The Tenant

The tenant in the room of my skull is not a burden, but a revelation, but an aspiring birdwatcher in a plaid, body-scented shirt, and high pants, walking with a notched cherrywood cane toward the room’s only window. (The room’s only window is only a window from the outside-looking-in. From the inside-looking-out, it is a mirror.) (And if every story ever told is true, then someday the mirror will become a window. And the window will become a door. And then that door will open.)

The birdwatcher spends his days in one of many ways: Some days he’s trying to sidestep his unrelenting reflection and grab a glance outside. Some days he gives up, and wanders the walls. Some days he doesn’t try at all; he simply dreams. Some days he repeatedly heaves his brittle body against the glass—rebounds like a bird who sees no windowpane, only more and more sky. Some days he spends with his tired knees to the floor so long the carpet etches indents into him while he prays to be let past the glass for just five minutes, just five minutes.

Today is different from the endless flow of yesterdays before. The birdwatcher wakes to an anonymous pair of binoculars on the windowsill. He clambers over, cradles this gift in his trembling, liverspot-dotted grip. (His reflection holds an identical pair in his identical fists.) The binoculars lift. They press and rest upon the bridge of his nose. They clink against his bifocals. His eyes close. He leans in until the binoculars and the magnified lenses of their own mirror-image kiss.

He opens his eyes. His pupils widen. Images fly before his black-infinity vision:

Morning fog. Soundless outbursts, razorblades. Kites and hints and evidence. Hurry blurring through grey streets while some perfect, everslow song echoes down like a soundtrack—this melody unheard by the bodies in the scene until the film is done, and showing. Echoes down as if from cloudcastle halls, held above and behind blue sky and halfveil. From halls hosting the slow, slow, metaphoric chase toward collapse, the dreamwoman’s ballgown sweeping and undulating in halfspeed cliche—

The binoculars drop. The birdwatcher breathes. Lungs full of everything he sees.

He stumbles into the middle of the room, and lets his breath free. The images fall; a heap of them in four white walls. He studies the pile with a glazed, fragile gaze—and faints. His body is caught and cleaved by the sharp, glasslike shards of vision. They drain his colour. They drench themselves in stomach acid.

Time passes.

Blue sky becomes twilit.

The heap and him all seep into the carpet.

And if the stories are true, then the film plays on outside. Moon spotlights the night. Daybreak takes its place. The lilacs drink and wilt and drink again, someone out there caring somewhat for them. (Or perhaps it is the rain.) Some robins look in from their branches, their heads tilted, unsure.

Out farther, there are farmers markets. There are galleries with pointillism on canvas. There are houses on city streets that stay lit in the night; there is laughter and bonding by candlelight. There are bonfires, there are songs. There are bombs. There is lava. Castles fall.

And if the stories are true, there are long distance lovers who now lay not more than a pillow’s-length away and contemplate the moonlit face of their beloved in the night. One of their hands is nestled in the other’s hair. One of them makes a sound that is not quite more than the absence of a sound, but the other recognizes it, and rolls into it like medicine. Night passes one large second at a time.

In the morning, a truck will rumble by outside, and the lovers will wake in precisely the same moment. One will look over at their sun-laden other with no words on their lips but ‘precious,’ and a lifetime will fall from their lashes. They will close the small distance the night tucked between them. They will have to join the morning soon. But while they lay less than a pillow’s-length away, while one lover’s face is pressed like an animal’s to their beloved’s chest, the two will pray to stay another five minutes, another five minutes.

If the stories are true, then there was once a room with four white walls and a window that was only a window from the outside-looking-in. Sun and stars and sun and stars and sun and stars cartwheeled in turns through the atmosphere while a large heap of mulch in the middle of the room had nothing to do but fear and fear that time would pass so long the film would whip the whirring reel—

The doorway stayed a window.

The window forever remained a mirror.

And life stretched for the wide open ceiling, anyway.