Journey around my room

From where I lie on my mattress on the floor, I can see the main room of my studio apartment in its entirety, either directly or via its dim reflection in the pearly glass globe that hangs from the center of a medallion--an upside down pie, full of lumpy curds and roses--on the ceiling. (I've just noticed a big black flea cantering over the furrows of my corduroy jeans; I bring my fist down heavily upon my thigh.) In the center of the globe I see a dark squarish shape, the rug, wearing on its lower right-hand corner a smaller, lighter rectangle, my bed, across which stretches a ghostly figure, me. Three smaller rectangles (two white, one red) that are set haphazardly against the rug's dark background just above my head are my dictionaries (English in two volumes, French) which double as bedside tables when I dine au lit. Five oblong trapezoidal digits extend from the rug's central palm. Two of them, dark and featureless, hang from its bottom edge: the door to my closet and the adjacent entryway from the minuscule L-shaped hall. The three remaining digits, radiating from the top edge of the central square, are brightly lit and animated, being the reflections of the three facets of my bay window (I have one of the smoothly curved variety, with glass panes and sashes of a matching curvature). At their base is a jumble of various shapes and colors pertaining to the objects on the surface of my desk. What appears to be a smaller, accessory window off to the right is the work of my mirror, which, resting on the chest of drawers, catches through the left-most window a portion of Fulton Street that would otherwise be invisible to me in my present position. Thus, the tiny image of a car that traverses the triptych from right to left is seen a moment later receding from left to right in the mirror's mirrored rectangle. The two side walls, pale beige and unadorned, do not figure prominently in my spherical pendant, but, examined directly, they form, together with their door-punctured brother, a playground for an endless series of transient fields and flashes of light and shade projected by passing cars. Occasionally an expanse of pale rippled light whose source may be the sun's glare on the rear window of a propitiously parked car will bear the imprint of intervening leaves belonging either to the somewhat dirty, bedraggled little tree just outside the window or to my own exuberant Schefflera that trumpets its leaflets upward in fan-shaped clusters from a basket on the desk. Before we move on to the rest of the apartment, note the radiator standing in its corner by the window, its four stubby legs piercing the carpet, its head cocked (mouth permanently embezzled in the short, twisted branch of a long narrow stem that emerges from the floor and disappears into the ceiling), its tail with that little hole from which water drips into a foil baking pan and from which gaseous sighs emerge at the end of the day. It's quite tame now, but for a while after I moved in it seemed fiercely inconsolable, and was especially upset when feeding--morning and evening meals were continually interrupted by mind-cleaving explosions. Now it purrs and percolates contentedly, emitting on occasion a low shudder that is less heard than felt: a pleasurable vibration in the pelvic bones.

The bathroom, small and windowless, harbored for a time in its upper corners a dynasty of daddy longlegs, whose last scion accidentally drowned last week while I was taking a shower.

From my chair in the kitchen I look across the table to the window. A vertical indentation in the building's box-like structure has provided space for an outdoor stairway, a garbage chute, and kitchen windows. The neighboring building is not very large, nor is it built right up to the property line, so quite a bit of light falls down into this well, and, although my apartment is on the first floor of a three story building, I can see, if I lean my head slightly to the left, a band of greenery from the neighbor's backyard with a bit of blue at the top. But there is another, more roundabout approach to sky-gazing possible here. Directly across from my window, but mostly hidden by my half-length curtain, is the kitchen window of a first-floor neighbor. More accessible to my sight is the second-floor kitchen window directly above it. Reflected in this window are a section of the rotund garbage chute and the third-floor window on the opposite side of the light well, i.e., on my side. Dimly seen behind the glass of this reflected window is a moving shape. I stare at it and it becomes still, seems to stare back. Suddenly the amorphous form condenses into a cat. But on the glass in front of this reflective cat is even another reflection: the top edge of the opposite side of the light well, another, more exalted section of the garbage chute, and, nestled into their cozy V, at last, the sky.