Magnetic Field(s) Read online

  More and more now he found that after he had gotten his one valuable thing out of a house and into his car he wanted to go back in the house and simply stand there, feeling the house as a kind of ongoing zone around him. He had been taking things that had no value from the very beginning, even though he did not know what he would do with them. Outside the house they had come from, they lost whatever magic they had seemed to possess—a spoon that said NEW JERSEY, a small plastic syrup bottle in the shape of a bear, a half-size railroad spike that someone had had brass-plated. They were things that had acquired a sort of magnetic charge from having been in one place, where people actually had lived, for a long time. Outside of those places they seemed not inert but diminished. Some of the older pieces he eventually threw away because they had lost whatever it was that had prompted him to take them in the first place. He had forgotten which houses they had come out of. But he always took the money things—stereos, TVs, jewelry. They formed the public reason for his being in the houses at all. How else could he explain, even to himself, that all he really wanted to do was be there in a place where people had their lives, and where they had had them, so that the place was somehow also a gathering of time? How could he explain—if he was caught—what he was doing feeling real in someone else’s house? The things—and even the smells—that were gathered here spoke of things done by these people who referred easily to the things the others had done, and also to each other’s plans, things that were going to be done. These references folded around the place a feeling he could never describe in words but that he knew he liked, and needed to feel.

  One day, passing an APARTMENT FOR RENT sign, he was struck by an idea that seemed at first totally crazy, but that would just not go away. He wanted to break into the vacant apartment, just to see what it was like, just to stand there, to be in it, the way he was in the other houses while he was robbing them. But would this be different? And how? He was actually more nervous getting in than he had been any time in recent months. (Finally he decided that if it came to that he would tell people he was interested in renting the apartment. The thought of that made him give a snort of laughter.)

  It was one of those railroad flats—a long hall moving straight back from the front door in one unbroken shot. Standing at the front door and looking back through the apartment was like standing in a square tube or conduit that was ready, waiting, to convey some sort of fluid. But the place was empty. Doors opened in the right-hand wall onto rooms. In the front was a room where a fireplace had been converted to a gas heater. Above the mantel was a mirror in which he saw himself standing in a vacant apartment. Behind him was the blank yellow of the wall, and two squares of different yellow hovering there as the ghosts of two pictures. The sliding doors to the next room stood open. One cubicle came off the hallway just far enough to enclose a toilet. How strange to have a special little room to do nothing in but pee and shit. Next door to the toilet was a regular little bathroom, except that it had no toilet. It made sense, he thought, but he had stood in all these rooms, every one of them, slowly turning his head and even turning his body this way and that, and it was not the same.

  People had lived here, and they would live here again, but the fact that nobody lived here now spoiled it. He thought that what was so exciting about being in the other houses where people were living was just the fact of standing in the middle of someone else’s life. Like the time he had actually sat down in the kitchen and made himself some toast. It had been all he could do to swallow the bread, and it had damn near messed him up good because some neighbor woman had seen him through the window and called the police. Up until he saw the woman peering at him through her window with the phone in her hand, he had managed to control his anxiety about feeling like a ghost by glancing from time to time at his reflection in the chrome of the toaster, inside of which now the heating elements were toasting this day’s bread for him. This thing had been given to these people as a wedding present by the wife’s father, who was hopelessly hooked on gadgets. It could toast four slices at a time and had no handle to pull down: you just dropped in the bread and a spring sensed the weight of the slice and lowered it quietly into the guts of the machine, where it was toasted. The bread had been bought the day before by the husband, who had made a special trip to the store because he was the one who had forgotten to put it on the shopping list. Their daily, ongoing life. He sat in their kitchen, sweating and tense and feeling good feeling himself being there. In the chrome toaster he saw a flattened-out fun-house version of himself bring the cigarette to his lips and take a drag. He picked up a knife with a paper napkin and buttered his toast, making sure the butter went all the way to the edges of the slice. He wanted to stay, somehow to be here while these people were doing this, just this, just to be here, to become the table or the toaster and in that way to participate in what went on here. He put the cigarette butt out in the remains of the cube of butter as it sat on the table in the general litter of plates and cups. At first the butter-with-the-cigarette-butt-sticking-out-of-it was simply lost in the overall welter that would be seen as the breakfast mess. But gradually it emerged more and more as the focal center, a kind of understated outrage around which the rest of the details ranged themselves.

