I used to spend a lot of nights looking at the moon, to get a sense of the surface of the moon. You’ve got the maps, but because of the reflective properties of it, you can only see one small section at a time. As it goes from waxing to waning, the line from dark to light moves across the surface, and you can only see it at the line because of the direct light.

    **You had to go out there for two months of the summer to be able to see it.*



 



    In 1961, America needed something to capture its collective imagination. Yuri Gagarin, on behalf of the Soviets, had just become the first human to orbit the planet, and America was flagging in the space race. The next year, Kennedy made his Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort, in which he famously said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...” It was a sweltering Texas day when he delivered the speech, and it was a hot Florida night when Apollo 11 took off, seven years and two presidents later. Not that it mattered past the launch: There’s no weather on the moon, just shadow.

    It was an era of discord, of race riots, a downward-turning economy, and a war in Vietnam. It was easy to argue that the moon project was frivolous—that putting money towards the space program was ludicrous when there was still poverty in America. Other proposed projects for the money included public school lunches. But the moon became Kennedy’s frontier. My father says that his own working class family, with his mother as the notable exception, was skeptical about the whole thing for a while.



 



    *Well, ever since Kennedy in his inauguration talked about putting a man on the moon Before This Decade Is Out, the whole space program was a top of mind thing. There were missions every few months. The sort of anti-Communist thing, the Space Race with the Russians, was less compelling than the idea that this was some kind of prophecy. Manifest Destiny. They used to stop class for us to watch rocket launches.

**    It comes into consciousness with me when Glenn takes off and they interrupt Romper Room and I’m annoyed and my grandmother snaps and says, “Hey, this is history. Watch it.”*



 



    Dr. Abe Silverstein was reading a book of mythology at home in 1960 when he chose the name Apollo for the manned missions to the moon and back. “Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.”

    Grand and dangerous, pulling the sun across the sky is no easy task. Take the story of Phaethon. There are many versions, but the one in Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* goes like this: Apollo had a son with a woman named Clymene, and the son grew up without knowing the god. The son, Phaethon, doubted that Apollo was his father, so he traveled to the palace of the sun to ask. Apollo welcomed him, and promised Phaethon any favor to banish his doubts. Phaethon immediately asked to drive his father’s chariot for one day. Apollo tried to dissuade him, arguing that even Jupiter could not control the team of horses or ride against the momentum of the turning sky. Along the track were the beasts of the constellations: Taurus, Sagittarius, Cancer. Apollo feared for his son, and asked that Phaethon look him in the face and instead accept his *patrio metu*, fatherly anxiety, as proof of his paternity.

    Phaethon, however, insisted. Apollo had made a promise, and could do nothing but implore his son to reign the horses firmly and follow the wheel marks in the sky.

    When the horses left the earth, they felt the lighter load of Apollo’s son and immediately strayed from the track, setting fire to normally cold constellations and—when Phaethon dropped the reigns—scorching the fields, cities and nations below. The earth herself implored Jupiter to end the catastrophe, and since the clouds and rain had been burned away, Jupiter’s only choice was to demolish the chariot. He launched a lightning bolt at Phaethon, who then fell, burning, from the sky. He was buried with the inscription:



 



*hic situs est phaethon currus auriga paterni

**quem si non tenuit magnis tamen excidit ausis*



 



Here lies Phaethon, driver of his father’s chariot

which, though he could not manage, he

  nevertheless fell from a deed of great daring.



 



    The technology the ancients used to get to the moon would be like doing it today with pocket calculators.



    *There’s always this beep. The Federal regulation says there has to be a tone every twenty-five, thirty seconds. Finally they open the door, video, you see him taking steps down the ladder. He pauses at the bottom of the ladder and says, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and then takes a step on the moon.

**    And I didn’t realize at the time: he kind of blew the line. It’s supposed to be “a man.”

    But then they kind of change the camera around so you can see they’re actually on the moon, see them hopping around like bunny rabbits. You can see they’re starting to have fun with it. Pogoing. They unfurl the flag—it’s got a wire thing in it to keep it out. And it was just great.*



 



    That we even have a moon is a peculiar feature of our planet. Moons are uncommon on planets close to their stars, because the massive pull of a sun far overwhelms the rocky bodies that immediately surround it. The moon also has an unusual composition: a rock with no metal, the same density as our mantle, it is larger and lighter than the more common moons of the outer planets, which are often composed of passing solar system debris picked up and looped into orbit.

    The reigning speculation as to why the moon is there is the giant impact hypothesis, which postulates that a large, Mars-sized object hit Earth four and a half billion years ago. A singularly unlikely event. The impact would have been sufficiently powerful to heat the Earth enough to melt its surface and essentially splash planetary material out into space, where it would accrete into a satellite as it circled the earth.

