What Emanuel noticed, first and foremost, was the way that the Girl looked at him. It was a disgusted sort of look, the kind he'd gotten from all the girls he'd ever liked, and most of the boys as well. The severity of it, the way her smile soured all across her face, transformed her from plain to ugly. It was a whole-body, whole-soul sort of look, and Emanuel, for the life of him, couldn't figure out what he'd done to earn it.
Catherine--he didn't have an aunt in his world, and so he couldn't think of her as Aunt Cathy in the same way that the others could--had given her a new name. Niki. It was disturbing, the way that Catherine, this stranger, had just given them all new names. Almost as disturbing as the way they'd taken to them.
He was happy enough to seclude himself in the Moreno library, read its books and try and figure out the differences between the reality he'd known and the reality he now inhabited. The history was almost identical, barring a few names--he'd never heard of Alexander the Great, or Thomas Jefferson; but for their lot, this world hadn't heard of Quincy Rhymer or Mishka Grabowski.
The library itself was a wide, warm room painted crimson and practically suffocating under the weight of its thick curtains, which gave the light in the room a heavy feeling. Each wall was lined with bookshelves which almost but never quite matched in terms of height, color, and design. The room, like the house, had a certain patchwork quality that could only come from three generations adding furniture, walls, and colors in a piecemeal way.
Of course, he wasn't the only one who holed up in the library. Niki was there every day, too, from the time Nico--the "real" Nico--left for school to the time he came back in the afternoon. She'd read in silence like he wasn't even there, look right past him when she searched the bookshelves.
But he looked at her. Sometimes quickly, sometimes longingly, sometimes just plain flumoxed. He looked at her, and he wondered what she was thinking, how she could basically fuck herself. They were awkward, even apart from one another: Nico and Niki. Hell, all things told, awkwardness seemed just about the only constant between every version of Nicodemus Ramm that they'd ever met across the cosmos and through the Hallway. Even the Rake had some glimmers of awkwardness in the way that he walked, in his lanky strides and limp, ragdoll posture.
"They're out looting again," he said, breaking the silence that had reigned in the library for hours today and weeks before that. When Niki looked up, she was absolutely incredulous, looking at Emanuel as if he'd come right out of nowhere, as if he'd burst into the room with his pants pockets full of weasels. In all fairness, it was probably more words than he'd said to her since they'd met. "They're out looting right now, I mean. Catherine and the Rake."
"I don't see that it's much of our business what they choose to waste their time on," she said, eyes fixed on her book again.
Emanuel smiled. "Of course it's our business. We're the only reason that she has to go out pillaging the Hallway, because she can't afford to keep us all."
She kept her face down, her mouth set into a mean little line.
"When was the last time you even just went exploring?"
"She asked us not to go off on our own," Niki said.
"The lady, she speaks!" Emanuel said. "But really, why should that matter? Are you related to her? Is she going to do anything to you? C'mon. Grab a book and let's find somewhere a little less oppressive to study today. Consider it a field trip."
Niki looked around, as if Catherine was likely to emerge from behind one of the curtains at any moment. Slowly, she stood up, sneaking a few books from the shelf.
"Well. You're really gonna go? Just full of surprises."
She turned and gave Emanuel the look--that lemon-faced look she seemed to reserve for him. In return, he shrugged and opened the door for her, giving her a little bow.
June 12, 2011
June 11, 2011
Part 7
I go shopping with the Rake now, because he actively encourages larceny and he knows how to pick locks, and I’ve seen too many empty alternate versions of my house that are inexplicably locked despite an utter lack of inhabitants.
"So," I say as he’s jimmying a particularly stubborn door with his favorite crowbar—Heaven help me, he has a favorite crowbar—"what do you think?"
"‘Bout what?"
I smile. "About this house, this empty house that looks just like a house—have you looked outside? It’s all just beach for as far as you can see."
"It’s too cold to be a beach," he says. He’s stopped jimmying, now he’s just striking the door in frustration, and his breath fogs up. It reminds me of the Ice Palace, but more humid.
"Well it’s all just beach as far as we can tell," I say.
And he says: "It can’t all just be beach."
"Why not?"
"Because beach is just where two bits meet. It might be all beach for a little line, but one direction it’s really all sandbox and the other direction it’s really all water, so it can’t be all beach."
He gives the jimmying one last go and then we decide, very adult-like, to have a lunch break and give prying a go in about thirty minutes. I unpack a pair of apples and sandwiches and set them out on a few paper napkins.
"What’s your plan?" I ask as he picks up the sandwich, some pastrami on wheat.
"Lunch and then the door"—he gestures rudely towards it—"is fucked."
"No," I say, "the big plan. Did Nico number your door before you left?"
"I left before I met your Nico," he says and everything gets a little more awkward, a little more complicated. Whatever hope I had of sending them all back was getting ridiculously slim. I had already given up on the Dog. Still, I had three extra (human) relatives, now, and nothing much to do with them—Niki and Manny kept to themselves and had taken to spending school days holed up in my father’s old study. And then there was the Rake. He was generally Nico, plus about a half a foot more and this time with Esperanza’s moon-wide eyes, the same dark circles she had under her lids like permanent bruises.
"The beach thing reminds me of philosophy," I say, swallowing down a bite of my sandwich.
"Oh?" There’s a flash of recognition in his eyes.
"Yeah, I say, an argument for God, where if you come across a watch on a beach, you have to assume that there was once a watchmaker. He’s still silent, so I go on: This house makes no sense, and a lot of the houses and doors and worlds don’t make much sense because they’re still my house—our house, but somewhere else, even in places without anyone around."
"So," he says, one eyebrow peaking out at a suspicious slant, "you think the hallway’s from God?"
I let it linger for a moment in the air: was that what I was saying? I decide: "Not really, no. It just reminded me of that because at the very boundary of improbability, there’s always the chance that the watch never had a watchmaker at all."
"Mmm," he says through his sandwich. A few minutes more, and he’s up to prying—the crowbar slips into a groove in the old oak door and wiggles for just a second before he finally bursts it open to reveal the room of some other, perhaps nonexistent Esperanza: hers, down to the faded blue comforter and grandmothers’ jewelry box. Hers, if her windows opened out onto a cold, damp shore in a strange world. Hers, if she had never even existed. I take the jewelry box, brush the dust from it, and we head back to the hallway.
"So," I say as he’s jimmying a particularly stubborn door with his favorite crowbar—Heaven help me, he has a favorite crowbar—"what do you think?"
"‘Bout what?"
I smile. "About this house, this empty house that looks just like a house—have you looked outside? It’s all just beach for as far as you can see."
"It’s too cold to be a beach," he says. He’s stopped jimmying, now he’s just striking the door in frustration, and his breath fogs up. It reminds me of the Ice Palace, but more humid.
"Well it’s all just beach as far as we can tell," I say.
And he says: "It can’t all just be beach."
"Why not?"
"Because beach is just where two bits meet. It might be all beach for a little line, but one direction it’s really all sandbox and the other direction it’s really all water, so it can’t be all beach."
He gives the jimmying one last go and then we decide, very adult-like, to have a lunch break and give prying a go in about thirty minutes. I unpack a pair of apples and sandwiches and set them out on a few paper napkins.
"What’s your plan?" I ask as he picks up the sandwich, some pastrami on wheat.
"Lunch and then the door"—he gestures rudely towards it—"is fucked."
"No," I say, "the big plan. Did Nico number your door before you left?"
