Little Doors

by Paul Di Filippo

  “You listen to me, Meta, it’s you and your wife who don’t belong here. I’m the new owner of this house, with clear and incontestable title. If anyone belongs here, it’s my wife and me. We’re sick of having half our house occupied by oddball tenants. We want it all! We’re the owners, goddamn it, and we’re serving notice! You’ve got no lease, and no right to live here without my sufferance. It’s out on your ass, Meta, as soon as physically possible! Go try to find another landlord who’ll have you!”

  Mr Meta’s face remained unmoving throughout my tirade. He failed even to cross his arms on his chest, as any normal person might do when confronted with hostility. Instead, those somehow arrogant limbs continued to hang, relaxed yet competent-seeming, by his side.

  When I finally spluttered down, and the silence began to grow discomfiting, Mr Meta spoke.

  “We’ll have to discuss this with Mrs Meta. Please follow me.”

  Then he disappeared. As cleanly as vacuum imploding to nonexistence.

  “Meta!” I called. “Mr Meta, where are you? Damn it, Meta, I can’t follow like that. Don’t leave me here, you bastard. Meta!”

  Mr Meta s head and shoulders poked neatly through one wall, so that he looked like a mounted trophy.

  “Please don’t bellow, sir. Keep calm. We cherish our even-temperedness on this level. Please try to maintain an objective perspective on affairs, sir. Put yourself beyond emotions. It’s the only way.”

  Mr Meta extended a hand through the wall, as in a Cocteau film.

  Instinctively, I grasped it.

  He pulled me through.

  We were in another room identical to the first, save for an antiseptic white couch. On the couch sat Mrs Meta.

  She was dressed identically to her husband, and was just as hairless. Her skull resembled a china egg. Save for a few different contours, she and Mr Meta could have been twins.

  “My husband tells me you wish us to vacate our residence. May I ask why?”

  Mrs Meta’s voice was, if anything, even more disconcertingly rational than her husband’s. Once again I was put off, and could speak only haltingly.

  “Well, it’s just that the wife and I need the space you’re occupying. We’re going to have children someday, you see …”

  I faltered. It all sounded so lame and insignificant and somewhat bestial, in the presence of the noble sexless Metas. Still, now that I was here, I had to press on.

  “Besides, it’s unnatural, the kind of life you lead. I’ve never seen either of you leave our house. Who knows what you two do up here all day? How do you even survive? No, it’s too creepy. We want you out.”

  Mr and Mrs Meta exchanged a glance pregnant with meaning. Then one of them—I confess to being so confused by now that I could hardly tell them apart—said, “Well, if we show you how we spend our time, will you reconsider?”

  “I don’t know. I, I—”

  “Here, sit down with us.”

  Seeing no reason not to comply, I took a seat on the white couch, between the Metas. Mr Meta then gripped my right hand, Mrs Meta my left. I felt a strange sensation race up my arms. Then the Metas linked their free hands across my lap.

  The room vanished. Disembodied, I was in a place filled with cold equations and numinous symbols, all gold and silver, pure and instantly apprehensible, yet infinitely deep. Totally disoriented, I tried to grasp the meaning of this new world. After a dimensionless time spent probing the symbols, I realized what I was viewing. It was a complex schematic representation of our familiar universe, all the people and objects and relationships therein, a structured, scientific version of our familiar jumbled mess of emotions and ethics, desires and compulsions, needs and wants. I could even distinguish the icons that represented the Metas and me, and our relationship. Their import was unmistakable: I was acting like an irrational idiot.

  I felt utterly humbled and minuscule. For an indefinite period I remained in this pitiless abstract world, face to face with my own insignificance. In a stern kind of way, it was rather bracing. Finally, I returned involuntarily to the Metas’ couch. They had broken the circle of hands.

  “Now you see how we spend our time,” said Mrs Meta. “Perhaps, in some slight fashion, you now understand why we cannot be disturbed.”

  I was speechless. I allowed Mr Meta to lead me back through the wall into the original room. There, he bent over, grabbed my ankles, and effortlessly lifted me up, so that I hung suspended in the same position my wife had occupied when I left her.

  Then he pushed me headfirst through the floor.

