The House in June

The Projection

Chapter 23: The House in June

The evening before Jin Park arrived, Silas walked through the house. He did not intend to walk through the house. He intended to eat dinner and check the equipment manifest one final time and go to bed. But the dinner was soup, heated and consumed in four minutes, and the manifest was checked and rechecked and triple-checked and there was nothing on it that needed checking again, and the bed was at the end of the hall past the closed door, and the hall was long, and the house was quiet, and the walking began the way most walking began in the field -- not with a destination but with a restlessness that the body resolved by moving.

He started in the study. The equipment was packed. The duffel bags stood along the wall like sentries, olive drab and bulging, the shapes inside them the shapes of instruments and notebooks and survival gear, the geometry of preparedness. The theodolite case sat on the desk, the latches fastened, the serial number visible on the tag he had tied to the handle with a length of parachute cord twenty years ago, the cord frayed and faded and still holding because parachute cord was designed to hold and he had tied a bowline, which was a knot designed not to slip, and the combination of a cord designed to hold and a knot designed not to slip was the kind of redundancy he believed in, the kind that kept the important things attached to the other important things.

He left the study and walked to the living room.

The living room was where the paintings lived. He had not thought of it this way until now -- the paintings living in the living room, the name suddenly literal, the room alive with Margot's work in a way that the rest of the house was not alive, the paintings the only things in the house that had been made rather than purchased or inherited or accumulated through the slow sedimentation of domestic life. The sofa had been purchased. The lamp had been purchased. The bookshelf had been built by a man in North Pole who sold bookshelves at the Saturday market. But the paintings had been made, here, in this house, by Margot, with her hands and her eyes and her brushes and her particular understanding of what the landscape looked like when you stopped measuring it and started seeing it.

He did not look at the paintings. He noted their presence the way he noted the presence of benchmarks on a quad sheet -- registered, located, not examined.

The bookshelf held the books that had accumulated over thirty-five years of living in Fairbanks. His books were on the left side: geology texts, surveying manuals, the USGS standards for topographic mapping, John McPhee's Basin and Range and Rising from the Plains, the collected works of John Wesley Powell, a dog-eared copy of Dava Sobel's Longitude that Margot had given him for Christmas in 1998. Margot's books were on the right side: art history, color theory, the collected letters of Vincent van Gogh, Robert Henri's The Art Spirit, a shelf of monographs on landscape painters -- Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Rockwell Kent, the painters who had tried to capture the American landscape the way the surveyors had tried to map it, each in their medium, each with their instruments, each producing a record that was faithful in some ways and unfaithful in others.

The books were organized by owner, his on the left, hers on the right, the division maintained by habit long after the reason for it -- the convenience of knowing where to find your own books -- had ceased to apply. Margot's books would never be retrieved by Margot. They would sit on the right side of the shelf until Silas moved them or until he died and someone else moved them or until the house was sold and the books were donated to the library or the thrift store or the dumpster, the hierarchy of disposal that determined what happened to the possessions of the dead, the possessions sorted by value and sentiment and utility, the valuable kept, the sentimental kept, the useful donated, the rest discarded.

He would not discard Margot's books. He would not move them. They would stay on the right side of the shelf, in their order, in their place, maintaining the boundary between his territory and hers, the boundary that was a datum line, a reference, a convention that had meaning even though the condition that created it no longer existed.

He walked to the kitchen. The kitchen was the room where they had eaten and talked and argued and laughed and sat in silence and done the daily work of a marriage, the work that was not dramatic and not memorable and not the kind of work that anyone wrote about in journals, the work of cooking and eating and washing and putting away, the repetitive, necessary, invisible work that constituted the substrate of the shared life. The kitchen table was pine, purchased at the same Saturday market where the bookshelf had been built, and the surface was marked with thirty years of use -- knife scratches, water rings, a burn mark from a hot pot that Margot had set down without a trivet in 2007, the mark still visible, a small dark oval on the pale wood, a scar.

He sat at the table. He put his hands on the surface and felt the scratches and the rings and the burn mark, the topography of domestic use, the contour lines of a surface that had been shaped not by geology but by meals, by the repeated placement of plates and cups and pots and elbows and forearms, the surface worn and stained and marked by the passage of ten thousand dinners across its face.

The French press was on the shelf above the sink. He looked at it. He did not take it down. The French press was Margot's instrument, the way the theodolite was his, and he did not use her instrument for the same reason he did not enter her studio -- because the instrument was calibrated to a different practice, a different way of engaging with the world, and using it would be an acknowledgment that the practice had ended and the instrument was available, was unclaimed, was waiting for hands that would not come.

He made instant coffee instead. Folgers. The jar was nearly empty. He would need to buy more before leaving for the field, or not, since the field would provide its own coffee, the camp stove and the aluminum pot and the coarse grounds that produced a bitter, thin brew that was coffee in the sense that it contained caffeine and was liquid and was warm, but that was not coffee in the sense that Margot understood coffee, which was a ritual, a practice, a four-minute exercise in extraction and patience that produced something rich and dark and complex, the way a four-week survey produced something rich and complex from the raw material of terrain and measurement.