"I left before I met your Nico," he says and everything gets a little more awkward, a little more complicated. Whatever hope I had of sending them all back was getting ridiculously slim. I had already given up on the Dog. Still, I had three extra (human) relatives, now, and nothing much to do with them—Niki and Manny kept to themselves and had taken to spending school days holed up in my father’s old study. And then there was the Rake. He was generally Nico, plus about a half a foot more and this time with Esperanza’s moon-wide eyes, the same dark circles she had under her lids like permanent bruises.
"The beach thing reminds me of philosophy," I say, swallowing down a bite of my sandwich.
"Oh?" There’s a flash of recognition in his eyes.
"Yeah, I say, an argument for God, where if you come across a watch on a beach, you have to assume that there was once a watchmaker. He’s still silent, so I go on: This house makes no sense, and a lot of the houses and doors and worlds don’t make much sense because they’re still my house—our house, but somewhere else, even in places without anyone around."
"So," he says, one eyebrow peaking out at a suspicious slant, "you think the hallway’s from God?"
I let it linger for a moment in the air: was that what I was saying? I decide: "Not really, no. It just reminded me of that because at the very boundary of improbability, there’s always the chance that the watch never had a watchmaker at all."
"Mmm," he says through his sandwich. A few minutes more, and he’s up to prying—the crowbar slips into a groove in the old oak door and wiggles for just a second before he finally bursts it open to reveal the room of some other, perhaps nonexistent Esperanza: hers, down to the faded blue comforter and grandmothers’ jewelry box. Hers, if her windows opened out onto a cold, damp shore in a strange world. Hers, if she had never even existed. I take the jewelry box, brush the dust from it, and we head back to the hallway.
Part 6
I have too many Nico’s. I realize this now. There are five of them seated around the breakfast table, and not nearly enough cereal left. I have allowed this all to spiral wildly out of control, and now I have five Nicos—one original, one girl, two boys, and the Dog—sitting around my breakfast table, fighting over the Chex.
And of course, there’s the question—are they really my nephews, my niece, if they’re from the hallway? They’re the children of sisters who aren’t my sister, not really, not exactly. But their faces are the same, and their eyes, and their Moreno noses are unmistakably Moreno-ish. So I gave in. I said to Nico, Yes your little friend can come stay if the alternative is catching her death of cold in the Ice Palace, and that probably tipped my hand right there, but Nico didn’t seem to notice or care and what started as one little friend became four because when a Nico decides to get lost in the hallway, my house is apparently the orphanage of infinity.
I use nicknames now. The girl is Niki, and she thinks that sounds weird because in her world that would be a very mannish name, but I reassure her that here, in this world, it’s the epitome of femininity. Then there’s the Rake, and I call him the Rake because it fits and because it makes him smile a little shiteater smile because he’s smarter than he looks and knows what it means. Then there’s Manny, because Nico’s middle name is Emanuel, and he’s like my Nico, if my Nico were even quieter—I haven’t heard him say a word yet. The last one I just call the Dog, because he’s a dog: a big Siberian husky with a somehow unmistakably Moreno-ish snout, and the others swear to me that he’s Nico if Nico was a dog, and to my great frustration, he seems to be the smartest out of the five of them. Sometimes at night I hear the toilet flush and the Dog just comes out of the bathroom, as if it were normal. At the insistence of the others, the Dog even has his own room, and finally pressed for space, it’s Esperanza’s. Which does seem fitting.
I drag my Nico away from the breakfast table and the Dog follows us up the three flights of stairs to the hallway, and I don’t have the wherewithal to send him back because he’ll just pretend that he’s a dog and not the Dog and it’ll be so awkward and frustrating that it’s just easier to let him follow.
"We’re going shopping again?" Nico asks, a little flustered. He’s been like this way lately.
"We are."
"It feels so skeezey," he says, and the Dog howls his agreement.
"What does skeezey even mean?"
Nico isn’t quite sure himself, but does his best to explain it as a general sense of discomfort as we make our way through the hallway. I pull out my notebook and cross reference our latest shopping list with the list of doors.
"44 has all the apples, right?"
"Yeah," Nico says, "and the mysterious shoe pile."
"I hope Door 44 decides to show up."
The Dog hears this and full-stops, scanning the horizon slowly, head upturned. Nico and I look at him, at the way his blue eyes seem to look right through the doors and the infinity of the hallway. His nostrils flare for a second and then he’s off and running, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth as he rushes forward, howling more like a wolf than a dog. We follow him as fast as we can and that’s when something happens that has never happened before: the hallway twists, like in a funhouse. The floor skews to one side and the doors kind of shift with it, but it’s just as easy to walk and to run as it’s always been. A second later and it’s over—the hallway is normal, for given values of normal, with flat floors and perfectly parallel doors and the Dog is sitting, tail wagging, in front of an open doorway.
DOOR 44
THE ORCHARD
The doorway, from the other side of it, is just a doorway, standing around in the middle of a big apple orchard without context. Nico’s been here a couple times, and he brought the bike last time just to make sure that there wasn’t anyone around. The trees are planted four yards apart exactly, in a very precise grid. About a mile from the door in any direction, you start looping back on yourself and you’ll hit the door again. Nico made a map of it in the notebook, with rough directions towards the shoe pile, which is exactly what it sounds like—an inexplicable pile of new shoes in different sizes, colors, and styles, men’s and women’s alike. I pick out some tennis shoes for Manny and the Rake, then start digging through to try and find the matching shoe for a nice little espadrille that I think would look good on Niki while Nico loads some old plastic grocery bags with apples. This was the place I felt the least guilty about shopping from—which was really just stealing with a quantum twist—but it wasn’t the only place by a long shot. We’d started keeping tabs on the alternate versions of our house, especially the ones that were either abandoned or loaded. We’d raid the pantries and the wardrobes, take occasional provisions. Those were the ones that really got Nico frustrated.
The Dog digs through the pile on his own, and then trots over happily with the espadrille’s match clutched softly in his teeth. I scratch him behind the ear out of reflex, and he enjoys it well enough, but there’s something about him that makes treating him like a dog uncomfortable.
"You’ve been acting weird lately," I say almost without meaning to. I’m looking directly at the Dog, so he tilts his head and whines a little, confused, but Nico hears me and drops another apple into the plastic bag. I wait a moment, shift around a stack of thigh-high leather boots, and give it another try: "Is it the school thing?"
"No. It’s not the school thing."
"Oh," I say, and I swear the Dog rolls his damn eyes which shouldn’t be possible because dog eyes are almost nothing but iris to begin with. "But, then, how is school?"
"It’s school," he says. "It was school back at home and its school here." He unravels another balled-up garbage bag from his pocket and starts plucking apples, alternating between putting them in the bag and throwing them off into the distance.
"You’re doing well, then?"
"Yeah."
"Find any good new doors?"
"You’ve got the notebook," he says, and it cuts a little.
I stand there with the notebook open, paging through it half-heartedly. I pass by the page marked DOOR 21. It’s still blank and a little crumpled now, as if in frustration, and there’s a little drop where the blue lines are smeared near the middle of the blank page. I flip past it as he looks back.
"C’mon," I say at last, and I take one of the bags and fill it with shoes, sling it over my shoulder dramatically and tuck the notebook under my arm. The Dog leads the way back to reality.
