3/1/2002, 4/9/2002 Geoffrey Gordon Ashbrook
Mik and Sandy shuffled in through the doorway and put down their many bags in the dark before groping for the light switch and closing the door behind them.
They found it to be rather empty, a lamp, a small end table, a sofa, an envelope on the floor, and vast expanses of undecorated wall and bare wooden boards. They could still hear the rain outside, and on the planks of the deck behind the sliding door, and they still had lots more bags to bring in.
Sandy sniffled and walked into the kitchen, leaving smudgy prints all the way. She opened the frigidaire and turned the little dial onto ‘low’ and screwed in the old-fashioned looking light bulb with a childishly oversized filament until it came on a bit glaringly and then she checked the freezer just to make sure nothing had been left in there.
He went out to bring in most of the rest of the bags while she plotted her use of the kitchen cabinet landscape. Where the herbs would be employed, where to station the trashcan, which oils to appoint to what precincts of the counter space, where would the knife block finally attain tenure?
She went out to help him with the last of the bags from the trunk and when everything was in he took off his shoes and gave himself a guided tour of their new home. As you can see, off to the right we have a completely empty room with two small round windows and a door into the bath. On our left, you can see the Kitchen. As we move on you will find two mostly empty rooms on both your sides, one of which connects to the kitchen and the other is the bath. Just after the bath you see a comfortable space containing a sofa that you would not at first suspect as being indicative of a beverage based society. [Cough] Up further on to your left is your opening onto the deck from which you can catch lunch, depending, and further to the right are two more completely empty rooms, one with two, and one with four, small round windows. [Hands clasped together] That is all, we hope you will enjoy your stay, please inform us of anything, anything at all, we’re completely lonely and we would love to have anyone come by for any or no reason, even to complain or chastise us.
She looked over the many bags that were scrunched like immigrants around the front door. She picked up a bag of socks and groceries and took it into the kitchen along with a modest amount of mud which she left off at various points along the way. She put the bag up on the counter and listened to Mik’s muffled steps punctuating. She began taking items from the bag and using them to manifest her master plan. After a few minutes Mik poked his head around the corner from the mostly empty room that connected to the Kitchen. “You know where you want to sleep?”
“Not yet,” she said, placing a bottle of oregano that was labeled ‘Coriander’ next to an ornate saltshaker filled with something green and crystaly. “Spotted anywhere nice?”
“The one at the end with the four windows is nice.”
“You want that one?”
“Dunno. Come take a look, there’s lots we can do.”
“One sec.” She finished putting away all of the non-socks and then stepped out of her shoes and went to see the rest of the place for herself.
She walked past the blue coffee table that sat in front of the sofa and stepped along the burgundy and beige throw rugs on her way to the deck where she stopped and watched breaks in the clouds open and shut like small slow blue-lined mouths taking breaths at the surface and going up and under again. A smack of thunder rung from far off, but she didn’t see any flashes or anything.
She turned around. A table set for two. Translucent candles burned in crystal holders and steaming bowls of onion soup sat beside small plates of thin focaccia topped with smoked provolone shredded with steamed baby spinach leaves all melted together and sprinkled with thickly grated parmesan, fresh rosemary, coarse pepper, olive oil and garlic. The light in the room came from naphtha lamps on the walls and it was warm and rich and easy on the eyes. She walked over to the wall and ran her finger over the rough barnwood frame, and then the smooth narrow driftwood mat, and then traced without touching the long outline of the lady’s face.
Mik walked behind her, moving toward the wall squinting down at it, and she spun around and locked her arms around his shoulders from the back, pinning his arms to his sides. And then she bit down on the side of his neck, gingerly, and then nuzzled in the back of his head.
“So you do,” he said, turning slightly at the hips back and forth like a slowed down third cousin of one of those clocks that has a spinning pendulum. “I thought you might.” And with one more nip she let go and walked off, sliding in her socks, to doorway of the four-windowed room.
It was not exactly as she had expected. The walls were lined with tables, navigation maps stretched out with heavy compasses keeping the curling-up edges down. Long telescopes on spindly tripods peeked out three of the windows. There was no chair and an abacus lay broken on the floor with a few of the beads scattered about. A half burned letter lay on one of the maps under a nickel protractor. Her eyes narrowed.
