Moving Into the Red House
A story by Keith Croes
Dory bought the house suddenly in a cold month and urged him to come along. Now he could leave the isolation of a room in the city for the isolation of a room in the country.
It had a barn, she said.
And suddenly they were there. Like the barn in the tangled clutch of naked trees off to the right, it was painted red. Glossy red.
"You're a small-town boy. You'll fit in here," she said happily, a ghost arm waving from her mouth.
He carried immediate necessities in two paper bags over cracked and tilted sidewalk slabs toward rectangular dark-tinted windows reaching upward on both sides of the front door for three-quarters of its ominous face. Skin the color of raw meat. Disoriented, he followed her in a wake of high spirits.
"This is the most amazing optical illusion. How many stories do you think there is? Three?" She was banking through doorways. He watched the back of her jeans. "Four? Six, Arnie, six! They're not as high as standard. Except the atrium of the living room. Look."
He moved slowly past her pointing figure leaning against an archway, and his gaze drew upward and upward. Each floor presented its own crazy architecture to the open space and uppermost was the geometric, spidery grid of a sunroof that extended beyond the dimensions of the living room and indeed appeared to cover most of the house. Like the roof of a greenhouse.
"And look--" She was backtracking through the rooms and doorways.
Like the sidewalk, the floors buckled at odd angles. The previous owners appeared to have left in a hurry, leaving trash and clothing strewn about. There were even pieces of furniture here and there. The greenhouse roof projected overcast sky into the living room, a hazy expanse across which he could make out cardboard boxes, a thin-legged mahogany light stand, a tubular brass chair with wicker seat and back. Immediately the previous owners became the Previous Owners. He set the bags down and followed her.
"The kitchen--" he heard her say from a distance in front of him, and thought: couldn't they get a normal house? a house with level floors? one based on Euclidean geometry? And don't realtors insist on tidying up? on downplaying a property's peccadilloes?
Past the unfathomably narrow kitchen he descended a slope he thought surely was hard-packed dirt and entered a small room like a den. She stood looking out the far window and he came up behind her.
Out the window was a corral, and beyond was a stream gushing with the full waters of late winter. He tried following some object caught in its current and thought that it moved a hundred miles an hour.
"We'll have to keep the kids away from there," he said, and she looked at him strangely.
He thought in the summer it would slow down, and maybe the kids and he could go swimming. He pressed against her rear.
Loneliness is an engine. He had written it in a letter to his father. She had many friends in the city, and would commute to her job there. She liked the fact that he didn't take up too much of her time.
"Look--" And she was gone down a dim hallway off the den. Bathrooms. Guestrooms. Rooms that had no obvious purpose, as if they were embryonic. He almost trotted to keep up with her, and then they were outside in the dusk. Gray rails gnarled impossible distances between posts, a fence diminishing to the barn, glossy red.
"Dory, what is this?" he said, gasping.
"Isn't it wonderful?" She also was breathless, legs pumping ahead of him.
The inside of the barn was dark, featureless. Something he thought was a cattle chute led out into the choppy corral. Unaccountably, the corral seemed to narrow and lead to the far end of the house.
He stood in the gaping door. "I don't feel like wandering around this thing in the dark," he said. "Let's go get something to eat. Maybe the movers will be here by the time we get back."
She drove in her Peugot. The town was four miles away, five at the most. They sat in McDonald's in swivel chairs at a tiny table.
"I'm hungry," he said.
"Me too."
Headlights were coming on outside. He watched a mud-spattered Chevy Blazer roll by, then watched himself watching in the reflection in the window. They ate.
The people looked so normal. Small tow-headed white girl, large black man, the consumers of all the styles and colors of clothing sold in the department stores, the orange-and-white saw-toothed sweater he would never think of buying, the tiny green coat for a moist-faced boy with long-suffering eyes, jeans and cords and sweatsuits, puffy jackets against the evening, faces thin and fat, long and squat.
"Do you like it?" she asked.
"Yeah, I do."
"I think it'll be perfect for your work."
"Yeah, why not."
Loneliness is an engine.
He emptied the brown tray into the thank-you receptacle. It was dark outside.
The car traveled up and down and left and right like a roller coaster.
A number of halogen lights lit up the front yard. From the semicircular driveway the place looked like a castle, the tall tinted windows twin turrets. Maybe the Previous Owners were going for some kind of Funkadelic Medieval, feudalism through the eyes of the Sixties.
"Ah, shit!" Slam. "I'll just have to call them."
He followed her inside, realizing that she was talking about the movers. He walked slowly through the vestibule as lights came on ahead of him and the ceiling seemed improbably low. The Previous Owners had built the house according to their whim, and their whim had been to give the entranceway no stature or character at all, leading as it did to a small room, which may be a sewing room, to another small room, which may be a dining room, and off to the left out of sight Dory was on the phone, which she must have arranged to have connected.
"--here yet. We're waiting in an empty house. Uh-huh, well, that's 20 miles away. Lost? Look, it's..." She began a peevish, rapid-fire set of directions.
He took off his leather jacket and carried it, searching to the left around the next doorway for a switch. There was none. He sought on the wall to the right. Nothing. It was the narrow kitchen, he could tell, and he walked back to the range. There were two push-switches on its hood, and he used his palm to turn on the blower, turn on the light, turn off the blower.
