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The Archaeology of 931

Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002

The key was already in the lock when she arrived. It had been there for seventeen years, though no one had lived in the house for twenty-three. Locals still knew it by the people’s name, not by the street address. You had to know to ask for it by number. Continue reading The Space Between → Sitting on the couch with my feet up, laptop on the edge of my lap, I was reclined in a familiar position, comfortable in my parents’ house without a care in the world. 931 For a moment he stood in the tile hall and stared at the sun, an image in his mind of light shifting through colors, reflections on glass. Bright and muted, the traces on the white marble floors and the cold walls. He smoothed his fingers over the wall to trace the occasional color stain there, the beginning of moonlight. A message, obviously, but from where? The flashes of cobalt and violet only lingered a moment, like an insect in the sun. He imagined them slowly fading as he moved to the guest room, where he studied each corner of the walls, imagining a case beneath the wallpaper. Moving his hand through the air, the case would slide through his fingers from some secret keyhole, a shelf full of one item: a single trolley ticket from this morning’s train. He turned the full circle of the guest room and then in the bathroom found himself again near his face, awake, blinking at the toothpaste stain on the mirror. As he washed he searched for the chalk splotches on the floor and found his reflection in the mirror. As he turned the contours shifted in place, changing form. Something rustled in the back room. One wall he found as beige as the rest, lacking color or objects. He only caught a glimpse of metal in movement, the image of teeth clanking against each other. He recognized the sound of excitement in the air because he had lived it many times himself. Too many. Not here. He rushed into the kitchen, but nothing was there, no squeaking hinge or scratching paw. He looked into the refrigerator and freezer in case they were wild animals hiding there. Even if they ate whatever was inside it would be wrong to be shocked that they would ignore the warnings in their own language. The door to the patio was cold on his fingertips. He tried the handle with his hand still damp. Nothing, of course, like the last several mornings. Perhaps the bell? Feeling this room empty, he moved along the hallway. Instead he stepped onto the patio, avoiding the steps for the parts of the threshold that hurt his feet. He looked at the upright, and checked the bottom of the door to find no clues there. The bell was silent. He looked up. The post showed no sign of a lock or key. 931 He waited in the dark for a moment, looking out at the stars decorating the road, and at the angry wind blowing across the bottom of the balcony before his own porch. The panes rattled, though they were sanded to allow the breeze through. To the left, a few steps separated his building from the neighbors. To the right, a chain-link fence’s boundaries marked property lines that no one cared about. It was more like a collapsed wall that simply marked the edge of buildings adjacent, its shadows suggesting a faint point of separation in a dream. A lantern sat on top of the chain links like a reflection in the darkness. This was where someone had sat, where two strangers had talked for a while before going inside. He discovered this by walking the block at midnight and looking where people could not see him and walking the rear yards, where it was possible to cover most of them. Another building had a light on in a kitchen with a tall glass door out to their balcony. It was just a few doors down, and distinct from the others because of this. It could be a restaurant, something close by, misplaced in the tiny space that was visible beyond the fence. Only their buildings cast the rear yards into shadow and made the quiet of the block roil at night. In the light of that kitchen, he stood and listened from the balcony below. He waited for a car to move on the street, and then for someone to enter an apartment, to close a balcony door, to step from light to dark. 931 His walk home in the early hours was quick and routine, the nine-story buildings different, but the same. He walked along the chain-link fence in the rear yards, noting the numbers that came between the four-digit addresses that described everything, and the piece of paper taped to the balcony above the door that offered him a single room for a price. He took a step into the lobby and went up the stairs without pressing any of the floor buttons at the elevator, even though he noted them each time. Years ago, there were two buttons near the 2nd-floor door, when he first lived here. It had been ten years ago. Technically he had been a tenant longer, but he had not lived here for five years. Using the phone in the lobby, he dialed 931. A young woman answered. “Did you check the basement?” she said. “No,” he said. “I thought I would call the landlord instead.” “901 must have keys, but I don’t think 931 does,” she said in a soft, northern accent. He hung up. He tried the numbers at the door where his mail was delivered, verifying that the light for 931 was lit. He crossed the threshold without a key, into silence, with light turning off at switch reaches across its darkness, feeling the chill of the foyer’s cold stone floor. Beside a faded area near the number was part of an old layer of wallpaper on the shuttered area where visitors had left their mail for so long it draped floppy like an ocean reef. In place of the first digit there was some form of darkness, which was not the color of the wallpaper. Light showed up weak to contrast it. He reached out, skin not quite touching it, no breeze on his fingertips. The darkness absorbed the light immediately and returned nothing. 931 seemed to be a locked apartment. Other doors along the hallway were unlocked and swung open as he passed, revealing carpets that shifted and left pads and layers of newspaper to form a pattern against cool linoleum. Doors led from entryways to staircases, hallways, and corridors great and small. He went to the corner where there was a door. In the dimness, it was easy to see that it had been etched over the years with hundreds of overlapping initials. Three hook-shaped symbols repeated often, four square symbols less so, three spiky symbols less than a hundred, sometimes paired. There was still writing below. The Ni-Ya-Jo-Jo as he read the first line. The Si-i-Oo-Oo-Hi-Hi symbols seemed more partisan here in their repetition, much less celebrated. This was the one door he could not open and he looked away, moving through the hall. He passed bedroom doors, some that banged or swung opened, a wood bench covered with varied things. In the next hallway, a door that had been recently repainted was marked with graffiti in the first language visitors wrote here. Not long ago, he had

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