The Blue Room Paradox
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
In the left pocket of a navy peacoat hanging in a second-hand shop in Reykjavik, there is a glass marble with a storm inside it. No one has tried it on in three months. The price tag reads: 2.500 kr. The marble was placed there by a boy named Elís, who died in 1973. The coat arrived yesterday in a black plastic bag. The storm inside the marble has begun to rotate, slowly, as if remembering wind. The day Elís put the marble in the pocket of his coat, his father didn’t come home. He was at sea, somewhere between the Hornstrandir Peninsula and Greenland, where a great storm lifted his fishing boat into the sky and set it back down, empty, with the sea washing through it. They never found him. They only found the boat. It was just after breakfast. A Tuesday. His mother was gone, too, to the grocery. He took a glass marble from the jar on his desk and put it in the pocket of his coat. Then he went outside to the shed and came back with a hammer and a screwdriver and a can of paint. In his bedroom, he took everything down from the walls: the map of Iceland, a framed picture of a puffin, the poster of Jaws, which he’d seen in America and had sent home to himself. His father took him there, a summer ago. They had bought the poster in the lobby of the theater and his father mailed it, folded inside a letter. “Here’s the shark,” he’d written. “Don’t put it above your bed or it will eat you.” Elís put it above his bed. Now, he rolled it up and stuffed it into a bag. He set all his books into a box. Then, with the screwdriver, he unscrewed the door to his room and leaned it against the wall. He unscrewed the door to the closet, the switch plates, the mirror from the back of the door. Then he pushed everything that was left in the room into the center, and, working in a circle around the pile of things, he painted the walls a very deep blue. The paint fumes rose around him as he worked. They erased all other smells. It took two coats. The blue of the sea. The blue of a child’s eye. The blue of longing. The blue of night in midwinter. It’s the kind of blue that is always calling to you, drawing you in. No one can paint a wall just once. No one can make one circle around a room and be done with it. You have to go back to where you started. You have to follow that blue line around and around, with the paint dripping off your brush until you can’t tell if it’s making the wall bluer, or if you’re just mixing the blue that’s already there. You don’t stop until the can is empty. And then, when it’s over, you have to go, to leave that room forever. When he’d finished, Elís stood in the center of the room for a moment, breathing it all in. Then he walked out, and as he was walking away down the street he heard his mother come home. He imagined her standing there, looking into his room, blue now from floor to ceiling. He imagined her calling his name. But he didn’t turn back. A little boy who lives up the street from the second-hand shop walks in with his mother. While she talks to the cashier, he wanders off into the racks of coats. The storm in the marble is blowing now. The little boy feels it, like someone whispering. Like someone saying, I am gone. Where have you gone to? They took me. The little boy tries on the coat. In the pocket, he finds a marble, a storm inside it, churning. The little boy takes the marble out, looks at it. He can see himself in the glass. A woman’s voice calls to him. A small woman in a purple scarf standing by the cash register, waving. The little boy takes the coat off and puts it back on the rack. He puts the marble back in the pocket. The little boy and his mother walk home, through the snow. In his mind, the boy is painting the walls of his room a very deep blue. He is thinking of the storm inside the marble, of the boy who put it there. That boy was like him, small for his age. He knows this, somehow. They shared something, the two of them, something more than the storm. He knows what the boy who put it there was thinking about when he left. He knows he was thinking about the color blue, about the sea. He knows he was thinking about a place where the sea meets the land. Where the water meets the sky. How far you could see from a place like that. You could see everything. You could see the curvature of the Earth.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title