Magnetic Field(s) Read online

  In the kitchen he remembered something Jerome had told him and he looked in the cookie jar and in the set of cannisters that said FLOUR, COFFEE, TEA. He reached his hand into a box of oatmeal and pulled out a heavy silver necklace with big blue stones all over it. He carried it in his hand into the bedroom and started to go through the drawers. As he was scooping more jewelry into a shaving kit, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He saw himself standing in the bedroom where these people slept and fucked. They had just recently moved in. Tonight they would come home to find they had been ripped off. The police would come and take all the information. After the police left, the man and woman would be sad, but they would comfort each other and then they would get into bed and make love. There was the bed. They still had some framed pictures sitting propped up against the wall in various corners.

  He picked up a small toy seal made out of some sort of tinny metal. The seal had little wheels, and when you rolled him along on top of the chest the ball on the end of his nose turned. He put the seal in his pocket and went back into the kitchen, where he took a bottle of beer out of the fridge and tried to open it, but his hands were shaking so badly he had to try three times, and even then he cut his knuckle. He pressed on the cut with the dish towel he’d been using to open the fridge and hold the bottle. His knees were shaking and the muscles in his calves felt light and fluttery, but he leaned against the counter and picked up the bottle and lifted it to his mouth and drank out of it.

  It was not that he was any more afraid of being caught than at any other time. He wasn’t afraid at all. It was how intensely he felt the thrill of being in the house. It was a place to live, and partly it was so delicious because it was so absolutely forbidden, much more forbidden than the stealing, this being where other people have their life. He felt their cold beer fill his mouth and slide down his throat.

  He thought of the framed pictures leaning against the walls. They had brought them here from where they had lived before, insisting that the house become part of their life, the wall they hung their pictures on. And yet all the walls were already here, the rooms laid out and named—living room, dining room, bathroom—before they had ever gotten here. The more he thought about it the more excited he became, having to lean again against the counter and take a long swallow of beer. They were trying to make this house become part of them, and the whole time it was standing all around them, containing them inside itself, holding them in its own body.

  He was stopped two days later by a policeman, who wanted to talk to him about the oversize stereo speakers in his back seat, and arrested. That was the first time he’d been made to lean all his weight on his hands spread out on the fender of his car, with his legs extended and the cop behind him kicking the insides of his ankles to spread his feet farther apart on the pavement. He had been pulled over into a bus stop, and some people were gathered around watching as they waited, and when the bus came they got on.

  He went to prison several times, but he always went back to doing houses. He made good money at it and he would tell people what he liked about his job was the hours. They allowed him to do the things he really wanted to do—hang out with his friends, play pinball and basketball, get laid, go to movies in the afternoon, which he loved to do: to come out of the cool darkness of the movie, still excited with the other life he had been part of, and then to walk out into the hot, bright light of the day. He felt then that the day was something he had chosen, as he had chosen the movie.

  It was while he was playing basketball one day that he had gotten a taste—just the palest shadow or suggestion—of that feeling of foreignness, of difference he felt when he was alone in someone else’s house. These guys from some other neighborhood showed up to play, and when they all started in to choose sides, one of them said, “It doesn’t really matter: if the score is too lopsided, we will just trade some personnel around.”

  Albert looked at him with his mouth open, then closed it but could feel his face beginning to frown with puzzlement. He asked finally, “If you are on the winning team, why would you want to trade away your players?” He was almost angry.

  In the houses the foreignness or difference was actually a heavy charge in the air of each room. When he left, he always felt light and strong. And the difference felt stronger as he penetrated deeper into the house that stood all around him silently, or was inhabited by the voice of the radio. He could feel it even in the living room or the kitchen, where the people ate their breakfast without thinking about it very much. When they were someplace else, not here, they could think about this kitchen table, but their thought of it did not include him being here in this place, while his thought of it did include them.

  But those rooms often felt like the outside of the house, the skin or some layer of tissue just inside the skin. Sometimes he would do nothing for a while but stand in a hallway or on the stairs, a place without windows, some spot that gave him the feeling he was deep in the interior of the house, where he would look—first without really seeing—at whatever they had there: a photograph of a big church, documents, family pictures. The people in these pictures were part of the past of the people who lived here. They had a life that went back into a time when people wore strange clothes and drove cars that looked like antiques. They had children too, whose lives moved forward into a time he could not see, like the time that passed in the world while he was in prison, a time that excluded him, for which he did not exist. Then he realized that he was looking at a single panel of a Dick Tracy cartoon these people had framed and hung here, and he wondered if it might be valuable, some sort of collector’s item, so he took it.

