Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  It is not advisable to purchase any of the goods the children themselves may offer for sale, although they have been affected by the same self-consciousness evident in the impressive buildings on the other side of the river and do sell picture postcards of their largest and most eccentric constructions. It may be that the naive architecture of these tree houses represents the city’s most authentic artistic expression, and the postcards, amateurish as most of them are, provide interesting, perhaps even valuable, documentation of this expression of what may be called folk art.

  These industrious children of the mercantile area have ritualized their violence into highly formalized tattooing and “spontaneous” forays and raids into the tree houses of opposing tribes during which only superficial injuries are sustained, and it is not suspected that the viaduct killer comes from their number.

  Further west are the remains of the city’s museum and library, devastated during the civic disturbances, and beyond these picturesque, still-smoking hulls lies the ghetto. It is not advised to enter the ghetto on foot, though the tourist who has arranged to rent an automobile may safely drive through it after he has negotiated his toll at the gate house. The ghetto’s residents are completely self-sustaining, and the attentive tourist who visits this district will observe the multitude of tents housing hospitals, wholesale food and drug warehouses, and the like. Within the ghetto are believed to be many fine poets, painters, and musicians, as well as the historians known as “memorists,” who are the district’s living encyclopedias and archivists. The “memorist’s” tasks include the memorization of the works of the area’s poets, painters, etc., for the district contains no printing presses or art-supply shops, and these inventive and self-reliant people have devised this method of preserving their works. It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of “oral painting” could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city.

  The ghetto’s relationship to violence is unknown.

  Further west the annual snowfall increases greatly, for seven months of the year dropping an average of two point three feet of snow each month upon the shopping malls and paper mills which have concentrated here. Dust storms are common during the summers, and certain infectious viruses, to which the inhabitants have become immune, are carried in the water.

  Still further west lies the Sports Complex.

  The tourist who has ventured thus far is well advised to turn back at this point and return to our beginning, the War Memorial.

  Your car may be left in the ample and clearly posted parking lot on the Memorial’s eastern side. From the Memorial’s wide empty terraces, you are invited to look southeast, where a great unfinished bridge crosses half the span to the hamlets of Wyatt and Arnoldville. Construction was abandoned on this noble civic project, subsequently imitated by many cities in our western states and in Australia and Finland, immediately after the disturbances of 1968, when its lack of utility became apparent. When it was noticed that many families chose to eat their bag lunches on the Memorial’s lakeside terraces in order to gaze silently at its great interrupted arc, the bridge was adopted as the symbol of the city, and its image decorates the city’s many flags and medals.

  The “Broken Span,” as it is called, which hangs in the air like the great frozen wings above the Valley, serves no function but the symbolic. In itself and entirely by accident this great non-span memorializes violence, not only by serving as reference to the workmen who lost their lives during its construction (its non-construction). It is not rounded or finished in any way, for labor on the bridge ended abruptly, even brutally, and from its truncated floating end dangle lengths of rusting iron webbing, thick wire cables weighted by chunks of cement, and bits of old planking material. In the days before access to the un-bridge was walled off by an electrified fence, two or three citizens each year elected to commit their suicides by leaping from the end of the span; and one must resort to a certain lexical violence when referring to it. Ghetto residents are said to have named it “Whitey,” and the tree-house children call it “Ursula,” after one of their own killed in the disturbances. South Siders refer to it as “The Ghost,” civil servants, “The Beast,” and East Siders simply as “that thing.” The “Broken Span” has the violence of all unfinished things, of everything interrupted or left undone. In violence there is often the quality of yearning—the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. It ought not to go unmentioned that most of the city’s residents have never seen the “bridge” except in its representations, and for this majority the “bridge” is little more or less than a myth, being without any actual referent. It is pure idea. Violence, it is felt though unspoken, is the physical form of sensitivity. The city believes this. Incompletion, the lack of referent which strands you in the realm of pure idea, demands release from itself. We are above all an American city, and what we believe most deeply we…

  The victims of the viaduct killer, that citizen who excites our attention, who makes us breathless with outrage and causes our police force to ransack the humble dwellings along the riverbank, have all been adult women. These women in their middle years are taken from their lives and set like statues beside the pillar. Each morning there is more pedestrian traffic on the viaduct, in the frozen mornings men (mainly men) come with their lunches in paper bags, walking slowly along the cement walkway, not looking at one another, barely knowing what they are doing, looking down over the edge of the viaduct, looking away, dawdling, finally leaning like fishermen against the railing, waiting until they can no longer delay going to their jobs.

  The visitor who has done so much and gone so far in this city may turn his back on the “Broken Span,” the focus of civic pride, and look in a southwesterly direction past the six lanes of the expressway, perhaps on tiptoe (children may have to mount one of the convenient retaining walls). The dull flanks of the viaduct should just now be visible, with the heads and shoulders of the waiting men picked out in the gray air like brush strokes. The quality of their yearning, its expectancy, is visible even from here.

