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In my house of glass I sat waiting. It had taken years for me to arrive, but once there I had moments that seemed infinite. I had never been so aware of eternity, had never before peered into a single moment with such intensity. My thoughts became less haphazard and at times I felt I was a shell, my life a performance, which is what I had desired above all things back when I lived in Portland and ran my particular maze along with all the other trained mice.
I had acquired a predictable number of aches and pains, but it wasn't until I worked at the box factory that I began to occasionally experience a quite crippling pain in the region of my lower back, a pain that appeared and disappeared mysteriously and seemingly without provocation. I still refused to stop running, though, and I tried to keep it up in four-mile jogs up and down the road that spiraled around the mountain.
Of course, my house was not entirely made of glass. A famous architect had designed it to my specifications. One of my favorite pastimes was to sit around at night surrounded by candles and oil lamps. The house was illumined then: beautiful and strange. I had an aversion to electricity; I found it primitive in comparison with fire and, like many other inventions (automobiles, televisions and clocks, to name a few), I thought it suicidal.
But I had by no means lost touch with the world. There was a ski resort on top of the mountain and there was a small shopping mall built in the style of a faux chalet (very ugly) a mere five miles down the main road.
I was, however, secluded. My house was built a half-mile into the midst of otherwise impenetrable ancient ledges and forest thickets. When I felt too isolated I went up to the ski chalet to get my mail, sat in the little restaurant/bar and drink coffee while I opened the mail, and read the local paper. There were huge windows through which I could watch the clouds that hovered over the lower mountain range to the north as far as the eye could see.
My house had enormous shelves that I filled with gemstones, animal skulls, pine cones and other artifacts I'd brought with me or found in the forest. I had a large collection of books, and a few plants, but almost no furniture. I wanted it to be as open and unconfined as possible. There was a small wooden alcove where I kept a piano. When you live in a house of glass you sometimes need a sanctuary from its unyielding sense of exposure, your own manifested vulnerabilities.
It was rather a challenge to keep such a house clean. I was constantly washing the glass windows and walls. Sometimes in a fit of laziness I would just let the bird droppings, tree bark, smears of rain and branches, accumulate. The snow painted patterns and trails all over my house. During those periods of lethargy, watching the snow fall through the reflected candle flames, I felt my sense of order begin to deteriorate and the stunning flow of futility, the elusive randomness of the wilderness struck me as something dangerously near perfection.
The worst obstacle I faced was the pain that ranged from mild twinges to crippling spasms. Though it resulted from a traumatic childhood injury, what really caused it to become chronic was my factory job assembling boxes; it became a disability that mercifully ended my career as a Level 3 Box Assembler. There were humid days when I could barely crawl out of bed, the pain was so randomly debilitating. Other days I was fine and could easily run my self-proscribed course.
That's how I met Michel. He was a ski instructor at the resort and had placed an ad in the local paper advertising his services as a physical therapist and masseuse specializing in back injuries. I had refused to seek medical treatment beyond the required parameters of the disability claim, having embraced the theory that all diseases and pain originate from psychological trauma rather than physical cause. I felt that a psychological barrier had lodged itself so deeply in my spine that I was convinced no doctor could ever help me. By the time I took up residence in the glass house I no longer had any faith in doctors, any more, for example, than I believed technology would ever "liberate the masses."
Though I did not consciously admit it at the time, in retrospect I think that a degree of physical attraction to Michel played a large part in my conviction that he could help me. I knew who he was. I had seen him in the restaurant and had made discreet inquiries at the bar, by pretending to have an interest in ski lessons, so that I felt somewhat familiar with him before we actually met.
He knew of these inquiries, no doubt, which probably explains his lack of surprise when "the strange mountain woman," as I was often referred to, approached him in the restaurant one morning where he sat with his coffee and a plate of fried eggs. He actually seemed to take me seriously. It was then than it occurred to me that in all my previous observations of him, I had never seen him smile. Not that he was unfriendly or unpersonable, but that air of sobriety, that focus or detachment from the world around him -- the self-control which that implied -- appealed to me strongly. He seemed self-enclosed, private, even in his movements.
