The Crooked House

The week he met the man who claimed to have exited the house by falling downward into a desert valley, Mull decided to give up coffee.

Mull had lost regular access to the community cafeteria and its coffee supply. The corridor leading to it had disappeared, in one of the building’s periodic shifts. But he could still see into the cafeteria. The window of his dormitory room opened onto the scene from high above, offering a bird’s-eye view. When Mull cracked the window, he could smell the rising steam of the coffee brewing.

Mull, after laboring through the now elusive corridor, had rarely found others in the cafeteria. Just coffee in the twenty-pot urn. Once or twice the supply had been down to dregs. Those times, Mull had brewed a fresh urn himself, from supplies stacked there. Others probably did the same, though he’d never caught them at it. The scene was hardly scintillating to watch, once one adjusted to the surveillance-camera perspective.

Still, he glanced through the window. Should the woman for whom Mull searched appear in the cafeteria, he could try again to relocate the corridor. He might even risk a plunge through the window, aiming himself at an empty area of floor. Coffee alone, however, wasn’t worth it. Long before, Mull had concluded that accepting the loss of inessential things was an elemental lesson that his present life, his life since entering the tesseractic house, had to teach him. Coffee was just the latest sacrifice.

The last time he’d been in the corridor, it had been almost completely blocked. Occupants of the San Pedro overpass had located a new one-way hatch into the house and begun shoving their possessions through: filthy bedding, shopping bags stuffed with clothing and keepsakes, photograph albums, nonworking electronics, baby strollers full not of children but of children’s toys, and unrecognizable other stuff, bundled with twine or extension cords or jammed into cardboard cartons loosely flapped shut. Mull had picked his way through the debris, fearful of accidentally treading on a sleeping body.

These days, he frequented the atrium. It was there that he met the man who spoke of the desert window. The atrium had food, though no coffee. Some volunteers had dragged a steam table in from the kitchen and most days it was loaded with hot food. If not, piles of sandwiches. No one oversaw the serving, or kept track of what was taken. Meals merely waited for takers. Some might load a shopping cart with sandwiches to distribute elsewhere, but no one had ever carted away the steam table itself. The food continued to be supplied, for now.

The atrium, which in the original plan had voiced both the grandiose and the bureaucratic aspects of the building, was ruined. Its central purpose, as a portal from the outside, had been lost in the first collapse. Little remained of its original splendor. The celebrated “night sky” ceiling, depicting the astrological figures, had fallen, its tiles collected as souvenirs or trodden into grit on the vast floor.

Nevertheless, the atrium’s ruins served as the clearest echo of the architect’s vision. Was this why residents treated it with reverence? No one slept there. Conversation was scarce and hushed. In contrast to the dormitories, the atmosphere was churchlike. Mull also regarded it as a crossroads, where he could scan for familiar faces and perhaps find the woman, Rose Gutiérrez. Mull still remembered, more days than not, that he was here to keep a promise to find her.

“Seen you round,” the man said.

A greeting that strangely mimicked a farewell, it left Mull momentarily speechless. When he managed to say, “Oh, hey,” it came out as a croak. His voice—when had he used it last? He cleared his throat and tried again. “You mean inside?” he asked the man. “Or before?”

Mull had been sitting against a wall in the atrium, slurping at broth with one of the inadequate plastic spoons that were the sole utensil provided. Others nearby, whether eating or only resting, kept their distance. The hippieish drifter, on the other hand, plopped down beside Mull now, even as he made his enigmatic reply: “Oh, I seen you both places.”

At first, Mull had taken the lanky man for eighteen or nineteen, but no. His face was sun-lined, though he was pale, not tanned. He might be in his forties, around Mull’s age. Mull hurriedly calculated: crazy, hostile, or both? A newcomer to the house? Or a longtime resident, perhaps even one of those who had entered before the first collapse?

Mull hedged his own reply. “Have we met?”

“Didn’t say that. I just recognized a fellow wanderer first time I laid eyes on you.”

“Through a window?”

The man laughed. “There’s a lot of those. I been known to look.”

So far as Mull knew, there were no views into his dormitory. “I used to get coffee every day at that cafeteria, that one with the mural of the cruise ship—”

“Sure, yeah, I know it.”

“Maybe you saw me there.”

“Maybe.”

“Or through a window,” Mull suggested again. “I can see into that cafeteria from above, myself.”

“You like down-facing windows, I got a good one. You like the desert?”

“The desert?”

“Yeah. I’ll show you. I went through it once. Maybe you’ll want to try.”

