The first requirement of architectural beauty is suitability to situation. A house should always seem to belong where it stands. If it looks forced upon an unwilling landscape, or if it is in any way antagonistic or uncomfortable because conspicuous or out of scale, then it fails in this first requirement.
—EMILY POST, The Personality of a House
It is best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain.
—MARK TWAIN
IN SNOW
When a father returns to empty shelves, empty cupboards, and a family that can only sit there, parched, playing one of many games centered around counting to larger and ever larger numbers, he will retrieve the luggage that he has brought back with him, bring the brown suitcase, the suitcase with two brass latches, opening it up before our eyes to reveal that it is full of snow.
Before our eyes he opens it up, his hands slip back the two latches in clean sound, and then the snow seen against a silk lining, paisley-printed, all the snow glaring back the lamps and shaming our house with the brilliance of things that belong outside it.
The snow is what sand would be if it could forget its material, if it could forget its hardness, roughness, if it could forget its own weight. And the snow is what we would be if we could forget ours. If we could become the things we pretend instead of merely pretending at them, playing over and over at a game of falling silent and soft from couch to floor, making ourselves silent and soft as we can, playing at being snow, playing until our elbows and sides are too sore to move.
Before our eyes he makes small motions at the contents of the suitcase, and the snow begins to fill out, piling the table and over the table to the floor. Then we are in up to our knees.
WE ARE THE WEATHER
The weather is beautiful through the windows of our house, you could take it for a painting. With an ear pressed to the window, it speaks, stutters, moist noises like someone in a form of forced sleep.
Right now it rains. Water throws itself against our windows, sideways with the force of the wind. It makes the things outside melt, dripping off gelatinous blots of their own color. How wonderful to be able to melt the shape from things that belong so smugly to themselves. To be the outside itself, or to reach for it and feel something without the flat touch of glass.
Father proclaims man and weather natural enemies, and suddenly we are. In motion his mouth laps at the air, takes into it the world we have been presented with and passes it out again, deformed. Pressed against tongue, teeth, the sounds fall out marked by indentations from human molars. They take shapes that imply our own deformation, that cause us to turn over the words in our own mouths, heavy and cold like a mouthful of marbles that taste of the hands of other children.
Father names the body of man a device for sculpting weather more weatherlike, less crazed, a device for disciplining the air. He walks out into the daylight shaking damaged equipment toward the mild sky. As hollow tubes spill from his arms, as springs jerk wildly, taut and loose, flinging themselves like a ruined cartoon body, knotted together and dancing. His voice going on without punctuation without pause about the ruined possibilities of his invention, his invention a device intended to transform one thing into another, that takes it away from itself and makes it one’s own, as my father to the weather or my mother to her projects of paper and thread. In the partial daylight, a father fills up with shadow, standing as a silhouette of a machine shuddering up and down as it works, wobbly, clanking against itself, a machine for the production of heat and noise.
My father, certain that internal forms of weather can be used to influence the external. My father under the big sky, shouting at clouds. We watch him through a window. We play rain, rubbing our hands and faces all over the smooth surfaces of the furniture.
MEASURED FACTS
We have invented a meter to measure the accumulation of time, a machine capable of producing detailed descriptions of the air. We have invented a method of extracting still water from rain and for shaming sleet and slush into legible forms of precipitation, forms a child could draw.
The surface of our home is a single block of shatterproof plastic. There is a single flaw in the surface of our home through which we would enter or exit, a thing we rarely do.
Air enters the flaw of a body and presses through into ever-deeper regions, traveling from oral reservoir to tracheal passageway to the lungs, which resemble small rooms. This is illustrated in a diagram fixed to the dining room wall, which is designed to remind us to keep food and air passages separate. In this diagram, a frog sits in a glass-sided tank. The frog is a cross-section, and air is a blue arrow traveling into its body. In the diagram to its right, the arrow is red, and represents food traveling the same path to the lungs. I point to this second frog, which is dead.
