The Door Without a House

The road was a thin crack in the world. He walked it because there was nowhere else to go. The sky was the color of wet paper. The wind carried dust that tasted of old walls and dead fires. He kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes low because there were things in the ditches that looked back.

He found the photograph on the second day after the rain. It lay on the shoulder of the road, face up, glued by mud. He pried it free with the edge of a stick and held it by two corners. The water had seeped into the gloss. The colors were ruined, if there had ever been colors. It looked like a memory exposed too long to light. He wiped the surface with his sleeve. A house stood in a clearing. A front door open to a small square of darkness. In the doorway a figure not much taller than the knob. A boy maybe. Or something in the shape of one. The head turned slightly, as if the photographer had called out, as if the boy wanted to keep a secret but could not.

He looked at the road behind him. At the road ahead. It was the kind of day that made every sound travel far. He could hear a drip somewhere. He could hear his own breath passing through the scarf at his mouth. He slipped the photograph into his coat and kept walking.

The road took him through a stand of pines that had burned once and then tried not to think about it. The trunks were black from the knees down. The needles above hung in sick clumps like dull knives. The rain had left puddles rimed with pale oil. He stepped around them and listened for the sound of other feet. There were no other feet.

He walked until the light flattened and the shadows drew long like wire. He made a small fire in a culvert where the concrete still held. He folded himself behind the mouth of it and watched the road and let the fire burn low. He waited. Waiting made time thin. He had learned to sit inside it like a winter coat. He took the photograph back out. He held it near the coals without letting the heat buckle it.

The house was a cheap square, two windows, a pitched roof that looked soft as bread. The doorway ate the light. The figure stood just inside, bare shins, a shirt that hung. There was something in the face where the emulsion had lifted. A white mark the shape of a tear or a thumbprint. It made the face seem wrong. Like there was a second face looking out from under the first.

He slept a little. In the night he woke to a sound like someone tapping a nail against glass. He lay very still. The fire threw off a brief orange and went blue and then black. He heard the nail again. It came from the road. Or from inside the culvert, difficult to tell. He breathed slow and quiet until he could not hear it anymore. The dream he slipped back into was the same dream he had been carrying since the beginning. A room. A voice. His name used like a key.

Morning made him old all over again. He rose with care. The world had not changed its mind. He ate what he had, which was almost a joke. He walked. He passed no marks, no signs, no names. The road he knew because it never ended. The rest was soft and vague. He came to a mile marker tilted like a bad tooth. No numbers remained. A smear of green and nothing else.

He kept one thought like a small stone in his pocket and he rubbed it when he needed. The thought was that there had been a before. In the before there had been a porch and a woman and the smell of yeast and coffee. The before got lighter each time he looked at it. He stopped looking at it as often.

By noon the road turned between two hills and fell into a low clearing. He saw the house then. Not the one in the photograph. Not exactly. It was the shape of that one. It carried the same simple pitch. It had the same door, open to shadow.

He stopped where the road widened into gravel. The place had once been a drive. The weeds were up through it in thin spears. He could feel the cold coming out of the open door like a draft from a cellar. He took his hand from his pocket and ran a thumb along the edge of the photograph. He raised his eyes and then raised them again, because the light shifted and something inside the doorway moved. Or he thought it did.

He was not a man who charged. He was a man who undertook small steps. He took one then. Then another. The gravel sounded like teeth. The air carried a faint sweet rot like forgotten fruit. He stopped at the broken stoop and looked at the threshold. A snail had dried there. The shell was a small spiral of bone. He put his hand against the frame. The wood gave under his fingers in a soft way. The paint had gone long ago, only skin left. He leaned inside.

The room smelled like wet paper and coins. The floorboards were dark with spills and time. A table stood on three legs and a can. A couch without its cushions and a bolt sprouting from one arm like a metal thorn. He made the shape of the room in his mind the way you map a mouth with your tongue. He stepped over the threshold. The change in air was quick and tight. It felt like passing through water.