  On the top shelf of the closet in one of the rooms he found a box containing a small plastic Baggie of marijuana and a long pipe made, evidently, out of ceramic, in the shape of a penis. Whoever lived here put the marijuana in the bowl of the pipe, a shallow well back near the balls with a sort of sieve-like screen at the bottom of it, and sucked the smoke out of a hole in the head end of the penis. Somebody had actually thought of this thing, and then had actually made it. That person knew while he was making it that someone would buy it, that it would go from his factory someplace to a store, where it would sit on a shelf till someone saw it and decided to buy it. It would have been the girlfriend of the woman who lived here. She had gone into one of those porno bookstores with her boyfriend. She had suggested it, laughingly, but with an element of a challenge in the suggestion, and they had gone in, where she laughed too much and too loud, and then she had seen the penis pipe and said it would be perfect for this woman. They had all had a good laugh when the woman who lived here opened the package and saw the penis. They had smoked a little of the grass in the pipe, the boyfriend at first saying he would pass on this one, until the girlfriend teased him, saying, “Yeah, you men. You want us to suck on yours all the time. If you think the real ones are so hot for us to suck on, why can’t you even put your mouth on a fake one? It’s just a pipe. Or are you afraid we will think you are latent?” Finally the man, to be a good sport, gave in and took a couple of small puffs, awkwardly, from the head of the pipe.

  When her friends had left, the woman had started to put the pipe away, thinking, Where can I hide this thing? What if someone should find it! But as she stood in the middle of the room with the box in her hand she could not resist opening it to look at it one more time—it was so funny. Then she took it out of the tissue paper in the box and hefted the weight of it in her hand for a moment. She was still pretty high. She put the box down on the dresser and got ready for bed, feeling a vague excitement diffuse itself throughout her body. As she sat on the edge of her bed rolling up her hair, she could see in the mirror of the dresser how raising her arms like that lifted her breasts. They would look more attractive to a man like that, the nipples seen by him through the sheer cloth as fully extended and pointing up. Of course, that would be why pinup girls were posed like that, with their arms raised. Something like that, some detail like that, which seemed so smal
l, the fact of her breasts being lifted, the fact of their being seen like that, moving slightly inside the cloth that hid them and revealed them at the same time—that would be enough to make a man excited as he watched her, his penis inside his shorts beginning to grow stiff. When she had finished with her hair, she went over to the dresser to put the pipe away, but instead brought it into bed with her, where she began by putting her mouth on the head end of it, the way she had done to get a puff of grass. The glaze of the ceramic was cold. Then she mouthed as much of it as she could, getting her saliva all over it, and finally inserted it into her vagina and brought herself off. In the morning she put it on the top shelf of the closet.

  Holding the box, Albert felt as real and as solid as the dresser or the desk that had watched the blanket over her pelvis pluck up each time her hand came back and up underneath it to pull that thing out of her before she stroked it in again until her knees came up, making a tent of the blankets that hid what she was doing, and at the same time he felt like a ghost, present in the room yet nowhere to be seen. Even as he pictured what went on in the room, he did not see himself in the scene watching. He had become only a consciousness in the room or a consciousness of the room, part of the body of the house.

  There were other times, too, when he felt as if he would disappear just as he stood motionless in a hallway or on the landing of the stairs, feeling the house around him that somehow denied him, whose life excluded him so thoroughly. He would see a place where the paint had chipped off a corner of the bannister and he could see three or four different colors of paint. The house, he realized, had gone through a whole series of lives, different families coming in and painting it different colors, and the whole house remembered and preserved those lives, and all those lives excluded him. He would feel a panic then, an anxiety whose source he could never name except that it was connected with the house, with his being in the house, as if—unless he did something—he would dissolve, simply not be there anymore, like the smoke from a cigarette, or that he would faint. It scared him to feel things he could not understand, like now this heavy feeling of loss. What was it he was grieving for?

  At times like this he would swear to himself never to do houses anymore, not if it made him feel like this. Then one day he was in a house and he felt like going to the bathroom, deciding suddenly to find the bathroom and pee in the toilet that belonged to these people, feeling then the old excitement—using in this way this place that formed the frame of an entire life for these people. But on the wall in front of him as he peed there was a note someone had tacked up, and the note made him feel that other thing, the anxiety and loss. Then he felt a cold object in his hand which held his attention through a sort of personality, and when he looked down he saw it was the handle of the toilet as he was about to flush it. He felt as if he wanted to throw up, it was so hard and cold. Then as he moved over to the sink he saw himself in the mirror over it. It was him. There.

  After that he always found the mirrors first, just in case he needed them, and the houses stopped scaring him. He even discovered he was doing things he never would have thought he could manage. Like the time he went up to the second floor of this house and heard noises coming from above the ceiling. They were not human noises—a hum, and with it some other noises, like some sort of machine, repeating themselves at regular intervals. He forced himself to follow them. They were coming down a narrow stairwell that probably led up to an attic. You could not tell what people would put in an attic they had converted—TVs, stereos, tape recorders, movie projectors. Looking up the stairs, he saw the lights were on. The noises were something small, like a sewing machine, and then over that steady humming there were these other, regular clunks and bumps. He could feel his body beaded with sweat all over underneath his clothes as he deliberately moved his feet up the steps without making any noises. He knew he was breaking one of the basic rules—you never got yourself into a room that had only one exit—but as he climbed the stairs, more and more of the attic came into view above the stairwell: the joists of the ceiling and the studs of the walls lit by small hanging lamps that threw weird shadows. Whatever was making the noise was coming from all around the attic, not a sewing machine but something spread out, something that took up the whole area, something that must have been on top of the tables he now saw set up on sawhorses, the tables set together with their edges flush so that they made a sort of second floor in the attic, about waist level, and in the dimness underneath that level he saw a forest of those sawhorses. There was no one in the room, which was totally taken up by an enormous model-train set—miles of tracks that went by billboards and forests, mountains with tunnels through them. Some of the tracks went in between the beams that held up the ceiling, the roof of the house, and through towns set up with depots and even a post office; Coming Home was playing at the local movie theater; a school yard was laid out with a couple of basketball courts, even nets on the hoops. A whole world up there in the attic, one of the trains still running around the outermost track, solitary over there on the far side of the room. In all the streets and the depot, in all the stores and all the switching stations and water towers, even in the logging camp in the mountains, there were no people. The train was running now behind some low hills, invisible, and he alone heard it there as it moved.

