Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Mr. Bunting seemed not to have heard him. “First my wife dies—three weeks ago Friday. Then I hear about Bobby, who was always a fuckup, but who happens to be my only kid. When they decide to give it to you, they really give it to you good. They know how to do it. Now on top of everything else, here’s this crap. Maybe I should have stayed away.”

  “You saw his face?” the super asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You said you saw his face.”

  Mr. Bunting gave the super the glance that one heavyweight gives another when they touch gloves.

  “Well, I did too, when I found him,” the super said. “I think you ought to know this. It’s something, anyhow.”

  Mr. Bunting nodded, but did not alter his expression.

  “When I came in … I mean, your son was dead, there was no doubt about that. I was in Korea, and I know what dead people look like. It looked like he got hit by a truck. It’s crazy, but that’s what I thought when I saw him. He was smashed up against the wall, and the bed was all smashed…Anyhow, what got me was the expression on his face. Whatever happened happened all right, and pardon me, but there’s no way the police are ever gonna arrest a couple of guys and get ‘em on this, because no couple of guys could ever do what I saw in this room with my own eyes, believe me—”

  He inhaled. Bunting’s father was looking at him with flat impatient indifferent anger.

  “But anyhow, thee point is, the way your son looked. He looked happy. He looked like he saw the greatest goddamn thing in the world before whatever the hell it was happened to him.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mr. Bunting said. He was shaking his head. “Well, he didn’t look that way when I saw him, but I’m not too surprised by what you say.” He smiled for the first time since entering his son’s room, and started shaking his head again. The smile made the other man’s stomach feel small and cold. “His mother never understood it, but I sure did.”

  “What?” asked the super.

  “He always thought he was some kind of big deal.” Mr. Bunting included the whole apartment in the gesture of his arm. “I couldn’t see it.”

  “It’s like that sometimes,” the super said.

  INTERLUDE:

  BAR TALK

  It was an ordinary side-street bar, its only oddity being its placement on the second floor over an Indian restaurant. The patrons of the bar never entered the restaurant, and the customers and staff of the restaurant never came upstairs to the bar. The people who went there liked the long dark dull wood of the bar, the mirror, the wooden paneling and old beer signs on the walls. Few people bothered to look any nore at the photographs of poets and novelists who had been regular patrons once, or at the pictures of boxers and anonymous show-business people who had also been regulars, though at another time. Nobody ever looked out of the windows, which were the unremarkable windows of the apartment the bar had once been. It was as if the new regulars did not wish to be reminded they were above the street, once they had climbed the stairs.

  These patrons were the people of the neighborhood, and they used the bar to escape from their apartments. None of them were young or rich, and most of them seemed to have settled into their various lives. They did not talk very much, except to Max, the bartender. Sometimes they seemed to be waiting for the bartender to return to them, so that they could continue their conversation, and to be impatient with the customer who had delayed him. Max was often the youngest person in the room—he wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and he liked to present his own experience in a comic, representative fashion.

  In the autumn, nearly on the first cold day of the year, a new person started coming upstairs to the bar. He dressed in camouflage fatigues, a leather jacket, and worn black running shoes. The fatigues seemed faded from thousands of washings, and darker patches showed where tags and insignia had been torn off. He had long thick black hair, and he wore heavy round glasses. The man always carried a book with him, and he sat down at the far end of the bar, ordered a vodka on the rocks, and opened his book and read for a couple of hours. He had three or four drinks. Then he closed the book, paid up, and left. Pretty soon he was there every day. Some of the regulars started nodding hello to him, and he nodded back or smiled, but he never said anything, not even to Max.

  After a couple of weeks, he turned up one day in a black tur-tleneck and a pair of jeans so faded they were almost white. One of the regulars, a woman in her sixties named Jeannie, couldn’t stand it anymore and went over to him when he opened his book. “What happened to the fatigues?” she asked. “You finally wash them?”

  Max laughed.

  “I have a lot of fatigues,” the young man said.

  “You must like to read,” Jeannie said. “Every time I see you, you’re reading something.”

  “I have a lot of books, too,” he said, and laughed, startled by his own words.

  Everybody else in the bar, even Max, was staring at them, and Jeannie inexplicably turned red. She stepped away from the young man, but he put his hand on hers, and she moved back beside him. Max drifted up the bar, and everybody else went back to their conversations or their silences. After a while Max began talking to an old merchant seaman named Billy Blue, and Billy began to laugh. Max turned to another of his regulars and told the same story, and both customers started laughing. Everybody forgot about Jeannie after a while. Then Max or someone else looked down at the end of the bar, and she was sitting there by herself. The man had dropped some bills on the bar and left without anybody noticing. Jeannie had a funny look on her face, as if she were remembering something she’d be happier to forget.

  “That guy say something to you, Jeannie?” Max asked. “He get nasty?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Jeannie said. “He was fine. Really.” She stood up and carried her glass over to the window and looked down onto the street.

  “He was fine?” Max said. “What the hell does that mean?” “You wouldn’t understand,” Jeannie said. She turned away from all of them and looked down. Some of the regulars thought she might be crying, but they couldn’t really tell. Everybody was sort of embarrassed for a little while, and then Jeannie finally turned away from the window and went back to her old place at the bar. The guy with the book never came back; after a couple of weeks, Jeannie began going to a bar further down the block.

