I went back there a few days later and couldn’t find the house. Just an empty lot, grizzled brown late-winter grass, no paved pathway, no steps, no garbage cans, nothing. This time I knew I hadn’t accidentally gone up some other street. The house next door to the white house was still there, the brown-shingled one where the dog had found the newspaper. But the white house was gone.
What the hell? A house that comes and goes?
Sweat came flooding out all over me. Was it possible to be having hallucinations in such convincing detail when I had been sober for a couple of months? First I was frightened and then I was angry. I didn’t deserve this. If the house wasn’t a hallucination, and I didn’t seriously think it was, then what was it? I was working hard at putting my life back together and I was entitled to have reality stay real around me.
Easy, I thought. Easy. You’re not entitled to anything, fellow. But you’ll be okay as long as you recognize that nobody requires you to be able to explain mysteries that are beyond your understanding. Just go easy, take things as they come, and stay cool, stay cool, stay cool.
The house came back four days later.
I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about it at meetings, even though that probably would have been a good idea. I had no problem at all with admitting publicly that I was an alcoholic, far from it. But standing up and telling everyone that I was crazy was something else entirely.
Things got even more bizarre. One afternoon I was out in front of the house and a kid’s tricycle came rolling down the street all by itself, as though on an invisible cord. It rolled right past me and turned the corner and I watched it traverse the path and go up the steps of the white house and disappear inside. Some sort of magnetic pull? Radio waves?
Half a minute later the owner of the tricycle came huffing along, a chubby boy of about five in blue leggings. “My bike!” he was yelling. “My bike!” I imagined him running up the path and disappearing into the house too, like the dog, the cat, and the tricycle. I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t just grab him up and hold him, either, not in an era when if a grown man simply smiles at a kid in the street he’s likely to get booked. So I did the next best thing and planted myself at the head of the path leading across the white house’s lawn. The kid banged into my shins and fell down. I looked up the block and saw a woman coming, his aunt, maybe, or his grandmother. It seemed safe to help the kid up, so I did. Then I smiled at her and said, “He really ought to look where he’s going.”
“My bike!” the boy wailed. “Where’s my bike?”
The woman looked at me and said, “Did you see someone take the child’s tricycle?”
“Afraid I can’t say, ma’am,” I replied, shrugging my most amiable shrug. “I was coming around the corner, and there was the boy running full tilt into me. But I didn’t see any tricycles.” What else was I going to tell her? I saw it go up the steps by itself and into the house?
She gave me a troubled glance. But obviously I didn’t have the tricycle in my coat pocket and I guess I don’t look like the sort of man who specializes in stealing things from little children.
A dog. A cat. A tricycle.
I turned and walked away. Up Maple to Juniper, and down Juniper to Beech, and left on Beech onto Chestnut. Or maybe it was up Oak to Sycamore and then on to Locust and Hickory. Maple, Oak, Chestnut, Hickory: what difference did it make? They were all alike.
I doubled back eventually and got to the house just in time to see a boy of about fourteen wearing a green-and-yellow jersey come trotting down the street, tossing a football from hand to hand. As he went past the white house the screen door swung open and the inner door swung back and the kid halted, turned, and very neatly threw the football through, a nice high tight arc.
The doors closed.
The kid stood stock-still in the street, staring at his hand as though he had never seen it before. He looked stunned.
Then after a moment he broke out of his stasis and started up the path to the house. I wanted to call out to him to keep away, but I couldn’t get any sound out; and I wasn’t sure what I could say to him, anyway.
He rang the doorbell. Waited.
I held my breath.
The door started to open again. Trying to warn him, I managed to make a scratchy little choking sort of sound.
But the kid didn’t go in. He stood for a moment peering inside and then he turned and began to run, across the lawn, over the hedges, down the street.
What had he seen?
I ran after him. “Hey, kid! Kid, wait!”
He was going so fast I couldn’t believe it. I was a pretty good runner in my time, too. But my time was some time ago.
Instead of going to the meeting that night, I went to scout out the house. Under cover of darkness I crept around it in the shrubbery like your basic peeping-tom, trying to peer through the windows.
Was I scared? Utterly shitless, yes. Wouldn’t you be?
Did I want a drink? Don’t be naïve. I always want a drink, and not just one. I certainly wanted a good jolt of the stuff now. Three fingers of Jim Beam and I’d have had the unshakeable savoir-faire of Sherlock Holmes himself. But I wouldn’t have stopped at three fingers. My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.
What did I see? I saw a woman, very likely the same one I had had that quick glimpse of in the doorway that first drizzly Monday morning. I got only quick glimpses now. She was moving around from room to room so that I didn’t have a chance to see her clearly, but what I saw was plenty impressive. Tall, blonde, sleek, that much was certain. She wore a floor-length red robe made of some glossy metallic fabric that fell about her in a kind of liquid shimmer. Her movements were graceful and elegant. There didn’t seem to be anything in the way of furniture inside, just some cartons and crates, which she was carrying back and forth. Stranger and stranger. I didn’t see the cat or the dog or the bicycle.
