Professor Plum #6

I owe to this story a chance, a man, and his house. The chance being my encounter with a relative of Miguel Casares, himself long since dead; the home is a modest country house in Ramos Mejia. In my post-collegiate travels, I found myself in the South, seeking a new perspective on my life, or on life in general, or at the very least a slightly skewed take on reality. When this man first approached me, I did not expect from him such earth-shattering conversation, but I engaged him nonetheless.

He told me his story, no sadder than the others I have heard on this road, but singular in its intrigue. As a younger man, he lived through the deaths of his mother and his sisters – the former at birth, the latter as he slowly distanced himself from that date. His father, as can be the pathology of a wounded husband, laid the blame of his wife’s death on the youngest of his children. When Miguel was left with only his son following the tragic death of his last and eldest daughter (a story in itself, but for another time), he took to the life of a recluse within his own home.

Despite the blame his father placed on his son for his own misfortunes, the child cared for Miguel until his death. When his father refused to continue working, his son supported him. When the father refused to help around the house, his son did it all. When the father vowed to never again leave his room, his son brought food to his door.

Once Miguel took that oath, his son never saw or spoke to him again. He would dutifully leave meals at his door and return to the ground floor of the home. When he came to leave more food, emptied plates greeted him. He would take them down to be washed.

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It is not easy to live in this room. It is no easier to think of leaving. To reenter the world that took so much from me. Life is not easy.

I have been here for now some twenty one years. In the beginning, I passed my days with naught but my thoughts. The days passed but my grief remained constant. I began to read those books that stared at me from along the wall. They mocked me, telling of the worlds I would never see but that became real in my mind. Even after my eyesight began to fade, I remained in those worlds. In the land of Uqbar. In the Garden of Forking Paths.

This is not to somehow suggest that I was immobile. Though I never peered out from the windows that bathed the room in the harsh light of that other reality, I would sit sometimes in the rocking chair or move to the more comfortable seat in the corner next to the table with the small lamp which would cast light over my books in the evening.

When my vision began to lose focus after a year, I thought little of it. All it meant to me was that I had less time to spend with my books and more to spend with my thoughts. With that currency of time and thought, I mourned the deaths of my loved ones. I took them with me on my travels. My wife and my daughters and I would sit on beaches, climb mountains, be with each other.

If you asked me now to tell you the details of my room, I don’t think I would be able. First it was the patterns that blended in my mind. The carpet’s beautifully colored something-or-others became a vast sea of muted beige. The window shades came to look as solid as the wall. I think I remember a time when they were bunched together, creating valleys and peaks, creating a microcosm of the Andes, but I can no longer conceive it. The next things to disappear were the lines of the furniture. It would seem that the boundaries of ones living space would cut like glass through existence but this was no longer the case. The back of my chair no longer ended – it faded gradually to nothingness.

It was with these visions that I remembered the lay of my tiny piece of land when my vision finally faded to its present state. Though I still notice the difference between light and dark - for that bare perception is with me still - I can no longer see, even in my minds eye, the colors that once flooded my memories. My recollection is now little more than shades of grey in an approximation of how the room first appeared. As I sit down in this chair, I sit down in that space that remained solidly dark despite the viciously airbrushed lens of my mind’s eye. My legs hit the forward edge of the chair, but I cannot say for certain where… though it is undoubtedly somewhere in that area where the chair blends into space.

It has been twenty one years since the death of my eldest daughter. It has been twenty one years since I left this compartment.

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At first I didn’t believe his claim. It seemed too outlandish to be real and the man provided little information beyond his initial, incredulously received statement. Still, I could not help but be curious. Was this not the sort of thing that I sought on this trip? I walked with him back to his childhood home. When his father died two months ago, he knew only because the food he had left for him was not taken. After waiting for two days, he finally walked in…

The man still lived there, for sentiment and for what was contained within, but mainly for lack of a reason to leave. As during his Miguel’s life, he stayed only on the first floor, never walking up the stairs to the door at which he had left twenty two years of meals for his father. And now twice.

As we reached the top of the stars, my new friend cautioned me not to step beyond the threshold, and he opened the door…

In front of me was the room as it had been left by its occupant. The scent of death still lingered over the darkened room. A darkened room… but with its shades drawn open in daylight hours. A darkened room tinted only in shades of grey. A darkened, grey room with furniture that lacked pattern. With furniture that lacked definition.



The room, put simply, was exactly as it was lived in for some twenty years.