He suffocates the final members of his family. He removes his shoes. Padding through this house of a hundred rooms, he listens for the ticks of the grandfather clocks and finding them he holds their hands until they stop moving. He shushes televisions and stereo speakers, he unplugs the noisy world. That evening he sleeps in the starched raucous-colored sheets of his childhood bed. In his dreams he is in the basement of a big old thing, composed of mud with hollows on the inside. Associations cluster: rabbit warrens, wasps, apartments built from masticated paper, mansions dug out, clutter and claustrophobia, the deeds of the day. It’s all too much.
          In the morning he gets to work.
          He has the house leveled, preserving only a few mementos. The staff are dismissed, and buried far away. The groundskeepers are let loose to produce their wildest fantasies, on the condition that, starting one mile from the house, the gardens and orchards and crops start to organize themselves, to diminish to a demure size, to display their more reserved colors, to whisper charmingly in the breeze of night, to leave their raw barbarian scents a mile down the road and grow more subtly perfumed.
          He hires the best, with his family’s money. The rubble of the house is carted away, the cellars excavated too, the earth scraped and hauled away. New servants ornament the new white home—of poured gleaming concrete with mica flakes, and new windows, every wall securely regimented with them—which emerges small but confident in the center of the new shapely low-lying gardens watered by the cleverly symmetrical and cedar-smelling pools, calm and undisturbed in the distant middle of the further wild world.
          In time he becomes a recluse. The family business is relegated to one hour in the day, the second hour before dawn, the worst hour anyway. Visitors yawn, but discreetly. The other hours he fills with reading and religious reflection. Every night before the evening meal he walks the hundred yards to the gravesite, waving away the attendants and the clouds of incense, and pisses on his family’s graves. If only their mouths were open, he thinks, and as he returns to his new white house his servants strip him of his clothes and rinse him and wrap him in fresh white robes in which he will take supper alone.
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