Alys Beach: Imagined Thresholds

When my beach reads are Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Susanna Clark’s Piranesi, my stroll through the seaside community of Alys Beach becomes more than a sightseeing tour through thoughtful variations on the theme of white stucco houses, but also an exercise of an overactive imagination spilling into architectural and psychological profiling. Probably my own. I’ve chosen photographs of eight doors from the community and wrote little stories to accompany them. Fictions, perhaps. But truthful ones.

He remembered when they climbed into the Colosseum at night, up to the top, beyond where the tourists go. He was with Romans, he was in their city, they had a guitar and bottles of wine. The brick came loose from his step up the canted pilaster. ”Take it!” they said. “You’ll remember us forever! And The Eternal City!” Was it original, two thousand years old? Or was it from one of the renovations? None of them knew. He traveled with that brick in his rucksack through his Eurail pass adventure that hot summer in the nineties, poor in lira and francs and pounds but so rich in spirit and that youthful optimism that is one part fear and two parts blind faith that refuses doubt.

Years later now, those Romans are still his friends, and he has built a house by the sea. He still has the brick, his Italian contraband. He showed the brick to his builder: “Surround the door with bricks like this.” Long. Thin. He will see them each time he enters. His friends will recognize the gesture. And the light here is the same pale gold in the late afternoon as he felt in Rome: Warm and alive.

She should have known then, the first time she was invited in, that her initial steps from the cool, shaded alley across the tall threshold and into the bright squinting pool courtyard, with its spilling fountain laughing somewhere beyond, and its perfect axis aligned to all the rooms she would explore straight ahead of her, each with their alternating shadows and brightnesses, aligned like all her future days and nights, and the rip of blue sky and palm frond and flitting bird wing and flowered seasalt air above, and the sound of his bare feet just ahead of her on the limestone, and the brightness of his eyes still a retina memory in her own eyes, her first tentative steps that followed him in: she should have known then that the threshold would change her, and that she would never be the same.

She could never reverse through that threshold and return to her old self.

She already thought of that woman as someone else.

The couple wanted a door that would be just like looking at their nearby sea, a door with an opening above it where the breeze would breathe through their courtyard. “The blue of the door should match the particular color of the sea just beyond the sandbar,” they said. Right where the sandy depths began to give way to the slow, gentle descent to the dark, the blue you see roughly half-way to the horizon; your eye could pick it out easily from the beach, though it was harder to discern when out in the waves, floating amongst the blues, the sunlight waving across your toes below you on its way down to its deepest reach. As if the sea had its own blue door.

They asked the painter to match their door to this part of the sea but they had no idea the color would grow dark or bright or shiny or dull and always change its blue mood to exactly match that of the waters, it was a magic they laughed at, and they questioned their own sense of wonder, and if they were just conjuring the idea of it in their minds. But if that were true, they thought, how were they both seeing the same blue?

They realized at that moment, each looking into the eyes of the other, that they were always conjuring their own reality together.

At first glance, so much about their relationship was about compromise: two headstrong, heartstrong people committed to being in love, each figuring out how to surrender lovingly to the other. The irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Each used to getting their own way, they slowly and willingly learned that compromise does not mean weakness or failure, but instead could be the revelation of a new thing they could create together.

Their argument over which direction their beach house door should face (north, for the cool, non-direct light; or west, for the dramatic warm sunset) was settled by the Boolean carving out of the corner by the architect: a compromise where they both would be happy, and where the resulting form would forever stand as a unique testament to that decisive moment.

Clubs. Diamonds. Hearts. Spades. The ironwork in the wood door, set in a rotated square, refers to each of these in general and none of them in particular. Perhaps they refer to playing cards, or even older tarot decks.

The door is shaped like a parted curtain. Games are played inside, the door seems to hint, and this house is but a tent, a carnival mirage. We are starting to believe that there is nothing that is true residing inside, only sunburnt fictions, seducing stories we desperately want to be real. The resident’s friends remember their visits only as dreams, where they gambled and won, or lost big, and the wine never ran dry as they permitted themselves, for once in their lives, to risk it all, to chance it, to try on lies that would never fit elsewhere. One needed only to knock, and enter. They each describe the Owner so differently that there is no consensus on his identity. They are not even sure if they’ve ever seen him outside his door.

