The Guest Room

by Will Lupens

“The inside of my head,” he said, “unlike yours, does not contain a so-called brain. Of that I’m certain.” Ignoring this perfect reminder of why it’s never a good idea to make eye contact on the subway, I took the bait and asked him what, in the absence of a brain, his head did contain. 

“Chambers.” 

I nodded thoughtfully, more an indication of sympathy than understanding. “Like the heart?” 

“Like a house!” he replied, with quiet vehemence. He chewed at the inside of his lip, compressing the smallish features of his ruddy, bearded face. “Or a palace.” “Ahh. Rooms, then?” 

“Yes, rooms!” 

I nodded again, as if in gratitude for services rendered. An uncomfortable silence slipped between us, which he punctuated by turning his back on me. Having said what he needed to say, he was apparently finished with me. But I was not finished with him. For one thing, I wanted to verify that my initial impression was correct (based on his appearance, I’d slotted him in somewhere between Harmless Eccentric and Failed Academic on the urban lunacy spectrum). More importantly, as a devoted student of human nature I am always on the lookout for impromptu lessons, and this linty curmudgeon presented a clear opportunity to expand my knowledge of the subject. I had no choice, then, but to ask: “How many?” 

With an air of aggrieved reluctance, he turned to face me again, his expression quite clearly suggesting that, as far as he was concerned, I was the dodgy one. His close-set eyes darted from side to side, as if unable to decide which of mine to focus on. I followed suit, and we found ourselves trapped in a game of retinal tag, an awkward impasse he eventually broke with a sudden shake of his head. In what I suppose was a compromise born of experience, he pinned his warbling gaze to a spot just above my right shoulder. 

“How many what?” 

“Rooms. How many rooms are there, in your head?”

“To date? Two.” 

I felt a twinge of disappointment. So few? 

“Don’t misunderstand,” he said quickly, as if sensing my dismay. “It’s not a matter of some suburban tract home, with a bunch of empty rooms you move into and fill with your things. Not at all. A palace, like I said. Best to think of it as an excavation. Like Troy, or Uruk. Or better yet, Knossos.”

“I see. Your cranium is an archaeological site.”

He tilted his head and searched the air beside me, trying to determine if I was having a laugh at his expense. Decid ing I was in earnest (I was), he said: “Precisely.”

“And so far you’ve unearthed two chambers?”

“Yes. Out of what will undoubtedly be dozens.”

“Undoubtedly.” 

“People have it all wrong, you see. Upside-down. They take the so-called self for granted, believe it to be a ready made thing, as if one just pops out of the womb a fully fledged Glen Heinrich or Marybeth Hanratty, et voilà, off you go, to get on with the business of life. Which, according to this sorely mistaken view, is simply a question of attire, of dressing one’s self up in this clothing or that. Let me tell you, such a notion could not be more in error. The self is there from the beginning, I’ll grant you that. But it’s buried, covered over by age upon age of sediment. No my friend, life—the whole thing of becoming who you are—is not a game of dress-up. It’s work. Tedious, back-breaking work. Uncovering, revealing, getting down on your hands and knees and removing layer after layer of sand and stone with trowels and sifters and brushes and little puffs of breath.” He wagged a stubby finger at me: “And don’t think I’m talking in metaphors.” 

Throwing my hands up to show that I thought no such thing, I inquired as to the nature of the rooms he had thus far uncovered.

A petit mal of satisfaction fluttered across his face, his jittery eyes sparkled. At long last the moment was at hand: he had successfully maneuvered someone into asking about the rooms in his head. 

“The first,” he began, with the studied delivery of a docent, “is a common sort of room, of a variety perhaps not unfamiliar to you: a medium-sized living room, carpeted in a dark shag—burgundy, in fact—the walls paneled with simulated walnut. The various pieces of unremarkable furniture—a brass floor lamp with a ruffled shade, a small sofa and two easy chairs covered in protective plastic, a laminate coffee table—are arranged in the typical manner. A gas fireplace is set into one wall. In another, the one facing outward, there are two windows, each of which—” 

“Like eyes.” 

“Pardon?” 

“The windows, facing outward. Like eyes in a head, looking out on the world.” 

“What? No, not eyes. They’re windows.” He frowned and shook his head. “I told you, I don’t deal in metaphors.”

“That you did. My apologies. So, what do you get up to in this … living room?” 

“Oh, things. Sit and think, mostly, when I’m not busy working. Excavating and whatnot.” 

“I see.” 

He fell silent, still frowning. I had the feeling he was having second thoughts as to whether I was worthy of his precious gift of disclosure. I would not have been surprised to see him turn away again. Instead, he said: “I think you’ll find the other room somewhat more to your liking.” “Oh?” 

“Yes. It’s a guest room. Nothing fancy, of course. It’s quite small actually, and nearly bare. Apart from a twin mat tress on a simple metal frame, there’s only a pine dresser in the corner and a braided oval rug on the floor. There are no windows, but there is a small table lamp on a nightstand, and a vase of flowers, and a little Flemish landscape hanging on one wall.” 

Needless to say, these two rooms did not exactly put me in mind of a palace. As I preferred to keep him going, however, I kept this reflection to myself. “You have guests then, in your head?” 

“I do.” 

“On a regular basis?” 

“Oh yes. People coming and going all the time.”

“Friends?” 

“Complete strangers. Folks on their way from here to there, you might say. Of course, they rarely stay for more than a night.” 

“Just passing through.” 

“Exactly. All manner of people, too. Old, young, men, women. Loners, mostly. People just like you and me, for the most part.” 

