The Mysteries of 2 ½ Stories
Moira Mangold returned home that evening from her second job as a barista at The Jumpy Monkey Espresso Hut with her mind made up that the time had come to break up with her boyfriend Faramour. They could still be friends, she would always think of him fondly, things run their course, et al. and amen, but the sun had set on their union and she was seeking disseverment, forthwith. On this crucial point she had girded herself to be intractable, knowing that regarding him she had tendencies towards immoderate acts of charity, textbook enabling, out-and-out pity.
Faramour on the floor; he blinked his slow blink, looking up from the cogs and gears of his latest creation, an animatronic chess set, the latest in a long line of inventions and rumors of inventions that youngish Faramour considered his life’s work (their decaying prototypes and endoskeletons packed the closets and corners and most every cranny of the Mangold family home—even now Moira could feel their onerous presence all around, like a pack of river stones cinched to her shoulders—how happy she would be to free herself of all this heavy baggage), most half-finished/half-abandoned. To view the entire collection in its various states of disrepair and incompletion made for a bizarre and vaguely grisly experience; take the contents of the cupboard, for instance, under the main staircase, wherein could be found packs of lamb-flavored dental floss, the aroma therapy nightlight, the magnetized safety-razors, and, most cumbersomely, The Versatilomatic—an incredibly unwieldy contraption, a kind of Swiss Army Knife of gardening tools, weighing eight stone and taller than the average man—taller than Faramour at least—an encasement of slots containing shovel, pick, rake and hoe, hedge-clippers, pruning shears and a crank-operated leaf blower. The heinous device nearly decapitated Moira the day she helped tote it to the back garden for its test run.
That had been nearly two years ago, during their honeymoon period. Now she stood before him, handing down her decree, as Faramour held the alligator clips connected to live wires above the exposed circuitry of The Queen’s mouth with his long-fingered, slender, soft, pale pink hands, and nodded along with her dissertation’s main points:
“You have no job”—check.
“You’ve never had a job”—check
“No money to help out with the bills”—check.
“Your personal hygiene is somewhat… lacking”—wince…check.
“I don’t love you anymore”—here he unawares allowed his hands to wander, the quivering navigations of heartbreak, and this drifting brought the electrical clips together, which by rights should have produced a flashing white crackle. Realizing what he’d done, he looked down in dumb surprise. Alas, the battery was dead.
While there was no flexibility in Moira as to the crux of the matter—the romance was kaput—in the finer points of the dismantling, the bloody grunt work, considerable compromise and give-and-take were called for. And accorded; she couldn’t just kick him out on the street; he had nowhere to go, would need time to put his affairs in order, find new lodgings. Moira Mangold was kind-hearted; and, as he had never been cruel to her, she would not now be cruel to him. For the short term, she proposed, he could move part and parcel into the study—
“Laboratory,” Faramour softly corrected.
—laboratory, if that would provide him the opportunity to chart a new course of action. (On her own utterance of the word ‘laboratory’, at this minor acquiescence, Moira Mangold involuntarily raised her fingertips to her temples in anticipation of the insidious first throbs of a migraine—she had lately been a frequent sufferer.) “There’s a futon in there, I’ll get you some sheets and things. It’ll be fine. For a week or two.”
Although Faramour was a good man—as far as that goes—endowed with large portions of sincerity, kindness, and gentleness (he had gentleness for days), he was still a man, and as such was not wholly devoid of self-serving stratagems. In a dingy burrow of his brain, somewhere near the rear, he knew that staying in close proximity to Moira could only improve his chances of keeping her, or winning her back. This he wanted dearly—never had he loved her so much as when she stood there saying she no longer loved him. And, the thinking went, if he could just remain close at hand, then maybe things would change: her passion regenerating, her love’s dimming going into remission, himself evolving into a sanitary go-getter, whatever. So lugging his life’s work and other sundries on his swayed back, he fell back to the study/laboratory, there to set up camp in a kind of holding pattern to the intemperate whims of Eros (that snotty little brat). He took his foam pencils, his astrolabe, his three-sided coins, his schematics for the helium-powered toilet—which he still believed could well become his crowning achievement, his “magnum opus” he sometimes called it, with a peculiar diction that stressed the last syllable—whenever it was finally completed—and along with a few stitches of clothing (lots of socks, not much in the way of underwear), he shut himself off from the house main, hoping that the atmosphere of his absence (her lonely breath visible in the austere rooms, a poignantly familiar shuffling from the next room, the unfamiliar emptiness of a Faramour-less bed) would give any reservations she might have about her decision the chance to propagate.
Additionally, he truly did have no place else to go. He was far from family, bereft of friends, had no prospects (the good people at NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts, Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble, and Hasbro had all refused to return his calls or respond to his queries), barely knew his way around the city, was cowed by the mere notion of boarding a metropolitan bus, and very much needed her gracious reprieve in order to formulate a Plan B, an alternative should the Moira situation prove irretrievably broken. (No, I can’t lose her, it’s unbearable).
The living situation became thus: Moira Mangold would rise with the sun, scrub and rinse, ornament herself in the garb of the workaday world and head out the door to tend the books at TransSystems Industries, Inc., an international (aren’t they all?) corporation dealing primarily in developmental research, cold fusion, gelatin manufacture, off-shore betting, mortgage tranches, and snack foods, with further holdings in balsa timber, munitions, fiber optics, theme parks and ‘Artist’ management—and which recently had rescinded overtime pay and 401k benefits for all employees. Faramour would doze blissfully on the futon until midday when a family of squirrels would gather in the split trunk of the runty sycamore outside his widow for their lunch of walnuts and walnut shells. He would rub clean his sleep-grouted eyes to the accompaniment of their convivial chatterings, shuffle down the hallway crisscrossed with streaks of sunlight and green-leafed shadows, enter the kitchen and pull the almond milk from the fridge and the cereal box from the pantry, chew spoonfuls of flaxen seed and granola clusters as a kettle of chamomile steamed and steeped on the stove; then he would adjourn to the living room to take in an hour to ninety minutes of the cavalcade of afternoon television (mostly shows about Judges giving hapless defendants what for), returning only then to the laboratory with his fourth cup of tea, sucking on a sugar-coated lemon rind and ready to get down to some solid work—which currently consisted of trying to fix the latest problem in his automaton chess project: the Bishops.