“Many thousands of years ago, the world’s surface was covered with small, thoughtless beings whose deaths held no consequences. In the terrible storms of lava and rain that occurred before the climate had come to a form of sense, they died and multiplied like a storm in themselves, flourishing haphazardly and then collapsing into a pit or whatnot where their lungs filled with the syrupy weight of their own liquefied ancestors. They lived like the weather, like a smattering of problems unforeseen but urgent, and they died, too, like the showers or sunlight: a brief seizure with no purpose, no understanding of their own duration.”
A necessary flaw belongs somewhere between an error and a mistake.
Our device to control the weather fails to control anything at all.
DREAMING WATER
We play a game based upon the weather, it begins in the living room. We stand in the middle, looking around. One player will ask, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” and the other will answer. I hold out my hand.
“I think I feel some drops, just a few.”
Look up at the ceiling, search it for clouds. Describe the color of the clouds and their shape. This one like a duck, that one like an anvil.
Demonstrate surprise.
Cirrus clouds indicate cold weather if they move from left to right. Cumulus clouds indicate rain if they are gray, stacked, or have grown taller throughout the day. Stratus clouds can bring snow flurries or storm. A cloud shaped like an anvil impends.
Describe the direction of their movement. Describe their speed.
I open an imaginary newspaper.
The newspaper opens like wings, makes their sound.
Gray squares tremble against the air.
“It says there’s a thirty percent chance.”
We watch the ceilings, and the minutes remove themselves.
TO UNDO OR NOT TO DO
This device is a vaporizer. It is for clouds, sunshine, temperature, and wind. It is also for plants and other living things.
When I say it is for them, I do not mean that it is good for them.
This device is heavier than almost anything. It has a case made of metal stuck through with tubes leading from one place within it to another. No matter how hard you lean against it, it does not sway. No matter how hard you kick it, it does not respond to or do anything. Under no circumstances is it to be kicked or pushed.
When the rain falls, bit by bit it becomes broken. I watch the rain falling on it, falling on its body and its back, falling into the funnel from which it acts out, falling all over it so it makes a sound like a thousand drums and I know suddenly that as heavy as it is, it is hollow past the shell. All is different kinds of gray. It gives off small stars as the rain knits it in water.
What our family has done, the rain undoes in a matter of minutes. The color of the sky and the ground, it undoes. Undone, the dryness and smooth feeling of the air. If it could undo also the year or two years that have come before, would we be as we were, or would we be something new, wetter?
I hold my ruined pet, looking out the window at the rain, the rain, the substance that would either bring my pet back, or turn it into something more distant, untouchable.
PLAY HOUSE
Outdoors, water soaks the ground and is lost. Indoors we live with rules that prevent things from becoming lost or broken, from leaking outdoors and coming loose.
These are obstructions that redirect absences before they unfold, closed spaces in which things are not forced to pass out of view in time like everything else, like a sudden dissipation replacing the light with its hollow or the objects of the day with their opposites, a flower with its absence or the shape of a pet with a thin, tasteless vapor. We pass these things from our view instead with willed movements away, we leave them by force and when we return to them in several minutes or hours or days, they remain.
In this way, our house resembles a life tied in a knot, or a passage of time spread out in all directions. There are long spaces unfilled by anything, then sudden clumps of familiar and unfamiliar strewn as in a salvage yard, portions that have “stepped to the side, safe, rather than eliminating themselves violently.” Indoors we may construct our lives from tissue paper, from brittle thread, from confectioner’s sugar, if we wish. Materials that crumble at the touch or sag under moisture live like magazine images beneath our ceilings, they will not wish to stir within our thick walls, repaired constantly with special tools we have made to preserve their form. We might be anyone, and our undoing just another thing rolling around like a marble through the halls, waiting to be found and left and lost and forgotten.
My mother sits, making small scratching motions with the fingers to coax the meanings from flat objects. I run from the room. I run back into the room. I run from the room and make small scratching motions at the wall, yielding little. I run through the house. I search my father, to go to him for the words to fill these descriptions. He stands in front of the window, practicing his speech. I run from the room. I run back into the room. These are the things we make possible in an environment salvaged from its own predisposition toward destruction.
