Little Doors (23 page)

Wandering throughout the second floor’s many halls and rooms (our house was much bigger than it looked from the outside, due to many convolutions and curious folds), I pondered the problem of how to secure entrance to the third floor, where the Metas resided.

Just as there was no exterior access to the basement, so was there no outside flight of stairs that would lead to the Metas. Entrance, therefore, had to be made from somewhere within. Yet the main staircase ended at the second-floor landing.

But just as I had located the inconspicuous cellar door, I finally found the hidden way upward, in a dark corner at the end of a hall.

Obeying a nameless impulse to look up, I detected the hair-thin outline of a square trapdoor in the high ceiling. Fumbling about in the shadows, I discovered wooden rungs set into the wall.

Grasping an upper rung and lifting my right foot to the first, I began to climb.

It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to reach the ceiling. When my head was nearly touching the trapdoor I placed a hand against it and pushed. The panel resisted slightly, as if long disused, then yielded.

As soon as the smallest crack showed, the panel was yanked away by unseen inanimate forces, a torrent of white light flooded out, blinding me, and I was snatched bodily, as if by suction, up and through the square hole in the ceiling.

I found myself standing in a medium-sized white room, lit by a harsh, pervasive light whose source was hidden. The walls and floor of the place were padded in a substance that seemed both organic and artificial, giving way slightly under pressure, like skin, yet firm and tough as plastic. There was no furniture, nor any door. And the panel in the floor, by which I had hoped to return to the familiar portion of our house, had been in some manner seamlessly closed. I could detect no trace of it.

As I stood, baffled, contemplating my prison, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned.

There had somehow appeared a man clothed in a form-fitting white jumpsuit of some synthetic material that merged imperceptibly with white boots. His head was completely bald. His features were smoothly regular and extraordinarily placid, as if he surveyed the world from a lofty perch, far removed from any of its foibles and cares. He looked utterly imperturbable.

This, then, had to be Mr Meta.

Before I could quite recover my equilibrium, he spoke.

“What are you doing here, sir? You really don’t belong up here.”

Mr Meta’s voice was a sensible, rational monotone that completely infuriated me. To suffer such treatment in our own house—! It was too much. I’m afraid I lost my temper, and began to rant.

“You listen to me, Meta, it’s you and your wife who don’t belong here. I’m the new owner of this house, with clear and incontestable title. If anyone belongs here, it’s my wife and me. We’re sick of having half our house occupied by oddball tenants. We want it all! We’re the owners, goddamn it, and we’re serving notice! You’ve got no lease, and no right to live here without my sufferance. It’s out on your ass, Meta, as soon as physically possible! Go try to find another landlord who’ll have you!”

Mr Meta’s face remained unmoving throughout my tirade. He failed even to cross his arms on his chest, as any normal person might do when confronted with hostility. Instead, those somehow arrogant limbs continued to hang, relaxed yet competent-seeming, by his side.

When I finally spluttered down, and the silence began to grow discomfiting, Mr Meta spoke.

“We’ll have to discuss this with Mrs Meta. Please follow me.”

Then he disappeared. As cleanly as vacuum imploding to nonexistence.

“Meta!” I called. “Mr Meta, where are you? Damn it, Meta, I can’t follow like that. Don’t leave me here, you bastard. Meta!”

Mr Meta s head and shoulders poked neatly through one wall, so that he looked like a mounted trophy.

“Please don’t bellow, sir. Keep calm. We cherish our even-temperedness on this level. Please try to maintain an objective perspective on affairs, sir. Put yourself beyond emotions. It’s the only way.”

Mr Meta extended a hand through the wall, as in a Cocteau film.

Instinctively, I grasped it.

He pulled me through.

We were in another room identical to the first, save for an antiseptic white couch. On the couch sat Mrs Meta.

She was dressed identically to her husband, and was just as hairless. Her skull resembled a china egg. Save for a few different contours, she and Mr Meta could have been twins.

“My husband tells me you wish us to vacate our residence. May I ask why?”

Mrs Meta’s voice was, if anything, even more disconcertingly rational than her husband’s. Once again I was put off, and could speak only haltingly.

“Well, it’s just that the wife and I need the space you’re occupying. We’re going to have children someday, you see …”

I faltered. It all sounded so lame and insignificant and somewhat bestial, in the presence of the noble sexless Metas. Still, now that I was here, I had to press on.

“Besides, it’s unnatural, the kind of life you lead. I’ve never seen either of you leave our house. Who knows what you two do up here all day? How do you even survive? No, it’s too creepy. We want you out.”

Mr and Mrs Meta exchanged a glance pregnant with meaning. Then one of them—I confess to being so confused by now that I could hardly tell them apart—said, “Well, if we show you how we spend our time, will you reconsider?”

“I don’t know. I, I—”

“Here, sit down with us.”

Seeing no reason not to comply, I took a seat on the white couch, between the Metas. Mr Meta then gripped my right hand, Mrs Meta my left. I felt a strange sensation race up my arms. Then the Metas linked their free hands across my lap.

The room vanished. Disembodied, I was in a place filled with cold equations and numinous symbols, all gold and silver, pure and instantly apprehensible, yet infinitely deep. Totally disoriented, I tried to grasp the meaning of this new world. After a dimensionless time spent probing the symbols, I realized what I was viewing. It was a complex schematic representation of our familiar universe, all the people and objects and relationships therein, a structured, scientific version of our familiar jumbled mess of emotions and ethics, desires and compulsions, needs and wants. I could even distinguish the icons that represented the Metas and me, and our relationship. Their import was unmistakable: I was acting like an irrational idiot.

