What Manner of Light?

He couldn’t live off the money he made from writing, so he bought old houses in the city, ones that needed a lot of work. He lived in them, writing in the mornings, and at night he fixed the house. He put in new windows, did plumbing work, laid tile—and he wrote and wrote and wrote—for as long as it took, sometimes for years, until both the book and the house were ready to put on the market. He made sure he finished them both at the same time, and from both he made a decent living, at least enough to buy another house and live comfortable in it, while he worked on the next book. It used to be, when he had started buying houses, that the book was the most important of the two works. The fixing of the house was an excuse, a means to write, but after a few years, he got good at it. He sometimes put in stained glass windows, and he learned how to design them himself. He did mosaic tile work around old fireplaces, he learned to install kitchen cabinets, to sand and stain the wood, and all that work began to take on a precision of craft and an intuition of art that became just as important as his books.

He was proud of his houses and liked to imagine the families that would live in them.

Sometimes, as he worked, he even talked to them, these future families, stepping back from a project to get a better look. He’d put his hands on his hips, sigh, look next to him, as if an entire family stood there watching him. He’d say, “What’s it gunna be, red or blue trim?” Sometimes he imagined their names. He talked to them as he put up a new window or replaced a ceiling light for a ceiling fan. He imagined people like Harry Wormholder, who was married to a woman named Sally (who was hardly ever home), and they had a teenage daughter named Destiny, who mostly stayed in her room listening to the rock band Tool. Sometimes, when Harry Wormholder got too irritating, the writer plugged his iPod into some speakers and he too listened to Tool or some other dark, heavy rock band, from Led Zeppelin to Archaic Torture, a demonic local group whose CDs he had bought at the night club where they performed. He loved hard rock, could get lost in it, could move his head up and down caught in the metallic rhythm, and although the writer, now pushing fifty, may have looked silly doing it, he went to bars where they had three rock bands back to back. He would sit in a shadowy corner by himself, feeling the music, sipping neat whisky, while kids in their twenties, dressed in black satanic T-shirts and leather jackets, drank beer from dark bottles as they gathered around the stage or jumped into the mosh pit.

As a writer he never worked while music was playing, but as a repairer of houses, he always did. He felt peaceful hammering and screwing with the music on as loud as possible, unless Julio was helping him. At times, when he was doing carpentry work, like hammering nails into wood, one after another, the hammer against the nail into the wood making its own rhythm, the music would be so loud and he would think of himself as complete, not as a soul becoming, but as one who has become. He was whole, lacking nothing. He considered himself fortunate that he was able to live a comfortable life being a writer. He avoided readings, those occasional requests from colleges and universities to come to campus for an event. He had no MFA or a graduate degree in English, just degrees in math and physics, so he couldn’t teach writing and had no desire to teach math.

He worked on the houses later in the day, starting around three p.m., right after a nap. During the work day, he took frequent trips to Five Home...