The other floor’s long hall of bedroom doors all stood open, stunk and stung the father’s eyes. The wet revolved inside his head and made him hungry, stuck with an itching, in the light. He held his hands upon the air there, flush with hot flashes—a drum kit in his lungs—his feet swollen beneath him, doorbells. The other house alive.
The floors down here were mirrors. The father watched himself walking from below. Each step made him thicker, narrowing the walls.
In spasmed gulps, the way his childhood cat had—the cross-eyed, many-named creature who one night had crawled into a mudhole in the woods behind his parents’ house and not come out—its name still somewhere in him, its absent sound—the father coughed something up into his hands: an origami box folded out of wet, smeary flash paper—with it at last out of his chest he could see head-on again—he could think of things he’d seen once: ash rising from fires, balls thrown, nipples tugged, bundles of cash. The father unfolded the origami, hearing it crinkle, as did each day the fat filling his head. WHO IS IN THERE, someone had written. The father ripped the note into many tiny pieces and swallowed it again.
In the house the hall held still. Somewhere above him a pucker shrunk a little, released a smudge of air. Black and magnets. Runny.
The father walked along the hall. He stopped outside the copy master bedroom. He turned to face the light. In the room he saw his body sleeping, several of him. The furniture had been removed. The bodies of him piled into the small space stacking, puddled up with limbs. Some were missing hair or digits. They were cuddling, chewing, talking in their sleep. Laughing, scratching, humping, what have you. The more he looked the more there were, though sometimes, between blinking, there was just him, well, he and the him inside him, and the meat around his seeing, and his arms. The father closed his eyes and heard them breathing, heard his many hungry stomachs snarl.
With his hands within the forced dark, the father closed the door.
The father felt his way along the hallway further, palms along the walls. In the grain, the house had written out a list of names, a man’s phone number, a tablature, a hymn’s words, a prayer, a map, a day—none of which the father understood as language, and yet it settled in him still.
The father felt along the hall with all his fingers till he felt another door. This door would be the son’s door, the father said, and heard his body say. The door into she and I and his and hers and ours and ours and our son’s room. This door as well was open, another mouth inside the copy house—or was he back inside his own house now? The father could not tell. His chest was throbbing.
The father moved into the room. He moved onto the air with skin around him, feeling forward, unwilling yet to open back his eyes.