And of course, there’s the question—are they really my nephews, my niece, if they’re from the hallway? They’re the children of sisters who aren’t my sister, not really, not exactly. But their faces are the same, and their eyes, and their Moreno noses are unmistakably Moreno-ish. So I gave in. I said to Nico, Yes your little friend can come stay if the alternative is catching her death of cold in the Ice Palace, and that probably tipped my hand right there, but Nico didn’t seem to notice or care and what started as one little friend became four because when a Nico decides to get lost in the hallway, my house is apparently the orphanage of infinity.
I use nicknames now. The girl is Niki, and she thinks that sounds weird because in her world that would be a very mannish name, but I reassure her that here, in this world, it’s the epitome of femininity. Then there’s the Rake, and I call him the Rake because it fits and because it makes him smile a little shiteater smile because he’s smarter than he looks and knows what it means. Then there’s Manny, because Nico’s middle name is Emanuel, and he’s like my Nico, if my Nico were even quieter—I haven’t heard him say a word yet. The last one I just call the Dog, because he’s a dog: a big Siberian husky with a somehow unmistakably Moreno-ish snout, and the others swear to me that he’s Nico if Nico was a dog, and to my great frustration, he seems to be the smartest out of the five of them. Sometimes at night I hear the toilet flush and the Dog just comes out of the bathroom, as if it were normal. At the insistence of the others, the Dog even has his own room, and finally pressed for space, it’s Esperanza’s. Which does seem fitting.
I drag my Nico away from the breakfast table and the Dog follows us up the three flights of stairs to the hallway, and I don’t have the wherewithal to send him back because he’ll just pretend that he’s a dog and not the Dog and it’ll be so awkward and frustrating that it’s just easier to let him follow.
"We’re going shopping again?" Nico asks, a little flustered. He’s been like this way lately.
"We are."
"It feels so skeezey," he says, and the Dog howls his agreement.
"What does skeezey even mean?"
Nico isn’t quite sure himself, but does his best to explain it as a general sense of discomfort as we make our way through the hallway. I pull out my notebook and cross reference our latest shopping list with the list of doors.
"44 has all the apples, right?"
"Yeah," Nico says, "and the mysterious shoe pile."
"I hope Door 44 decides to show up."
The Dog hears this and full-stops, scanning the horizon slowly, head upturned. Nico and I look at him, at the way his blue eyes seem to look right through the doors and the infinity of the hallway. His nostrils flare for a second and then he’s off and running, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth as he rushes forward, howling more like a wolf than a dog. We follow him as fast as we can and that’s when something happens that has never happened before: the hallway twists, like in a funhouse. The floor skews to one side and the doors kind of shift with it, but it’s just as easy to walk and to run as it’s always been. A second later and it’s over—the hallway is normal, for given values of normal, with flat floors and perfectly parallel doors and the Dog is sitting, tail wagging, in front of an open doorway.
DOOR 44
THE ORCHARD
The doorway, from the other side of it, is just a doorway, standing around in the middle of a big apple orchard without context. Nico’s been here a couple times, and he brought the bike last time just to make sure that there wasn’t anyone around. The trees are planted four yards apart exactly, in a very precise grid. About a mile from the door in any direction, you start looping back on yourself and you’ll hit the door again. Nico made a map of it in the notebook, with rough directions towards the shoe pile, which is exactly what it sounds like—an inexplicable pile of new shoes in different sizes, colors, and styles, men’s and women’s alike. I pick out some tennis shoes for Manny and the Rake, then start digging through to try and find the matching shoe for a nice little espadrille that I think would look good on Niki while Nico loads some old plastic grocery bags with apples. This was the place I felt the least guilty about shopping from—which was really just stealing with a quantum twist—but it wasn’t the only place by a long shot. We’d started keeping tabs on the alternate versions of our house, especially the ones that were either abandoned or loaded. We’d raid the pantries and the wardrobes, take occasional provisions. Those were the ones that really got Nico frustrated.
The Dog digs through the pile on his own, and then trots over happily with the espadrille’s match clutched softly in his teeth. I scratch him behind the ear out of reflex, and he enjoys it well enough, but there’s something about him that makes treating him like a dog uncomfortable.
"You’ve been acting weird lately," I say almost without meaning to. I’m looking directly at the Dog, so he tilts his head and whines a little, confused, but Nico hears me and drops another apple into the plastic bag. I wait a moment, shift around a stack of thigh-high leather boots, and give it another try: "Is it the school thing?"
"No. It’s not the school thing."
"Oh," I say, and I swear the Dog rolls his damn eyes which shouldn’t be possible because dog eyes are almost nothing but iris to begin with. "But, then, how is school?"
"It’s school," he says. "It was school back at home and its school here." He unravels another balled-up garbage bag from his pocket and starts plucking apples, alternating between putting them in the bag and throwing them off into the distance.
"You’re doing well, then?"
"Yeah."
"Find any good new doors?"
"You’ve got the notebook," he says, and it cuts a little.
I stand there with the notebook open, paging through it half-heartedly. I pass by the page marked DOOR 21. It’s still blank and a little crumpled now, as if in frustration, and there’s a little drop where the blue lines are smeared near the middle of the blank page. I flip past it as he looks back.
"C’mon," I say at last, and I take one of the bags and fill it with shoes, sling it over my shoulder dramatically and tuck the notebook under my arm. The Dog leads the way back to reality.
June 10, 2011
Part 5
I’ve got a notebook, now—one of those speckled composition notebooks with flimsy binding and thin, unappealing sheets. I leave it on a little bookshelf just outside the hallway and both Nico and I have taken to bringing it with us, jotting down notes. I didn’t think of it until Nico had already numbered at least two hundred doors, and some of them stubbornly refuse to show back up again, so there are plenty of empty pages with nothing but numbers for a header.
It’s Sunday morning, and so Nico is asleep. I walk down the hallway, peeking in through the doorways that have been left open, examining their signs. They’re not in any real order thanks to the way they move, but the higher-number doors start showing a certain degree of sophistication in Nico’s nomenclature, especially around 150 (“the Feldspar House,” made of genuine feldspars and prone to dangerous overheating). I jot the names down, and major facts—one of the doors apparently leads to a 1920s speakeasy, and another leads to my house, if my house were in New Orleans--which is near enough to be reassuring, but far enough to make it seem stranger, at least by context. I generally stayed in the hallway, and the only people who ever came out to the hallway were other me’s who looked so alike—in clothing, in manner, in time and place. There were variations, mostly on the degree of my success or my failure, but they were still essentially me.
There’s a series of open doors here, and I jot them down quickly on their proper pages:
DOOR 102 – Empty Arizona-ish Desert, strong lightning storms, nasty lizards
DOOR 93 – Starfield, low gravity, falling danger
DOOR 21
I stop. That’s all that’s written, DOOR 21. Nothing in the notebook and nothing on the placard either. The door’s only even a sliver open, with a doorstop keeping it from closing all the way. I slide it open just to make sure there’s nothing else written, which doesn’t make sense, because there’s no mention of gravity or danger or anything. There is, however, a little scrawl along the bottom, giving the year as 2004 in an uncharacteristically mild hand.
I duck into the door and find myself in a pantry. There are shelves of canned food—the big, industrial cans you see in restaurant kitchens. There’s a door at the far end of the pantry, and I crack it slowly, silently. I can hear people talking outside, and I have to sit down, right there on the cold tile floor, because DOOR 21 makes a lot more sense. Through the sliver of door, I can see Esperanza and Big Nico, my sister and my brother. Big Nico’s in a terrible Hawaiian shirt, apron, and chef’s hat. Espie’s long, harpy-hands are wrapped around a blue glass.