She found a house by the sea that spoke to her, and through its open-mouthed, wooden-arched double doors it whispered: ‘I will help you forget all that troubles you, that itinerary-life from where you came; come inside, we will measure your life instead with tides and winds, the skypath of the sun and the infinite dawning of the starry night.’ Could a house do this for her?

The first time she passed through the doors she felt the cool of the vestibule and like a veil of forgetfulness she lost memory of the inessential things.

The second time she passed through the doors, sandyfooted and salty, the veil took from her all worry for the things she couldn’t remember, and she slept with the window open, rocked gently by the far-off waves.

The third time she passed through the doors, in the silence of the second vestibule hidden from the outside, she remembered only her breathing, and only then when it came to mind. Her dependable heart beat without reminding. That night she slept in an empty bliss, and her parents came to her in her dreams, pleading on the steps outside the open double doors, mute silhouettes under the new moon.

My father chose the lot in the seaside village where we would build a house and spend our summers, those youthful summers that we remember as never seeming to end. He collected select pieces of wood from the scrub oaks that were on the lot before it was cleared, hard gnarled wood, with trunks no thicker than his thigh. His contribution to the construction was the design and crafting of our courtyard gate from that oak wood right from this very place. ‘It sheltered this land when it was a tree, and it will shelter us still. It knows it is still home. It remembers,’ he said. Still, he needed saws and vises and glues and stains to bend the wood to his will. Now it stands bright in the beachlight. Oddly, it is the only door in our courtyard house; spaces and rooms flow one from the next, easily and gently like the approaching and retreating sea foam or a visiting breeze.

I have a theory that I never shared with my father when he was alive: the gate he made had a power of remembering. Anyone coming in, handling the gate, sat and shared our hospitality and our open house, and then couldn’t help but share a story that they had not recalled in so long but now was so vivid and real. Some would be overcome with memories, always happy, sometimes bittersweet. It happened to us, too. I think my father knew this to be true as well but never revealed it out loud.

I’ve seen it all. We’ve seen it all, I should say, and we’ve seen it together.

The ebullient joys and the unspoken sorrows.

Her Perfect words that settled into Perfect poetry.

My numbers self-configuring into self-knowing maths.

Little successes and even littler failures.

The ever-faster whirl of seasons.

Great grandchildren absorbing the sun and the sea here with unimaginable vigor.

Makes us feel surely we will live forever.

The generations gather at this house, this white door carved into this white wall that lets the sun play in its recesses, with these white marble spherical sentries like our perfect words and perfect maths sphinxpaw-like on either side.

We are not old but Platonic and pure.

We are not an archeology of time but instead Sun-bleached and stripped of all that is unnecessary.

Come in, describe your day with words and numbers.

They will write equations of love all by themselves here.

We will understand.

My Last Day at Work

The watch wristbuzz wakes me gently, with the earbud I left in last night blossoming with optimistic sound waves like ambient dawning. After breakfast maybe I’ll peek at the data and look at the dream-wave signatures, wonder if my sleep was productive, if I’m still grinding my teeth, count signs of nocturnal vigor, haha. So much data. A daily fog of data.

In the shower the ping of a calendar reminder: this morning’s office meeting will be a pioneering one, a potential landfall after a season of drift: the last of the program linkages between design departments in the studio were cloud-loaded and enabled last night. Today we find out if the new design software can be more than the sum of its parts. I opened up all current work to the DesignMind program (or DM as us old-school folks call it) and after some debate, we dismantled the firewalls and teased the nerve links to connect to Alphanet. Alphanet owns the out-of-the-box DM, pre-adoption as it were, and with this new baby neural net our DM architectural modeling program will, theoretically, wake up and learn and absorb basically everything any architect has ever drawn digitally.