NEVER HAVE I EVER
I lie in the center of the emptiest room of our emptiest house looking from right to left. The room breathes around me as I lie more like a floor than the flattest, deadest floor. Looking down over the belly, I see the sockets and lights rise up and down, up and down steadily, and I can make it breathe more quickly by breathing more quickly, until I feel dizzy and my head rolls over in circles.
We study the weather from within this house, and we are the weather within this house. Outside this house there are weather and weather patterns, stretching for miles in any direction. We cannot control the weather from within this house. But in this house we are working on it.
We study the weather in a house that keeps the weather out, we watch the weather outdoors from indoors, through the windows. We can see rain through the windows, sleet through the windows, hail, snow, partially cloudy, cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms, partially cloudy with isolated thunderstorms. We can see fog through the windows, but we cannot see what lies past it.
Indoors we have cataloged the indoors, named its parts and recorded their number and location. We remove their ability to surprise us, even as they relieve us of our astonishment. It seems as though this indoors is held up by these numbers: if they were to become lost, it would vanish like pots and pans when one forgets they are playing house.
Weather covers the length of a wooden fence. It covers over our backyard and the backyards of our neighbors, who have all disappeared. Where did they disappear to, and how?
They disappeared like weather, like weather the day after weather.
UNTIL SOMETHING HAPPENS
We approach the cold like the water approaches the bottom of a hill. It makes itself felt through the holes in our airtight windows, six inches of solid plastic. He rolled everyone in thick acrylic fleece, I saw nothing but white and a small circle of mixed color. We roasted and ate large wheels of meat, meat being “the command given to another body, setting it in purposeful motion with knives and grinding.” There was nothing to do and there was less of it every day, the husks of board games drained in the corner of every room, their only use brief and saddening. Pick it up, look for something new to appear printed on the reverse side, try to use the game pieces on another board, grow heavy, carry to another room and leave in that corner, a new corner. The winter “like an abomination paralleled only by the flaccidity of spirit with which it has been met with in response.” The winter “the gravest threat to productive and life-affirming activity to enter these walls since the homequake of three autumns prior,” but making a sound more like that of mice inching under the floorboards or of fire scratching at the outer shell. One night, they read and I look at pictures in a large atlas of other places to be. On other nights, I read and Father argues about great inventions of the past. Or we listen to forecasts over the radio.
The first idea was a house without weather, says Father. The same idea as a roof, but bigger. Better, he says. Mother looks up from her work. She is making a blue scarf out of woolen yarn, another blue scarf to add to the piles of blue scarves, hats, mittens, muffs that sit over there in the closet, getting older.
PERCENTAGE OF CLEAR SKY
Of the types and the shapes. Of arranging them in groups by height, weight, or self-similarity. Of the types of children they once were and could someday give birth to. Other people and their ability to pass freely through the space that you take up, to pass to and through and away from it in a way that you were not designed to do.
Once upon a time other people were around. You could see them through the window. They were washing their minivans, vacuuming debris up from under the car mats. They were playing with a dog, or tousling its ears, or scratching the scruff of its neck under the collar. You could see from their faces that they loved soccer, or horses, or mornings. They had preferences for large things over small, or the opposite.
What happened inside their houses, besides a choreography of lights going on and off and, eventually, entirely off?
How did they know when to turn which lights on and off, and to what end?
Distance and knowledge are nearly the same thing. Or so my family tells me, demonstrating this by covering my eyes with small pieces of white paper and asking me to identify what I see. Children have been visible outside the window, playing in the snow as though unaware of its crystalline structure, each one fragile and irreproducible. I have watched the snow melt in their hands, though I have not felt it melt in my own.
ONLY SLIGHTLY
My mother watches the storm from the kitchen window of this house, watches the storm fall over roof and yard. It falls from the sky through a fiberglass frame of approximately a foot in diameter, suspended outside the kitchen window by a hermetically sealed plastic pipe, the pipe’s opening governed by vacuum pump, ending in an airtight seal.