I scrabbled around from window to window for maybe half an hour, hoping for a good look at her. I was moving with what I thought was real skill, keeping low, staying down behind the lilacs or whatever, rising cautiously toward windowsill level for each quick peek. I suppose I might have been visible from the street, but the night was moonless and people don’t generally go out strolling around here after dark.
There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the house. And for about fifteen minutes I didn’t see her either. Maybe she was in the shower; maybe she had gone to bed. I was tempted to ring the bell. But what for? What would I say to her if she answered? What was I doing here in the first place?
I crept backward through the shrubbery, thinking it was time to leave. And then there she was, framed in a window, looking straight out at me.
Smiling. Beckoning.
Come hither, Tommy-boy.
I thought about the cat. I thought about the dog. I began to shake.
Like the kid with the football, I turned and ran, desperately loping through the quiet streets in an overwhelming excess of unreasoning terror.
I was getting to the point where I thought it might be calming to have a drink. In the old days the first drink always settled me down. It lifted the burden; it soothed the pain; it answered the questions. It made taking the second drink very easy. The second suggested the third; the third required the fourth; the fourth demanded the fifth; and so on without hindrance, right on to insomnia, vomiting, falling hair, bloody gums, raw eyes, exploding capillaries, nightmares, hallucinations, impotence, the shakes, the shivers, the queebles, the collywobbles, and all the rest.
I didn’t take the drink. I went to a meeting instead, jittery and perplexed. I said I was wrestling with a mystery. I didn’t say what it was. Let them fill in the blanks, anything they felt like. Even without the details, they’d know something of what I was going through. They too were wrestling with mysteries. Otherwise what were they doing there?
The house was gone for two weeks. I checked for it every day. Spring had arrived in full force before it returned. Trees turned green, plants
were blooming, the air grew warm and soft.
The woman was back too, the blonde. I never failed to see her now, every time I went by, and I went by every day. It was as if she knew I was coming. Sometimes she was at the window, but more usually she was standing just inside the screen door. Some days she dressed in the red slinky robe, some days in a green one. She had a few other outfits too, all of them classy but somewhat oddly designed, shoulders too wide, the cut too narrow. Once—incredibly, unforgettably—she came to the door in nothing at all but a pair of stockings, and stood for a long moment on splendid display, framed perfectly in the doorway, sunlight glinting off her lush lovely body.
She was always smiling. She must have known I was the one who had been peeping that night and it didn’t seem to bother her. The look on her face said, Let’s get to know each other a little better shall we? Always that warm, beckoning smile. Sometimes she’d give me a little come-on-in flick of her fingertips.
Not on your life, sister. Not on your life.
But I couldn’t stop coming by. The house, the woman, the mystery, all pulled me like a magnet.
By now I had two theories. The simple one was that she was lonely, horny, bored, looking for distraction. Maybe it excited her to be playing these games with me. In this quiet little town where the chief cause of death surely must be boredom, she liked to live dangerously.
Too simple, much too simple. Why would a woman who looked like that be living a lonely, horny life? Why would she be in this kind of town in the first place? What was more important, the theory didn’t account for the comings and goings of the house. Or for what I had seen happen to the cat, the dog, the tricycle, the boy with the football. The dog had returned—he was sitting crosslegged on the steps just below the screen door the day I was given the full frontal show—but he never went more than a couple of yards from the house and he moved in a weird lobotomized way. There hadn’t been any further sign of the cat or the tricycle.
Which led to my other theory, the roach-motel theory.
The house comes from the future, I told myself. They’re studying the late twentieth century and they want to collect artifacts. So every now and then they send this time machine disguised as a little white-stucco house here and it scoops up toys, pets, newspapers, whatever it can grab. Most likely they aren’t really looking for cats or dogs, but they takes what they gets. And now they’re trying to catch an actual live twentieth-century man. Trolling for him the way you’d troll for catfish, using a beautiful woman—sometimes naked—as the bait.
A crazy idea? Sure. But I couldn’t come up with a saner one.
Ten days into springtime and the house was gone again. When it came back, about a week later, the woman didn’t seem to be with it. They were giving her some time off, maybe. But they still seemed interested in luring me inside. I’d come by and take up my position by the curb and the door would quietly swing open, though no one was visible inside. And would stay open, waiting for me to traipse up the walk and go in.
It was a temptation. I felt it pulling on me harder and harder every day, as my own here-and-now real-life everyday options looked bleaker and bleaker. I wasn’t finding a new job. I wasn’t making useful contacts. My money, not much to begin with, was running out. All I had was the Program and the people who were part of it here, and though they were fine enough people they weren’t the kind I could get really close to in any way not having to do with the Program.