Sometimes, it seemed, his work was nothing but an infinite series of snags to be smoothed, knots to be untangled; and no sooner would one bit of trivial minutia be dispatched than many more hydra-heads rise to take its place, Faramour like a king who never fails to find another yet another disloyal subject no matter how many previous he’s had publicly quartered. It could be wearying—but was it different for any artist?, the creative process being an ill-lighted path beset with all manner obstacles and hazards to be negotiated so that a delicate, pristine whole could safely pass, the glimmering triumph of the one great thing—just so does the composer wrestle with the recalcitrance of one bum note for the sake of the symphony, does the writer duke it out with lantern-jawed semi-colons to one day raise the mighty novel, sterling and abundant, above his head. Faramour found himself forced to stoop, again and again and again, to the level of dwarfish details in order to salvage his vision. And the challenges of his chess set extended beyond only his clergymen—though they were vexing enough, not content merely to capture the pawns (Faramour having constructed the pieces with tiny enameled pincers with which to seize an opponent and fling them, harmlessly, a few inches off the board) but through some undiagnosed glitch were ruthlessly intent on perpetrating unspeakable acts upon them, the proper execution of which should have been an impossibility as Faramour had not molded the necessary appendages; his knights were equally rape-happy, they would even turn on their own color; and the Queen would sit back and take in this queasy panorama of debauch and laugh a droning mechanized laugh to herself—a grotesque sound that raced a chill down and up the inventor’s spine—as though it was all good sport. The rooks, on the other hand, did nothing at all, never so much as budged, though occasionally one did burst spontaneously into flames. This, however, Faramour believed to be caused by a simple snafu in the wiring and easily correctible.
Moira would return home around 9 pm. They’d greet one another with some awkward, kindly trepidation (but how his heart leapt at these few seconds of seeing her); he would meekly withdraw to his warren; the living room television set would pulsate for an hour or so, then the house would stretch and yawn and make to retire for the evening. In fact, everything was much the same as before outside of he now slept on a futon and Moira was afforded more leg room in the bed, and on rising in the morning found she better remembered her dreams.
Not a single troop in Faramour’s platoon of inventions had anything to do with Time. There was a reason for this. The reason was that Faramour didn’t understand Time. Moreover, he had little cognizance of it. Virtually nil. Oh, he could read a clock—he could tell time (the most presumptuous misnomer in the English language) and, if asked, he could give one a rough approximation of the hour, could distinguish between day and night, night and day—but in regards to how the hours and days cohered together, and how then these accruals became weeks and the aggregates of the weeks steadily became months, then years, he was hopeless. The concept was like a shoebox in the dark of the top shelf of a closet; those boxes are usually empty. Moira Mangold’s allowance to him of a week or two to find new lodgings, a new life, went by quick as a spark flashing and dying; and as sweet-hearted Moira kept granting extensions on her original terms (another week, another two), these as well were neutralized in white-hot bursts by his inborn psychic defense systems immediately upon entering the crackling anti-matter of his temporal lobes’ no-fly zone. When seventy-one days had passed, and zero progress had been made on vacating, Moira breathed deep again and confronted him one Sunday, in his sanctum sanctorum:
“I have plans for this room, Faramour. I was going to make it into an exercise room maybe, get some of those bamboo window treatments, roll out a mat and get a yoga ball. I already bought the mat. Things have to change.”
Faramour had by now abandoned the chess enterprise (and removed each automaton’s power chip—they had all turned mutinous, could have posed a threat to Moira, and like bombs had to be defused); he’d moved on to a scratch-and-sniff globe of the world, something for kids, although the racial implications indivisible from the logistics of design were just becoming apparent to him: how to assign fragrances to all the cultures and ethnicities? Without being racist how could one assign a representative odor to each of those African nations, for instance? There were so many of them…
“It’s time to go, Faramour. We broke up two and a half months ago. You’re still here.”
Fair words, he knew. With the rails of his forearms crossed like an X over his modest lap, he looked around at his mountains of detritus, each morsel precious to him, and meekly said, “My things…I don’t know where I can go and take all this stuff…there’s so much…” and like the fiefdoms of Africa his gewgaws were indeed numerous and nearly uncountable.
“Well,” she said, and looked around and now saw the assortment through Faramour’s mild and tranquilly blinking eyes, alight with the poignancy of potential loss, “there’s the attic. It’s huge, from what I remember. You can keep your…work up there until you find a storage unit or something. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a big place to live. This could be a good thing for you too.” Her brain nipped her a bit since in some way she had again retreated and proffered a concession, of the enabling kind.
Now Faramour likewise beheld matters through her eyes (sylvan, cornflower eyes) and observed the figurative table, and her next, best offer which now graced it, and he accepted immediately.
Slowly, gradually, he transferred his motley mounds to the regions upstairs, the hitherto unexplored attic. The going was slow because of heartache, because of a lack of cardiovascular health in any sense, because the pull-ladder leading to the lands above was narrow and difficult to manage with cargo (the lugging of the Versatilomatic once again nearly resulted in a fatality after he took a nasty spill and was narrowly spared disemboweling himself on the freed scythe). Finally, after much labor, all his prototypes and designs and works-in-perpetual-progress had been relocated to the attic.
“Attic” was an inaccurate term, as it turned out. It was an entirely different story, an extra floor, which would have been obvious had he ever taken a good look at the house’s exterior (more on later) and done the proper calculations of ceiling height and roof-pitch; but as this was not a view or an inclination he’d often indulged in, the sheer space and openness and the multitude of rooms and chambers took him by complete surprise. It was night. Moira had deigned to stay out later than usual while the sad production was taking place; the weather was going through a pleasant cool snap, making the air of this topmost story plush and welcoming; he was tired. He raised the draw up behind him, and it swished shut like the sealing of an escape hatch. The light through the rippled wood slats of the eaves and the languorously revolving roof vents was a rich oceanic blue, laced with the silver threading of a high lonesome moon. Faramour unfurled a dusty afghan on the floor—and laid face-down upon it, relaxing body and head on new firmament. Heat rises, and from below he felt the warm kisses his cheek, through the scratchy fabric, through the stiff floor, the inverse of his old ceiling. He slept.
*****
And now a word about the house. 1013 Bonaparte Avenue had been in the Mangold family for six generations, forty-five years before there was even a Proscenium Drive a mile east for Bonaparte to deposit itself into, sixty-seven years before the Lutheran Church at 1593 was transformed into a Magnet School, and sixty-eight years before it was re-transmogrified, this time into a Southern Baptist Bible College, where it has since remained unmolested by the years. The house must be viewed from the ground up, as it was built, starting first things first with the foundation, which, in the story of a fixed structure, is akin to exposition, and Mangold Manor being a near-mansion, sprawling, rambling, rambunctious in design and quite, quite large, the exposition itself must be broad and sturdy in order to support the desired heights of the architectural aspirations (and ultimately those who criticize grand foundations are people best suited to bungalows). So we see on passing glance or close examination (which is only a glance where the passing is arrested for a spell) an earthwork of stone built out of the earth, in the proper light showing slivers and speckles of mica and lime and quartz, said foundation then grading into the High Victorian style of the house itself: dainty patina, cherry wood and hardy pine, umpteen paint jobs over its weathered lifespan—and presently sporting on its hide a smart shade of indigo, with sail-white trim and quoin-posts. There are picture windows on the portside, a columned porch positioned starboard. All the Victorian trademarks not fused to the actual skeleton of the home had been vulnerable to the variegated whims of the 20th century’s fancies: scrubby, dumpy Depression era touches, flattened roof over the wraparound front porch, iron pipe railings up to the stoop; the Brutalism abutments of the politesse 50’s, aluminum gutters, jutting cornices, stringent storm windows; the neo-colonial flourishes of the imperial ‘60’s, boxed-out gables like quizzical eyes along the second story, with striped awnings fastened like brows to the dormered peaks. Then the seventies, when in places the house broke out into rashes of ruddy, synthetic brick. During Reagan’s reign in the following decade the house itself was subject to few embellishments but the neighborhood around it was flung into flux—Crack and Aids hit, hijacked cars began to litter the curbsides, cyclone fences went up, property values went down, and the accountants, actuaries, advertising executives and associate vice-presidents all scrambled for the suburbs. This state of affairs continued in rollicking stasis until tech stocks kaboomed and the Bohos began to flood in, the children of the accountants, actuaries, executives and associate vice-presidents of the decade previous. It was at the aft end of this trend that Moira Mangold received word at the university that her father had died (coronary thrombosis, quarrelsome Hugh’s fatigued ticker finally tocking its last), and she came home to a vacant house (her newly-liberated mother, plump with the life insurance payoff, already off jet-setting), the deed to which was now in her name alone.
