Self Storage
A Serial: Episode 4
4.
The painted clock was placed in an inset that few would have occasion to enter, but which K. always checked during his rounds. Unlike the warehouse areas of the building, with their efficient rows of identical units under a high shared ceiling, this corner had a low ceiling and plaster walls which fully separated one room from the next. On the exterior, it filled one of many angles and protrusions that made the building difficult to map in one’s mind - its “footprint” more a series of steps, or perhaps missteps, as if one were looking for an eroded trail in the woods.
The clearest markers on the inside were the long hallways of its largest spaces, hallways one could look down 100 yards at a time. But these too took unexpected turns that sent them off another direction, like a fork in the trail. Even when these bends were at right angles, they didn’t necessarily return or connect to anywhere else, making the experience of the interior less chart than maze.
These long hallways, with their blocks of units placed end to end, offered little wall space for hanging pictures, so K. instead used the odd, leftover spaces for his increasingly large collection of paintings. As an unexpected consequence, the paintings helped orient him; the more images he hung on the walls, he discovered, the less often he found himself lost inside the building. This K. learned first from a topographic map of Alaska, which wasn’t a painting but whose tactile qualities made it not quite a piece of printing, either. The mountains and ravines of the map, bumpy like braille, stopped K. in his rounds when he first picked it up. What might be read here through touch, he thought, is similar to what I read in paintings through sight. The map seemed less schematic than a specific slice of time; or a compressed, unmoving representation of time. These glaciers, which K. could measure with his fingers, won’t melt or slide; they will remain in this form regardless of all the moments they have lived through since, or will live through to come.
K. pinned Alaska in a dark corner of the building, an area with a series of enclosed hallways that he always found particularly disorienting. But once he could see its white, icy profile emerging from the featureless brown of Canada and the USSR, picked out against the cold blue of the Bering Sea like a Northern Renaissance portrait of a pockmarked, bulbous face, he knew precisely where he was in the storage facility.
The map he treated like a painting, led to paintings treated as maps. Nearest the office, at the first confusing fork on his way toward the interior, K. placed a painting of an arid, mountainous landscape, with a stream in the foreground quickly bending out of sight. The angle of the water’s sharp turn was echoed by the angular hills rising above it, making clear the stream’s homely role of filling and flattening the lowest points of this view. Higher up, a low light - morning light, K. thought, since it came from the right and he had the distinct impression this view faced north - picked out irregular rock faces, and improbably a bright brown area on the near bank of the river. This area should have been in shadow, reasoned K., rising as it did toward the sun and a stand of trees, which should at minimum be casting their own shadows across it. A mistake; a liberty of the artist; or was it in fact lit by some second source of light, out of view to the west?
This pastoral image with multiple light sources K. chose as a marker for an important spot of confusion - with his back to the office, it warned him of the first unexpected branching of the corridor ahead, not unlike the quick turn of the stream in the painting. And coming from the interior of the building, it served as a sign that the office lay just ahead, to one side of this final doubling. (The other side of the split led, eventually, back to this same place, but in a loop that K. had more than once feared was perpetual.) Placing the painting close to this divide, K. found he could just make out that oddly bright brown patch before taking the turn he had so many times regretted. Was the field lit by his own office light, he wondered? He could no longer remember for sure whether it had appeared quite so bright, before he chose to hang it at this junction.