The front entrance was homier than she’d pictured. At the top of these theme park-ass stairs, you’d expect: traditional raider-style rusted steel door, replete with unnecessary bolts; or torches in wireframe geometric holders, demarcating the boundary between the sunny world at large and a dungeon; or, Heaven forbid, a gargoyle. Instead what you got was classic BC charm–wood paneling in all three dimensions, a dried bouquet of wheat stalks and field flowers mounted on the “Lindon” wooden family plaque. It was almost gaudily homey–no, wait, those are 60s-style skis, in red Bakelite, hanging above the door!—definitely gaudy.
In fact, this seems like the exact kind of front door you can guarantee will have a key under the–excuse me, Dr. Lindon, again I ask—if you’re going to bother locking up out here at all, why so half assed—
The door swings open, Amelia, still wielding the bolt cutters like a weapon, fills the doorway, a young woman in a bold white and spring green windbreaker, those jeans2, and a fan of rich brown hair so large it could be described as atmospheric.
Why do I feel so… majestic? She gazes at herself, without realizing, through the entryway’s large mirror, which is framed in carved dark wood, vines around the columns and all, little angel baby resting on the stopped clock, and is bewitched by her own beauty—well, maybe the sunrise framing her from behind helps.
Ms. Esparse, she tells herself, you are a scientist, not Indiana Jones, and sets the bolt cutters down gingerly on the wood deck-landing, somehow the exact same tone of wood as either wall or the ceiling.
And no caffeine yet! Oh my goodness, my face is going to melt right off. Please Dr. Lindon, you washed the basket before disappearing, yea?
Amelia stomps inside, removes her boots out of respect for somebody else’s aging carpet, then stomps across the curved, skinny living room into a wonderfully 1970s kitchen, mahogany paneling goddamn everywhere, in search of Mr. Coffee and his conspirators. She halts, grabbing the inner rim of the stainless steel sink, and centrifugally figure eights her neck around and under the tap, to drink cold, cold, wonderful, goddamn, copper tinted water, delivered by the Lindon family tank, some distance further up the mountain. And who could blame her–do you realize how hot the inside of an F-150 can get when it’s 70% humidity out and the sun shining over the eastern side of the Cascades is sous vide-ing you and whatever receipts, cigarette butts, small vermin, and curl-edged manuals reside in the cabin with you?
At last Amelia is sitting, some minutes later, with coffee, a glass of water on its second fill, and a package of small coffee biscuits she found in the professor’s cupboard, relaxing in one of those chairs with the horrid yellow cloth and smooth, thin dark wood arms and looping legs, chairs which you might see in a psychiatrist’s office as late as 2008 and in a church or library as late as 2015. It’s got that–what do you call it–the back like fifth of the legs tapers up so you can pop a wheelie while studying for a statistical mechanics exam—although frankly I think it would scare the bejeesus out of an unexpecting victim. Ah–
–whup! Ah–whup! Hehe.
Amelia rocks back and forth, dopamine firing wildly over the simple pleasures of sugar and vestibular sloshing. When she comes to rest, bent a bit forward, she momentarily dissociates.
In 1968, Charles Lindon–no, not the Nazi sympathizer and sometimes-aeronaut–Mr. Lindon, lifetime resident of Abbotsford, sold his third automobile dealership in the Vancouver area and decided that his wife should have her long-dreamed of home in the literal trees, somewhere in the Cascades near Seattle, her parents, and her childhood home. It would be a fantastic place to vacation with their young daughter, and better than staying at the in-laws’. Creative and multitalented man as he was, Mr. Lindon got to work immediately drawing up plans–not proper architectural drawings, but a fine crack for a businessman–regarding how, exactly, one might construct an actual, modern house up in one of those giant cedars. In one drawing, we see a surreal 4-story structure, spiraling around the tree as it rises, a really quite angelic–in the 13th century sense–building. Or it would have been, had the construction estimate stayed under 100,000 (and that’s U.S.) dollars.