When it rains good, clean rain, when it rains types of rain that we have not encountered previously, or familiar types that can replenish our collections. Then we will make it sleep, we will put it under ether.
I watch her at the window, loading a canister of gaseous substance, checking air pressure within canister and pipe, preparing the pump for operation and checking its parts for leakage and wear. At the peak of the storm, when the sounds of individual raindrops falling upon the roof are no longer distinguishable one from the other, she presses the button and the frame fills with mist.
My mother dons raincoat, gloves, galoshes, and an oversize hat. She opens the umbrella and steps outside, gingerly over the cobblestones, gingerly to the collection tank. The plastic frame is filled with droplets of water suspended in midair, shaped like downward momentum, but paused there. Paused. She takes the large glass jar from beneath her coat and fills it with sleeping rain. The cap again atop the jar.
We have learned that the weather cannot be kept outdoors and must be brought indoors, dragged indoors, before it brings itself indoors. We create the image of a house where the outside must ask to be let in, where it rings the bell and wonders what to do with its hands while it waits for someone to come to the door. Through such preemptive tactics we show it that, though it may cover the whole world, we cover the world inside our house.
When my mother comes back, she leaves the jar on the kitchen counter. The raindrops inside look sad or exhausted. They stir, but only slightly.
LEARNED MOTIONS
We maintain a constant temperature of 73 degrees within our house, counteracting temperature drops with baths and warm foods, counteracting rises in temperature with meals of ice and cold water.
We gather in photographs in triangular formations, the hands of the two larger on the shoulders of the smaller, as if we could become a single solid structure.
Nineteenth-century physicist Arthur Worthington photographed drops of milk at their moment of impact with a hard surface, providing irrefutable evidence of “the deeply lodged gimpishness of nature at her core.” While scientists had previously imagined the splash patterns of liquids to be regular, symmetrical, crystalline, the photographs taken within Worthington’s laboratory revealed ragged blooms that threw themselves up into the air with “indiscrimination worthy only of a pratfall.” They surged up upon impact, or seemed to reach outward with irregularly sized pseudopodia. With this material proof of their irregularity, naturally occurring phenomena entered the category of “trainable effects,” like “the squelching and spattering sounds that emerge from a mouth in the process of doing other than generating meaningful speech” that we silence with practice and much cloth.
The walls of our house are to its space as the rules are to a game. In between lie air, and everything allowed. We run circles from the kitchen through the den through the bedrooms through the kitchen.
Controlling the weather will be the first step past building descriptions that cannot hold it in. It could be the first step out of this house that we have lived so far into and through.
MANY QUESTIONS
At dusk, we play a game of thought and guessing. This is recreation, which fills the spaces between moments of productive friction, moments in which we create. In the dusk, the space within takes on a color to which it is difficult to respond. We want to turn the lights on but it is too early, we want to keep them off but it grows too late. We want a space in which we could half do, do halfway, but we are forced to be one thing or another, except within the act of hoping.
Our family, like other collections, possesses a nested structure. My father has known the most and thus could know us better than we know ourselves: he could dream us and we would not know the difference. My mother has seen less and knows proportionately less, and I know the least possible. I could fold up into her, and her into him. We would live inside him like a house, one large white house with two tiny windows on the front. In this house we would have all the things we have now, but we would have no father.
The game is called Many Questions. It happens like this:
I’m thinking of an object, my father says.
Is it a refrigerator? asks my mother.
No, it is not, he replies.
Is it my kitten? I ask.
No, no, he answers.
Is it a stop sign? asks my mother.
It is not, he replies. Now, why in the world would I think of that?
THAT WHICH MEETS NO RESISTANCE
The first idea was to build a house free of weather. Mother says Father was sleepless for weeks, drawing plans for houses without doors, without windows, houses without pipes for outdoor water to enter, houses without any air inside at all.