The total digital sphere of architectural influence will be folded into the Buildspace. Our Buildspace. That, combined with the scans of every major historic work of architecture libraried online, will make for pretty deep knowledge of how and why and what us humans have built anywhere on this earth. My team says it will be like giving LSD to a child with a CrayonApp on an old iPhone (I never know if their metaphors are supposed to be a good thing or bad...) They are usually so rhapsodic about big data and the potentialities of a machine learning assist, but I don’t know now... Anything that helps produce an array of possibilities so we can whittle down the design options from infinite to one could be a great thing. I will always be there to sift and sort from the best iterations myself: DM cannot know the best result because it doesn’t intuit. That’s all I do anymore in this thought processing world: Feel my way through. That’s my value.

Dress and signal the Coffeepour. Do I need the Faraday tactical suit today at client’s office? They wouldn’t dare to try stealing the BIM file library from our phones again. Driveway message from the car: expect good battery storage today, with forecast for clear skies. Full charge. Drone deliveries stack against the garage, blocking the gate again—can they not stay in the pad zone? Refrigerator and pantry must have colluded for a simultaneous food order. Last time this happened they accessed my HealthChart and revised my milk order to skim and added vegetables pulled from the wife’s recipe search history. All because my cholesterol is still high? I need to figure out the overrides.

Car says fourteen minute drive to office with negligible traffic risk probability—I’ll let it get me there and interface with the team en route. Did I leave the house without saying goodbye again? Everyone is in their own world all the time. I rail against them but I am the one lost in a virtual space most often. What’s the matter with me? This is what we’ve become? Getting that uncomfortable feeling again that we’re in the future and it’s not what we thought it would be. “Phone: add family time to weekly calendar, merge available times, set recurring. Then call studio. And put me in everyone’s ears.”

“Folks, why would the generative chorus run more than once last night? It should have enough resolution on best solutions after one pass, right?” (I might not have my head under the hood, but I know what the engine should sound like.)

The office replies: “Brian, you know DM assembles all project files on the server when initialized; it swallows google earth, sat imagery and utility data, it knows the program square footages the building needs, every parameter and constraint. Construction budget. Equity investor tendencies and market valuations. Previous work built by this client. It’s digested everything. The generator ran and kept running.”

“So when I get in we can look at the iterations and steer it where we want it to grow.”

“It isn’t following list commands anymore. It’s just. You’ll see.”

“What will I see?”

“Maybe your access code can reboot, but it’s done. The building is designed. It says it’s complete, it’s run accessibility and code review, clash detection, all the obvious stuff. It’s not waiting for...your approvals... that sounds strange to say out loud.”

“Sending you my temp log-ins now; let’s back the timeline up to concept mode and not let it play out to full constr—“

“Brian, it’s done. We’re just sitting here paging through a 324 sheet set, engineering and all, put together by DM. Window details. Landscape. Exterior envelope with perfect execution. Solar shading studies. Predictive reads on energy use... it ran scripts for renderings even, they seem to emulate the moody atmospheres from our previous work. Novel color schemes, in a way. Wait, it’s...”

“What? There are literally thousands of decisions to make before the design can be complete—wait, what does it look like?”

“T says the program is preparing a download site... It’s downloading the model offsite! It’s downloading itself to itself? That doesn’t make sense... What does it look like? It looks like something we thought you could do on your best day. It’s nice, you know, tasteful. Good plan. Perfect plan, really. None of those serendipitous moments that you seem to get excited about though, those little spiritual efforts that you’re always pushing us to be open to and looking for. Sense of wonder or whatever. That’s all subjective though, right? But it’s a totally complete thought, like it knows you, you know? K thinks you’re playing with us. Are you playing with us?”

“Pulling in now, I’ll be right up. Double the office air recycle if you don’t mind. We’ll call the client and...”

“... Looks like it sent itself to the client’s server early this morning. Why wouldn’t it have told us that? It’s embedded your stamp and forwarded itself to the city’s Bureau of Buildings. Now it’s scanning across all Amazon for fabricators? Could it be following through on the what-ifs in our meeting minutes? Your log in permissions look like ours now... they can’t override or reset or even delete. None of us can interfere with it now. What should we work on in the meantime? The program seems to be cycling through all of our active projects... Hello? Are you still there?”