We briefly discussed the nature of my injury, without delving into the gory details, and Michel agreed to come to my house at six o-clock Thursday evening.
It had been so long since I had had an appointment of any kind, I was amazed at how swiftly I rejoined the temporal world of clocks and apprehension. My small clock had long since run down and stopped. As much as it had once amused me to allow it to halt and rest at its natural hour of cessation, so proportionally did it disturb me to reset the slender black lances, wind the gears back into their perpetual mechanical motion.
On the appointed day I built a blazing fire, bathed in my big claw-foot tub and dressed in a dark blue dress covered with yellow stars. I made a big pot of tea steeped with cinnamon and oranges and sat waiting, leafing through one of my favorite books, the writings of the composer Janacek, without retaining a word of what I read.
Michel arrived precisely at six on snowshoes, a huge pack on his back. I lit the oil lamps and poured the tea. It had already grown dark outside; it was a cloudy night with no moon or stars, and I wondered how he would find his way back to the road.
We drank our tea in silence. I felt at ease and he showed no sign of surprise or curiosity regarding my eccentric lifestyle or my unusual house.
Finally he set down his cup and matter-of-factly said, "Where should I set up the table?"
"In the alcove, I guess," I said, gesturing toward the dim little annex. I led him in and lit the candles that stood in front of two small mirrors. The room was very warm from the wood stove on the other side of the wall.
"You play?" he asked, nodding at the piano I'd dragged here from the city.
"Would you like me to play you something?" I offered, and he nodded, a faint smile flickering at the edges of his mouth.
I hadn't played for anyone in years. But I sat down and played a nocturne. Halfway through I glanced over at Michel, who was standing, eyes half-closed; his stature reflected great poise and grace.
I finished and gave him a questioning look. In the lamplight his face resembled that of a satyr. "Thank you, that was very pleasant," he said in his polite, reserved manner. "Shall we begin?"
He unstrapped the pack and drew out a hinged table and legs which he laid out on the floor. Then he emptied out a small cloth bag that contained nuts and bolts. In five minutes the table was assembled. He unrolled a thin mat which fitted over the top. "It will be necessary for you to undress," he said in the same grave tone.
I suddenly remembered watching him ski down the mountain once, and I remembered the speed of the snow, the timbre of the air, the gonging warmth of the sun that day. I took off my dress and draped it on top of the piano. Then I stretched out on the table and closed my eyes.
I heard the sound of a cap being unscrewed and a pungent aroma filled the room, a sharp woodsy scent reminiscent of late summer or early autumn. The scent of moss and burning leaves exploded in my mind as a panorama of images and recollections unfolded like a fan behind my eyes.
I quickly drifted into a hypnogogic state, when I felt Michel's hands smoothing warm oil onto my skin. My skin became warmer and warmer where he touched me, almost, but not quite to the point of burning and I fast approached the fragile line where pleasure almost (but not quite) crosses over into pain. Strong yet tender, there was a powerful sense of restraint in his probing fingers -- as if the hands themselves possessed a preliminary knowledge of the untold secret passages and histories buried in my body. I felt as if his hands and my body were beginning a long conversation or performing a duet independent of either of us. I felt incredibly drowsy, yet intensely aware of the soothing pressures and resistances enacted on my muscles. My mind began to drift, to float . . .
"Shall we go to the forest now?" he whispered from beyond the high stone wall covered with velvet moss and tenacious red vines.
"Yes," I whispered back.
"Can you see the stream?" the voice said and I thought to myself, what a strangely seductive voice; how intimate and trustworthy, and I wondered if actual words had even been spoken or if I was imagining things.
"Yes," I repeated, for I did see the stream, suddenly. I heard it as it gurgled over the rocks on the mountainside. It was late afternoon and heat shimmered in a tangled sky. Birds rustled in my russet hair and high among the pines distant mountains rose one after the other into the distance. At haunting intervals a mourning dove cooed from the brush.
Immense with stolidness, deep and dense, I stretched in all directions, electrically connected to the slithering worms and beetles, the froth of larva seeping from shiny encased shells. I was a weight, perpetually moving in dense textures of seething pattern, rhythmic myriad, a great hum.