"They’re too fucking blue," Espie says. "Pool blue. Chlorine blue. No one’s going to want to drink jackshit out of something that looks like it’s going to give them chlorine poisoning. People don’t like the taste of chlorine, Nico."
Big Nico doesn’t say anything at first, but Espie goes on and raises even more of a fuss and so he finally sits down at the bar, slapping the glass top of the bar with an open palm. "I didn’t want the blue glasses, Espie, he says, they were your idea."
"Well," she says, head bobbing up and down like a buoy, "I’m rethinking this idea. Look at this. Look at this! This is impossibly fucking blue."
Big Nico exhales slowly, takes the glass from Espie, and fills it with water from the tap. He holds it up to the light and examines it for a second, considering it carefully. His back is to me, but I can imagine him doing the same side-frown that I do. His side-frown. The little bit of him I keep with me.
Espie crosses to the door of the restaurant—empty restaurant, strange enough—and leans out. She yells at someone on the street and drags the poor, wide-eyed man in, petting his arm sweetly.
"Would you drink from this glass?" she asks.
He’s not sure what to make of it, and looks over to Big Nico, and now I can’t imagine Nico’s expression, but it’s probably a smile or an exasperated grin. The man finally stammers that it’s very blue and Espie frogmarches him out, practically throws him off the stoop. She slams the door on her way back in.
"I don’t need this, Espie."
"You tell her Big Nico," I whisper.
To my surprise, Esperanza lowers her voice, murmurs something that fades before it gets to me. The way she says it, though, is sad and self-conscious, completely un-Espielike. I remind myself that this isn’t my Espie, and suddenly wonder why the door leads here instead of to another version of my house. I try to lean in to get a better vantage point, try to maneuver one way or the other to get a glimpse of Big Nico’s face. Instead, I end up pulling down a shelf full of tomato paste. The metal thunk of cans against tile is loud enough to make my feet quiver, and they both turn towards the pantry door. I get a single glimpse of Big Nico’s face, the wide, perpetually-red thing that it is, and then I practically cross the length of the pantry in one jump and slam the hallway door behind me, dislodging the doorstopper.
It’s Sunday morning, and so Nico is asleep. I walk down the hallway, peeking in through the doorways that have been left open, examining their signs. They’re not in any real order thanks to the way they move, but the higher-number doors start showing a certain degree of sophistication in Nico’s nomenclature, especially around 150 (“the Feldspar House,” made of genuine feldspars and prone to dangerous overheating). I jot the names down, and major facts—one of the doors apparently leads to a 1920s speakeasy, and another leads to my house, if my house were in New Orleans--which is near enough to be reassuring, but far enough to make it seem stranger, at least by context. I generally stayed in the hallway, and the only people who ever came out to the hallway were other me’s who looked so alike—in clothing, in manner, in time and place. There were variations, mostly on the degree of my success or my failure, but they were still essentially me.
There’s a series of open doors here, and I jot them down quickly on their proper pages:
DOOR 102 – Empty Arizona-ish Desert, strong lightning storms, nasty lizards
DOOR 93 – Starfield, low gravity, falling danger
DOOR 21
I stop. That’s all that’s written, DOOR 21. Nothing in the notebook and nothing on the placard either. The door’s only even a sliver open, with a doorstop keeping it from closing all the way. I slide it open just to make sure there’s nothing else written, which doesn’t make sense, because there’s no mention of gravity or danger or anything. There is, however, a little scrawl along the bottom, giving the year as 2004 in an uncharacteristically mild hand.
I duck into the door and find myself in a pantry. There are shelves of canned food—the big, industrial cans you see in restaurant kitchens. There’s a door at the far end of the pantry, and I crack it slowly, silently. I can hear people talking outside, and I have to sit down, right there on the cold tile floor, because DOOR 21 makes a lot more sense. Through the sliver of door, I can see Esperanza and Big Nico, my sister and my brother. Big Nico’s in a terrible Hawaiian shirt, apron, and chef’s hat. Espie’s long, harpy-hands are wrapped around a blue glass.
"They’re too fucking blue," Espie says. "Pool blue. Chlorine blue. No one’s going to want to drink jackshit out of something that looks like it’s going to give them chlorine poisoning. People don’t like the taste of chlorine, Nico."
Big Nico doesn’t say anything at first, but Espie goes on and raises even more of a fuss and so he finally sits down at the bar, slapping the glass top of the bar with an open palm. "I didn’t want the blue glasses, Espie, he says, they were your idea."
"Well," she says, head bobbing up and down like a buoy, "I’m rethinking this idea. Look at this. Look at this! This is impossibly fucking blue."
Big Nico exhales slowly, takes the glass from Espie, and fills it with water from the tap. He holds it up to the light and examines it for a second, considering it carefully. His back is to me, but I can imagine him doing the same side-frown that I do. His side-frown. The little bit of him I keep with me.
Espie crosses to the door of the restaurant—empty restaurant, strange enough—and leans out. She yells at someone on the street and drags the poor, wide-eyed man in, petting his arm sweetly.
"Would you drink from this glass?" she asks.
He’s not sure what to make of it, and looks over to Big Nico, and now I can’t imagine Nico’s expression, but it’s probably a smile or an exasperated grin. The man finally stammers that it’s very blue and Espie frogmarches him out, practically throws him off the stoop. She slams the door on her way back in.
"I don’t need this, Espie."
"You tell her Big Nico," I whisper.
To my surprise, Esperanza lowers her voice, murmurs something that fades before it gets to me. The way she says it, though, is sad and self-conscious, completely un-Espielike. I remind myself that this isn’t my Espie, and suddenly wonder why the door leads here instead of to another version of my house. I try to lean in to get a better vantage point, try to maneuver one way or the other to get a glimpse of Big Nico’s face. Instead, I end up pulling down a shelf full of tomato paste. The metal thunk of cans against tile is loud enough to make my feet quiver, and they both turn towards the pantry door. I get a single glimpse of Big Nico’s face, the wide, perpetually-red thing that it is, and then I practically cross the length of the pantry in one jump and slam the hallway door behind me, dislodging the doorstopper.
Part 4
It’s easy enough to find the door to other-Nico’s reality; the more he and Nico-Nico play, the more frequently it slides down the hallway towards my door. Nico-Nico told me this. I find the fishing line and follow it, taking a left into a door-less doorway, giving the standee a once-over:
DOOR 54
THE ICE PALACE
YEAR: N/A
GRAVITY: ~0.9
IMMEDIATE DANGERS: SHARP ROCKS, PERIODIC COLD, UNINHABITED?
The instant I step through, I feel a little light and jump around a bit, quiet and happy. The world around me looks like my house, if my house was carved into the cavernous underbelly of a mountain. The third floor landing was a little outcropping walled off by limestone. There are stalactites overhead, clear and crystalline, but also glowing and splayed like chandeliers. I notice the cold next and my first instinct is to go back and grab my winter coat, but instead I follow the fishing line down the crude, cavernous doppelganger of my staircase. It winds around to what should be the first floor and that’s when I hear them, so I get quiet. There’s four of them sitting around a perfectly blue pool of water. Three are perfectly identical, on their backs with hands set lazily atop their chests. I watch the rise and fall of their breathing, the way they make a competition out of who can breathe out the darkest, thickest fog. The last one is a girl-ish Nico, dark-eyed and clip-nosed as ever, but with meager, implied breasts underneath her coat. She’s seated on one of the rocks, looking into the pool.
