THE PROJECT

Maybe it was with a strange kind of reverence—of the monk toward his god—that I decided on my quest to stake out and occupy each province of my household. My duty was to seek out each spot in the house, to locate the ones that I hadn’t made fully mine, and to go to those places and spend enough time in them to know them completely. This was how I came to be found under the desk one night by Jenny, who upon noticing me there gave a startled yelp (she was sitting down to write another letter to a councilman about the property tax situation, which is beyond all control—her words—and must be changed because our property is assessed for much more than its actual value. We pay more than our due, she says; it’s a theme with her). She found me under the desk when her toes touched my foot. I was all the way to the back of the desk, as far back as I could get, hunched up, examining mostly the carpet—a yellow shag—and the flanks of the desk’s legs, around which paper clips and pencils had collected back there along with dust balls and insect frass, or what I construed to be insect frass, although I had no way of authenticating it because I am no expert. Jenny did not know about my project. She believed I was searching for a piece of paper that had slipped back there, as papers are prone to do, or plugging in a computer cable, or just looking for termite damage. There were small piles of sawdust everywhere, and this gave me a pretext on which to begin my adventure—it shielded me for a few months, until it became evident to Jenny that I was one hundred percent committed to the project. Until then I was able to commit myself to each spot. I selected them in the morning over a cup of orange juice. I listed them on the yellow pad, which I kept locked in the strongbox under the bed upstairs (we were sleeping in separate rooms at that time, not simply in single beds, as in old television episodes, but separate rooms allowing us each our own peculiarities and quirks, going through the door between the rooms when we felt like copulating, which was about twice a week). The list was never finished, but I began it knowing that the project would be one that grew upon itself—the exact biological phrase eludes me now—and the next spot, the intake vent for the furnace in Dodge’s room: a large metal grille with a brown enamel finish, was one that required me to lie down, face against the grille, for a good twenty minutes to get the particularities of that vantage down specifically, which I did. It was, I might add, more compelling than the spot under the desk (although here I must add that there were many other spots in and around the desk that needed careful checking); consolidated on the inner inside edge of the box pipe, at the point where the duct made a right angle into a rectangle of pure darkness, the lint and dust and carpet fibers and dead skin of the house had collected into a ridge at which I stared for ten minutes to get down all of its qualities; there were bits of toys, too dust-covered to afford an exact ID, but I could make out that they were action figures of the small variety, like the mummified Pompeiians.