Slowly, after days, or possibly weeks, a man appeared. He was dark and small, the size of a short bear. He wore clothing marked like an unimaginative species of Lepidoptera and a crude piping noise came from thick rubbery lips; in his hands, which were naked without hair or claw, he carried a blistering silver light. His clumsy steps crashed through the intricate forest floor.
When the first blow struck, every cell of my being sent forth a deafening howl throughout the forest and all my relatives reacted to the tremendous vibrations shooting out from me in ever widening concentric circles, like a whirlpool, triggering massive shock waves that traveled from the fibers of weeds that could not run to the fine silica of the microscopic animals. Birds rose into the air en masse. Each stroke delivered a thunder-loud crack, sending infinite scarlet vibrations hurling into the spectrum. Red waves lashed back and forth across the mountain slope and like an avalanche, an instantaneous migration of invisible organisms flew into motion as my internal connections to their interior universes were -- one by one, stroke by stroke -- severed, exposing me to an external view I was glimpsing for the very first time. If I had possessed eyes beyond the omniscient remnants of my sightless vision, I would have interpreted the event, I think, as the explosion of sight, an obfuscation of blindness into light, until I was finally enveloped in a brilliance beyond comfort, beyond shelter, beyond defense.
There wasn't a sense of death in the mortal sense, beyond the ideas of mortality I later transposed from my human self into the filtered observations of this dreamt self (just as the term "scarlet," for example, had no equivalent to my envisioned sensation); death was the human approximation of a remembered sensory reaction. The undistilled experience of the vision itself, as it occurred, was . . . untranslatable.
After I fell, in a smoldering atomic descent that split the world open, the woodcutter lay down his axe and walked up to the stream, whistling. For a second I even experienced the icy coldness of the water as he plunged his calloused hands into the singing turbulence. Then everything was still, vaporized within a dizzyingly sweet flood of the first traces of dusk emanating through the ancient wood, and I watched the woodcutter lie down in the brush, his head resting against the bleeding amputated trunk. His face wore an almost savage yet remarkably childlike expression as he slept.
At this point I returned to the room.
I suddenly knew -- recalled, rather -- that I had just experienced the most agonizing pain of my life in the injured area of my back. At the same time I was aware that what had startled me out of the vision was the abrupt cessation or absence of that pain. Deep within my body I felt a new lack of rigidity, a missing tension, the absence of an iron sense of control I had felt as far back as I could remember.
Michel was whistling softly, the song of the woodcutter.
That night I had a vivid dream. I dreamt that Michel and I were lovers, our bodies revolving in a weightless sky, adrift as two eagles or a constellation. Unable to tell where my body ended and his began, we fit together so perfectly, I felt my nerves dissolving into a lake of pure sensation -- intermingled eye and hair, tooth and brow, fingernail and nipple, ankle and wrist.
For the next few days I went about my business. During one of my runs I noticed wolf tracks in the snow, though wolves were not thought to inhabit that area. Things had changed, and I noticed many small details about the forest for the first time. I no longer felt the driving pressure that had caused me so much past anxiety, dogging me throughout the years. Everything was as easy as unrolling a ball of string. The pain had completely vanished.
I decided to go back to Portland for awhile. There were things I needed to do there before I returned to my seclusion. Of course, things have a way of growing more complicated, so I'm not sure exactly when I'll be able to return. Things are different now. I feel as if living in a house of glass may no longer be necessary. At first the lack of pain in my life was so acute that I almost missed it, so radical was my liberation; I had become used to the pain -- almost to the point of love.
On my last day on the mountain I went up to the chalet restaurant. I sat at one of the lacquered tables, ordered a coffee and sat watching the clouds. The strangling fear of punishment, the terrible need for sanctuary, had lifted.
I asked the bartender if he had seen Michel, but of course there was no ski instructor by that name. I started to think about my house of glass, the secluded ravine and the ancient quarry. Some might come to the conclusion that mine was an instantaneous cure, when in fact it took the best part of thirty-seven years to properly heal the gaping wound of my father's harm.
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