Shadow Traffic (33 page)

He got up from the bed and tried the door only to discover it was locked from the outside. He'd predicted it to himself, yet he was shocked. Now, he clearly was a prisoner as he'd feared and as such couldn't knock or yell or do anything to cause Andrew to come to the room. Instinctively he felt his best chance was to be compliant and play along with them while waiting for his opportunity.

Why had he come to this house? Why? It began with his blind date with Serena, but why had he wasted so much time on her and later Greta instead of calling Melissa or simply flying to L.A. to see her on his own? How foolish to wait to be asked. How foolish to have that kind of pride with his own daughter.

He ran to the window. It was locked from the outside and though it was immense, it was divided into eleven rows of six small squares with each window framed by a panel of wood. He could see at once that he couldn't fit through any of them and pounded the window in frustration. But it was unbreakable glass and his hand throbbed in pain. What were their plans for him? Yet how could he begin to figure out the plans of the mad? Hadn't Greta said last night that she thought of certain people as insects?

His door opened then and he shivered, expecting to see Andrew or perhaps some other guard that he knew must exist. Instead, he was astonished to see Serena slip into his room wearing a white dress.

“Hello Tyler,” she said, looking at him with a kind of confidence combined with a dash of disdain he'd never seen from her before.

“What's going on here? I want to leave at once.”

“I wouldn't try the windows again,” she said in that same disconcerting tone of voice.

“How did you know I did?”

“We know many things here. If you stay with us, you will too.”

And so began their conversations, which would occur two or three times a day for an hour or so for what he guessed was a week. At some point while he was passed out they'd taken his watch from him, so it was difficult to guess the time, or even what day it was, much less the sequence of conversations and what was said in which one. And yet, what else did he have to do to occupy his time but to try to organize time itself into some semblance of order? His memories of his former wife, who'd divorced him, then of Melissa, were at first often excruciating to think about, and his work on towns absurd. His “town” was now the house, as his “house” was now this room. His theory on the archetype of towns seemed as irrelevant as the windows in his room, which he could neither open nor break.

Information about the house came slowly, though it had to be remembered whenever he got some and then fit into some kind of context. He remembered that during his first meeting with Serena he was not as tactful as he should have been and had blurted out a number of questions such as, who were the
people he saw in the hall, and were they some kind of zombies or vampires. He got no direct answer to that question (which only served to confirm their existence), merely a fleeting look of concern. In conversation Serena was almost as evasive as Greta, but her face was far more revealing, especially, he discovered, when she was taken by surprise.

In their next meeting he held off on any more direct questions and controlled his tone of voice. Serena was still his only link to the outside world, and he wanted to increase his chances of being visited by her again. He also realized that if he asked little of her, her own purpose, and ultimately Greta's, might eventually emerge. So far, all she'd done was heap praise on Greta and the house and reiterate how all the guests were always so grateful to Greta. He'd hoped to find a crack in her loyalty so that they might potentially become allies and perhaps escape together, but so far he hadn't spotted any ambivalence in her about either the house or its owner.

It was only halfway through her third visit, which seemed to take place much later in the day than the first two, that he said, “She collects people, doesn't she, and then she destroys them?”

For the first time he saw fire in Serena's eyes. “Sometimes you have to kill the old to bloom the new,” she blurted. Then catching herself, which he clearly saw in her anxious regretful eyes, she said she wasn't speaking literally of course, just metaphorically.

“You recruited me, didn't you? You use the Internet to meet people so you can bring them here.”

“No one has ever regretted visiting Greta's house that I know of.”

“I more than regret it. I loathe every room of it. It's killing me, as I'm sure it's killed many others.”

“You're speaking out of anger and therefore not making sense. Anger has blinded you.”

“Being in prison has a way of trying my patience, and don't tell me that I'm not in prison—that you're taking care of me again.”

“But of course we are. When your spirit is angry it's easy to mistake opportunity for prison. You were in prison a long time before you came to the house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You've had a lot of years to be happy your way and can you honestly say you ever really were? You forget your e-mails to me where you talked about your loneliness after your divorce, your sadness about aging, all your career disappointments—and then the cruelest blow of all, your daughter moving to California and all but cutting herself off from you.”

“Don't talk about her,” he said, sitting back down on his bed and waving his arm weakly. He saw an image of Melissa as a child and felt a jolt of pain.

“Exactly,” she said. “You've lived a life that is too painful to talk about. That, in fact, is the kind of life you've lived.”

It was still sometimes difficult to think about Melissa but thinking about her had become more pleasurable than not—in fact, it was now his only source of pleasure. He thought he had spent his working life trying to advance his career, and then his retirement thinking and (less often) writing about the functions of towns, but he didn't spend his time doing either now that he was profoundly uncertain how much time he had left. Instead, he saw a gallery of pictures from his past of his blue-eyed, auburn-haired daughter. A game of gin rummy they played on the front porch. A Boston Marathon they attended, then a game of hide-and-seek
that took place both in their house and in their yard. How she squealed with delight when she jumped out at him from her hiding place in the forsythia. These memories, and some lines he still recalled from the few letters she'd sent him, were his only solace and, besides Serena's visits, his only company as well. Since he now looked forward to thinking about Melissa, in what sense was Melissa in the past?