Mik walked up behind her and then sidled into the room, knelt down, and picked up a wooden bead from the floor? “I wonder what this is from?” he said, and looked at it, and turned it around with his fingers. “I wonder what it is?”
She stepped quietly into the next room. Yellow walls with light blue stars. A waist high gate in the doorway. A nippled bottle on a squat dresser under a plain linen shaded lamp. A crib with a wrung missing from the headboard. The closet door is shut and the white paint is cracked like crackle-glaze and the grain of the wood underneath is showing through.
She walked back toward the paper grocery bags on the floor and turned left into the bathroom. A large cast iron tub stood on four legs. A thick brass pipe came down from the ceiling and hung over the foot of the tub with a series of dials and valves at the end. A loose knit curtain with a purple bottom frill hung all pushed aside to either end of the curved bar that hung from ceiling. Some of the copper hoops swayed and glinted slightly. A small mask lay face down next to a felt hat on the edge of the sink. The large mirror behind the sink was rounded at the bottom but formless at the top, as though it were viscous quicksilver poured and dripping up the deep purple wall.
She stepped past the bath and into the last room, where the wooden floorboards stretched out to meet a simple wainscoting, and the walls stretched from floor to ceiling pocked with two round windows. Mik stepped into the doorway that led toward the kitchen, and said, “Have you found you’re way around ok?”
“I’m sleeping here,” she said. And looked over at him, with a look like she’d just confirmed a questionable price.
He looked at her for a moment, and then, “As you wish,” and then smiled. And so did she.
The next day they woke up early, she earlier, and while he was still in the shower she lit candles and put them on the kitchen counter and then elsewhere on plates on the floor as there was hardly another place she could put them.
When he got out of the shower he stood in the doorway, one towel around his middle and roughing his hair with another, and asked if the lights had gone out when he saw her crouched and relighting a small red candle, on a plate on the floor infront of the sofa, that kept going out.
“No,” she said.
A few minutes later he came out dressed and then she snuffed all the candles and they left patting their pockets and asking eachother if they had the spare and finally shutting the door with a click.
That evening the door opened again. And bags and boxes and crates were escorted in, one by one, and asked politely to stay put up against a wall or in a corner. And she emptied the contents of a tall bag into the fridge and walked over to the sofa and sat down.
It was soft. Mik was going in and out, bringing in parcels out of the rain and finally paying the cab-fare. She turned and looked at the TV where a Black and White talking head was speaking in what sounded to her like Scandinavian. And just as Mik was walking in, holding a large nest of tissue paper, she yelled out, “Why didn’t you wait for the other cab?”
He tilted his head and gently put down the bundle and walked into the sofa-room leaving his shoes by the front door. “You ok?” he asked.
A card table with a red and white plastic cloth over it stood between her and Mik. The TV drowned out the sound of the rain, and images of the Headmaster of the Academy walking into the office and nitpicking her work kept running through her head. “Maybe I was wrong,” she said, “We should have just waited like you wanted. Probably would have gotten here faster.”
He walked up to her and sat down on the floor in front of the sofa. “I don’t care even if it did take a little longer. It got us here ok, didn’t it? Why would it have taken longer? Lets take a walk. Come on. It’s nice and rainy out.” And he stood up and he pulled her to her feet by the hands and he kissed her on the forehead and they put on their coats and galoshes and went out in the direction of the pier by the lighthouse with the woods around it.
While they were gone the sounds of a pleasant drizzle crept from room to room and peeked into the parcels and bundles and boxes, trying to guess from the sizes and shapes what was in what. All the time the newcomers wondered patiently where they were, listening, trying to imagine who their new siblings and coworkers and friends would be, licking their open memories as a person licks a finger to see which way the wind is blowing.
With a click the door opened and a light went on, and off almost immediately. There was a shuffling and a flint wheel spun and scratched and a flame jumped up and Sandy walked into the kitchen with her shoes on as Mik shut the door and took his shoes off and smiled.
She walked into the sofa-room and knelt down and lit the red candle on the floor, which wasn’t having trouble staying lit anymore, and she looked at the sofa. She squinted at it.
There was a knocking sound, and Mik pulled open the door and heavy set man stepped in and took off his weathered looking plaid woolen hat. “Is your electricity out?” he said, looking around the place.
