[ momentary
Momentary
Imagine a room with no ceiling. It looks as though the sky is pinching it together at the top and the lowest hanging clouds are adhesive swaths of air, earthly with longing. The room is clean, built like a fortress from the inside out with a place for everything that is there and a space for everything that is not. On the northern wall there is nothing but books and on the eastern side just one off-center painting that seems to change the way only people change, every time eyes pass over it. The western-most side catches a table into its side like a bullet and the south wall appears the way mosaics do; if a man stands far enough away, the fragments are names (places, but mostly people) or tastes (familiar, strange, wanted) or feelings (it was cold that day, it was cold and it looked like it was going to rain but it never did). A wardrobe opens to reveal a full length mirror, a set of drawers and an antiquated cupboard with a broken lock, the narrow oak doors pushed ajar by the volume of letters filed away inside. Here the floors are a dusty beechwood, offsetting the mahogany bookcase and hand-carved desk, quiet and sturdy and smooth underfoot.
Not all of the books have titles that make sense in any language - real or fiction, reduced then elevated to blurs just outside of a direct gaze. The shelf edges are lined with knickknacks: cufflinks with faces like tiny clocks, three dried violets gathered at the three-quarter point, a gold tie pin with the head of a lion, glass pebbles, a compass, a red loaded die, and a pocket watch that is perennially several hours off. The last of these rests on top of the bookcase, barely an inch between it and the sky that presses blue and sure and downward. At the right angle, a good eye can spot the flinch of gold given away by the sun - evidence that it is still there, out of reach and on an overcast day, invisible too.
Imagine a room and imagine a boy. His name is Arthur. This is his room. It is the only room he knows.
...
Inside the pocket watch exists the longest part of a year, the part where Arthur builds himself a new shape to better fit into - armored and sharp and unrelenting with reliability for one man, but it is not the man who owns the watch. That man lives and moves forward outside of the antiquated gears, slicks his way across continents like a rumor or a ghost or a memory. Arthur sometimes wonders if he is alive and checks just to be sure without him ever knowing. This is as close he allows himself to be where Henry Eames is concerned, a distanced clutch.
...
The memory of Henry telling him not to leave angry is opaque, solid as concrete and immovable as anything ever has been. Arthur remembers the abandoned office and the looks the other team members had sent them on their way out, looks Arthur had rebuffed with a practiced efficiency that made him seem older. He knows that he did leave, and he knows that Henry never asked again, that he never gave him the chance to, but sometimes the details mingle and reform until he cannot quite be sure what had made him angry in the first place. It was close to James' birthday, he recalls, and Dominick not being able to return home was sending Arthur instead. Apart from that, everything else dims, slips just out of his reach and he knows that he was the one who snapped, that he was the one who left and then let it end that way. Arthur tries to remember more finite aspects of how it happened, wishes to deconstruct the conflict and see his missteps with clarity and Henry's too, whichever there are of them. But he can't.
...
If he holds his hand up to grasp at the gold flicker in the sun, curved on the mahogany shelf, it winks out of sight again.
...
Sometimes the effort only makes him angry again, digs itself a place inside of his chest and strangles a quietness around his heart until everything is still and far away. He then tries to remember what was said instead of what he felt, and sometimes he thinks that he might have said, I can't do this. Yet when he arrives at that possibility, he fails to know what he meant at the time, if he meant one thing or everything, and if only one, then what that single thing is. He does remember that they were both angry eventually, that at some point their vision and tone and look reddened into a nebulous impasse. That must be when he left, he realizes one day, looking out the airplane window and ever reminding himself not to look over at Dominick on the other side of the aisle; they are not supposed to know each other; it is much easier to pretend at that than Arthur is comfortable with, but by now comfort is expendable and love is not very far behind. In a way, it is a sort of comfort that he has loved and he refuses to wonder at his own willingness to let it go. From the outside, it looks like the willingness of someone who suddenly realizes he might not be the kind of person who deserves it.
But love is hard to earn, harder to keep, hardest to understand. It must be the last one that continues sending him in circles, trying to remember and only ever half getting there.
...
One day, going over the logistics for a side-job in Denmark, Arthur remembers that Henry was wearing a blue button-down and how prominent his pulse seemed in the bare expanse of his throat when he was yelling, when Arthur yelled back, when they made things a mess and then instead of cleaning it up just left the mess on the floor, scattered and belonging to neither of them. It is true that Arthur put up the door, but it is also true that they both walked away from it; somehow, it does not make him feel any better. Covering his face with both hands only to lower his arms onto the table as if to rest his eyes, Arthur sees a room with no ceiling, his room, and looks up for the shock of gold but he cannot find it and when he opens his eyes, he notices the rain outside the hotel window.
...
