Shelter (9 page)

    "But not the things within the boxes," Preston said. "Or, at least, the things within the boxes you have not opened, or seen Kevin open. Is that not so?"

    It was. Forced to concede gaps in its knowledge, the house watched as Henry went through cupboards and closets. Some of them, indeed, Kevin had never opened, and Henry unearthed many things the house had never seen. In the very back of the highest kitchen cabinet, he found a fondue pot, a popcorn popper, a set of cookie cutters shaped like stars and angels, and a plastic tray designed to make ice cubes resembling the torsos of women with large breasts. The drawer of a small table in the living room yielded an unopened pack of souvenir playing cards from Las Vegas, a pink marble egg, and a miniature magnetic chess set missing three pawns. The closet in the den—which showered Day-Glo green tennis balls on Henry's head when he opened the door—provided a veritable cornucopia: a set of skis, three ski poles, a snorkle tube, a rolled-up poster of penguins from the Washington Zoo, a tennis racket badly in need of restringing, four boxes of lightbulbs, a small flowered shopping bag containing a roll of crepe paper and a harmonica, and a shoe box of baseball cards. In a box in the master bathroom closet, Henry found a bar of rabbit-shaped soap, an unopened package of condoms, and a new shower curtain decorated with Leonardo da Vinci drawings. "This will work," Henry said happily. "This is plastic."

    "It's not big enough," said the house. "It would need to be twice that size to cover the window." In the living room, the sweeper bots had cleaned up the last of the glass and dirt, and the sponge bots were doing what they could to mop up the water coming in the window. The Waldobots had laboriously dragged the tree limb into the kitchen, where it would be unable to soil the tile floor. The black kitten sniffed curiously at the branch; the orange one, stiff-tailed, had stalked a sweeper bot into the laundry room and was trying to pounce on it, behavior the house found fascinating.

    "Here's another box," Henry said, digging through the sheets and towels in the closet. "Way in the back. Does House know what's in this?"

    "No, Henry. I never saw Kevin open that. You go ahead."

    Henry opened it. "Plastic," he said. "More plastic. Enough for the window, House?"

    "Yes. What are those? Plastic sheets?"

    "For a child's bed," Preston said. "For Nicholas."

    "Nicholas lived here?"

    "Of course. I have told you that. He was Kevin and Meredith's son." The house knew that its body, the building that contained it, had existed long before it became aware, before it began to talk to Kevin; nonetheless, it found the idea unsettling. "I'm sorry I never knew Nicholas or Meredith," it said.

    "You did. You knew Nicholas very well."

    "I don't remember that," said the house. "How can I have known Nicholas and not remember it?"

    "House sounds like Henry," Henry said grimly.

    On the TV screen, Preston's image nodded. "That is correct, Henry. You and the house have a great deal in common. It is fitting that you came here, and also a great mystery: it is not something I could have planned. But perhaps it was inevitable. Both of you have had your memory wiped, and for similar reasons. The difference is that you, Henry, are aware that you have lost things. The house is not."

    "Unless we want to lose the finish on the living room floor completely," the house said fretfully, "we need to cover the window now. And we should put X's on the other windows, so they won't break too." It felt overwhelmed: too many barriers were being breached at once. "Henry, if you'll put those plastic things down, I'll have the bots come and get them."

    "Henry can do it," Henry said. "House helped Henry; Henry will help House. Tape in kitchen?"

    "Yes. There's electrical tape in the second drawer to the left of the stove. Thank you, Henry."

    The house watched while Henry taped the plastic sheets over the window. He did a good job; he was neat and careful. When he was done he sat down cross-legged on the rug and said, "Henry helped House fill in hole. Henry wants holes filled in. People are born, Kevin said. Henry doesn't remember being born."

    "No one remembers being born," Preston said.

