2 Other House

Tom lived, that is, his body lived, in a normal sort of house in a normal sort of street. A quiet residential street, and a house that his mother was quite proud of, though she would have liked something a little bigger. That might have been why Tom thought the house was small; his mother often said it was. And he father said there was no need to move, but he too seemed to accept the house was small. Tom had little experience of other people’s houses, but he knew there were bigger ones, much bigger sometimes, even nearby. He saw them when they drove past. That might have been where his mother got the idea, seeing almost every day those houses that were bigger than her own.

He also knew his house was small because they were always in each other’s way, always bumping into each other, they never seemed to be alone. A house of the right size should have room for everyone to be by himself most of the time. What, after all, did they all want to be together for? The things he liked were not the things they liked. With his parents it was mostly boredom, dull chatter, being told what to do and what not to do and how not to do it. But he had to be with them much of the time because there didn’t seem to be enough rooms in the house.

Another proof that the house was small was that he knew every corner of it perfectly. It was impossible for that house to surprise him, there was no space for secrets. Not only the house on the lake, but the houses of his family and his friends, when he visited them, had secrets that they revealed slowly, but surely. Every time he went to one of those houses he discovered something new. That could only happen if they were big enough.

None of this really mattered to Tom. Things were as they were. He lived comfortably. He imagined no other way to live. He heard talk of poor people, starving people, people with diseases of a deadliness that did not exist in his world, sufferings that only existed in the speech of adults and seemed to refer to nothing real, but rather to images on the television, pictures coming from places so far away he could hardly be expected to believe they truly existed. These things, he assumed, were not actual lies, but a form of allegory, designed to show how lucky he was to have what he had, and as a form of warning of the divine punishment he could expect if he failed to be ‘good.’ Even as such they didn’t work well, or indeed at all, as he was unable to imagine anything of that sort happening to him, however bad he was. He was sometimes ‘bad’ and was punished, but not in a way that threatened his comfort, or that involved large numbers of people or that would make good television. So he could not understand why they created these images. It was one more thing that he did not understand, and he didn’t worry about it, either.