When the son looked again they were in another room. He’d been laid prostrate on a long deep red sofa with an awning that hid the ceiling from his head. The room held several mirrors. The girl stood behind him, behind the sofa. The girl combed the son’s hair. The hair had so many knots and nits slipped in it. The son felt okay. The combing stunk.
Why weren’t you at school last week? the girl said.
The son felt a spasm in his eye. I was at school, he said. I thought you weren’t.
The girl hummed a little song.
Whenever the girl’s knuckle brushed the son’s scalp, he felt it burn.
What butler? the girl repeated. She laughed out through her nostrils. She tugged hard on the son’s hair. In his cleaned locks, she threaded rings, translucent to the light.
The room they’d come to now was long and thin and had one enormous window, though from where they were sitting the son could not see out. The light changed direction and intensity every several seconds, revealing different parts of the long room. In one section the light revealed a corridor down which the son could hear many other people singing, the same song as the girl. In another section the light revealed a fountain and a man standing at it with his back toward them, completely still.
In completely different light entirely the son saw on the wall behind the girl several long black bags hanging—bags like the one he’d found inside the box. These bags had shapes inside them that stretched their fabric. Some bags were bulgy, flush with weight, while other bags seemed to handle almost nothing. Some of the bags were wet in places. Each one had a tag sewn onto the zipper, filled in another kind of script—names and numbers, illegible descriptions of their contents, where they’d come from, how they’d been. There was at least one bag for every picture the son had seen inside the box, including his—his long black bag hung there on the wall there, open—and many more beyond. Bags and bags unending. It was hard to look at any of them very long. There was no smell inside the room.
The son realized, in the seeing, how he did not actually remember the bag from his own house or the box or his father and mother or his house itself or the house they’d lived in before that one or how he’d come into the house here or how he’d met the girl—these bags had only been in this room here, ever—he wasn’t sure how he knew he realized this. The son’s forehead wormed with flexing meat. He laughed and laughed. He loved the bags. He loved his bag, the skin of its inseam. He loved this house and all the people and the walls that held them in. The son loved the couple who’d come to see and touch the walls inside the other house, their replication, the couple carrying his want. The son loved the slick of sound inside him never ending and loved how he could no longer feel his mouth, his hair pulled down so hard around his skull he needed nothing more than nothing, than the hour of his skin, cells given from the width of many others, in thunder, money, wishing, laughter, need, and mud. He would love this house forever. His house. This girl. He. Hers. Him. The rivers of the air inside his blood in prisms. Evenings.
The son shook his head, looked up by looking down.
His mouth filled up again with nothing—he swallowed hard.
I like to remember things my own way, like anybody, he said, in a second voice, with words that were not words.