The man stood in the doorway, looking in. It was a large room, brightly lit. A grandfather clock, a persian rug. Gleaming hardwood flooring. The murmur and buzz of conversation, though no one was around. The odor of rotten fruit lacing the air.

He extended his arms, touching the sides of the doorway, and squeezed his fingers. The brick and mortar gave way like fabric in his hands. He held chunks of the doorway bunched in either fist, and he walked forward, dragging the room behind him like shot game. He felt its tractable mass, half-floating behind him like a load hauled underwater. His face flushed, his arms tingled.

He pulled it in further, and the deeper he walked into the room, the more airy the room, in his grasp, became. First clay, then quilt, now sheets. Now paper. Tapestries & wall-clocks liquid-blending and fragmenting in the crumples of the fabric he surrounded himself with.

The room was becoming his. Drawing in tighter. Nothing like the giant space he’d first seen. First a tent. Then a soft alcove. Now a shawl, a cloak. Soon a skin. Soft against his body, every feature of the chamber splintered into itself. The fruit smell was gone. No smell remained, no murmuring, no sound. The colors of the room fused. Everything compressed and pliable.

Finished. He held himself in the room-skin. He was cold, he hadn’t realized it until now. And what was there now that there was no more room?

Watery white, all around. He searched the horizon. Nothing. Like an endless ocean of thin milk.

He was worried now. Maybe he could unwrap the room, expand it back to its dimensions? He hadn’t expected this, this pale expanse of nothing.

He started pulling the room-skin off, trying to stretch it, fold it out. It hung uselessly in his hands, an incoherent mass, grown even more diaphanous and illegible. No clue now as to what it had been. It was like a film of feathers, or the foam in cheap pillows. He looked around, shivering.

It was whiter than ever, but now, in the top left corner, a shadow. A smudge, a mark, growing larger as he watched. A giant comma in the sky — or underwater, or whatever this place was.

The man was paralyzed. Part of him wanted to call out, hail the mark, guide it to him, through the pale milk, to his body. To do what? Touch him, envelop him, erase him. The man didn’t know. It was a need outside reason.

But the other part of him longed for the room, and what had come before: Wine swelling in his mouth. The house turtle clunkily trekking around the living room. Light through drapes. Waking up to breakfast. The wood floor underfoot. Saying hi to himself in a mirror. The ache in his bones from hearing violins. His fingers sticky with honey. Sleeping under a blanket on the roof. His mouth wet with kiss. Her laugh, ready and easy, supple and sweet. The old things. The unnumbered, holy old things.

But this was holy too, just new: this pale milk world, the black smudge growing, and whatever could come from all this. He felt like a whole new world could start right here. Around his feet. From the white, from within the white. The very air felt fertile, ready to sprout runners and buds of reality: people, places, objects, time.

The man suddenly turned away from the mark, which even now seemed to take up a fourth of the sky. He fought the urge to turn back around. Slowly he felt relief wash over him with his back to it. Because he wasn’t worthy, and he knew it. Unworthy to receive it full-on, to see it. Not yet worthy to absorb what it had to give. He felt filthy and useless. An unready pollutant. Better to give his back for now. And if that’s deemed worthy, he’ll sense it, and turn around, offer the rest of himself, his eyes, mouth. But not yet. He felt safer, calmer. He waited.

Time passed. He smelled the rotten fruit again. He opened his eyes.

The rug, the clock, the murmur & buzz. The room.

The doorbell rang. A dog barking downstairs. The patter of feet in the hallway. Someone cooking pancakes. He listened for awhile then sat slowly on the floor. He looked once behind him, over his shoulder. A black speck on the ceiling.

Closer, he saw it was a spider. Compact, dense, shiny black, no web visible, absolutely still.

“Vic, it’s Betty!” called a voice from downstairs. “Bring the photos from the trip?”

“Sure hon,” he called out, staring at the spider.

“You’d better go away, ” he said quietly to it. “Please go. Out. Leave, go hide.”

He kept saying this the whole time he went to fetch the broomstick.

“Go, go. Go. Leave. Go”

Now the broomstick was in his fists. Now his brain steaming in his skull. Now his eyes hot and wet.

Everything in him smoking with violation. Like he was holding a vein of the world, wrangled from the meat of its neck.

He got on the chair, balancing himself carefully. He pulled back the broomstick. The spider was still. It had a design on its back. A skull? A sun? A moon? A star? All the old signs, all nothing. Pretty blots.

It never moved. It was stuck to the rounded broomstick end, a tangle of mashed abdomen, crumpled legs, fluids.

Above him, a steady, small rain of plaster from the huge hole he’d made in the ceiling.

“Honey?” came the cry from downstairs.

“Got it, got it, sorry!” the man called out. “Be right down!”

His voice sounded strange to him. Did anyone downstairs notice it? Alarmed, he dropped the broom.

His voice, the air from his lungs, his legs, the feel of his tongue in his mouth: it all felt different now. His guts felt like cold links of chain. He closed his eyes.

He wanted to swim, to climb, to leap. Squeeze like an eel into that hole in the ceiling, shoot out into the sea, devour minnows, be devoured. He wanted so much. Rupture, failure, triumph, to ruin his shoulder against all doors.

In his mind, he floated. Higher, higher. Until he was rubbing his back against the ceiling of the world, marking it like some great, golden, slumbering bear.

posted by Snail at 10:15 pm