Arms behind his head, on his back on the floor, he stares up at the sky, the periphery of the room a vague reality at the corners of his eyesight. Above him the bookshelf plunges into the air, a monolith of things that matter to him even when he falls short of calling them by name, of knowing them for what they really are anymore. He thinks, drawing a hand across his mouth as he yawns, he might be fearful - might have been fearful, and not knowing the feeling in the thrush of all the others, was flung all the further for it, the door shut all the harder, locked and stuffed with old shirts at the floor level so that no light could get in - keeping out what he had decided he could not have; looking backward would only make moving forward more difficult.
When he props himself on his elbows, staring down at the splay of his fingers on the light wood panels, his head begins to pound so he sits up and presses it to the support of his knees, eyes closing, feeling more adolescent than he ever felt when he was in fact an actual adolescent. He tries to identify something other than the anger, grasping his way through the dark until his hands settle on a sharp word, unchanging and distinct, cold under his palms; it was not always cold.
Blinking to let some of the sky back in, his vision is nothing but blue and he reels from it.
...
Some days he feels closer to understanding what happened, how he came to that point and how he left, but it is not until Dominick leaves for Mombasa that Arthur, straining beneath the surface, remembers how it felt apart from the anger and the nausea that always comes with an anger that is unwanted. He remembers how he knew with a sudden and complete clarity that he was choosing to be alone and he knew that he felt he had to, not that Henry was asking it of him but that Arthur himself knew no other way. There was a limit to his capacity and it was narrowed to one person and it was not Henry, so Arthur left. He knows that Henry wrapped his hand around his wrist, that he told him not to leave angry, that he told him to explain what was going on - that he could not read minds as convenient and terrible as that would be. Arthur remembers sighing and growing motionless and old, becoming a stranger to the hand and mouth and eyes and ears that knew him best. He became a single unforgiving angle with a spine thrust through the center at that precise moment, and finished building the rest later on. Henry let him go and Arthur closed the door and they didn't call.
There didn't seem to be a reason to, after that.
...
But Henry is coming here now, he thinks, standing in the center of his room, watching the sky go from blue to gold to midnight, a firmament alive with stars and the brightness of visible planets; it is the kind of sight Henry would appreciate and the thought alone leaves an electric pang across his tongue. It is a lot, he supposes, like missing someone.
...
Arthur's room does not actually exist except for in his dreams and these days it is the only place his dreams take him to. It might be more accurate to call it a dream, but the things he tries to do and say or think vary, so he calls them dreams and conducts himself with as much thoroughness in his own mind as though he was in someone else's, as though it might matter after all. He still cannot reach the top of the bookshelf, at this point, fails to even see the edge of the last shelf because the structure has risen so high into what must be clouds or very old stars, wreathed like raindrops and mist and he thinks that if he breathes too deeply, maybe one of them will slip inside.
His gaze locked upward, his hands are at work in the dream, attempting to shrug off the confines of pretending love does not exist except to ascertain whether or not the source is still living. This would all be simpler if Arthur knew what he wanted for himself, but that is something he has not known, not with any precision, for a very long while - what seems a lifetime, and that remains true now.
It is worth noting that, sitting cross-legged on the beechwood floor, for the first time in that same long while, he wishes he did know and he wonders in the quiet way of someone who is fighting invisible things, if Henry knows.
...
Imagine a room with no ceiling. It looks as though the sun is blotting out the blue of its foundation, all white gold rivulets that burst at the touch of an eye. The room is clean and built like a fortress from the inside out and everything is burning, fire meeting out every crevice, a fervent infection of daylight. Beneath him Arthur can feel the base of the bookshelf giving way, one of his hands curled around the twined rope of the ladder he has spent several dreams building, the other an impossible fist, the kind built to keep something in rather than other things out. Everything tilts and the flames tease against his shoulderblades but he is not afraid.
The fire is not the point of things here and he continues to hang on to the rope ladder - neither moving up nor down, curling his arm in to hook his hold, uncurling the fist until gold falls out of it into the palm of the other. It is only a dream but it is Arthur's dream, the only dream he has had in almost two years, a dream where he knows what he knows when he is awake - that Henry is alive and in Mombasa or Florence or Madrid or Beijing, that Henry was born on the sixteenth of April in 1967, that Henry dislikes Quebec and once loved Paris the way Arthur once loved Paris, that Henry can no longer be shut out. Arthur does not doubt for a second whether Henry will take the job or not; he knows him even when he pretends not to. When the rope snaps from above he stuffs the watch into his breast pocket and feels the dream crush him awake again, the smell of smoke and fire and history flooding him out.
Imagine a room that is not a room any longer, just cinders and ash, a few dangling embers.
This was Arthur's room, the one he leaves behind, the only room he has ever considered his own in all his life - four walls, no ceiling, and all of the words he has never said, all of the words he has never known how to say.
...
Later, on the second layer, Henry's wrist a warm weight he never could forget in the circle of his own grasp, he comes close to saying one of them, but there is not any time for what it might have been, so when Henry tells him to be back before the kick, he simply tells him go to sleep, Mr. Eames. It isn't nearly enough but it is more than they have had in a long time.
With his head inclined, standing sentinel amongst the dormant bodies, he finds himself wondering if it counts.