Well, by early ‘74 Charlie still hasn’t given up on this dream, and now Apryl is going on, gosh, she is going to be seventeen now, isn’t she? Honey, let’s just pick a simple one, says Inessa Poliakova Lindon, America’s sweetheart Stalin refugee, who spent her first six months under Communism before crossing the Pacific to balmy Seattle. It struck a nerve with her parents, perhaps, when she was sent to a different terrible cold north (well, 100 miles north); they might have been more at ease had she met a businessman from, say, Atlanta.
Better time than ever, replies Charlie, who now has eighteen properties, two gas stations, and a Pizza Détente on the south side of town3. “This Faisal fellow wants to stick a wrench in things, well, that’s fine with me, as long as he doesn’t have plans for my lovely wife!”
The design they settle on is a three-quarters circle, which, if you’re looking at it from above, is missing its bottom-left quadrant. First is the entryway at the base, then the building curves about through a narrow living room. This comes to a two-seater bar at the kitchen counter, then around, past the linoleum kitchen, cozy yet with spectacular window view. Then you have the washer and dryer, and to the left, the efficiency bathroom; to its left is the walled-off single bedroom. It’s an odd room, to say the least; there’s really no good way to fit a rectangular bed in a slim, curved hallway. But what makes this plan really pop for Charlie and dear Inessa is the balcony off the end of the bedroom. If we can get the perfect tree, just imagine, steak and a glass of wine out there… I mean an anti-view, Charles. I want to feel enveloped by those trees.
“What Mrs. Lindon wants…”, bumping noses, sickeningly in love, “Mrs. Lindon gets.”
It’s winter of 1982, and Apryl is once again making the drive to Pittsburgh, once again belting out Kim Carnes’ “Love Comes from Unexpected Places” as the cassette plays. Except this time, for the first time, she’ll be there on her own. Дедушка picks her up from Sea-Tac, she stays the night, and the next morning, it’s hiking gear and Dad’s Ford–“Ласточка, do not forget leftovers.”
There’s nothing Apryl loves more than this kind of temporary self-reliance, adventure not extreme in its scope but rather in its bruteness and simplicity. Being completely alone, 12 meters up in a tree somewhere deep in the Cascades–well, it’s not Arctic exploration, but it does make her feel a little more raw, more interesting. A neutron star and a pulsar whipping around each other so fast that we could maybe, someday, measure the ripples they make in space itself–that’s fascinating, but a bit hard to communicate over the Pat Benatar at a dyke bar. And when it’s a two-and-a-half hour drive from University Park, well… She needs a slightly better opener than “Did you know the Arecibo dish is a thousand feet wide?” if she wants to meet anyone.
Someone, someone interesting. A physicist can dream.
In short order, that physicist has settled back into one of Pierce county’s finest Thuja plicata and is sitting on the floor, enmeshed in the banana-yellow carpet her father chose. She is enjoying, higher up on her thighs, “The New Binary Pulsar and the Observation of Gravitational Spin Precession” (Hari Dass and Radhakrishnan, 1975), on her shins, June’s Vogue, and in between, a mug of formerly-hot cocoa, to which Apryl has added a few ice cubes, in spite of the light layer of snow outside. Roiling electric orange clouds glint from the west, through treetops, off a few dripping icicles, off the colour TV’s curved glass, and through Apryl’s large, round frames, at which point she realizes how long she has spent reading. Probably a good idea to take a little walk up the hill before it gets dark, eh. Take the SX-70 in case the sun pokes out.
As twilight wanes she hikes past the end of the National Forest route, through the conifers, and up to the ridge peak that marks the highest elevation on their property. A donut, high in the trees some 60 meters downhill, glows at 2300 Kelvin–her own little class M star. Perhaps she missed the sunset, but to the physicist, astronomical twilight is a nightly reminder of the limitless expanse, and of how little we yet know. For just a moment Apryl stands akimbo, feeling her past and future strung out in, ironically, Copernican perfection, and then–she snaps a photo.
Two months later, back on another annoyingly lonely trip to PGH, Apryl finds herself at Shawn’s when her fortunes change. Head full of ethanol and swaying happily through a fogline of cigarette smoke, she is held by one Stella Rockio, and around them, Stevie makes the air vibrate, an ocean of sound, something about black spiders and black moons.
This feels pretty creepy, remarks Amelia out loud, in her usual splayed virasana pose, knees deep in this truly wild yellow-brown carpeting, half a dozen Lindon family photo albums arranged before her.
