In a House on the Side of Route 89

TRACK ONE IS STUCK ON REPEAT

In a house on the side of Route 89. Track one is stuck on repeat.

His bottom teeth press evenly against the teeth on top. In his chest, he feels his heavy top teeth pushing through his bottom teeth. His rows of teeth connect. They have fundamental stability. The floor will tear from the ceiling, the walls will collapse yielding shadowy black, if his jaw yawns from his skull.

He keeps his mouth closed. He breaths through his nose. Breathes in. Air outside his head becomes the inside of his head. A whistling spirals. It vibrates inside him. Seeps into his brain. Vibrations fill the room. Vibrations hold the walls to the ceiling. Vibrations whistle inside him. Deep into his brain. The sound is aspirated and strange. The room has changed.

Carpet shapes two peaks. Not only carpet. Wood floor. Cement foundation. Dirt. Reaching from the planetary center into peaks. Two conical peaks nearly piercing the ceiling. Tiny mountains. Unannounced. Bewildering his timeline. Preexisting. A sticky grid of carpet at the apex of each peak. Fibrous decades stretched and torn.

He is sitting on the floor. And leaning his back against the wall. His body connects to the peaks to form the axis of the room.

The carpeted stalagmites stabbed uncomfortably into a crucible of normalcy. The peaks were between the floor and the ceiling, but there was no downward of or upward of the objects that rested on carpet. Instead a stronger tightness pushed everything into the middle. Around the sides of the two peaks lay several beer cans, two canvas bags, a coloring book and a cluster of unsharpened colored pencils, which had all stuck to the carpet as it rose out of the ground, much like bushes on a hillside. Chairs and tables tipped backward but didn't fall over. They stayed connected to the carpet in exactly all the places where they had been. A sock-foot dangled leisurely from a chair, pointing toward the side of the peak, at what had been the floor. The eleven people sitting in the chairs kept their eyes forward in their heads. In the conversations flowing between their heads, every letter reached away from the letter next to it, with the tops of the letters spreading apart and the bottoms closing together, so the words followed the curve of the room while the sentences stayed intact and unharmed.

The room was larger than it had been before, he was sure. Looking across to the opposite wall, he determined that if he were to get up and walk all the way over there it would take longer to reach than it would have a moment before. Then he realized that it was because the other side of the room had expanded out from the center. His side of the room had not changed at all. Everything between his wall and the opposite wall stretched and bulged according to its distance from him. The closest things, a book of matches and a pile of feisty paper clips, were still nearby, though slightly lengthened by the elongation of the room, extended a few inches beyond where they rightly belonged. The coffee stain on the corner of the corduroy couch, which had been at arm length the last time he looked, was two arm lengths away. The farthest wall was now farther from its original position than anything else in the room.

He was also sure that the expansion of the room had not interrupted the highway below the far window. The room had become larger on the inside than it was on the outside.

The next moment, his body autonomically exhaled, through his nose, his teeth and mouth shut tight, as tight as he could tighten the tops of teeth to the bottoms of others, though he didn't remember why he was clenching his teeth, only that it was important. He was again enveloped in an echoing whistle, this time in a lower register than when he had inhaled. As he exhaled, the carpet melted softly flat and taught, without a ripple or a hint of having stretched. The furniture that had been tilted backward now swung down to the ground as if hinged. Nothing shifted or spilled. Words didn't come more or less. No one seemed to notice that this had happened.

Again he breathed in, making the higher-pitched whistling sound, and again the ceiling called the floor into two perfect peaks. Again he exhaled, making the lower-pitched whistling sound, and again the room repaired itself. He tried not to breathe, to test the connection between the two nasal passages into his brain and the two peaks in the carpet. But he instantly forgot what he was trying not to do, reminded by the whistling sound he was trying not to make, and the peaks formed again, and he continued his interaction with the visible foreground in this way for a small eternity.

Why is it like this? He thought. Why is it like what? Said the marketing director, who was worth every dollar they were paying him. It's always been like that. The infrastructure is sound. Just don't move around.

New York, 2015

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