"You have to go back sometime," one of the Nicos says. At this point, I abandon all hope of telling the difference. All I can tell is that he’s talking to the girl-Nico. They all are.
"I can’t even find my way back anymore," she says. "Even if I wanted."
"Me either," one of the boys says, sitting up with a rakish posture. He eyes the pool and then the girl. "It’s not such a bad life now, thanks to kiddo here," the rake says and claps his hand down on another boy-Nico’s shoulder. My Nico.
My Nico and girl-Nico share a quick glance, wavering and hard to read, and I crawl into the corner for a better look, hiding myself behind a thick stalagmite—which, strangely enough, don’t glow.
"Whatever; I go where I want and right now I want to be away from you dorks," rake-Nico says, lighting a cigarette with a quick match strike. I didn’t even see him get the cigarette, but he moves pretty quick despite the gravity. He shuffles towards the stairs and I know that that’s harder with the gravity like it is, so he’s just doing that to look more nonchalant because, really, you can’t be a badass if you’re hopping around like it’s the moon. The difference in weight here isn’t quite that big, but it is noticeable. I chalk rake-Nico up to being a douchebag and a runaway.
The other not-my-Nico winks and follows the rake up the stairs, and as he passes I notice the spool of fishing line clipped to his belt.
And slowly, very slowly, I realize what’s going on.
My Nico stands up and walks over to the girl, slides a hand under her shirt and keeps it on her waist, then moves it up slowly until he’s cupping one of her tiny breasts. She breathes in little, laughing breaths that send frost puffs into the air. I sit, soundless and hidden, as she undoes his belt.
If I was Espie, I might scream out and stop this and cause an embarrassing scene, but I feel too guilty here, too much like a voyeur. This is how cameramen must feel when they shoot reality shows. I close my eyes and turn my back, try not to hear the sounds or think the thoughts that the sounds prompt. In my head, I almost want to coach him. That means go. That means stop. This one means that you can go a little further, but you always have to listen; it’s like an engine, champ.
DOOR 54
THE ICE PALACE
YEAR: N/A
GRAVITY: ~0.9
IMMEDIATE DANGERS: SHARP ROCKS, PERIODIC COLD, UNINHABITED?
The instant I step through, I feel a little light and jump around a bit, quiet and happy. The world around me looks like my house, if my house was carved into the cavernous underbelly of a mountain. The third floor landing was a little outcropping walled off by limestone. There are stalactites overhead, clear and crystalline, but also glowing and splayed like chandeliers. I notice the cold next and my first instinct is to go back and grab my winter coat, but instead I follow the fishing line down the crude, cavernous doppelganger of my staircase. It winds around to what should be the first floor and that’s when I hear them, so I get quiet. There’s four of them sitting around a perfectly blue pool of water. Three are perfectly identical, on their backs with hands set lazily atop their chests. I watch the rise and fall of their breathing, the way they make a competition out of who can breathe out the darkest, thickest fog. The last one is a girl-ish Nico, dark-eyed and clip-nosed as ever, but with meager, implied breasts underneath her coat. She’s seated on one of the rocks, looking into the pool.
"You have to go back sometime," one of the Nicos says. At this point, I abandon all hope of telling the difference. All I can tell is that he’s talking to the girl-Nico. They all are.
"I can’t even find my way back anymore," she says. "Even if I wanted."
"Me either," one of the boys says, sitting up with a rakish posture. He eyes the pool and then the girl. "It’s not such a bad life now, thanks to kiddo here," the rake says and claps his hand down on another boy-Nico’s shoulder. My Nico.
My Nico and girl-Nico share a quick glance, wavering and hard to read, and I crawl into the corner for a better look, hiding myself behind a thick stalagmite—which, strangely enough, don’t glow.
"Whatever; I go where I want and right now I want to be away from you dorks," rake-Nico says, lighting a cigarette with a quick match strike. I didn’t even see him get the cigarette, but he moves pretty quick despite the gravity. He shuffles towards the stairs and I know that that’s harder with the gravity like it is, so he’s just doing that to look more nonchalant because, really, you can’t be a badass if you’re hopping around like it’s the moon. The difference in weight here isn’t quite that big, but it is noticeable. I chalk rake-Nico up to being a douchebag and a runaway.
The other not-my-Nico winks and follows the rake up the stairs, and as he passes I notice the spool of fishing line clipped to his belt.
And slowly, very slowly, I realize what’s going on.
My Nico stands up and walks over to the girl, slides a hand under her shirt and keeps it on her waist, then moves it up slowly until he’s cupping one of her tiny breasts. She breathes in little, laughing breaths that send frost puffs into the air. I sit, soundless and hidden, as she undoes his belt.
If I was Espie, I might scream out and stop this and cause an embarrassing scene, but I feel too guilty here, too much like a voyeur. This is how cameramen must feel when they shoot reality shows. I close my eyes and turn my back, try not to hear the sounds or think the thoughts that the sounds prompt. In my head, I almost want to coach him. That means go. That means stop. This one means that you can go a little further, but you always have to listen; it’s like an engine, champ.
June 9, 2011
Part 3
The hallway is as dark as it ever is, and Nico stares down it and tries not to go cross-eyed.
"So," he says, "they’re all doors to your house?"
"Mostly," I say, "but not all." I explain: one that I found once led to an inexplicable doorway standing in the middle of a mangrove bog, and another opened up to a perfectly blue room full of miniature skyscrapers. "But most of them lead to the house, yes, with its own versions of me. And very likely you."
"Isn’t this like home invasion?"
"A little, I admit, but very few alternate universes extradite, and I haven’t found very many versions of me who haven’t at least started to figure it out."
"That’s cool," he says.
His eyes dart from door to door, eying them like potential prizes. He finally walks a few yards in and picks a door on the left, opens it to reveal the same landing on the third floor. His face sags a little like the me who didn’t have her shit together.
"It’s the same."
"Probably, mostly. But not exactly."
"That’s kind of anticlimactic," he says.
I agree.
"Is there an end to the hallway?"
"I don’t know." I explain about the walking and the running and the bicycling. He asks to see the garage and smiles in the same way that a shark would smile if they had lips. Espie’s smile, and the sight of it makes me feel six again, and mischievous. I take him down there and he starts rummaging, moving with purpose. He gathers up things—a hot glue gun, pots, paint-sticks and old boxes. While he packs, he asks questions.
"Have you ever tried post-it notes?"
I have; they go missing in about ten minutes, even if you paste them right on the door with superglue.
"Defacing the doors?" he asks as he eyes a can of spray-paint.
Tried it, it never sticks.
I say these things, like tried that or doesn’t work but he just smiles and that makes me smile the way that his mom used to, when she wasn’t being a bitch of the worst sort. She practiced at being a bitch the way most girls practiced the oboe.
He leads the way back up the stairs, taking them two at a time and I follow, beaming, with a box full of things in my arms. I set it down on the landing and he rips the sides of one of the boxes carefully, making a rough brown square. On his knees now, he pivots back and forth, writing with a paint-stick in careful block letters—
DOOR 1
AUNT CATHY’S HOUSE
YEAR – 2010
"You think some of the other places are in other times," I ask.
"It’s possible," he says.
GRAVITY 1.0
"You’re going to measure the gravity?"
"We can eyeball it."
IMMEDIATE DANGERS: BOREDOM
"Well," I say, "there are some wolves in the woods around here, sometimes."
He corrects himself.
IMMEDIATE DANGERS: BOREDOM AND INFREQUENT WOLVES
He breaks another piece of box down and then glues it to the back of the makeshift poster, and the kid’s got a standee ready—a little rickety but nice enough.
