Tales from Beyond the Fifthwall: My Own Place
I heard her walking up the stairs, but I ignored it.
This could be my own place, I decided. This could be my territory, my space, my home.
I was standing in the third floor of my tall, skinny, run-down building, looking out around me. It was in the middle of a forest. The trees were like willow trees, but not quite- they were something different. They obscured the view of everything around me. They were tall enough that I couldn’t see over them, even from the third floor of my building, and their willowy branches draped down just a foot above the ground. If I looked around the house, there would be trees in every direction, except where the cave was. I think I would visit the cave today. I think that’s what I wanted to do.
Sometimes I would walk out into that forest- it went on forever, because I felt the forest shouldn’t have to end itself on my account. I would see things in the forest, usually only in the distance. I would see a man or a woman pass by. I would see someone’s house through the reeds, or I would see something large and dark lumbering through shade of the trees. They wouldn’t scare me though. Nothing here could scare me. I could get lost in the forest, lost in the dark, but I was never scared of that place.
Today, I didn’t go out into the forest. I just sat and watched. I leaned out my window and looked up at the sky. It was overcast. I like the sky when its overcast. Everyone talks about sunny days as if they were best thing ever, but I’ve never enjoyed them. I wanted an overcast sky, with the cool breeze that almost inherently comes with an overcast sky, so I made it so. I wanted the air to have silvery-blue quality to it that both contrasted and complemented the leaves of the trees, so it was there.
I wanted the light to be akin to the pre-dawn quality of the sky, when there’s light, but there’s no sun- that twilight of excitement, that alien light humans only catch short glimpses of before its either day or night for the next several hours. I wanted it to be like this here, without all the colors of the sun, only that very specific effect of the light, and so it was.
Thud Thud. “Are you in there?”
I looked around the room I was in. It was dirty. The wallpaper was bland and peeling. The wood floors needed to be swept. There were leaves that had blown in through the window- thin leaves from the half-willow half-other trees -there were a few bugs here and there- cockroaches frequented my home, as well as crickets, ladybugs, spiders and centipedes -and I’m sure there were mice, maybe rats, and possibly even bats in the small attic.
Once, I had seen a cat on the roof. A few times, I woke up in the middle of the night to find raccoons entering through the window of my room. I didn’t mind. I had seen a fox one morning, while I was venturing out into the ocean of willow branches. It never came into the house though. She was beautiful, and she lived right up the road, but I would never ask her to come to my house.
All this was how I liked it. Something about it seemed so real, so comforting to me, despite how it looked. Real. I think that was it. Something about it seemed real, and familiar, like a pleasant childhood memory of someplace you couldn’t remember the name of. And the animals and the insects, and even the leaves, were all my guests. They came and went as they pleased, and I never turned them away. I think they came because I wanted them to come, and I wanted these small creatures to feel safe here, just like I felt safe here, with all my beautiful things.
Today, I would visit the cave, but before that, I would look at all the beautiful things in my little building. In this room alone, I had a few paintings hanging on the wall. There were six total- there was one on either side of my window, two on the wall next to my bed, one above the headboard of the bed, and one on the wall between the staircase going up to the attic and the staircase going down to the second floor. Then there was a nightstand next to my bed, with a globe, a framed photograph, and a book.
Thud! Thud! “Open this goddamn door!”
First, I admired the paintings on either side of the window. The first was a Russolo, Memories of a Night. The second was a Boccioni, States of Mind II: Those who Stay. Both were originals. I walked over to my bed. All the paintings around my bed were abstract to the point of disassociation. I liked it that way, it helped me dream. One of the paintings next to the bed was Wyndham Lewis’s Composition, and the other was a Braque, Le Portugais. Then the painting above the headboard was In the Hold by David Bomberg. All originals, of course.
I took a quick look at the nightstand. The globe was old- I hardly touched it for fear of something breaking. The framed photograph was of Einstein, and it was actually signed by Albert himself. The book was a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which was not signed by Friedrich himself, but by his sister, Elizabeth. I did not particularly revel in this, I didn’t like Elizabeth so much, but I cherished it nonetheless. Then I walked to the stairwell, ready to go on to the next floor. The last painting was another Lewis painting, Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair. This one was not an original.
The second floor was filled with things that hung from the ceiling. There were things made of paper here, which were strung together with thread, yarn and wire to form mobiles. There were three chandeliers- one from the Late Renaissance, one from the Baroque era, and another from the Victorian era. None of them could shed anymore light now, however. Hanging from the ceiling, there were metal sculptures balancing precariously on one another. In one part of the room, there was a model of our solar system hanging level with my chest, and above that hung clouds, stars, whales, fish and a single spaceship. In here was also a couch for me to sit, and several bookcases with a dense scattering of classics, contemporaries, and a few relatively-unknowns.
The first floor, the lowest floor- as I had no basement, unless you counted the cave -had a stove with an oven, a deep sink, a single, small table with a single chair, a wide desk for experiments and tinkering with little gadgets, and another bookshelf- but this one was filled with books on physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, medicine, pharmacology, machinery and mathematics. Then, there was a second, smaller desk in the corner of this room. This desk was special to me- more special than anything in this house, other than the peeling wallpaper and the raccoons that come in through my window. This was my drawing desk, and it had its own bookshelf too, which I used for drawing references, inspirations for ideas-
BANG! BANG! CRACK! “When I tell you to open the fucking door, you open the fucking door. Now you don’t have a door. Now, I come in whenever I want, and I don’t ask for permission.”
Today, however, I wasn’t going to draw, or tinker with any machines, and I didn’t feel hungry. Today, I was going to go into the cave. I walked out the front door, and there, twenty feet away, was the entrance to the cave. It was all tall grass- almost as tall as I was -and there was a wall of it, about twelve feet wide, I’d say. At the center of this wall, the grass was pulled to the sides, and it curled around in the shape of a thin ellipse, with angled ends where mother nature parted at the bottom, and where it came back together in the end.
I ducked into the entrance, and made my way down a tunnel. It began as a tunnel of tall grass on my sides, where the ground dipped down into a trench, but then the trench overcame you and the earth came over your head. Then it was a tunnel of dirt and debris- the stuff of life -and roots of the willow trees. It was dark here, but there was a light up ahead. I came to the end of the tunnel, to the source of the light.
It was a room made of clay. It was roughly in the shape of a semi-circle, and the back wall opened up to a waterfall. The waterfall covered the entire opening at the back end of the cave. I never looked to see what was on the other side, but light came in through this window, so I could see what I was doing in here, the spray from the water kept the clay moist and malleable, and if I was thirsty while I worked I would cup my hands in the water and take a drink.
What was so special about this cave was that you could make anything you wanted in here. I knelt down to the clay, dug my fingers into its surface, and pulled the clay up. When I did, I pulled a rose bush from the clay, and all the flowers were the colors I wanted them to be. There were blue roses, pink roses, purple roses, white roses- whatever I wanted. I grabbed a handful of clay and mashed it around inside my closed hands. When I opened them back up, a bird flew out and flapped around the room. It needed a place to land, so I pulled a tree branch from the wall, and it came to roost there. Safe and sound.
Something was hitting my face, and something was screaming in my ear, but I couldn’t tell you what that thing was. I wasn’t paying any attention to it, I was in my own place.
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