  Sometimes the houses would have signs—usually on the gate to the backyard—saying BEWARE OF DOG. After he discovered that some of these places didn’t even have any dog, he systematically checked them out. He almost always avoided the ones that had animals, but the worst of it was that some of the places that actually did have them did not say anything about them. It occurred to him that some of the people bought the dogs to protect their homes and property, but others put up the signs without the dogs, trying to protect their property with words.

  Once he went into a house he thought was empty: he had seen the widow lady who lived there go off with her shopping cart. He got in the back door, which she had left open, and was doing fine (TV out of the living room, silver out of the dining room) and was headed down the hall when suddenly a large man’s back appeared in front of him. The man had lurched out of a doorway Albert had not even known was there and turned back toward the kitchen—actually turning his back on Albert. But it was too much of a startle, the man just suddenly being there, and stumbling, too, doing a sort of Frankenstein-monster walk, stiff-legged, with his arms out in front of him, losing his balance and caroming into the wall. Albert heard himself yell and drop the box of silver. The man stopped and grunted, “Mama!” and then lurched around, a bright smile on his idiot’s face, a gross, misshapen face, round and hairless and pink, drool spilling out of the corner of his mouth. Albert felt himself backtracking, amazed to find himself thinking at the same time—This is one of those Mongolians! This thing would start in to yelling, and how long the widow woman had kept this thing hidden in here. Her secret, huh? The secret life of the house that mouthed now silently, Mama, and then sat down—it must have been forty years old: its fucking hair was salt-and-pepper gray—and actually cried, blubbering. Albert picked up the box of silver, opened it and put it in the thing’s lap. The man stopped crying now and began pawing awkwardly at the bright pieces.

  In closets and drawers he found the secrets of other houses, too—a stack of porno postcards, a whole drawer full of dildos and vibrators, a life-size woman in a closet who scared him into a silent scream in the half-second before he realized she was only inflated rubber. In a shoe box on the floor under one woman’s bed he found magazines filled with pictures of young men jacking off. He found drug paraphernalia, and in a house that belonged to a judge he found hundreds of little potted plants that he recognized as marijuana. Then there were wigs and false teeth, a closet full of broken artificial legs, tubes of Preparation H in the drawers of nightstands, bottles of hair dye and whole boxes of tubes, compacts and bottles of stuff he called makeup. Sometimes in the back of a cupboard or the top shelf of a closet he would find packets of paper with w
riting on them, writing that obviously had never been seen by anybody but the person who had done it, lines of writing that did not even reach the right-hand edge of the page, like a grocery list. Others would be bundles of letters, sometimes tied with a ribbon, sometimes with a rubber band. Secret writing.

  He found that he had become something of an expert on the cost and value of the various brands of stereo components. In a house that had probably the most expensive stereo setup he thought he had ever seen, he saw also the most elaborate fish-tank outfit—more than anything he could have imagined. There must have been thirty different tanks arranged on shelves that came up the stairs, all lit from behind, all the tanks complicated by pumps and bubble gadgets and thermometers. He looked at the fish open-mouthed. Some of them were transparent, some of them streaked with colors he had never seen, others veiled in fins that draped around as they swam like some sort of ballet costume. They were not like the other animals. He did not think of them as animals. They moved in a way that was totally different, in a medium that was totally different. As he passed them again and again on his trips back and forth to the car, they irritated him more and more. When he had gotten everything there was to get (even a coin collection out of a back closet), he went back and looked at the fish. Coldly beautiful and delicate, requiring all this amount of care. For what? Bullshit. He pulled the lid off one of the tanks, then turned on a small radio on a table just inside the living room and threw the radio into the water, listening to the sparks and fizzle and watching the fish jerk around a little before they went limp and floated to the top. The lights and bubble gadgets in most of the other tanks blinked off. He went down the line of the tanks still functioning: where he could figure out the temperature controls he turned them up to boiling, and where he could not he just yanked the tubes and wires out of the water. One enormous tank he couldn’t do anything with and saved for last. He picked up a pottery elephant with a sort of castle on its back from a corner of the living room and threw it at the tank, forcing himself to stand there long after the crash, watching the cascade of the water, and the fish with it, as it poured whitely down the steps to the front door.