A Paradigm of Earth Read online

  The house stood inside an overgrown yard surrounded with a rusty wrought-iron fence. It faced south, fronting onto a cul-de-sac avenue along the edge of the riverbank. Morgan left her suitcase by the gate, took the cat carrier and walked across the narrow street to the ribbon of grass boulevard. In front of her a dramatic drop two hundred feet to the river was staged by a small shelf of greenery alongside the water, where bicycle paths and picnic tables attested to the urban parkland vision—but the picnic tables were weathered from green into grey, and up on the grass, the bench overlooking the river had been carved deeply with graffiti. She showed Marbl the view, but the cat was complaining loudly, and turned her back like Gertrude Stein.

  Morgan smiled without humor. “Guess you’re telling me not to avoid it any more,” she said, and the cat was silent at last. They returned to the gate and Morgan lifted the latch. It was stiff, and caught briefly, then released with a musical pop. She kicked the gate shut behind her, climbed up the three stairs to the wide veranda, and unlocked the heavy wood door with the leaded-glass central oval.

  The house was still entirely empty but for the jumble of her belongings, stacked haphazardly in the living room by the moving company. She left her suitcase and Marbl’s carrier in the sundrenched hall where the stained glass and prisms of the door panel cast rosy blocks and rainbow patterns over the scratched wood paneling and chipped plaster.

  The huge living room was on the left of the door. A dining room mirrored it on the other side. Both were separated from the hall by leaded-glass doors. Behind the living room, a smaller room, completely wood-paneled up to a picture rail, and with piano windows of stained leaded glass, had been converted to an office with telephone and data lines. Morgan nodded. This would be hers, a kind of household command center.

  The dining room was separated from a huge kitchen and pantry by pocket doors. Behind the kitchen was a mud porch, a utility room, and a small bedraggled greenhouse with broken panes. Two other doors led toward the center of the house. Hearing Marbl’s howls begin again and echo in the empty hall, Morgan left these rooms unexplored, returned to her annoyed pet.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said soothingly, “we’ll find a place to sleep.” She made sure the door was latched.

  In the back of the hall there was an ancient brass-fitted elevator with a telescoping metal door. She walked up the stairs behind it.

  One of the rooms had long windows looking out onto a small balcony littered with fallen leaves. Hanging against one of the windows on a leather thong was a small dusty metal ring filled with a colored glass mosaic. At the wind of the opening door, it bumped gently against the window like a moth trying to get out. Small, inside it, was the image of the prairie, with its warm clear light sky, rendered in epoxied shards with an artistry not slavish to detail but for that even more exact. Morgan, seeing it for the first time, was momentarily paralyzed. Then her eyes blurred with tears.

  She didn’t know she had tears any more. She went to the hall and got her suitcase. The hollow bang as she set it down in the prairie room was a punctuation mark. This would be her place. She brought the cat carrier up, closed the door behind her, and opened the carrier. Marbl came out wondering into the empty room and, seeing refuge, dived for the closet where she crouched, her complaining miaouw echoing.

  The stained glass was like a raindrop caught in the curve of metal, a lens making the landscape tiny. Or a teardrop? She laughed shortly at her own conceit.

  The best house computer she could afford was old and clunky, with no virch and no smart-chip capability, upgrading the hundred-year-old house to the minimum standard of smart, but it was adequate. After a few days, Morgan found herself in a habit of late-night game playing: always the repetitive, patterning games to put her in trance.

  The night she found herself playing the game and weeping, she took all the games off her partition and the common area. She might not have been good at grieving, but she was damned if she was going to let the machine do it for her.

  Instead, she decided, she would revive and keep her journal, write in it every night. A journal on paper, not in the machine. She had enjoyed, or at least found release in, journal writing before; now it was a survival device and she approached it as a discipline, the same way she had the requirement of her previous profession to write daily report: doggedly, and with a cool documentary flavor.

  She wrote about the renovations, the recurring real estate administrivia, the way the cats were eliminating the mouse problem, the motion of light on the surface of the river, or the sweep of an advertising spotlight across the sky. She didn’t include in the diary her frustration at how the constant low-level business torment that remained as the final detritus of her parents’ wills was made more difficult by the necessity to either see or avoid her brother—she chose avoid, usually—and if she mentioned it at all on the pages of the journal, she tried to be dispassionate about the cool anguish of her restless nights.

  She took her duty as a recorder seriously. Some details were not important.

  Morgan’s room was plain, almost barren, a habit into which she settled. A low wide platform in one corner was the bed, covered with, and with pillows of, plain-colored and Indian-print cottons. Against one wall were the desk and the short oak filing cabinet she had taken from her father’s office. A woven Cree rug near the bed covered part of the hardwood floor. The white walls were bare except for the colors cast by the sun through the tiny piece of stained glass.