The first idea was to build a house free of weather. But they discovered within the removal processes a secondary origin of weather. A house with nothing to resist—no rain, no wind—finds areas of resistance within, growing frustrated with its own stasis, shuddering and crumbling around its own stable shape. He formulated a rule: The shelter that meets no resistance shall resist itself.
It was many days ago that Father’s rule was proven accurate and, conversely, that our house proved itself to be a rule. I curled around my warmth as the morning opened itself up, peacefully, without even drops of dew or the movement of birds outdoors. A sharp whine began from within the walls and floor, making items of furniture whine too, like a bomb about to go off. The things on the walls fell off during this whining, and the things on the tables fell with the onset of a chugging, painful sound from machines somewhere within the house. Around us, two gulps softly and one spasm like an attempt to hurl something from the throat. I said that it seemed the house felt we were alien, but I was told that was unlikely. The machinery, built to withstand high winds and violent events, was simply buckling under the weight of very little: through induced outer turbulence we would regain the internal stillness that comforted our objects and our routines. The floor was on a tilt and I watched the round things roll away and out of the room, and the flat and square things slide more slowly toward a similar exit. In another room the refrigerator was on fire, burning up from inside, smelling at once like charred meat and plastic.
I open the freezer door and stare at the hail. It stays still in there. It looks back at me from next to the ice cream and some frozen peas, the hailstones beginning to stick to the freezer’s artificial frost.
THE FIRST IDEA
From one room I looked for another room to hold me, to change the things around me and leave this sharp feeling behind me in the sharp air. A feeling might claw you open with the simple intention of freeing itself, and it would be no one’s fault. I took the black marker from the top of the table.
One arrives at the map room, taking long steps through the shuddering hall. Charts of yesterday’s weather and today’s weather and tomorrow’s weather cover the walls and windows. This is where we make the fiction of tomorrow’s weather, which we hope to make fact, where we draw the weather on the maps, draw the future on their flat faces.
I drew storms on the maps of yesterday and today.
There had been no storms yesterday or today.
The world of the future will be “storm-free, an environment designed for utter compatibility with the needs of the many, as determined through a survey reconstructing the median desires of a high-quality section of inhabitants.” It will wheeze rather than roar. Instead of the storm, there will be a pocket of mild, warm wind. Instead of the rain there will be light and additional light, filling every corner of the empty sky. Instead of hiding from it as one, we will scatter, walking aimlessly away from a central point to a peripheral.
I drew a storm with a warm front traveling north toward this house, a low-pressure center. I marked the origin of storm activity and the counterclockwise direction of wind flow around the low-pressure center.
LACK OF WIND
The clouds we make with the breathing machine are too heavy, and will not float in the air. For now, we strap a harness to them and hang them from the rafters, but we will run out of room, even in this house designed to substitute the sky.
A small, simple game played using words printed on white note cards, and a small black-and-white board. Mother takes a card from the top of the deck and reads it out:
Move back three spaces.
It is my turn, and I move the piece that stands for me three spaces backward on the board. Tiny, useless clouds roll by like tumbleweeds. Or would, if any wind blew within the walls of our house.
I look toward my sister.
It is Father’s turn and I read it out:
Move back one space.
Father moves his piece back one space, and takes the first card off the top of the pile:
Move back two spaces.
Mother moves her piece back two spaces. She takes the next card from the top of the pile. But I take myself to the map room, where I draw angry storms all across the midwestern United States, and both coasts.
A SMALL, SIMPLE GAME
I wander us to the room where clouds are constructed, and now we sisters look upon the same machines with similar eyes. Surrounding us are the freezing chambers, the artificial breathers, the cloud-molds and cloud-cutters.
The first of our homemade clouds were made of real breath, sighed and heaved into the chambers through an air tube. These clouds were perfect and small and a child could name them, pretending that they were a pet cat or dog. These clouds achieved a maximum volume of 6.5 liters, the vital capacity of my father’s lungs.
