FAR SIDE OF THE ATTIC, Chapter 3

      Several days passed and I completely forgot my buyer and the agent outside the attic (man is my wife going to be pissed).  Sarcastically I thought to myself how great for business this was going to be and how it would probably be the last referral I would get from that agent.  My wife will kill me----but I will survive.  We always joke about her being an “inspection widow” when she has to watch movies alone due to my working on reports all night.  Relationships can be a whole other side of a different kind of attic----difficult at times to assess ----never mind access.

     For some reason, being where I was seemed to make perfect sense.  It made sense in spite of not being able to make any sense as to where “here” actually was.  It was kind of like I had both choice and no choice all at the same time.  Weird.

     The apartment was an eclectic visual feast.  The smell of pancakes and real maple syrup----and cinnamon----filled the room.  There were Tibetan carpets covering the walls and a row of brightly colored skis created a room divider.  A giant fish tank, with a very large and hard working plecostomus, bubbled away near the window.  I couldn’t see through the window----as if either its seals had been broken for many years or it was covered with some amorphous film.  I wanted so badly to be able to get my bearings.

     There was a Monopoly game set up for four players on the Lake & Company Realty sign doubling as a coffee table----and it was obvious that one of the players thinks they are Donald Trump.

     There was a 24” tall candle----the likeness of Antonio Banderas as Zorro----standing next to the fireplace.  Wax was dripping off the brim of his hat into the hole in his glove where his sword should be.  There was also the entire VHS collection of Planet of the Apes----all five of them.

     I had learned that ice-pack girl’s name was Lara (apparently her parents were huge fans of Dr. Zhivago----even though she herself had not seen the movie).  She worked at Trader Joe’s, was going to night school to become a nurse and her kids went to North Beach Elementary School in Ballard.  All normal sounding enough.  However, I was perpetually plagued with questions of where “here” was.

    From the other room, where the kids were playing, I heard the boy scream in frustration for having landed on a “Licorice Square.” 

     I learned that Lara's husband had been tragically killed by a drunk driver 8 years earlier and that she graduated from Ballard High School in 1998.  She and her husband had owned a house together but she could not afford to keep it on just her income so she came to live where she is now----after living with her parents for a month.  All of this stuff should be easy enough to verify.  If only I had my I-Phone, I could have gotten to the bottom of it all, right then and there.  She could tell by the skeptical look on my face that I didn’t really believe her.

     She took me to the breakfast nook where she had her laptop.  She showed me stuff on the internet that confirmed everything she was saying.  Now I was really curious.  We spent several hours searching the web----about her---even the newspaper account of her husband’s death----and then about me, my business, my wife and kids----Facebook.  Everything was a seamless, consistent, stream of incontrovertible facts----facts that painted a very clear picture of the “truth”----that things were the way they were.  I slowly came to terms with the reality that the demand to “know” was preventing my enjoyment of being alive during the times of not knowing.  It miraculously, no longer mattered that I could not explain where “here” was.  There is freedom in small favors.

     The next morning when I woke up, someone with really bad pepperoni pizza breath was shining a very bright and annoying light in my eyes----first one eye then the other.  I heard them say, “Equal and responsive.”