There were two windows at the front. The glass was ribbed with years of rain. Beyond them the world was a low smear. He could see only gray and the suggestion of trees like ink pulled with a thumb. He turned and saw the second room. There was no door. Just a rectangle cut into the plaster where a door had once been. He listened for breath and heard only the death of the house itself, a slow settling, a story retold.

He took out the photograph and held it at his chest and lined up the edges with the room the way a boy might line up a toy with the world to feel bigger than he is. The table was there in the same place. The windows were the same. The doorway in the photograph was this doorway. He looked to the dark square. He knew then that the figure had been standing where he stood now. The height would fit. Bare shins. A shirt that hung. He raised the photograph and hid his face behind it for a moment. The paper was cold. He lowered it again.

In the second room the floor fell away in one corner. He could see the dirt below through a fan of splinters. There were bottles on their sides with the labels gone and the bulbs of their necks matted with cobweb. The walls had peeled down in long strips that hung like tongues. He stepped around the weak place and crossed to the back door. It hung by one hinge. He pushed it with his knuckles. It swung and screamed a little and then stuck.

The yard looked like a thought someone had forgotten to finish. There was a shed with half a roof. A metal tub sunk in the ground with water dark as tea. A rope hanging from a branch, frayed, the knot at the end big as his fist. He kept his hands where he could see them and walked slow. He circled the tub and looked into it. A coil of hair floated there. It might have been moss. He took a stick and moved the surface. The stick came up slick. He wiped it on the grass.

There were tracks in the dirt by the shed. Small. The rain had softened their edges but they held a shape. Child or dog. They moved from the shed to the back steps and then went no farther. He stood with his head bent and counted them. One set coming, none returning. The hair along his arms rose by itself.

He went back inside. He sat on the floor by the front window and leaned his back against the wall and held the photograph in both hands. He tried to see past the white lift in the figure's face. He tried to find eyes in the blur. He turned the photograph over. The back was a stained field of brown. There was a faint mark that could have been a letter. A curve and a cross. He pressed the edge of his nail into it and brought away a grain of paper. Nothing else.

He should have left then. He knew it in the quiet center that still spoke to him plain. He did not leave. He waited until the light thinned again. He picked up a chair and dragged it across the floor and wedged it under the front knob. He could hope no one would come. He could act as if someone would. Both were true, and both were lies. He lit a small fire in a skillet in the second room and kept it low with the last of his fuel. The smoke went into the walls and stayed there like a secret. He held his palms over the weak flame until feeling returned in pins. He ate a piece of hard bread that stank faintly of the cloth he had wrapped it in. He drank water that tasted of the bottle. He rolled himself in his coat and lay by the wall and set the photograph on his chest because he could not seem to set it down anywhere else.

When he woke it was full dark and the house had changed. It had shifted in the old bones the way a sleeping man does, without any light to watch him. He heard the tapping again. Very light. Careful tapping like the world wanted not to wake him. He lay with his eyes open and they were full of black. He felt the photograph on his chest as a cool weight. The tapping came from beyond the second room. From the back. Three taps, a pause, two more. A shape the mind makes into a name whether it should or not.

He did not speak. He put his hand flat on the floor and felt the rhythm again through the wood. A message the way tide is a message. He rose slow and slid along the wall and crouched by the frame of the second room. He reached with the tips of his fingers and pinched the coal of the fire and it went to ash. The room was empty of light.

The tapping stopped. He waited with his breath held. A soft hiss rose like water poured onto something hot. Then the scrape of something against the back door, gentle, polite, as if the house itself were trying not to wake.

He went back to the front window and pressed his face to the ribbed glass and looked out at the road. The world beyond was a graphite smear, a line that meant nothing and then meant less. He looked down at the photograph in the little light that was not light, only the memory of it held by the glass. He studied the figure again and now he thought he saw the hands. They hung at the sides, the fingers long, the last joints swollen like berries. He could not tell if the face he made in the blur was a smile.

