December

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 21: December

December came the way December always comes to Oregon, not as a single arrival but as a deepening, the deepening of the gray that had begun in October and that had thickened through November and that was now, in the first days of December, complete, the gray total, the gray the sky's permanent condition, the gray that Portlanders accepted the way they accepted rain and traffic and the particular civic melancholy that settled on the city when the daylight contracted to eight hours and forty-three minutes and the sun, when it appeared, appeared low, appeared reluctant, appeared to be visiting rather than residing, the sun a guest in December, the sun arriving late and leaving early and never fully committing to the day, and the not-committing was the quality of December light in Portland, the tentative quality, the light offering itself and then withdrawing, the light saying: I am here but I will not stay, I am present but I am leaving, and the leaving was the December.

Miriam drove between two buildings. She drove between Evergreen House in Portland, where her mother lay in Room 6 beneath the nine-foot-six ceiling and beside the east-facing window, and Orchard House in Bend, where James and his crew were closing in the building, the framing complete, the sheathing applied, the roof structure in place, the building no longer a skeleton of studs and headers but a body, an enclosed body, a body with skin, the sheathing and the housewrap and the exterior cladding forming the building's exterior surface, the surface that separated the inside from the outside, the air from the weather, the controlled from the uncontrolled, and the separation was nearly complete, and the building was nearly a building, was nearly the thing it had been designed to be.

She drove between the two buildings and the driving was the corridor between them, the three-hour-and-twelve-minute corridor that connected the room where her mother was dying to the rooms where other people's mothers and fathers and spouses and children would die, the corridor that was Highway 26 over the Cascades at Government Camp and through the Warm Springs Reservation and down into the high desert of central Oregon, the corridor that was the longest corridor in her practice, longer than the twelve-foot corridors she designed in her buildings, longer than any passage she had ever drawn on trace paper, and the corridor was not enclosed, was not heated to seventy-two degrees, was not lit by amber LEDs or lined with art at forty-two inches, the corridor was the road, was the highway, was the distance between the personal and the professional, between the daughter and the architect, between Room 6 and Rooms 1 through 16.

In Portland, Lin was declining. The decline that had begun in September, that had accelerated through October and November, was now, in December, entering the phase that Nurse Thea described as transitional, the phase between the active dying and the final dying, the phase in which the body's systems began their sequential withdrawal from function, each system stepping back in an order that was roughly predictable but specifically unpredictable, the general trajectory known -- the appetite goes first, then the mobility, then the wakefulness, then the speech, then the breathing -- but the specific timing unknown, the when of each withdrawal a mystery that the body kept and the medicine could not extract, and the mystery was the dying's privacy, the dying's final assertion of autonomy, the body saying: I will do this in my own time, in my own order, and the time and the order are mine, not the doctor's, not the nurse's, not the daughter's, not the architect's, mine.

Lin's appetite had gone. The mug of tomato soup that she had held in November, that she had breathed and sipped and found the basil right, was no longer part of her day. The kitchen still sent trays to Room 6, because the protocol required it, because the offering of food was the building's daily statement that the patient was still a person who ate, still a person who was sustained, but Lin did not eat, could not eat, the body refusing the food the way a building refuses a load that exceeds its capacity, the body's capacity for intake diminished to the point where the intake itself was a burden, and the body was shedding burdens, was reducing its load, was simplifying itself the way a structure simplifies under duress, shedding the non-essential, retaining only the structural, only the load-bearing, only the minimum required to stand, and the minimum was less each day.

Her mobility had narrowed. In October she had walked the corridor with Thea, had walked slowly, carefully, the cork absorbing her footsteps, the corridor holding her passage, the art at forty-two inches visible at her walking height, the walk a daily practice, a daily assertion that she was still a person who moved through space, who occupied corridors, who passed through doorways, who traveled from the room to the common area and back. In November the walks had shortened, had contracted from the full corridor to half the corridor to the distance from the bed to the bathroom, twelve feet, the same twelve feet from the door to the bedside chair, the distance shrinking the way a map shrinks when the territory contracts, the world becoming smaller, the world becoming Room 6, the room becoming the world. Now, in December, Lin did not walk. She was in the bed. The bed was the world. The bed was the room within the room, the smallest room, the room defined not by walls but by the edges of the mattress, the room whose ceiling was the nine-foot-six ceiling that Miriam had designed, the room whose window was the east-facing window through which the December light entered, tentative, reluctant, the light of the shortest days.

David came every day. He came with the book. He was reading The Pillow Book now, the Sei Shonagon that Lin had requested, the book of lists, the book that catalogued the world in categories of the author's invention -- hateful things, elegant things, things that make the heart beat faster -- and David read the lists to Lin and Lin listened with her eyes closed and sometimes she said yes and sometimes she said no and sometimes she said nothing, the saying and the not-saying both forms of the listening, both forms of the receiving.

