THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 51
T
he week he met the man who
claimed to have exited the house
by falling downward into a des-
ert valley, Mull decided to give up coffee.
Mull had lost regular access to the
community cafeteria and its coffee sup-
ply. The corridor leading to it had dis-
appeared, in one of the building’s peri-
odic 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 oth-
ers in the cafeteria. Just coffee in the
twenty-pot urn. Once or twice the sup-
ply 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 con-
cluded that accepting the loss of ines-
sential things was an elemental lesson
that his present life, his life since enter-
ing the tesseractic house, had to teach
him. Coffee was just the latest sacrifice.
T
he last time he’d been in the cor-
ridor, it had been almost completely
blocked. Occupants of the San Pedro
overpass had located a new one-way
hatch into the house and begun shov-
ing their possessions through: filthy bed-
ding, shopping bags stuffed with cloth-
ing 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 tread-
ing 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 vol-
unteers 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 else-
where, but no one had ever carted away
the steam table itself. The food contin-
ued 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 por-
tal from the outside, had been lost in the
first collapse. Little remained of its orig-
inal 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 vi-
sion. Was this why residents treated it
with reverence? No one slept there. Con-
versation was scarce and hushed. In con-
trast 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 re-
membered, more days than not, that he
was here to keep a promise to find her.“
S
een you round,” the man said.
A greeting that strangely mim-
icked a farewell, it left Mull momen-
tarily 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 for-
ties, around Mull’s age. Mull hurriedly
calculated: crazy, hostile, or both? A new-
comer to the house? Or a longtime res-
ident, perhaps even one of those whohad 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 sug-
gested again. “I can see into that cafe-
teria 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.”T
he window over the cafeteria wasn’t
the only high vantage Mull had
encountered. Another window he’d dis-
covered appeared to dangle perilously a
quarter mile or so above the glamor-
ously 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 myste-
riously 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 to-
gether northward, toward the old post
office or beyond, out of sight.
But these windows were the excep-
tion. The preponderance of the house’s
windows or doorways looked into dif-
ferent parts of the house. Others ap-
peared 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