He lay down but he did not sleep again. He must have drifted because the next thing was a pale lift at the window that could only be morning. He rose and found that the tapping had left a new sound behind, a tick in the boards like a watch. He rubbed his neck and found grit on his skin as if the house had shed during the night and chosen him to carry it.

He dressed the fire and let it die and moved the chair from the door. He stood on the stoop and let the light wash his head and he felt lighter under it, which he did not trust. The yard was still. The rope at the branch stirred once and then was still again. He went to the back door and looked for marks. The door had scored a pale arc into the dirt. Nothing else. He stepped into the shed and the smell of mouse was strong. He kicked at a box with his boot and a scatter of nails slid out like teeth. He pulled crates aside until he found a crate full of photographs.

He carried the crate into the front room and set it on the floor and sat with his legs crossed and leaned forward like a student.

The photographs were all the same size. Most were stuck together where some wet had conspired with time. He peeled one away and the face of a woman came up, stretched. He thought for a moment she was alive and buried there and that he had hurt her. Then only the paper, torn. He laid her aside and heaved up the next and the next. A room. A room. The same room. The same house. The front door open, the back one latched, the windows ribbed, a chair set there and then moved there. In one a pair of hands on the sill from outside, only the fingers, only the curve of knuckles, which was somehow worse than a whole person.

He found one with the figure again. Not the doorway this time. The figure outside in the yard near the rope. A little boy shape looking up at the knot like it was a moon. The blur on the face was worse. Like the film had been wet while it still remembered and the memory ran and never stopped.

He looked at another. At another. In one the figure stood behind the chair he had dragged last night and in the photograph the chair was in the place where he had wedged it, though he had only done that the night before. He stared until his eyes hurt and the grain of the paper went soft and swimming. He set the photograph down on the boards. He picked up the first one he had found by the road and placed it beside the others and he saw then how the edges lined, how the corners would make a big square, a map of the house made of images of itself like a room lined with mirrors. He set them so. One two three. Four five six. He filled a rough square on the floor. Each one showed a different hour. In each the light leaned different. In each the figure was somewhere else.

He sat there until the sky shifted again. He felt the house breathe around him. He spoke once, which he had not done in a long while. He said his name. He listened to how it sounded inside this place. It sounded like a small animal trying to cross a creek.

He took the photographs and slid them back into the crate and then took the first one and kept it. The road was waiting. He had the thought that to leave without knowing what the tapping had been would be a kind of theft. He put that thought into the pocket where the small stone had been. He stood and the boards answered with soft voices. He carried the crate back to the shed because he could not be the one to decide its place in the world. He set it where it had been and closed the shed door and heard a nail fall and land and spin.

He started down the drive. He reached the gravel and he stopped. The rope at the branch was moving and there was no wind.

He did not turn. He walked until the house was small behind him and then smaller. He did not look back again. The road welcomed him as it welcomes all things that do not ask questions. He put one foot before the other and the air out here was only air.

By afternoon he came to a place where the road crossed a creek that had decided to be still. The water lay in a fat run under a scum of pollen that no trees had given. He sat on the edge of the bridge with his feet over and he took the photograph out again. He looked to the space by the doorway where the white lift blurred the face. He bent the photograph very gently until the light took the gloss and he could see a little more. There was a line at the mouth that could be a smile and could be a wound. There was a shape near the head that could be a hand. He lowered the photograph and looked into the water and saw himself looking back but wrong side to, and older, and he felt a slow kind of hate for the face there that was not the hate of a stranger. He held the photograph over the surface and the water made a second image under the first that shivered with flies. He could drop it there. The water would take it. He could be only the man on the road again. He brought it back to his lap instead.

He slept under a fallen sign that night. The sign had once warned about a crossroads that no longer met. He lay with his back to the metal and his hands crossed on his chest like a saint in a forgotten church. The photograph lay on his belly, a small cold weight. He dreamed the doorway again and the tapping. In the dream the tapping was letters. In the dream the letters spelled his name but wrong. A letter swapped with another. How a child might write it. How a hand that had forgotten once how to hold a pen might write it and then never learn again.

