Sylvie The House on the Rock
I want access. I want a peephole
into Knox’s brain, want to see
what he sees, because I know it’s so different
even when we’re standing side by side.
Think of all the lenses that curve
and shape the way we know the world:
the religion lens, the money lens, the stability
or lack-thereof lens that shapes the way we see
that gas station, that golden retriever,
that hesitation in his eyes before I toss him
a line and hope to connect. Even our no-dad lenses
mismatch. No one experience can be mapped
onto another, we’re all so different even if
we’re the same, and it would make me give up
on the whole human project if it wasn’t the reason
I love it. The mystery. The almost. Alex Jordan
spent his years collecting things and every single one of them
is like eight feet tall. The House on the Rock
isn’t just his house, it’s a series of houses, it’s a maze
of catwalks that take you up through the life-
size ceramic angels with their unseeing eyes
bathed red by some flickering light and when
Knox looks at me and asks is this hell
I tell him he hasn’t even seen the self-playing
piano room yet. Fortune-telling machines
waggling their mustaches, slow-blinking dolls
with human hair and frilly little dresses,
marionettes, a dozen soldiers with cymbals
and they clap them together when we pass
on some signal we’re not allowed to see, and the noise,
the noise throughout is tinny and insistent
and bellicose, noise you hear in your nightmares, and
if Knox and I don’t talk for the first two hours here
it’s because of that, it’s because he’s letting me
pull him onward by the hand. In all
this magisterial chaos there’s one thing
I remember from when I visited at thirteen—the lull
in the action halfway through. A row of silent
old-timey storefronts and there
in their midst, a hot dog stand. A kid in a paper hat
working the roller grill. There are booths
and a cash register in this one instance of the actual
in a battery of simulations, and because of that
it’s more real than any reality I’ve known.
I dream about this hot dog stand and now I guess
I’ll dream about Knox across from me, trying—
failing—to take it all in. How can you
see through someone else’s eyes?
You watch what they make of the world. Alex Jordan
died and his carousel still spins on, riderless,
into infinity. The show you wrote plays on and on
after you shuffle off into the darkness, stage right.