The window over the cafeteria wasn’t the only high vantage Mull had encountered. Another window he’d discovered appeared to dangle perilously a quarter mile or so above the glamorously tangled intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego Freeways. This view was vertiginous. Most seemed to shun it, and the room that contained it.

When he peered at the freeways, Mull found the activities below mysteriously reduced, a subject of study to file away for another time. It wasn’t that there were no cars, but there were fewer, and whole intervals of bright daylight in which no cars appeared at all. Once, Mull had seen a group of walkers on the freeway, a cluster of eight or nine, centered in the empty lanes, moving together northward, toward the old post office or beyond, out of sight.

But these windows were the exception. The preponderance of the house’s windows or doorways looked into different parts of the house. Others appeared to gaze upward from deep wells or pits in the earth. It seemed to Mull that these windows told a truth. Yes, the four-dimensional collapse contained enigmas. Likely the house still unfolded itself spatially with each aftershock. Yet the structure hadn’t been able to defy the simple law of gravity. It had reorganized its geometry downward. Since the start of the earthquakes, Mull and the population of the formerly unsheltered were essentially living underground.

It was only a short distance from the atrium to the drifter’s desert window, which lay hidden behind a maintenance door, at the back of a room full of breaker boxes and wiring panels. The frame wasn’t large, though wide enough to clamber through. The view was panoramic. Yellow scrub to a horizon of sand, sky-petitioning Joshua trees, molten-appearing rock formations. Had Mull never visited the desert east of Los Angeles, he could have mistaken it for Mars.

“You really went through.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How did you get back?” Mull asked.

“I hitchhiked back, from J-Tree. It ain’t that far.”

“Why did you return?”

The man shrugged. “Nothing else to do.”

“How did you get back inside?” Mull was interested, generally, to know which entrances were in use. The one he’d used had closed. Yet still new faces appeared. The numbers grew.

“I came through the train tunnel, under Union Station.” This reply took a moment. Was the man uninterested? Or unremembering?

“Have the trains quit running?”

“Maybe.”

The drifter’s tale of escape and return tested Mull’s credulity. For one thing, the height of the desert window looked to Mull too dangerous to risk bridging with a leap. And there was no sign of shelter below. No road out of that blasting sunlight. One wouldn’t have to break one’s legs in the fall to die of thirst, such distance from help. Even a turned ankle could be fatal.

The man’s account was too vague. Had he observed nothing during his sojourn outside the house? Mull had yet to meet anyone who’d persuasively gone outside and returned; the matter of the present state of the wider city was, for Mull, an open one. Perhaps there was no city to return to now, not as he’d known it.

In any case, Mull had put aside the question of whether he would be capable of exiting the house if he wished. All windows and doors worked in one direction only. For instance, when Mull had crawled over the debris and tried the hatch in the now disappeared corridor, it had led to another point deep inside the house. This was typical.

Mull had no idea whether he could still transit outside. His own entry point had grown remote as the house unfolded itself through the series of earthquake collapses. Would his car still be parked on the other side of the door through which he’d entered, at the bottom of the public stairs where Reservoir Street descended to Glendale Boulevard? It might have been stripped for parts by now. Even beyond his uncertainty about the condition of the city outside, Mull’s sense of time had been damaged by his residence in the house.

Mull excused himself from the window. The vision of the desert was entrancing but nauseating. So different from the life he’d learned inside. The drifter said nothing. Mull, as he left, attempted to memorize the turns that led to this place, another possible subject of his study.

Environmental analysis. That had been Mull’s field, when the earthquakes began and the house first fell. He could barely recall now what it was supposed to entail. He’d studied the Los Angeles River, the secret system of concrete channels, as often dry as carrying a trickle of moisture, which went ignored by most Angelenos. The fenced zones zigzagging alongside the freeways were home to wildlife—to lizards and frogs, swimming rats, weird herons—and to unsheltered humans, with their tents, their carts, their fires. Mull had liked to think he was “working” on that intractable problem. Though, in comparison with the intervention of the church volunteers, the food banks, and the charity medical clinics, anything Mull had to offer was paltry, theoretical. He reported to no one. No office of the city waited for his results.

Few students had ever affiliated with Mull, choosing him as an adviser, say, or to supervise their thesis work. His classes were a requirement in the architecture major; otherwise they’d have been empty. The handful of disciples Mull attracted tended to be those with roots in the wider city, sometimes older students. Others were transfers from the community colleges and living alone or with their families rather than in the dorms. Often the type to wander from college, into trades or the military, or off the radar entirely. Mull had felt more than once that if he were faithful to his ambivalence he’d have followed them out of the institution, to set up a life by the river.