  Somehow, without having landed heavily, I was lying on the carpet in the hall outside our bedroom door. All the lights were off. It took a moment for my eyes, dazzled by the illumination of the Metas’ apartment, to recover.

  When I felt that I could make my way without stumbling, I stood and entered the bedroom. My wife, again, had gone to sleep without awaiting my return.

  Exhausted, I crept into bed beside her, still clothed.

  * * *

  After my failure to evict the Metas, my wife’s importunings became unbearable. When I couldn’t stand them anymore, I burst out: “If you think you can handle the Abs and the Metas then go to it!”

  “I will!” she feistily replied.

  That night, descending the long staircase, she visited the Abs. I went to sleep before she returned, feeling not one whit guilty.

  In the morning, she looked unnaturally disheveled, and had nothing to say. A male musk permeated her hair.

  Two nights later, somewhat recovered, she set out for the Metas. I generously pointed out the location of their trapdoor.

  Sometime around three a.m., I sleepily sensed her fall into bed beside me.

  Over breakfast, I asked, “Did you convince the Metas to seek new lodgings?”

  “Shut up,” she wearily replied, as if embarrassed and confused.

  After this, there was no more mention of our inherited tenants.

  * * *

  Our life settled into an easy routine. Months passed.

  We adapted quite nicely to sharing our house. Despite being excluded from cellar and third floor, we felt the house mold itself to our personalities like a favorite set of weekend clothing. We still planned to have children, but had resigned ourselves to housing them on the same floor as our bedroom. It would probably be more convenient anyway.

  The Metas had, of course, been right: the house was big enough for all of us.

  I have just said that we were excluded from the basement and the upper story. This was not entirely true.

  There grew a pattern of visits between the levels, with my wife and I acting as solo intermediaries. (Naturally, the Metas never went slumming down with the Abs, nor would the Abs ever have dared to visit the Metas. In fact, I doubt whether the cave dwellers even knew or could possibly conceive of the existence of the Metas, beings so far removed from the life the Abs experienced.)

  By far the majority of our separate visits were made downstairs, to the Abs. Their company was simply much more congenial than the chilly hospitality of the Metas. Far down below our house, sitting mutely for hours in the damp cave around the flickering flames that alternately disclosed and hid the painted walls, rolling on the gritty floor in animal passion, Mrs Ab’s hairy legs locked behind my back, I felt utterly connected with my roots, cast backward in time to a more primal, aboriginal existence, where words and abstract concepts meant nothing, failed even to exist.

  I believe my wife experienced the same sensations in her unaccompanied visits to the Abs. I knew, from the apish scent that clung to her the mornings after, that she regularly had carnal relations with Mr Ab (whom I had met one night, when heavy rains kept him from hunting; a fine fellow, the salt of the earth). But I wasn’t jealous. How could I be, considering what I did with Mrs Ab?

  No, my wife and I both gained from our separate visits below, and our own relationship was only strengthened.

  Even the much rarer visits we made to the Metas were beneficia
l. The mental jaunts to the land of symbols, made with the Metas as guides, were as frigidly character-building as a January dip off the coast of Maine. Still, it was not something one cared to do every day, whereas visiting the Abs was. But alas, this happy coexistence was not to last forever …

  One night I was taking my leave of Mrs Ab. We rose from the cave floor, I dressed, and, as was now her habit, Mrs Ab kindled a piney torch from the flames and accompanied me back to the foot of the stairs, lighting my way.

  At the base of the wooden stairs, Mrs Ab was overcome with lust. (I believe her physiology included an actual period of estrus.) Dropping the torch, she ripped my clothes to shreds with her sharp nails and tripped me to the floor. Soon we were coupling as if we had not done it for weeks.

  Unnoticed, the torch passed its flame to the staircase. The ancient wood quickly accepted the gift, and just at the climax of our union, I became aware of the spreading conflagration, which now lit the rocky walls with an awesome radiance.

  The way upstairs was impassable. And fire was climbing two steps at a time toward the first floor.

  I jumped up and managed to wrap a scrap of fabric around my loins. Grabbing Mrs Ab’s furry hand, I raced back down the tunnel and out the exit I had never ventured down.

  As I had once speculated, the tunnel emerged in a public park not far from our house, occupied during the day by addicts and drug peddlers, winos and children. Mrs Ab and I hurried through the deserted city streets back to our house.