  INTERLUDE:

  THE POETRY

  READING

  The department chairman pronounced his name, and the famous poet got to his feet and began to move uncertainly toward the podium. The young woman who had written to him several days before (and had not received an answer) held her breath—for a second, it seemed that the poet might walk off the stage, or collapse. He seemed much older and weaker than she had imagined—she would have walked straight past him on the street. He looked like the sort of old man who would have dirty fingernails, who would no longer be able to shave himself well. He gained the podium, leaned on it, opened his folio, frowned, wiped his forehead. He was perspiring. He began to read, and his voice was a glorious surprise. It sounded as if another man, much younger and stronger, were reading from inside him. This young man spoke with the voice of an orchestra, in the voices of trombones and trumpets. The old poet never looked up from his papers, but she thought that his eyes looked glazed, as if he were drunk, or nearly asleep.

  The next day, she could remember the sound of his voice, but the poems were only a golden blur—she was glad he had not answered her letter. She couldn’t think of a single place where she could go with a man like that. Where could you take a guy who looked like a bum?

  THE BUFFALO HUNTER

  For Rona Pondick

  ONE

  At the peasant’s words…undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out as though they had been locked up, and all striving toward one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.

  —Leo Tolstoy, ANNA KARENINA

  Bob Bunting’s parents surprised him with a telephone call on the Sunday that was his thirty-fifth birthday. It was his first conversation with his parents in three years, though he
had received a monthly letter from them during this period, along with cards on his birthdays. These usually reflected his father’s abrasive comic style. Bunting had written back with the same frequency, and it seemed to him that he had achieved a perfect relationship with his parents. Separation was health; independence was wealth.

  During his twenties, when he was sometimes between jobs and was usually short of money, he had flown from New York to spend Thanksgivings and Christmases with his parents in Michigan—Battle Creek, Michigan. Thanksgiving disappeared first, when Bunting finally got a job he liked, and in his thirtieth year Bunting had realized how he could avoid making the dreary Christmas journey into the dark and frigid Midwest. It was to this inspiration that his father referred after wishing him what sounded to Bunting like a perfunctory and insincere Happy Birthday and alluding to the rarity of their telephone conversations.

  “I suppose Veronica keeps you pretty busy, huh? You guys go out a lot?”

  “Oh, you know,” Bunting said. “About the usual.”

  Veronica was entirely fictional. Bunting had not had a date with a member of the opposite sex since certain disastrous experiments in high school. Over the course of a great many letters, Veronica had evolved from a vaguely defined “friend” into a tall, black-haired, Swiss-born executive of DataComCorp, Bunting’s employer. Still somewhat vague, she looked a little like Sigourney Weaver and a little like a woman in horn-rimmed eyeglasses he had twice seen on the M104 bus. “Well, something’s keeping you pretty busy, because you never answer your phone.”

  “Oh, Robert,” said Bunting’s mother, addressing her husband’s implication more than his actual words. Bunting, who also had been named Robert, was supposed to be scattering some previously unsuspected wild oats.

  “Sometimes I think you just lie there and listen to the phone ring,” his father said, mollifying and critical at once.

  “He’s busy”“ his mother breathed. “You know how they are in New York.”

  “Do I?” his father asked. “So you went to see Cats, hey, Bobby? You liked it?”

  Bunting sighed. “We left at the intermission.” This was what he had intended to write when the next letter came due. “I liked it okay, but Veronica thought it was terrible. Anyhow, some Swiss friends of hers were in town, and we had to go downtown to meet them.”

  His father asked, “Girls or boys?”

  “A couple, a very good-looking young couple,” Bunting said. “We went to a nice new restaurant called the Blue Goose.”

  “Is that a Swiss restaurant, Bobby?” his mother asked, and he glanced across the room to the mantel above the unusable fireplace of his single room, where the old glass baby bottle he had used in his childhood stood beside a thrift-shop mirror. He was used to inventing details about imaginary restaurants on paper, and improvisation made him uneasy.

  “No, just an American sort of a place,” he said.

  “While we’re on the subject of Veronica, is there any chance you could bring her back here this Christmas? We’d sure like to meet the gal.”

  “No—no—no, Christmas is no good, you know that. She has to get back to Switzerland to see her family, it’s a really big deal for her, they all troop down to the church in the snow—”

  “Well, it’s a kind of a big deal for us, too,” his father said.

  Bunting’s scalp grew sweaty. He unbuttoned his shirt collar and pulled down his tie, wondering why he had answered the telephone. “I know, but …”

  None of them spoke for a moment.

  “We’re just grateful you write so often,” his mother finally said.

  “I’ll get back home one of these days, you know I will. I’m just waiting for the right time.”

  “Well, I suggest you make it snappy,” his father said. “We’re both getting older.”

  “But thank God, you’re both healthy.”

  “Your mother fainted in the Red Owl parking lot last week. Passed right out and banged her head. Racked up her knee, too.”