Mull had been spending more time there, testing himself for exile, before the earthquakes. He’d leased an in-law house from a friend, ostensibly a “writing studio.” It backed onto a wide embankment, accessible through a rent in the fencing. The river’s concrete was streaked with white trails of bird shit, liquid ejections stretched by velocity into a kind of hieroglyphic language, if only Mull could read it.

At the channel’s edge, where the rain’s surges deposited refuse, one bare tree sheltered a gnarl of sun-bleached junk, stuff pitched through car windows from overpasses. Most days, Mull was alone at this crap oasis, his personal Walden. Few of the tent-dwelling people chose Mull’s embankment. Perhaps that was because of the lack of shade, perhaps because Mull, in his studio, seemed to the tent dwellers to be surveilling the area.

The time leading to Mull’s decision to enter the house had been marked by a series of catastrophic occurrences. The earthquakes, but not merely the earthquakes. In the contemplative vacuum of his present life those events stacked in memory, as if they’d transpired in a matter of days, or hours. In truth, it had been almost five months from the first earthquake to the moment when Mull committed himself to searching for Rose Gutiérrez.

An example: it was at the third press conference on the subject of the collapse, not the first, that the assassination attempt had occurred. The televised presentations were already threatening to become routine, always the same three men on the stage, flanked by policemen and press secretaries: the slim dapper mayor; the beleaguered president of the housing authority; the architect Quintus Burnham, with his shock of white hair teased to the ceiling, his black collarless suit, his red-framed glasses, looking as though he belonged more on the stage of the Cannes Film Festival. Their incomprehensible maps and charts, attempts to track the rescue efforts, to decipher the shape the structure had taken as it settled and settled again.

Who had been the assassin’s target? The architect took the only bullet, in his spine. Just days before Mull entered the house, Burnham had reappeared on television, a glimpsed form in a wheelchair, hair still coiffed. Why had Mull been so glued to the news? In his recollection, he’d been watching live the morning that the L.A.P.D. perp-walked the would-be assassin: Mull’s onetime student James Gutiérrez.

As it happened, Mull had once been at a dinner party with the architect. At a private home, that of an author Mull knew, a glamorous type, who’d married the sister of the mayor. Though the man never spoke aloud any suggestion of access or influence, this association by marriage conveyed an air of civic celebrity that the author plainly relished.

Burnham seemed to style himself a man of action, in some mid-twentieth-century Hemingway or Picasso sense. His only battles, so far as Mull could tell, had been with aggrieved civic institutions, or with neighbors of his proposed incursions upon sunlight or airspace. The money that flowed everywhere around men like Burnham guaranteed that he vanquished all such opponents.

Another thing Burnham vanquished was dinner parties. At least this one. His monologue began lightly enough, with a disquisition on Los Angeles as the site of a contest between flatness and what he called stepped tessellations. “The richer and crazier you are”—here Mull began instantly to hate him, for this romantic conflation—“the likelier you are to occupy a tessellated planar environment. The simplest example is the standard canyon house. Notched into a ravine, turning a buttressed backside to anyone approaching from below. But the spectacular examples are those private homes the studios rent, at great expense, to play the domiciles of villains in science-fiction movies—”

Mull tuned out. He looked to his table companion at his left for a side conversation. A woman he knew, who’d left academia to serve on the city’s planning commission. She, too, gave signs of impatience with Burnham’s preening. She had to explain it to Mull, who was being a little slow. Burnham had sold the city on his solution to the problem of Skid Row. The tens of thousands living unsheltered, the tent cities strung along miles of streets. That explained the confluence of guests here. Burnham’s table talk was a rehearsal for the public unveiling of his plan, the tesseractic shelter.

The dinner concluded with Burnham’s toast to the partnership. “Why shouldn’t our refugees from late-stage capitalism participate in the wonders of hypercubic spatiality? You don’t have to understand a house to live in it.”

It struck Mull, at the time, as tendentious. Crypto-scientific nonsense. He left before dessert.

Lately Mull wondered if Burnham had, in a sense, delivered exactly what he’d proposed. The psychic catastrophe of unapproachable canyon houses, windows that functioned as one-way glass, rooms locked in abutment, like coffins. All of these had been the domain exclusively of the canyon dwellers. Burnham had brought such marvels to those finding shelter along the overpasses and riverside embankments. Should he be blamed for the earthquakes? Some claimed that the faults had been triggered by the anchoring of the structure to the bedrock. Yet Los Angeles had been overdue.

In any case, the collapses had turned Burnham’s revolutionary shelter into its own opposite. At its unveiling, the tesseractic house had been a kaleidoscopic tower, impossible to gaze upon except from below. Now it could be seen only by peering into apertures in the ground. Sinkholes, some of which might even be dangerous to approach. In a time of continual earthquakes, the windows into the earth could only inspire fear.

