many rooms, 2

October 2016

 

Where everything fell apart

 

"My Father's house has many rooms..."

John, 14:2

 

The room where everything fell apart had a semi-circular floor plan, pivoting around a spiral staircase, outside.

The stair landing paved with grey linoleum gave way to a broad threshold, with two white wooden doors, each with a rectangular moulding with concave curved corners. One of these doors was always closed, fixed in placed by upper and lower steel pins, while the other opened against a curved wall, leaving behind it a small useless space. Beneath, marking the transition between two floor materials lay a brass strip. Entrance through this door immediately faced a long window, covering the whole perimeter of room.

The lower part of this perimeter was a deep sill, used for storage, and closed with several square white wooden doors, with the same moulding as the entrance doors, and with small hanging chromed pear-shaped steel handles. A few books, wooden boxes with old postcards from European museums, and unused gadgets were stored in these built-in cupboards. Under this strip of mostly empty storage space lay the skirting of the grey carpet, turning around to embrace the foot  of the wall. Above the wooden doors lay a thin band of white stucco, over which rested an array of Anolok Bronze anodized aluminium frames, holding – with black rubber seals – the slightly tinted glass panes that made the window, all the way up to the ceiling. Some of these panes were fixed, the others pivoted at their center, leaving half pane out and half pane in, when open. Cubpoard doors, frame, and panes were all flat, and thus turned rather roughly above the smooth stuccoed surface, ending up in two straight concrete columns, stuccoed over and painted white, which revealed the loadbearing structure of the room.

The ceiling was plastered white, continuous. Hanging from it, three chromed steel spheres lit the room at night, each with a sixty watt incandescent light bulb inside.

The floor, as noted above, was clad with an even grey synthetic carpet. On it lay a bed, in a completely different style. While the whole shell was white and streamlined, the bed was a rustic dark-brown wooden collection of ornaments, complete with two matching nightstands, and a crucified Jesus hanging on the curved wall above the headboard. Cross and headboard only touched the white stuccoed wall at a point. On each nightstand, a chromed steel sphere served as a reading lamp. One nightstand also had a phone on it. Behind the other, there was a button on the wall, that rang a bell on the kitchen downstairs.

At the furthest end of the curve from the entrance, stood a wooden valet stand, beside the bathroom door. Next to that door, and in front of the valet stand, was an aluminium and glass door, which opened up to a balcony. Between the thick and lush plants that filled the balcony,  hanged an empty white metal birdcage.

 

Jorge Mejia Hernandez