1001 Nights Cast

The smell of pine, the soft breeze, the sky a deep blue. Quiet nights and quiet days without end. A fox sneaking past the house last night, its eyes caught in the beam of her flashlight.

She wasn’t going to make a lot of noise.

Under these conditions, she began to tear apart the house. First, she stripped off the wall paper, wetting it little by little, then, tearing big pieces away. Pagodas in a dark green field, tendrils of ivy, flocked white teardrops, pink ponies and elephants, all coming off as fast as she could tear. She crumpled each piece and stuffed it into the black plastic bags.

She heard a small sound and turned to the window. Nothing but the neighbour’s cat licking its paw in the driveway.

Lifting the hammer to eye level, she rammed the wall until she had a hole as big as a fist. From there, she tore at the plasterboard, pulling off pieces and throwing them onto a pile at her feet. If only she could use the power saw, this part would go faster. Sweat was pouring down her forehead into her eyes.

To disturb the silence would have defeated her purpose.

She worked for three days, until the walls were down. After that she started on the floors, pulling up the floorboards, one by one. She pulled up the linoleum in the kitchen and the tiles in the bathroom. In the middle of the house, a large pile of garbage sat on the one floor she’d left untouched.

Each morning, she piled four or five bags into her truck, and, with a minimum of sound, drove them to the dump.

She barely stopped for food, didn’t wash and slept fitfully. It was a big job, an endless job, but she felt it had to be done. When she finished, the skeleton of the house would rise up on the land. That’s all she could hope for. On the reasons for all this, she was mute.

As she worked, she pictured herself in a new house made of glass. She heard loud sounds, but knew they were only in her imagination. Outside, it was a hushed world—only the call of a bird or the shooshing of the leaves in the trees.

She pulled out the plumbing and the electrical wires, the telephone cables, the gas lines. She began to sleep on the porch.

After she had finished the inside of the house, she rested for five days. Everything she heard had become louder to her. Hissing, sighing, flapping—howls, cracks, cricks, claps—screeching, groaning—creaks, slaps, caws—the world was roaring in her ears.

She would have taken off the shingles next.

Instead she’s in the city, in an undisclosed place. Her task half-completed, she sits at the window, looking out at another silent world. This room is non-descript—white walls, a bed, a chair, a lamp. She doesn’t even have any books.

She’s locked in this room, a prisoner, with no one to help her, not even the sound of a comforting voice. She thinks about the house, incessantly. Had she made too much noise? Was that the problem? Had she banged, thumped, crashed, cracked, yelled—without knowing it. She didn’t want to make a sound.

And her vision of the skeleton, was that all for nothing? Were they remodelling the house from the inside out? Would there be new wood floors, insulated walls with radiant heat, white tiles in the bathroom, something colourful for the kitchen. All this was unspoken, but she knew it was true.

If only she’d used fire, burning the house down to the rafters and struts, to a frame. But the bones of the house would have collapsed and there would have been nothing but ashes. That’s not what she wanted at all. She wanted the idea of a house, a sketch, rising up on the land.

In her mind, she heard all sorts of sounds.

‘It’s a pity,’ she thought, ‘that artists have to suffer, to be always misunderstood.’

Years later, when she had been famous for a while, she explained how her work began.

‘It began with my house, tearing it down to its frame, without making a lot of noise. That was the plan. My brother stopped me, put me in hospital, I don’t remember all of it. I think I was drugged for some time.

‘And then it came to me. As soon as I got out, I went to a hardware store and bought rolls of wire. I got a warehouse space on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t a web, no, that’s what people called it, but they didn’t see it clearly. It was a house, the skeleton of a house, made of wire.

“‘It was a musical instrument,’ they said, ‘a harp.’ I did pluck it and the sounds it made were quiet sounds, like water in a lake, just lapping at the shore. But it wasn’t a harp or a guitar or a violin. It was a house.

‘If you listened to it carefully, you could hear everything, even the hushed world, the place where no one whimpers or cries out or

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