  The entire building was ablaze, a hopeless pyre lighting the night. On the lawn stood my wife and the Metas, looking bewildered. Yes, even the imperturbable Metas were reacting in their subdued fashion to the destruction of our beloved house.

  Mrs Ab and I joined them. As we watched, Mr Ab slunk forlornly out of the night, dragging a club.

  The six of us, huddling together, watched in silence for a time. Sirens began to fill the night.

  “Ab cold” said Mr Ab at last.

  “I’m heartsick,” said my wife.

  “There’s just no making sense of this,” said Mr Meta. Further silence, save for the crackling of the flames. In the end, I felt compelled to speak.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “There are other houses in this neighborhood just as nice. We only have to stick together, exert ourselves, and we’ll surely find one. The important thing is not to split up.”

  “New safe cave?” inquired Mr Ab tentatively.

  “Enough room for my office?” asked my wife.

  “Privacy to meditate?” ventured Mr Meta.

  “Yes,” I said. They were all watching me hopefully. “Yes and yes. Something for everyone—

  “All in our house.”

  JACK NECK AND THE WORRYBIRD

  On the western edge of putty-colored Drudge City, in the neighborhood of the Stoltz Hypobiological Refinery (“The lowest form of intelligent life—the highest form of dumb matter!”), not far from Newspaper Park and Boris Crocodile’s Beanery and Caustics Bar—both within a knuckle-bone’s throw of the crapulent, crepitant Isinglass River—lived mawkly old Jack Neck, along with his bat-winged and shark-toothed bonedog, Motherway.

  Jack Neck was retired now, and mighty glad of it. He’d put in many a lugubrious lustrum at Krespo’s Mangum Exordium, stirring the slorq vats, cleaning the lard filters, sweeping up the escaped tiddles. Plenty of work for any man’s lifetime. Jack had busted his hump like a shemp to earn his current pension (the hump was just now recovering; it didn’t wander so bad like it used to), and Jack knew that unlike the lazy young and fecund time-eaters and space-sprawlers whom he shared his cheapjack building with, he truly deserved his union stipend, all 500 crones per moon (except once a year, during the Short Thirteenth, when he only got 495). Why, it had taken him a whole year of retirement just to forget the sound of the tiddles crying out for mercy. Deadly core-piercing, that noise was, by Saint Fistula’s Nose!

  But now, having survived the rigors of the Exordium (not all his buddies had lived to claim their Get-gone Get-by; why, his pal Slam Slap could still be seen as a screaming bas-relief in the floor tiles of Chamber 409), Jack could take life slow and easy. During daylight hours, he could loll around his bachelor-unclean flat (chittering dust-bunnies prowling from couch to cupboard; obscurantist buildup on the windows, sulfur-yellow sweatcrust on the inside, pinky-grey smogma on the outside), quaffing his Anonymous Brand Bitterberry Slumps (two crones per sixpack, down at Batu Truant’s Package Parlor) and watching the televised Motorball games. Lookit that gracefully knurltopped Dean Tesh play, how easily he scored, like a regular Kuykendall Canton pawpaw!

  Ignoring his master’s excited rumbles and despairing whoops, Motherway the steel-colored bonedog would lie peacefully by the side of Jack’s slateslab chair, mostly droop-eyed and snore-birthing, occasionally emitting a low growl directed at a more-than-usually daring dustbunny, the bonedog’s acutely articulated leathery wings reflexively snickersnacking in stifled pursuit.

  Three times daily Motherway got his walkies. Down the four flights of badly lit, incongruently angled stairs Jack and his pet would clomber, Motherway’s cloven chitin hooves scrabbling for purchase on the scarred boards. Last time down each day, Jack would pause in the lobby and check for mail. He never got anything, barring his moonly check, but it was good to clear the crumblies out of his wall-adherent mailsack. Dragoman Mr Spiffle wouldn’t leave the mail if contumacious crumblies nested within Jack’s fumarole-pocked personal mailsack. And Jack didn’t blame him! One or two migrant crumblies a day could be dealt with—but not a whole moonly nest!

