4.8 Alexander Enters the Black Lodge

1. The Green Bed

I find myself alone in a bedroom with an enormous green bed. I can’t remember ever seeing a bed so large. Downstairs I hear voices. I climb out of the bed and ease onto the floor. I am wearing chinos in a muddy blue color. Underneath the bed I see shoes. Slowly I crawl toward an open window and pull up the venetian blinds, but the cords are uneven and one side pinches, leaving the blinds in a fan-bunting arc. The light is sharp, and for the first time in months I feel the warm, radiant heat of the sun. But it was an illusion—the bed, the shoes, the floor, the pants, and the sun’s heat. What I was actually feeling was the sizzling warmth of a baseboard heater. And there weren’t any voices downstairs at all.

2. The Kingdom of Heaven

Two women are sitting across from me on a green sofa. One asks me to describe the Kingdom of Heaven to her. And I tell them—yes—it is something like a forest—a verdant wood, vaguely Korean, vaguely North European. The sinful are punished with limited mobility. The truly awful are uncomfortably frozen forever in place, while the righteous have free access to any part of the Kingdom of Heaven they wish. But, of course, they are inclined to stay in the nicer parts and avoid slumming around the frozen. But some of the righteous, maybe the most restless of them, wander around, speaking with the damned and collecting their stories.

3. The Yellow Kitchen

I am ironing a pale yellow shirt in the kitchen when a woman walks into my house. I am so startled I gasp. She brings a chair into the kitchen and begins smoking thin cigarettes with the door open. I am boiling water on a stove. I am cooking spaghetti. Distracted, I leave the iron on my shirt when I go check on the spaghetti. She smokes her cigarettes. I pour thin streams of water onto my shirt from a mug. I can smell the steam and smoke.

Sometimes, and just for a moment (a moment!), time seems to collapse. The past, present, and future telescope into one entity, all existing at once, and I am aware very vividly that I am alive and dead at the same time, like the opera singer in the ruins of Pompeii. Once it happened when I was walking up a set of stairs in Basel with an American friend. Once it happened when I was standing in a yellow kitchen, eating a meal while leaning against a counter and facing the refrigerator.