The day had been going well. rswfire was inside the camper, sorting, staging, making the kind of progress that only he could see — the kind that would look like nothing to anyone standing in the doorway. He said so himself, on camera: if I showed you, you would be like, you're not making any progress. But he knew what had moved. The air conditioner ran loud enough that he apologized for it before he apologized for anything else, and then, because the noise had drawn his attention to the problem, he went looking for the problem. Seventy-nine here. Seventy over here, a couple of feet away. Set to seventy-two. Seventy-four across the room. He read the numbers aloud to the camera like a man checking whether the instruments or the world had gone wrong. Up in the loft, no thermostat anymore — that area was staged for removal — but he estimated eighty, maybe eighty-five, and let the estimate stand as estimate.
Then he stopped the survey and named what had happened twenty minutes earlier. A feeling had come through him with enough force that he described it as nearly knocking him over. He did not know where it came from. He had been on the verge of thinking about plans — plans he wanted to make — and it arrived. He breathed his way through it. He offered candidates rather than causes: the withdrawal, the new life, a combination. And then he did the thing that shaped the rest of the recording. He drew a line between transmitting his experience and giving advice, and he stood on the transmitting side of it. I can't trust myself right now. I truly can't. He said he was afraid to say anything, because what he wanted to share needed to be solid, based on something solid, and he could not certify that today. He kept the camera on.
The cables came next. He had been putting them away, meaning to get rid of most of them, and had ended up keeping a lot — a bundle of HDMI cables among them. He held the thought up and turned it over: that's life in a house, a dozen things plugged into a television, always looking at screens. Getting away from screens had been one of the reasons for all of this, and it hadn't happened yet. He was still looking at screens. He said he would change it, that there needed to be a balance, and then he narrowed the claim to himself — I'm just going to speak for myself. He noted that the channel had slowed since what he called his little freak-out, and said he was mostly okay with that, that he wouldn't necessarily want people watching right now, and that he had to post anyway because he couldn't do anything about how he was feeling. He had had a different plan for the channel. He wanted to get back to it.
The audit resumed and turned thermal again. He realized the thing in front of him generated a lot of heat, so he turned it off. The PlayStation in back, probably too. Everything up here. And then the retroactive engineering thought: he probably shouldn't have insulated that section — he could have made it an exhaust port. He asked the camera whether that made sense, allowed that it probably didn't, and kept it anyway as an interesting idea. The somatic layer got its own reading in the same register: appetite coming back, sleeping every night, tiredness arriving out of nowhere and all day long, and a rhythm of doing something in here, then sitting, then doing something, back and forth. He had not left the camper once that day.
Then his mother. He had come across a video of a woman who started learning to paint in her forties and made beautiful pictures. He'd owned painting supplies at the house for six or seven years and used them once, badly, and never again, and when she'd asked about them he'd told her to do whatever with them. That day he asked whether she still had them. She did. That's a mother for you. She knew. He said he'd get them one of these days and maybe try painting — landscapes, outdoors, nature, the Bob Ross kind, the kind he would love making. He also said he didn't know how to draw, and that he'd learned drawing was part of it, you outline first and then paint, though he allowed there were probably painters who didn't. A nice moment, he called it.
The cats were doing well with her. He had gone to the house Friday for the walkthrough and to his mother's afterward to see them, and Oliver hid from him the entire time. He had never done that. rswfire said it broke his heart and that he was starting to accept it — that Oliver was probably afraid he'd come to pick him up and didn't want to go, and that he couldn't fault him for that. He read it as a decision the cat had made, and he chose not to pursue it further. They're probably where they belong. For now.
And underneath all of it, the thing he had been thinking about at the moment the wave arrived: land. He wanted to buy land with a little cabin on it and call it his home base. He wanted to keep the camper and do things in it. He wanted the cabin for bookshelves and books and the little book nooks he'd assembled, a very nice relaxed life there with the camper hooked to shore power, and little adventures along the way. He didn't have the money. So it would become one of his top goals, something to work toward — and then, he said, he could have his cats, though they wouldn't be there all the time, and maybe they'd go back and forth between his place and his mother's. As he laid the picture out, the feeling passed. He noted the passing on camera, said it had been pretty intense, and said he just wished he understood it — that he assumed it had a purpose and a meaning, that it had been happening lately, that it blew him away each time. He offered the candidates one more time without choosing between them: the new life, or the withdrawal, or something else. Don't trust anything I say right now. I trust nothing I say right now. Then: But I'll post this anyway. He said he'd probably talk to them tomorrow, and wished them a wonderful Saturday night.