The Resonance of Unlocked Rooms
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She kept the key though the lock had been changed forty years ago. Sometimes, turning it over in her pocket, she could almost remember the weight of the door, the particular resistance of the hinges—but the color of the paint, whether it had been green or blue or that faded cream they used in those years, this she could not summon, and the failure felt like a small death, repeated daily. All the things she could re-create now, in dark moments of memory, were the things she needed least—her daughter, an infant unrecognizable; her father, his sharp face etched with the pain of early childhood death, the delicate skin of his cheek still swollen in the wind; the old dog, that much comforting presence, shivering in the rain. She lost the custody of her children and she lost the home in which they grew, in two guilt-driven acts of the court, and while she never uttered a single regret for one, she felt every day that her life might end in ruin due to the other.
A few ticking motifs from all her overheard and unknowingly learnt scores yielded a mixture of rhythms—the regular clack of the doorknob as she returned from work, the squeaking of the rubber kitchen mat beneath her foot, the towel fraying from use, the chirp of the microwave once it was set dead even, the patter of her cat’s paws in the kitchen; all form an interlocking counterpoint to her solo, prelude, and variations.
Climbing out of the trance, she found herself suddenly aware of the sound of rain. A downpour had begun, with that special rhythm of raindrops that they have only on the first day of winter. Standing at the kitchen window, from where she could see only the trees at the other side of her street, she wondered, not for the first time, where all the running rain wanted to go during a half hour downpour. She imagined the water to be going roughly once around the earth in sixty minutes cycles, taking with it the few days of hot summer behind, the wet dreary autumn, the hard frozen winter, and throwing it over the knives and blows of everyone she knew.
The last day of the year came with mist and the slow scent of eucalyptus overbrush. On the way to work, she thought she could hear the raw beating of a heart, both wrecking and buoyant. Looking out the bus window at the trees, already yellowed, their lines declaimed in a rather husky voice, she wondered about consciousness, about consciousness and the causes of it, and for a moment marveled that all of us had not succumbed under such a weight of weather, of wind, of desolation. She heard the voice again, old, precise, mournful, calling out. She heard the catastrophic section sounds of nature trials, rain striking hard against us, beating our bums and faces. Then it passed.
Inside the library she wondered at the exact reverberation of a voice in the circulator, around the coffee rooms and waiting places in the branch; this music fascinated her, in a wistful, idle way, a way that had nothing to do with pleasure. She pushed open the door and pulled different apples into piles, quite temperately, it seemed to her, but with a deliberate eccentricity of motion, thickly clinging to the apples as she pushed crates around the floor.
It was like returning to sea, at last, head swimming, after a crawl through dirt shallow like waist-high brackish spring water, lost. A current drew her under; she waited for the canal to submerge her suddenly in a seaworthiness that made her snort, that brought her cloud bells and laughter, that swelled her foam-far to heaven.
She would imagine herself sweltering somewhere between the two pools of December sun,◆ About the ending
❧ About the title