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That dratted draft is getting worse, thought Ben, it’s woken me up. He stretched, yawned, fumbled on the bedside stand for his glasses and put them on as he sat up in bed. Jess was already up and standing on the floor, facing the wall behind the bed. She stood, without moving, without blinking, nothing readable on her face, staring at the wall. This was not standard behavior for her. “Jess… Jess… Honey, are you alright?” Dang, but that draft had gotten bad. Was the window open? Ben turned and for a moment was pleased at his easy view of the autumn colors.
Then, “Jess, where’s the wall?”
“The wall’s gone, Ben.”
“What do you mean the wall’s gone?”
“It’s gone.”
“How could it be gone? It’s a wall. Walls stay. They don’t go.”
“It went.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The wall is gone.”
Ben scooted around on the bed so that he sat facing the space where the wall once was. “Jess, don’t screw with me. What happened to the wall?” Tears began to stream down his face.
“It’s not here.” Jess pulled a tissue from her sleeve and handed it to Ben.
“I can’t believe it.” He brought the tissue up to wipe his eyes and bumped his glasses rather hard.
“Seeing is believing, Ben.”
“But I don’t see it. It’s not there. There’s no wall to see.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, sore from having hit his glasses. Since I’m here, he thought, and blew his nose.
“Right.”
“Did you call the police?”
Jess looked down at the cordless phone in her hand. “I.... You call.”
Ben took the phone from her outstretched hand. With a job to do, Ben managed to plug his various facial leaks. He dialed the three digits and waited as the phone rang. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“Hold a sec’ please.” Ben looked at his wife. “What do I tell them?”
“That we have a prowler.”
To the phone, “Yes, thank you. Em… Ah…”
“Sir, do you have an emergency?”
“I’m not sure.” Ben looked at Jess. Her eyes widened and she nodded. “Someone seems to have stolen our wall.”
“I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“Sir, it is a crime to call a prank in to the Emergency Response Service. I’d thank you not to call again.”
“Please,” Ben blurted, “don’t hang up. This isn’t a prank. Someone… Our wall. It’s missing.”
“What wall?”
“Our bedroom wall.” Jess had finally broken her trance. She was kneeling on the floor, peering over the edge at the backyard. “I’m looking at nothing where there once was a wall.”
“I um… I guess I’ll send someone out. You’re at 312 Oak Drive?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Sit tight, sir, an officer will be around as soon as possible. Goodbye.”
Ben pressed the button to hang up the phone.
***
“Ben, it’s been two hours since we called.” She looked at him across the kitchen over a pancake-laden frying pan. While he had stayed sitting on the bed, Jess had left the room immediately after his call. He had not budged until she lured him downstairs with a mug of coffee. She dumped three more cakes onto his plate where a half eaten one lay already beside two untouched others. Ben just shrugged. He hadn’t said a word since ending the call with the dispatcher.
Ben stood and collected the dishes from the table. After a rinse, they went into the dishwasher. He filled his fifth cup of coffee. “Ooh. Careful honey. You know how coffee affects you.” Ben downed the lot in one draw. “Do you want some more pancakes?” She ladled out more batter onto the skillet. His eyes widened and he bolted for the bathroom.
As bubbles rose and burst on the surface of the cakes, Jess gazed out the kitchen window. She looked out at the neighbors’ house and gingerly touched her yellow-painted wall. It seemed solid enough. The sound of a churning, powerful stream of water reached her ears, and she gave the wall a good solid shove. It didn’t budge.
Jess jumped a bit when the doorbell rang. She was not surprised to see a very young police officer on the doorstep. “Oh, officer, thank you for coming. We’re just beside ourselves. Can I get you some coffee?” She followed the officer’s gaze to the griddle in her hand. “Oh,” she held it out to him. “Would you like some pan cakes?”
“No, ma’am, thank you.” He seemed to be trying to hide a smile. “I understand that you are missing a wall?”
“Yes, that’s right, officer… Barkley,” she got from his nametag. “It’s just gone.” Jess swung the door closed and led the officer into the living room. She motioned for him to sit and herself collapsed onto the sofa. Barkley removed his hat and sat in the chair she’d indicated.
“What did the wall look like?” Barkley grinned widely.
“What..? It looked… well… like a wall. The inside was plaster, or drywall or something. Painted ecru.”
“Painted… a crew?” he interrupted.
“Ecru. Ecru… light beige. The outside was red brick. There’s a window in it. There was, anyway.”
“This is an exterior wall?”
“Yes.”
“Are there any footprints in the butter?” Barkley allowed himself a chuckle.
“There’s no call to be rude to my wife.” Ben entered the room, still in his boxers. We’ve suffered a terrible blow.”
Jess looked the officer in eyes. “Are we ever going to get it back?”