I let this attribution of our like-ness, too, pass without comment. Nor did I say anything about the fact that my own head was something of a waystation for visitors and voices. I simply smiled and said: “Solitary beings.”

“Right. That’s right. And each with a story to tell.”

“Tales of woe, I imagine.” 

He shrugged. “Not really. ‘Story’ is perhaps the wrong word. ‘People’ isn’t quite right either. I never see most of them, to be honest. It’s not like they’re desperate to show themselves. They seem content, for the most part, to stay inside the room, and only speak to me from behind the closed door. Which is fine by me. You can get all need on a person from their voice: how it whispers or rumbles, the way its cadence strides or stutters, the little pauses and twists and turns, the sudden constrictions of thought, the manner of words at the speaker’s disposal. Believe me, a voice is more than enough to tell me exactly who I’m listening to.”

“And that’s your part, is it? To listen?” 

“Yes.” 

“Hmm. Imagine that.” 

Like a fattened bear in thrall to the tug of hibernation, the train stumbled wearily into some station or other. As always, the hydraulic sigh that signaled the temporary cessation of its labor left me with a hazy sense of loss. My companion, meanwhile, looked quietly about, seemingly fascinated by the sad shuffle of our fellow passengers as they went off in pursuit of their various consolations, each step choreographed to a lifeless soundtrack of chimes and artificial voices. 

The door clattered shut. 

I looked about the car, surprised to find that we were alone. How many stops had it been since I boarded? I’d lost track. It wasn’t until the train pulled away from the platform that I realized we were already well past my own stop. No matter. I had no reason to be home, really, and no one to be there for. What I wanted, in the here and now, was for him to go on, to tell me more about the guest room in his head. Unfortunately, he seemed to have fallen asleep. His eyes were now closed, his bearded chin resting on his chest. His breathing was shallow and short and his hands twitched ever-so-slightly. 

I wasn’t having it. 

“What do they get on about?” I prompted, my tone like an elbow to the ribs. “These voices of yours?” He let out a beleaguered sigh, as if this conversation— which he’d started, after all—had become a genuine ordeal. At length, he opened his eyes and said: “Above all, they seem keen to remember. Or maybe it’s that they’re looking to be remembered. Yes, that’s more what it is. It’s not a question of their own memories, you understand, of trying to remember things about themselves. Believe me, they know very well who they are. It’s hard to explain. Let’s just say that at some point I … they … stepped to the side of things. They took in the world for a while, from outside, and then found they couldn’t make their way back. It feels— to them, you understand—it feels as if the world is a person with a type of selective amnesia, and they’re the memories which this person has forgotten, and what they want, all they want, is to be remembered. They’re not asking for much, really, just to be known, to be …” 

“Understood?” 

“Restored. To memory.” 

I took advantage of my companion’s inability to look directly at me by looking more closely at him. His expression, like the inside of his head, seemed to warrant excavation. How long had it been, I wondered, since he stepped to the side of things, since he found himself forgotten? 

“Whenever I have a chance,” he said, a sudden lightness in his voice, “I give the floor a quick mop with warm water and oil soap, change the bed linens, put some fresh flowers in the vase. The room’s quite bare, as I said, but cozy nonetheless. Sometimes, in between visitors, I go in and lie on the bed for a spell, pretend I’m the guest.” He stared at the ceiling, then laughed. “I often wonder what would happen, if I were to suddenly walk through the door and find myself lying there.” 

“Yourself?” 

“Not myself exactly,” he said, placing a hand on his chest. “Another me. The me I was, or the me I might be someday. A me more real than me but also less real, somehow. The original me, maybe. Or a parallel me I never quite managed to become. Do you understand?” 

My own parallel me, the one burdened with the inclinations of my better nature, reached out and put an invisible hand on his shoulder. “I believe I do. So, what do you think would happen, you know, if you actually walked in on yourself?”

He turned his head and looked straight into my eyes, his loopy gaze suddenly quite fixed. “I would lie back and say to myself the things I most needed to say. At the same time, I would listen to myself with my whole being, the way I listen to all the others. Maybe I would lose sight of which me is me, but I’m not overly concerned about that. What matters is I’d know, for once, that I’d been heard. There’s something in that, I think. Being heard. In the whole deal of talking and being listened to.” 

He smiled wearily and closed his eyes. I nodded my silly nod and let him be. 

The rattle and roar of the car swirled around our slumped forms. My companion receded into his redundant sweaters and parkas, folding in on himself like an anemone at ebb tide. For my part I tried, as I often do, to quiet the clamor in my head, to clear it of every thought, to think nothing at all. I failed in this, of course, as always: I deliberated over which station was best suited for turning around, then thought better of it and decided it made more sense to walk, at which point I began weighing the merits and shortcomings of a dozen possible routes home while simultaneously rearranging the volumes of an imaginary library and reading an advertisement above the seats opposite listing the qualifications necessary for participation in the trial of a new drug for treating addiction to drugs. 

Eventually my thoughts circled round to the strange fellow sleeping beside me. Was he sleeping? I wondered. Or was he not sitting, even now, in one of his plastic-coated easy chairs, looking out through a small window at a gray winter sky crosshatched with snow? Or crouching with a palette knife and a toothbrush in a dusty corner of his head, uncovering some new part of himself? Or maybe—why not—maybe he was leaning against a closed door, listening to the gentle buzz of a quiet voice, a voice similar to his own yet wholly other, speaking to him from the other side.

Will Lupens lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Salamander, minor literature[s] and, yes, JAKE. He is the author of the novel Cares of a Wandering Boy, and the story collections Neighbor, The Institute of Solace, and Stories From My Head. http://will-lupens.com/