The father had bought the house with paper money. He’d worked for years and years. If asked he could not say for certain what the work was. Mostly all he did all day any day was look into a blank screen flush with light. Sometimes the father looked at porn or ads or sports scores, but mostly just the light.
In the nights before the new house, the father walked up streets peeping through glass. He’d seen the light in other houses. He’d seen people in their beds—sometimes moving in the darkness to the bathroom or the stairs. He’d seen so many bodies fuck. In one house he’d seen someone reading about a father at the window in a book. All the houses touched by wire. The grain in the glass in the windows in the frames in the walls in the rooms in the houses on the yards along the streets aligned for miles.
The father wanted a certain kind of life to give his family. He wanted a house described by all of who he’d been—though who he’d been, to him, would not stop changing.
The father washed and washed his hair. He tried. He concentrated.
He had not asked the mother or son what she or he thought before he signed the family name on legal lines. He could not remember where he’d found the listing. He could not remember what he did not remember—nor would he want to, would he ever.
There were many things the father did without his wife’s permission—things like seeing, walking, aging—things he could not name.
From outside the new house looked like many other houses.