“We can check the bus stations.” Ben crossed his arms. The officer cleared his throat. “Ah, maybe we should go have a look?”
“Good idea.” Ben beckoned Barkley to follow him and led the way upstairs. He paused in front of the closed bedroom door and waited until Barkley stood expectantly waiting. He still fought his face to keep from smiling. When Barkley had found stillness, Ben turned the knob and tossed the door open.
Barkley stood agape, and Ben felt some satisfaction at that. “What a view,” said Barkley enthusiastically.
“Yes.” Ben and Jess spoke together.
A breeze came through and Barkley started – agaper “The wall’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.” Barkley began to shake his head. “You’re screwing with me. This is some sort of prank. You’re renovating your home and thought it would be a gas to call the cops and report your wall missing.”
“No. We did not do this.” There was an edge to Ben’s voice that made both Jess and Barkley stand a little straighter.
“Okay.” Barkley took a tiny notebook out of his breast pocket and began to scribble. “Okay. Wall, bedroom, drywall, Egg…”
“Ecru”
“Ecru. Right. Brick, window.” He looked up from his notebook. “I… What… Okay. When was the last time you saw it… the wall?”
“Last night,” Ben looked at Jess.
“When we went to bed.” Jess gestured at the bed. “That bed.”
“Where was it when you last saw it… the wall?”
“Where was it? Are you serious? Where was it?” Ben strode into the room and past the bed. “It was right here, you ass. Right here. Where the wall goes. Where the hell do you think it was?” In his excitement he almost fell through. His arms pin-wheeled as he struggled for balance.
“Honey, try to stay calm. Officer Barkley, don’t be an ass. It’s a wall we’re talking about.”
Barkley’s face had lost some of its color. “I’m doing the best I can. I’ve never handled a Missing Wall Report before. This is my first day on my own after training. This is highly irregular.”
“Sorry, guess I’m a bit on edge.”
The doorbell rang.
“Ben, why don’t you get that?”
Ben was glad to have his wife give him an excuse to get out of the room. He didn’t feel entirely in control and looking at that big empty space was beginning to turn his stomach. Without looking at Barkley, he strode out of the room.
“Won’t you go over and look at… where the wall should be?” Jess placed a flat hand on the officer’s back and applied gentle pressure. It took a few moments, but he finally yielded and walked slowly to the precipice. He looked around the rectangular void. He put on some latex gloves and ran his fingers around the edge. From the doorway, she glanced nervously at the ceiling and swallowed. “Do you think it was a load bearing wall?”
Barkley choked on nothing and almost pitched through onto the patio below. He shrugged then reached into his satchel and pulled out a dusting kit and began gently searching for prints.
***
Downstairs, Ben took a deep breath and opened the door. The next few moments were quite confusing for him. There was a large back sphere suddenly poised below his nose. There was also a sudden and strange clamorous noise battering his ears. Soon, the clamor sorted itself out in his head and he heard, “Do you have any ideas about what may have happened?”
With this question crystallized out of the battering cacophony of sound, all the other elements of the brouhaha quickly sorted themselves out. “Please,” Ben said as calmly as he could manage and taking care not to release hold of the door in case it needed to be slammed, “take the microphone out of my face. Don’t ambush a person like that. I nearly soiled myself.”
There was a general muttering of sorry and then the clamor returned – a mishmash of queries. Ben raised his hand. “One of you asked what may have happened. That seems a silly question. I infer from your being here that you are already aware of what happened. We lost a wall.”
From the gaggle of press, “Where’s the wall?”
“The wall’s gone.”
“All of it?”
“The bedroom wall, yes.”
“Can you think of anyone who would want to harm you… or the wall… for any reason?”
***
Upstairs, Barkley had finished dusting and had his pad out again. “So you came in here round six and the wall was gone?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I was asleep in that bed. Right here.”
“You’d think a major demolition effort like this would have woken you up.”
“You’d think.”
***
Downstairs Ben was getting frustrated with the reporters’ foolish questions. “Okay, listen up you people. The police are working on it. Our wall is gone. I have nothing more to say to you all. If you want some footage, I’ll take you round to the back yard and you can film the gaping hole in our home from there. Then leave.” The neighbor paused in his car washing to glare. Ben swallowed back a lump in his throat and smoothed his boxers. “Mind your own damn business.”
He led the press through the dew-covered grass to the gate and through it.
A reporter or maybe one of the camera crew said, “Holy, bizzarro. It’s been surgically removed.” Seeing the missing wall, the hole where it should have been, from outside made Ben twitch. There was a perfect rectangle cut out of the face of the house, as if cut by an Exact-O blade of epic size.
