54 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
rumbling for trains passing by on their
way to Union Station. None of the pris-
oners 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 of-
fered stupidly. “It’s not like they’re pull-
ing 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 care-
fully, “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 re-
ceiver, 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, Profes-
sor 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.M
ull’s wish to avoid seeing the des-
ert 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 him-
self. He’d been puzzling, too, over the
replenishment of the food, and other
staples, like toilet paper. For that mat-
ter, how had the pipes kept water flow-
ing after the collapses, which ought tohave ruptured most if not all of the
plumbing? Was the house being main-
tained 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 famil-
iar 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 confu-
sion, 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 ter-
ritories. 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, walk-
ing 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 gym-
nasium, 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“It says, ‘Save yourselves, the plants have won.’”