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from its neighbour piece and away from the whole. Making it bigger by making space. It’s a new architecture, a purest architecture he’s learning, one that widens the spirit. In the stomach a palpable emptiness and glow. Each piece taken from a whole is another door lifted off hinges.
    He falls back onto his pillow. He’s breathing hard for no reason except age. He wonders if he shouldn’t put on some clothes for this.
    Richard interrupts the silence to give the taxi driver a second address. He really should see the house. How long has it been since he came out for Christmas? Three years? Four?
    His accent heavy, the driver is squat and feline and could come from any number of hot countries. He appears irritated by the detour, as if he’s being asked something that threatens his wallet, though the meter ticks steadily up. When Richard spots the house and asks the driver to slow down, the driver swings to him with apparent dismay and asks, “You
want
?”
    It doesn’t help that the house the driver has been asked to stop at is doorless, with dark gaps like empty eye sockets. Through the front door, furniture can be seen in the hall shadows. Even the double garage door is gone. The perimeter of the house is barred with two strips of yellow police tape and Richard doesn’t bother to explain when the driver turns again to stare at him. He takes in this house he hardly knows, the helpless little curve of its drive, meant to suggest an estate. The faux shutters. He wonders why, ten or twelve years ago, his parents ended up here, in suburbs. They had lived in Barcelona. New York. New Mexico. Up a fjord ten miles from the Alaskan border. Likely they were here for the same reason as everybody else — convenience. Proximity to a hospital.
    Richard wonders if the police were calling the home invasion a home
invitation
because of the absence of doors. Well, why wouldn’t they joke? Isn’t his father’s eccentricity funny? Or, if we just cut to it and call it dementia, what’s dementia except nature’s ugliest joke? To put the wrinkling people back in diapers and also make them crazy.
    He wonders if he has the legal right to go in and look around. Though why bother. He’s been in a thousand houses like it, sold dozens with a similar floor plan.
    Richard remembers the trips, which were always in service to his father’s career, where he first learned about the qualities of the desirable home. All those times as a child hanging around odd buildings, learning concepts like “natural light” and “onsite-energy source.” He remembers that long drive to New Mexico when, leaving a gas station, him in the back seat with a new old-fashioned pop bottle in hand, his father explained “neo” to him. And when he arrived at their new home he understood that “Neo Vernacular” meant a huge old weathered country shack that was actually brand new and had heated floors, disguised solar panels, and a cool hidden electric dumbwaiter that delivered stuff up to his bedroom.
    This house, his father’s last, had no architectural label.
    Richard wonders at the house’s worth, and the size of his commission. Because of course he’ll be getting the listing. Why wouldn’t he? He isn’t up on the market here but it’s in a nice neighbourhood and might be in the half-million range.
    But how perverse is this? To hear about his father’s attack, to fly out and pass the house on his way to his distraught mother — and then to pause and calculate commission? He feels some guilt, but wishes he felt more.
    When told to continue downtown, the driver groans as if put upon.
    He can’t find his robe in the dark of the closet so he feels for candles in his drawer and locates two. They are the Gaudi tower replicas a colleague sent from Barcelona as a kitschy joke; from the look of it Gaudi wanted to build a vertical city for hobbits. Space