Residents can borrow books such as the sleep and sex manuals from the library, which has four rooms on as many floors, each furnished with dark wood furniture, several benches that are functional and unattractive as well as institutional, uncomfortable chairs, because the decor is meant to encourage seriousness, studiousness, or contemplation, though in one room there is a piano and two lutes; in the others, reference books like the sex manual, outdated, in the future to be replaced by newer ones whose information and definitions, which are just explanations and interpretations, will also turn outdated, and these ponderously line the shelves of the four rooms. I'm drawn to manuals and reference books, which sate my ravenous curiosity and often lead me away from what I should be doing, the way some others are, so with these residents I may trade citations at dinner, and I prefer to read these books like stories whose repetitive tellings shape the world. To he distracted from worry and hurt, or entertained, when I'm alone and the peace and blight of night eliminates what I like as well as what I don't like seeing during the day, I read in bed, keeping the pages of books free of stains, especially the old, borrowed ones, but some marks come anyway with time, like foxing, small brown stains, and wormholes, which are caused by worms, actual bookworms, that subsist on paper. Some damage appears almost miraculously, though I don't believe in miracles. I have known people who do, spiritual people, people who believe in God, along with their own and other peoples' goodness, and who depress me, like the Polish woman who gives me facials. She is religious and goes to church on Sundays with her girlfriends, or mother, possessing guilty secrets, sinful thoughts, about the glowering man who waited impatiently for her when I was there, hearing his restless movements just outside the dingy room in which I was being tended carefully, though I don't know what was on her mind as she steamed my pores. She will never tell me what is on her mind, and I don't want to know, since I don't want to listen to her when I am being attended to and cared for like a baby, just as I wouldn't tell her what I was thinking, observing an unwritten code that allows us to be at ease with each other in a regular, but intimate situation in her cramped place of work.
Each time I visit it, I wonder if her life will have changed significantly, and if she will ever be happy, because she never seems happy, though she has a lovely smile. She usually appears to be sullen, or even sad, or just reticent or expressionless, though she might simply be stupid and dull, the way I think one of the two young women is, dull, mostly, though days ago, I watched her lusterless eyes quicken, sparkle, when the tall balding man spoke to her, yet I didn't guess at their involvement then, just her desire, which had arced from her like a rainbow. He had arrived some weeks ago, the tall balding man, virile, though his posture was poor, and his comments were usually cryptic, I discovered and liked, and he stooped over still more to talk with her. My father stressed posture, and this man sagged, his head hung, he was slackjaw, and yet the young woman responded gaily, ignorant of how the world bore down on him, though demonstrably it burdened his lanky frame, since he couldn't keep himself upright. It is hard for me to look at people with terrible posture, since my father, who held to a high standard for Homo Erectus, impressed its importance on me and held his frame up, defying his depressions, and I can't much contemplate or converse long with a person whose shoulders slouch severely, whose skeleton is skewed, or whose head juts far forward, since misshapen and rounded shoulders look full of pain, which is unspoken, and could indicate rough, early treatment, insufficient care, or inadequate childhood exercise. Bad posture can also indicate an inner disturbance so fundamental it forms the basis of the skeleton, the curved and twisted bones declaring a person's initial and formative inability to meet the world, instead withdrawing from it, bending under the burden, and some retreat into their carapace, one they might want later to shed. The skin registers the inner world on the exterior, as the world external to it marks it as well. There is also the deleterious effect of badly designed chairs on a young, growing body.
I want to take apart an Eames chair, especially this morning, I believe I dreamed of it, I have taken apart other chairs, though none as beloved or significant, for about these chairs there is no disagreement, and I have split apart boxes, mattresses, TVs, and a corroded car that sat in a field, but I don't have an Eames chair here, just its memory as well as photographs of it and its designers, the Eameses, husband and wife. It's satisfying not to make things, to undo them, the way experiences can't be, since undoing is an activity like doing, or I think it is, and thinking is an activity like riding a horse without a horse, and it's especially pleasing to engage with and analyze the undone object, since after destroying something inert I can see its construction, even its larger design in my life. When I took apart a square box, I thought of the satisfaction I had learning geometry, the simplicity that resided in planes and angles, as well as of the geometric character of a family of four, how from each corner a mother, father, daughter, son must relate, each in and with a corner, and that any balance was necessarily of two and two, which was why my parents must have wanted another child, for balance, but they delayed too long, so when I arrived I unbalanced my brother's corner, he had lived in a triangle, which has its own balance, and then he fell from his pinnacle or place, never to forgive me or them. Taking apart a TV, I thought about impulses and connections, its delicately colored wires like nerve endings, and when the guts of the TV were scattered on my floor, life itself seemed disconnected. Invention is a human necessity, and lasting value has nothing to do with it, since everything is temporary. For a while now, I have found it hard to make things, when once I wanted to fabricate what I hadn't seen before-before trying that, though, I had to overcome a phobia to three-dimensional objects-and once I did, I could easily build them, but then I also overcame my need to build what wasn't there and wanted only to unbuild what was. Now I rarely want to do even this, except in thinking, where I test spatial relations and imagine space bounded and unbounded, and happily move non-things about in unreal places.
When I was first here, no chair gave me what I wanted, and I tried many, though ostensibly I just wanted a chair that could support my frame, so that I could forget about it, as I ruminated, awash in thoughts I wished I weren't having, or in some that I wanted to have, roaming into places where a chair and its design had no function, since I also wanted a chair to do more than it was designed for. The chair designer Harry Bertoia said, "The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living. The assumption is that somewhere, hidden, is a better way of doing things," and that's sensible, or in my life it is, because I'm looking for a chair that fits me and in which I can feel at home, since homeyness is easier to locate in things than in people, or even in animals, but I like cats, dogs, and chairs almost equally, though I have more control over chairs, which are inanimate, but any cat or dog is in some way pleasing, while most chairs aren't.
When he was first here, the tall balding man gave his attention to the Count as well as to the disconsolate or sad-eyed young woman, divining in her some pleasing quality or grace no one else did, except the other disconsolate woman. Early on I observed an acute scene between them, the man of no consequence to me or the woman, when he held her skinny, psoriatic hand to his face, brushed her palm against his sunken cheek, and then uttered some words I couldn't hear, but their thin-lipped exchange held some fascination. Thin lips are scant protection, a mere lining to the crater in the face, that worthy hole, but my lips are full, suggesting a lushness I don't believe I deliver, just as big breasts incriminate the female body with lusty abundance and comfort. My mother told me to be happy if nay breasts were small-and I'm rather flat on the chest, full in the face, tall for a woman, lean everywhere, something like an aging boy-because when I was old, like these women, my breasts wouldn't drop to my waist. I was four when I gazed rapt at a cluster of old women, their pendulous breasts touching their waists, while my mother and I sat on a bench in a Turkish bath near the ocean I loved in a beach club I also loved for a time.