Free The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page A

would have been opaque a week ago. Emphasis added. It’s like someone’s taken a yellow highlighter to the dialogue.
    More rooms, more themes. More explanations from this fictional character made up of pieces of my son. A guitar room with a built-in stage; an office, wallpapered with letters and artwork Milo’s admirers have sent. “Pretty soon I’ll have to move to a bigger room,” he says. “It gets pretty crazy. There’s one girl who cuts my horoscope out of the paper and sends it to me every damn day.”
    Upstairs there’s a library—I scan the bookshelves for my books, their spines as familiar to me as the spines of my own children, but I find nothing—and a guest room I’ve never been invited to sleep in. A bathroom Milo calls “the sea monster room.”
    He walks us down the hall. “We used to have a beach room,” he says. “But the sand got really annoying. Not to mention that we’ve got the actual ocean right out back. But I’m always changing stuff up. I’m kind of like that crazy lady who was afraid to stop building her house—you know who I mean? Her husband invented a new kind of rifle or something, and she thought that if the house was ever finished, all the ghosts of people who had been killed with those guns would come and get her.”
    The Winchester Mystery House. I feel a brief electric twinge. I remember Mitch reading about it in a travel guide and telling Milo the story. We even made plans to visit it once, but we never made it there. It’s in San Jose, I think, not too far away. I wonder if Milo’s ever been.
    He turns into the last room. “And finally,” he says, “the bedroom.”
    The camera pans the room. It’s a big, airy room, colored in different shades of white. A corner window looks out on the Pacific Ocean; you can actually see the Golden Gate. The bed itself is massive and simple, a block of dark wood. A comfortable-looking chair with an ottoman, a night table with an art deco lamp. And in one corner, almost out of sight, a rack of exercise weights.
    “We figured the bedroom didn’t need a theme,” Milo says. “Bedrooms kind of have their own theme.”
    The sleep room. The comfort room. The lay-your-body-down room. The sex room, the sweat room, the fuck-me-any-way-you-want room.
    “There’s just a really nice vibe here. I love waking up to that view.”
    The sick-in-bed room. The pillow-wet-with-drool room.
    “Top-of-the-line mattress. There’s, like, a three-year waiting list for these babies. Crazy expensive, but man, is it worth it.”
    The waking-up-with-a-hangover room. The alarm-clock-ringing room.
    “I hate staying in hotels now. They’re never as nice as this.”
    The screaming room. The beating room. The skull-bashed-in room.
    Bettina walks in. “You’re not telling them all our secrets, are you?” She puts her arms around him.
    The breath-turning-shallow room. The falling-heart-rate room. The choking, the gasping, the bleeding-out room.
    “Naw, baby,” he says. “But if walls could talk, right?”
    The viscera room. The crime-scene room. The last-thing-you-see room.
    “If walls could talk,” says Bettina, “we’d never get any rest.”
    •  •  •
    Later, after the sun has risen and the city has stopped holding its breath, I get myself dressed and head out for a walk. It’s still too early to call Joe—what time is acceptable? I wonder. Do rock musicians still sleep all day, or have they all turned into savvy businessmen who keep regular hours? And I need to get out of my room. Walking out into the pale morning, I try to imagine the landscape around me as a map of my son’s footprints. Milo has lived a life here, in this city of muted colors, this city as misty as a black-and-white photograph. He has walked these vertical streets and slept in these listing, seasick houses. I know nothing about the times he’s had here, though I’ve imagined them often enough: mornings in cluttered kitchens of group houses with shabby furniture and