  Soon she was no longer completely unencumbered. In a few weeks, she gathered some moss—of the human sort. Delany, her close friend all the time in university and fitfully since then, had been living in adapted housing that had just been “discontinued”: the polite word for sold out from under her to the highest bidder. Morgan made her the first of the tenants in her penitential boarding-house. Then, by chance in the Swedish prefab-furniture store, she met Russ, back in the city from Indonesia and looking for a house to share: she recognized him despite the beard and the heavy tan—and the streaks of white in hair and beard. A friend of Russ’s, Jakob, recommended because he was a dancer and needed a studio and Morgan’s house had big rooms, turned out to be someone she had worked with years ago in an art therapy program, canceled during funding cuts.

  Jakob discovered (with suitably dramatic shrieks of joy) the tiny gymnasium the school had long ago created in the attic when converting the brick house, and immediately claimed it for a practice room. At one end there was a loft which became his sleeping place. He hung it about with silk scarves and gaily-colored cloths. His bed was a pallet on the floor, spread with a brocade throw. He was putting up mirrors on one gym wall, and a barre, had rented a sander to smooth the floors. From his area outward, all the surfaces in the house were starting to be covered with a layer of fine wood dust, dotted with the pawprints of cats.

  Russ was moving into the small room upstairs, at the back. Nothing was there right now but cardboard boxes containing the modular furniture, ready to be assembled, that he had been buying when he and Morgan happened on each other. He had gone hiking: would really move in next week, he’d said.

  Delany chose the room beside the elevator. She was in angry revolution against ground-floor living after years in the handicapped-people’s-housing complex; the elevator allowed her to take this second-floor room with the big north-facing windows giving her an elevated perspective of the deep ravine behind the house. The room’s ell shape had been formed decades ago by removal of walls between three smaller rooms—in the school, it had been a common room for the teachers. In one arm of the ell was her special bed; in the other, in the light from the biggest windows, her paints and easel. The rest would arrive on the weekend, when her brothers were going to help her move. From that room, for three days, had come plaster dust and paint fumes from the renovations, while three grumpy workers had taken only an hour to install a wheel-washer for Delany’s wheelchair in the mud room at the side door.

  Morgan looked into doorways at rando
m, walking through and through the house, wearing down her paths. Occasionally she encountered one of the cats doing the same. Marbl, the one she had brought with her, was five years old, lonely and tentative. Dundee and Seville, the five-month-old marmalade twins they had all gone together to pick out at the SPCA, were exuberant and raucous. Morgan felt a kinship to Marbl, who stayed close to the walls, hissed when the twins tumbled into her full-tilt on one of their rampages. What was she doing filling with all these beings a house meant to be quiet and insulating?

  Then why didn’t I sell the house and buy some solitary apartment with no room for anyone but me and my cat? her interior voice mocked her. Methinks the lady doth protest too much …

  Morgan settled in the kitchen, where big windows looked out over calm trees in the back yard, the tumbledown garden shed, and the weathered ramshackle fence along the lane. The rain clouds that had threatened all day had loosed into a sheet of soft grey silk whipping across the greenery. The air blowing through the open screen smelled damp and alive.

  Morgan knew she was alive because she slept and woke, ate and shat, still trembled at infinity. But she experienced the rain as everything else, like the cat in the hallway, looking through open doors at the real universe. She was waiting for something to teach her to go there. To invite her to go there. She couldn’t go without leave. She didn’t live there any more.

  Morgan wanted the world to end. She sat on the riverbank in the clear dusk and wished the glittering buildings along the curve to explode, wanted the towers of commerce to topple, not from economic but from physical decay, a decay like that in her heart, she thought, and seeing the towers intact after all that destructive thought she smiled with the same anger at herself, wondering if she would want to be on top of such a falling edifice, thinking it might be an interesting way to die, wondering if any dying can be interesting, wanting the world to die and leave her senseless.

  How maudlin of me, she thought, and the word started her considering Maudlin and Bedlam, their close relationship, the prisons of the mad: she thought of the old English song Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes, for to save her shoes from gravel … .

  Mad Morgan, she thought, how I wish it were so.

  The mad have an easy time of it, she thought; they can let go. They can let the towers of their own minds crumble with no resistance. They are free of whatever damning necessity keeps me sane, keeps me in this prison of my body, this quiet madhouse, this disguise. Where do they get the courage? Just to go crazy, to leave their old world behind, without caring who they leave there crying?

  Like the dead, she thought, they are free to desert us.

  I wonder what it takes to wake me into one of those people who just disappear one day, she asked herself. I quit my job, brought the cat with me, didn’t just go out to the store one night and vanish, sadly missed by loving family, only to be found ten or twenty years later, found by accident, in New Zealand or somewhere, with a new name. Usually also they have a new spouse, more kids, another job, she remembered. Changing your life isn’t easy.

  She thought about the big leather suitcase she packed in her tiny apartment. She thought about the time she spent packing her parents’ belongings, dividing them into categories, what to take, what to keep, what they wanted whom to have, what to give away, what to leave in the basement for her brother Robyn to sort when he had become accustomed to living in the house he inherited.

  She thought that those who desert us leave us a terrible burden of which to dispose. She remembered the cartons and green plastic garbage bags readied for the Goodwill truck to collect, the furniture carried out to its merciful maw by two amiable, slowwitted men who knew how to be kind, so much kindness that she wondered how used they were to taking away the furniture of the dead, comforting the living. How many graveyards did they dismantle every day? She thanked them for their work, and their kindness, then left the ravaged house, put the key back through the mail slot for Robyn, and fled.