  Outside on Marmoreal Boulevard, Jack and Motherway always turned left, toward Newspaper Park. Marmoreal Boulevard paralleled the Isinglass River, which gurgled and chortled in its high-banked channel directly across the Boulevard from Jack’s flat. The mean and treacherous slippery river was further set off from foot and vehicle traffic by a wide promenade composed of earth-mortared butterblox and a rail of withyweave. Mostly, the promenade remained vacant of strollers. It didn’t pay to get too close to the Isinglass, as more than one uncautious twitterer had discovered, when—peering curiously over the rail to goggle at the rainbowed plumduff sluicejuice pouring from the Stoltz Refinery pipes—he or she would be looped by a long suckered manipulator and pulled down to eternal aquatic slavery on the spillichaug plantations. GAWPERS AND LOOKYLOOS, BEWARE! read the numerous signage erected by the solicitous Drudge City Constabulary.

  (Boating on the Isinglass held marginally fewer risks. Why, people were still talking about the event that quickly came to be known throughout Drudge City and beyond as “Pale Captain Dough’s Angling Dismay,” an event that Jack had had the misfortune to witness entire from his own flat. And he had thought the squeaky pleas of the tiddles were hard to dislodge from his mind—!)

  Moving down the body- and booth-crowded sidewalk with a frowsty and jangly galumph that was partially a result of his fossilized left leg and partially attributable to the chunk-heeled, needle-toed boots which compressed his tiny feet unmercifully, Jack would enjoy the passing sights and sounds and smells of his neighborhood. A pack of low-slung Cranials surged by, eliciting a snap and lunge from the umbilical-restrained Motherway. From the pedal-powered, umbrella-shielded, salted-chickpea cart operated by Mother Gimlett wafted a delectable fragrance that always convinced Jack to part with a thread or two, securing in return a greasy paper cone of crispy steaming legumes. From the door of Boris Crocodile’s poured forth angular music, the familiar bent notes and goo-modulated subsonics indicating that Stinky Frankie Konk was soloing on the hookah-piped banjo. Jack would lick his bristly nodule-dotted lips, anticipating his regular visit that evening to the boisterous Beanery and Caustics Bar, where he would be served a shot of his favorite dumble-rum by affable bartender Dinky Pachinko.

  On the verge of Newspaper Park, beneath the towering headline tree, Jack would let slip Motherway’s umbilical, which would retract inside the bonedog’s belly with a whir and a click like a rollershade pull. Then Mo
therway would be off to romp with the other cavorting animals, the gilacats and sweaterbats, the tinkleslinks and slither-sloths. Jack would amble over to his favorite bench, where reliably could be found Dirty Bill Brownback. Dirty Bill was more or less permanently conjoined with his bench, the man’s indiscriminate flesh mated with the porously acquisitive material of the seat. Surviving all weathers and seasons, subsisting on a diet scrounged from the trash can placed conveniently at his elbow, Dirty Bill boasted cobwebbed armpits and crumbly-infested trousers, but was nonetheless an affable companion. Functioning as a center of fresh gossip and rumors, news and notions, Dirty Bill nevertheless always greeted Jack Neck with the same stale jibe.

  “Hey, Neck, still wearing those cellbug togs? Can’t you afford better on your GGGB?”

  True, Jack Neck’s outfit went unchanged from one moon to the next. His ivory- and ash-striped shirt and identically patterned leggings were the official workwear of his union, the MMMM, or Mangum Maulers Monitoring Moiety, and Jack’s body had grown accustomed to the clothes through his long employment. Of course, the clothes had also grown accustomed to Jack’s body, fusing in irregular lumpy seams and knobbly patches to his jocund, rubicund, moribund flesh. That was just the way it went these days, in the midst of the Indeterminate. The stability of the Boredom was no more. Boundaries were flux-prone, cause-and-effect ineffectual, and forms not distinct from ideations. You soon got used to the semi-regular chaos, though, even if, like Jack, you had been born ’way back in the Boredom.

  With the same predictability exhibited by Dirty Bill (human social vapidity remained perhaps the most stable force in the Indeterminate), Jack would consistently reply, “Happens I fancy these orts, Dirty Bill. And they fancy me!”

  With a chuckle and a snaggletooth snigger, Dirty Bill would pat the bench beside him and offer, “Sit a spell then, neckless Jack Neck—not too long though, mind you!—and I’ll fill you in on my latest gleanings. That is, if you’ll share a salty chickpea or two!”