Joshua Malbin

307 12th St. Apt. 8

Brooklyn NY 11215

The Ice House and the Glass House

Somewhere in the world are two houses, side by side, simple one-room rectangles. One is

made 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 ice

house has been washed just before dawn to take away the past day’s scuffs, and as the fresh layer

of water runs down to the ground it freezes into lumps and braids. The spectra accommodate

themselves to those irregularities when they hit them: a beam of blue wraps around a thick place

in the ice, orange pours through a patch worn thin. As the sun rises more and more each

spectrum 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 then

become 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 to

pass first through the east wall and then, already refracted once, through the west, it gets

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 Joshua Malbin
307 12th St. Apt. 8
Brooklyn NY 11215

muddled. And because the angle of the sun changes every day, the patterns of color in the ice

are always changing too.

At sunset exactly the reverse happens. Light passes through the ice slabs on its way to the

glass house, and the ice leaches out every color except for a certain shade of blue-gray, which

then invades the glass bricks. Standing inside the glass house, the glow seems to come from all

of them equally, so that nothing casts a shadow. If the ice house at dawn is transformation and

motion, the glass house at dusk is pure stasis. Each evening is precisely the same as the one

before; the angle of the sun makes no difference. The lack of color and shadow flattens

everything, so that any object brought inside seems to occupy the same plane as any other, at an

indeterminate but unbridgeable distance.

There are only a few places in the world where such a thing might be, since there are few

where an ice house can survive at least most of the year. Somewhere tundral, boggy in the

summer. The rare people around lose blood by the pint to the mosquitoes and watch the birds fly

in and then fly out, and the reindeer graze in and then walk out, and the muskoxen stand in one

shaggy place and eat. People in such a place wait the year for those weeks of summer, when the

midnight sun makes them hyperactive and their joints unfreeze.

The interesting question about the houses is not how they could come to exist. Anything

physically possible has happened or will happen when someone wants it badly enough. The

question is, who wanted them so badly? Who would build them in winter? The dead of winter,

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 Joshua Malbin
307 12th St. Apt. 8
Brooklyn NY 11215

polishing those blocks of ice. For a thin pleasure, because the sun stays below the horizon most

of the day, and emerges for an hour, or a half-hour, or a few minutes. Those coldest days when

the sky only lightens to a half-glow are the days for suicide, and drunkenness, and for the

particular 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 houses

ignores them.

It takes a particular kind of madness, too, to spend the precious weeks of summer hauling

glass bricks to the rocky bank of a lake that freezes in winter, and then to spend hours filling the

spaces between them with epoxy rather than cement, because while epoxy is much trickier than

cement, it’s translucent. And that lakeside is a half-mile from heat, and on those days with only

a 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 and

snowshoe 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 the

pole to build it. The only kind of person who could build the houses is one who wants to fill

every crevice of his life with the possibility of accidental death, so that he can then turn around

and 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 job

itching him until he hears of one a little farther on, until he’s manning a weather station, say. A

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 Joshua Malbin
307 12th St. Apt. 8
Brooklyn NY 11215

job without the possibility of advancement or relief. One he could abandon any time. Where

he’d think he could rest, for now.

But find he couldn’t. The drive that would send a man to such a place would keep him from

being satisfied even there. If some summer a grizzly were to wander across the stretch of tundra

he considered his, rooting in the muck for tubers and berries, he might look to the sky instead of

watching it, because suddenly he wanted to see swans. He’d be disappointed in his own

hallucinations, when he had them in the dark of winter.

The kind of person who would order truckloads of glass bricks when there were only the

most rudimentary roads where he lived, and who, because those roads were only passable to

laden trucks in the early spring, frozen enough to drive on but not too cold to drive, would then

have to wait a full two years before they all came through, and would wait it gladly, because

desires, no longer how long they take to fulfill, are better than the absence of desire.

Maybe such a person seems hard to imagine. He isn’t really. The important thing to

remember is that while he may tread a thin line with suicide, he doesn’t actually want to die. He

wants to stop being dissatisfied with the world. One way to stop, of course, is suicide. But far

better would be to be satisfied.

We’re all questers, like him, and we’re all failed questers, like him. If most of us haven’t

traveled beyond the edge of the habitable world on our quests, have settled instead for love and

health and children where we are—well, neither have most of us built a glass house and an ice

house side by side. Most of us have never tried to capture the aurora.

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 Joshua Malbin
307 12th St. Apt. 8
Brooklyn NY 11215

Perhaps we know, even a little smugly, that it doesn’t work. That the proper way to deal

with dissatisfaction is to bury it under happiness. That otherwise a person might find himself in

his ice house one morning in midwinter, bathed in color, and realize that he was horribly,

horribly lonely. And at that point a person would have no choice but to pick up the

sledgehammer he’s been storing in the ice house’s corner, waiting for this day, the haft so cold

from waiting that his fingers freeze to it, and smash the house walls from within, so that it cracks

along the secret middle seam he’s half forgotten he put there, falling on him in the image of his

broken heart.