"It’s probably going to disappear if you leave it in the hallway," I say.
"Then we’ll just leave it right here."
He props it up right on the landing and reaches into the box for a screwdriver and starts taking the door right off its hinges, standing on his tiptoes to reach the top screws.
"Just in case the hallway tries to close it," he says.
There’s a me in the hallway when we walk into it, and she waves us over.
"You look just like my nephew!" she says.
"I am your nephew," he says. "Kind of. Can I take your door off its hinges?"
"Woah champ," she says, "no need to be so forward."
She’s joking, of course, and I can tell because it’s the kind of joke I would make, but not the sort I’d ever really go through with saying out loud. Nico doesn’t get it, probably because my bitch-sister sheltered him to an absurd degree and gave him books to read about pheromones and bees and flat-earth theory. I set a hand on his shoulder and can’t help but think that it’s sad when a kid thinks that sex is the genital-based exchange of reproductive materials.
He explains his idea and the other me gives a pleasant sort of shrug. Nico tiptoes up again, at the hinges quick as a cricket, and I grab some more cardboard from my house, the real house, and a paint stick.
"So tell us, he asks, what’s the gravity like in your universe?"
*
He’s up on the third floor already. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my robe with my fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee. I start to worry that I’ve given him an obsession to replace depression, and really that’s not much better to begin with, but I’ll admit it—I’m fucking curious, and he’s found some interesting me’s, and couple of interesting him’s to boot. One of them tags along on all his expeditions now—they tie the end of a fishing line around the third floor railing of that other-Nico’s house and just unwind it as they go. Sometimes the door moves, slides like they’re wont to do, but as long as they don’t close any doors behind themselves, the line holds just fine. Nico talks to me every night at dinner, loud and excitable theories about the hallway. It’s not the nature of it that really gets him, so much as the mechanics. I suppose we’re opposites that way—when he figures out that the doors always slide once every six hours and never move more than ten spaces up or down, I can’t revel in the meaning of that without wondering why it works that way.
"You know that you’re going to have to start school soon," I say to him at dinner.
He fiddles with his porkchop.
"Discover anything interesting today?"
He smiles, doesn’t want to say anything as payback for bringing up school at all, but he can’t help himself in the end.
"We found a version of the house that’s abandoned for miles around, nothing but fields of wildflowers and grain."
"Strange," I say, and hold my tongue for a second before finally letting go. "You two have been leaving the house, then?"
"Just the once," he says. He knows that he’s caught, but I’ve avoided the matter for long enough that neither of us feels the need to really get into it. It’s all absurdity anyway, the fucking hallway, and whether I draw the boundary for him at the doorstep of another me’s house or miles away from it, it’s all still just as potentially dangerous.
I don’t say anything else, and we eat our porkchops in uneasy silence.
"So," he says, "they’re all doors to your house?"
"Mostly," I say, "but not all." I explain: one that I found once led to an inexplicable doorway standing in the middle of a mangrove bog, and another opened up to a perfectly blue room full of miniature skyscrapers. "But most of them lead to the house, yes, with its own versions of me. And very likely you."
"Isn’t this like home invasion?"
"A little, I admit, but very few alternate universes extradite, and I haven’t found very many versions of me who haven’t at least started to figure it out."
"That’s cool," he says.
His eyes dart from door to door, eying them like potential prizes. He finally walks a few yards in and picks a door on the left, opens it to reveal the same landing on the third floor. His face sags a little like the me who didn’t have her shit together.
"It’s the same."
"Probably, mostly. But not exactly."
"That’s kind of anticlimactic," he says.
I agree.
"Is there an end to the hallway?"
"I don’t know." I explain about the walking and the running and the bicycling. He asks to see the garage and smiles in the same way that a shark would smile if they had lips. Espie’s smile, and the sight of it makes me feel six again, and mischievous. I take him down there and he starts rummaging, moving with purpose. He gathers up things—a hot glue gun, pots, paint-sticks and old boxes. While he packs, he asks questions.
"Have you ever tried post-it notes?"
I have; they go missing in about ten minutes, even if you paste them right on the door with superglue.
"Defacing the doors?" he asks as he eyes a can of spray-paint.
Tried it, it never sticks.
I say these things, like tried that or doesn’t work but he just smiles and that makes me smile the way that his mom used to, when she wasn’t being a bitch of the worst sort. She practiced at being a bitch the way most girls practiced the oboe.
He leads the way back up the stairs, taking them two at a time and I follow, beaming, with a box full of things in my arms. I set it down on the landing and he rips the sides of one of the boxes carefully, making a rough brown square. On his knees now, he pivots back and forth, writing with a paint-stick in careful block letters—
DOOR 1
AUNT CATHY’S HOUSE
YEAR – 2010
"You think some of the other places are in other times," I ask.
"It’s possible," he says.
GRAVITY 1.0
"You’re going to measure the gravity?"
"We can eyeball it."
IMMEDIATE DANGERS: BOREDOM
"Well," I say, "there are some wolves in the woods around here, sometimes."
He corrects himself.
IMMEDIATE DANGERS: BOREDOM AND INFREQUENT WOLVES
He breaks another piece of box down and then glues it to the back of the makeshift poster, and the kid’s got a standee ready—a little rickety but nice enough.
"It’s probably going to disappear if you leave it in the hallway," I say.
"Then we’ll just leave it right here."
He props it up right on the landing and reaches into the box for a screwdriver and starts taking the door right off its hinges, standing on his tiptoes to reach the top screws.
"Just in case the hallway tries to close it," he says.
There’s a me in the hallway when we walk into it, and she waves us over.
"You look just like my nephew!" she says.
"I am your nephew," he says. "Kind of. Can I take your door off its hinges?"
"Woah champ," she says, "no need to be so forward."
She’s joking, of course, and I can tell because it’s the kind of joke I would make, but not the sort I’d ever really go through with saying out loud. Nico doesn’t get it, probably because my bitch-sister sheltered him to an absurd degree and gave him books to read about pheromones and bees and flat-earth theory. I set a hand on his shoulder and can’t help but think that it’s sad when a kid thinks that sex is the genital-based exchange of reproductive materials.
He explains his idea and the other me gives a pleasant sort of shrug. Nico tiptoes up again, at the hinges quick as a cricket, and I grab some more cardboard from my house, the real house, and a paint stick.
"So tell us, he asks, what’s the gravity like in your universe?"
*
He’s up on the third floor already. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my robe with my fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee. I start to worry that I’ve given him an obsession to replace depression, and really that’s not much better to begin with, but I’ll admit it—I’m fucking curious, and he’s found some interesting me’s, and couple of interesting him’s to boot. One of them tags along on all his expeditions now—they tie the end of a fishing line around the third floor railing of that other-Nico’s house and just unwind it as they go. Sometimes the door moves, slides like they’re wont to do, but as long as they don’t close any doors behind themselves, the line holds just fine. Nico talks to me every night at dinner, loud and excitable theories about the hallway. It’s not the nature of it that really gets him, so much as the mechanics. I suppose we’re opposites that way—when he figures out that the doors always slide once every six hours and never move more than ten spaces up or down, I can’t revel in the meaning of that without wondering why it works that way.
"You know that you’re going to have to start school soon," I say to him at dinner.
He fiddles with his porkchop.
"Discover anything interesting today?"
He smiles, doesn’t want to say anything as payback for bringing up school at all, but he can’t help himself in the end.
