Come Through

On one day in March, eight rooms were described. Not sketched ... described, in the present tense, the way a guide describes a building while standing inside it. The light in each one. What the air smelled like. Where a body would sit ... They were plans for a house on the internet. Eight pages, written out first as rooms, so that whoever built them would know what they were building toward. The house got built. Not this house ... What is left is the description. Eight rooms nobody can walk into, still carrying their furniture. And at the foot of each one, a short list of questions the writer meant to settle later and never did ... Come through. The porch Warm paper. Two chairs in a backyard, plantain trees, good light. Nobody explaining anything before there has been a chance to look around ... Every other room in the house was to be dark. This one alone was to be light — the front of the building glowing like paper while everything behind it went to low lamps. The question left standing here: whether the front of a dark house is allowed to be bright ... The corridor Not a room. A passage, with the doors open on both sides, so that what is in the other rooms can be seen while walking past them. Dark ground, and a light at intervals — one light for every month, each a different colour, because each month carried a different temperature ... Six months, end to end. Walked rather than read. The question left standing here: how much of the long version anyone actually needs ... The workshop Sawdust, dried autumn leaves, copper thread. The tools on the wall, all of them used. Earth and honey and frankincense ... The question here is the room asking what it is for. Tools, or the things the tools made. Nobody decided. The workshop was described down to its smell before anyone had settled whether it held the hammers or the furniture ... The five stations Quiet the way a workshop is quiet between shifts. A potter at the wheel, clay on the hands. A reader surrounded by books that lied. A cook at the stove, waiting for the middle of something. A pianist turned away from the piano, listening for what is not being played. And on a green bench outside a laundromat in Duluth, a woman holding a blue sock with orange stripes, waiting for whoever needs to cry about a son ... Nobody who comes in is told what to feel. Five kinds of knowing are set out, and the only question is which one is needed today. The question left standing in this room answered itself on the page. Someone in one of the scenes is never named, and the note asks whether the page should give the name. Then, in the same line, in brackets: yes, leave it. The practice does not explain ... The office with the harbour view Mediterranean light on clean water. A filing cabinet that does not open smoothly. The light is administrative. The horror is pristine. The paperwork is in order ... In the evidence tray, a green glass marble with a chip in it, lifted out of a jar that stood on a shelf above a kitchen sink. The question left standing here: whether the marble should appear on the page itself. A small green circle. Perhaps the colour of the whole room ... The ninety doors Ninety doors, and a pair of headphones on a hook beside each one. Behind every door, one life — a musician who does not exist, in a town that does, carrying one instrument into one kind of weather ... The question left standing here: whether to hang a map instead of doors. Every one of the ninety is rooted in a real place — a lake, an iron range, a river town, a street of murals facing the water. Touch the town and hear who lives there ... The chamber under the forest Fallen logs to sit on. The walls lit by fungus rather than by lamps, and the light answers the room — brightening when what happens on the stage is joyful, dimming when the weight arrives. Earth, decay, and something sweeter, like honey ... Ten puppets of dried leaves and translucent fabric and copper wire and living moss. Four hours. And afterward, in every city, real seeds put into real ground. The question left standing here is the one that should not be possible to ask. Whether a seed can be a design element ... The table Ten chairs, and a thousand doors behind them. On the table, ten things laid out the way evidence is laid out — not framed, not labelled. Brown paint. Copper plates. A toy gun with an orange tip. A blue sock. Reading light, steady, warm enough to stay in ... Nothing is explained. The object is handed over, and then the room stops. The question left standing here is the plainest of the eight, and the coldest. Five of the ten have their full text. The other five exist as one sentence each. The note asks whether the rest of them exist anywhere at all ... Eight rooms. Eight questions. One day in March. Nothing here was abandoned the way a building gets abandoned. No failure, no funding that fell through ... the house simply got built another way, and the drawings stayed where they were — furnished, lit, smelling of honey and frankincense, with the questions still standing in them ... And there is this. Whoever is reading has come in through a door in the house that did get built ...