The Wrong Man

I was waiting, I was waiting. All around me, lives and dreams and houses were building up or tearing down, but all of that commotion had no effect on me. For the first time that I could remember, all the things I felt and thought in the course of a simple domestic existence were enough to fill my mind and body so that I was never bored. I was sunk in something, but not in boredom. At first I thought I was waiting for a change, but then I saw how things were always changing, and how that was one reason why I never left the house or saw friends anymore. Even my friends had changed, and the new ones were all strangers.

My house was changing, too—growing each day, in every detail. Every night my bed seemed wider, emptier. Sometimes in the morning sudden doorways would appear, giving onto unexplored guest bedrooms. From the outside, too, the house seemed to have grown larger, unless it was just a trick of perspective and the little house next to mine had shrunk.

When my little neighbor came to tell me he was moving away, I offered to buy his house on the spot. I had just won a good-sized sweepstakes and was looking around for a smart investment. Besides, the little house had always fascinated me. I'd imagined it as a miniature version of the house I lived in, though in truth the two looked nothing alike. When I finally got a peek inside, I was surprised by how unfamiliar it seemed—windows all in different places, no fixtures overhead, different textures to the carpet and even to the water in the bath.

Still, I tried to make it as much like the bigger house as possible. I moved in my furniture, shaving down the legs of my table and chair so I could sit more comfortably. I don't mean to brag, but in that time I could sit in my chair and do nothing but think for days on end, getting up only to use the bathroom or to microwave a frozen meal. I didn't even have to sleep, because my thinking was a kind of sleep.

I could tell right away that I had made a good decision. There was no reason for me to be taking up all that space in my first house, my previous house, when all I meant to do was sit there thinking. And what did I think about? I made plans, mostly—to direct a documentary film about myself, with all the unpleasant parts mined for the broad societal truths that they undoubtedly revealed; to teach myself the piano and record a beautiful album of devotional music about evolution and neurochemistry; to map the trees and bushes around my little house and develop a narrative schematic of the neighborhood according to each species's significance in ancient poetic tradition. Of course I didn't own a video camera or a piano, and I couldn't recognize trees by name, so I never made the remotest attempt to put any of those plans into action. But it was as if I didn't need to, as if action was another thing, like sleep, for which I had no use.

________

One evening in the little house I received a telephone call, which was unusual because I hadn't given anyone my new number. "Hello?" I said.

"Hi," said a woman's voice. "It's me."

"I'm sorry?"

"It's Charlotte. Look, don't mess around with me. I know you're upset. You have every right to be."

"I don't know any Charlottes," I said. It was true, I didn't.

"Let's not do this, Sandy," she said. "This is hard enough as it is."

"Maybe you're calling for my little neighbor?" I gave his name, which was not Sandy either, and the name of the new city where he lived.

There was a pause. The woman sighed, an annoyed yet wistful sigh that led me to imagine soft lips against the phone, then a downcast...