I felt utterly humbled and minuscule. For an indefinite period I remained in this pitiless abstract world, face to face with my own insignificance. In a stern kind of way, it was rather bracing. Finally, I returned involuntarily to the Metas’ couch. They had broken the circle of hands.

“Now you see how we spend our time,” said Mrs Meta. “Perhaps, in some slight fashion, you now understand why we cannot be disturbed.”

I was speechless. I allowed Mr Meta to lead me back through the wall into the original room. There, he bent over, grabbed my ankles, and effortlessly lifted me up, so that I hung suspended in the same position my wife had occupied when I left her.

Then he pushed me headfirst through the floor.

Somehow, without having landed heavily, I was lying on the carpet in the hall outside our bedroom door. All the lights were off. It took a moment for my eyes, dazzled by the illumination of the Metas’ apartment, to recover.

When I felt that I could make my way without stumbling, I stood and entered the bedroom. My wife, again, had gone to sleep without awaiting my return.

Exhausted, I crept into bed beside her, still clothed.

* * *

After my failure to evict the Metas, my wife’s importunings became unbearable. When I couldn’t stand them anymore, I burst out: “If you think you can handle the Abs and the Metas then go to it!”

“I will!” she feistily replied.

That night, descending the long staircase, she visited the Abs. I went to sleep before she returned, feeling not one whit guilty.

In the morning, she looked unnaturally disheveled, and had nothing to say. A male musk permeated her hair.

Two nights later, somewhat recovered, she set out for the Metas. I generously pointed out the location of their trapdoor.

Sometime around three a.m., I sleepily sensed her fall into bed beside me.

Over breakfast, I asked, “Did you convince the Metas to seek new lodgings?”

“Shut up,” she wearily replied, as if embarrassed and confused.

After this, there was no more mention of our inherited tenants.

* * *

Our life settled into an easy routine. Months passed.

We adapted quite nicely to sharing our house. Despite being excluded from cellar and third floor, we felt the house mold itself to our personalities like a favorite set of weekend clothing. We still planned to have children, but had resigned ourselves to housing them on the same floor as our bedroom. It would probably be more convenient anyway.

The Metas had, of course, been right: the house was big enough for all of us.

I have just said that we were excluded from the basement and the upper story. This was not entirely true.

There grew a pattern of visits between the levels, with my wife and I acting as solo intermediaries. (Naturally, the Metas never went slumming down with the Abs, nor would the Abs ever have dared to visit the Metas. In fact, I doubt whether the cave dwellers even knew or could possibly conceive of the existence of the Metas, beings so far removed from the life the Abs experienced.)

By far the majority of our separate visits were made downstairs, to the Abs. Their company was simply much more congenial than the chilly hospitality of the Metas. Far down below our house, sitting mutely for hours in the damp cave around the flickering flames that alternately disclosed and hid the painted walls, rolling on the gritty floor in animal passion, Mrs Ab’s hairy legs locked behind my back, I felt utterly connected with my roots, cast backward in time to a more primal, aboriginal existence, where words and abstract concepts meant nothing, failed even to exist.

I believe my wife experienced the same sensations in her unaccompanied visits to the Abs. I knew, from the apish scent that clung to her the mornings after, that she regularly had carnal relations with Mr Ab (whom I had met one night, when heavy rains kept him from hunting; a fine fellow, the salt of the earth). But I wasn’t jealous. How could I be, considering what I did with Mrs Ab?

No, my wife and I both gained from our separate visits below, and our own relationship was only strengthened.

Even the much rarer visits we made to the Metas were beneficial. The mental jaunts to the land of symbols, made with the Metas as guides, were as frigidly character-building as a January dip off the coast of Maine. Still, it was not something one cared to do every day, whereas visiting the Abs was. But alas, this happy coexistence was not to last forever …

One night I was taking my leave of Mrs Ab. We rose from the cave floor, I dressed, and, as was now her habit, Mrs Ab kindled a piney torch from the flames and accompanied me back to the foot of the stairs, lighting my way.

At the base of the wooden stairs, Mrs Ab was overcome with lust. (I believe her physiology included an actual period of estrus.) Dropping the torch, she ripped my clothes to shreds with her sharp nails and tripped me to the floor. Soon we were coupling as if we had not done it for weeks.

Unnoticed, the torch passed its flame to the staircase. The ancient wood quickly accepted the gift, and just at the climax of our union, I became aware of the spreading conflagration, which now lit the rocky walls with an awesome radiance.

The way upstairs was impassable. And fire was climbing two steps at a time toward the first floor.

I jumped up and managed to wrap a scrap of fabric around my loins. Grabbing Mrs Ab’s furry hand, I raced back down the tunnel and out the exit I had never ventured down.

As I had once speculated, the tunnel emerged in a public park not far from our house, occupied during the day by addicts and drug peddlers, winos and children. Mrs Ab and I hurried through the deserted city streets back to our house.

The entire building was ablaze, a hopeless pyre lighting the night. On the lawn stood my wife and the Metas, looking bewildered. Yes, even the imperturbable Metas were reacting in their subdued fashion to the destruction of our beloved house.

Mrs Ab and I joined them. As we watched, Mr Ab slunk forlornly out of the night, dragging a club.

The six of us, huddling together, watched in silence for a time. Sirens began to fill the night.

“Ab cold” said Mr Ab at last.

“I’m heartsick,” said my wife.

“There’s just no making sense of this,” said Mr Meta. Further silence, save for the crackling of the flames. In the end, I felt compelled to speak.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “There are other houses in this neighborhood just as nice. We only have to stick together, exert ourselves, and we’ll surely find one. The important thing is not to split up.”

“New safe cave?” inquired Mr Ab tentatively.

“Enough room for my office?” asked my wife.