Portal

 I came home from work one evening thinking the kids would already be asleep. Lately, I’ve been wrong in this supposition. My headphones still in, wheeling my bike into the garage, I was greeted by their visual clattering. I took my headphones out. Happy to have their “dad’s home!” in my ears, but instead I got “Dad, the bathroom door got locked again and there’s a candle burning in there!” Having relieved themselves of their informational burden, they ran back inside, presumably to be closer to the chaos which, this close to bedtime, or this long after bedtime, was more than welcome. 

I’m processing the bathroom door being locked again when my son runs back out, and adds “welcome home, dad!” I can’t tell if this is done as a coup de grâce or if he is still young enough to actually be thinking of my feelings and trying to mitigate the impression of the door news.

The energy of the house is focused on the bathroom door, even though no one is near it. Is that the candle flicking causing the lambency in the light under the door or is there already a fire in there? I don’t smell any smoke at least. 

“Hi” my wife adds from where she sits on the couch fully nine months pregnant, and at this point in the day, unable to do much other than eat ice and apologize for eating ice. 

“Hi,” I say. “So the door’s locked again?” I ask, wanting to know what I’m up against. 

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened *crunch*.” She bites down on another ice cube. Damn those things are loud.

“Yeah, but what happened to the tape?” I ask. 

After this happened last time and it took me about an hour of agonizingly screwing around, cursing this particular type of door handle, and being generally inept at this kind of thing to get the door open, I wrapped tape all around the locking mechanism on the inside of the door. Usually, the door doesn’t even get closed, so the tape seemed like a sufficient precaution against this happening again.

Apparently not.

“I’m not sure *crunch*. I think one of them took it off.”

I look at the little rascals bounding around in celebration of the disorder they have caused, and I think of Mikey’s maxim of entropy being the natural tendency of all things. 

I set to work on the door. The kids gather around in excitement, but when they realize that the door isn’t going to be broken down, or explode in flames, they resume running around in circles demanding candy as is their wont before bed. 

I manage to locate the paper clip I bent with needle-nose pliers into the perfect shape to fit the notch inside the handle the last time this happened. It’s just a matter of turning the mechanism inside the handle over. But it is like a game of chance. The mechanism is tiny, and it seems only to be luck to locate it. 

“It might be harder *crunch* this time. The tape might still be on the other side of the handle.” My wife says, taking the kids up to bed. Surprisingly they go without any further resistance, and as they go up the stairs, I think how I miss them even when I they are asleep, how, sometimes in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I just want to go lie down in their room to be near them and be part of their growing up. 

What I say is “how the hell did the door get locked with the tape still on?” Everyone shrugs and continues up the stairs. 

Last time, once I’d found the right Youtube video, the right paperclip, and the stars had aligned, I’d managed to get the door open pretty quick. So quickly, that I’d saved the paperclip, designating it an important tool, but now, the damn thing just seemed to bend in there. Every time I connected with the mechanism and got purchase, I’d feel the paperclip turning and then it would take on the torque and start twisting until: Pop! It would come out of the mechanism. Damn! Was the tape still on the inside of the door? If the lock had become engaged and was reinforced by tape on the other side there was no way this was going to work, but how could the door be locked when there was tape over the lock?

“I wouldn’t be so worried,” a voice calls down from upstairs. “If it weren’t for that candle in there.”

The door leads into the closet-like downstairs bathroom which, in our small home, sits at the confluence of the dining room, living room and kitchen. It would probably be the only bathroom that ever got any use if it weren’t for bathtime, bedtime stalling once the kids are upstairs, and the tattered remnants of modesty which still prohibit the adult use of a bathroom so close to where we eat for certain uses, thank god. 

There’s no way to get into the bathroom, but knowing I can’t go to sleep with a candle still burning in there, I can’t help but to project my imagination under the door frame. I even start prying my fingers under there until I realize the absurdity of it and diligently go back to the paperclip and imagine how much better dinner will taste after this thing is open. 

I’ve got the paperclip all twisted up now. I’ve folded it back on itself to try to get more torque from it. It’s looking less like the slick tool it was when it popped the door open last time, and more like a tangible demonstration of my frustration and desperation. I’d take a break, but all that’s going to do is make this take longer when, suddenly, pop!, the twisted wire catches, the handle turns free, and at last the damn door is open.

The candle burns innocently on the shelf above the toilet where even if the door hadn’t been opened, it would’ve just gone out. I had been imagining it, smokey, surrounded by paper, maybe even oily rags, but it’s just an innocent little bathroom candle burning even delicately, if such a thing is possible.  