"We found a version of the house that’s abandoned for miles around, nothing but fields of wildflowers and grain."
"Strange," I say, and hold my tongue for a second before finally letting go. "You two have been leaving the house, then?"
"Just the once," he says. He knows that he’s caught, but I’ve avoided the matter for long enough that neither of us feels the need to really get into it. It’s all absurdity anyway, the fucking hallway, and whether I draw the boundary for him at the doorstep of another me’s house or miles away from it, it’s all still just as potentially dangerous.
I don’t say anything else, and we eat our porkchops in uneasy silence.
June 7, 2011
Part 2
Nico is named after his uncle, and he has his uncle’s nose—a clipped, abrupt thing that just stops without any of the normal slopes or angles. He’s quiet on the whole ride home, not surly but shy—or at least, that’s the hope. I help him wheel in his suitcases and show him to his room, an airy bedroom on the corner of the first floor that opens on the house’s second veranda. The instant he walks into the room, with his shaggy dark hair and his wrinkled hoodie, I realize that I’ve made a mistake. He looks completely out of place in the room, which is bridal white. Fourteen year olds don’t really need verandas, they don’t belong on verandas. I wondered if he even knew the difference between a veranda and a patio, not snobbishly but from compassion—it would be so embarrassing for him to go about calling it a patio or a balcony when it was so clearly a veranda, what with its rails and crossbeams and pillars. He looks like a stain on the whiteness of the room, on its carpeting and its walls and its bedspread and frame.
"It’s nice," he says. He probably means it, because he’s a smart kid and objectively, yes, it is a nice room, if you’re an adult. Maybe he is an adult. Maybe when my sister named him Nico, he inherited the forty-odd years that his uncle had lived. Other than the nose, they didn’t really look too similar.
"It’s too white, isn’t it?"
"I don’t mind. I like the patio," he says.
I bite my tongue.
"There are other bedrooms," I say. "It’s a pretty big house."
"Lots of people used to live here."
"Yeah, I say, a whole lot. Too many people, really."
I hold up both hands and make a show of counting them off, finger by finger: "Me, your mom, Uncle Nico, your grandparents, your great-grandfather, your cousin Cassie and Miss Agnes. I haven’t touched most of the other bedrooms, so you can go exploring if you want. They might need a little dusting, I say, but really, they’re probably uninhabitable," maybe even mildewing (which I don’t say, but I think it hard enough that he probably hears me anyway).
"This room’s fine, thanks."
"Okay, champ. I used to call you that, you know. Do you mind?"
"No," he says. The way he says it though, cutting the O as short as it can go and still be a vowel, makes me decide to call him something else.
"You gonna be okay?"
I don’t ask him that. It seems too demeaning, here in this room, stiff with newness. Somewhere in the periphery of my senses, I do a quick check to make sure that my sister never used this room and confirm it, nodding as I close the door behind me. Espie’s room is the only one I leave locked.
*
A few days later, I look out on the living room, cleaned and tidied specifically for him, but he’s nowhere in sight. I won’t lie to myself, I’m a little disappointed. Somehow, I expected to actually see him when he came to live here.
I find him out on his patio-veranda in a rocking chair, not rocking. He’s right against the rails, leaning forward with his arms draped over the side and his eyes on the road, following cars up and down. He stares into each house one by one and concentrates.
"What’re you up to, Nico?"
He likes his own name better than champ, I can tell, but Nico means someone completely different to me.
"Pheromones," he says.
I don’t understand.
"Lots of animals communicate with pheromones. Like bees. I wanted to see if there were any other kids my age here."
"Any other teenagers," I say thoughtfully.
"Teenagers isn’t the right word, he says. You only get to be a teenager when you have a car and can be played by a thirty-year old on television. Freshmen aren’t teenagers."
"I don’t think there is anyone your age here," I say. I try to turn the rocking chair around because I know that there is a teenager three houses down and across the street, a girl with a ridiculous chest and her own corner window. Pheromones sound too much like hormones to begin with, and I was pretty sure that one led to another, and Nico was so scrawny that I could imagine him suffocating under the weight of that girl’s absurd overdevelopment.
"There’s nothing really to do here at all, is there?"
I frown at an angle, one of those little thoughtful side-frowns that are so hard to accomplish, but I practiced at them for years and finally perfected their workings. I had hoped for a creative and self-reliant nephew, something like the one I remembered in dim memories. I hadn’t even told Espie about the hallway, or the older Nico for that matter. When I inherited the house, it became mine regardless of any shared history and so its secrets were mine.
"There is something to do," I say. I ask him if he wanted to know what forever looks like.
He does.
"It’s nice," he says. He probably means it, because he’s a smart kid and objectively, yes, it is a nice room, if you’re an adult. Maybe he is an adult. Maybe when my sister named him Nico, he inherited the forty-odd years that his uncle had lived. Other than the nose, they didn’t really look too similar.
"It’s too white, isn’t it?"
"I don’t mind. I like the patio," he says.
I bite my tongue.
"There are other bedrooms," I say. "It’s a pretty big house."
"Lots of people used to live here."
"Yeah, I say, a whole lot. Too many people, really."
I hold up both hands and make a show of counting them off, finger by finger: "Me, your mom, Uncle Nico, your grandparents, your great-grandfather, your cousin Cassie and Miss Agnes. I haven’t touched most of the other bedrooms, so you can go exploring if you want. They might need a little dusting, I say, but really, they’re probably uninhabitable," maybe even mildewing (which I don’t say, but I think it hard enough that he probably hears me anyway).
"This room’s fine, thanks."
"Okay, champ. I used to call you that, you know. Do you mind?"
"No," he says. The way he says it though, cutting the O as short as it can go and still be a vowel, makes me decide to call him something else.
"You gonna be okay?"
I don’t ask him that. It seems too demeaning, here in this room, stiff with newness. Somewhere in the periphery of my senses, I do a quick check to make sure that my sister never used this room and confirm it, nodding as I close the door behind me. Espie’s room is the only one I leave locked.
*
A few days later, I look out on the living room, cleaned and tidied specifically for him, but he’s nowhere in sight. I won’t lie to myself, I’m a little disappointed. Somehow, I expected to actually see him when he came to live here.
I find him out on his patio-veranda in a rocking chair, not rocking. He’s right against the rails, leaning forward with his arms draped over the side and his eyes on the road, following cars up and down. He stares into each house one by one and concentrates.
"What’re you up to, Nico?"
He likes his own name better than champ, I can tell, but Nico means someone completely different to me.
"Pheromones," he says.
I don’t understand.
"Lots of animals communicate with pheromones. Like bees. I wanted to see if there were any other kids my age here."
"Any other teenagers," I say thoughtfully.
"Teenagers isn’t the right word, he says. You only get to be a teenager when you have a car and can be played by a thirty-year old on television. Freshmen aren’t teenagers."
"I don’t think there is anyone your age here," I say. I try to turn the rocking chair around because I know that there is a teenager three houses down and across the street, a girl with a ridiculous chest and her own corner window. Pheromones sound too much like hormones to begin with, and I was pretty sure that one led to another, and Nico was so scrawny that I could imagine him suffocating under the weight of that girl’s absurd overdevelopment.
"There’s nothing really to do here at all, is there?"
I frown at an angle, one of those little thoughtful side-frowns that are so hard to accomplish, but I practiced at them for years and finally perfected their workings. I had hoped for a creative and self-reliant nephew, something like the one I remembered in dim memories. I hadn’t even told Espie about the hallway, or the older Nico for that matter. When I inherited the house, it became mine regardless of any shared history and so its secrets were mine.