What am I supposed to do.
She flops back in defeat into an uneven supta virasana.
“She lives here full time, right?–” (Staring up again at a ceiling, this one, no surprise, the exact same 6cm wide veneer slats as the walls, the shiny-dusty wood strips with the little 7mm dark gulleys between them, spots where a child can stare and imagine–well, she didn’t imagine creatures crawling into or from the cracks, it’s more of a matter of staring through the small gap and the trick that plays on one’s optic nerve–a practice Amelia has enjoyed since age six or so as a means to mentally escape church service.)
“–It’s like, preserved in fucking amber.”
Flopping her head right to look between the legs of the barstools. Four legs, times two, eight; two stabilization bars per side, four sides, eight times two chairs…
Ugh! Fine, I have to check the bedroom. I don’t know why that feels different.
To Amelia’s relief, the bedroom is no more a repository of the professor’s personal affects than is the rest of the house. Well, she does recognize the two separate identical drapey buttonless cardigans in the closet, jet black, that the professor switches between most days and in most weather–yes, the very one from the ‘89 Sears Style Catalog, the same catalog Amelia has in a stack, amidst others, somewhere in that room…
Oh and here’s that wonderful, bright yellow polka-dot dress she pairs with it! Looking like some kind of tall, slender, sexy (–Well, I’m not gay, but you know, aesthetic), bumblebee, sunny and goth at the same time.
…What am I doing in here?! She could have receipts in these pockets! Clues! Fuck you!!!
Amelia stomps the floor in protest at no one, or perhaps at the reader, and turns from her glowering, underlit close-up to blankly face camera two, a wide-angle, straight-on of the curved–yes, it’s a curved closet door, gotta fit that donut shape as best as possible, only the best for Mrs. Lindon, etc.,–door, with Amelia blocked within it so as to be centered from all four corners. Soundtrack fades out as we linger on her standing stock still and looking over her shoulder, a bit spooked.
She shakes an imaginary gnat off her ear’s helix and takes stock of the room.
Takes stock…
Outside of this concave closet, which hugs the westernmost part of the ¾ circle, the room continues on, southward, past dressers with more impressive, large mirrors adorning them, mirrors wreathed in wood so dark and glossy you can hardly imagine how it would have been carved in the first place without chipping–ah, but sorry, the dressers aren’t curved, do you think Mr. Lindon was Lewis fucking Carrol–past the Mrs.’ vanity (another enshrined mirror) and gilt icon of Иисус, to a rather old-fashioned looking brass bedframe. The Lindons seem to have dealt with their own version of the moving sofa problem in the most obvious way possible, by simply pushing the top- and bottom-left corners of this bed against the wall, leaving a clementine slice of available floorspace. It certainly doesn’t look great, but as Inessa predicted, the visitor’s attention is rapidly drawn away from this homey-in-the-30s (Is that really an old Soviet piece?), now by the 90s somewhat cinematic bedframe, to sliding glass doors and a small, shockingly cozy balcony. Fellow conifers lean in invitingly as a guest relaxes, doused in pine scent, swaddled up high in a little plank wood nest. Emerging onto this balcony, you may reach out and touch the very bark of the giant cedar around which4 the house spirals. You may sit on the built-in bench (this outdoor wood having gone the way of that black-grey-white rot, but spotted with moss) where the lovebirds had their steaks for just two joyous seasons–summer and fall ‘79–before Charlie was (and I must stress this) unfortunately killed, viciously gobbled up, by one of his many used cars. Mothers shielded children’s eyes in Vancouver that day, that horrible, absolutely non-comedic day when Mr. Lindon, head inside the hood of a 1970 Saab 96 (boots-on-the-ground owner-operator as he was, not afraid to get his 3-piece spotted with oil if it meant a customer who felt confident in their purchase), was demonstrating the smoothness of the timing best, leaning in close and ah—first went the hair, then Mr. Lindon’s fine tortoiseshell specs and the face with them, and, well, you may find it hard to believe, but–those 96s were nothing to sneeze at for their size–the torso right after. And then, of course, his lower half did that slow kneeling pose, as if still connected to the rest of the human. Mrs. Lindon got a $700,000 (American) settlement from the Saab corporation, sold the rest of Charlie’s businesses, and retired to volunteer full-time at her Orthodox church in Abbotsford, sitting on some untold amount of wealth, and hardly touching it, considering she survives on naught but pure love and about one loaf of Canada Bread per week.
