Jack took an apartment
Jack took an apartment high in a house with a window onto a narrow alley facing a brick wall. What was the entire bustling world to a domain where only he existed. Only the rooms are painted up and made up in mute, inherited colors, if they were able to be judged in a more vast context of preceding rooms and of hopes. Other worlds appear in the fluorescent bulb he stares into, lost, wandering them in growing stretches of widening eyes and nearly choked pupils, trees the color of imagined sand, hills of dust, dark wood sag undersky like a faded bandage. The brick out the window seduces iridescent tongues pressed against the threshold of teeth. The barrier is too far to close him in completely but from no angle can he see the sky. He crouches at the baseboard. He draws a leathery, suntan drape. The rooms are his color, the color of him. The world is these colors. This is the world. He did not leave the apartment. Jack was always fully dressed. Without trousers a man is an animal. Without socks and laced shoes he is illiterate. In an undershirt he is a brute. With buttons undone words condense beyond his grasp. Without sweater a curtain is a curtain; asphalt is asphalt. With hat, with glasses, combed, worn, alert, the world is transcendent. The heat, the baking wind is best met with little skin. The apartment floor is obscure with keratose columns of books on the occult, particularly the displacement of consciousness. Someone had been lost here before. Ignoring those, the décor itself was a recollection, bring assorted of items that in combination alluded to the frustrations of an occupant, the alienation of the furnished room. Jack ignored the enigmatic volumes and lived with the furniture, occupying it delicately, with purpose, and with dedication to the lifestyle of modesty and simplicity it prefigured. Flaps of sunlight drape through the dust for long periods lingering into what the darkly silvered brick recalls of the night sky. He struggles to avoid characterizing his actions with words. That naming of his states is too many discrete hatches into the infinite recollections of other people. He sits in the chair with his feet outstretched. This was the unnamable. Right at its brightest the light plays as if through lace curtains, limp in an otherwise dark window, as if seen from without, the light passing the wrong direction. He developed a rhythm with its borrowed colors. He ate the same portions of the same food in the same spot with the same poses daily. He read the same texts from the same shelf and placed them back and did the same chores in the same temperature. It’s not late, especially for a night unconnected from the rest, from the day that follows it. Jack watches his notepad for movement, waiting for his hand, not the least bit weary, in loafers and a cardigan, only distracted by how exhausted he must look. The brick wall ranges in hue and sheen through time but without sky its index to the beyond is a jumble. Associations and complex recollections decay quickly. In the absence of inherited structure a mythic order is dusted in such fine sediment that its makeup or origins are lost in irrefutable purity. Within this hewn consciousness diffused to fill this given space are inexplicable compulsions in the form of poses and habits that aren’t valuable to a man alone, other than to partition time in degrees. In executing these rituals Jack exhibits the confidence and purpose he could have only found in isolation. His rote movements, the distant affect seem to tempt an initiate to happen upon them, accidentally entering the suite of rooms, each by each, darkening into lugubrious opacity, as if invoked by just such effectiveness of living. The longer he is isolated the stronger is his sense that he is capable of sorcery at some personal level. Who might disprove his miracles?