Rachel and I sit at a folding table in the living room, in a space we’ve carved out among the flood of boxes spouting up from the basement. I shuffle my attention between five different online databases and a book that sags off the edge of the table, typing a few meticulous words at a time into my laptop. Skid Row, Cabrini Green, 19th century tenement houses, displaced people everywhere, living in tents, caught up in gang violence, sleeping on the roof because it’s too hot inside and there’s no window.
Aunt Tweet shuffles past, the plastic soles of her shoes dragging on the hardwood floor. Shuffle-clunk-shuffle-clunk-SHUFFLE-CLUNK-SHUFFLE-CLUNK-shuffle-clunk-shuffle…
She rounds the corner into the hallway. The pitch lowers as she reaches the kitchen linoleum, pauses when she hits the countertop peninsula and turns, becomes higher and louder as she passes over the wood floor again on the other side of the staircase. Softer over the rug by the front door. Then past our table again.
Rachel’s eyes look as if they might burn holes through her laptop along with the next three things behind it, but they’re so thickly glazed over that they’re more likely to sponataneously combust and then smolder, deprived of oxygen. Still, I am the very next thing behind her laptop, and it wouldn’t hurt to take some preventative measures.
“Would you like to go for a walk, Aunt Tweet?”
The sun is bright and the springtime air is thick and warm, but Aunt Tweet insists on wearing her heaviest winter coat, which I pull over her shoulders and zip up to her chin. On her way out the kitchen door, she clutches the railing tightly and pauses at each of the three stairs, dipping her foot cautiously as if to stir the surface of a cold pool. To keep pace with her on our way up the driveway, I take half-steps with long pauses between. Her back hunched, her flat face stretching forward from the blue-tinged folds of her neck, her whole body lurching with each step, she looks like a turtle crawling along the edge of the road. I bob along beside her, a water bird with gangling legs, twitching its wings impatiently. Aunt Tweet stops as a car passes by, very slowly on the other side of the street, and stares straight ahead, her eyes wide. “We don’t have to stop,” I point out. “They can see us.” Never mind that we’re as much in the way when we’ve stopped as when we’re barely moving.
“I like to feel safe,” she replies.
After several minutes, we round a bend in the road.
“What is that light?”
It’s hard to tell what she’s looking at; she turns her body slightly but still holds her head stiffly in front of her chest, and her arms dangle at her sides. It’s silver, she says, above the trees. I scan the horizon and notice a radio tower, poking up from the woods far away, its thin spire glinting in the sun. As we continue walking, the trees block it again from our view.
“It disappeared.”
“No,” I say forcefully, “We just can’t see it anymore.”
“Where did it go?”
I don’t know how to explain to her that a one-hundred-foot tall steel structure weighing several tons cannot vaporize into thin air, and my inability to explain why I’m obviously right irritates me immensely. All the way home, she continues to blather: “What is it for? Will it come back, do you think?”. I ruffle my feathers haughtily, not noticing that a particularly bright pink one is sticking up on the back of my neck.
At dinner (“What kind of fish is this?” she asks as she takes a bit of chicken), she relates her exciting observation to my parents, who nod along patiently. I finish eating as quickly as possible and dive head first into the basement, slopping green water around the top of the stairs, pushing aside slimy reeds and groping toward a rickety French easel that sits crookedly on top of the sand, looking bare and out of place among the algea-covered wreckage.
I survey my half-finished painting, a set of stairs with no support, floating and twisting on their way to a half-open door. A row of columns waver up toward a hazy suggestion of a ceiling. Bright swaths of purple and orange hang in amorphous blobs, screaming into a void. I squeeze a giant gob of white and a smear of ultramarine onto my palette and mix them into a pale, pasty blue. I paint around and over the stairs that float beneath the doorway, so only the edges are still visible. If I were to step on one, my foot would sink straight through.