“Jess,” Ben called up to his wife who stood in the void, “does our homeowner’s insurance cover this?” Jess stood still for a moment and then collapsed shuddering onto the bed. Ben could hear her making some strange howling sound. “Honey, are you alright? Honey? Don’t cry.” Ben fought tears of his own. “Are you crying? We’ll find it.” Ben broke the floodgate with that one and wet his cheeks. Find it? There wasn’t a bit of brick, mortar, sawdust or plaster on the lawn out here. It was almost as if the house had been built that way.
“I think…” It was Barkley. “I think…” Ben thought, I’ll believe that when I see some evidence. “I think she’s laughing.”
“Hang on, Jess. I’m coming up. Get that damned mike out of my face.”
He leapt up to the stoop and burst through the door. Ben nearly fell to his death – or at least to his severe discomfort. It was only by clinging desperately to the doorknob that he managed to prevent himself from falling into the basement.
***
“If you hadn’t been schmoozing with the press in the backyard, we might not be in this predicament.” Jess sat near the bottom of the staircase, looking all the way across the living room at Ben who sat in the front doorway.
“Keep your voice down. They’re right out here.” Ben shook his head as he surveyed all the broken living room furnishings that lay beneath them in the basement. “If I hadn’t been in the backyard, I might have been standing on the floor when it… disappeared, and I might have fallen into the basement and died. I nearly did.” Ben stabbed a finger in the air, and worried about what he might have done, looked to check that the ceiling was still there. “If you didn’t find fault with every little thing about the house, maybe it wouldn’t be leaving in a huff like this.”
“Mrs. Zinn, Mr. Zinn…” Officer Barkley had a strange tone in his voice that could not be accounted for alone by his being upstairs and their being down. “I think you better come up here.”
Jess jumped to her feet and so did Ben. Jess darted up the stairs and Ben almost tried to follow her. He remembered the missing floor just in time. And also just in time to hear the cadre of newshounds gasp outside.
“What? What? What happened?” Jess didn’t answer and Ben couldn’t see anything new.
***
Upstairs Jess found Barkley with his neck craned looking up through the trap door into the attic. “I was going to look for clues in the attic, but…”
“Oh, my.” Jess hardly made a sound. As she approached Barkley, she began to see sky through the trap. All the joists were still there, standing proud and boasting their strength to the world. If you are so strong, thought Jess, then why couldn’t you hang on to my roof? “It’s gone.”
Barkley breathed, “I don’t believe it.”
“Seeing is believing.”
“But I don’t see anything.”
“No. Neither do I.”
“This is number twenty-two come in.”
“Go ahead twenty-two,” Barkley’s radio crackled.
“I’m going to need backup. A lot of backup.”
“What’s the situation number twenty-two? We’re pretty busy.”
“My life may be in danger. And I am also worried about a number of civilians.” The hand that didn’t hold the radio clung tightly to himself. He seemed to fear that he might be the next thing to vanish.
***
Downstairs, Ben had walked into the front yard to see what all the noise was about. He couldn’t find the roof. He sat down, right there, on the front walk at the feet of the press. “If you can’t beat ‘em,” Ben said aloud, “join em.” He didn’t mean the press. He sat up straight and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and fully expected to disappear. He held his breath. When that didn’t work, he cried.
One of the crowd behind him broke his trance. “This is too spooky. I’m getting out of here.”
Ben began to breathe again and with the breath came a decision. He walked around to the backdoor of the house and was pleased to find that only the living room had lost its floor. “Jess, would you come downstairs please. Bring my shoes.” He went into the study and emptied their little safe into his briefcase. He took a few documents out of the desk and tried to put them in his pocket. Boxers.
“What is it, Ben?” He sighed and put on the shoes she’d brought. “Ben, we need to find out what’s taking pieces of our house. I think we need to come up with some sort of a plan for action.”
“I have a plan.” Without another word, he lifted his briefcase, grabbed his keys, handed Jess the documents, and led her by the hand out of the study and into the garage. “Get in.” He hit a button and the car chirped as the locks jumped open. Bemusedly, Jess climbed into the passenger seat. Ben fastened his seatbelt and started the car. Another button and the garage door opened. He twisted around and backed out of the garage. Jess gasped. Ben spun, and the car screeched to a halt.
“Ouch, God damn it,” came Barkley’s voice from the place where their house had once stood - where there was now just a hole in the ground. Ben unfastened his seat belt and put the car in park. He got out and walked to the brink of the pit. Eventually he picked out the form of Barkley struggling to his feet amid the debris of their possessions.
“Are you alright down there? You’re not hurt?”
“The bed broke my fall.”
“Alright then.” Ben walked purposefully back to the car.
Jess looked at him as he shifted back into reverse. “These are our passports.”
Ben smiled for the first time all day. He motioned to his briefcase. “In there you’ll find my cell phone and the number for our lawyer. Call him second. You know the travel agent’s number. We keep talking about taking a trip to Paris. I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”
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