So why not go up that path and into the house? Even if they swept me up and took me off to the year 2999 and I was never heard from again, what did I have to lose? A drab life in a furnished room in a nowhere town, living on the last of my dwindling savings while I dreamed of fifths of Johnny Walker and went to meetings at which a bunch of victims of the same miserable malady struggled constantly to keep their leaky boats from sinking? Wherever I went would be better than that. Perhaps incredibly better.
But of course I didn’t know that the shining visitors from the future would sweep me off to an astounding new existence in the year 2999. That was only my own nutty guess, my wild fantasy. Anything at all might happen to me if I passed through that doorway. Anything. It was a kind of Russian roulette and I didn’t even know the odds against me.
One day I taped a piece of paper to a rubber ball from the five-and-dime and tossed it through the door when it opened for me. On it I had written these questions:
WHO ARE YOU?
WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
DO YOU WANT ME?
WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?
WILL YOU HARM ME?
And I waited for an answering note to come bouncing out. But none ever did.
The house went away. The house came back. The woman still wasn’t there. Nobody else seemed to be, either. But the door swung expectantly open for me, seemingly of its own accord. I would stand and stare, making no move, and after a time it would close again.
I bought another rubber ball and threw another message inside.
SEND ME THE GIRL AGAIN. THE BLONDE ONE.
I WANT TO TALK TO HER.
The house went away again and stayed away a long while, nearly a month this time, so that I began to think it would never come back and then that it had never actually been here at all. There were days when I didn’t even bother to walk past the vacant lot where I had seen it.
Then I did, and it was there, and the woman was in the doorway smiling, and she said, “Come on in and visit me, sailor?”
She was wearing something gauzy and she was leaning against the door-frame with her hand on her hip. Her voice was a soft throaty contralto. It all felt like a scene out of a 1940’s movie. Maybe it was; maybe they’d been studying up.
“First you tell me who you are, all right? And where you come from.”
“Don’t you want to have a good time with me, pal?”
Damn right I do. I felt it in my groin, my pounding chest, my knees.
I moistened my lips. I thought of the way the house had reeled in that angry snarling cat. How it had pulled that tricycle up the stairs. I felt it pulling on me. But I must have more ability to fight back than a cat. Or a tricycle.
I said, “There’s a lot I need to know, first.”
“Come on in and I’ll tell you everything.” Softly. Huskily. Irresistibly. Almost irresistibly.
“Tell me first. Come out here and talk to me.”
She winked and shook her head. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Studying old movies, all right. She closed the door in my face.
What they hammer into you in the Program is that you may think you’re pretty tough but in fact when you’ve added up all the debits and credits the truth is you aren’t as strong as you like to pretend you are. You’re too weak not to take the next drink, and it’s only after you admit how weak you are and turn elsewhere for help that you can begin to find the strength you need.
I had found that strength. I hadn’t had a drink on the seventh of February, or on the eighth, or on the ninth. One day at a time I wasn’t having any drinks and by now that one day at a time had added up to four months and eleven days and when tomorrow came around I would add another day to the string, and I was beginning to feel fairly confident that I could keep going that way for the rest of my life.
But the house was something else again. I was starting to see it as a magic gateway to God knows where, just as booze had once been for me. It came and went and the woman smiled and beckoned and offered throaty invitations, and I recognized that I had let myself become obsessed with it and couldn’t keep away from it, and the next time the house came back there was a good chance that I’d go sauntering up the path and through the door.
Which was crazy.
I hadn’t put myself through this whole ordeal of recovery just for the sake of waltzing through a different magic gateway, had I? Especially when I didn’t have the slightest idea of what might lie on the far side.
I thought about it and thought about it and thought about
it and decided that the safest and smartest thing to do was to get out of here: I would move to some other town that didn’t have houses that came and went, or languid naked blondes standing in doorways inviting me to step inside for a good time. So one drowsy July morning I bought a bus ticket to a town forty miles from the one where I’d been living. It was about the same size and had a similar name and looked just about as dull; and on the street behind the lone movie theater I found a house with a FURNISHED ROOM sign stuck in its lawn and rented a place very much like the one I had, except that the rent was ten dollars more a month. Then I went around to the local A.A. headquarters—I had already checked with my own to make sure they had one here, you can bet on that—and picked up the schedule of meeting hours.
Done. Safe. A clean break.
I’d never see that white house again.
I’d never see her again.
I’d never face that mysterious doorway and never feel the pull that it exerted.
And as I told myself all that, the pain of irrevocable loss rose up inside me and hit me from within, and I thought I was going to fall down.
I was in the bus depot then, waiting to catch the bus going back, so I could pack my suitcase and settle things with my landlady and say goodbye to my friends, such as they were, in the Program back there. I looked around and there she was, standing stark naked in the doorway of the baggage room, smiling at me in that beckoning way of hers.
Not really. It was a different woman, and she wasn’t blonde, and she was wearing a bus company uniform, and she wasn’t even looking at me.
I knew that, actually. I wasn’t hallucinating. But I had wanted her to be the other one so badly that I imagined that I saw her. And I realized how deep the obsession had become.