Our eyes drift now to the manor’s crown: roofline extravagant, complex, opulent in its pell-mell clash of pitches and levels. There are peaks, parapets, valleys, nooks and swoops; toward the rear there was even a tower, an honest-to-God tower with a turret and everything, practically begging to have a prim proud flag planted there to snap crisply in the breeze. The top portion of 1013 resembled a giant origami unfolded into the three-tabbed skyline of some fantastic kingdom. And it was directly underneath this crazy canopy of altitudes and atmospheres that Faramour now found himself ensconced as émigré and sole resident.
An initial impression on awaking that first morning in his new climes was that in an attic there is no such thing as quiet. Even when there was no intruding noise from outside—lawnmowers, weed-eaters, chainsaws, garbage trucks, dogs barking, dogs barking at garbage trucks—the innards of the place itself rumbled constantly with its private functions: rafters creaking, studs rustling, joists clucking, the ubiquitous world of adjusting wood pitching new settlements every minute or two. At certain moments the myriad sounds synchronized into overture, to break into bawdy rhapsody as unhinged as a Spike Jonze record.
He explored his North Country. Walls in the province tended to slant and skew, ceilings tended to drop and rise willy-nilly, Faramour in his expeditions often forced to adopt the side-ways movements of the hermit crab; the pathways coursing through the locale were not uniformed, going from wide, expansive apertures where our intrepid man could spread his arms and touch nothing to his sides to narrow, cramped slits tight as gangplanks, where even given his litheness Faramour was forced to proceed profiled. Isthmuses emptied into the lagoons of partial rooms, quasi-rooms, antic chambers tailored to mysterious specs and purposes unbeknownst to the current scout, dimensions seemingly dreamed up by a fevered mind and sketched by a palsied hand. Some were larger than any single room downstairs, others barely the size of a linen closet. Logically enough, the region had been used these last decades primarily for storage; boxes, crates, footlockers all crammed with artifacts of the Mangold Dynasty, time capsules the forebears of the clan had stowed away here, and promptly forgot. Not all the treasures were packed away—there were as well leaning stacks of gilt-edged family portraits (older Mangolds tended to look like bootblacks, bounders and strike-busters, particularly the women; Moira he found was the only beauty in the bunch), coats racks with bases carved like elephant’s feet, an umbrella stand painted with scenes from Arabian Nights, an antique bureau of heavy chicory wood, now serving mainly as a mausoleum for dead flies; and a green tarpaulin spread outspread on the floor arrayed with bronze candlesticks, cuckoo clocks, a deflated soccer ball, the cylinders of old locks, a bejeweled music box still operable, that when the lid was lifted warbled a tinny rendition of “Waltzing Matilda”, tap shoes with silver buckles still fastened, a protractor, a compass, a nutcracker statue in the costume of an Alpine mountaineer—such an eclectic mélange so daintily arranged, almost as if to serve as component parts to some envisioned conglomeration, that Faramour suspected there may well have been a fellow inventor at one time working happily here—that, or some sort of collage artist. Faramour cared nothing for history (again with the Time problem), neither personal nor cultural, and these knick-knacks and bric-a-brac preserved of a familial past served not as object lessons but instead just charming accoutrements of his new habitat.
A particularly beguiling feature of the second and a half story: in many of these rooms, the sunlight somehow wiggled in, though Faramour couldn’t always see how—there were no windows that weren’t boarded over, the panels of the walls generally seemed sealed and true, the ceiling, catawampus though it was, appeared solid—he didn’t know how the light found purchase but here it was, all around him, the air itself softly aglow, laced with reddish gold and russet strains as if the enclosure itself generated its own illumination, burnished by its brushes on the boundaries of the rich, ripe wood.
“Are you living up there, Faramour?”
Faramour blinked. From this perspective, hanging upside-down, bat-like, through the attic’s open hatch, head and shoulders exposed, it looked to Moira as if the eyes over his brows were closing and opening over prim mustaches—he actually looked a little like William Powell from this angle, it nearly made her giggle—and she noticed too, for maybe the first time, that his front teeth, now based on the lower bridge, were a bit bucked. “No,” he said, “not exactly. Just organizing a few things…don’t want all my stuff to be in the way….” He felt his cheeks blush a little red with his little white lie (although, broken into its finer points, nothing in the statement could with certitude be called a lie—one would not with authority deem his current mode ‘living’; he certainly didn’t want his things to be in the way; he was, to some largely truthful degree, ‘organizing’—it is on just such rationalized tabula rasa that all our most niggling motives are hid in plain sight).
She looked up the slot, at the dark spaces above his legs that were folded over the lip of the floor. “How long do you think you’ll be organizing?”
His eyes shot up, or down: “Not long. I’ll try and keep the noise low.”
“Uh…okay, that’d be great.”
He nodded—so to speak—and retracted like a periscope through the hatch, closing the breach after him with a creak of the bearings and a cough of shunted air.
Moira learned to live—grudgingly—with the claps and banging that often issued from the other side of her ceilings, startling though they might be. At least the nights were relatively calm, and the mornings virtually silent (as indicated earlier, Faramour was not one of those morning people we hear so much about). Once she stopped starting at every normal household sound—the clunking of ice in the maker, the pinging of galvanized piping behind the walls—and grew able to distinguish such noises from the machinations of Faramour, she was able—relatively—to adapt to the situation, and sometimes—relatively relatively—even forget it. Because whatever dubious goings-on were occurring within the legacied walls of Bonaparte Avenue, out of doors Moira Mangold’s life was expanding, sprouting wings and bright purple plumage.