I blow the candle out, just in case the door somehow locks again. I’m seeing the bathroom as if for the first time, unable to believe I’ve succeeded in getting the door open. It’s so small and cozy in here, much like the home I share with my family. It is familiar, and yet strange, and almost unbelievable that I should own such a thing as a bathroom with its toilet, and plumbing, and hastily painted walls. It seems so incredible, so wonderful to own a bathroom, an entire house.

“Wow,” I say quietly to myself. And then I hear my wife coming down the stairs. 

“Oh good, you got it open. Do you want dinner now? They’re asleep.” She stands in the doorway of the bathroom, measuring the room with her eyes, and probably thinking something similar to what I was just thinking, or maybe just being exhausted and being happy the door is open. 

“Yeah,” I say, finally leaving the sanctuary of the little bathroom. “What’s for dinner?”

The next day, my son and I went out to get a new door knob without a lock. It turns out to be pretty easy to put on.

…

After a week of rain and working in front of the computer, I spent the entire morning outside, positioning myself in the narrow wedge of sunlight falling over the driveway, cleaning and changing the tire on my bike. My son played a game where he’d ride his bike across the street, call to me, and then indulge in my astonishment that he’d crossed the street so quickly. 

“Wow!” I’d say, looking around wildly. “You’re already over there!”

I sprayed WD-40 into the crank and loosed all kinds of grit in clots of gravely foam. I scraped congealed oil from the teeth of the chainring. I ran several Q-tips around the rear hub. The more I cleaned, the more I found to clean. When I finally replaced the tire, I discovered I’d put it on backward, which is a very minor detail, but, no, I thought, I’m not afraid of a little disassembly, and I took it off to flip it around, and, what the hell, try to clean it a little more. 

My son and I had been going in and out of the house. Getting more Q-tips, seeing what my wife and daughter were doing in there, getting a snack, a drink, etc. We’d opened and closed the front door many times with no more effect than usual, but probably to the slight irritation of the neighbors—our front doors and right next to each other. 

When I finally had the bike put back together and the rag, soaked in bike grease and grit, thrown out, I started to go in and found the front door locked. 

The handle turned without issue, so it must’ve been the deadbolt. My greasy hands fumble for my keys, soiling my pockets. I have to work later, so I still have the giant cluster of work keys in there to differentiate my house keys from. Meanwhile, I an hear my wife crunching ice and my daughter painting at the kitchen table in there. I want to shout, “will someone please open the damn door!” Why the hell is it locked? I’ve been in and out of the house? But I manage to get my oily fingers around the right keys, get them into the deadbolt lock and push aside my irriation. I turn the key and push, nothing happens. I try the handle lock, it is still turning freely, but the door won’t open. I shove. I rattle the door in its frame. Nothing. The bolt is frozen in there. 

“What’s going *crunch* on out there?” My wife asks around a mouthful of ice.

“The damn door won’t open.”

“Huh?” It’s hard to hear when you’re chewing something that loud. 

“I said the damn door won’t open!”

The neighbors, by the way, are hearing this entire conversation. Given the proximity of our doors, one can hear everything that is said on our shared front porch. They are good people, and too polite to say so, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t see us as indelicate rubes forever yelling through closed doors, loosing a gaggle of indelicate children upon the world who are frequently trying to take a peek into their windows. All I need is a big old rusted car parked in my front yard to complete the picture.

When she finishes her ice trays, my wife tries the door from the inside. She rattles it as I did while I walk around to the back of the house and come in the back door to do the same, as if the result would be different. 

“Dammit! It’s stuck!” I say, stating the incredibly obvious.

For a moment, the kids crowd closer to see what the hubbub is, but when they deduce that it is only more door rattling—which they’ve recently seen with the bathroom door—they return to their stations at the kitchen table and on the back porch. 

While I go get the tools, I think about how often I say “dammit” Recently my three-year-old son, in conversation with me, tried out a casual “damn”. I thought, “well, it’s something even my grandmother would use to express frustration or impatience. It’s not a word without function, and it’s not vulgar. Still, when you hear a three-year-old use it, it make you wonder how often you are demonstrating frustration or impatience. I leave the garage with the tools, resolving to be as cool as I can about this whole thing. 

I take up my station at the of the house and continue rattling and pounding at the front door just to make sure the it isn’t the deadbolt or that it can’t be unstuck. The neighbors come out. 

“What’s going on?” They ask in a friendly way. 

“Oh, door’s stuck,” I say sheepishly and feel guilty for the door being stuck, like it’s something that would befall such a bumptious family that yells through closed doors anyway. There’s probably some polite, quiet thing that decent people do to care for their doors that I’ve never heard of which doesn’t involve all the rattling and tools.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” my neighbor tells me. “But I can help when I get back if you still need any help.”