  SOMETHING ABOUT A DEATH, SOMETHING ABOUT A FIRE

  The origin and even the nature of Bobo’s Magic Taxi remain mysterious, and the Taxi is still the enigma it was when it first appeared before us on the sawdust floor. Of course it does not lack for exegetes: I possess several manila folders jammed to bursting with analyses of the Taxi and speculations on its nature and construction. “The Bobo Industry” threatens to become giant.

  For many years, as you may remember, the inspection of the Taxi by expert and impartial mechanics formed an integral portion of the act. This examination, as scrupulous as the best mechanics could make it, never found any way in which the magnificent Taxi differed from other vehicles of its type. There was no special apparatus or mechanism enabling it to astonish, delight, and terrify, as it still does.

  When this inspection was still in the performance—the equivalent of the magician’s rolling up his twinkling sleeves—Bobo always stood near the mechanics, in a condition of visible anxiety. He scratched his head, grinned foolishly, beeped a tiny horn attached to his belt, turned cartwheels in bewilderment. His concern always sent the children into great gouts of laughter. But I felt that this apparent anxiety was a real anxiety: that Bobo feared that one night the Einstein of mechanics, the Freud of mechanics, would uncover the principle that made the Magic Taxi unique, and thereby spoil its effectiveness forever. For who remains impressed by a trick, once the mechanism is exposed? The mechanics grunted and sweated, probed the gas tank, got on their backs underneath the Taxi, bent deep into the motor, covered themselves with grease and carbon so that they too looked like comic tramps, and at the end of their time, gave up. They could not find a thing, not e
ven registration numbers on the engine block, nor trade names on any of the engine’s component parts.

  In appearance it was an ordinary taxi, long, black, squat as a stone cottage, of the sort generally seen in London. Bobo sat at the wheel as the taxi entered the tent, his square behatted head flush against the Plexiglass window that opened onto the larger rear compartment. This was empty but for the upholstered backseat and the two facing chair-seats. It was the very image of the respectable, apart from the sense that Bobo is not driving the taxi but being driven by it. Yet, though nothing could look so mundane as a black taxi, from the first performance this vehicle conveyed an atmosphere of tension and unease. I have seen it happen again and again, consistently: the lights do not dim, no kettle drums roll, there is no announcement, but a curtain at the side opens, and unsmiling Bobo drives (or is driven) into the center of the great tent. At this moment, the audience falls silent, as if hypnotized. You feel uncertain, slightly on edge, as if you have forgotten something you particularly wished to remember. Then the performance begins again.

  Bobo does strikingly little in the course of the performance. It is this modesty that has made us love him. He could be one of us— fantastically dressed and pummeling the bulb of his little horn when confused or delighted. When the performance concludes, he bows, bending his head to the torrential applause, and drives off through the curtain. Sometimes, when the Taxi has reached the point where the curtain begins to sweep up over the hood, he raises his white-gloved, three-fingered hand in a wave. The wave seems regretful, as if he wishes he could get out of the Taxi and join us up in the uncomfortable stands. So he waves. Then it is over.

  There is little to say about the performance. The performance is always the same. Also, it differs slightly from viewer to viewer. Children, to judge from their chatter, see something like a fireworks display. The Taxi shoots off great exploding patterns that do not fade but persist in the air and enact some sort of drama. When pressed by adults, the children utter merely some few vague words about ‘The Soldier” and “The Lady” and “The Man with a Coat.” When asked if the show is funny, they nod their heads, blinking, as if their questioner is moronic.

  Adults rarely discuss the performance, except in the safety of print. We have found it convenient to assume a maximum of coincidence between what we have separately seen, for this allows our scholars to speak of “our community,” “the community.” Exegetes have divided the performance into three sections (the Great Acts), corresponding to the three great waves of emotion that overwhelm us while the Taxi is before us. We agree that everyone over the age of eighteen passes inexorably through these phases, led by the mysterious capacities of the Magic Taxi.

  The first act is The Darkness. During this section, which is quite short, we seem to pass into a kind of cloud or fog, in which everything but the Taxi and its attendant becomes indistinct. The lights overhead do not lessen in intensity, they do not so much as flicker. Yet the sense of gloom is undeniable. We are separate, lost in our separation. At this point we remember our sins, our meager-ness, our miseries. Some of us weep. Bobo invariably sobs, the tears crusting on his white makeup, and blats and blats his little horn. His painted figure is so akin to ours, and yet so foolish, so theatrical in its grief, that we are distracted from our own memories. We are drawn up out of unhappiness by our love for this tinted waif, Bobo the benighted, and the second act begins.

