Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 112151

The Ice House and the Glass HouseSomewhere in the world are two houses, side by side, simple one-room rectangles. One ismade of ice slabs, smooth enough to see the world through, swimming. The other is glass bricks,each slightly concave in the center, holding the world’s image, distorted and inverted.They sit in line with the sun. At sunrise light shines through the glass house into the ice one,and each glass brick acts as a prism, casting spectra into the ice house’s clear slabs. The icehouse has been washed just before dawn to take away the past day’s scuffs, and as the fresh layerof water runs down to the ground it freezes into lumps and braids. The spectra accommodatethemselves to those irregularities when they hit them: a beam of blue wraps around a thick placein the ice, orange pours through a patch worn thin. As the sun rises more and more eachspectrum creeps through those ice walls, bottom to top, breaking, separating band by band,spreading into the ones around it. A spot of wall might flash indigo for only a moment but thenbecome the center of a spreading stain of violet that lasts full minutes.It’s because of the way the glass bricks twist the sun, partly. If there were just one wall of them the spectra cast into the ice might settle into an orderly repetition, but since the light has topass first through the east wall and then, already refracted once, through the west, it gets

Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 112152

muddled. And because the angle of the sun changes every day, the patterns of color in the iceare always changing too.At sunset exactly the reverse happens. Light passes through the ice slabs on its way to theglass house, and the ice leaches out every color except for a certain shade of blue-gray, whichthen invades the glass bricks. Standing inside the glass house, the glow seems to come from allof them equally, so that nothing casts a shadow. If the ice house at dawn is transformation andmotion, the glass house at dusk is pure stasis. Each evening is precisely the same as the onebefore; the angle of the sun makes no difference. The lack of color and shadow flattenseverything, so that any object brought inside seems to occupy the same plane as any other, at anindeterminate but unbridgeable distance.There are only a few places in the world where such a thing might be, since there are fewwhere an ice house can survive at least most of the year. Somewhere tundral, boggy in thesummer. The rare people around lose blood by the pint to the mosquitoes and watch the birds flyin and then fly out, and the reindeer graze in and then walk out, and the muskoxen stand in oneshaggy place and eat. People in such a place wait the year for those weeks of summer, when themidnight sun makes them hyperactive and their joints unfreeze.The interesting question about the houses is not how they could come to exist. Anythingphysically possible has happened or will happen when someone wants it badly enough. Thequestion is, who wanted them so badly? Who would build them in winter? The dead of winter,

Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 112153

polishing those blocks of ice. For a thin pleasure, because the sun stays below the horizon mostof the day, and emerges for an hour, or a half-hour, or a few minutes. Those coldest days whenthe sky only lightens to a half-glow are the days for suicide, and drunkenness, and for theparticular form of madness that can lead a person to polish ice every day with his urine and a rag,so that even in the absence of light it shines. It shines black.There are moons even in winter. The moons are beautiful. A maker of ice and glass housesignores them.It takes a particular kind of madness, too, to spend the precious weeks of summer haulingglass bricks to the rocky bank of a lake that freezes in winter, and then to spend hours filling thespaces between them with epoxy rather than cement, because while epoxy is much trickier thancement, it’s translucent. And that lakeside is a half-mile from heat, and on those days with onlya few minutes of light, half a mile, a mile round trip, is a long, cold snowmobile ride.It takes a madness bordering on suicide to make that ride every day, even to try andsnowshoe it when it’s too cold for the snowmobile to start. But then that is, after all, the point.It is the point of building the thing as well as the point of living the winter close enough to thepole to build it. The only kind of person who could build the houses is one who wants to fillevery crevice of his life with the possibility of accidental death, so that he can then turn aroundand stare at rainbow light, beautiful and cold, every morning, and feel himself dissolved in a flat,gray glow every night.Not the kind of person who leads his life on purpose. He goes north, and north, each jobitching him until he hears of one a little farther on, until he’s manning a weather station, say. A