There’d been more aftershocks the day Mull had been in the visiting room at Men’s Central, talking with James Gutiérrez. Entombed in the windowless vault of the jail, Mull took the rumbling for trains passing by on their way to Union Station. None of the prisoners on their telephones seemed to notice it at all. Yet the guards immediately began talking on their radios about earthquakes, and Mull understood.

Gutiérrez had shaved his head. He was heavier and more slow-moving than the hectic and furious kid Mull remembered from his class, as though formed now of denser molecules.

Gutiérrez had been told by his guards that the architect had survived. Mull didn’t choose to ask whether Burnham had been the lone intended target or one target among many.

“Motherfucking house swallowed my mother,” the prisoner said. The words were ferocious, but spoken in a meditative monotone. All anger seemed to have exited the teen-ager’s body, or blended into the ambient rage of his surroundings.

“They’re alive in there,” Mull offered stupidly. “It’s not like they’re pulling out bodies.”

“What kind of alive?”

Mull had no answer to this.

“Human garbage disposal, I call it. Urban removal.”

Mull recognized the last term, one he’d introduced in his lectures on East St. Louis, Tulsa, Robert Moses, the Housing Act of 1949.

“If I understand the complexities of the house,” Mull said, speaking carefully, “many of the people inside may not know what’s happened out here. They may be living just like they were before the collapse.”

They’d spoken for perhaps fifteen minutes when the second temblor hit. At that, the guards declared the visits finished. An order had come to clear the rooms. Before he racked the receiver, Gutiérrez said, “You find her. Tell her what I did.” This request’s pass-the-salt mildness induced confusion in Mull.

“Your mother?”

“Go in the house. Tell her, Professor Mull.”

The specificity of this address could have been mocking, caustic even, had Mull’s former student not lowered his eyes in—modesty? Shyness? Shame? Perhaps all of these, or none. James Gutiérrez likely knew no other name to call him.

Mull’s wish to avoid seeing the desert drifter again too soon kept him from the atrium for the next days. He needed to renew his search for the prisoner’s mother, or so he told himself. He’d been puzzling, too, over the replenishment of the food, and other staples, like toilet paper. For that matter, how had the pipes kept water flowing after the collapses, which ought to have ruptured most if not all of the plumbing? Was the house being maintained from the outside? Necessarily so. Yet Mull had never seen a crew, or found evidence of the supply chain for what appeared in the cafeteria. Was the city administration responsible, or had something taken its place? Were the residents of the house beneficiaries of a humane intervention, or rats in a scientist’s maze?

What Mull had begun to observe was that the house seemed to bend him toward three or four destinations, as though determined to thwart his wider mapping effort. Near though it was to the atrium, he never would have found the service closet in which the desert window was hidden. The doors Mull chose tended to dump him into familiar corridors, those that terminated in his dormitory wing, or ones that led back to the atrium. It was as if some subroutine had executed a misguided directive to spare him effort or confusion, to shrink his residency’s scale. Could the house be adapting itself in this way to each occupant?

Moving alone through the rooms, he moved as though through a prism, reflections of the same exhausted territories. Eventually he’d find himself alone in his dormitory room, facing his bed.

The answer was to pick another body and follow it on its route. By that means, Mull could break the spell. He began trailing others along the corridors, walking at a discreet distance, the length of a room or two, yet close enough to keep that other person within his sight.

In this way, Mull found himself led to further wings of the collapsed house. He located, among other things, a gymnasium, complete with a pool, which he’d never known existed. When he blundered into the cavernous facility he found it populated by older women.

“This isn’t for you,” one informed him, before he could apologize.

“Do you know someone named Rose Gutiérrez?” Plashing echoes swallowed his words.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the woman informed him.

“Will you tell her I need to speak with her?” Mull was seized with the certainty that the prisoner’s mother was one of the bodies arrayed on the far side of the enormous pool, or immersed in the lanes.

“Please go.”

At the conclusion of any bout of following, Mull fell into a narcotic sleep. He’d wake hungry and reduced, seeking solace in routine, in reliable sites for feeding and washing. In this state, it nauseated him to contemplate the complexities of the house. He could barely stomach his usual routes, or afford glimpses through crooked, paradoxical thresholds. It felt as though the house had punished the attempts to widen his orbit.

The habit of tracking, however, was now an addiction. He returned to the atrium only to find unknown persons to follow out of it. On his fourth morning of doing so, Mull observed that the figure ahead of him seemed also to be tracking another.

