NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Jake Trip moved into his dream house last year at 1674 Oval street. Wicket Street is flat, narrow and one way going around the hill from East to West about half way up from Boundary Road at the bottom of the hill. The steep incline of Oval Street between Boundary Road at the bottom and Wicket street above, passes Jake Trip’s granite faced basement walls as they disappear into the slope. The basement was cut into the hillside and all eight oneiric stories are visible only from Wicket Street. I did not mount the twelve steps up from Wicket St. to enter through the formal front doors. Mrs. Gomez let me in through a side door under a half- timbered overhang. Looking at all this granite off Oval Street could lead one to expect battlements above, but there are several stories of half timbered stucco. It’s exterior is designed in many styles. The brick facing on Wickett street features arches and ledges and iron railings in front of tall windows. Looking up at the top stories I can see the last few leaves against the long parallel lines of siding like notes on an extended staff. The sun sets behind mature oaks growing on the perimeter and none of them obstruct his sixth floor view of distant hills beyond the river. Jake owns a local Snaz Super Store franchise. Lou had introduced us over a platter of bear meat as the three of us helped ourselves at his last barbecue. Jake was interested in telling me about the neighborhood but we didn’t talk much at the time. Before he left he told me to walk over for a visit after I move in. Now he is speaking to me from the privacy of his Jacuzzi on this unseasonably warm November evening. I declined to join him, but settled into a Snaz semi-inflatable seating pod close by on the extensive sixth floor deck. The pod surrounds you like an amoeba as you sink into it, but surprisingly, it firms up when its innards find their equilibrium around you.
Jake stands up to observe me. Two crows call to each other on the dead branch of a Willow Oak growing up from Diddlie’s yard next door.
“How about that?” exclaimed Jake, dripping in his tub. Narrow curled leaves from the oak blow into the water, and float next to his knees when he sits down again.
I tell him it was like sitting in a jellyfish in front of jeering crows. “Yea, that’s about it” Jake goes on. “How do you know they’re jeering?”
“Only a guess.”
“I don’t think we interest them. They’re busy trying to make a living like the rest of us. My daughter developed that thing as a college project. She’s got them on the market already; pretty good in two years. So far I am the only Snaz store that carries them.”
“How’s business?” I asked; “Hey, business is good” Jake said. He also indicated that lower taxes will be great for him and his employees. “I held the line on wages and benefits this year” he remarked sternly. The proud Snaz owner has cleared most of trees from his lot and his dream now rises eight stories above the expanse of his smooth lawn .
I ask if he is going to plant any trees to replace the losses.
“Yes I have a shipment due in next Tuesday. The trees will grow back. They have a history of doing that. Ask the coal industry.”
He splashes at a late wasp that found his plate of sliced Mountaineer apples. He offers me some and goes on. “By adding that eighth floor, we have an unobstructed view of the river and the Parkway. We will see trouble before it finds us”.
Jake has a full security package which cost him ‘half a mil’, he remarked with a wink, including a contract with Suburban Safety and Security Solutions. Jake tells me that they are able to respond discreetly, in minutes, 24/7, with a team of consultants who will “assure the protection of your home”. He finishes the last slice of Mountaineer apple after I refused it.
Trip dismisses local residents’ complaints about the excessive height of his structure as narrow-minded.
“These folks need to get a life,” remarks Trip, as he rises again and starts drying himself off on his sunny Eastern exposure. “I have added to the security of all my neighbors and raised the value of their homes.” He pauses to dry his head and face.
“You can’t take it with you. So, I thought I would just realize a dream of mine to live in a multistory home.”
Standing up again, I can see the sky’s unlimited blue reflected in his jacuzzi water as the surface stills after he steps out. I can also see warm yellow brown patches in the river filled with mud washed in by recent rains. After this short chat he goes inside to dress. As he opens the door from the deck into the house the twins come out in elegant deep purple Snaz track suits with their names Liberty and Gale, embroidered on the front and logos on the shoulders with gold piping on the sleeves and pants.
No they are not twins. Sorry, it is Jake’s youthful wife Gale. She blows her husband a kiss and introduces me to their daughter Liberty.
Gale takes the lead, guiding me down to the second floor wine ‘cellar’, where my tour with Jake will begin. I notice their matching NY Yankee baseball caps and white shoes with purple stripes, and more Snaz logos in the back below their ankles. We take our time descending the grand double staircase, modeled on one that sank in “Titanic”. Liberty tells me that her mother was a semi-pro tennis player in her time, and now runs the “Sports Arena” at Snaz. I ask Liberty about Snaz, and they both laugh nervously, as Liberty explains that “Snaz isn’t ready for me yet.”
As we enter the wine ‘cellar’, Jake appears, in khakis, teeshirt and aviators. His friendly tones suddenly take on the familiar qualities of a sales pitch. It emerges that his five thousand bottles of Chardonnay, (he only drinks Chardonnay), are the beginning of a new line at Snaz. He plans to do a joint venture with Glitz Holdings.
“Glitz do high end Condos, and we shall do the wines and accessories,”
Jake explains. He has a fully motorized, climate controlled, inventory sorting and tracking system installed on three stories of structural steel, between the basement and the polished surfaces of his second floor ‘cellar’. I stand next to him while he activates the pop-out keyboard installed behind one of the mahogany wall panels that alternate with glass doors around the walls of the room. With a few key strokes he summons the screen listing his holdings and then selects the bottle he wants. The gentle murmuring of electronic switches and motors behind the walls is drowned out by a sudden shrill chirp from Jake’s cell phone. Gale goes over to his side.
Liberty beckons me over to the door and suggests we move on. Gale comes across before we leave the doorway, with earnest apologies. She explains that this is not the right time for my tour. She offers lunch next Sunday, and a tour, if I don’t mind eating early. I accept. She escorts me to a Parisian art deco style elevator door, which doesn’t squeak or rattle and I go down to the lobby at Wicket Street level.
Walking out of the elevator into the entrance hall below I see a wall of television screens. There are four rows of four screens, some blank but flickering, others showing whatever comes into the mirror across the room. I turn to the left and notice a tall beveled glass mirror on the wall, perhaps twelve feet high and about four feet wide. As I walk toward it, my image in the mirror walks towards me. I keep going towards the mirror until my image meets me a few inches from the glass. The glass steams up as my breath hits it. So it happens a number of times on the screens opposite. I can see the screens across the room in the mirror. There appear to be slight delays between the video capture and the displays. When I turn around completely I can watch various pictures of my reflection, at different moments in the past few seconds. Some screens act like another mirror facing the one I was looking in, creating an image of ifinite regression, one image inside the other. I can’t tell where the cameras are.
“There seems to be something wrong with your security video Gale.”
There is no reply. The elevator door is closed. Gale is gone. I am too bewildered to fully understand the strange infinities in that video kaleidoscope. I walk out the front door and turn off the path through ivy in the deep shade cast by the Trip’s fantastic home.
