Robert Silverberg: It Comes and Goes

The house comes from the future, I told myself. They’re studying the late twentieth century and they want to collect artifacts. So every now and then they send this time machine disguised as a little white-stucco house here and it scoops up toys, pets, newspapers, whatever it can grab. Most likely they aren’t really looking for cats or dogs, but they takes what they gets. And now they’re trying to catch an actual live twentieth-century man. Trolling for him the way you’d troll for catfish, using a beautiful woman—sometimes naked—as the bait.

A crazy idea? Sure. But I couldn’t come up with a saner one.

Ten days into springtime and the house was gone again. When it came back, about a week later, the woman didn’t seem to be with it. They were giving her some time off, maybe. But they still seemed interested in luring me inside. I’d come by and take up my position by the curb and the door would quietly swing open, though no one was visible inside. And would stay open, waiting for me to traipse up the walk and go in.

It was a temptation. I felt it pulling on me harder and harder every day, as my own here-and-now real-life everyday options looked bleaker and bleaker. I wasn’t finding a new job. I wasn’t making useful contacts. My money, not much to begin with, was running out. All I had was the Program and the people who were part of it here, and though they were fine enough people they weren’t the kind I could get really close to in any way not having to do with the Program.

So why not go up that path and into the house? Even if they swept me up and took me off to the year 2999 and I was never heard from again, what did I have to lose? A drab life in a furnished room in a nowhere town, living on the last of my dwindling savings while I dreamed of fifths of Johnny Walker and went to meetings at which a bunch of victims of the same miserable malady struggled constantly to keep their leaky boats from sinking? Wherever I went would be better than that. Perhaps incredibly better.

But of course I didn’t know that the shining visitors from the future would sweep me off to an astounding new existence in the year 2999. That was only my own nutty guess, my wild fantasy. Anything at all might happen to me if I passed through that doorway. Anything. It was a kind of Russian roulette and I didn’t even know the odds against me.

One day I taped a piece of paper to a rubber ball from the five-and-dime and tossed it through the door when it opened for me. On it I had written these questions:

WHO ARE YOU?

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

DO YOU WANT ME?

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

WILL YOU HARM ME?

And I waited for an answering note to come bouncing out. But none ever did.

The house went away. The house came back. The woman still wasn’t there. Nobody else seemed to be, either. But the door swung expectantly open for me, seemingly of its own accord. I would stand and stare, making no move, and after a time it would close again.

I bought another rubber ball and threw another message inside.

SEND ME THE GIRL AGAIN. THE BLONDE ONE.

I WANT TO TALK TO HER.

The house went away again and stayed away a long while, nearly a month this time, so that I began to think it would never come back and then that it had never actually been here at all. There were days when I didn’t even bother to walk past the vacant lot where I had seen it.

Then I did, and it was there, and the woman was in the doorway smiling, and she said, “Come on in and visit me, sailor?”

She was wearing something gauzy and she was leaning against the door-frame with her hand on her hip. Her voice was a soft throaty contralto. It all felt like a scene out of a 1940’s movie. Maybe it was; maybe they’d been studying up.

“First you tell me who you are, all right? And where you come from.”

“Don’t you want to have a good time with me, pal?”

Damn right I do. I felt it in my groin, my pounding chest, my knees.

I moistened my lips. I thought of the way the house had reeled in that angry snarling cat. How it had pulled that tricycle up the stairs. I felt it pulling on me. But I must have more ability to fight back than a cat. Or a tricycle.

I said, “There’s a lot I need to know, first.”

“Come on in and I’ll tell you everything.” Softly. Huskily. Irresistibly. Almost irresistibly.

“Tell me first. Come out here and talk to me.”

She winked and shook her head. “Here’s looking at you , kid.” Studying old movies, all right. She closed the door in my face.

What they hammer into you in the Program is that you may think you’re pretty tough but in fact when you’ve added up all the debits and credits the truth is you aren’t as strong as you like to pretend you are. You’re too weak not to take the next drink, and it’s only after you admit how weak you are and turn Elsewhere for help that you can begin to find the strength you need.

I had found that strength. I hadn’t had a drink on the seventh of February, or on the eighth, or on the ninth. One day at a time I wasn’t having any drinks and by now that one day at a time had added up to four months and eleven days and when tomorrow came around I would add another day to the string, and I was beginning to feel fairly confident that I could keep going that way for the rest of my life.

But the house was something else again. I was starting to see it as a magic gateway to God knows where, just as booze had once been for me. It came and went and the woman smiled and beckoned and offered throaty invitations, and I recognized that I had let myself become obsessed with it and couldn’t keep away from it, and the next time the house came back there was a good chance that I’d go sauntering up the path and through the door.

Which was crazy.

I hadn’t put myself through this whole ordeal of recovery just for the sake of waltzing through a different magic gateway, had I? Especially when I didn’t have the slightest idea of what might lie on the far side.

I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and decided that the safest and smartest thing to do was to get out of here: I would move to some other town that didn’t have houses that came and went, or languid naked blondes standing in doorways inviting me to step inside for a good time. So one drowsy July morning I bought a bus ticket to a town forty miles from the one where I’d been living. It was about the same size and had a similar name and looked just about as dull; and on the street behind the lone movie theater I found a house with a FURNISHED ROOM sign stuck in its lawn and rented a place very much like the one I had, except that the rent was ten dollars more a month. Then I went around to the local A.A. headquarters—I had already checked with my own to make sure they had one here, you can bet on that—and picked up the schedule of meeting hours.

Done. Safe. A clean break.

I’d never see that white house again.

I’d never see her again.

I’d never face that mysterious doorway and never feel the pull that it exerted.

And as I told myself all that, the pain of irrevocable loss rose up inside me and hit me from within, and I thought I was going to fall down.

I was in the bus depot then, waiting to catch the bus going back, so I could pack my suitcase and settle things with my landlady and say goodbye to my friends, such as they were, in the Program back there. I looked around and there she was, standing stark naked in the doorway of the baggage room, smiling at me in that beckoning way of hers.

Not really. It was a different woman, and she wasn’t blonde, and she was wearing a bus company uniform, and she wasn’t even looking at me.

I knew that, actually. I wasn’t hallucinating. But I had wanted her to be the other one so badly that I imagined that I saw her. And I realized how deep the obsession had become.