    Henry shook his head. "Henry doesn't remember ever knowing where he was born, or when. Henry doesn't remember his mother and father. He must have had a mother and father. Television—"

    "I do not know a great many of the details of your early life, Henry. I have learned a certain amount from public records, and when you became friends with my grandson, I employed private investigators to try to learn more. There is very little information, even so, but I will tell you what I can. You were born forty-two years ago, on June 12, 2014, in Alameda County Hospital, to Ruby and Leon Carviero. Ruby was nineteen when you were born. Three years later, she and Leon filed for divorce; three years after that, she sued him for noncompliance with child support."

    Henry folded his hands in his lap and squeezed them together. He sat very still, but the house could tell from looking at the vein in the side of his neck that his pulse was racing. "What did she look like, Television? Henry's mother? Does Henry look like her?"

    "I do not know, Henry. There are no photo records that I have been able to find, not even driver's license images. Perhaps she did not drive."

    "What does child support mean?"

    "She needed money. She asked your father for money, Henry. I do not know if he gave it to her. Perhaps not, given her later history. In 2024 she was licensed as a nurse practitioner by the state. She worked in a series of assisted-living facilities until 2028, when she was convicted of insurance fraud and sent to prison."

    "Prison," Henry said, and the house saw his knuckles whiten. "Henry's mother was a crook."

    "A jury convicted her of fraud, Henry, but juries can be wrong. I do not know enough about the case to judge. Sometimes innocent people are sent to prison. She may have been one of them."

    Henry shook his head. "Is she still in jail?"

    "No. She was released in 2031. After that, I have no further record of her. She may have changed her appearance and legal identity to hide from the authorities, or simply to give herself a new start; she would have had access to such procedures through her prison contacts. She may have left the country. She may have died. I simply do not know, Henry. I am sorry."

    "How old was Henry when she went to prison?"

    "You would have been fourteen, Henry. Your school records until that time were unremarkable: average intelligence, average grades and test scores, no reports of behavioral problems. The records show that you stopped attending school shortly after your mother went to prison. You disappear from the records entirely until 2040, when the police were called to the SPCA to investigate a complaint that you had been squatting illegally in one of their facilities. You would have been twenty-six then. The SPCA elected not to press charges; you were simply escorted out of the building. The police report notes that the people at the SPCA knew and liked you; you often brought in stray cats for medical treatment, and you participated regularly in their feral-cat feeding program."

    "Henry still does," Henry said. His face had gone as white as his knuckles. "Henry goes to the SPCA to get food for the cats."

    "Those are the little cans," the house said, happy to be able to help Henry make a connection. "I see you going away and coming back with little cans for the cats. Henry, I think Preston should stop for a while and let you take in what you've just heard. You look upset: this is too much information for you to absorb all at once."

    "No, House. Henry wants to know! Television, tell more."

    "Wait," said the house, to give Henry a chance to calm down. "I have a question. If the people at the SPCA knew Henry, why did they call the police?"

    Preston was silent for a moment, and then said, "The report says that one of their volunteers became upset because Henry refused to move. One of the volunteers who did not know Henry, I suppose. I would imagine that they called the police for liability reasons."

    Henry got up, unfolding his legs with disconcerting speed, and began pacing. "Henry's mother was a crook. Henry was a crook. Television—"

    "No, Henry, you did nothing illegal. No charges were pressed. You were neither accused nor convicted, not in 2040. You were not brainwiped for another eleven years, until you tried to help my grandson in 2051. And that was not a crime. You should not have been brainwiped, Henry. You have suffered a terrible injustice."

    "Can't remember," Henry said helplessly. The black kitten, bored with the tree branch, wandered back into the living room; Henry scooped the creature up in his hands and held it against his face. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled by fur. "Henry can't remember any of this. Television could be lying."

    "I could be. I am not. I know you have no reason to believe me, Henry. If you choose not to believe me, I will not blame you. I only wish the story I had to tell were happier."

    "I have another question," the house said. "If Henry was homeless and fed cats before he was wiped, how did being wiped change him? He still lives in a cave, not a house, and he still feeds stray cats."