    The presence of this large satellite stabilizes the Earth’s axial rotation; it does not wobble far from its twenty-three and a half degree tilt. This creates the climate consistency that allows for the evolution of complex, multi-cellular organisms. The reliable rhythms of the planet’s water throughout its history are thanks in large part to the moon. Without it, it is unlikely that life as we know it would have formed.



 



*    They’re doing all these collections they had to do. I think the guy hit a golf ball, you know, and that’s it! It was kind of dumb, just a flag and the guys doing a moonbounce. But it was exhilarating, and there was also a sense of peace.

    When I think of it in retrospect, there was a sense of peace that came from it. Deep. An abiding sense of peace.*



 



    On their 1968 mission, the Apollo 8 astronauts were able to take a picture of the whole earth from the moon—the first picture of its kind. The most famous image of the earth though, *Blue Marble*, was taken four years later. In his thesis for Reed College, *Dao of Dasein*, Ahmed Moharram Kabil collected responses to such a perspective from figures such as the Dalai Lama: “The image of a blue planet floating in deep space, glowing like the full moon on a clear night, brought home powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of a single family sharing one little house.” Or Heidegger: “I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.”

    Such an image has the potential to be both a totalizing and alien experience. A photograph of the planet from an exterior body, the moon, both unifies and otherizes the Earth. It emphatically declares that it is an object: one of many.



 



    *You just never saw edges like that on earth, you know. There’s something different or beautiful about it. The purity of the color. So that was my **experience of the moon in 1969.

    And you know partly it’s self-referential and partly it was social and partly it was aesthetic. But in the end I think you know the landing itself felt transient and it was a way of focusing on this object that was kind of strange and beautiful.*



 



    My father was eleven years old when Apollo 11 launched. I called him because I was writing about the moon and I wanted to hear a first-hand account of the landing.



 



    *So we’re out visiting my father and his wife Loretta. I loved Loretta because she was very kind to us. It was pretty good living because my mother—my father had this apartment, it was a corner apartment which was cool. It looked out over Great South Bay. It was a hot night. We didn’t have air conditioning, so the windows were open.

**    My father is there, he’s excited, because he was a jet pilot in the sixties, and this was just the ultimate. Like oh God, that could have been me. He was fascinated and excited by it, but also down on himself.

    Loretta’s making us food and keeping things fun.

    We’re all sitting in this big queen-sized bed, waiting for this thing to happen.*



 



 



*    With grateful acknowledgement to Charles Langmuir’s How to Build A Habitable Planet for information about the moon’s formation and planetary effects, and to NASA’s website for details about the Apollo missions. *

Even at forty years old, Leo indulged his younger brother. He stood at the kitchen counter and loaded a Hi8 tape into the Handycam that he and Charlie had found when they were packing up the basement. Leo pressed the cassette compartment back into the camera, and the metal frame set the black tape into place. Charlie clutched a candlestick and stared into the lens with the expectant attention of a newscaster. “Do you have to do that?” asked Leo.

Charlie grinned. “Is it on?”

Leo scrutinized the miniature of the room cast in realtime on the small, flipped-out screen. It looked unfamiliar, like it belonged in the pages of a catalogue. He pressed the red button with his thumb, and REC appeared in red digital letters. “Alright, you can start whenever.”

“Hello! For the purposes of posterity, I am Charlie, Leo is filming, and this is the kitchen. Mom will not be happy that it’s a mess, but that’s probably more accurate in any case.”

The kitchen was in disarray, although it was not familiar daily clutter. Nearly everything had been pulled from the cabinets. Cans were stacked on the counter to the left of the stove and perishable items were placed on the right. On the table were plastic bins, which held pots and pans with newspaper stuffed into the gaps. A box labelled “Very Fragile” in permanent marker held stacks of plates. The refrigerator was bare except for a bottle of milk, a mostly empty carton of eggs, and a container of lo mein from the night before.

“The style is French Country—very rustique. Note the hanging pots and pans.” Charlie gestured towards the ceiling. Although his hairline had receded slightly, his face was still boyish, and on the small screen he could pass for as young as twenty-five. “What else to say. The oven runs hot. Take five or ten minutes off of all cooking times. Maybe give a quick three-sixty, Leo.”

Leo panned obligingly around the room, sweeping along the cabinets, stove and sink. The appliances had all been packed up.

“I’ll be glad someone will be cooking for mom now. Little old lady with a gas stove was starting to make me nervous. And next up we’ll make our way into the dining room.”

Leo backed out of the kitchen and turned to the swinging door, the camera coming right up to the slatted wood until the peach room burst suddenly into the frame. The dining room was a formal space, used more around holidays than any other time of the year. For the most part it lay dormant, though it took up nearly a quarter of the downstairs. It was almost completely empty, with the lacquered table and chairs sitting in the center of the room on the decarpeted floor, and the wall where the sideboard had been slightly darker.

