The Addition (u)

Another story in progress, abandoned until the semester ends. Purgatory. Etc.

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They started building the addition in February, while the ground was still firm and frozen. A rudimentary draft, pastelled with beige and salmon and crude unscaled evergreens, hangs on the empty wall where the new wing will one day fuse with the sluggish aseptic halls of the Nine Lakes Retirement Community. The draft is there to give residents who happen to find themselves at the farthest end of the eastern corner of the building a glimpse of the new facilities that are materializing just out of sight. It also disguises the window, which previously framed a stretch of biscuit colored cornfields, but since the foundation was laid has been boarded over to abet the construction of a new hallway. Hallways, they decided, are more valuable than corn.

Gustav Moser will tell you that he was the first resident to discover that the window had gone missing. It happened one morning, his discovery, between the small hours of four and five. Gustav had risen before the dawn to ferret through the pantries of the communal kitchen, a practice he habituated for several reasons. The tradition afforded him the greatest selection of fruits and breads, yet undisturbed by the palsied, overly discerning hands of the other residents. If he did not make this trip, choosing instead to shepherd himself with the masses, Gustav’s taste for these victuals would fail. In their morning inspection the residents would paw the food. They would crumble the breads and grope and mangle the fruits with their brutish fingers and selfish minds. The grapes often suffered the worst of it, their fine skins punctured and strewn from the headless vine. By any other regard, Gustav held his neighbors in equal esteem to himself, but their coarse behavior around fresh produce was something he could not tolerate. Grapes were, after all, Gustav’s favorite.
More importantly he enjoyed the utter emptiness of the building in the predawn. The quiet and the secrecy of his daily pantry raids made Gustav feel as a child. They reminded him of the deviousness of youth. In the fifth hour the halls were broader and the white walls seemed to soften and dissolve into a comfortable distance. Gustav floated through them. Only the occasional false step, from which he steadied himself with an outstretched hand, reminded him that they were still there; that they were still cold and arresting. When Gustav made the trek from his room to the kitchen, his slippers would shuffle across the thick latticed carpet, voicing a quiet shhhhf with each step. It was a pleasing sound. One that, during the day, could not be heard over the prying small talk and questions of the nursing staff. He made every attempt to avoid the nursing staff.

On the morning that the window disappeared, Gustav had gone about his ritual of harvesting the ripest fruit, as he would have on any other day. It was on his return from the kitchen, down to the far end of the eastern hallway that he made the discovery. Cast-iron posture inclined Gustav’s head towards the ground, but when he turned to open his door the emptiness of the concealed window became cornered in his presbyopic eyes. The soft light of winter was gone.
He approached the new wall with guarded procession, a stout woody sprig of black grapes overhanging the cup of his left hand. When he came near enough to recognize the rectangle of patchwork was a painting, Gustav stopped.
The building in the painting looked familiar. There was a lifeless permanence to it; the impassive brick walls and the off-white louvers, all thrown open to unlidded windows; the blue firs and the chlorined water features, untouched by the air; the brackish sky. Gustav adjusted himself to the left and then to the right. Each new angle revealed the same image. Gone were the fair things once framed here; the cornfields and the heavens, where stars had once shone. What advanced upon him now was a portrait of staunch architecture. He had seen this before.
Behind him a door opened, and a phlegmatic clearing of the throat came down upon the quiet of the hallway. Gustav paid this no mind.
"Morning, Gus."
The airbrushed grass. The hooded entrance.
"Moonlight getting to you too. I tell you, it creeps up in my joints. Legs are stiffer’n hell."
This painting was not art. It was too controlled. The structure, too rigidly designed to arise from the souls of men. Behind this crude sketch lingered a greater utility.
"Course I can’t say that’s what got me up. Might well have laid’n there all day if I didn’t need to use the commode."
"Mmm."
"But that’s how it is, you know. If you need to do something, then you need to do it. Lord knows I’m not one to abstain."
It was a draft, Gustav decided. A fanciful blueprint for those who wouldn’t understand the dimensions and complications of this building any other way.
"Thought I heard someone walk by my door, so I figured I’d come’n see who was out."
But a draft to what?
"You okay, Gus?"
He did not turn around, but balled and unballed his right hand rather absentmindedly.
"Well, say, I didn’t even notice. That a new painting?"
"Hmm?"
The canvas glared back at him, if it was in fact a canvas. The opacity of its many windows, like cataracted eyes, hiding behind their thin depth an unmeasurable wealth of detail.

Etc.