She attended concertos and museum openings, drum-circles and sit-ins. She tried Nepalese cuisine, and she liked it. She tried hang-gliding, and she didn’t like it but did live through it. She quit one of her bad jobs and got another that was slightly less awful. She dyed her hair all the colors of the kaleidoscope before finding to her glee and pride that she liked her natural brown, original brown, brown plain brown, thank you very much, the best of all.
She painted the room—nevermore the laboratory of one Faramour—cyan, with goldenrod accent walls, and even had the floor lined with cork—Proust himself might have wanted to give Pilates a whirl in there. She took up photography, signed up for a pottery class. Sometimes she smiled to herself, in sudden, unexpected bursts, at all the sparkling joys the quotidian had to offer.
There was good reason for the occasional noises Moira was subjected to; left to his own devices, Faramour was proving a surprisingly deft hand at feng shui, albeit in highly idiosyncratic form. His garret quarters blossomed with the labors of his organizing principal, which was to achieve a meld of the old and new, the transferred objects and the ones discovered there, imposing no separations but, as major domo of the inanimate—a benign regime—striving for equitability and an aesthetically pleasing balance. This was the process which revealed hitherto unknown gifts for spatial development: Grandma Eudora Mangold’s tacky and graceless fur coats, for instance, he hung in the widest aperture of the attic, from transverse beams, and their dragging hems well-concealed some of his own more modest projects, such as the paraffin bowling ball, the hydraulic-operated pencil sharpener (any soft fluid would do), and the Gymoparaus, a gyroscope that doubled as a caulk gun. Knowing such rich possibilities lay just out of sight behind the fox and sable pelts lent luxurious vibrato to his sensations of depth in this the land of infinite buried treasures, more afforded by every nook that discretely sheltered trove upon trove. So over by that strip of wainscot, under the extended inlaid shelf, went the astrolabe; up on one blank canvass of wall went the dismantled gears of the cuckoo clocks, which served admirably as trellises for his spools of flavored dental floss; here in the distended alley of one eave were crates of Hugh’s tax documents and Aunt Irma’s needlepoint, freshly laid over with the prototype of the gossamer parachute; there in a conspicuously small alcove at the rear—another hermetic place mysteriously goggling with light—went his defunct chess experiment, ghoulish even it its dormancy, his edible dop-kits (there had been an extended period where all his inventions were designed for edibility), his olfactory globe of the world, and the helium casks for the specialty commode. And, within these ministrations, there emerged a few touches shorn of any desire to integrate his with theirs, undertaken only for a burgeoning appreciation of belongings which involved him not at all—he came across a hammer and some ten-penny nails and making like a carpenter hung crosswise the sabers of Great-Grandfather Uriah Mangold, Calvary Captain in the Army of the Potomac, the swords gleaming weapons of shiny silver, still sharp and seemingly unsullied by any use.
The arrangement was mutually tolerable if only beneficial for one party; Moira was generally able to put the weird dynamic out of her head, while Faramour reveled to remain in such close orbit to her; through careful listening he grew able to distinguish her steps ushering below from the manifold other click-clacks which chronically assailed his ears in the upper berth of 1013, and working at such bittersweet remove he came to love even more, to love gloriously, with baited breath, salted with a hot sniffle every now and then, her every morning grumble and grunt, her bedtime gurgle, her toilette’s flush. He obeyed his exile like a gentleman, only venturing below once or twice a day, never when she was there, to use the facilities and perhaps pluck a rice cracker or two from its cellophane package, and snag a can of kidney beans from the dry storage—and refill his water jug. He took all meals, such as they were, in his little personal eco-system, and the solitude of the situation was fortifying to him.
At times, however, the fourth wall—in this case floor and ceiling—dissolved and contact between the former lovers became more direct than simply overheard noise and sighs regularly eavesdropped. There was, on his level, an especially cock-eyed chamber with akimbo walls which he dubbed The Inspiration Grotto, where he whittled away many happy hours with pen and parchment and palimpsest, the Grotto too low to stand erect so he lay on his belly, head clad in Cousin Ernie’s wool longshoreman’s cap which he lately had taken to wearing, sketching out whatever latest fancies had coalesced in the back channels of his brain and making a point of doing so uninhibitedly, without any thought for pragmatism or practical application or the limits of reality on actually forming these concepts into tangibility, just letting blazing visions streak and dart rampantly, all the more pure for their likely impossibility. The Grotto happened to be located directly above the main living room in the house conventional. Here he was one evening, scribbling excitedly the latest madcappery to surge inside him (something to do with microscopes, and Geiger counters, and laser-sighted insulin monitors), and from below came fresh and clean and pristine the sounds of the TV, grooved with the sounds of Moira in repose, the singular squeaks of the couch springs, even the melodious filigrees of her exhaling breath. (The entire house was erratically insulated.) He recognized the voices of the program she was watching—a long-running show, one of those reality kind, that had long been a favorite of hers; and Faramour’s thirst for the tiniest gulp of her ambience overcame his swirling revolutions on the paper—and Inspiration was given a number and told to wait until called for.
The television burbled, wherein an panel of contestants, racially and ethnically and culturally mixed, but all cretins (just as a cheap lunch buffet seems to offer fantastically varied cornucopias of foodstuffs but really all are just the same globs of MSG done up in different molds and dye-jobs), look for true love and their ideal soul-mate and their rightful fifteen minutes of notoriety through a bewildering series of tests and tasks and manipulations, instituted by the tough but benevolent producers to test the mettle of each woman and man (and it was always a woman, always a man), until by the grand finale there is only a single specimen of each gender who has not had his and her completely craven character completely exposed—at least to all but the most glaucoma-eyed, credulous segments of the viewership—and the adorable couple are united with satisfied salaams and crocodile tears to live a life of happy-ever-after.
The one tonight was indeed this ultimate episode. And with his ear tight to the floorboards, Faramour somewhat shamefully found he was enraptured in the storyline—such is the cunning of tacky sentiment and all hollow art. It was the intimate proximity, the scalding distance, of his love one true love that made his heart palpate like this, the heady mix of Moira below distilled through the sap and syrup of Brendan and Brianna rushing into one another’s well-toned arms high up on some windswept cliff, with the surf pounding below, to embrace and laugh and embrace some more, awash in the splendor each had no doubt they well deserved—for was such a dénouement so different than any of our other classic fairy tales, only revered and cherished from their perseverance through the gauntlet of centuries, with all their hearts’ eventual content, their sleight of hand, their suspect magic? The exclamation at the end was the same as back in the halcyon days of knights and princesses, except on major-network programming frogs and ugly ducklings need not apply, and were a size twelve female to make it to the second round you could practically hear the backslaps of the network controllers congratulating themselves on their egalitarian daring. He pictured her (Faramour now, picturing his Moira) and knew assuredly his image was accurate, her clustered on the far left arm of the sofa, legs drawn up under her, heel atop ankle in the shape of a V, eyes all lashes and irises, and it was the refraction of the vulgar blaring, glaring carnival on the Sony through the prism of Moira that seized him like a claw of daffodils. And he sensed she was gripped as well. And, as if in confirmation, Faramour heard, under the crackle of the smug announcer’s voice bidding America to tune in for the next season of Soul Mates (“our realest installment yet”), Moira’s soft, silvery weeping. Seeing through one burning eye one dark droplet hit the dusky dim floor, he knew he was crying too. For a few seconds an invisible lasso bound them liltingly together, a bond firm and real as the air they breathed. The huffs of docile sobs, some suspended seconds of pregnant silence. Then the TV was switched off. The delicate pad of her steps retreating to the bedroom. He listened. He was rewarded, after a minute or two, by the prairie vibes of her voice: “Goodnight, Faramour.”
