My confidence was not misplaced. By the time the next evening arrived, Meridian had lights.
There are accomplishments which announce themselves with considerable ceremony and others which consist of turning a switch and discovering that something happens. The latter are generally more useful. I had spent enough of my life in the company of computers to distrust any system whose principal achievement was to inform its operator how successfully it had started. A light, by contrast, either illuminates the room or does not.
Ours did.
The sconces cast their warm light across the wood-paneled walls, the green velvet curtains, and the small accumulation of domestic objects which had begun, without any particular authorization, to make the place look inhabited. The electric fireplace glowed beneath the bed. Beyond the desk, a tall ship labored through a blue North Atlantic on a screen mounted against a wall which contained no window.
Meridian was not finished. The refrigerator had yet to be installed, its wiring remained to be pulled, and the diesel heater awaited similar attention. There were still cables to secure, stores to arrange, and a quantity of construction debris which seemed to reproduce whenever my attention was elsewhere.
But the lights worked.
This was more than could be said for the judicial system, whose machinery I had also been attempting to persuade into operation.
The Answer had been filed. Whether the court would forgive the filing fee remained uncertain. I had submitted the necessary request, but poverty, even when adequately documented, is not a condition upon which one may safely presume official agreement. Service of the papers had required its own expenditure, since the opposing party must be furnished with the appropriate documents by someone other than the person whose immediate interests depend upon their arrival.
I had paid for that.
It was an interesting feature of the proceedings that every step intended to preserve my remaining options appeared to consume some portion of the resources necessary to exercise them.
There remained the possibility of a negotiated surrender. I was preparing terms for the property owner’s legal counsel in the hope that we might dispense with the remaining formalities and arrive at the conclusion toward which events were already proceeding. I would leave. They would recover their house. We would attempt to agree upon the conditions under which these things occurred, and perhaps avoid further expense in establishing what neither side seriously doubted.
The difficulty was that an agreement might require me to leave sooner.
I was not ready to leave.
I was also rapidly approaching the point at which readiness would cease to be relevant.
It is tempting, when contemplating a departure, to imagine that one will eventually reach a satisfactory state of preparation. The cupboards will be provisioned, the machinery tested, the accounts settled, the last box packed, and the traveler will step across the threshold with the pleasant conviction that nothing essential has been overlooked.
I had abandoned this expectation.
The more immediate question was how many unfinished things could accompany us without becoming fatal to the undertaking.
Don was supposed to have come that day to help pull the refrigerator and heater wiring. He did not.
This was not surprising. Don’s relationship with appointments remained much as previously described, and I had long since learned that the best way to endure his absence was not to organize an entire day around the certainty of his arrival.
Nevertheless, I had purchased parts for his vehicle.
There is a variety of disappointment which becomes particularly irritating when one has taken the trouble to prepare for it not to occur. I had bought the parts, arranged the work, and hoped that the man who had spent hours beneath my bed in intolerable heat might return to help complete the next portion of the undertaking.
He had not.
It would have been easy to improve upon this circumstance by conducting a private prosecution of Don’s character. I possessed the necessary vocabulary, and considerable experience in its application. But the evidence would have remained inconvenient. He had already done work for which I could not adequately pay him. The electrical system was operating. His absence that day did not undo his presence on the others.
I was still annoyed.
These things are not mutually exclusive.
In his absence I turned my attention to the bed, which had acquired the unusual distinction of being both the most substantial piece of furniture in Meridian and the most difficult to make.
The mattress was fourteen inches thick. The sleeping alcove, raised above the electrical compartment and storage beneath it, provided considerably less space above the mattress than its generous dimensions might have suggested. I had designed it for sleeping, not for the convenience of a chambermaid, and the distinction became apparent as soon as I attempted to introduce fitted sheets.
A residential bed permits its occupant to walk around it, lift its corners, and arrange the bedding from a position in which the human spine retains something resembling its intended configuration.
Meridian’s bed permitted none of these things.