In the morning he walked. He followed the road over a rise where the wind was bad and the light brighter in a way that made nothing warmer. He met an old store with its teeth knocked out. He went inside and found nothing that wanted him. He found jars under the counter with clouded glass and something that had been cherries once. He left them unopened. He found a length of cord and he took it, and a needle black with rust, and he left a coin in a drawer though there was no one to consider fair.

By midday he heard a car. He could not remember the last time. The sound came thin, then grew. He stepped down into the ditch and crouched in the weeds as a truck rolled past. The paint was a color like dried blood. Two men sat in the cab. The passenger had no eyes he could see, only holes and the shadow of a brow like bare bone. The driver looked down once into the ditch as if to count stones. The truck went on, a rattle of cans, a cough of black. He waited until the sound was gone and then his fear was bigger for a moment because now the silence had to come back to fill the space where the machine had been.

He climbed out and walked. He did not hurry. He had learned that haste is a seed that grows trouble. He came to a fork and there were no signs. He stood longer than a man should stand and watched the edges of the trees for movement which he did not see but felt. He went left because that was the side where the sun had seemed kinder once. The road narrowed to a thought of road. He came to a fence of barbed wire that someone had bent to make space for a person to pass. He did not like what that suggested but he did not like anything else better.

Past the fence the land flattened into a field of dead stalks that rattled when the air moved. At the far edge a line of houses lay like teeth dropped from a pocket. He chose the smallest and went up its step and found the door taken off and set against the wall as if the house had shrugged out of it. He went in and stood and said his name again to test the space. He heard it return from another room, softer. He went there.

The room had been a nursery or a place that would have been one if the world had managed to go on. A small bed without a mattress. The frame of a walker with two missing wheels. On the floor a circle of toys arranged in a ring. A soldier, a bear, a block with a letter that had been sucked to pale. The ring was careful. The ring was neat. The dust was thin on the soldiers shoulders. He crouched and held his breath and listened for the breath of another. There was none.

On the wall someone had tacked photographs. He stood and stepped near and looked. The same house. The same doorway. The same blur of a face. Here the figure was larger. Here the figure did not stand in the doorway but in the yard. In the window. In the road. He saw one with the figure standing behind a man on a bridge and the man held a photograph over the water with his hands shaking, and that man was him.

His breath left him and then it came back in a different shape. He put his fingers on the edge of the photograph on the wall. It curled under his touch. The tape that held it had dried and cracked like skin. He read the image again. There at the bottom corner, barely made, the fray of a scarf he knew. The way it always sat wrong after a night. The way it never kept his neck warm no matter how he wished it would.

He stood with his head down and his hands at his sides and the taste in his mouth was iron and old wood. He pulled the photograph from the wall and it came with a sound like an old wound opening. He held it next to the one he had been carrying. The same glossy ruin. The same blur, only larger, closer, as if the one in his hand had been taken first and the one on the wall later, a step nearer, a day nearer, a life nearer.

There were more. He took them one by one and laid them on the floor. A circle like the circle of toys. A ritual or the ghost of one. In each the figure was closer to the viewer. In the last the figure was at the window, not looking in but looking out, as if someone were inside the house and the figure outside wanted in but also knew he was already there and had been for longer than he remembered. The face was better in the last one. He could see the mouth. He could see the teeth which were wrong, too many, small, like seeds in a fruit.

He turned and the small bed seemed to tilt toward him, a boat in a tide that did not exist. He stepped back into the hall and into the front room and out to the step. The street was wind and paper and nothing else. His head ached like a slow hammer. He put the photographs into his coat. He walked to the next house and the next. He did not go inside them. He had learned what there was to learn. The field creaked as if something alive and great were turning in sleep beneath it.

He left the houses and crossed back over the wire and took the right fork back where the left had been and walked until evening and did not know what he had seen until later when he could not stop seeing it.

