The father spent coming weekends painting over the walls of several rooms. At move-in the house’s walls had been all a shade of blue so blue it appeared black. In certain rooms the walls had been augmented with intricate designs and tiny lines of texts, though these as well were rendered in the same blue and thus could not be seen. The paint the father swathed over the old paint hid the old paint from the eye. The father’s body groaned with all his reaching. The wall’s length often seemed to grow. The father would paint and paint and paint and still have hardly painted anything at all.
In the evenings now before his sleeping the father walked for hours through the house—room to room to room there, seeing. The house seemed larger than it was. Many rooms were long and had no windows. Firetraps, they might be called. Other rooms had shelves or holes or seating built right into the body of the house. Doors with odd knobs. Patterned carpet. Bulbs in certain lamps he’d need would burst. Sometimes the father liked to leave the lights off from one room to another, fumbling for something, bumping his shoulder or kneecap on something hidden, hard. At doorways he would flick the light on half a second, burst the room bright, then in the returning dark try to negotiate the space by mirror in his mind. In certain rooms the father found it hard at all to breathe.
One room on the second floor had a dumbwaiter which would whine along its string, and when pulled rose to somewhere overhead, straight up. There was nothing above the second floor as far as the father knew, except the roof, the sky, the light. One night the father placed an empty water glass into the dumbwaiter. He closed the small door and pulled the pulley. He waited long enough to smoke a cigarette then he brought the box back down. The glass had been turned on its side. The rim felt wet. The father put an orange inside and brought it up and brought it down and found the orange had lost its color. The father wrote a note on a piece of paper—WHO IS IN THERE—and brought it up and brought it down and found the paper rendered blank. The father was too large to fit into the dumbwaiter himself. The father bought a padlock.
Off the house’s longest hallway, the father found a room the realtor had not shown the father—a room also not on the father’s copy of the blueprints, a room so small the father could hardly fit inside—this room was stuffed with hair. Wispy black hair, the kind a cat sheds, though it didn’t smell like cat. The father found himself pressing his head into the hair, breathing, breathing. The father had been balding steadily for at least the past two years. All the other men in the father’s family kept their hair. In fact, the father’s father had grown his hair beyond his ass—enough hair to wrap the father’s father’s body before they’d buried him at sea.
Nestled in the hair against the seamless wooden floorboards, the father found a key. The key seemed wider than most locks. The father clenched the key inside his fat fist. The father swallowed something in him. The father closed the tiny room. The father walked the key into the kitchen and placed it in a drawer with all the steak knives. The father stood in the kitchen for an hour. The father went back to the tiny room. The father gathered all the black hair into a black trash bag and walked it outside to the street. The father went inside watched it through the window.
The father drank a beer. The father drank a beer.