In a House on the Side of Route 89

TRACK ONE IS ON REPEAT

His row of bottom teeth pressed evenly against the row on top. He could feel the top row through the bottom row. The two met connected with mutually fundamental stability, as if the floor of the room where he was sitting would tear itself away from the ceiling, the walls would collapse and yield shadowy black in the middle, if he allowed his bottom jaw to fall away from his skull.

So he kept his mouth closed and breathed through his nose. Breathed in. As the air from outside his head became the inside of his head, a whistling sound spiraled around him, vibrating his insides and seeping into his brain. The vibrating filled the room. It held the walls to the ceiling. Then something happened. The sound became aspirated and strange. The room around him was changed.

The center of the carpeted floor pierced upward into two conical peaks, like tiny mountains with points that came nearly to the ceiling. Though they sprung unannounced and bewildered his timeline, he now clearly saw two peaks appearing preexisting. At the top of each peak, the carpet was thin and strained, and at the very apex the sticky grid of glue and fibrous decades was stretched so acutely that it was torn. He sat on the floor, leaning his back against the wall, and if someone had drawn a line between his body and the first peak and the second peak, it would have made a perfectly straight line precisely down the middle of the room. It was clear that not only the carpet but the entire wood floor and possibly the cement foundation and even the dirt beneath the house had risen from the core of the earth to form these two peaks reaching toward the ceiling.

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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