  But here in the vacant apartment there was no ongoing life to stand in the middle of. If there were memories of the people who had lived here, the memories had gone into the walls and floors somehow, were embodied in the choices of paints and wallpaper. The house itself could not remember anything, and he started to leave. But just as he did he realized that this view he was now getting of the apartment was exactly the view each of its tenants had had as they moved out, and also the view they had had of it when they first moved in. It was the bare place, without any accommodations, that was both the introduction and the farewell to the life lived here. The blank, uncompromising thereness of the place enclosed all the other memories of the place as it had been lived in. And this was what he was getting now, the maze-like pattern of empty boxes (which was all the rooms were, he told himself), empty boxes connected to one another, that had been chosen as the place where these lives would be lived. And again he almost had to laugh at the realization that every tenant who had ever lived here, and every tenant who would live here in the time to come—they would all have this same view of the blank apartment stretching out in front of them as it now stretched out in front of him. Except that he saw them as they looked down this hall or walked quietly into the rooms, their shoes echoing in the hollow shell of the house. But their view of it did not include him, him standing here, being here, stubbornly, looking the place over as if he would actually decide to rent it. Even in the midafternoon the place was dark. The interior of the apartment had only two windows, and each of them looked out into an airshaft. What fool would want to live here, he thought.

  What would it take to make this place livable? How many of the things that weren’t valuable that he had taken from the other houses would he have to bring in here, and how long would he have to leave them here before the place acquired the feeling the others had? He did not know why the question made him angry.

  He was still angry a minute or so later, when he decided to leave, at first starting to move back toward the window of the service porch that he had forced open to get in, then changing his mind and walking straight down the length of that hall to the front door, which he wrenched open. He found himself looking directly into the face of a young man in a suit and tie who was holding a key aimed right at the place where the lock would have been. Behind the man was a middle-aged couple.

  “Hello,” the man said. “Did Mr. Jurgensen send you to see about the stove?”

  Albert looked at him, enraged. In a minute he would push this fool out of his way. “What?” he said. He could hear the open contempt and anger in his own voice.

  Now the man was confused. “I thought you were the stove man,” he said. “Isn’t that your truck outside?” Behind him the couple was busy looking politely interes
ted.

  As he stood there in the doorway, Albert could feel the vacant space of the hall as it stretched itself the length of the apartment and exerted a pressure on him, on his back, even though he could not tell if it was pulling him back into its elemental blankness or pushing him out, excluding him again. The man in front of him was probably close to six feet tall, a little shorter than himself, but he looked lighter. Albert looked him in the eye and said, “No. I am not the stove man.”

  “I don’t understand,” the man muttered. Turning to the couple behind him, he started to “explain”: “I thought—” and then turning back to Albert he said brightly, “Oh, you must be here to look at the apartment too. Why don’t we—”

  “No,” Albert said. “I am not here to look at the apartment, I live here. I own this place.”

  The man in front of him could not any longer pretend he did not notice the hostility. “Look here,” he said, taking a step back and suddenly becoming very “official,” “I’m going to have to ask you what you’re doing here.”

  “I am here to tell you to fuck yourself,” Albert said, taking a step forward and standing too close to the man. Albert could see the man’s face register the realization that if he did not give ground he would have to fight. The man could not keep his cool, Albert thought, simply because he had crowded him, simply because he had taken away some of the space the man had assumed was his to stand in. If the man had only kept his cool when he stepped back, he might have been able to salvage the situation, but now he was just confused, and afraid of getting hurt. He did not even know how much he might get hurt or if there was any way he could still avoid it. He was angry at being shamed in front of customers and the adrenalin was flowing in him for sure, but that only made things worse for him. Albert recognized the look in his eye from the animals. It was hateful to see, painful to see, and he turned and walked down the porch steps into the sunlight, leaving the three of them standing there next to the open door of the apartment he had just been inhabiting.

  He was still keyed up when he drove past a house he remembered as a place he had broken into before. When had it been? He pulled around the corner and parked. Yes, it was just about three months ago that he had been parked across the street from this place, setting up to do a house on the other side of the block, when the people started coming out of this brown shingle place, yelling back and forth that they would meet back here at nine o’clock. Of course, then they left the lights on and the radio playing. Smart. Now he drove around the corner and backed into a parking spot almost exactly in front of the house. Next to the brown shingle house was an old clapboard, and next to that was a pedestrian sidewalk that cut through the middle of the block to the next street over.

  The place was perfect. Looking through the window, he could see the brand-new stereo, right where he remembered the old one had been. To get to the backyard, you walked along a little alley that ran beside the house, where the garbage cans were. From the front you could hardly see the gate at the far end of this walk because of the overgrown hydrangea bush. He pushed on the gate but it would not open. He reached up to the top of the gate and climbed over. The sucker had put a big lock on it. He had also put some kind of little lock on the window of the breakfast room that was screened from the backyard. As Albert pried open the window with his tire iron, he watched the screws of the little lock pull out of the wood, and wondered how much the poor fool had spent on it.

