Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  “Understanding. Depth of understanding. Unbelievable responsiveness to detail linked to amazing clarity of vision.”

  “Yeah,” Bunting said, “yeah, that’s it.” He clutched the book to his chest and turned away toward his apartment building.

  He placed the book on his chair and sat on the bed and looked at its cover. In a few sentences, Anna Karenina had brought shining bits of the world to him—it was as close as you could get to The Buffalo Hunter experience and still be sane. Everything was so close that it was almost like being inside it. The two short passages he had read had brought the other world within him, which had once seemed connected to a great secret truth about the world as a whole, once again into being—had awakened it by touching it. Bunting was almost afraid of this power. He had to have the book, but he was not sure that he could read it.

  Bunting jumped up off the bed and ate two slices of whole-grain bread and a couple of carrots. Then he put his coat on and went back to the cash machine at the bank and to the drugstore across the street.

  That night he lay in bed, enjoying the slight ache in his legs all the walking had given him and drinking warm milk from his old Prentiss. Beneath him, odd and uncomfortable but perfect all the same, was the construction he had made from eighty round plastic Evenflos and a tube of epoxy, a lumpy blanket of baby bottles that nestled into and warmed itself against his body. He had thought of making a sheet of baby bottles a long time ago, when he had been thinking about fakirs and beds of nails, and finally making the sheet now was a whimsical reference to that time when he had thought mainly about baby bottles. Bunting thought that sometime he could take off all the nipples and fill every one of the Evenflos beneath him with warm milk. It would be like going to bed with eighty little hot water bottles.

  He held the slightly battered copy of Anna Karenina up before him and looked at the cover illustration of a train which had paused at a country station to take on fuel or food for its passengers. A snowstorm swirled around the front of the locomotive. The illustration seemed filled with the same luminous, almost alarming reality as the sentences he had found at random within the book, and Bunting knew that this sense of promise and immediacy came from the memory of those passages. Opening the book at all seemed to invoke a great risk, but if Bunting could have opened it to those sentences in which the horses snorted in the mist and the wind sprang up under a gray morning sky, he would have done so instantly. His eyes drooped, and the little train in the illustration threw upward a white flag of steam and jolted forward through the falling snow.

  THIRTEEN

  Thursday morning the telephone rang with a fussy, importunate clamor, that all but announced the presence of Frank Herko on the other end of the line—Bunting, who was in the fourth day of his sobriety, could imagine Herko grimacing and cursing as the phone went unanswered. Bunting continued chewing on a slice of dry bread, and looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock. Herko had finally admitted that he was not coming in again, and was trying to bully him back to DataComCorp. Bunting had no intention of answering the telephone. Frank Herko and the job in the Data Entry room dwindled as they shrank into the past. He swallowed the last of his papaya juice and reminded himself to pick up more fruit juices that morning. At last, on the thirteenth ring, the telephone fell silent.

  Bunting thought of the horses snorting in the cold morning mist when everything else was silent but the frogs, and a shiver went through him.

  He stood up from the table and looked around his room. It was pretty radical. He thought it might look a little better if he got rid of all the newspapers and magazines—his room could never look ordinary anymore, but what he had done would mean more if the whole room was a little cleaner. The nipples of baby bottles jutted out from two walls, and a blanket of baby bottles, like a sheet of chain mail, covered his bed. If there were very little else in the room, Bunting saw, it would be as purposeful as a museum exhibit. He could get rid of the television. All he needed was one table, one chair, two lamps, and his bed. His room would be stark as a monument. And the monument would be to everything that was missing. Bunting was a little uncertain as to what precisely was missing, but he didn’t think it could be summed up easily.

  He washed his plate and glass and put them on the drying rack. Then he unplugged his television set, picked it up, unlocked his door, and carried the set out into the hall. He took it down past the elevators and set it on the floor. Then he turned around and hurried back into his apartment.

  Bunting spent the morning stuffing the magazines and newspapers into black garbage bags and taking them downstairs to the sidewalk. On his fourth or fifth trip, he noticed that the television had disappeared from the hallway. Bango Skank or Jeepy had a new toy. Gradually, Bunting’s room lost its old enclosed look. There were the two walls covered with jutting bottles, the wall with the windows that overlooked the brownstones, and the kitchen alcove. There was his bed and the bedside chair. In front of the kitchen alcove stood his little dining table. He had uncovered another chair which had been concealed under a mound of papers, and this too he took out into the hallway for his neighbors.

  When he came up from taking out the last of the garbage bags, he closed and locked the door behind him, pulled the police bar into its slot, and inspected his territory. A bare wooden floor, with dusty squares where stacks of newspapers had stood, extended toward him from the exterior wall. Without the newspapers, the distance between himself and the windows seemed immense. For the first time, Bunting noticed the streaks on the glass. The bright daylight turned them silver and cast long rectangles on the floor. Rigid baby bottles stuck out of the wall on both sides, to his right going toward the bathroom door and the kitchen alcove, and to his left, extending toward his bed. The wall above and beyond the bed was also covered with a mat of jutting baby bottles. A wide blanket of baby bottles, half-covering a flat pillow and a white blanket, lay across his bed.

