The Manuscript Room

Lyrics

Another climb. Up past the second floor.
Past the fixed gazes of The Portrait Hall, where all the arguments are settled and framed.
The air thins out. The steps narrow. Dust motes dance in the sliver of light from the high window.

Here, on The Attic Landing, the house exhales a century of held breath.
A left turn. I keep my eyes from the door to The Taxidermy Room, from the glass-eyed stillness of things that once ran.
That is a different kind of history. Too final. Too neat.
This is the one I need. The key is cold in the lock, where it’s been waiting since 1953. Or was it 1981? The lock doesn't care.

And the door swings open on the silence.
The smell of dry paper, brittle promises.
Here is the monument to the second draft. The life rewritten, the one that never took.
Under the single green lamp, the performance was meant to happen.
Just stacks of paper now. Just the weight of every word.

The old map table is scarred with compass points, journeys plotted to countries of the mind.
The filing cabinets are labeled by year, but the years are fictions.
'1928: The South American venture.' There was no venture.
'1946: Letters to my son.' He never had one.
This was the real work. Forging a better past. A performance for an audience of one, who was never quite convinced.

The scent of oxidizing lignin has a sound, a low hum, the C-sharp of a promise breaking.
I found the ledger once. The one that catalogues the others.
Page one hundred, it reads: 'An attic room, containing the ledgers.'
It describes this light, this dust. It describes a man standing by the table, remembering, or remembering being remembered.
It knew I was coming.

And the door swings open on the silence.
The smell of dry paper, brittle promises.
Here is the monument to the second draft. The life rewritten, the one that never took.
Under the single green lamp, the performance was meant to happen.
Just stacks of paper now. Just the weight of every word.

On the north wall, a rectangle of clean wallpaper.
Where something hung. A diploma? A map? The first page, framed?
Some stories don't even make it to the page.
They just leave a clean space where the dust couldn't settle.