“This is probably the least exciting room of the house. The most exciting part of it is the door to the basement, and only because the basement is a horrible place.” Leo zoomed into the stairway door as Charlie spoke. “Why don’t you give this one a three-sixty, too?”

“I did when we came in.”

As they passed the bathroom, Leo flashed the camera inside, quickly focusing on the sink knobs, which had the hot and cold reversed.

The living room was a mottle of things. The corner by the dusty-brown upright piano was crowded with cardboard boxes in various states of closure, with two packing tape dispensers and shreds of pink and clear bubble wrap littered on top. The big floral sofa was noticeably absent, replaced by a cream showpiece that the real estate agent had selected so potential buyers could better impose their own imagined rooms onto the space. The low shelves had been cleared of the frayed gardening paperbacks and their father’s old French textbooks to make way for a Complete Works of Shakespeare and a jar of polished stones.

The camera swung up to Charlie’s face, which still had the makeshift candlestick microphone at his lips.

“Here,” Charlie arced his free hand outwards, as though to a large audience, “we have the living room. Home of our mother’s failed attempts to make me a piano player. Successful for you, at least. But ...” He held a finger up to the camera. His audience waited. “I still remember this gem.” He set the candlestick on the piano as Leo stepped back to fit the scene into the frame. Charlie sat at the bench and swept imaginary coattails out from under himself. With dramatic wrists, he began an ungainly rendition of “The Entertainer,” furrowing his brows like a maestro. His hands leapt up between the octaves and dropped heavily onto the keys, eliding the ragtime rhythm as though stumbling and drunk. 

Charlie swayed back and forth, favoring the left hand, then the right, and as he slowed the piece almost to a stop he turned to the camera and grinned. Leo, half watching over the camera and half watching through the screen, was struck. For a moment, the Charlie on the screen was a boy; maybe twelve, maybe fifteen. It drove their mother crazy the way during recitals, Charlie would turn to the camera and grin, getting up from the bench even as his hands finished the piece, like he wanted to play for the audience and be in it all at once. Though his face had aged and rounded, the geometry of his smile had remained indelible, twenty years later.

“You’re up, Rubinstein.” Charlie approached and reached for the camera. His chest filled the frame.

Leo shook his head and withdrew the camera. “I’m alright.”

“Come on, Leo. We’re making memories.” Charlie thought for a second. “Well, we made memories. Now we’re keeping them.” Leo snickered. “I don’t remember anything well enough, anyway.”

“That’s bullshit. You were always a thousand times better at this than me. Now give.” Charlie pulled the camcorder from where it was strapped around Leo’s hand and hefted it to his own eye. He gave Leo a small slap on the back as he approached the piano.

Leo eased himself onto the bench as though it would break and brushed his fingers lightly across the keys as if they, too, were fragile. When the first chord sounded into the room, the faint mistunings lingered in the air beside the notes. After probingly pressing the first few bars, his fingers grew reaccustomed to the keys and he began to play in earnest. He leaned into the instrument, restraining notes that seemed always on the verge of collapsing into one another. It was a complex piece, technically challenging, although Leo had always insisted that it was easier than it sounded. He stumbled twice but recovered quickly. His face and posture were labored, but the notes themselves were light and effortless.

As Leo finished the piece, the tones grew higher and faded away as if floating off the edge of the keyboard altogether. The final hammer hit the string so lightly that it was difficult to tell whether the final moment was silence or another soft resonance. He placed his hands on his thighs and looked at the piano like he could see inside it, to the action and tuning pins behind the frontboard.



“Jesus. When Mar and I have kids I hope they’re more like you than me,” said Charlie. His applause was muffled by the hand strap, and the camera filmed an erratic swing across the floor. “Take a bow.” But Leo waved his hand and retrieved the camera from his brother.

They made their way upstairs. To the left, the hall led to the master bedroom. To the right, the bedroom they had shared for their twelve overlapping years. Charlie turned left and opened the door, although both brothers remained in the doorway.

“This is our parents’ room. I probably slept here more than my own bed for the first six years of my life.”

“Eight,” corrected Leo.

“Let’s just say seven, shall we? Anyway, one time I found a condom on the nightstand.” Charlie made a wry face. “Maybe we’ll erase that part of the tape. I don’t think we need to record that particular memory in the

annals. We should get a shot of this and a shot of our room, and maybe a shot of the shed, too.”

