Into the house quietly; it’s the way to come back home, tentatively, days after the last big scene, see if you can just sort of appear, probably no one will say anything. They never lock the kitchen door, and it’s strange to step into the house, after the freshness and immensity of the night, which is so unwearied and promising. The swamp-box cooler chills the room; the atmosphere of the house is turbulent and static at once, as if you could see the grief in the air, as if the whole place were blurry with the smear of somebody’s anger. The heavy pendulum of the clock swings out its assigned arc, sounds like its name: clock-swing, clock-swing. Quiet now, past the cabinets scrolled with their curlicues and flowers. Around the corner, down the hall, but they aren’t asleep, or she’s not. She’s talking, as if she’s been talking all night to him, to the wall, recounting her litany of grief, telling the beads of her sorrows, voice you’ve heard through the walls for years, sour voice seeping into the adobe walls like some oily pigment, this rag of a house soaking it in till its ready to combust. This time you hear her plain: “Son’s a homosexual and Sally’s a whore.” But you go on past their door, into your room, the lights are out, and you’re hoping you’re not visible at all, not even a shadow. You close your door as slowly as you can, so that the hinges will make no noise, and you can sleep now, in your own bed, and though she hasn’t stopped saying things you can’t make out now through the wall between you, you’re tired enough to sleep regardless.

I have a little shrine I brought home from San Francisco, an upright wooden box painted celestial blue, with a yellow horse floating on a field of stars. The wooden door slides open, so that the box becomes a little theater, revealing its interior. It used to hold three crude images of gods—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—but they didn’t speak to me, so I’ve replaced them with one perfect smooth river stone I found someplace, a token of—fixity, I think, serenity.

Which I reach for also with the Nepalese rope incense I burn in my room, with albums of the smoky and swirling music of the sitar, Ravi Shankar playing evening ragas, with the mantra that steadies and calms as it sinks down toward silence, like my stone thrown into a deep lake. Soothing, elemental vocabulary of the Maharishi: stone, water, lake.