"There is something to do," I say. I ask him if he wanted to know what forever looks like.
He does.
June 6, 2011
Part 1
My nephew is coming to live with me today—he’s been through a rough spot with his mom, but I’m going to try and cheer him up while he’s here, at my house, which is at the center of existence. That sounds like bragging, but it’s really more a matter of fact—and of inconvenience. There’s a door at the end of a landing on the third floor, and yes, it has three floors and a basement but I’m not rich, it’s not rich thing, it’s just a center of existence thing. The door opens on a hallway that has no business being anywhere, much less on the third floor of a converted Catholic church. Back in the early 1920s, it was a church, but when my grandfather bought it, he just started adding floors until he could finally reach the ceiling on his tip-toes.
None of that really matters compared to the door, though, and the hallway behind it. The hallway is lined on either side with even more doors, and it continues onward, possibly forever. I haven’t really tried to count the doors, but I have walked, ran, even ridden a bicycle down that hallway in pursuit of its end. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t end. There are only two meaningful directions—homewards, leading back into my home and my reality, and forwards into the unending hall and its many, identical doors.
The doors lead places, because they wouldn’t be worth much if they didn’t. The curious bit, though, it that they lead to places that look exactly like my house, if my house were somewhere or somewhen else. Sometimes I see women, my dopplegangers, creeping down the hallway; usually they’ll duck into doors to avoid me. Some stop and say hello—these are the ones who’ve done some research, who’ve Googled endlessly recursive hallways and figured out that my house—our house?—is at the center of existence. They’re nice enough, for the most part. Some have better hair than I do and some are fatter or thinner or an entirely different ethnicity, but almost always recognizably me-ish. The most annoying ones are the ones who have their shit together, the grinning bitches that come out of their doors in pinstriped power suits with attaché cases and a whiff of perfume on their bosoms. They’re the ones who talk down to me, the ones who have a family and a career and they’ve figured out the mysteries of the hallway, mapped its systems and unraveled its schema.
"Oh," they like to say, "you’re the lucky one. The one that lives at that end of the hall." The way they say that, pointing as if it was part of the word itself, makes me want to punch them in the stomach. The others can’t stray very far from their doors—it’s easy to get irrevocably lost and the hallway seems to resist all forms of demarcation. I tried chalk and then permanent markers, but they just faded off the door in about a minute. Even worse, the doors move, sometimes up the hall and sometimes down but always in pairs—two parallel doors sliding across the hallway in perfect synchronicity, gliding behind other, stationary doors. Mine is the only one without a partner, the lonely door at one end of the hall.
So it’s a fixed point.
Sometimes, the me’s with their shit together try to insinuate that the hallway is a graduated scale from least to most perfect. They never mention which end of the hall is the least—they don’t need to, with the way they look at me, brushing some imagined filth from my sweater. I could point out that the hallways goes on for at least eighty minutes at a brisk pace on a ten-speed Schwinn, and so they’re categorically pretty damn indistinguishable from imperfect if you really got down to the nitty-gritty, but I haven’t. I’m saving that one, polishing it up, letting it get sharper and sharper in my head. One day, one of them will do something to me. I know it. And I’ll look up at her and slam that fact down in such an ice-cold tone that she’ll probably explode into tears on the spot, sob into the dark hardwood of the endless hallway and ball and ball and beg for me to take my logic back.
Today, the me’s with their shit together are staying put in their own houses, too busy to wander infinity. One of me walks out of her door, though, but she obviously doesn’t have her shit together—her hair is standing up like she’s been electrified and her face is sagging like she’s holding all her weight just beneath her eyes, and mouth, and chin. She looks up at me and smiles feebly.
"Hey other me," I say to her, "do you have a nephew?"
"No," she says back, "but I do have a niece that’s supposed to be living with me."
"How’s that going?"
"I think she’s hiding here somewhere," the other me says in a voice that sounds almost too exhausted to care and then adds: "but that’s not very helpful."
"I’ll keep an eye out for her," I say. "What does she look like?"
"Do you have a nephew?"
I do.
"Probably like him, with slightly different chromosomes."
None of that really matters compared to the door, though, and the hallway behind it. The hallway is lined on either side with even more doors, and it continues onward, possibly forever. I haven’t really tried to count the doors, but I have walked, ran, even ridden a bicycle down that hallway in pursuit of its end. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t end. There are only two meaningful directions—homewards, leading back into my home and my reality, and forwards into the unending hall and its many, identical doors.
The doors lead places, because they wouldn’t be worth much if they didn’t. The curious bit, though, it that they lead to places that look exactly like my house, if my house were somewhere or somewhen else. Sometimes I see women, my dopplegangers, creeping down the hallway; usually they’ll duck into doors to avoid me. Some stop and say hello—these are the ones who’ve done some research, who’ve Googled endlessly recursive hallways and figured out that my house—our house?—is at the center of existence. They’re nice enough, for the most part. Some have better hair than I do and some are fatter or thinner or an entirely different ethnicity, but almost always recognizably me-ish. The most annoying ones are the ones who have their shit together, the grinning bitches that come out of their doors in pinstriped power suits with attaché cases and a whiff of perfume on their bosoms. They’re the ones who talk down to me, the ones who have a family and a career and they’ve figured out the mysteries of the hallway, mapped its systems and unraveled its schema.
"Oh," they like to say, "you’re the lucky one. The one that lives at that end of the hall." The way they say that, pointing as if it was part of the word itself, makes me want to punch them in the stomach. The others can’t stray very far from their doors—it’s easy to get irrevocably lost and the hallway seems to resist all forms of demarcation. I tried chalk and then permanent markers, but they just faded off the door in about a minute. Even worse, the doors move, sometimes up the hall and sometimes down but always in pairs—two parallel doors sliding across the hallway in perfect synchronicity, gliding behind other, stationary doors. Mine is the only one without a partner, the lonely door at one end of the hall.
So it’s a fixed point.
Sometimes, the me’s with their shit together try to insinuate that the hallway is a graduated scale from least to most perfect. They never mention which end of the hall is the least—they don’t need to, with the way they look at me, brushing some imagined filth from my sweater. I could point out that the hallways goes on for at least eighty minutes at a brisk pace on a ten-speed Schwinn, and so they’re categorically pretty damn indistinguishable from imperfect if you really got down to the nitty-gritty, but I haven’t. I’m saving that one, polishing it up, letting it get sharper and sharper in my head. One day, one of them will do something to me. I know it. And I’ll look up at her and slam that fact down in such an ice-cold tone that she’ll probably explode into tears on the spot, sob into the dark hardwood of the endless hallway and ball and ball and beg for me to take my logic back.
Today, the me’s with their shit together are staying put in their own houses, too busy to wander infinity. One of me walks out of her door, though, but she obviously doesn’t have her shit together—her hair is standing up like she’s been electrified and her face is sagging like she’s holding all her weight just beneath her eyes, and mouth, and chin. She looks up at me and smiles feebly.
"Hey other me," I say to her, "do you have a nephew?"
"No," she says back, "but I do have a niece that’s supposed to be living with me."
"How’s that going?"
"I think she’s hiding here somewhere," the other me says in a voice that sounds almost too exhausted to care and then adds: "but that’s not very helpful."
"I’ll keep an eye out for her," I say. "What does she look like?"
"Do you have a nephew?"
I do.
"Probably like him, with slightly different chromosomes."
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