He camped in a concrete box under the road that had carried water once but did not now. The walls were mossy. He set no fire. The photographs lay on his chest again because there was nowhere else for them. He did not sleep but his mind drifted into the place where the sense of a person places itself when the person cannot. He spoke to the dark as if it were listening. He told it things. He told it who he was and where he had come from and who he had lost. The dark did not answer but it did not go, which was enough.

Near midnight he heard the soft hiss again. Then the careful tapping. Not at the door. Not in the yard. On the concrete over his head where the road lay. Three taps. A pause. Two taps. The letters of his name wrong in the same way they had been in the dream. He put his palm flat to the ceiling and felt the cold there like the belly of a fish. He spoke his name in the right way as if that might correct it. The tapping stopped. He lay there with his hand up and soon his arm shook. He lowered it and held it to his chest until the shake went out of it.

In the morning the light came threadbare and he rose and climbed to the road and the world had not changed but he had. He felt the shape of himself altered. He walked and found his legs less his and more dumb tools that did as they were told.

He came by noon to a hill that had been cut for the road and the faces of the stone were scraped and raw. In the scrape he saw marks scratches words half made. He put his fingers into the grooves and felt a letter he knew and one he did not. He ran his hands over the wall like a blind man reading a last book. Some of the marks were old. Some were wet new. He saw a shape made by the meeting of two cuts. A figure. A house. A doorway. He moved on.

Toward evening, when the light was like a low breath and the shadows were stood up like men, he reached a bend and there the house was again. Not the first. Not the second. The same shape only farther gone. The roof folded at one corner like a torn hat. The door open not as a welcome but as proof that the hinge remained. He thought he was walking in a circle but he was not. He laid the photographs on the road and compared them and the angle of the house and the line of the roof and the ribbing of the glass were all a little off. The photographs were not of one place. They were of many places that were all the same house.

He laughed once, a bark that hurt his throat. He bent and picked up the photographs and went to the door.

Inside the air was colder again. The cold had the shape of a person. There was a crib in the corner with the mattress gone and the springs like wires to catch birds. He crossed the room and his foot went into a soft place and sank and he pulled it out with care and sat and cleaned the mud with his knife and in the mud he saw gray hairs that were not his and that did not comfort him. He rose and went to the window and looked at the road and saw a man standing in the road and for a second hated him before he knew it was his reflection in the glass.

He did not go to the second room in this house. He held the photographs up instead, one after the other. He looked at the figure and he let his eyes go soft the way you do when you want to see what hides in patterns. Something in the mouth. Something at the jaw. The blur had a direction to it. The emulsion had run not as a spill runs but as if a hand had dragged it. As if a thumb had smudged it downward and left a print. He turned the photograph sideways and then upside down and the face became the suggestion of a face in any orientation, which was worse. He pressed the photograph to the glass and looked at the figure in it and at his own face behind both and could not tell where one ended.

He left the house as the light failed. He crossed the yard and his foot struck something that gave with a small sound, a child's toy, a bell without its tongue. He did not look down. The rope at the branch here had weathered to a gray braid and still it moved with no wind.

He went to the road and made camp a mile on under a length of corrugated sheet leaned against a wall. He made a little fire anyway this time and held his hands out over it like a supplicant and when the heat climbed up his sleeves he closed his eyes and saw the face from the photograph and knew then what was wrong with the mouth. There were too many teeth and they were small and they were all like baby teeth, but there was also the suggestion of something behind them, another set, a second rank like soldiers lined behind boys.

He let the fire die. The dark came in close. He slept and woke and slept and woke. Near the hour when the world considers if it will go on, he felt someone sit beside him. He did not open his eyes. He smelled wet wool. He heard a breath that had never learned to be quiet. A small sound like a child makes when trying to be brave. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. He raised his hand and it moved through cool air and touched only air. The weight on the ground beside him remained. He rolled toward it and the cold entered his chest and for a moment he could not shape breath enough to live. He lay and counted until his chest loosened. He spoke once, a word he had not used since before. It did not help.

Morning. He rose with effort and the place beside him was unmarked. He walked with a hitch. He lifted his scarf to his mouth. The road laid itself out in front of him as if he had earned it. The sky had decided on gray again. He went on.