He drank the instant coffee standing at the window. The yard was still. The birch trees held the last light at their tops, the trunks already in shadow, the canopy still gold. The fireweed along the fence was six inches tall, the first shoots of the season, and he noted the height the way he noted all heights -- automatically, precisely, his eye trained by decades of reading stadia rods and leveling marks to estimate vertical distances within a few percent of the true value. Six inches. Plus or minus half an inch. The fireweed did not care about the precision of his estimate. The fireweed was growing at the rate the fireweed grew, which was determined by the soil temperature and the photoperiod and the genetics of the particular strain of Chamerion angustifolium that grew along his fence, and the rate was not affected by his measurement, was not changed by his attention, was as independent of his observation as the elevation of the saddle at the headwaters of the unnamed tributary was independent of the GPS signal that would determine it.

Margot's garden beds were dark shapes in the yard, the dead grass lying flat over the perennials that might or might not be alive beneath it. He had not checked. Checking would require bending down and pulling back the dead grass and looking at the soil and looking for green shoots and either finding them or not finding them, and the finding or not finding would be data, would be a measurement, would tell him something about the state of the garden and therefore something about the state of his tending of it, which was zero, which was the null measurement, the observation that said nothing was there because nothing had been done.

He finished the coffee. He rinsed the mug. He set it in the rack.

The hallway was dim. The light from the kitchen reached partway down the hall and then stopped, the boundary between the lit and the unlit as sharp as a contour line, the hallway's own declination from light to dark. He walked the hallway. He passed the bathroom, the spare bedroom, the closet where the coats hung -- his Carhartt jacket, his rain gear, Margot's red fleece, the fleece that she had worn in the field and that still smelled, he imagined, of turpentine and the particular warmth of her body, though he had not taken it off the hanger and held it to his face because doing so would be an act of measurement, an observation, a collection of data that he was not prepared to process.

He passed the closed door.

The door was white. The knob was brass. He had passed this door twice a day for two years -- once in the morning walking from the bedroom to the kitchen, once in the evening walking from the kitchen to the bedroom -- and the passing had become a ritual, a daily observation, a station in the traverse of the domestic routine. He did not stop at the station. He did not set up the instrument. He did not take a reading. He passed it, noting its position, noting the door and the knob and the closed state of the door, and he continued.

The bedroom was at the end of the hall. The bed was queen-sized, which was a measurement -- sixty inches by eighty inches -- and the measurement described the surface area available for sleeping and did not describe the way the bed felt when one person lay in it, the way the sixty inches of width seemed both too wide and too narrow, too wide because the empty side was a reminder and too narrow because the empty side was not empty in his awareness, was filled with the shape of the person who was not there, the negative space that had the dimensions and the contour of Margot's body, the impression preserved not in the mattress but in his sense of the space, his proprioceptive memory of where she had been, the way a river preserved the shape of its former channel in the terraces and the oxbows and the abandoned meanders that the map showed as dotted lines, former channel, the terrain remembering what the water had done before the water moved on.

He set the alarm for six. He lay down on his side of the bed. The other side was made, the sheets tucked, the pillow plumped, the surface undisturbed, the way a recently surveyed benchmark was undisturbed -- checked, verified, found to be in its correct position, the datum intact, the reference surface unchanged.

He closed his eyes.

Tomorrow Jin Park would arrive. Tomorrow there would be another person in the house, briefly, a young man he did not know, and the presence of the young man would change the acoustic signature of the house, would fill the particular silence that was not silence but the sound of one person breathing in a space designed for two. The house would hold two voices instead of one. The hallway would carry footsteps that were not his. The kitchen table would have two places instead of one. The change would be temporary -- one evening, one night, and then the field, and then the return, and then the house again, alone again, the one-person silence restored.

But the field would come first. The field and the work and the instruments and the notebook and the landscape that did not care about the house or the paintings or the closed door or the empty side of the bed. The landscape cared about nothing. The landscape was the one thing in his life that did not require interpretation, did not require emotional processing, did not require the kind of attention that Margot had asked for and that he had not known how to provide. The landscape required only measurement. The landscape required only the theodolite and the notebook and the eye and the hand and the thirty-eight years of training that turned the raw terrain into the clean geometry of the map.

Tomorrow the field assistant would come. The day after that, Carl would fly them north. And then the work would begin, and the work would be the thing it had always been -- the reduction of the complicated to the comprehensible, the conversion of the landscape into the map, the projection that preserved shape and sacrificed everything else.

He lay in the bed that was too wide. The light came through the curtains, the June light that did not end, the light that lay across the bedroom at midnight like a hand across a forehead, gentle, persistent, impossible to ignore. The light fell on the made side of the bed, on the tucked sheets and the plumped pillow, and the light did not distinguish between the occupied side and the unoccupied side, the light falling equally on both, the way it fell equally on all the surfaces of the earth, on the mapped and the unmapped, on the measured and the unmeasured, on the terrain that had been reduced to contour lines and the terrain that had not, the light democratic, the light indifferent, the light the one true equal-area projection, preserving everything, sacrificing nothing, showing the world as it was.

He slept. The house held him. The paintings hung on the walls in the dark that was not dark. The closed door stayed closed. The equipment waited in the study. The manifest was checked.

In the morning he would begin.