David's hands still shook. The shaking had not abated, had not diminished with the weeks, had become the new condition of his hands, the permanent tremor, the tremor that Lin had named and explained -- structures shake, the shaking and the holding are not opposed -- and the naming had not stopped the shaking but had given the shaking a place, had catalogued it, had assigned it a call number in the system of their marriage, and the call number was somewhere in the 620s, the engineering numbers, the numbers that held David's profession, and the shaking was an engineering problem, a structural problem, the problem of a structure carrying a load that exceeded its design capacity, and the structure was David, and the load was the dying, and the dying was Lin's.

In Bend, Orchard House was becoming a building. The framing was complete. The mechanical systems were being installed -- the ductwork threading through the ceiling cavities like arteries through a body, the ducts carrying the conditioned air from the rooftop units to the registers in the patient rooms and the corridors and the common areas, the air heated or cooled to seventy-two degrees, the temperature that Miriam had specified, the temperature that would be constant, would be the building's internal climate, the climate that the dying would inhabit. The plumbing was in, the copper pipes running through the walls and the floors, the pipes carrying the water from the municipal supply to the sinks and the showers and the kitchen, the water the building's second essential fluid after the air, the water that the dying would drink and bathe in and that the families would drink and that the nurses would use and that the kitchen would cook with, the water continuous, the water flowing through the building the way it flowed through the body, and the flowing was the building's life, the building alive with air and water the way a body is alive with breath and blood.

The windows arrived on a Tuesday. Sixteen patient room windows, each sixty-six inches wide and eighty-four inches tall, the floor-to-ceiling windows that Miriam had specified, the low-iron glass in the thermally broken aluminum frames, the frames anodized dark bronze, the frames designed to disappear, to recede, to leave only the glass, and the glass was clear, was truly clear, the absence of the green tint that standard glass imposed, the glass transparent in the way that transparency is a moral quality as well as an optical one, the glass honest, the glass showing the world without distortion, the world as it was, the mountains and the sky and the light, the December light that was different here than in Portland, that was sharper, clearer, the high-desert light that cut through the dry cold air without the softening filter of the marine layer, the light that was itself, that was nothing but itself, and the glass would admit this light without alteration, the glass performing its function, the function of getting out of the way.

James called Miriam. He called her from the site, from inside the first patient room, standing on the subfloor, the cork not yet installed, the walls not yet plastered, the ceiling not yet finished, the room raw, the room in its structural state, the room showing its bones -- the studs and the headers and the sill plates and the electrical boxes and the plumbing stubs -- and James was looking through the window, through the first installed window, the window in Room 1, the first room in the east wing, and he was looking at the Cascades through the low-iron glass, and the mountains were the color of mountains, and the sky was the color of sky, and the light was coming through the glass and falling on the subfloor in a rectangle of December sun, and the rectangle was the shape of the light in the room, the first light, the first time the light had entered through the glass that Miriam had specified, and the first time was a thing that James needed to tell her, needed to share with her, because the first light was the building's first breath, the building's first function, the building beginning to do the thing it was designed to do.

"The light is in the room," James said.

Miriam was in Portland. She was in her car in the parking lot of Evergreen House. She had just left Room 6, had just left Lin, had just walked the twelve-foot corridor and passed through the lobby and pushed through the double doors of the entrance she had designed, the level approach, and she was sitting in the car with her phone pressed to her ear and James's voice was telling her that the light was in the room, that the first window was installed, that the glass was clear, that the mountains were visible, and she received this information the way she received all information about Orchard House -- with the professional attention that the project required and the personal weight that the project had acquired, the weight of designing a building for the dying while her mother was dying, the weight that had been present since September and that was now, in December, heavier, the weight increasing the way a load increases on a structure that is settling, the foundation sinking incrementally, the settlement adding to the dead load, the load of the building's own weight pressing down on the foundation that was pressing down on the soil that was pressing down on the bedrock, and the pressing was continuous, was the permanent condition of the building, and the pressing was Miriam's permanent condition, the permanent weight of the two buildings, the building in Bend and the building in Portland, the building that was opening and the building that was closing, the building that was receiving its first light and the building that held her mother in its seventh year of light.

"Is the color right?" she said.

"The color is right. No green. No tint. The mountains are brown and white and gray. The sky is blue. December blue. The high-desert blue that has no cloud and no haze and no moisture, just the blue, the pure blue, and the glass shows it."

"Good."

"Miriam."

"Yes."

"It's going to be a good building."

