Robert Silverberg: It Comes and Goes

I went home and made some phone calls to potential employers, with the usual result. I watched some television. If you’ve never stayed home on a weekday morning you can’t imagine what television is like at that time of day, most of it. After a while I found myself tuning to the home shopping channel for the sheer excitement of it.

I thought about the flash of flesh in the screen doorway.

I thought about the color of the label on a bottle of Johnny Walker, too. You don’t ever stop thinking about things like that, the look of labels and bottlecaps and the shape of bottles and the taste of what’s inside and the effect that it has. You may stop using the product but you don’t banish it from your mind, quite the contrary, and when you aren’t thinking about the flavor or the effect you’re thinking about weird peripheral things like the look of the label. Believe me, you are.

It rained for three or four days, miserable non-stop rain, and I didn’t do much of anything. Then finally I went outdoors again, a right and a right and look across to the left, and there was the white house, very bright in the spring sunshine. Very casually I glanced over at it. No flashes of flesh this time.

I saw something much stranger, though. A rolled-up copy of the morning paper was lying on the lawn of a house with brown shingles next door. A dog was sniffing around it, a goofy-faced nondescript white mutt with long legs and a black head. Abruptly the dog scooped the paper up in its jaws, as dogs will do, and turned and trotted around to the front of the white house.

The screen door opened a little way. I didn’t see anybody opening it. It remained ajar. The wooden door behind it seemed to be open also.

The dog stood there, looking around, shaking its head from side to side. It seemed bewildered. As I watched, it dropped the paper and began to pant, its tongue hanging out as if this were the middle of July and not the end of March. Then it picked the paper up again, bending for it in an oddly rigid, robotic way. It raised its head and turned and stared right at me, almost as though it was asking me to help it. Its eyes were glassy and its ears were standing up and twitching. Its back was arched like a cat’s. Its tail rose straight up behind it. I heard low rusty-sounding growls.

Then, abruptly, it visibly relaxed. It lowered its ears and a look of something like relief came into its eyes and its posture became a good old droopy dog-posture again. It wriggled its shoulders almost playfully. Wagged its tail. And went galloping through the open screen door, bounding and prancing in that dumb doggy way that they have, holding the newspaper high. The door closed behind it.

I stayed around for a little while. The door stayed closed. The dog didn’t come out.

I wondered which I would rather believe: that I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in, or that I had imagined I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in?

Then there was the cat event. This was a day or two later.

The cat was a lop-eared ginger tom. I had seen it around before. I like cats. I liked this one especially. He was a survivor, a street-smart guy. I hoped to learn a thing or two from him.

He was on the lawn of the white house. The screen door was ajar again. The cat was staring toward it and he looked absolutely outraged .

His fur was standing out half a mile and his tail was lashing like a whip and his ears were flattened back against his head. He was hissing and growling at the same time, and the growl was that eerie banshee moan that reminds you what jungle creatures cats still are. He was quivering as if he had electrodes in him. I saw muscles violently rippling along his flanks and great convulsive shivers running the length of his spine.

“Hey, easy does it, fellow!” I told him. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, guy?”

What the matter was was that his legs seemed to want to move toward the house and his brain didn’t. He was struggling every step of the way. The house was calling him, I thought suddenly, astonishing myself with the idea. As it had called the dog. You call a dog long enough and eventually his dog instincts take command and he comes, whether he feels like it or not. But you can’t make a cat do a fucking thing against its will, not without a struggle. There was a struggle going on now. I stood there and watched it and I felt real uneasiness.

The cat lost.

He fought with truly desperate fury, but he kept moving closer to the door all the same. He managed to hold back for a moment just as he reached the first step, and I thought he was going to succeed in breaking loose from whatever was pulling him. But then his muscles stopped quivering and his fur went back where it belonged and his whole body perceptibly slackened; and he crept across the threshold in a pathetically beaten-looking way.

At my meeting that night I wanted to ask the others whether they knew anything about the white house with the screen door. They had all grown up in this place; I had lived here only a couple of months. Maybe the white house had a reputation for weirdness. But I wasn’t sure which street it was on and a round-faced man named Eddie had had a close escape from the bottle after an ugly fight with his wife and needed to talk about that, and when that was over we all sat around the table and discussed the high school basketball playoffs. High school basketball is a very big thing in this part of the state. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Do you mind if I change the subject, fellows? Because I saw a house a few blocks from here gobble up a dog and then a cat like it was a roach motel.” They’d just think I had gone back on the sauce and they’d rally round like crazy to help me get steady again.

I went back there a few days later and couldn’t find the house. Just an empty lot, grizzled brown late-winter grass, no paved pathway, no steps, no garbage cans, nothing. This time I knew I hadn’t accidentally gone up some other street. The house next door to the white house was still there, the brown-shingled one where the dog had found the newspaper. But the white house was gone.

What the hell? A house that comes and goes?

Sweat came flooding out all over me. Was it possible to be having hallucinations in such convincing detail when I had been sober for a couple of months? First I was frightened and then I was angry. I didn’t deserve this. If the house wasn’t a hallucination, and I didn’t seriously think it was, then what was it? I was working hard at putting my life back together and I was entitled to have reality stay real around me.

Easy, I thought. Easy. You’re not entitled to anything, fellow. But you’ll be okay as long as you recognize that nobody requires you to be able to explain mysteries that are beyond your understanding. Just go easy, take things as they come, and stay cool, stay cool, stay cool.

The house came back four days later.

I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about it at meetings, even though that probably would have been a good idea. I had no problem at all with admitting publicly that I was an alcoholic, far from it. But standing up and telling everyone that I was crazy was something else entirely.

Things got even more bizarre. One afternoon I was out in front of the house and a kid’s tricycle came rolling down the street all by itself, as though on an invisible cord. It rolled right past me and turned the corner and I watched it traverse the path and go up the steps of the white house and disappear inside. Some sort of magnetic pull? Radio waves?

Half a minute later the owner of the tricycle came huffing along, a chubby boy of about five in blue leggings. “My bike!” he was yelling. “My bike!” I imagined him running up the path and disappearing into the house too, like the dog, the cat, and the tricycle. I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t just grab him up and hold him, either, not in an era when if a grown man simply smiles at a kid in the street he’s likely to get booked. So I did the next best thing and planted myself at the head of the path leading across the white house’s lawn. The kid banged into my shins and fell down. I looked up the block and saw a woman coming, his aunt, maybe, or his grandmother. It seemed safe to help the kid up, so I did. Then I smiled at her and said, “He really ought to look where he’s going.”