By late afternoon he came to a town. Not much of one. A few storefronts. A bank with its windows busted and its vault open like a mouth. He passed a barber and the chairs lined like thrones and the mirror dark with the soot of years. He passed a school where the chalk still marked sums no one had solved. He came to a shop with cameras in the window. Behind the camera thin figures made of wire and wood, stands with clamps like little hands. He went inside because he was not wise.

The air was cold. The floor was tiled and the tiles made a grid that comforted until it did not. He passed the counter and went behind the curtain where a light would once have been and the room beyond was narrow and long and lined with trays where fluid had slept and woken and slept again. On the wall a string with clips. On the string photographs hung in a rank. Their edges curled. The faces were all the same face. The face from the doorway. The face from his nights. In some the blur barely was. In some it ran and smeared and the eyes became slits the way eyes do when someone laughs, though the mouth did not laugh. It only opened a little and showed the baby seeds and the second rank.

On the table was a book. He set his palm on it and drew it toward him and opened it and inside were pages of notes. Dates in a careful hand. Places. Numbers. Sometimes a word he knew, creek, road, bend, school. Sometimes a letter and the letter had a little mark above it like a crown. He turned pages. Toward the end the words thinned, as if the hand that wrote them had learned the shape of stopping. The last page held only a single line. A name. His, but wrong, with the letter swapped as he had seen, and then the right one beneath it, written harder, cut into the paper, as if the correction would keep something from entering and perching there forever.

He set the book down and went out to the front of the shop and stood with his hands at his sides and looked through the glass at the road. He could see himself there, very faint, superimposed, the same ghost as every window gives. He lifted the photograph and held it up to the glass and made them line. His face behind the blur. The road behind his face. He watched himself breathe through the ribbing. He lowered it, and when he did he saw it. He did not move. Beyond the glass. Across the road. In the doorway of the barber. A small figure in a hanging shirt. Bare shins. Head tilted as if at a call. The face wrong. The mouth not a smile and not a wound. Something between. It watched him the way people once watched animals at a fence. Curious. Patient. Without hate.

He did not run toward it. He did not turn away. He stood and let his heart do what hearts do when told to sit and be quiet. The figure did not move. The street lay empty around it as if the world had stepped aside to make a corridor. He lifted his hand a little and the figure lifted its hand the same, and for a second he thought it was a mirror. Then he saw the hand had too many joints.

He lowered his hand. The figure lowered its. He put the photograph into his coat and buttoned the coat. He walked out of the shop. He stepped into the road. The air between was cold and possessed a kind of weight he had to push through. He took one step and then another. He did not watch his feet because the street was flat. He watched the figure. The figure watched him.

At the far side of the road he stopped. He was close enough now to see the threads of the shirt, the dirt in the hem, the bruised look of the knees. The face was a blur and yet it was not. It moved if he did not look and failed to if he did. He spoke his name in the right way. The figure made a sound like air escaping from a bottle. It tapped once, twice, against the wood of the doorframe with the ends of its fingers which were not round. The pattern he knew. The letters wrong. He said his name again and this time he said it wrong to match the tapping.

The figure tilted its head. It lifted one arm and pointed past him, down the street, past the shop, into the gray. He turned his head to look and there was only the road, only the world, only the same. He turned back and the doorway was empty.

He stood there for a long time because moving seemed like a kind of treason. He did move. The road had its own gravity. He gave himself to it because he did not know what else to give himself to. The town fell behind. The day fell behind the town. He walked into the hour with no name and then into the next.

Near night he reached a place where the road buckled as if something under it had tried to rise and had been told no. He stepped over it and then over the next and then he stopped because he felt the weight beside him again. He did not look. He spoke once. The wrong name and then the right. He felt a small cool hand take his own. The fingers were too many and the joints wrong but the touch knew him. They walked together as the light died. Neither of them asked for anything. Neither offered comfort. The hand was there until it was not. When it left, it did not slip away. It faded, like breath from a mirror.

