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You remembered the one or two perfect days in your life. The balletic spin of a certain fallen dust, the point your right hand whereon ink had smeared. You remembered.
But where every day was that sun-soaked day, I cannot recall what happened when nothing was wrong.
The few months after that fateful arrival I occupied by making acquaintance with the home. While the others frolicked outside whenever possible, I'd excuse myself and wander around that maze of a place. Every day offered new doors to open, each one a portico to another dimension. The cellar walled by encyclopaedic rows of preserved entrails. The claustrophobic music room, empty save for an upright piano and a tilted barre. There was within me a thirst to dissect the home, anatomize its secrets.
I had to steady my breathing the first time I stumbled across the library. It was cavernous, with dark, webbed voussoirs that formed a grand arch overhead. The windows were more frame than glass, just hundreds of small wooden squares shattering the sunlight as they streamed in. Dark bookshelves soared and kissed the ceiling, and on them were books upon books upon books -- anchor-heavy atlases of everything mappable, sprawling prose in steely Cyrillic, mystical Arabic, rotund Gaelic.
The first book I took out was a hefty anthology of neurosurgery essays, Consecratio Medici and Other Papers. Underneath it, in gilded print, read Harvey Cushing. I spent weeks jotting down everything old Cushing had to say, in the library, under infinitely split sunrays. I understood him maybe three sentences out of every ten. The rest I had pleasure to define using the thousand other books at disposal. At its last page, I marvelled all light-headed at just how much more there were -- knowledge and time to burn.
There were other scholars in the home, too. Claire and Olive turned out to be mathematical savants, and I'd humour them by fake-sobbing at the Year-12 exercises they shred through. I'd catch flashes of pastel through the racks and watch Emma comb through the photography aisle again. Millard read everything from scripts by people with elaborate Greek names, to verbose essays on the Brontë sisters. He was engaged to memoir-writing, though.
"Mark my words," he'd say for the trillionth time. A battered ball-point danced in the air as he gesticulated. "I'll chronicle this day so, very completely, they'll all be studying Mrs. Higgins' coughing fit three-hundred years from now."
For a while he attempted to study medicine, with me as his tutor. But that was how I found out about my ineptitude in teaching.
"... then these stuffs, they bind to the calmodulin, and they create this-- this sort of-- amalgam. And that amalgam activates this other thing that'll add phosphates to the myosins, you call it the MLCK..."
"Just what... are you on about? What's a calmodulin?" Millard said, the pages of Coggeshall seemingly crumpling on its own. "What are stuffs?"