  After a lunch of carrots, celery, and bread, Bunting poured hot water and soap into a bucket and washed his floor. Then he poured out the filthy water, started again, and washed the table and the kitchen counters. After that he scrubbed even his bathroom—sink, toilet, floor, and tub. Large brown mildew stains blotted the shower curtain, and Bunting carefully unhooked it from the plastic rings, folded it into quarters, and took it downstairs and stuffed it into a garbage can.

  He went to bed hungry but not painfully so, his back and shoulders tingling from the work, and his legs still aching from his long walk down the length of Manhattan. He lay atop the blanket of bottles, and pulled the sheet and woolen blanket over his body. He picked up the old paperback copy of Anna Karenina and opened it with trembling hands. For a second it seemed that the sentences were going to lift up off the page and claim him, and his heart tightened with both fear and some other, more anticipatory emotion. But his gaze met the page, and he stayed within his body and his room, and read. And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a tigfit, rapid step she went down the steps that led from the water tank to the rails and stopped close to the approaching train.

  Bunting shuddered and fell into exhausted sleep.

  He was walking through a landscape of vacant lots and cement walls in a city street that might have been New York or Battle Creek. Broken bottles and pages from old newspapers lay in the street. Here and there across the weedy lots, tenements rose into the gray air. His legs ached, and his feet hurt, and it was difficult for him to follow the man walking along ahead of him, whose pale robe filled and billowed in the cold wind. The man was slightly taller than Bunting, and his dark hair blew about his head. Untroubled by the winter wind, the man strode along, increasing the distance between himself and Bunting with every step. Bunting did not know why he had to follow this strange man, but that was what he had to do. To lose him would be disaster—he would be lost in this dead, ugly world. Then he would be dead himself. His feet seemed to adhere to the gritty pavem
ent, and a stiff wind held him back like a hand.

  As the man receded another several yards down the street, it came to Bunting that what he was following was an angel, not a man, and he cried out in terror. Instantly the being stopped moving and stood with his back to Bunting. The pale robe fluttered about him. A certain word had to be spoken, or the angel would begin walking again and leave Bunting in this terrible world. The word was essential, and Bunting did not know it, but he opened his mouth and shouted the first word that came to him. The instant it was spoken, Bunting knew that it was the correct word. He forgot it as soon as it left his throat. The angel slowly began to turn around. Bunting inhaled sharply. The front of the robe was red with blood, and when the angel held out the palms of his hands, they were bloody too. The angel’s face was tired and dazed, and his eyes looked blind.

  FOURTEEN

  On Friday morning, Bunting awoke with tears in his eyes for the wounded angel, the angel beyond help, and realized with a .shock of alarm that he was in someone else’s house. For a moment he was completely adrift in time and space, and thought he might actually be a prisoner in an attic—his room held no furniture except a table and chair, and the windows seemed barred. It came to him that he might have died. The afterlife contained a strong, pervasive odor of soap and disinfectant. Then the bars on the windows resolved into streaks and shadows, and he looked up to the bottles sticking straight out on the wall above his head, and remembered what he had done. The wounded angel slipped backward into the realm of forgotten things where so much of Bunting’s life lay hidden, and Bunting moved his legs across the bumpy landscape of baby bottles, his fakir’s bed of nails, and pulled himself out of the bed. His legs, shoulders, back, and arms all ached. Out on the street, Bunting realized that he was enjoying his unemployment. For days he had carried with him always a slight burn of hunger, and hunger was such a sharp sensation that there was a small quantity of pleasure in it. Sadness was the same, Bunting realized—if you could stand beside your own sadness, you could appreciate it. Maybe it was the same with the big emotions, love and terror and grief. Terror and grief would be the hardest, he thought, and for a moment uneasily remembered Jesus slapping a bloody palm against the side of his old house in Battle Creek. Holy holy holy.

  The extremely uncomfortable thought came to him that maybe terror and grief were holy too, and that Jesus had appeared before him in a Battle Creek located somewhere north of Greenwich Village to convey this.

  A white cloud of steam vaguely the size and shape of an adult woman rose up from a manhole in the middle of Broadway and by degrees vanished into transparency.

  Bunting felt the world begin to shred around him and hurried into Fairway Fruits and Vegetables. He bought apples, bread, carrots, tangerines, and milk. At the checkout counter he imagined the little engine on the cover of the Tolstoy novel issuing white flags of steam and launching itself into the snowstorm. He had the strange sense, which he knew to be untrue, that someone was watching him, and this sense followed him back out onto the wide crowded street.

  A woman-sized flag of white steam did not linger over Broadway, there was no sudden outcry, no chalked outline to show where a human being had died.

  Bunting began walking up the street toward his building. Brittle pale light bounced from the roofs of cars, from thick gold necklaces, from sparkling shop windows displaying compact discs. In all this brightness and activity lurked the mysterious sense that someone was still watching him—as if the entire street held its breath as it attended Bunting’s progress up the block. He carried his bag of groceries through the cold bright air. Far down the block, someone called out in a belling tenor voice like a hunting horn, and the world’s hovering attention warmed this beautiful sound so that it lingered in Bunting’s ears. A taxi slid forward out of shadow into a shower of light and revealed, in a sudden blaze of color, a pure and molten yellow. The white of a Chinese woman’s eyes flashed toward Bunting, and her black hair swung lustrously about her head. A plume of white breath came from his mouth. It was as if someone had spoken secret words, instantly forgotten, and the words spoken had had transformed him. The cold sidewalk beneath his feet seemed taut as a lion’s hide, resonant as a drum.

