A Paradigm of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

of her parents’ wills was made more difficult by the necessity to either see or avoid her brother—she chose avoid, usually—and if she mentioned it at all on the pages of the journal, she tried to be dispassionate about the cool anguish of her restless nights.
    She took her duty as a recorder seriously. Some details were not important.

    Morgan’s room was plain, almost barren, a habit into which she settled. A low wide platform in one corner was the bed, covered with, and with pillows of, plain-colored and Indian-print cottons. Against one wall were the desk and the short oak filing cabinet she had taken from her father’s office. A woven Cree rug near the bed covered part of the hardwood floor. The white walls were bare except for the colors cast by the sun through the tiny piece of stained glass.
    Soon she was no longer completely unencumbered. In a few weeks, she gathered some moss—of the human sort. Delany, her close friend all the time in university and fitfully since then, had been living in adapted housing that had just been “discontinued”: the polite word for sold out from under her to the highest bidder. Morgan made her the first of the tenants in her penitential boarding-house. Then, by chance in the Swedish prefab-furniture store, she met Russ, back in the city from Indonesia and looking for a house to share: she recognized him despite the beard and the heavy tan—and the streaks of white in hair and beard. A friend of Russ’s, Jakob, recommended because he was a dancer and needed a studio and Morgan’s house had big rooms, turned out to be someone she had worked with years ago in an art therapy program, canceled during funding cuts.
    Jakob discovered (with suitably dramatic shrieks of joy) the tiny gymnasium the school had long ago created in the attic when converting the brick house, and immediately claimed it for a practice room. At one end there was a loft which became his sleeping place. He hung it about with silk scarves and gaily-colored cloths. His bed was a pallet on the floor, spread with a brocade throw. He was putting up mirrors on one gym wall, and a barre , had rented a sander to smooth the floors. From his area outward, all the surfaces in the house were starting to be covered with a layer of fine wood dust, dotted with the pawprints of cats.
    Russ was moving into the small room upstairs, at the back. Nothing was there right now but cardboard boxes containing the modular furniture, ready to be assembled, that he had been buying when he and Morgan happened on each other. He had gone hiking: would really move in next week, he’d said.
    Delany chose the room beside the elevator. She was in angry revolution against ground-floor living after years in the handicapped-people’s-housing complex; the elevator allowed her to take this second-floor room with the big north-facing windows giving her an elevated perspective of the deep ravine behind the house. The room’s ell shape had been formed decades ago by removal of walls between three smaller rooms—in the school, it had been a common room for the teachers. In one arm of the ell was her special bed; in the other, in the light from the biggest windows, her paints and easel. The rest would arrive on the weekend, when her brothers were going to help her move. From that room, for three days, had come plaster dust and paint fumes from the renovations, while three grumpy workers had taken only an hour to install a wheel-washer for Delany’s wheelchair in the mud room at the side door.
    Morgan looked into doorways at random, walking through and through the house, wearing down her paths. Occasionally she encountered one of the cats doing the same. Marbl, the one she had brought with her, was five years old, lonely and tentative. Dundee and Seville, the five-month-old marmalade twins they had all gone together to pick out at the SPCA, were exuberant and raucous. Morgan felt a kinship to Marbl, who stayed close to the walls, hissed when the