If anyone opened this cabinet, I could only hope to remember the type of person involved and the thoughts judged in isolation from being that person. Impossible to pigeon-hole.  Yet an insulated dream which knew itself – at least somewhere – to be real and boundless.

Once I (as this person) stepped  within the cabinet – a walk-in wardrobe that I could never have afforded the space to own – I could perceive the dulcet care of lighting that a gentleman about town may have confessed was intended for liaisons rather than garment storage. The two long mirrors failed to hype or eke out any illumination.

There were no garments; they had been stripped out along with their clothes-horse frames, tie-racks and sock-drawers of ill-defined usage.  No see-through drip-dry shirt-tails to assist the lighting’s ambition not to dim.  The tapestry that once concealed cross-hangers like a draught-excluder or wind-break had slipped not only from in front of the open wall but from the memory I now used.  Indeed, many things not there, nor even thought about or considered worthy of noting their absence, I’m sure.  But there was a dead tree lying on the parquet floor.  Seeping open its own flayed and palsied bark.  Not the corpse of a soldier as I first unaccountably assumed, but a genuinely slumped trunk reaching into the darkest regions of the wardrobe, leafless branches out-splayed like a thousand knotted limbs grasping at nothing: crumbling where the damp had reached its due existence of further nothingness.  Rotting by root and tip.  Indeed its minor rootlets were further limbs, more sveltely ‘living’ than the branches.  Yet rotting, nonetheless.

The major roots were tantamount to things I once feared growing in my own body.  No possible description of such huge coiled menaces, hidden by their own minors, as they were.  Yet vaguely sensed in the wardrobe’s body mirrors on each side wall.

I stooped to touch the dead tree’s bark or, rather, its upper sutures – or, rather, I didn’t stoop at all, but squinted in the sedated light – to see the shape more clearly, without daring to approach it. Merely to touch with my eyes, as it were, failing to see that this was the most dangerous entry to the soul with which I saw.

The dampness had reached such depths, I spotted a tiny lake amid the runnelled surface – even a pocket sea.  I yearned to saw through various branches to allow irrigation to drier areas where tiny wooden mouths seemed to pock out with airlets or minuscule bubblings.  I fondled the nail-file in my pocket, wondering if its serrations would prove sufficient purchase.  I clicked my heels on the parquet, in a tantrum of powerlessness.

Purple crosses had been carved into words upon the bark and equally stained with some verjuice that my tongue knew more intimately than my nose was rhino-gomenol, despite various trajectories of these two senses conflated with surrogate touching.  I could not read the sad words thus chiselled which no doubt noted some tryst beneath the tree’s wide bower in happier times.

The tree’s pulpy ridges pulsed but, then again, they were dead, completely dead.  As if the floaters in my eyes – fed by deeper heartbeats – lent their own life to what they witnessed.  Back and forth our sight does travel, nobody owning its visions.  My last and best liaison perhaps, I raised my hand tentatively to the dimmer-switch.

A voice spoke that the cabinet was made that way.  From dead wood.

2.

The dubious direction of next cabinet approach derived from a sense of both inner and outer address, as well as both game and serious quest.  Which of these became appropriate would remain uncertain for some while, he felt – but he was at least sure he approached the next cabinet almost instantaneously, even possibly in advance of a few other cabinets that had once appeared chronologically prior to this his current locking into a new set of falling tumblers.

He was faced on the back wall with – not photographs or frozen televised shots of soldiers – but soldiers depicted in a tapestry, albeit with no obvious weft or woof in the fabric.  The stitches or weaves were slipstreamed, nevertheless remained proud from the surface upon which they had been laid down like rich chintz: soldiers that once (in a previous or subsequent cabinet) had been photographed old (beyond indeed the age of film) but now even older like Mediaeval icons.  Each of their eyes stared out at the face in the cabinet’s opening frame, like a gold coin … or a military medal.  He cringed, as if they deemed him unworthy of his own personality’s currency or exchange rate protagonism.

Then he noticed that the soldiers did not bear Xs like wounds or stigmata – Xs that had crossed them out in earlier lingering images once foretold by another cabinet.  Here, the soldiers themselves crossed out the crosses by means of their tunics, but crosses still vaguely seen through the woven arteries of their bodies like wrong marks or slipped stitches in the knitting or falsely identifiable co-ordinates where treasure was buried … except the cross itself constituted the treasure and the uniform plateau of flesh above marked its spot.

The smell, he noticed, was simultaneously anger and incense, a strange heady contagion of eucalyptus cold cure like rhino-gomenol and the rankness of confession.

Beneath these images of soldiers were wickerwork baskets containing the ripe seeds of ancient sanitary processes – as if positioned there to catch all the droppings of the tapestried soldiers.

He laughed – he who had backed into this telling cabinet tableau – roared with hysterical mirth.  Among the droppings were true pigeon-holes.  Not those pigeon-holes that existed as familiar doorless mini-cabinet oubliettes that cross-hatched the back wall of many a cabinet proper … but, instead, as they rested and nested in ordure, singular nothingnesses like noughts.

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