Crack

It started with a discussion of the second world war. A cheese platter was placed on the coffee table. An unnamed jazz record was playing while the moon, tangled in the pines like a balloon, shone through the living room windows. Prisms of light fell slithering on the rug. We were in a room walled with certainty. The lights were yellow and warm. I mention the light, you see, because of what it did to our bodies. The academic went into a long story about Truman, arms resting perpendicular on the arms of the chair. The lawyer, addressing me and two others, was standing in front of us entering into an unsolicited debate. My father was there, hands on his hips, and I don’t think I’d be alive today if we hadn’t used it. And suddenly another entered the room, seated in the corner with legs neatly crossed saying nothing, whom I was being urged, for no reason other than their arrival, to mouth the words thank you to. All lawyers stand with astute faces. Leaves unseen had struck the window, another bottle of red was uncorked. All executioners sit effaced. The chandeliers, glistening, were dangling like ears. And now, said the economist, chuckling, we only worry about dying from aliens or asteroids. There was laughter. To refute this, you understand, was pointless, because it was true; the room’s geometry confirmed it. There was laughter. This is when it happened. The way a river cracks under the chilled hoof of a deer in winter, the room was riven by words. Not the water, but the sound of ice aching in the woods. Not the unease, but the ordinary revealed within. It provided a momentary glimpse at the logic of this house, of just how far from the world it is. Dearest, though on a diferent continent, of a different night, you were sitting next to me, our elbows touching like clouds; us, in this room where the doors were illusions, likely misunderstood, and the ceiling was iron. This occurrence, now long gone by, a cavity in the night since filled. Everyone left, went on with their little lives full of little joys—they amassed photographs of amber skies, kissed in the kitchen, noticed the perfume of a stranger on the bus, and made many, many plans. There’s no good reason to be telling you any of this. Consider it a sort of confession. A sort of wail. A touch of your hand hoping to be discerned. I can’t get the sound of the room out of my head, muffled and turning, as if already buried. The house is haunted. The house is me. You know this. Every night I return, standing hunched in the hallway mopping up the blood on the hardwood. There is neither a mop nor blood.