Entry #73
September 9, 2024 — 7:00 PM
I stayed late on the stairs, working the old paint out of the baluster twists. The heat gun loosened it to a skin, and the scraper lifted it in curled ribbons that fell warm against my wrist before they cooled into brittle chips. The work light bleached the hallway and made the dust look like slow weather drifting down. The smell was chemical over old wood and something that could have been damp cloth deep in the treads.
I’d set a rhythm—warm, scrape, brush, sand—enough repetition to quiet the other parts of the brain that want to make patterns out of the last few days. Lines in the stone, paper pulled from plaster, routes that don’t like corners. I’d rather count strokes and keep moving.
Halfway down the run, with my left shoulder to the hall, it came in close. A small exhale with shape to it, not a draft, not the big room sigh the house gives when the temperature drops. It was right at the notch of my left ear, close enough to stir the little hairs by the hinge of my jaw. There was a hitch in it, like the start of a laugh completed under the breath.
I turned so fast the scraper clicked skitter against the rail. The light swung. No one on the landing, no one on the risers below. The air took a second to catch up to the movement, and when it did it felt oddly cooler only on that side of my face, as if something had been there and wasn’t anymore. My first thought was ductwork backflow, so I checked the register at the foot of the stairs—closed, cold. The window at the landing—latched, no draft. I shut off the heat gun to listen. The house gave me its regular ledger: the refrigerator a few rooms away, a low hum somewhere in the walls, the tick of cooling paint. Nothing shaped. Nothing near.
I stood still long enough for my own breath to annoy me. The small muscles at the base of my scalp pulled tight on their own. I won’t write what I thought I heard in that sound. It was the contour of something personal, that’s all I’ll put down. I don’t want to add to it by fixing it with a word.
Back at the rail the scraper felt heavier. In the raw places where the paint gave way, there are old marks from other hands—small cuts, a scratched E worked into the underside curve, and what might be the start of a B or just the way the grain runs against the chisel. They’re faint, almost lost in the varnish below the paint. I’d noticed them before and filed them under incidental. Tonight they read as nearer.
I tried again to give it to mechanics. Maybe the work light’s fan eddies air along the wall and it hit a pocket, maybe the new sealant around the window found a leak and the pressure found me. It’s a comfortable shape, that kind of thinking. But this was within inches, warm first and then not, with a texture of intention I can’t sand down.
I kept going until the brush grew tacky with dust and the edges of the balusters blurred with the poor light. It’s different, having to decide if you move your own head out of the space something else just used. The house has always been large. Tonight it stepped inside the width where I live.
Proximity is a different kind of evidence.
— Thomas Hale