For approximately two hours I wrestled fabric, mattress, pillows, and myself through a sequence of positions which would have interested a particularly vindictive instructor of physical education. The fitted sheet resisted installation. The mattress resisted being lifted. My back, having reviewed the proposed activity, registered its objections in the customary manner.
At several points I considered whether the bed might be easier to make from outside the trailer.
It was not.
Eventually, however, the sheets were fitted, the blankets arranged, and the pillows established in their proper places. The green velvet curtains framed the alcove. The sheepskin lay across the bedding, and the little room acquired that peculiarly persuasive appearance of comfort which causes one to forget, for a moment, the amount of labor required to produce it.
I stood back and regarded the result.
It looked like a bed.
More importantly, it looked like my bed.
I had been sleeping in Meridian before, but there is a difference between sleeping upon a mattress which happens to be present and making one’s bed in the place where one intends to live. The former is an accommodation. The latter is a declaration, however modest.
The house outside remained full of things I could not take.
Inside, I had made the bed.
There was no ceremony to mark this transfer of domestic authority. No document had been signed, no title conveyed, and no official had been invited to certify the occasion. Yet some small part of the transition had occurred without consulting the court, the landlord, or the financial institutions which continued to maintain such an energetic interest in my affairs.
The bed was made.
The lights were on.
And Meridian, as I was shortly to discover, had begun to breathe.
Not literally, of course. I had not fitted her with lungs, although the ventilation system might be considered a reasonable approximation. The discovery arose instead from an examination of her electrical consumption.
With most of the equipment turned off, and the trailer otherwise settled for the night, she drew approximately eighty-eight watts.
This was not an alarming figure. It was the combined appetite of the inverter, the equipment left in standby, the small necessities of a home which remains awake after its occupant has gone to bed. There were losses in converting and distributing the power, and various devices which, although apparently off, retained a private interest in electricity.
The refrigerator had not yet joined them.
Eighty-eight watts is about the resting heat output of a small human.
I considered this for some time.
Meridian had acquired a sleeping metabolism.
The comparison was imperfect, as comparisons generally are when pursued beyond the point at which they become pleasing. A human body converts food into useful work and heat through processes considerably more elaborate than anything I had constructed beneath the bed. Meridian’s batteries stored electrical energy rather than breakfast, and the solar panels upon her roof had no particular interest in photosynthesis.
Nevertheless, there she was.
While I slept, she would continue to consume a little power, keeping the essentials alive. Her batteries would surrender a small portion of the energy accumulated during the preceding day. The inverter would maintain the electrical system. The various quiet mechanisms of domestic life would continue their work without requiring my attention.
And above us, the roof would wait for sunrise.
There was something unexpectedly companionable about the arrangement.
I would sleep in the velvet alcove. Meridian would keep watch over the modest civilization we had assembled within her walls. In the morning, provided the weather cooperated, the sun would begin replacing what we had consumed.
Yesterday’s sunshine would carry us through the night.
I had spent considerable time calculating this system in ampere-hours, watts, cable sizes, voltage drops, and the tolerances of protective devices. These were necessary calculations, and I had no intention of abandoning them merely because the resulting machinery had acquired a personality.
But the numbers had become a home.
That was new.
Of course, once the refrigerator moved in, Meridian would develop an appetite.
There would be food to keep cold, water to move, air to circulate, and, in due course, heat to provide when the desert became less accommodating. The electrical system would need to support not merely the agreeable spectacle of a few lamps but the ordinary demands of two living creatures, one of whom required medicine and neither of whom could reasonably be expected to subsist upon the satisfaction of having completed an interesting engineering project.
The solar panels would have their work cut out for them.
So would I.
For the present, however, the bed was made, the lights were on, and the machinery beneath us was quietly converting stored sunlight into the conditions necessary for sleep.
Outside, the house awaited its disposition.
The court awaited its decision.
The landlord’s counsel would shortly receive my proposal.
Don might appear tomorrow. He almost certainly might not.
And so I turned out the lights.