It is cold. Rainy. Overcast. The kind of gray day that makes a person want to run and hide. I think hard about a place I would rather be than here, far from home on a gloomy day. I am told money is no object. The possibilities it seem are endless, yet there its only one place that I can picture in my mind.
The deep, dimly lit basement of what would almost seem to be some sort of industrial center. The ceiling is high. The corner, dark; and in the center, or perhaps one corner, is a larger and ominous stove. By the stove there is a cot, though I think it would like it more comfortable that what you might imagine the standard cot to be. Nearby, a desk of some sort. Maybe an additional place to sit. The glow furnace; the only light that fills the room. It seems somehow comforting, like a large, concrete womb. I know it sounds dreary. As I think of it, I think of how odd that I can think of no other place to go on a day such as this.
The fire. The dominate, overwhelming smell is whatever is burning in the fire. The smell of concrete. A hard sort of smell, if so it could be described. Moisture in little corners of the room give almost the aroma of a cave. The cot itself, like old army fabric; that kind of scratchy, nylony substance that seems not to be a fabric at all. Some sort of canvas? Maybe. I don’t know, but the smell of it has its own, independent little personality. Oil maybe. Bits of oil in the room. I smell them. The desk even smells of it.
Laying on the cot, the surface of it is firm and secure. You know you are in it because it lays back on you. The heat of the fire on skin, I must occasionally flip side to side in order to keep one half of me from cooking. I go temporarily to the corner, feeling the heat recede, like immersion in water after baking in the hot day sun. The desk is an old one, rough to the touch. An occasional splinter can be gained by a careless brush across its surface. The cool, floor: damp only in the furthest corners of the room.
There is not much to see down here- not at first glance- and I think that’s part of the appeal. Of course the light from the stove, and its mysterious contents, is the major force in the realm of sight. Like a huge pot belly, its chimney rises to the high ceiling and on out into whatever I am missing in the world. I need not know what I miss though, because not a stitch of outside light may enter the chamber; if indeed there is any. As I lay on the old cot- green, of course, what else? - I stare into the darkness around the room. The desk shines back a little light.
Pop. Pop. Sizzle? Don't know if I’d quite call it a sizzle. There is life in the old stove. I listen. It sounds not so much like it is talking, but thinking very loudly. I hear its story, a rambling as old as time. Except for one drip, far removed from the last, and way off in the corner, it’s the silence that I hear. My ears turn also inward, following the strong example of the old rambling stove. My heart beat. Breathing. If I listen very closely, the sound of my blood. Is it my imagination?
The air; not stale, but definitely not so fresh in origin. It tastes like a cave, but not a cellar. The desk is stocked sparsely with little snacks, mostly sweet and salty in variety. As I live and breathe- and move, I must say- one side of the room tastes very different from another. The dipping corner, the source of all the noise, tastes like a root; the under half of some tired old tree.
It is hard to imagine this place as every having an occupant, yet shadows of an old mind seem to linger on the walls, seen only as they jump at the occasional flick of light from the stove. The old man wrote his book here. Weeks upon weeks he never left, convinced that the world was coming to an end. They said the old man was crazy, and sane is not what I would have called him, but here is where the old man lost his mind. It reads out in the script, between the lines, as first the comfort of the place enclosed him; then, the loneliness overcame him.
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