Still, it was difficult to remember their fights. He saw clearly how he'd isolated himself in his work, when he knew she needed some more attention, that out of some kind of fear, perhaps of his own need for her, he used his work as an excuse to withdraw from her, fearing … what? The very closeness he longed for now? What a way he'd lived. Serena was right: he had mislived his life.

He was still possessed with these thoughts, which came and left and returned again, like persistent ghosts, the next time he saw Serena. He no longer hoped she might become his ally, nor was he even angry with her. While he followed the ghost of Melissa, she blindly followed the tyrannical Greta. It was not as if he couldn't understand. So while he continued to confront her, he did it almost diffidently now, as if recalling something with his wife that had happened to them many years ago. He'd said, for example, in a mild tone of voice, “There wasn't ever a magazine, was there?”

“We knew the magazine would appeal to you,” Serena said, with a smile she now permitted herself in light of the new atmosphere between them. “We knew you'd like to have an outlet to publish your work.”

“Yes, it was my vanity that led me to the house and to every other wrong decision I made in my life. I see that it was all an illusion, of course, now that it's too late.”

To which Serena merely nodded almost imperceptibly, with her Mona Lisa kind of smile.

“I suppose you got other people through different ways. You'd find out what their dreams were and tell them they must meet this ‘most interesting woman,' who could help them come true. Greta, the keeper of dreams. Yes, that was the way you described Greta, as ‘the most interesting woman.'”

“Greta is much more than merely interesting.”

“Do you think she's God?”

Serena hesitated, “Greta is unique, but it takes some time and a true effort to understand her vision.”

“But she understands us, of course,” he said, with his old sarcasm again creeping into his voice.

“Yes,” Serena said, “she does.”

Every day Andrew, and then finally a younger, well-muscled “assistant” named George, brought him his food. The large room also contained an adjoining bathroom—all his essential needs were met. At first he was afraid to eat the food, but after Serena ate some in front of him, that, combined with his ravenous appetite, made him eat the quite appealing food of the house once again.

In her last visit Serena told him that he was improving and might soon be allowed to exercise.

“Outside?” he asked.

She smiled. “Didn't you know there's a fully equipped gymnasium in the house?”

His life continued like this, gradually learning things about the house, without ever grasping its central purpose—much like his earlier life, he realized. No wonder that in his work on towns
he began with his thesis about their purpose and proceeded from that so he could always have his thesis confirmed, a thesis that now meant nothing more to him than any dozen other ideas. Ah, it was ironic to have to use his mind this way, to be tested like this at his age.

Serena continued to be nice to him, and he looked forward more and more intently to her visits. He no longer referred to the house as a cult and barely ever talked about it anymore.

On her last visit she walked into his room wearing only a thin white bathrobe and offered herself to him. He stepped back, feeling both nervous and aroused, grateful and angry.

“She picked me for you, didn't she?” he said.

“She knows many things.”

“All things?”

“More than we can count. But I was happy with her choice because you were always kind to me in your e-mails and on the phone. Even before I met you I liked you.”

He looked at her shapely, still mysteriously youthful body and didn't know what to say or do. Old age really is like a second kind of childhood, he thought. It had been so long since he'd done it, would he still know how?

“You're not ready yet,” she said. “I just want you to know we can do this if you ever want to.”

“I've grown very fond of you,” he said in spite of himself. “But I still want my freedom.”

“You're as free as you ever were. Freedom is an illusion—it doesn't grow in nature—nature isn't free. It grows in our minds like the idea of heaven or perfection, but it's all an illusion that we generate inside ourselves, really.”

“Did Greta teach you that?”

“Yes, she did. We may have misled you about the magazine, but not about our philosophical society.”

She turned to leave but just before she opened his door (outside it he knew George and some other guards were waiting) he blurted, “I want to see my daughter.”

“I want you to also. You will.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“But don't bring her here.”

“Don't worry. She'll never be a guest here. I promise.”

“Thank you,” he said, “for everything.”

The door opened and closed. He felt something melt in his mind or heart, he couldn't be sure which. Could it be he was falling in love with a cult member, a slave of the house? He felt his eyes and discovered they were wet.

He remembered little of that night and later imagined he must have fallen asleep early. It was a strange sleep, deep but full of bizarre dreams and visions. Just before morning he entered a net of mists. He was running toward the water that he couldn't see to catch up with his little daughter, who had gotten loose. “Melissa, Melissa! Come back,” he called out as he ran. Finally the mist disappeared. In front of him the sun was shining on a dazzling, emerald blue lake. Melissa was walking beside him holding his hand, first as a little girl, than as an adult, as she'd looked just before she left for California. They were talking easily about nothing in particular, and he was filled with an intense sense of joy.