Amelia is now pawing through these various mirror-adorned hardwood cabinets, finding tchotchkes, Inessa’s mother’s ivory brush, hmm, a lot of empty space. It’s like they got rid of half of the stuff. Amelia can feel the sun growing in intensity even as the windows of the outer ring5 pull back their light-beams, that award-winningly bad banana-yellow carpet being graced once again with shadow as skewed rhombi of sunshine retreat.
Dr. Apryl Lindon’s possessions, apart from the snappy closet collection, seem to amount almost entirely to a proper battlement of books, textbooks, binders, stacks of papers, and office supplies–a literal hill made from humanity’s knowledge of matter and energy–which she keeps tucked to the inner wall, covering the bedroom’s view of the great tree. Amelia would loveee to look through all these, don’t get her wrong, but she’s really starting to feel she’s overstaying what was, to begin with, not even an implied invitation.
I need to be looking for travel plans, phone numbers, scraps of paper. But outside of Physics Mountain, Apryl keeps her quarters beyond spartan–or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she acts like a temporary guest in what is in fact legally her home. The last place to check is…
This little bedside cabinet. A compact, cylindrical unit positioned right in the middle of the empty slice formed between rectangular bed and curved outer wall. Amelia bites a finger, considers, then leans over the bed, basketball-shuffles left and right looking for a good angle, realizes there’s no way to get to the cabinet without actually laying on the bed, and–
Flops onto it gracefully, acrobatically. She has a left knee up on the bed, right heel planted for stability, and is behaving almost like a grasshopper, leaning out, but no, it turns out to be a grasshopper made of candlewax, and yes, this day is still heating up; the grasshopper droops and Amelia finds her face buried in the place where–oh dear, come on–Dr. Lindon lays her shoulders, just south (well, east) of the outer pillow. She pauses and contemplates a memory of leaning into a doorway at PSU, the professor swiveling around with sharp eyes, tight smile.
Putting her weight on her chin, Amelia slides to face the little dresser and swim-arcs her left arm up from behind to finally reveal a large gold ring, Prada wallet atop a film pack, Canadian and American passports, pocket slide rule, an old Polaroid camera–that looks just like Dad’s–and next to it, two pictures. The one on top is almost entirely black. Amelia picks them up and examines the first, a shot taken well after the golden hour, hell, well after sunset. The skyline is a faint blue along the horizon, and in the foreground, there are a few orange dots. Maybe a building? Not much of a picture to keep around, no offense, Dr. Lindon.
Amelia flips the first card behind the second and stares, in confusion, then worry, then confusion, at a Polaroid she knows better than the memory it records. A short-statured Hispanic man holds up a small brown-haired girl in one arm and a little red button on a cord with the other, Cascades cascading away behind them. Hesitantly, she turns it over—scrawled in blue engineer’s pen on the back is–
“w/ Amelia on Mt. Rainier // July ‘77”.
[2] You know what jeans she is wearing, this story is set in 1994.
[3] A chain Charlie believed in quite sincerely, so much so that he put $40,000 (Canadian) into starting its second-ever location. Unfortunately, in ‘86, some Greek bastard got the same idea in his head, and by 1992, the last Pizza Détente was out of business. Not that this troubled Dr. Apryl Lindon, who by this point was already getting paid handsomely to oversee macrostability at LSCC, nor her dear mother.
[4] Due to legal barriers which Nixon, strike that, Ford, failed to remove, Inessa’s marvelous treehouse-house does not in fact touch any part of the tree it encircles. This proved to be a smart decision regardless, as Thuja plicata can grow really stupidly tall, and this one was nowhere near done. Since the house was finally finished in ‘78, the tree has continued to grow in girth, and may well someday come to touch the shy house itself.
[5] There are a few windows pointed inwards, as well, which provide a really stunning view of tree bark, approaching at a few millimeters per year, and a dancing pattern of light from above, through the pine leaves. These windows, unlike the outward-facing ones, do not open.