He’d selected a man who’d visited the atrium alone. The man was young, dressed in long shorts and Air Jordans. He wore a small backpack but was otherwise unencumbered, no cart, no bags of Tupperware to ferry away supplies. He’d browsed the steam table in a cursory way and then headed back through the corridor.

Mull was quickly drawn into unfamiliar portions of the house, or portions formerly familiar, now rendered strange. He trailed the man through a room of built-in library carrels, never outfitted with the intended computer terminals, which Mull recognized from his earliest days. In some settling action after one of the earthquakes, the room had lodged sideways, and sleepers, after first smashing out the interior dividers, employed the carrels as a series of bunks.

It was in the next corridor that Mull spotted the other man, far ahead. Another voyager through rooms, shadowed by the man Mull himself was shadowing.

The distant figure slipped around corners before Mull could discern much. He was older than the man in shorts between them, and dressed less like one of the unsheltered who’d moved into the house at the start, more like Mull. The default costume of the average white man, which Mull had chosen, half-consciously, for its invisibility.

Mull couldn’t see far enough ahead. The man he followed blocked his view. Mull struggled with the urge to dash forward. He didn’t want to draw attention, raise an alarm in his own target. Yet, should he warn the man beyond, that figure cutting out of view again and again? Was that man in danger?

Attending to this double chase, Mull failed at first to register the alteration in the rooms. They’d become familiar in some different sense. Not from his residency but from his visit to Men’s Central, to see the prisoner James Gutiérrez. The dun-colored cement-block walls, the linoleum floor, the green-painted metal sliding barriers—hard to call them doors. They’d entered it, somehow. The collapsing underground structure had melded with the jail, or the jail had tunnelled itself into the tesseractic house. They’d been less than a mile apart to begin with, Mull supposed. On either side of the disused train yards. He shouldn’t be so surprised that they’d met.

Now he looked up again, not wishing to fall behind in his pursuit. It seemed all the more essential that he keep sight not only of the man he’d chosen to follow but of that other, vanishing ahead.

When he spotted them again, racing along a row of holding cells, the man between had closed on his quarry.

All at once, Mull saw that it wasn’t that the far man was dressed as Mull was, or that he resembled him. The man ahead of the man Mull followed was Mull himself. Mull had chased and been chased. Been ahead and behind, both. The house had worked as a refracting lens.

Two others came from within the open-gated cells, to join in the capture. At that, Mull was no longer behind, watching. He was in their hands.

Though the cell they placed him in was open, it was nevertheless a cell. The drifter who’d shown him the desert window had joined the men who held Mull there, and regarded him again with the same snickering familiarity.

“Told you I seen you.”

The words unexpectedly stung. Among the illusions they’d stripped from Mull was his belief in his invisibility. But this hardly mattered now. Mull needed to understand the relation between the structures.

“Did the building fall into the jail?” he asked them. “Or did the prisoners . . . escape?”

“We’re all prisoners,” said the man Mull had been following and who had been following him.

“One building all along?”

“You need me to say it?” the man said. “One building all along.”

“Talk to a kid named Gutiérrez,” Mull said. “He’ll explain.”

“Gutiérrez isn’t a kid, no more than me,” the man said. Mull had to grant the case. That Mull was thirty years older didn’t make them kids.

“He sent me searching for his mother.”

“Everybody’s searching for someone,” the drifter said. “We got a lot of explanations, too.”

“Gutiérrez takes care of his mom,” another man said. “He don’t need you searching no more.”

“He sent you to do this?” Mull asked. They kept him pinned, needlessly. Yet nothing felt gratuitous in their attitudes or postures. Mull sensed instead their clarity of intention.

Only the drifter was giddy. “Everybody’s sent, or else they’re sending!” he quipped.

“Are you going to lock me in here?” Mull asked.

“We lost the keys,” the man Mull had followed said. “We don’t like to put people deeper in. We like to put them deeper out.”

“Deeper out,” the drifter said, shaking his head. “Damn, I like that.” As if on a signal, Mull’s captors had him on his feet, to frog-march him through the open gate of the cell. Then, true to their word, they pushed him screaming through the desert window.

The plunge wasn’t as far as he’d feared. Mull ended on all fours atop a soft knoll, his left arm sunk to the elbow into some creature’s burrow. Here, from the ground, he saw what he couldn’t from the window: a sand-strewn asphalt roadway, lined by the twisted, mocking trees. Beyond them, desert stones, those wind-carved orange bodies sleeping beneath the unreachable bridge of the sky. Nothing prevented Mull from setting out west, toward the house. He supposed he could find his way back inside. ♦