THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 55
far side of the enormous pool, or im-
mersed in the lanes.
“Please go.”
A
t 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 af-
ford glimpses through crooked, para-
doxical 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 morn-
ing 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 oth-
erwise unencumbered, no cart, no bags
of Tupperware to ferry away supplies.
He’d browsed the steam table in a cur-
sory way and then headed back through
the corridor.
Mull was quickly drawn into unfa-
miliar portions of the house, or por-
tions 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 ac-
tion after one of the earthquakes, the
room had lodged sideways, and sleep-
ers, after first smashing out the inte-
rior dividers, employed the carrels as a
series of bunks.
It was in the next corridor that Mull
spotted the other man, far ahead. An-
other 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 atten-
tion, 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 Gu-
tiérrez. The dun-colored cement-block
walls, the linoleum floor, the green-
painted metal sliding barriers—hard to
call them doors. They’d entered it, some-
how. The collapsing underground struc-
ture 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 ei-
ther side of the disused train yards. He
shouldn’t be so surprised that they’d met.
Now he looked up again, not wish-
ing 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, van-
ishing ahead.
When he spotted them again, rac-
ing 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 re-
fracting 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.T
hough the cell they placed him in
was open, it was nevertheless a cell.
The drifter who’d shown him the des-
ert 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 invis-
ibility. But this hardly mattered now.
Mull needed to understand the rela-
tion 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 expla-
nations, 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 atti-
tudes or postures. Mull sensed instead
their clarity of intention.
Only the drifter was giddy. “Every-
body’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, shak-
ing 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 scream-
ing 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 win-
dow: a sand-strewn asphalt roadway,
lined by the twisted, mocking trees. Be-
yond them, desert stones, those wind-
carved orange bodies sleeping beneath
the unreachable bridge of the sky. Noth-
ing prevented Mull from setting out
west, toward the house. He supposed
he could find his way back inside. NEWYORKER.COM
Jonathan Lethem on Robert Heinlein.