She did not respond immediately. She sat in the car in the parking lot of Evergreen House, the building she had designed seven years ago, the building that was holding her mother, and she heard James say that Orchard House would be a good building, and the goodness was the thing she had been working toward for four months, the goodness of the design and the materials and the construction and the light, and the goodness was coming, was emerging, was visible now in the first window and the first rectangle of light on the subfloor, and the goodness was also the thing she could not feel, could not access, because the feeling was blocked by the other thing, the December thing, the thing that was happening in Room 6, the declining, the contracting, the body shedding its loads, and the shedding was its own architecture, its own design, its own process of simplification, and Miriam was caught between the two architectures, the building up and the winding down, the construction and the decline, the framing and the unframing, and the between was December, and December was the month of the between.

"Thank you, James," she said.

She drove home. She drove to the apartment on Belmont Street, the apartment she had rented after the divorce from Paul, the apartment that was small and adequate and that she did not assess anymore, did not measure the ceiling height or note the window orientation, had stopped assessing her own space the way a doctor stops diagnosing her own symptoms, the professional eye turned off in the private space, and the turning-off was a form of rest, a form of the release that the private space provided.

She sat at the desk her father had built. The desk was white oak, solid, the surface scarred by twenty-two years of trace paper and pens and coffee cups and the mechanical pencils that she used for dimensioning and the felt-tip pens that she used for sketching and the architect's scale that she used for measuring and the compass she used for orientation, the tools of her practice, the tools that occupied the desk the way a life's instruments occupy a workbench, and the desk was her workbench, and the work was the building, and the building was in Bend, and the building was receiving its first light.

She pulled out the drawings. She spread them on the desk. She looked at the floor plan, at the sixteen patient rooms, at the corridors and the garden and the kitchen and the common area, and she saw the building the way she always saw the building at this stage, as a thing that was almost real, almost there, almost the thing she had imagined, and the almost was December, the month when the almost becomes the nearly, when the construction closes in on the design, when the gap between the drawing and the building narrows to the point where they are nearly the same thing, nearly identical, the abstraction and the reality converging the way two lines converge at a vanishing point, and the vanishing point was the completion, was the opening, was the day the building would receive its first patient.

February. The opening was scheduled for February. Two months away. Eight weeks. Fifty-six days between this December evening and the morning when the first patient would enter Orchard House through the entrance that Miriam had designed, the level approach, and would be wheeled or walked or carried down the twelve-foot corridor, past the art at forty-two inches, to one of the sixteen patient rooms, and would be placed in the bed that Miriam had specified, and would look through the floor-to-ceiling window at the Cascade mountains, and would see the mountains in their true colors through the low-iron glass, and the seeing would be the building's first act as a hospice, the building's first performance of its function, which was holding, which was the holding of the dying in the light.

Two months until the opening. And Lin -- how many months did Lin have? Miriam did not know. The doctors did not know. Thea did not know. The dying kept its own schedule, its own calendar, its own December that was not the world's December but the body's December, the body's shortest day, the body's deepest dark, and the body's December could be this December or next month or the month after, and the not-knowing was the thing, the architectural problem that had no solution, the dimension that could not be measured, the variable that could not be specified.

She sat at the desk. The December dark pressed against the window. The apartment was quiet. The drawings were spread before her, the building in the drawings waiting to become the building in the world, and the building in Portland -- Evergreen House, the seventh building, Room 6 -- was holding her mother in the December dark, the amber night-lights on, Thea making her rounds, the cork absorbing the quiet footsteps, the warm gray walls holding the darkness the way they held the light, holding everything, holding the December, holding the mother, holding the daughter's design, and the design was the holding, and the holding was all Miriam could do.

She turned off the desk lamp. She left the drawings on the desk. She went to bed. She lay in the dark. She thought about the light in Room 1 at Orchard House, the first rectangle of December sun on the subfloor, the light that James had seen, the light that was there now, in the dark, in the December dark, the light not there because the sun had set and the December night was total, but the light remembered, the light recorded, the light held in the building's new memory, the building beginning to remember the light the way all buildings remember the light that enters them, the memory in the surfaces, in the subfloor that had received the first rectangle, the subfloor that would be covered by cork and that would never see the light again but that held the memory of the first light, the way the foundation held the memory of the first pour, the way the framing held the memory of the first nail, the way the building held all its firsts, carried them forward, remembered them in its structure, and the structure was the memory, and the memory was the building, and the building was almost there, was almost real, was almost the thing that Miriam had designed, and the almost was December, and December was the between, and the between was where Miriam lived now, between the two buildings, between the dying and the opening, between the mother and the rooms, between the light that was leaving and the light that was arriving, and the between was the corridor, and the corridor was three hours and twelve minutes long, and the corridor was her life.