Their own room was mostly unrecognizable. The two beds had been cleared for the night, but the room was otherwise cluttered with junk: board games, two trunks of clothes, ironing supplies, beach chairs and other accumulated artifacts of the elderly. The right bed was Leo’s, the left was Charlie’s. Both claimed to have lost their virginity in the room, though Charlie was rounding up. The shared desk, which had once held a boxy computer, was covered in sewing supplies, and a Singer sewing machine sat where the monitor had once been. The only constant was the steel blue color of the walls and the view out of the windows. The one by Charlie’s bed looked over the driveway, and the one by Leo’s looked into the garden in the backyard. Leo filmed out of his window and followed Charlie back down the stairs.

He stepped after his brother through the screen door onto the patio and surveyed the yard through the viewfinder. The tape whirred gently as it took in the garden. Petunias leaned clumsily against the shadowbox fence and the side of the shed, which Charlie was prying open. He spoke to the camera over his shoulder.

“This is our dad’s shed. No one really uses it anymore.” After a few seconds, the screen adjusted to theshadow inside. There was just room for the two men.

“Everything was packed up a long time ago,” Charlie continued, “but you can tell where things used to be.” He indicated the pegboard above the workbench, where thick black marker made swollen tool outlines. Under some pegs, the varnish of the board had been sanded away to erase the outline of a discarded implement, and a new shape had been drawn on the pale matte surface. Leo’s throat tightened with dust and he turned from the camera to cough.

“Our mom tells a story that she knew he was going to die after he waterproofed the house, because he left his tools in the wheelbarrow outside overnight.”

Leo spoke over his hand, “Not that he should have been doing that in the first place. He wasn’t even supposed to go jogging.”

Charlie smiled and shrugged, the combination of gestures familiar to the story. He went on. “This also happens to be the site of my first kiss.”

“I thought your first kiss was with Anna at Jack Feld’s house.”

“That was my first kiss on the mouth. Lisa Campbell gave me a peck on the cheek here when she was waiting for her mom to pick her up after the safari party. The minx.” Charlie held his face coy until it fell once again into a grin. He looked around the small space. “Unless our cameraman has anything to add, I think that might conclude the tour.”

Leo said he would take a shot of the facade and stepped back into the light.

He turned the camera on the house itself, tracing the white clapboard and pausing on the windows. Pulling the zoom lever to the right, he looked at the screen, seeing what was visible from the outside. The whitebacked curtains of his parents’ bedroom hung at the edges of their glass. He panned over to his own room, where the corner of the closet appeared in the bottom left pane. Each waver of the hand was amplified, and the windows rocked in and out of the frame. He couldn’t tell whether the clothes in the closet were really discernible or if he were inventing collared shirts in the pixels. He panned to the kitchen window, bright and orange, through to the window on the opposite wall that faced outwards to the street. Charlie went into the house, his body appearing in the kitchen window onscreen and disappearing again. The living room light clicked on, faint against the bright day, and the muffled, awkward tones of the piano sounded into the yard.

The camcorder showed little. Just beyond the siding were the rooms Leo and Charlie had toured, larger than the painted wood belied from the outside. He tried to place the contents of the rooms, imagining what the screen would show in the absence of the exterior walls. In the cutaway, there would be his parents’ bed, its back to the camera. His and Charlie’s beds sat across a thin dividing wall, the furniture placed as in a massive dollhouse. Removing the walls altogether, the three beds alone would sit straight in a row, the leftmost one doubled in size, ludicrously suspended above the grass. If he included the sofa bed that they pulled out for guests, that would appear on the ground below, perpendicular to the three.

Next he tried just the doors, placing them as he panned from left to right and then up. The doors between the living and dining room, the bathroom and the hall, and the one from the kitchen to the driveway were perpendicular to Leo. The others faced flatly towards him. The upstairs doors had all the same brass knobs, although the ones to the bathrooms would be brighter with use.

The three toilets of the house, one on the first floor, two on the second, sat on their pipes like stems. The sinks and showerheads did, too. He began to populate the space with the furniture as it was inside: the desks and dressers, the clothes hampers, rugs lying remarkably flat in the air, framed pictures and shelves fixed to invisible walls. He tried just the knicknacks, sitting against the blue sky like black stars, but it was too unfeasible to place them all and he went back to the bigger furniture. He continued until everything was there except the walls and the floors, though it was difficult to hold the full image in his mind. As he built one room, another would slip into abstraction. 

He added the frame like a ribcage, the bones of the house. His father, who read blueprints the way some men read the newspaper, would have known the exact placement of the studs. The house had looked identical to the others on the block before his parents had moved in, but no one would guess that anymore.

When Leo looked up from the camera, the clapboard seemed unnaturally opaque and hard. He turned the camera towards his face and waved at the lens, though he was not sure his fingers made it into the frame. He pressed the red button and the REC disappeared, though the screen still played the view through the lens.