I thank him and try to push down the feeling that he’s going to come home from work and find a doorknob that’s had a hammer taken to it, which is still stubbornly attached to the door, and the door attached to our house with the whole family coming and going through the front window. My wife and I still yelling to each other despite the window being open. A baby bawling from inside. 

I go back inside and start to remove the handle, but even when I’ve got the handle off and the bolt’s mechanism—the cylinder?— is there, I can’t get it unstuck. The bolt won’t pop back into place no matter what part of this thing I mess with. I shove a screwdriver in there, I grab a pin with pliers, I have two screwdrivers going at once. This thing isn’t budging and now, well, I’ve got a hole in the door where the knob was. I can’t leave it like this. 

I resort to the internet, which I had been really hoping to not have to do. I hate the feeling of tapping on my phone screen while holding a screwdriver in the other, impatiently listening to people who know how to fix doors demonstrate how the lock will just “pop open” on doors and door handles that look nothing like mine and, I suspect, are mere props to generate views. 

I leave Youtube and go to Reddit. In response to someone else’s advice on a thread, someone has posted, in all caps: “THE BOLT IS FROZEN. THE ONLY SOLUTION IS TO REMOVE THE DOOR.” Dammit, but at least it’s another option.

My wife has since slipped out the back door, and the kids come over, their curiosity renewed when they see me tapping out the pins the hold the door to the hinges. I explain to them how I have to remove the whole door since the bolt is stuck. They both climb up the steps behind me, probably secretly hoping the whole door will topple down on me with a crash when I take out the last pin or a similar calamity which would entertain them. 

But even with the third pin out, the door remains stuck fast. A Youtuber tells me to use a hammer to pry the door off the hinges. He has a lot more space than me to get the claw end of the hammer under the hinges, but I do my best, knocking all kinds of dents into the wall and around the frame in the process. Yep, there should be an old Ford parked right under the eucalyptus tree in the front, one with plants growing out of it and the front hood rusted open. It would match the hammer dents around my front door nicely. 

The kids weary of the mock drama of me wrestling with the hinges and resort to playing games of quiet narration on the stairs. I can hear them whispering the action of their games to themselves as they move toys back and forth and the sound calms me immensely. I love hearing them resort so thoroughly to their imaginations. It assures me that they will grow up to be compassionate and independent people. 

I go back outside and try throwing my weight against the door, but it’s as if the pins aren’t even out of the hinges. It’s like I’m throwing myself against a bank vault door.

I’m afraid to just try mangling the hell out of the lock, afraid to force anything in case I have to bring a locksmith into this. I can imagine them coming over and seeing the bent, smashed lock cylinder twisted part way out of the door and just shaking their head at such an obvious display of frustration and ineptitude and then saying something condemnatory like “well, since you’ve got this all twisted in here I’m going to have to get the blowtorch.” However, I manage to get a screwdriver underneath the cylinder and I can’t help but to just pry at the damn thing. It starts to bend and I think “here it is, the point of no return. This is where you succeed only in hopelessly mangling this. This is when you create a huge mess for someone else to deal with.” But then I realize that I’m obviously going to get a new lock; I’m going to throw this one out. Who cares if it’s bent as long as I get it out of the door!

Relieved of any anxiety about the state of the door, I just bend the thing all the way back, like an ape trying to use a complex machine, and just before the whole door falls on me, I remember to put the pins back in the hinges. The lock breaks, but the door remains intact and swings open to the front yard and the hazelnut bushes and azalea I have planted out there in lieu of having the rusted car. I return to the dignity of homo sapiens. 

The kids come down from the stars and congratulate me. The phone rings, I tell my wife on the way home from the pool—who I’m pretty sure was chewing on ice even in the car— to stop and get a new lock set. Hell, I even manage to get the knob installed, ready to go before I have to leave for work. 

The sun is out. It’s a beautiful afternoon. I announce triumphantly that I’m going to ride my bike to the office after all this honest labor. I go into the garage and find my bike with the back tire, the one I worked on all morning, totally deflated. 

“Dammit!”

Ways to Wake Up

This morning, on my way over here, I passed a man standing in his yard with a baby strapped to him, pacing, bouncing slightly. No matter how normalized, a still very incongruent thing to see in the dark of the very early morning.

Quite likely, the man was at a major crux of experience in life. An inflection point that, like most of them—except maybe high school graduation—we are ignorant of how profound and irreversible it is. 