But larger clouds were required to replicate natural weather, and the artificial breathers were therefore invented to be larger than us, and better than us at accomplishing things they did not even want to accomplish. Like a huge plastic tube, a huge rubber lung, the mechanical breathers breathed all through the night, wheezing through dream after dream, collapsing themselves into flat rubber sacks and then drawing back up, well-oiled and smooth, and filling the chambers with a strange, moist breath that congealed into weird uncloudlike shapes.
To achieve standardized clouds for my mother’s experiments, we took these clouds that felt a little wooly, a little wet, and pushed them into the molds, making the shapes of cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, stratus, fog.
The day the machine broke, there was barely a real cloud in the sky. The blue stretched pale and cool over my father, arms full of machine scrap jostling as he strode around in sharp patterns like a ball striking against invisible obstacles, emitting liters of shouting. The blue opened up over layers and layers of empty space waiting to be filled up with big soft shapes that we had chosen. It gaped above as, at the end of the driveway, no longer shouting, he crumpled downward.
INSTEAD OF ONE
My sister is either older than me or younger than me.
She is either better than me or she is less good.
Under the right circumstances, she is able to put aside self-doubt and leap into action with reflexes that harken back to a more instinctual time, rescuing the child from the onslaught of truck wheels, train wheels, car wheels, saving the child’s life and earning the respect of townspeople and journalists.
Or else she is unable to.
The utility of a sister stems from the longing for reinforcement, for an additional, aligned person inside the house to see what is happening and feel some way about it.
This has something to do with why we are fitted with two eyes instead of one.
WE HAVE DREAMED FOR THEM
Approximately the same height, almost certainly the same age, we sisters crawl hand and knee down a sidewalk we have imagined to exist: three feet wide, five hundred feet long, sidling past a series of miniature houses lined up like the silences in a single day. Preferring one and then the other, we invest in these houses one by one as though we were able to see only halfway through them, through the front facade in a cutaway view, and not all the way.
In the living room, at half size, in the transparent homes we have dreamed for them and placed in our own, we crawl on hands and knees to peer in at one and the next. We have made them of ice and they melt, but slowly. The object of the game is to resist seeing all the way through these glass walls to the familiar objects that lie beyond them, to the old armchair with a dun doily on each tattered arm. Mothers and fathers in these homes of glass turn toward us and smile small, shining, glass smiles, holding up their smiles and their hands in greeting, standing still among perfect stacks of sandwiches: white bread, peanut butter, bananas. This mother, whistling as she fills brown paper bags. That mother, waving at us with one arm, the other arm around the shoulders of a gigantic glass of milk.
At this, my sister stops suddenly and makes a motion as if to dive in and leave us separate, lonesome. I grab the back of her dress and hold tight but she is so hard to hold still, my hands finding no place to make of her a handle or a knot. She whines low and mournfully, signaling as though she would like to crawl inside. Small, silly sister. She has not seen that the spell of play lasts only so long as one pretends not to wish to grasp the things that we have played into being.
In one house, they make snowman versions of themselves, which come slowly to life and begin slowly a series of ordinary things that the family watches, entranced. The snowmen notice us watching, then all the inhabitants of the house turn to us and wave.
In another house, they invent a device to control the weather. When I look into this house and count the number of persons inside, I begin to cry.
WITH TWO
The fact of two sisters allows an escape into situations that could not be accommodated by only one. With two, we may hide in the cupboard for hours, pretending we are somewhere else entirely, without ever having to feel ourselves alone.
From the cupboard, I gaze at her and beckon her in. My knees hunched up by my ears.
The fact of two sisters allows for escape within a situation that is hostile or unfair. Certain species of cicadas lie dormant in their burrows for seventeen years of hibernation, before bursting forth to eat and eat and fly about in the air.
Certain species of birds time their own hatching to meet the soft new cicadas when they emerge.
I set the table, four plates and four sets of silverware for our small careful family.
With her face set in a shape of preoccupation, my mother removes the fourth plate and places it back in the cupboard.
I see my sister’s face grinning back at me from the cupboard, a space so small I cannot imagine how I would fit with her in there.
