City of Night

weak light seeping under the door give him enough illumination to assess this space.
    At long last he is in the house of the smiling autistic, Arnie O’Connor. The secret of happiness lies within his grasp.
    He waits here in the cozy gloom as one song changes to another, and to another. He is enjoying his triumph. He is acclimating himself to this new environment. He is planning his next step.
    He is also afraid. Randal Six has never been in a house before. Until the night before last, he lived exclusively in the Hands of Mercy. Between there and here, he spent a day hiding in a Dumpster; but a Dumpster is not the same as a house.
    Beyond this closet door waits a place as alien to him as would be any planet in another galaxy.
    He likes the familiar. He fears the new. He dislikes change.
    Once he opens this door and steps across this threshold, all before him will be new and strange. Everything will be different forever.
    Trembling in the dark, Randal half believes that his billet at Mercy and even the torturous experiments to which Father subjected him might be preferable to what lies ahead.
    Nevertheless, after three more songs, he opens the door and stares into the space beyond, his two hearts hammering.
    Sunshine at a frosted window sheds light over two machines that he recognizes from magazine ads and Internet research. One machine washes clothes. The other dries them.
    He smells bleach and detergent behind the closed cabinet doors above the machines.
    Before him lies a laundry room. A laundry room. At this moment, he can think of nothing that could more poignantly suggest the sweet ordinariness of daily life than a laundry room.
    More than anything, Randal Six wants an ordinary life. He does not want to be—and cannot be one of the Old Race, but he wants to live as they do, without ceaseless torment, with his small share of happiness.
    The experience of the laundry room is enough progress for one day. He quietly pulls shut the door and stands in the dark furnace closet, pleased with himself.
    He relives the delicious moment when he first glimpsed the baked-enamel surfaces of the washer and dryer, and the big plastic clothes basket with what might have been several dirty rumpled garments in it.
    The laundry room had a vinyl-tile floor, just as did all the hallways and most of the rooms at the Hands of Mercy. He hadn’t expected vinyl tile. He had thought that everything would be wildly different from what he had known.
    The vinyl tiles in Mercy are gray with speckles of green and rose. In the laundry room they are yellow. These two styles of flooring are at once different yet the same.
    While the music from high in the house changes a few times, Randal gradually grows embarrassed by his timidity. Peering through a door into the O’Connors’ laundry is not, after all, a heroic accomplishment.
    He is deluding himself. He is succumbing to his agoraphobia, to his autistic desire to minimize sensory input.
    If he proceeds at this agonizing pace, he will need six months to make his way through the house and find Arnie.
    He can’t live under the structure, in the crawl space, for such an extended time. For one thing, he is hungry. His superlative body is a machine in need of much fuel.
    Randal doesn’t mind eating what spiders, rodents, earthworms, and snakes that he might find under the house. However, judging by the creatures he has encountered thus far during his hours in the crawl space, that shadowy realm doesn’t contain even a small fraction of the game he needs to sustain himself.
    He opens the door again.
    The wonderful laundry room. Waiting.
    He steps out of the furnace closet and gently closes the door behind him. Thrilled beyond words.
    He has never walked on yellow vinyl tiles before. They work the same as gray-vinyl tiles. The soles of his shoes make the faintest squeaking sounds.
    A door stands open between the laundry room and the kitchen.
    Randal Six halts at this new threshold, marveling. A kitchen is everything—more!—that he thought it would be, a place of numerous conveniences and overwhelming charm.
    He could easily become inebriated with ambience. He must remain sober and cautious, prepared to retreat if he should hear someone approaching.
    Until he can locate Arnie and wrench from him the secret of happiness, Randal wants to avoid coming face to face with anyone. He isn’t sure what would happen in such an encounter, but he feels certain that the consequences would not be