My Father's Room
There wasn't one really until the last, I recognize with a shock. He died in the last of a series of rooms my brother and I had shared before we each left a decade before, the one modern room in the house (for the modernists) carved from the attic joists by the Sears' subcontractors. There near the end of his life my father carved "windows" of his own in the staircase using a hammer to break through the sheetrock, smoothing the gashes with bandages of duct tape, forming it into jagged silver casements. The ragged holes had the shape of silent screams, like the hole in the wallboard of the Marathon, Ontario hotel room where Magdalena did not die. My father's death was successful– in my eulogy I said I thought he would have been proud of it– a fall into the light after a long night's heart ache. Before that room he shared the bedroom with the yellowed face of the General Electric clock and a desk in the corner which had been covered with clothes and photos and books for years. There had been a series of desks in the corners of rooms (one had oxblood wood legs with beadwork rills that looked like corrugated cardboard). None of his desks magically kept track of anything. I suppose his true room was the basement darkroom where for a few years he ruled in amber light, raising the images of the dead from hypo baths and silver salts. There was also a shortwave radio he used to inhabit like a room, listening to distant signals and lost codes. Image and codes: Prospero of sorts.
Obvious exits:
None