An old man walked into the kitchen out of the dark doorway to the den.
"Ah!"
His insides spiraled to a hard, hot, prickly point, and he leaned back against the range, appreciated its metal handle. Through the doorway was a slope, he remembered, a downward ramp of hard-packed dirt. No footsteps, he thought, no sound from there. Could walk right up it, no sound.
He watched the man cross the narrow room and disappear through the opposite doorway.
He thought of Dory.
"Hey!"
Just an old man. Something entirely normal about this, on some level entirely normal. He really did like the house. No shit. Weird fucking place, but he could live here. He tested his knees, found them wanting.
"Dory!"
He heard a noise from the den, from the direction where the old man had come, and found that he could walk. That's where he must go, toward the noise. From where the old man had come. He walked.
Looking now through the doorway, he could see it was not completely dark. There was light down the hallway that connected to the den, and light through the far window, out toward the corral and the stream, a white light like the halogens out front.
In the hallway was a rocking shadow. Someone was approaching.
He stood in the doorway at the top of the dirt ramp and listened to the footsteps, his jacket exchanging hands as he searched for a lightswitch left and right. Nothing.
Scrambling into the jacket for lack of something better to do with it, he turned his head briefly and shouted over his shoulder-- "Dory! there's an old man coming!" --then stepped slowly down the ramp, crouching.
His eyes were adjusting. He could see that the woman was well-dressed. She ignored him as she entered the den and turned to ascend the dirt ramp.
"Hey," he said, but he was already looking past her. Behind her down the hallway were a number of figures. Walking slowly on the crazy-tilted floor.
"What the--"
He glanced around the room, and could make out a built-in desk with several drawers missing, some kind of day bed with an unevenly closed sliding storage drawer underneath, an overturned waste basket so stuffed with paper that none spilled out. He approached the window. Under the halogen lights outside, he could see that people were filing down the cattle chute out of the barn and across the corral toward the house. They remained about 15 feet apart, exiting the barn about every five seconds. Far away, he heard Dory call his name.
The Previous Owners must've thrown some great parties, he thought. They're here looking for the Previous Owners, right?
He sat heavily on the day bed.
"This is all entirely normal," he said to himself.
He rose and entered the hallway, allowing a young man wearing a red plaid Woolrich hunting jacket to pass. The cock-eyed floor made any kind of regular pace impossible. Every step required a glance. A young girl was next, her face a blank, then a fat Italian-looking woman with black hair streaked with gray. He stopped to look at each of them, look into their faces, and each persisted as if he didn't exist.
He realized that he hadn't even seen the bulk of the house, that he had seen only a quarter of it, a tenth of it.
Would they wander around, looking for the Previous Owners? The house could fit a hundred people, a thousand, ten thousand. Would they fill the rooms? What did they want? He blocked the forward progress of a middle-aged man wearing an open charcoal coat, a green sweater underneath covering a protuding potbelly.
"Where are you going?" he said. "They don't live here anymore."
The man kept coming and he stepped aside.
Behind him, closer this time, he heard Dory call for him again, but he continued down the hallway, stumbling.
"They don't live here anymore!" he waved at an obese, black-haired woman whose puffy face made her look like an American Indian.
"They don't live here anymore!" he railed at a younger woman, attractive, eyes as uncomprehending as nail heads.
"This is our house now!" he screeched at a black man, a big black man who looked like an ex-football player. The same man he had seen at McDonald's.
His ankles were weak, painful pivots by the time he reached the end of the hallway where the people were entering in loose single file, and he had seen the orange-and-white sawtoothed sweater worn by a thirtyish man with long, fine, dirty-blond hair. He tripped out to the scarred earth of the corral, spouting white puffs in the harsh light. The pedestrians approached and passed, caught in their irresistible destination. Faces thin and fat, long and squat.
"This is our place now!" he screamed at the marching column of shadowed figures extending back to the barn, exiting from a black rectangle at the top of the cattle chute, the blood-red barn siding shiny with slivered reflections.
"What do you want?" he begged a passing couple, a mother carrying a child who wore a hooded green coat.
He was on his knees, clutching at their legs as they passed. All kinds of fabrics. The ground here was rough and convoluted, and he put his forehead down on something that felt like undeburred metal, like lava. A few blades of grass slapped about. Frozen dirt like thorns. He wanted to taste it, to be dust, when Dory grabbed his shoulder.
"They're inside," she said.
"What do they want?"
"They want to meet you," she said.
Loneliness is an engine.
They waited in the living room in their jeans and sweatsuits and cords and department store jackets, an infinite spectrum of usual people. Up and down the open atrium they converged on the bent balconies, the edges of a Funkedelic Fuedalism that would use the moon overhead, glowing through the spidery framework of the greenhouse roof, as a tool of interrogation. Nowhere to hide.
Suddenly they were waiting for him. He looked up at the gridwork extending beyond the dimensions of the room. The moon moved with him, painting everyone up and down. The moon painted Dory, who sat on the floor next to him.
He knew what was expected. On some level, it was normal.
"My name is Arnie," he said, "and I want you to have my baby."
She smiled. "Dory."
The man with the saw-toothed sweater was next.
"I'm Sam," he said.
"Arnie."
And one by one, he met them all.
THE END
keith@croes.com