EACH ONE LIKE THE NEXT
I can see my sister crouching in the living room, playing over something I cannot see.
A toy?
The reasons for a sister are manifold, and if we could persuade her to speak she would give them for herself. The house is emptier every day, less populated, the doors all shut, the objects seem to disappear from tabletops. It is like a leak has opened up someplace we cannot see or sense; there has been no one to watch or be watched by. The eyes grow restless, finding faces in the folds of curtains, crockery, closets.
For another, too few games can be played alone.
I played a game alongside my parents at breakfast. It began with all players picking up a section of the newspaper and opening it up at the fold. My father shakes it three or four times, with a disappointed sound. My mother begins with the headlines and then the little sections, then the longer articles. We went through it, piece by piece, until all was read. We consumed the little letters in their little blocks, then we turned the page for the others.
My newspaper was imaginary, and I finished first.
I watch from the doorway, an empty frame. This door has been taken off its hinges to prevent it from being slammed shut. The resulting air flow, expelled at the velocity of anger, could shake a house to dust. The door has been taken off and taken where?
UNHABITED
A house at night should not be woken into alone, if other methods can be made available. The presence of a parent via effigy, by means of photograph or even an object that they have been seen to love, hate, or merely hold, may be presented to the darkened house as evidence of the presence, past or future, of others with an investment in your existence. The notion of a linkage between yourself and another, by means of structure or form, will impress the house and render it less likely to target you with unidentified sounds and shadows.
We play a game involving the description of the walls, but we are both so good at it that we cannot but fail to surprise each other.
Are there ghosts in the house, and if there were, how would they have gotten in? I tuck the quilt in under my feet, I close the closet door and turn on three different nightlights. These things will yield, if not safety, then an allusion to the idea of it. If there were ghosts in the house, how lonely would they be? With no one to see me, I become like a vapor.
The emptiness within the house populates what lies beyond it. Lightning walks the plain like a tall, glowing man. He looks toward me and at once he is gone.
WE COULD DO IT ALONE
I explain to her the mechanics of daring. She must step outside the door. Outside the door, the day roils with temperatures that would touch our skin.
I explain it. Gameplay proceeds by turns, with each player advancing the series by one. One player’s proposal for action on the part of another is balanced by a counterproposal for a different sort of action by a different person. She must step outside the door. But when will the action be performed? The emphasis is upon daring, not doing. If it were only about doing, we could do it alone, in our separate rooms, with the door closed. I explain to her that this process may bring joy nevertheless, though she remains impermeable to this point, sprawled sideways on the carpet and staring deeply into it.
As I watch her stare under the couch or into the cabinets, I imagine that she may be dissatisfied with the network of beings and objects that she is required to live among. Escape from the scale she was born into could be achieved by burrowing into phenomena of a different scale, belonging to the world of much larger or smaller things.
Our father, for example, has escaped us, has escaped deeper into the house or laboratory, to a position behind a final door through which the sounds of shouting are audible. Our mother proceeds laterally, walking her eyes around at their much greater height, as if in a walking form of sleep. They exist for their work, and are lost to us now.
Experienced by a much smaller being, this day would glow with the excess beauty of certain of its shorter intervals. The moment, for example, when a spoon fell from the table and onto the kitchen floor in the brilliance of an unlonely afternoon. Stretched to a beautiful length, the resulting sound would have rung out for nearly an hour, rung out like a force of nature, a piece of the air. We would not have had to think of a new game, living our joys in the shadow of this long, loud sound.
Even with all this in mind, she must step outside the door.
I AM LIKE I AM NOT THERE
Standing before the door, I speak to her. I explain to her the ultimate aim of the game of daring: to dare someone to do what is impossible to do, and thereby undo themselves. With this in mind, I dare her to open the door and step through it. Into the murderous gales of the sky, I say, though I cannot see the sky from in here. She looks at me glassy-eyed. She has become more doll-like day by day, spending her hours heaped sideways and still, looking under the furniture at things I can only infer. I repeat myself and wait for surrender.