His own voice broke through a froggy fog, perhaps croaking only from rampant disuse: “Goodnight, Moira Mangold.”
It could have so easily happened there and then. The stage was set, the mood just so, everything in pitch and tuned expectantly to the most mellifluous key. All he had to do was lower his drawbridge and descend, or else she to have condescended to ascend to him via the same portal; either approach would have been welcomed by the other. Whispers and rushes of autumnal crispness soaked down the house and all within it, the replenishing air that feels like delicious life yet carries within its current the definite tap of mortality and the gradual fading of things, half-clad branches outside skittering over the surfaces of the windows, scratching softly the shingles of the roof. But neither made a move. She eventually swam off to sleep. Faramour…Faramour had not moved except to rest his head on the fold of his hands, and with nocturnal eyes well-adjusted by now to all darkness, realized for the first time that The Inspiration Grotto was adjacent to the interior barrel, massive as a redwood’s trunk, of the tower previously mentioned. Like an immovable object, the rest of the house struck him as having been constructed around it, as is maybe a skeleton around the necessary keystone of the soul. Faramour prone by his tower, Faramour held captive, pining and longing away. “Rescue me,” he gently intoned, in the breathy bottomland of his throat. “Rescue me.”
Inevitabilities happen. If this is not the First Law of Theoretical Physics then it certainly should be—semantics as well. It came to be that Moira eventually brought home a man. It came to be also that she had sex with this man. What nettled Faramour most—he told himself—was the unconscionable swiftness with which this inevitability occurred. He felt that no sooner had he retreated to the upper peninsula, and their agreement was paying some handsome dividends, than she goes and befouls the whole thing with this guy.
Faramour, again in The Inspiration Grotto. Moira and her date on the divan. Visibility low, the lights through the slits in the slats of his floor leaking husky, velveteen blue light from the living room where she received her would-be beaux. Their voices, hers and this (insufferable) man’s stabbed at him unimpeded, like a fixed bayonet. The voices lilted and listed and droned: about rock-climbing, about electoral politics, about the pros and cons of Twitter accounts. He believed he heard wine swishing in glasses (Noir for the lady, Grigio for the Mister). Then the lags of quiet between the talk began to grow more frequent, and longer; and Faramour all at once knew what they were doing during these lapses, and a inward whimper quaked down to his bowels as he rocked back and forth with his whippet arms cradling his knees.
The pair adjourned. To the bedroom, naturally. By now Faramour could trace the patterns of movement beneath him by the pops and clicks of the floors as surely as an air-traffic controller at his radar. For a long time he heard nothing; this quietude he thought the height of torture, until it was replaced by staticky crackles: clothing being shorn, cotton on gooseflesh skin, the crunches of unspooled zippers, the plink of plastic buttons as garments dropped to the floor.
His rocking increased in ferocity. He heard a moan. Which might have been her, could have been him, an androgynous vapor. Then another moan—certainly her…until another moan lowed, sublimely throated and femininely frosted—and he realized this, in fact, was his Moira. Then the stinging softness of private words garbled from one panting mouth into another whistled into his ears, and he heard their ribald engines stuttering into ignition. Faramour jumped up, circled the cell of his grotto thrice, his footfalls still stuck in the default setting of when so recently it had been only she and he and he would pad his steps out of consideration, so as never to be to her annoyance. Now he pitched forward onto the floor like a hound on a scent, an avaricious compulsion suddenly seizing him to absorb every iota and atom of the torment.
Mattress springs clucked and gasped. Faramour clutched his face. Her moan, his moans, Faramour counting moans: well into the tribulation he had the tally at seven moans for the man, only two for her. This provided some balm for in his brain—and then any solace was summarily dashed when three Moira-moans bivouacked him in quick succession.
Faramour tried insouciance. He leaned against a wall, he chucked himself under the chin, he wished he smoked so he could drag blithely on a cigarette—
More creaks and grunts and stutters and coos. Insouciance sloughed immediately off like a man’s coat on a toddler’s shoulders—
The assault continued unabated, Faramour now slapping himself about the face and head. When would it end?! It was like a tantric loop—
Frantic fantasias of vengeance vandalized his brain; he instantaneously flashed upon a new invention sprang wholly-formed into his head: a titanium-gloved, boilerplated behemoth with twisting red aerials affixed to its domed head, an engine of destruction which, with the flick of the switch on the likewise simultaneously conceived digital controller would swoop a great arm down and pluck the interloper by his pimpled buttocks and, with a vice-hold about both head and pelvis and to the refrain of one gurgled cry, snap the dastardly thug into two pieces, whereupon his brains then could be sucked out, like a crawfish. Or perhaps instead Faramour would slide the power chips back into the chessman, and drop them down like paratroopers through the ductwork to do his bidding, where they would skitter spider-like across the lout’s furry back, and proceed from there to do God knows what—
One would have thought—Faramour would have thought—the barrage would have ended by now. But it mounted in intensity, volume massing in the swelling acoustics of his brain, salvos coming in new calibers and shrapnel and flack piercing him—a heard word, unbidden now, no matter how before he so ravenously tried to distinguish what they were saying, a word like “want”, another like “more”, and a couple of curses uttered hot and sweet—by her! by her! Faramour wished he’d go numb, would enter a shocked state of trance. But he didn’t! he didn’t! Never before had his thinking been so clear, his perceptions so sharp, every sense in him alive and his entire psyche a field of antennae raised ramrod straight and tuned to perfect frequency.
The volleys came faster, furiouser, until they reached their apogee, the most horrible of all, and in the sobbing shells of his ears all the stale metaphors rang bitterly true: fireworks exploded, foghorns bellowed, the bells of cathedrals tolled, and tolled, and tolled again. And one last gasping toll—and their conjoined afterglow in all its pornographic heat rose up to find him like the fumes of gunpowder after a great battle. And then Faramour finally was all voyeur’d out—the sounds of the aftershocks, and the rumbles of mutual congratulations would have to go on without him as audience. Shock of a kind did mercifully steal upon him at last, like a blessed stardust-flecked blanket wafting down in the hands of translucent fairies whose wings fluttered madly. And they spread it over him in his fetal implosion, his pale face doused in sweat, eyelashes glittery with crystals of saline.
