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new. house. blue. time. july 23 2015 

by Ray Ogar (written to Oz)

the empty rooms ache to be filled. each potential living space advertising some moment in the near future when it will be occupied with common objects, personal history, the material layers of me. at the moment though, each near cubical of space merely exists in white on white on black-line-near-the-baseboards white: my eye resisting how shadow and crack draw wall to floor so precisely; a private horizon so compressed and tight it would only remain a small challenge to hide money, drawings or small graphite lines in its cleft.

my eyes grab that line and follow it to the corner of the room, the vertical horizon of wall/1 and wall/2, an intersection of planes not necessarily darker, but a revealing of how the same neutral color placed on two opposing planes actually become new colors based on where light originates. in this case out the window. here, two walls first white, now become one gray and another grayer. still, a vertical horizon between them. the line up and touching ceiling, glancing, merely scratching, because the line stitching the two walls does extend across the ceiling. and it shouldn't. no line should spray from that corner. no suggestion of something not-pure, white, flat, perfect, exact, new ceiling. yet a crack emanates, throws, runs from the nexus of ceiling, wall/1, and wall/2. why hadn't I noticed this before? why wasn't I made aware that this line of inquiry would present itself to me on move-in day?

the ceiling is low enough (that) I can scrape my hands across it being it resides in a species of building descended from a dense breed of mass brick housing originating from the early 20th century to supposedly corral temporary dock workers. developers of the new century never aware such a compressed living space would still exist and become so readily remaining and inhabitable. easier then to renew such buildings than to tear them away completely. explains why I was asked about my height when I first inquired about the residence. this memory does not stay my hands as they continue to scrape at the ceiling and the surface's own newly obvious tear. 

now obsessed with revealing the crack, I grab a stack of books from the box I brought with me on my first move-in trip. art and science books each an inch (or more) thick: books now my foundation and I can stand taller, my hand feeling palm to finger a warm pulsing from the ceiling surface and crack. pulsing. warm. I begin to peel the paint skin from the ceiling, away from the crack. away from the jag line. layer by layer. determined to find something, anything, beyond the overhead surface. the pulsing still present and I recall the thud and bang Aaron heard in the attic in the movie _Primer_. At first believed to be animals, later discovered to be a time-displaced duplicate of himself subdued by various gases which cause a coma-like sleep. The pulse. deeper. will I find a version of myself from some iterated future? some past decayed ghoul? from some day in which I didn't wake up early from nightmares about peeling baroque wallpaper from a moldy corner of the bathroom? or the day I woke early to take a trip to the used-bookstore downtown near the 45 degree angled concrete hills painted with scientifically accurate images of flora and fauna. angled to be viewed as precious only by those living in the nearby lofts looking down, images therefore not considered appropriate viewing for ages 18 to 25 year-olds when seen skewed from street level. into the bookstore, the smell of paper when it is torn, the particulars of mold by decade bred into each book. making my way to the 3rd floor which has more columns between book stacks, columns which make it easier to slip a book into my bag unseen by the black surveillance hemispheres which populate the building from floor 6 to floor -2. my favorite floor, floor 3, science, accuracy, specificity, no supposed skewing the perception of data. raw vision. actuality ... ... fingering more books, forefinger between pages, careful not to lick pages so no infection of mold on finger tip then to face or near tongue then sick for days. no. decide on 3 books from floor 3, all nearly as cheap as I am, but the thinnest book begs for me to hide it from purchase, merely for the thrill, merely because it is the most raw of data, a slim tract on the geologically ancient volcanoes of New Mexico. page after page of pure description of land and stratigraphy, where ground curls and shuffles into ditch and ravine, scuttled embrasures and folded dark rock all existing as pure introduction to spaces more suited to tears in the terrain from which molten orange, red, white and near blue rock spew. (memory collapses)

my hands along the ceiling, pulling the paint, almost like paper because the layers are so old and only painted so many years apart. the strata of the ceiling layers, me pushing back into time to some point before me, before (the) before. 2010, 2001, 1996, 1985, 1972, 1962, 1950, 1943. my finger brushes through the overhead layers and the pulse of the building quickens, warms, light begins to peer through. not that I am so deep that I see the beginning of time, not time molten and base, time white hot and nearly blue and bruised and waiting to pour in all directions at once reaching for some subset of infinity it will only ever reach as a function of universal heat death. the pulse. the ceiling, the light peering through. I reach further and break the last layer and blue-white foamy time falls around me. I collapse into the ceiling.