It is difficult to catch the signs of a baby’s nascent personality, traits that will later solidify into something we recognize as a unique human being, with a unique orientation to the world. As a baby, they seem only a packet of demands, the fulfillment of which becomes duty and, in turn, shapes our unique orientation to the world.

In high school, I discovered my capacity for creativity was greater at night when the house was quiet, and I had space to explore my thoughts. Back then, I roamed through future possibilities, sandwiched, as I was, between a Stephen King novel and the Michigan winter outside. What I never intended to go beyond indulgent reading, mere resolution of conflict, gradually grew into musings on maturity. King’s teenage protagonists ventured into a world in which they were alone, and I followed eagerly in my mind, seeking a better understanding of my own burgeoning independence. 

Eventually, I discovered that I could intensify the experience by manipulating words in another way: before reading each evening, and exploring new emotional scenarios of independence, I would write, usually focusing on a single emotion and expanding on it as much as possible. In a way, I was priming myself to read, checking in with who I felt myself to be, before spending hours with imagined characters and trying to extract something personal from their experiences.

I built a cult of this routine, spending hours each night in words, trading the ephemeral daytime experiences of human interaction, of sight, and sound, for the solid, but mutable experience of writing and reading surrounding by the sleeping world. 

Turned out the routine was a great primer for college. The bulk of what I was expected to do as a student was to sit with words, ideas strung out in paragraphs and entire books, and make something of them, understand them and comment on them. Now, on my own, I built a temple for my cult of words, as a student, I was to be their acolyte. 

Long before I was a morning coffee drinker, I was an evening coffee drinker. I still can’t help but to associate the dark, earthy flavor and warmth more with twilight than with dawn; a way to cross over into the quiet period, to hone the focus on the page, while the world grows still, abstracted only by the occasional set of roving headlights, passing the café on the road outside. Inside, I was using the words I was reading to construct what I was writing through quoting. Moving them from one pile to another, sifting them through my fingers, using them to examine the radical present I was living in, on my own, with all the roads leading to the horizon seemingly open.

But unable to construct much foresight, I eventually began to impetuously follow these roads. No longer imagining them, glancing over the top of a book, but setting the book down and going out to walk them. Once I had begun, I found it difficult to stop.

I read less and walked more. With less of a routine to hold me to the nightly exploration of words, they lost their magnetism, and I wandered larger and larger circles in the night. The night would begin with reading, but I was no longer anchored in it by assignments and due dates, and, closing the book, I’d walk to the ocean, through the mountains that were just outside my constantly changing windows. Why read about what was, after all, right there?

I found other people out in that night, and I realized that I had been alone in my books, with my words. I followed these people, sometimes, and other times, they followed me. We went new places together, had conversations which reflected the writings I had done, it was another way of playing with the words, one that left no trace, and suited my itinerant lifestyle. 

Until all this foraging and this ranging through words and experience leads you to the experience of creating another life. For me, this transition came in the same way that moving from words to experience did. Gradually, I explored this idea further and further. Leaving the book face down on the coffee table, and shuffling out into the night for a walk that led to three hours halfway across town. 

And then I found myself in the position of the man walking through the neighborhood streets very early in the morning, bouncing a wide-eyed baby, resigning myself to being awake at a previously unknown time, and knowing that if I sat still and read, the baby would cry, and being tired of hearing crying. Being very tired of hearing crying.  

Before having a baby, dawn was the bleariest time of the clock. It was the punishing treasure at the end of the night, the exhausted sunrise before collapse. When reading, it was the time when you realize you have passed the entire time the world has been resting following someone else’s thoughts. When wandering, it was the time when you finally made it back home, having crossed over the night like a bridge. It was when the spell broke and you had to come back, or get risk getting seriously lost. 

My son slept beautifully, but he woke up around five or six am every day, and I gradually adapted my orientation to suit him. I went to sleep early, walking only to the mailbox, reading only a paragraph or two, knowing I would be awakened before the dawn for a new kind of exploration. 

Having known the world of words, and the world of wandering, I slept through the night, and woke to the experience of holding another world against my chest while I strapped the carrier on, and made my pre-dawn coffee, and together we would step out into the precise place on the earth rolling over into the sun shining through the darkness of space. The same point that once signaled the end, now signaled the beginning. 

No amount of reading, or wandering, or baby-soothing ever prepared me for the next stage in life, but it has always been fulfilling to know that I devoted myself so entirely to each one while I lived it. 

And just the other day, my daughter expressed regret at not being able to stay up late, explaining that she felt much more creative at that time. God knows what late stage I will be in when she begins to take my books of the shelf after we have gone to sleep, ready to create her own world of words and follow it where she will.