  When he got to the new stereo, he remembered what it was about this place that had pissed him off. These people were too damn neat. The man had installed the components, and then he had kept the wires running together in neat bundles tied with plastic fasteners that looked as if they had been made just for that. The wires were then tacked to the walls with those white insulated staples, the bundles of wires following the lines of the shelves or the corner where two walls met. Like fucking ants. His tire iron would not fit under the staples to pry them loose—and this sucker with his new locks on the gate and on the windows and his tight-ass wire installation, this sucker was just costing him time. He swore softly to himself and got a knife from the kitchen. He cut all the fucking wires and lifted out the stereo. But when he got to the front door with it, he saw that the man had also put one of those double dead-bolt locks on it. The back door too. He had to go out the window with the stereo. That did it: he would clean this bastard out. He would not leave him a bar of soap. Then there was the new lock on the back gate. He put down the stereo and pulled the tire iron out of his pocket. Now the bastard’s two cats were nosing around the stereo and looking up at him nervously. He waved them away with the tire iron and turned to the gate. It was a very impressive-looking lock, but the turkey had attached it to a very old redwood fence with one-inch screws. They pried out of the wood like loose teeth.

  Back in the house he paused for a minute trying to figure out the most efficient way to strip the place. He began to pile everything just outside the breakfast-room window. When he was upstairs getting the TV and a smaller radio, he glanced at the bed and remembered the man’s set of cassettes. He would take them too. He grabbed a pillowcase, but then had to laugh at himself. He rummaged through the closets until he found a suitcase. He swept the cassettes into it with his forearm, wanting to make up for all the time he had lost, and then quietly remembered: “All you’ve got to do is keep your cool.” He got up with deliberate slowness, closed the suitcase and put it by the back window.

  He went to the fridge and opened it with a dish towel. He looked at his watch. He got out a beer, and as he leaned back against the fridge drinking it, he saw for the first time a door that went off the laundry room. They had a whole other room back there, a room he had not even known existed. He opened the door and found the light switch. God damn!

  He was in a room that looked like a small recording studio—white soundproofing stuff on all the walls and ceiling, carpet on the floor and all over the place panels of switches and gauges, tape machines of all sizes and descriptions, things with TV screens—some of them small, and some with round green screens—lots of microphones and cable and even a big thing with a piano keyboard in the middle and a switch panel on the top, like a telephone switchboard.

  This was some kind of jackpot. But what the hell did they do in here? They must be musicians: on a white table in a corner he found lots of music paper covered with indecipherable notations that didn’t even look like notes. He stood in the middle of the room and took a long pull from the beer can. This room was some kind of secret. You could hardly tell it was here from the outside because it didn’t have any windows. It was hidden away in the back part of the house, back behind the laundry room, and yet it was obviously an important room. It had the same feeling as a repair garage. It was a place where work got done. But it was also like a hospital, like an operating room. The work that got done in here was highly technical, and clean in a way that irked him, even though he could not say why. There was also a smell in the air that he associated with electronics, with computers and transistors and high voltages running around behind gray metal panels. It was separate from the rest of the house—cut off from the house and sealed off from the world too. He realized suddenly that in here he would not be able to hear if anyone came home, and quickly went back to the main part of the house. He decided he would pack up the car with what he had already stacked up outside the window, and then if he had any room left in the car he would start in on the stuff in the secret room.

  The idea of a secret room started his heart pounding again. What did these people do in there? Maybe they were spies. Bullshit. They could be making bootleg records. But he had not seen any records in there. Bootleg tapes. That was it. The man had some dumb-ass job in an office somewhere, but when he got off work he would go back to that secret room and become a bootlegger. It was secret in a different way from the jack-off pictures and the drug paraphernalia. This was something that stayed a secret for a while and then emerged from that unseen room into the public world, where it ci
rculated, freely and openly, even though its true, undercover nature, its stolenness, remained concealed. It made him giddy to think he had been standing, standing in the middle of that life—his own, invisible secrecy wrapped up this way in someone else’s. He went into the bathroom and looked at himself drinking from a can of beer in this bootlegger’s house. He imagined phone calls the bootlegger would make to Detroit or Atlanta, and now the thrill of being here in the house merged into a different anxiety. If these people came home and found him here, they would not call the police. They might shoot him quickly or—

  He poured the rest of the beer down the sink, threw the can in the garbage under it and put the dish towel on the drainboard. He climbed out the window and picked up the tape deck and the typewriter. At the far end of the little alleyway beside the house he paused for a moment, hidden by the hydrangea bush. A man was coming casually down the sidewalk. He turned in at the steps of this house. Fucking jackpot. Albert laid the goods down on the ground and walked out from behind the bush. The man was—what, about forty?—built O.K. He looked pink, his face just a little flushed, so wrapped up in his own life, not knowing he was being watched. Coming home to his own house where he lived his life was something he did day after day—day after day! Albert suddenly wanted to kill him, to beat the life out of that smug body, to destroy the body, to make it all go away so that there would not be any of it left, not even a memory.