  This section is known as The Falling because of the physical sensations it induces. Each of us, pinned to the rickety wooden benches, seems to fall through space. This is the most literally dreamlike of the three acts. As the sensation of falling continues, we witness a drama that seems to be projected straight from the Taxi into our eyes. This drama, the “film,” is also dreamlike. The drama differs from person to person, but seems always to involve one’s own parents as they were before one’s own birth. There is something about a death, something about a fire. Our own figure appears, radiant, on the edge of a field. Sometimes there is a battle, more often there is walking upward on a mountain path through deciduous northern trees. It is Ireland, or Germany, or Sweden. We are in the country of our great-great-great grandfathers. We belong here. At last, we are at home. It is the country that has been calling to us all our lives, in messages known only to our cells. In it we are given a brief moment to be heroic, a long lifetime to be moral. This drama elates us and prepares us for the final section of the performance, The Layers.

  The beam of light from the taxi disappears into our eyes, like a transparent wire. When our eyes have been filled by the light, the Taxi, Bobo, the sweaty lady sitting on your right and the man in the blue turtleneck directly in front of you, all of them disappear. The first sensation is that of being on the fuzzy edge of sleep; then the layers begin. For some, they are layers of color and light through which the viewer ascends; for some, layers of stone and gravel and red sandstone; an archeologist I know once hinted to me that in this part of the performance he invariably rises through various strata of civilizations, the cave dwellers, the hut builders, the weapon makers, the iron makers, until he was ascending through towns and villages that had been packed into the earth. I, for my part, seem to rise endlessly through scenes of my own life: I see myself playing in the leaves, making snowballs, doing homework, buying a book—I cry out with happiness, seeing the littleness of my own figure and the foolishness of all my joys. For they are all so harmless! Then the external recurs again before us, Bobo waves driving through the curtain, and it is finished.

  In the first years, when the Taxi was of interest to only a few, we did not worry much about meanings. We took it as spectacle, as revelation—a special added attraction, as the posters said. Then the scholars of C—— University issued their paper asserting that Bobo’s Taxi was the representation of “common miracle,” the sign that the world is infused with spirit. The scholars of the universities of B—— and Y—— agreed, and issued a volume of essays entitled The Ordinary Splendor.

  G——, however, and O—— disagreed. They pointed to the sordidness of the surroundings, the seedy costumes of the other acts, Bobo’s little horn, his tears, the difficult benches and the smell of cotton candy, and their volume of essays, The Blank Day, was much given to analogies to Darwin, Mondrian, and Beckett. Like many others, I skimmed the books, but did not feel that they had touched the real Bobo, the real Taxi: their resonant arguments, phrased with such tact and authority, battled at a great distance, like moths bumping their heavy wings against a screen door. A remark uttered by a friend of mine indicates much more accurately than they the actual quality of the Taxi’s performance.

  “I like to think,” he told me, “of Bobo before he became famous. You must know the theory that he used to be an ordinary man with an ordinary job. He was a doctor, or an accountant, or a professor of mathematics. My sister-in-law is certain that he was the vice president of a tobacco company. ‘It’s in his posture,’ she says. Anyhow, what I like to picture is the morning that he walked out of his house, going to work in the ordinary way, and found the Taxi waiting for him at the curb, not knowing that it was his destiny, entirely unforeseen, black and purring softly, pregnant with miracle.”

  INTERLUDE:

  THE VETERAN

  After two divorces, he lives in a two-bedroom suburban home near Columbus, Ohio, with a pit bull called Lurp. Most of his clothing refers to Vietnam—he has a large collection of T-shirts with pictures of elaborate dragons and slogans like if you weren’t there, shut the fuck up. The second bedroom is his exercise room, where he works out with weights every morning and afternoon. Although he never read for pleasure during his youth, and in fact still reads very little, he earns his living by writing action-adventure novels about Vietnam.

  He writes facing a wall in his living room covered with framed covers of his own books, photographs of Asian women, photographs of himself and his old unit, and a framed poster once issued by his publishers. At eye level, just to the left above the monitor of his computer,
is a frame containing the medals he was awarded in Vietnam. The living room curtains are always drawn.

  He works eleven or twelve hours a day, and goes out as seldom as possible. His wives wanted him to go to psychotherapy or at least join a veterans’ group, but he said that his books were his psychotherapy. He controls his drinking, as he controls everything else— a man without control, he thinks, isn’t a man at all.

  Every night he comes thudding out of sleep, covered in sweat and staring into the dark. Something huge and scaly is twisting away into nothingness. There you are again, he thinks, there you are, old friend.

  MRS. GOD

  For Lila Kalinich

  ONE

  Take a line. What is it about? What is it referring to? What picture can I think of to replace it? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . .

  It is as if it doesn’t care about me but just stares. (He, She,—.) (Trees, Rocks, Planets, Stars.) Still, I am inside it as much as under or across. I stare back at myself.

  —Charles Bernstein CONTENT’S DREAM

  Standish had not realized how tense he was until the jet finally left the ground and his body, as if by itself, began to relax. Nothing could call him back now, neither Jean’s anxiety nor his own reservations. It was settled; he was on his way. The startlingly graphic map of lights that was New York City appeared in the window to his left, then slipped out of view. They were at some alarming, dreamlike attitude to the earth that would have meant certain death during Isobel Standish’s day—but what might she, in whose name her almost-grandson had ditched both home and seven-months- pregnant wife, not have done with the experience of being revolved above the earth in a metal tube?