He went on. He slept where the road crossed a dry stream and the stones made a music under his weight. He dreamed the photograph. He dreamed the doorway. He dreamed the house and the second room and the taps that were letters. He dreamed the roof giving, the rope moving when there was no wind, the faces on the string, his own behind the glass, everywhere the same blur where a face should be.

He woke before the world and he did not wait. He walked. The road rose and fell like a thought that will not be dismissed. The sky stayed gray because it liked gray. He looked once at the photograph and then put it away for good. He knew it now without needing to see it. He carried it with the stone in the same pocket and they lay together like teeth.

When people speak of hauntings they speak of places and never of roads. They are wrong. A house can be left. A town can be circled and forgotten like a name on the tongue that tastes of nothing. A road goes with you. It is the only thing that keeps pace. The figure in the photographs had not been locked to the house. It walked where the living walked. It tapped at the doors we made of our faces, careful, polite, not to wake us before we were ready.

He did not look for the house again. The house would find him when it wished. In the trees he began to see doorways where trunks met and in ditches he saw rooms and in the ribs of the clouds he saw the old stair and the rope and in the silence he heard the careful tap. He answered once and then he stopped answering.

On the third day he crossed a plain of gravel where there should have been grass. The wind kept the stones moving and the sound was like whispers. He came upon a new photograph lying face down. He did not pick it up. He did not need more. The road made the choice for him. He stepped over it. He heard behind him the faintest click as if a shutter had closed and opened. He did not turn and did not run and did not stop. He walked until the light failed and then he kept walking because the dark was not any different. He walked because one day the road will end or he will. It does not matter which comes first.

When he sleeps now, he sleeps with his hands open and turned upward. Sometimes, in the hour with no name, a small cool weight returns to one of them and rests there and shares the dark and does not take anything away. He does not ask it questions. In the morning his palm holds a faint print, as if a damp coin had lain there, and by noon it is gone.

There are things that belong to no house and no town. There are rooms that occur in the open and there are doorways in the air. The road passes through them. He passes with it. The photograph in his coat makes no sound as he goes. He thinks sometimes of the woman and the smell of yeast and the porch, but that house is not haunted like this one. That house is gone. He does not speak her name because he does not want the tapping to learn it.

The world thins. The sky frays. He walks into what is left. When he comes to a fork he turns without thinking. When he crosses a bridge he does not look down at the water for fear he will see his face there again looking up from beneath the surface, black and shaking, holding a photograph, ready to drop it, unable.

He knows this much. There was a photographer. There was a darkroom. There was a hand that learned to tap out a name and then to write it wrong and then right and then not at all. The hand stopped. The tapping did not. It has found another door and another and it keeps the same careful rhythm. It is not cruel. It is not kind. It asks nothing. It waits to be answered.

He does not answer. He walks. He eats when he can. He sleeps when he must. The road is the thin crack still. It runs to the edge of the map and then goes on. The figure is always just where the eye does not look and the photograph in his coat is not getting lighter.

He does not tell anyone this because there is no one. He keeps it and that is enough. The road owns it now and he belongs to the road and the road knows what is his and what will be taken and what will stay. The day will come when he will step into a doorway that has no house. The day will come when the tapping becomes a knock and then a hand at the latch and then the latch gives and the door swings because that is what doors do. He hopes to meet it with his hands open. He hopes to remember his name, the wrong one and the right, and to give both.

Until then he walks. The sky does what it wants. The weeds at the edge of the asphalt bow and rise and bow again. The road is tired of itself but will not say. The world goes on because there is nothing cleverer to do. He carries the photograph. It is colder than the rest of the world. When he presses it to his chest the cold goes through and cools the fever of the blood there like someone putting a hand to a child's face. It is not mercy. It is only contact. It is enough, for now. He rests when he must, and he goes when he can, and the figure keeps the same distance. It waits at the door. It points down the street. It lifts a hand when he lifts his. It will wait as long as the road waits. Longer, if it has to.