(Not that this consoling information will ever be available to our hero, but his usual Time myopia, fortified with the interminability inherent in agony, had made the session seem a pornographic marathon, when in fact the event lasted, from stem to stern, less than four minutes, Mr. Grigio acquitting himself for two hundred and twenty-three seconds, to be exact. As for Moira’s guttural words and lewd sighs, they were the products of both wistful encouragement to her conjugal counterpart and the fact that at a particularly vulnerable moment a coiled spring had erupted from the worn mattress and jabbed her in the back of her shoulder. She carries the dimple to this day.)
Morning. Faramour awoke from the trance that must have been at least tousled with sleep to the clink of keys, to her hurried steps in boot heels rushing to the front door, front door hinges whining, front door slamming, dead bolt clacking into place. No stirring followed to suggest the dark caller was still a presence in the house. Nevertheless, Faramour arose with the stately reserve of a duelist, brushed himself off, spit the grit of grief from his coated mouth, and began stuffing a nearby canvass bag with scraps of clothing, swatches of fabric, anything really that was near at hand and that he could make fit in the bag’s pouch. He yanked tight the cord. He lowered the draw-ladder, stepped nobly down. All dignity.
The rooms indeed were absent of others. He treated himself to the exquisite pain of viewing the scene of the crime; he crept into her room, which used to be an ‘our’ room, and a spasm seared him as he surveyed the shattered space of his memories—the frowzy room and all the defiled unkemptness, the discarded lasciviousness of her clothes (her black peasant skirt, that black blouse), the ripped prophylactic package, all the soiled clutter of last night’s spurted injustice; these things were invested in his sight with sheer shamefulness, and what’s more they all knew it; each object cowered in penitent sadness, ashamed that together they would have been players in the injuring of such a soul. His was the only wounded heartbeat, love-beat, in the place; but he indulged the imagining that she was there, curled in the farthest corner, cheeks reamed with opalescent tears, shivering, prostrate with regret:
“No please, Faramour, don’t go—”
“Tut-tut. There is nothing more to say.” Said not coldly, not without love, but with the rigor of the proud and wronged.
“But please, please listen, he meant nothing to—”
“Tsk-tsk. It is too late for that, Moira my sweet.”
“No, it can’t be, please! Oh God, what have I done—”
“There, there. No flagellations now, my crumpet. I must be gone.” And he saw, as she would see, from her supine abjectness in the grovel corner, when gazing up with the full import of her deed now dawning, the irrevocability of it all, the betrayal which even a love as pure as his love could not pardon. How very tall he looked.
She buries her face in her hands. Faramour exits stage one side or another.
And…scene.
He waved goodbye to that empty corner that held her, made for the hallway, down the hall, past the living room, the sofa, the divan, two wine glasses remaining—damningly—from the previous evening’s tryst, pebbly sediment coagulated in the bottom of her red, and he harrumphed and—stiff upper-lip and all—threw the hasp on the front door, ripping it open like an envelope that bore an eagerly awaited missive, and moved to cross that threshold for the last time, playing out his role in this particular season’s finale, bidding a backhanded adieu to all he’d known.
The world, the wide world at large, blinked back at him in the pristine shimmers of morning’s make-up: the branch of every tree sharp, bright as Cinemascope, a diamond of hoarfrost twinkling on every blade of grass. Perfect sky casting down perfect shadows onto the lawn, the entirety of everything he saw crisp and razor-sharp and yet somehow static, flat, like a pre-renaissance fresco. He stared down at his own body, checking his own gawky contours and inescapable three-dimensionality—it seemed impossible he could meld with this world. Had he dared press his face forward one inch further, he was certain it would tink! as surely as if on aquarium glass; he was imprisoned like an exhibit, and the look on his face was the same as any other mammal gently baffled at the epiphany of its own loneliness. Quickly he closed the door, redid the bolts, and backtracked over his still warm trail to ascend back up the staircase, to the landing, scurrying up the ladder like a boomerang winging in return to the place it rightly belongs, Faramour withdrawing to the second-and-a-half-story that floated peacefully a piece off the ground, that priceless bit nearer to heaven yet still safely beneath the threats couched in that limitless, naked sky.
The temperate season in ignominious retreat, mercury doing half-gainers and smacking dead on a frozen floor, the wind sharpening in bite and maliciousness as it rushed unstaunched through the flimsy, brittle walls of his gulag for one. It would have been considered chilly if you were an Inuit; if you were a Faramour, it was downright cold. The attic sounds and noises now had clacking shutters added to the arsenal, and insomnia came to bunk with him. All his thoughts turned to survival; such was the nature of the cold that he had no gray matter to spare for inventions, nor for nourishing his aggrieved status as cuckold. He raided the boxes of Mangolds dead and gone, assembling a patchwork armor from their winter clothes: tweeds and dusters, smoking jackets, kangols, ponchos, golfer’s pants, yachting jackets, blazers of Masonic orders (Father Hugh had been a great one for secret societies; also upturned in the desperate grab for garb was the carbon of a five-hundred word essay entitled Why I Should be a Skull and Bones, by Hugh Mangold), leg warmers, and the lucky find of gumboots that may have belonged to great-uncle Julius, an Arctic explorer and like Faramour a man endowed with abnormally small feet.
Another lucky find was an industrial-sized case of dried figs—origins completely unknown. He subsisted on the figs for much of the season—he supplemented these by eating his dopkits (cornmeal, marshmallow paste and baking soda), though their taste left something to be desired. The winter was a wet one, and our intrepid survivalist had managed to wedge a clay cistern through the splintered lattice of an old dormer vent: rains came often enough to keep him alive, if he rationed his water. Usually when he pulled it back inside his hovel the water had frozen, but he broke up the ice with one of the implements of the Versatilomatic (the hoe was especially suitable) and melted the chunks with the flood-master of the helium powered toilet; the thing once detached and the nozzle extended and a struck match applied became quite a serviceable blowtorch. In this way he outlasted the winter. Spring one day came; thawing Faramour, hearing a blue-jay trilling outside on the wheeling weathervane, inhaled the playful perfume of bluebells in the winnows of lightening air.
