The Development surrounding, it’s motionless, noiseless, because all she can sense is herself: it seems no one’s at home or awake. Midnights until Fridays late (Edy’s hosted cousins tonight, relations so far removed as to constellate another spacetime, and even that neighborhood changing, not for the better), Adela would help wash the dishes, sponging away whatever’d been left behind after Edy’s quick rinse, the scraps that’d feed families, the detritus of rind and fat, grease and oil pooled only a gesture above an initial superficial scrub, at this hour Edy usually at the sink herself less working than waiting, like Hanna a maker of one meal a week, and insistent on washing up after it, at least a little, one squirt from the faucet’s long nose; maternal proofwork to herself more than to her kin, washing distracted and so poorly, leaving the salvaging to Adela, once she’d arrived upstairs from the exile of the meal, and before returning Underground for the night. She’s whispering, American lipstick and Slavic dentistry, Eatee, Eatee…throughout the house, seeking order, direction, the host that is mastery: her whispers to rise up the stairwell slat by slat up to the rooms upstairs-upstairs, to sound plank into rooms that uphold the walls, voice to grain away wood. Furniture, possessions, stuff. That that is owned has no right to respond. Only echo, reflecting echo — and even when ordered to respond, it cannot, because it’s not only owned, it’s dead. Adela shrugs, smiles caps, crowns, a mouth full of fools and princes, the cityscape of a world far away, vista of castle and church. Pleased to be alone, to preserve her hands, safeguard her manicure for the favor of night, it’ll be pleased, they always are: her hand strokes up and strokes down, then a milky moon appears above the valley of palm. To leave its dish with the others for the promise of tomorrow, though what’s not done tonight is undone forever, can’t blame. Even upon the Sabbath, Adela has to sign herself into the Register, with the pen left on its table, Alan’s spare fountain: one of two received as a wedding gift a life ago, it’s never been used to sign anything but her own name; then, makes her way down the other slotted stairs to her room, downstairs-down-stairs with her heels heeled off held in her hands she passes there on the walls the albums eviscerated, their remains now framed for inspection, portraits of family, immediate, ancestors, once her fellow countryfolk, never her fellow countryfolk, who knows what they’d have to say about it, their lips held tight, one black, one white, the rest of them predeceased gray. Koenigsburgs long passed on…their eyes compel, then concess and give depth, they aren’t just frames sunk into frames — they’re photographs themselves: each pupil the home of the portrait entire held within its gaze, and within the eyes of that portrait the photograph admitted again and yadda unto infinity and eternality, perhaps, at least the unphotographable. Timeless just means whatever’s no longer. We are not buried below the earth, we are buried atop our own dead. And then, to enter over the threshold.
On the door there is a house and in the house there is a name and as one passes through the door then past the house one must kiss there at the house, whose walls kiss the name — a mezuzah, Edy’d once explained, that this is done to remind people that houses are to be reverenced as homes, and that the very idea of owning or even renting a heaven on earth, itself mortgaged, is a miracle to be recognized upon every pass. As to pass through a doorway is to experience a revelation, especially when over this threshold lies your dead. Adela never kisses, though. As this isn’t her house or home as much as she is the house’s, like a wall when she’s left alone, when working more like a floor. Door shut, there have been no bodies found yet, only basement, paneled in cedar: outside lamplight eking through windows at earth, illuminating fingers of dust, then a pinball machine they’ve never plugged in, and a screen, embarrassingly huge, an entire wall, a world in and of itself. Another passage. Images live on this screen. Images like people, like gods, some appropriate, others not so. Discretion’s advised. Images to Show the Kids to Shut Them Up on a Rainy Day, images Never to be Screened by Anyone Else Save Edy & Alan on Penalty of Grounding, the ratings. Loss of Innocence, labeled. And if screened then alone amid the dead of night, with no one home and the doors and the windows locked and the alarm armed with you know the basement’s code, when that little light thing goes red. An image imagining itself. As for the code, it’s the same used by all these houses, all in secret. Numbers breathe no word or letters even. Eighteen, thirtysix, sums or permutations of the numerals of life.