Mik smiled. “No,” he said. “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice. Hate to bother.”
“Oh no bother,” he said, “Is that it down there?” he asked, taking off his Mackintosh, looking around for a hat tree while Mik reached to take it out of his hand.
“This is the one,” she said.
After taking off his shoes he walked up to the sofa and put a hand on it. “Strange how something like this could slip through,” he said, half to himself. “Still, we’ve got it now.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small book, bound with leather and bark and lashings of wire and gut. He opened it and pulled out a small vile of bluish liquid and pulled from his pocket a silver metal piece connected to a bulb. He snapped the top onto the vial so that it resembled a small perfume dispenser, and he squeezed the bulb and an oily mist sank quickly, almost too quickly, down onto the fabric of the sofa.
Sandy sat on the floor behind the candle, leaning back against her arms, her head tilted.
When the droplets hit the surface of the sitting device there was a sudden sound that consumed the whole room, as if a gigantic plastic wrapper were being scrunched up into a ball infront of a microphone turned up far too loud. Sandy and Mik both jumped, but, as they saw, the man simply watched.
After a second or two the left arm of the sofa split down the middle and opened up. The man reached inside and pulled out a small tightly ringed metallic disk. “This is your problem,” he said with a smirk.
He held it up to the candlelight, his finger through the hole in the middle. Then he popped open his little book again and placed the disk inside, and shut the book. The wires along the binding began to glow blue, and a high-pitched spinning whine issued from the tiny tome.
Then the sound subsided and the wires flashed yellow and he opened it up and took out the little circle, which looked no different, and placed it back into the arm and pushed something and it closed up and the seam disappeared.
“No more trouble from that,” he said with a single forward nod.
“How much for it?” asked Mik.
“Fer that?” the man asked in surprise.
“Or maybe…we’ve got some sushi left over from dinner…”
The man’s eyes suddenly grew large. “You do?”
“It isn’t much.”
“I’d hate to intrude, you were probably looking forward to a late night-“
“Actually we’re both completely stuffed.”
“Well, ok.” And he smiled at Mik who smiled back. Then he asked, “Anything else around here not been wiped properly?”
“No,” she said. “That was the only thing.”
“Well we’ll all sleep sounder tonight. What with that drizzle it’ll be hard not to.” He tucked the little book back into his pocket and stepped over toward the door where Mik was waiting with the man’s coat, cap, and midnight snack.
“Is Salmon ok?”
“Is Salmon ok, he asks me. To that I can only answer, yes.” He put his arms in the sleeves.
Sandy, who was standing in the kitchen now and leaning against the fridge, asked, “Where do the memories go when something gets wiped?”
“Where? Don’t know. Nowhere? Maybe? Time’s riddle. I don’t think no one knows that, lassie.” He flattened his hat onto his head, tipped the brim, smelled the bag he held, bowed, and stepped out into the drizzle whistling.
“Where’d you put that bead you found?” Sandy asked.
“The what? Oh, the…where…oh, it’s right here.” He dipped into his pocked and produced the squat black wooden thingy shaped like a wheel around a large hole in the middle.
“It’s from an abacus,” she said.
“How can you tell?” he said, looking closely at it.
She walked into the empty room --the one just deck-wards of the bathroom-- and went into the closet and fished around the base until her hand closed around a stick. She walked out with it in her hand and held it out to Mik.
“What’s that?”
“Bar from a baby’s crib.”
“I see.” He held the two objects in his hands and looked from one to the other.
“Their older than the sofa. I don’t know what happened. I think they were trying to find something.”
“Who?”
“The people who used to live here. And there was a note too. They tried to burn it.”
“It sounded like the Wiper didn’t want anything left around, I wonder why not.”
She shrugged and took the bead from him and went and sat on the sofa. “Maybe he thinks it’s like dirt.”
“Maybe they’re trying to hide something?”
The rain drizzled on. A packing tube slid down the wall and tapped against a box where it came to rest.
She rolled the bead around between her fingers. “I don’t think they know about this. But I think they’re scared.” She turned to him. “Like being scared of ghosts, maybe.”
He walked over and sat down next to her on the sofa and examined the dowel. He tapped it with his knuckle. She tipped her head against his shoulder, and he reached around wrapping both his arms around her and hugged her, and let the rod clatter against the floor.