*****
No man walks through such an ordeal without he is changed. So it was; never again would Faramour’s eyes open quite so wide. But shocks absorb (postulate, Thermodynamics…or something like that). He found his mood lifting with the thermometer, his senses regenerating and his mind bounding hither and yon over downy nimbuses of thought. A new creation, most modest, came to him one fresh-faced morning—a little thingamabob he dubbed The Thingamabob, a larky little device harkening back to the pilgrim days of last season’s organizational flourish, a period of planting and furrowing which now found harvest in this one proud plain flower. Tired of the scraps and tidbits of daily life, the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus, those incommoding bottles of whiteout, the torn envelopes, the old invoices you are sure are long past relevance but are terrified to throw away? Relax, and let the Thingamabob do the work. Don’t know quite what to do with those seven or eight rainbow-colored safety pins—but it seems awfully wasteful to just toss them? The Thingamabob is for you. And why, you might ask, must your desk drawers be cluttered and crammed with this junk: the glass figurine in the shape of a porpoise, the fuel-less Zippo, the unused pocket-sized photo album, some red ink pens, a ball of yarn fraying into loose threads that get everywhere (oh where, oh when, you cry, did I acquire a ball of yarn?), the hundred and nineteen spilled staples along the drawer’s bottom that rattle every time it’s open or closed, and that prick your thumb just under the nail, so that can’t so much as write out a letter to an editor without being nauseated by a feeling of aversion? Answer: they mustn’t. The Thingamabob is here to put things right, and put everything in its right place. To build the initial model, Faramour used some slivers of pressboard, the shell of an archaic sewing machine he’d happened upon, and loads of purple, crushed velvet bags of Crown Royal bottles (oh, Mrs. Mangold) he’d accidentally knocked from their hiding place among the rafters when standing up too fast in The Inspiration Grotto. Already, in the span between conception and execution, the invention was mutating, honing a greater purpose. Whereas it had begun as a repository for any old tuffs and tidbits, now Faramour viewed the thing more gloriously as a kind of tackle-box of notions, with lots of trays, slots, and cubbyholes, a godsend for the jotters and scribblers of this world who are forever losing their jottings and scribblings, or, perhaps worse, finding them at some later date, out of order and hopelessly devoid of context, in a pair of pants that no longer fit or a parka eaten away by moths, so that the little notes to self that once seemed so brimming with import now are distorted and incomprehensible, if not entirely illegible from the ink having smeared with the gum of the post-its: royalties from Jag…where are they no… oor Emac… Alford Knot… heal car…. He had completed his prototype by nightfall, and was able to give it an immediate dry-run as he himself was a person amok in tissue and napkin scraps of doodling. After these had been, for the most part, stored away, the Thingamabob proving a resounding success, he felt lithe and free, like a man who has had shackles removed from his feet and a travel-visa placed in his hand, and this, along with the comforting weather and the natural metabolic turn towards optimism it provided meant he tingled with the iridescent sensations of the newly liberated. Anything was possible now.
Coffee cans: in the silver ones he stored his urine, the blue ones, solid waste. Idly he considered tapping into the main-drain line behind the walls, and thought how an artist should always be able to do a little plumbing; once he was able to manufacture some homemade helium, he could put his magnum opus to practical use. All was well, just as destiny had fated it. No, the world downstairs would not darken him again.
All communiqués with lower provinces were restricted now to the stray exchange of sounds. For instance, one morning not long after his rebirth he heard the thud and exertion of some apparently cumbersome thing being dragged. Faramour’s mind instantly sprang to metaphor—he felt sorry for poor Moira that she had to live such a bulky, encumbered existence, the workaday humdrum dailiness of it all; and for a moment he wished she too could share in his sublime emancipation—but no, she’d made her choices, and she had to live with the consequences. (In actuality, the sounds Faramour heard were the sounds of Moira Mangold single-handedly sliding out the old ruptured mattress and sliding in the new Thermopedic she’d finally saved up to buy, up the stairs, over the landing, up the stairs and through the hallway). If Faramour were a story this would be roughly the moment of his epiphany, a changing character and realization—long time coming though perhaps it is. Perhaps we should leave him now with his splendid if ambiguous feeling of contentment as it has already been an overly winding track to get even this far, as congruous to his sense of time as this approach may have been. But too many things would be left abandoned by such an abrupt departure from the attic, or even such a leisurely one. And the story of Faramour and Moira is nothing if not one of inclusion.
Nothing yet about the books he found. Here it comes: Faramour found some books. In some boxes. He pulled the books from the boxes. Paper-backs. Once they were called dime novels, though Faramour noted from the front covers the original sales price as being twelve cents. There were a few dozen of them, divided nearly exactly between two different authors, one a man named Carter Dickson, the other fellow called John Dickson Carr. Faramour puzzled over the vague likeness between the names…then shrugged it off. They had other similarities; for instance, both were writers of mysteries firmly in the Golden Age tradition, with weekend gatherings at country estates, red herrings, strange doings, scenes of titanic liquor consumption (Faramour always was fascinated in fiction from the earlier part of the previous century at how any character managed to make page 200 without dropping dead of cirrhosis), a Wodehouse sense of humor, and each had his main protagonist a corpulent amateur detective with a taste for the arcane and a flair for the dramatic unveiling. And the hallmarks of both writers seemed to be locked-room mysteries—where in a crime, generally a murder, has been committed in a room with bolted doors, barred windows, and no obvious means of access or escape (no hocusing with locks, no flim-flam with secret passages and such nonsense—a bona-fide hermetically sealed chamber). Faramour began with a lively tale called The Problem of the Green Capsule, proceeded on to Dickson’s The Judas Window, found he was completely hooked and devoured the remaining dozens in quite short order. There were dogs to be sure (a latter-day Carr called The House at Satan’s Elbow, which had all the narrative precision of a lemming on Benzedrine and all the continuity of a fever dream, and an execrable piffle with the title The Cavalier’s Cup, which even to one with Faramour’s laissez-faire attitude towards time felt like hours badly wasted); but for everyone one of the lesser works there would be a mighty masterwork like The Three Coffins, which held him spellbound—and as its creeping Grand Guignol atmosphere harmonizing nicely with that of his gothic garret even managed to give him the willies, looking over his shoulder periodically, starting at every prod and jangle in the night. This book, in the bravura chapter 17, actually turned quite post-modern (or was it simply modern? Pre-modern? Pre-historic?) when the author (Carr), in the guise of one Dr. Gideon Fell, holds court on the very nature of the locked-room problem, ticking off various methods by which the phenomena can be achieved, and simultaneously raises gleefully the curtain on the entire illusion of fiction itself, admitting he is a character in a detective story—saying this to the other characters—and exclaiming how they should glory in this most vivid of existences It was a stupendous thrill to Faramour, to see the artist insert himself into the work. He hadn’t known you could do that! Such was the magnitude of the revelation—inbred with the nature of the locked room problem—that Faramour immediately decided he had not pushed himself far enough in his own calling—and that while there was doubtless joys to be christened in his private laboratory, up here in his own hermetically sealed chamber, he needed to shove off, explore new frontiers, found new realms. The problem was in the leaving, since he had already proved he could not vacate the house. How to solve the puzzle he had set for himself, how to create himself out of the corner he was stifled in?
Any exit strategy would have to be inimitable to him; and the beginning of anything new means the end of the thing past. Endings were a problem where Faramour was concerned—things concerning him tended to ramble on for far too long (as those with an even fleeting relation to him will testify). He saw it as well. He looked around his home (this was well after the artistic revelation of The Three Coffins, after the throbbing had percolated and gestated an appropriate while, and after Faramour had thirstily imbibed all the other books in the box), and while he loved it well, he knew he could not stay here any longer. It was time—well past time, probably—to strike out.
