The Architecture of Inherited Ghosts
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The third floor hallway extends further each time I climb the stairs, though I've lived in this house for thirty years and know its blueprint by heart. Today, the door to my childhood bedroom opens not onto twin bed and wallpaper ships, but onto my grandmother's summer kitchen—the one with the blue checked curtains where she taught me to fold dumplings. The air smells of yeast and something metallic. On the counter sits my father's service revolver, though he's been dead for twelve years and never set foot in that grandmother's house. I reach for it, and my hand passes through. Behind me, I hear the front door open—the sound of keys I've never owned, unlocking a lock that shouldn't exist. My father walks through the doorway, and I drop the revolver. We do not acknowledge each other as he strolls past me into the bedroom, while I stand frozen, still studying my implausible hand-me-down.
I turn back to the wall between my fantasy and my bedroom, to reach for the extinguished light switch before the darkness takes me completely, before I awake from this dream to the heavy knowledge that he'll live forever. I reach slow and halting for my father's bedroom, and realize I'm not moving anymore. I can't seem to move my hand beyond the switch, which is still turned on. I am no longer in my house but a bedroom deep inside my dream, my hand already dead. I turn to the brother who is sleeping beside me and feel around his face for his voice, his mouth. I reach to his throat to feel for his heartbeat, but he's not there either, his body a ghost. I am face to face with myself, not moving my hand but finding the switch now, and feeling it toggle off. Far beneath, in the kitchen, I hear a whistling, following the wimpering of the pots and pans. My bedroom door opens behind me and they come out. My grandmother holds a blue bowl for me—tugs at her apron, and pushes the dumplings between my lips. In a swirl of fire, she whisks me away with her, into a forest, a small village. The year is 1957. We sit on stools at a counter while she flips between three black and white channels. Later, she'll sew me a new dress out of her heavy eocalese, let me steam dahlias, doughnuts, plum and apple pies. I'm more real to her—was more real to her—than my actual father, who murders more people now, holds more guns, questions her more often, talks of cleaning and renovation and what he might do with his money.
We are each others' comfortable disappearances, extensions of ourselves. We are not from here or this time, and never were—in the corridors going ostensibly past my sister's childhood bed I walked into my grandmother's small shop where she sold cheap symbols and crosses to poor women while mothers watched their young children in the graveyard, to an hourglass Hemingway held as he eyed the mockingbirds. My father believed the night they killed him they marked him a blue whale because the moon hung like that summer night in her canal mirror. But my mother made it light, washed all marks away. My grandmother died when she was too old to eat, a lifetime too old. I don't stare at the wall for long—I live there, after all—but it will be days before I touch those switchplates again. There are crackles when I pass that particular bulge in the wall; I feel like I'm touching eternity. (Unreal to others, though often in the real world I am a patch of shadow, hair hanging past my face, the fast blinking of an eye, my arms held against my sides in a seashell tacit) I turn off all the switches keeping my ghostless house lit—and miss them all.
Copyright © 2005 Rose Brainerd◆ About the ending
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