  For the first time she thought of it as flight, but she sidestepped that thought too, and stood up from her cramped seat on the bench, went back to the house, where she had left the desk light burning in her ascetic room, where dusk was coming persistently in at the windows but was kept at bay by the yellow skirt of light. She lay down on the cotton-covered bed and went suddenly to sleep, like a baby.

  She dreams of the six o’clock news, telling her that the aliens have landed, the aliens have her parents’ calm dead faces but she is not afraid. “What do you want?” she asks. “It’s not easy to go away without packing anything,” her father replies. Her mother says, “We’ll be in New Zealand if you need us.” The skyscrapers are impossible icicles of flesh; they fall slowly and silently and never break against the ground. There is an indigo mist around them, and it forms into a clutch of faces. Her parents’ bodies are blowing away, leaving only their smiles, like the Cheshire Cat—

  —and she wakened with Marbl sleeping on her bed, purring a little.

  As Morgan woke the purring faded, the cat went more soundly to sleep. It was full night and despite the room warmth Morgan was shivering. She stumbled up from the bed and into the cone of light where she sat down like a prisoner, tears drying on her face: the interrogation was not a success, where were you on the night of the—

  —and the cat Marbl, wakened too by Morgan’s upheaval from the bed, raised her head and meouwed once, then put her head on her crossed paws and watched with an unblinking stare while Morgan weathered the agony of not weeping.

  Finally the sawdust was all vacuumed away, the varnish smell aired out enough to be background, the last contractor’s bill paid with the last of Morgan’s inheritance, and they had the house to themselves. Morgan walked the corridors at midnight, checking that the windows were latched and the doors locked.

  The house felt empty despite the people working or sleeping behind each door. Morgan realized she missed her dead—but in a distant way: she too was missing, presumed dead. She was a set of behaviors without a person inside. Since her night of self-scourging established a baseline of self-loathing, she had not allowed herself to go searching for the missing self. She did not yet believe she needed anything she had lost that night. But the truth was coming for her, stalking her through the silent corridors of her life as softly as the cat Marbl who followed her on her rounds.

  One night as she passed Delany’s room, Delany opened the door. “Tea time?” she said, wheeling herself out into the corridor and toward the elevator. Marbl ducked into the room behind her, and Delany laughed. “You’ll get paint on your paws again, you silly thing!”

  “Do you want me to get her out of there?”

  “Sure. Last time she left little prints on the new floor. Teal, very fetching and old-fashioned; I’m gonna leave them there—but perhaps best if not continually augmented in other colors. I’m working in tiger yellow today.”

  “That’s the same combination I have in that Simpson watercolor,” said Morgan. “I should leave her to it.” But she was chasing Marbl as she spoke.

  Marbl was a fluid cat, always had been good at getting under the furniture. Morgan hadn’t been in this room since the renos were done and the furniture came, and she saw it from lower than her usual eye level, bent over to look for the cat, which meant perhaps at Delany’s usual eye level. The furniture was wood, and old, and had been ruined with paint. It looked, not like family hand-me-downs, but like some theater set seen up close: spattered and textured with paint and stain; what from the corridor looked like a patina of age seemed from three inches away to have been engineered that way from a standing start. Morgan was uneasy with its falsity.

  “Like the antiquing,” she said to Delany. Delany wheeled back in, startling Marbl out from under the only easy chair in the room—which was stacked with art magazines and painting materials. The walls were still bare, white and smooth.

  “Yeah, my brother and his ladies did it. Got the idea from one of those back-to-the-twentieth-century home decor mags. I plan to
reverse it as soon as I can afford to get it stripped. The original finish was a beautiful rich dark brown. Fumed oak. Can you believe it?”

  Morgan laughed. “I am so glad you said that. I was wondering if you’d had an aesthetics transplant since university!” She lunged for Marbl, who, emerging from behind a stack of canvases with their faces turned to the wall, was poised to leap up onto the painting table, and caught her just as she left the ground. One paw had indeed been leaving tiger yellow prints already, and Morgan wiped it with a paint rag. The cat protested with a tiny plaintive mew, and Morgan hugged her and petted her in apology.

  Marbl hated cuddling, pushed away from Morgan with soft paws, her claws retracted. Morgan scratched under her chin and she half-purred, still struggling. “Ach, ye poor beastie!” Delany crooned, laughing. “Doomed to have affection lavished upon you.”

  Morgan wasn’t listening. She was struck by the image on the easel, the only image in the room. The rich yellow light, created with rays of the “tiger yellow” which was almost saffron where the thick smears of paint had folded, cascaded behind a dark figure which, though small, dominated the canvas. In front of the figure, however, in a reversal of traditional road images, there was only darkness, and it was clear that the figure itself saw none of the light outlining it. Below the feet of the figure there was a brown tabby cat, realized in meticulous detail, almost as if it had been created hair by hair. Though the painting was clearly unfinished, it already had a disturbing, raw challenge about it.