Robert Silverberg: It Comes and Goes

The house comes and goes, comes and goes, and no one seems to know or to care. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You keep your head down; you take notice only of the things that are relevant to your own personal welfare; you screen everything else out as irrelevant or meaningless or potentially threatening.

It’s a very ordinary house, thirty or forty years old, a cheap one-story white-stucco job on a corner lot, maybe six rooms: green shutters on the windows, a scruffy lawn, a narrow, badly paved path running from the street to the front steps. There’s a screen door in front of the regular one. To the right and left of the doorway is some unkempt shrubbery with odds and ends of rusting junk scattered among it—a garbage can, an old barbecue outfit, stuff like that.

All the houses around here look much the same way: there isn’t a lot of architectural variety in this neighborhood. Just rows of ordinary little houses adding up to a really ordinary kind of place, neither a slum nor anything desirable, aging houses inhabited by stranded people who can’t move upward and who are settled enough so that they’ve stopped slipping down. Even the street-names are stereotyped small-town standards, instantly forgettable: Maple, Oak, Spruce, Pine. It’s hard to tell one street from another, and usually there’s no reason why you should. You’re able to recognize your own, and the others, except for Walnut Street where the shops are, are just filler. I know how to get to the white house with the screen door from my place—turn right, down to the corner and right again, diagonal left across the street—but even now I couldn’t tell you whether it’s on Spruce corner of Oak or Pine corner of Maple. I just know how to get there.

The house will stay here for five or six days at a time and then one morning I’ll come out and the lot will be vacant, and so it remains for ten days or two weeks. And then there it is again. You’d think people would notice that, you’d think they’d talk; but they’re all keeping their heads down, I guess. I keep my head down too but I can’t help noticing things. In that sense I don’t belong in this part of town. In most other senses I guess I do, because, after all, this is where I am.

The first time I saw the house was on a drizzly Monday morning on the cusp of winter and spring. I remember that it was a Monday because people were going to work and I wasn’t, and that was still a new concept for me. I remember that it was on the cusp of winter and spring because there were still some curling trails of dirty snow on the north-facing side of the street, left over from an early-March storm, but the forsythias and crocuses were blooming in the gardens on the south-facing side. I was walking down to the grocery on Walnut Street to pick up the morning paper. Daily walking, rain or shine, is very important to me; it’s part of my recovery regime; and I was going for the paper because I was still into studying the help-wanted ads at that time. As I made my way down Spruce Street (or maybe it was Pine Street) some movement in a doorway across the way caught my eye and I glanced up and over.

A flash of flesh, it was.

A woman, turning in the open doorway.

A naked woman, so it seemed. I had just a quick side glimpse, fuzzed and blurred by the screen door and the gray light of the cloudy morning, but I was sure I saw gleaming golden flesh: a bare shoulder, a sinuous hip, a long stretch of haunch and thigh and butt and calf, maybe a bit of bright pubic fleece also. And then she was gone, leaving incandescent tracks on my mind.

I stopped right on a dime and stood staring toward the darkness of the doorway, waiting to see if she’d reappear. Hoping that she would. Praying that she would, actually. It wasn’t because I was in such desperate need of a free show but because I wanted her to have been real. Not simply an hallucination. I was sober that morning and had been for a month and a half, ever since the seventh of February, and I didn’t want to think that I was still having hallucinations.

The doorway stayed dark. She didn’t reappear.

Of course not. She couldn’t reappear because she had never been there in the first place. What I had seen was an illusion. How could she possibly have been real? Real women around here don’t flash their bare butts in front doorways at nine in the morning on cold drizzly days, and they don’t have hips and thighs and legs like that.

But I let myself off the hook. After all, I was sober. Why borrow trouble? It had been a trick of the light, I told myself. Or maybe, maybe a curious fluke of my weary, overwrought mind. An odd mental prank. But in any case nothing to take seriously, nothing symptomatic of significant cerebral decline and collapse.

I went on down to the Walnut Street Grocery and bought that morning’s Post-Star and looked through the classified ads for the one that said, If you are an intelligent, capable, hard-working human being who has gone through a bad time but is now in recovery and looking to make a comeback in the great game of life, we have just the job for you . It wasn’t there. Somehow it never was.

On my way home I thought I’d give the white house on the corner lot a second glance, just in case something else of interest was showing. The house wasn’t there either.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

I tell you that three times because what I tell you three times is true. If anything at all is true about me, that much is. It is also true that I am forty years old, that I have had successful careers in advertising, public relations, mail-order promotion, and several other word-oriented professions. Each of those successful careers came to an unsuccessful end. I have written three novels and a bunch of short stories, too. And between the ages of sixteen and thirty-nine I consumed a quantity of brandy, scotch, bourbon, sherry, rum, and beer—and so on down to Cherry Kijafa, Triple Sec, and gin fizzes—that normal people would find very hard to believe. I suppose I would have gone on to rubbing alcohol and antifreeze if nothing else had been available. On my fortieth birthday I finally took the necessary step, which was to admit that alcohol was a monster too strong for me to grapple with and my life had become unmanageable as a result. And that I was willing to turn to a Power that is stronger than I am, stronger even than the booze monster, and humbly ask that Power to restore me to sanity and help me defend myself against my enemy.

I live now in a small furnished room in a small town so dull you can’t remember the names of the streets. I belong to the Program and I go to meetings three or four times a week and I tell people whose surnames I don’t know about my faults, which I freely admit, and my virtues, which I do have, and about my one great weakness. And then they tell me about theirs.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

I’ve been doing pretty well since the seventh of February.

Hallucinations were one thing I didn’t need in this time of recovery. I had already had my share.

I didn’t realize at that point that the house had vanished. People don’t customarily think in terms of houses vanishing, not if their heads are screwed on right, and as I have just pointed out I had a vested interest in believing that as of the seventh of February my head was screwed on right and it was going to stay that way.

No, what I thought was simply that I must have gone to the grocery by way of one street and come home by way of another. Since I was sober and had been for a month and a half, there was no other rational explanation.