My sister looks toward the door and places one small hand on the lock. I hear a small, clean turning sound and the rush of air. Then she is over the threshold and moving. I run to the door to close the air out. But I open it again slightly, I watch her through the gap in the door.
Both arms out straight and extended, she walks like someone on a balance beam, down the driveway, teetering away from the door, away from me, twirling around, hopping on an imaginary hopscotch grid. The sunlight draws a yellow haze around her, her hair, her small false hands. Watching her walk away is like watching myself depart, though when I look down, I find I am in place.
At the end of the driveway, she turns and looks back at me from a distance.
Then she is gone.
YOUR MOVE
I plunge my whole fist into the jam jar. I write my name, and your name, all your names, on the wall. I tidy the china with a soft dustcloth. I rage and rage and rage and rage at the furniture that still resembles human beings, at the ones shaped like people I shout my language. There seem to be fewer. I am picking the blueberries out of the muffins, the toppings off the frozen pizzas, still frozen. Ever ever fewer. I am shiny, sticky. I run around and around, trailing berry-colored handprints, and when I get back to the start I grow silent and track myself, quietly, through the halls, soundlessly, I am like I am not there, I am there like I am not there, I am my own ghost trailing my own ghost to some indeterminate point in time, forward and backward on a track made of iron. I plunge my fist into the jam jar. I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich of the fatherly armchair. Where have you all gone? So I write your name on the sticky surface. So I dust the furniture, even lifting the vases, plates, etcetera, to clean under them. But no one is pleased. No one is bothered. There is no one to be pleased. I rule these lands, and there are none that could dare question these acts, or declare them unjust, or affirm that they have come to pass or have not. As a result, do they come undone? I try to do a thing so large or heavy that it recognizes itself, that it does not need someone else to see it to make it endure. I try to carve my name into the wall. I tie all the things to one another with red string. It will not guard against their leaking, slowly, from inside these walls and out, who knows.
FACTS LIKE FACES
I play a game of making it rain. I fill the sky with clouds, I label and describe them one by one. They are all different types, collecting at the ceiling of the living room. I check the forecast in the newspaper, I comment on the dark storm brewing overhead. I hold my hand out, but I feel nothing.
It is necessary that “the child find him or herself confronted by his or her own increasingly ‘ordered’ behavior as, from the world of practice and play, the world of the adult is grown into.” Is it necessary for this world to be so quiet, its contents captured between parentheses?
When the actual shape of the liquid’s breakage was discovered, there were two basic tactics that could have been adopted. The first was to reshape the preferences of the liquid, training it toward a manageable complexity that would reveal itself legibly—as a hexagon or a torus, for example. The second would have been to reshape ourselves.
In the context of the development of an organism into an organism that masters its surroundings, reshaping ourselves would have been to “grow backward.”
Backward was the more populated direction, and had a tendency to look beautiful as a result. The orientation of our faces on the fore side of our bodies, luckily, made it more difficult to see and long for that direction, which was becoming farther away all the time.
OUT OF DOORS
I wake to a Mother standing by the bed, a Father by the window with his hand on the cord, pulling the blinds open. The blinds are never open.
The sky outside is strange, its papery surface, its white flank. Be handed a coat, a hat, a set of galoshes. We are going outdoors. We never go outdoors.
We have one driveway and it is never used. It leads from the garage with its one shiny car, down past our door, past a little path that leads from our door, past our door, down to a mailbox that we have not looked inside for quite some time.
Mother on one side, Father on the other, a family walks down the driveway to the end of the driveway. It is as though we have never used our eyes before, we are looking right and left, right and left.
Today is a day without weather. We don’t know where it went, but it has gone and thus we walk around, soft-skinned, into the air. Is this walking the ultimate aim of my Father’s efforts to cancel the weather? Are we achieved at last?
There is no wind, there is no water. There is light. There is no sense that something in the sky will heave or change color. The only air that moves is air we push from our lungs.