The mist clears further: there were—exclusive to attics it would seem—odd fringes to some of the floors in his domicile, where the hardwood planks would end in a border of gaping insulation, soft and malleable, the borders segmented into small squares, each about two feet by two feet. He had been aware of them for some time; in bored moments he had been known to jab at these surfaces with his thumb, maybe to gently coax his fist into the soft flesh that felt like stale cotton-candy. Our Faramour, always lean, had grown considerably lankier from his time on the second-and-a-half story. He nudged at a square with his big toe, testing again its texture, as one tests the temperature of lake water—yes, he thought, this could be workable. It was uncomfortably close to a secret passageway; Messrs. Carr and Dickson might find his route out unacceptable jiggery-pokery, but it was the Faramour way. Then he pinched closed his nostrils and jumped for it.
Moira Mangold in the park, on a bench, watching the leaves changes, the dark green of the gigantic dogwoods ripening to ribald, ruddy red, eating a homemade sandwich from wax-paper, cucumber and egg salad. A harbinger wind, bringing winter’s RSVP, blows down the long gallery of green; kites dot a royal blue sky, Frisbees slice the air into glass petals. Dog barks from various corners of the park, amiable scouts on benevolent patrol. Around the base of one particularly mammoth tree, Moira watched two squirrels quarrel, and chuckle, and bow and embrace; a waxwing soared and spiraled, a training maneuver held aloft on the pine-comb breeze. Her eyes drifted from sky to earth, and it was in a happy skim over the latter that she first saw the shadow bouncing across the huntsman grass. The shadow pulled up short very near her feet, skidding to a stop, and she lifted her eyes. It was a dog, head cocked jauntily to one side, open mouth with red interior, golden eyes evanescent with a fetching confidence, coat a blue like gunmetal. She said hi, the dog barked back with perfect timing. Another shadow, this undoubtedly belonging to a biped, came crossing the lawn at an angle like clock’s hand taking the shortcut from eleven to six. The human shadow eased and ceased by the dog, a dangling red leash falling into the frame of Moira’s vision. She did not look up yet, only admired the newcomer’s strong jaw, in silhouette form, the steadfast precision of the shoulders, two mannish but gentle fingertips stroking the furry cobalt crown of the dog’s head, whose eyes crinkled in sleepy bliss at his master’s bestowal of comforts.
Every structure has its own skeleton, and as such is its own sarcophagus, rife with nerve-endings, veins, arteries, complex channels of marrow and other compounds. Faramour had now quested into the hinterlands of the house, below the floors, above the ceilings, beyond the plaster, twixt the studs, imbedded deep a weary nomad chuffing inside the complex circulatory systems of residential architecture several generations classic. It was a world, a dimension really, where conventional bearings did not apply: visibility was feeble at best; the sense of smell was rendered equally moot as the fumes of silicone, cedar shavings, dry-rot, moistened wood, plumber’s putty and asbestos overpowered all else, and no nose was blessed with fine enough powers of distinction to calibrate through the miasma of such an odiferous assault. Ears too were of no help—every noise was a phantom, every creak a rattling ghost. Taste? Neutered—omnipresent fibrous fluff was nowadays forever crowding his mouth. He proceeded mostly by touch, poking through whatever tissue had give, stopping short at whatever was to stolid to allow permeation. He was through the looking glass here, fording the slipstream, down the rabbit-hole, making like a proletarian Alice into this new plexus of reality. We believe black holes to be nullities, howling voids of rippling nothing—when in fact where Faramour found himself, capsized and spinning like a Virginia reel, was overstuffed with matter, fervid with matter, exploding with matter. The lost objects alone that he found were legion: pennies (many millions of pennies), screws, eraser-heads, cufflinks, hunks of chalk, crumpled balls of yesterday’s newspapers. Subterranean fiefdoms of objects, and the most prevalent material of all, a powdery petrified silted stuffing between the levels of the house, alluded to a few sentences ago, clung to Faramour in his cramped voyage like a second, scratchy skin.
He was not alone here. This new layer of existence had its own wildlife, was a veritable sanctuary. Not only did he come across many spiders (he knew by counting the dotting of legs walking across his cheeks and knuckles), he came across egg sacs of spider families; he came across flies and fly larvae; he happened onto camps of crickets that cut out their conversations but quick on hearing his approach. He found dead birds, sometimes only bones but on not infrequent occasions some with meat still clinging, and, as he had become a creature forced to live off the land and to take whatever nature provided, he did what was necessary—even if it meant he would be spitting out feathers for some time afterwards. The food-chain linked up here as on the outside—man takes all—and Faramour became quite the connoisseur; roaches were, as conventional wisdom would have it, absolutely disgusting, but beetles weren’t bad at all, surprisingly sweet. Ants were barely a snack, but a dead mouse, one that had been freeze-dried by one turning of the seasons, was a delicacy that could be stretched to last two or three sittings.
He kept moving, constantly moving, and boredom somehow never entered his life’s new equation. Hazily he was aware that he must be occasionally covering the same ground, treading the same trodden path’s in the maze of tunnels, but never did it feel old hat and the experience was the thing; not what could be taken from the experience to serve as grist for other purposes when he returned to the typical life of standing and walking and sleeping and cutlery, but the experience itself, a mode only valid in present tenses, so that former cares and concerns—no doubt, no doubt the result of societal conditioning—bled very swiftly away, and Faramour entered a primordial state which he knew instinctively must be closer to the soul of existence itself.
One day. Or night—the difference no longer was a relevant issue. He heard her voice, déjà vu, but only slightly. “Faramour,” it called, as if out of a stranger’s dream. “Faramour? Are you in the attic still?” He believed the voice issued from somewhere above him, if direction any longer applied.
It took some spluttering to make his larynx function. “Of course not. Crawlspace, I think.”
“Faramour, we need to talk. Seriously.” Yes, she was nearby.
“Okay. Speak up, though.” There was considerable muffling, and the distance her voice had to travel was, to say the least, ample.
“I got married yesterday, Faramour. To a wonderful man. We’re going to live here; we’re going to raise Weimaraners. We…we’re going to need our space.”
Faramour coughed, and a spume of dust and grit blew back into his face. Why was she doing this now, of all times? The grubbing had been scarce of late, and when hungry he was disposed to crankiness.
“Can you hear me, Faramour?”
Of course he could hear her. Really, he’d forgotten how tiresome she could be, at times. “Moira, do you think we could do this later. Now isn’t really a good time.”
An extended pause—“No, we have to talk now, Faramour. This has gone on too long. Faramour, it’s been four years.”
She may have been able to hear his grunt, weak as it was. Tiresome, he thought, very tiresome.Talking such nonsense. He’d forgotten that about her. He’d forgotten it all.
Couldn’t she understand, couldn’t she see that he was coming closer to the place he needed to be? That everything was converging. That he was almost to the end.