  “Fainted? Why did you faint?” Bunting said. He pictured his mother swaddled in bandages.

  “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “It’s not really serious. I can still get around, what with my cane.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not really serious’?”

  “I get a headache when I think of all those eggs I broke,” she said. “You’re not to worry about me, Bobby.”

  “You didn’t even go to a doctor, did you?”

  “Oh, hell, we don’t need any doctors’” said his father. “Charge you an arm and a leg for nothing. Neither one of us has been to a doctor in twenty years.”

  There was a silence during which Bunting could hear his father computing the cost of the call. “Well, let’s wrap this up, all right?” his father said at last.

  This conversation, with its unspoken insinuations, suspicions, and judgments, left Bunting feeling jittery and exhausted. He set down the telephone, rubbed his hands over his face, and stood up to pick his way through his crowded, untidy room to the mantel of the useless fireplace. He bent to look at himself in the mirror. His thinning hair stood up in little tufts where he had tortured it while talking to his parents. He pulled a comb from his jacket pocket and flattened the tufts over his scalp. His pink, inquisitive face looked reassuringly back at him from above the collar of his crisp white shirt. In honor of his birthday, he had put on a new tie and one of his best suits, a gray nail-head worsted that instantly made its wearer look like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He posed for a moment before the mirror, bending his knees to consult the image of his torso, neck, and boyish, balding head. Then he straightened up and looked at his watch. It was four-thirty, not too early for a birthday drink.

  Bunting took his old baby bottle from the mantle and stepped over a pile of magazines to enter his tiny kitchen area and open the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. He set the baby bottle down on the meager counter beside the sink and removed a quart bottle of Popov vodka from the freezer, which he placed beside the baby bottle. Bunting unscrewed the nipple from the bottle, inspected the pink, chewed-looking nipple and the interior of the bottle for dust and foreign substances, blew into each, and then set down bottle and nipple. He removed the cap from the vodka and tilted it over the baby bottle. A stream of liquid like silvery treacle poured from one container into the other. Bunting half-filled the baby bottle with frigid vodka, and then, because it was his birthday, added another celebratory gurgle that made it nearly three-quarters full. He capped the vodka bottle and put it back in the otherwise empty freezer. From the refrigerator he removed a plastic bottle of Schweppes tonic water, opened it, and added tonic until the baby bottle was full. He screwed the nipple back onto the neck of the bottle and gave it two hard shakes. A little of the mixture squirted through the opening of the nipple, which Bunting had enlarged with the tip of a silver pocketknife. The glass bottle grew cold in his hand.

  Bunting skirted the wing chair that marked the boundary of his kitchen, stepped back over the mound of old newspapers, dropped the bottle on his hastily made bed, and shrugged off his suit jacket. He hung the jacket over the back of a wooden chair and sat down on the bed. There was a Luke Short novel on the rush seat of the wooden chair, and he picked it up and swung his legs onto the bed. When he leaned back into the pillows, the bottle tilted and expressed a transparent drop of vodka and tonic onto the rumpled blue coverlet.

  Bunting snatched up the bottle, awkwardly opened the book, and grunted with satisfaction as the words lifted, full of consolation and excitement, from the page. He brought the bottle to his mouth and began to suck cold vodka through the hole in the spongy pink nipple.

  On one of his Christmas visits home, Bunting had unearthed the bottle while rummaging through boxes in the attic of his parents’ house. He had not even seen it at first—a long glass shape at the bottom of a paper bag containing an empty wartime ration book, two small, worn pairs of moccasins, and a stuffed monkey, partially dismembered. He had gone up
stairs to escape his father’s questions and his mother’s looks of worry—Bunting at the time being employed in the mail room of a magazine devoted to masturbatory fantasies—and had become absorbed in the record of his family’s past life which the attic contained. Here were piles of old winter coats, boxed photograph albums containing tiny pictures of strangers and empty streets and long-dead dogs, stacks of yellowed newspapers with giant wartime headlines (rommel smashed and victory in Europe), paperback novels in rows against a slanting wall, bags of things swept from the backs of closets.

  The monkey came firmly into this category, as did the shoes, though Bunting was not certain about the ration book. Wedged beneath the moccasins, the tubular glass bottle glinted up from the bottom of the bag. Bunting discarded the monkey, a barely remembered toy, and fished out the thick, surprisingly weighty baby bottle. An ivory-colored ring of plastic with a wide opening for a rubber nipple had been screwed down over the bottle’s top. Bunting examined the bottle, realizing that once, in true helplessness, he had clutched this object to his infant chest. Once his own tiny fingers had spread over the thick glass while he had nursed. This proxy, this imitation and simulated breast had kept him alive: it was a period piece, it was something like an object of everyday folk art, and it had survived when his childhood—visible now only as a small series of static moments that seemed plucked from a vast darkness— had not. Above all, perhaps, it made him smile. He held onto it as he walked around the little attic—he did not want to let go of it— and when he came back downstairs, hid it in his suitcase. And then forgot it was there.