The Sound: Sunday Morning

Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.

some sort of something

Mr. Taylor had been sick. Not with physical ailment—he was, in fact, an alert (if gaunt) young man of twenty-two or -three—but with what can only be described as a distinct and penetrating sickness of the soul—a malady which caused him no end of grief. This distress, in turn, further aggravated his precarious state, resulting in entire days spent curling in upon himself behind the dark blue curtains and dusty blinds of his rented room. Positioned so, he might think himself adrift upon a river, a pebble cast, weightless, no thing closer or further away than the other. Thinking this way, however, never relieved him fully of the burden of cognition, that vague and nagging spectre of distinction, which forced him to acknowledge, say, that although the sheets on which he twisted himself about in the sweltering but muffled daylight were brown, and the aged hardwood (mahogany, perhaps, or oak) on which the mattress sat on which the sheet was stretched was also brown, neither the sheet nor the mattress nor the floor were the same brown.[1] It was these minute disparities that troubled him:

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[1] The mattress, in fact, was a light blue. It sat as if sprawled within the cluttered expanse of the room, no box-spring beneath it, set slightly at an angle from the walls' degrees, so it seemed to ease out ever-so-prominently towards the center. Three of the room’s four walls were light blue too, though not the same blue as the mattress: more of a washed-out sky than the crispness of the mattress’s hue. These three walls were constructed of wooden panels, presumably like to the wood paneling that formed the periphery of the living room. It may also be assumed that the panels beneath the light blue paint were originally a similar bespackled brown to their brothers in the den, this an entirely new confusion of color than the hardwood floor or the sheet. The fourth wall, which faced the door on entry, was brick, a warmly russet grid that greeted and held the wandering eye, especially when the lamps were lit. It was the brick that secured my rental of the room. Many hours I spent tapping them, attempting to discern by resonances whether they were truly real.