  Even the lobby of his building was charged with an anticipatory meaning.

  He let himself into his bare room and carried the groceries to his bed and carefully took from the bag each apple and tangerine, the carrots, the milk. He balled up the bag, took it and the carton of milk to the kitchen alcove, flattened out the bag and folded it neatly, and then poured the milk into three separate bottles. These he took back across his sparkling floor and set them beside the bed. Bunting took off his shoes, the suit he was wearing, his shirt and tie, and hung everything neatly in his closet. He returned to the bed in his underwear and socks. He turned back the bed and got in on top of his fakir’s blanket of baby bottles and pulled the sheets and blanket up over his body without shaking off any of the objects on the bed. He doubled his pillow and switched on his lamp, though the cold light from outside still cast large bright rectangles on the floor. He leaned back under the reading light and arranged the fruit, carrots, bread, and bottles around him. He raised one of the bottles to his mouth and clamped the nipple between his teeth. There was a pleasant brisk coolness in the air that seemed to come from the world contained in the illustration on the cover of the book beside him.

  Bunting drew in a mouthful of milk and picked up the copy of Anna Karenina from the bedside chair. He was trembling. He opened the book to the first page, and when he looked down at the lines of print, they rose to meet his eye.

  FIFTEEN

  The super of the building looked down as he fit the key into the lock. He turned it, and both men heard the lock click open. The super kept looking at the floor. He was as heavy as Bunting’s father, and the two sweaters he wore against the cold made him look pregnant. Bunting’s father was wearing an overcoat, and his shoulders were hunched and his hands were thrust into its pockets. The breath of both men came out in clouds white as milk. Finally the super glanced up at Mr. Bunting.

  “Go on, open it up,” said Mr. Bunting.

  “Okay, but there are some things you probably don’t know,” the super said.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know,” said Mr. Bunting. “Like what the hell happened, basically. And I guess you can’t be too helpful on that little issue, or am I wrong?”

  “Well, there’s other things, too,” the super said, and opened the door at last. He stepped backward to let Mr. Bunting go into the room.

  Bunting’s father went about a yard and a half into the room, then stopped moving. The super stepped in behind him and closed the door.

  “I fucking hate New York,” said Mr. Bunting. “I hate the crap that goes on down here. Excuse me for getting personal, but you can’t even keep the heat on in this dump.” He was looking at the wall above the bed, where many of the bottles had been splashed, instead of directly at the bed itself. The bed had been cracked along a diagonal line, and the sheets, which were brown with dried blood, had hardened so that they would form a giant stiff V if you tried to take them off. Someone, probably the super’s wife, had tried to mop up the blood alongside the cracked, folded bed. Chips of wood and bent, flattened bedsprings lay on the smeary floor.

  “The tenants are all mad, but it’s a good thing we got no heat,” the super said. “I mean, we’ll get it, when we get the new boiler, but he was here ten days before I found him. And I’ll tell you something.” He came cautiously toward Mr. Bunting, who took his eyes off the wall to scowl at him. “He made it easy for me. See that police bolt?”

  The super gestured toward the long iron rod leaning against the wall beside the door frame. “He left it that way—unlocked. It was like he was doing me a favor. If he’d a pushed that sucker across the door, I’d a had to break down the door to get in. And I probably wouldn’t have found him for two more weeks. At least.”

  “So maybe he made it easy for whoever did it,�
� said Bunting’s father. “Some favor.”

  “You saw him?”

  Mr. Bunting turned back to look at the bottles above the bed. He turned slowly to look at. the bottles on the front wall. “Sure I saw him. I saw his face. You want details? You can go fuck yourself, you want details. All they let me see was his face.”

  “It didn’t look like anybody could have done that,” the super said.

  “That’s real clever. Nobody did it.” He saw something on the bed, and moved closer to it. “What’s that?” He was looking at a shriveled red ball that had fallen into the bottom of the fold. A smaller, equally shriveled black ball had fallen a few feet from it.

  “I think’s an apple,” said the super. “He had some apples and tangerines, some bread. And if you look close, you can see little bits of paper stuck all over the place, like some book exploded. All the fruit dried out, but the book … I don’t know what happened to the book. Maybe he tore it up.”

  “Could you maybe keep your trap shut?” Mr. Bunting took in the bottles above the bed for an entire minute. Then he turned and stared at the unstained bottles on the far wall. At last he said, ‘This is what I don’t get. I don’t get this with the baby bottles.”

  He glanced at the super, who quickly shook his head to indicate that he did not get it either.

  “I mean, you ever get any other tenants down here who did this kind of thing?”

  “I never seen anyone do this before,” said the super. “This is a new one. These bottles, I gotta take the walls down to get ‘em off.”