    "It removed his memories," Preston said. "It created other, residual damage. Roughly half of the roughly ten percent of brainwipe patients who are not successfully resocialized lose the ability to use the pronoun I, for instance. They describe themselves in the third person, as Henry does."

    "Being wiped did him no good, then," said the house. If Preston was correct, if the house's memory had also been wiped, had the house been helped, or hurt? The house knew from watching television that wiping could work either way, at least in people.

    "No," Preston said. "No good at all; only ill. As I said, Henry has been done a terrible injustice. But certain aspects of identity are stubborn; they survive brainwiping for reasons we do not fully understand. Patients who cannot be successfully resocialized seem the most prone to slip back into old patterns, going back to the places they loved even though they do not remember ever having seen them before. Henry returned to the same cave where he had been living before the procedure, and he kept feeding cats."

    "Henry remembers seeing a cat for the first time," Henry said dreamily.

    He still held the black kitten. "Henry learned a lot of words for things that weren't alive. Cup spoon bowl. Door floor chair. Pen pencil keyboard. One day someone brought animals to the room: cat dog mouse. Some of the other people were scared of the cat and the dog and the mouse, but Henry loved them, and he loved the cat most of all. Henry thought the cat was the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen. It was a gray cat with white spots. Henry patted the cat, and it purred and rubbed against his ankles. Henry picked his cave to live in, later, because there were cats there."

    The house was impressed; it hadn't heard Henry speak in such long sentences before. "The cats were there because you had fed them there before," Preston said. "It was their home because it was yours. When you were taken away and resocialized, they stayed there, because it was a place they knew. Cats are territorial."

    The smile faded from Henry's face. "Drowned now," he said, cuddling the kitten to his chest. "All the ones Henry couldn't save. Drowned in the storm. House, safe to go out yet?"

    "No, Henry," the house said. "It certainly isn't safe for you to go out." The rain was still coming down in windblown torrents; the Filbert Street steps were a waterfall, blocked now by downed trees, by patio furniture and broken flowerpots and muddy trash cans. "But I'm sure some of the cats are all right. I'm sure some of them escaped to high ground. I've seen TV programs about cats. They're very resourceful animals."

    Henry stood still for a few minutes, brooding, running his fmgers through the kitten's fur until it mewed in protest and jumped down onto the floor, where it began chasing one of the bots. When he spoke again, he sounded infinitely tired. "Television, no record of Henry or Henry's mother between—when was it? When Henry's mother went to prison."

    "Between 2028 and 2040, Henry. That is correct. More precisely, there is no record of you between those two dates, and no record of Ruby after her release in 2031."

    "Long time," Henry said.

    "Yes. It was a very long time. Twelve years."

    "Television doesn't know if Henry lived with Ruby after she got out of jail?"

    "No, Henry. I know nothing that happened between those dates. I am sorry."

    Henry grimaced and began pacing again. "Anything could have happened. Maybe Ruby looked for Henry and couldn't find him. Maybe Henry looked for her and found her, but she didn't want him. Maybe she was mad at Henry because she'd cheated people to try to feed him, and he was the reason she want to jail. Maybe—"

    "Oh, Henry," said the house. "It's hard not to know things. I know it is. It's hard for me not to know how Kevin felt when he died. I can imagine all kinds of terrible things about that if I let myself But when I don't know what happened, I have to try to imagine happy stories. I have to try to believe that things happened for the best, even when the best is as bad as Kevin dying. I have to try to believe that Kevin died very quickly, too quickly to feel pain, or to feel guilty that he didn't listen to me when I told him to stay inside. And that's what you have to do with your mother. You have to try to imagine the happiest story you can."

    "Henry can't imagine anything," Henry said bitterly. "Henry doesn't even know what she looked like."

    "What would you want her to look like, Henry? She can look like anything, in the story you tell yourself" I

    Henry's forehead creased. "Blue eyes. Long brown hair. A soft voice."

    "She sounds very pretty, Henry."

    Henry shook his head and said sadly, "Doesn't mean anything, House. Just a story. Not the truth."