Circus of the Grand Design
“Great then, we’re all squared away.” Are No picked up his suitcase and opened the door. “Enjoy your stay. After my inspection we’ll talk about return of your deposit.”
Lewis remained in the doorway, listening to the thump of Are No’s trunk shutting and the rumble of his sports car engine. The car backed down the driveway, and Lewis moved to the front room, looking out one of the small, round windows that bracketed the fireplace until the lights of Are No’s car faded from view.
Fires
Sometimes, Lewis wished he was more like his older sisters, one a medical doctor like their parents, the other a biochemist for a pharmaceutical company. Their lives had stability, predictability, and income. He had always been able to find work when he moved to a new city, but never for much money. School had never interested him, and being like his sisters would have required an early commitment to academics. The sisters, they thought him feckless—one of them, he couldn’t remember which, had once used that word to describe his life. Feckless and peripatetic. Aside from the amorphous bond of having grown up together, they had little to keep them close.
Perhaps while he was here, at Are No’s Fabulous Beach Resort, he would write to them, something he usually did at least once a year.
Deciding to go down to the water before bed, Lewis rummaged through Are No’s kitchen drawers and cabinets (noting assorted serving utensils, corkscrew with a fish-shaped handle, empty box of candles, plastic dishes painted with scenes of purple fish and orange kelp) until he found a flashlight.
The truncated road, where it met the shoreline, reminded him of an amputated leg. Looking out across the dark water, an inlet of a larger bay to the northeast, he wondered what had happened to the rest of the road. He remembered dreams of highways entering the water and continuing past submerged homes, graveyards, churches. His father had told him stories of burial mounds flooded when the government built the dam in the hills near their old family homestead. Lewis’s grandmother’s house likely still stood somewhere below the surface of Clearwater Lake. Catfish nosed through the rosebushes and up the stairs. His father’s younger brother, who had died as an infant, was buried behind the house, now 200 feet below the surface.
Pale gray mist drifted on the surface of the bay. Mist flowed from his mouth when he exhaled. “Here we are. Here we are,” he kept saying, as if the words lent some affirmation to his surroundings, and the cold air he took into his lungs reinforced his sense of being adrift in an unknown and unknowable land of severed roads and mist.
The wind picked up, chill penetrating his clothes and inadequate coat. Rain had turned to ice, which made a slithery sound falling among the ragged grass.
He returned to the porch, where the thermometer hanging from a beam showed twenty degrees, and despite Are No’s claim of expertise, the fire had died. The still air in the room chilled him more than the wind outside had. Leaving the door open, Lewis made several trips to the woodpile, stacking logs beside the fireplace until he thought he had enough to last the night. Only a few pieces remained on the porch. Tomorrow he would need to find more.
Still wearing his coat, he squatted on the cold Plexiglas surface of the collage to rebuild the fire. From this position, he could see that each photo showed a different view of sea and sky, not the same two photos duplicated. At the bottom a label said: PROJECT POSEIDON.
The flames took hold again, and he went up the stairs to the bedroom, each step of ascent bringing him deeper into a hungry maw of ice, lying in wait, splayed across Are No’s second floor… the two rooms repulsed him, a tactile force of cold his body could not penetrate. He wouldn’t sleep up there, but the mattress on Are No’s brass bed would be impossible to move. In the studio though… a futon couch. He dragged the thin futon mattress down the stairs, then returned for a down comforter and flannel sheets he had found in the bedroom closet (though Are No had instructed him to bring his own bedding).
Thinking it would be nice to sit up in bed, before the fire, and write in his journal, he pulled the notebook from his bag and looked around for the light switches.
“I don’t believe this crap,” he said.
Every light in the house was already turned on, but aside from a lamp on Are No’s desk and an overhead in the kitchen, they were all low-wattage bulbs and fixtures, mounted under the artwork and pointing up at it.
