1900 Gibbon Street

Norbert was wont to blame the nosebleeds too on

his continuing discord with a neighbor in a parallel

world—in this house, the boundary between planes

thinned almost to transparency. Norbert’s first day

upon moving here had ended with his blacking out

in the bath, and since then, headaches, nausea, and

such ills had been making him into a regular invalid.

His chief duty, therefore, was to gauge the capacity

of the house for serving a malign will. He devoted

countless hours to scrutinizing the pastoral scenes

printed on the wallpaper in the sitting room, for he

had a recurring dream in which he discovered the

carpet strewn with offal from a recently butchered

elk. When he woke, the air smelled stale and gamy.

On account of the cold drafts that the repairmen

could never locate, he often became fevered, even

delirious. In the sitting room, he watched the light

from the setting sun through the glass front door

burn onto the wall a red portal. His physician had

diagnosed a case of nerves and prescribed strong

tranquilizers—yet what protection were dull wits?

Everything in this world corresponded to, or was

inhabited by, something from another—the door

had its shadow door; the sun had its shadow sun.

And what might seem a whimsical circuit through

this suburb, made by Mrs. Loden with her beagle

on their evening walk, was in reality the signature

of an alien intelligence laboring for some purpose.

Indeed, was Mrs. Loden human at all? Could it be

that she and the beast together were but an image

of a hungering nothing, vacuous and weightless as

its very concept? Norbert pulled his muffler tight.

How best was he to guard himself? Were he ever

to leave this house, his tribulations might cease—

or might he himself as easily vanish into oblivion?

Or wherever he went in this world, might he find

the same wallpapered room and the same chimera

of woman and dog making its paranormal patrol?

In a remote village of the Klondike, with a winter

sun that never rose and struck his garret window,

he would be no safer. Miners one after the other

disappeared into an unmapped, frozen wilderness.

He would stay where he happened to be, reading

Hegel’s unfolding of the history of all-consuming

Geist through its phenomenological moments of

body and mind, servitude and liberty. Something

existed so that nothing might also, and vice versa.

Between the something and the nothing lay their

mutual necessity, a force forever becoming aware.