Room 7
My robot vacuum builds a map of my house with a spinning laser on its back. The first time you run it, it explores every room, bumping and turning, and when it’s done, the app on your phone shows a floor plan in pastel colors, each room a different shade, labeled automatically. Room 1. Room 2. You can rename them. I did: Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, Office, Bath, Hall.
My house has six rooms. It’s a 1924 bungalow in the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, one story plus a basement I don’t count, and I’ve lived there for three years. On a Tuesday in March, the app sent me a notification that said: New room detected! Would you like to name Room 7?
I opened the map. There it was, a small pale-green rectangle, maybe eight feet by ten, wedged between the hall and the bedroom, where the hall closet is. Except it was bigger than the hall closet, and the closet was there too, separately, a little gray square beside it.
I figured the laser had gotten confused by a mirror. They do that. I hit Ignore.
The next morning the app showed me the overnight cleaning history. The vacuum runs on a schedule at 2 a.m., because I sleep through anything and I like waking up to clean floors. You can see its path as a thin line, looping over the map like a scribble.
It had done the kitchen, the living room, the bath. Then, at 2:51 a.m., it had gone into the hall, stopped at the closet, and the line continued into Room 7. A dense back-and-forth pattern, the zigzag it uses on open carpet. It had cleaned in there for forty-one minutes. Then the line came back out through the wall, into the hall, and back to the dock.
I went and looked at the closet. It’s a normal coat closet. Plaster walls, a shelf, a rod, my coats, my vacuum’s spare brushes in a box on the floor. The back wall is solid. I knocked on it and it was solid. Behind it, according to the map, was a room the size of a small bedroom.
I emptied the vacuum’s dustbin into the trash. Then I stopped, and took it back out, and looked at it.
My house is wood floors except the bedroom, which has a beige rug. My dust is beige rug fibers, my own short hair, the cat’s hair, which is orange. The bin was full of fine gray fluff. Not my dust. And mixed into it were long hairs, very long, almost black. My hair is short and brown. Nobody’s been in my house with long dark hair.
It did it again the next night. And the next. Always at the end of the run, always forty minutes or so, always the tight zigzag that means it’s on a carpet. I don’t have a carpet that size.
I started to get, I guess you’d say, methodical. I took the vacuum and set it down in the hall closet by itself in daylight and hit Clean Room 7. It spun its laser. It drove forward into the back wall of the closet, bumped, turned, bumped again. It gave a sad little chime and said, in its recorded voice, Unable to reach target area. Please clear obstacles.
That night, at 2 a.m., it cleaned Room 7 for forty-four minutes.
I didn’t sleep. I’d tried to stay up to watch it and fallen asleep on the couch around one. When I woke up at three-fifteen the vacuum was back on its dock, blinking blue, fully charged, and the app said it had cleaned Room 7 from 2:30 to 3:14, and the dustbin was full of gray fluff and long dark hair.
I went to the city’s permit records. The house was built in 1924. There’s a sketch plan from a 1958 remodel showing a “rear bedroom” between the hall and the main bedroom, eight by ten. Marked on the 1958 plan, in pencil: Close up. Plaster over door. No reason given.
So there had been a room. Somebody had sealed it, and it was still there, the space was still there, and my vacuum had found it with its laser, somehow, through a plaster wall, and was going in at night.
I’m a reasonable person. Here’s the reasonable explanation I came up with: there’s a gap somewhere. Under the floor, a heating duct, an old pass-through. The vacuum’s getting in through some gap I can’t see and cleaning a dusty sealed room full of somebody’s old hair. Fine. Creepy, but fine.
But the map didn’t show a gap. The path line went straight through the wall of the closet both ways, like the wall wasn’t there.
The app has a feature I’d never used. In the newer models the vacuum has a front camera, and it identifies obstacles so it doesn’t run over socks or cords or the cat’s mistakes. When it sees one, it drops a little icon on the map. A sock icon. A cord icon. You can tap it and see the photo it took.
In the second week, an icon appeared in Room 7.
It was the generic one, a little gray triangle with an exclamation point, meaning Unidentified obstacle. I tapped it. It said, Photo unavailable. The obstacle was in the far corner of Room 7, against what would have been the outside wall. The vacuum’s path went around it carefully, in a neat square, the way it goes around a table leg. Except a table leg is a dot. This was a shape about the size of a pair of feet.
The next night it was in the middle of Room 7.
The night after that it was by the wall between Room 7 and my bedroom.
I called the company’s support line. I told a kind young man in what sounded like a call center that my vacuum was mapping a room that wasn’t there. He took me through resetting the map. You delete it, and the vacuum starts over, exploring the house from nothing. I did that. I watched it drive around the house, bumping, in the afternoon light, the cat following it like a bodyguard, and when it was done the app showed me six rooms. Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, Office, Bath, Hall.
The next morning there were seven. Room 7 was a pale green rectangle between the hall and my bedroom. The cleaning path went into it at 2:47 a.m. The obstacle icon was on the wall nearest my bed.
I should have unplugged it. I know. You’re thinking that. I thought it too. But I want you to understand that I’d started to feel that the vacuum was the only thing in the house that knew what was going on. It was going in there every night and cleaning, carefully, around whatever was standing there. And then coming back out and reporting it to me. Like a dog that keeps going to the same door and whining.
I kept it running. I checked the map every morning with my coffee.
Last Thursday the obstacle icon wasn’t in Room 7.
It was in the bedroom. My bedroom. In the space between my bed and the wall, on the side I sleep on, about two feet from my pillow. The path line from that night shows the vacuum coming into the bedroom at 3:02 a.m., going around the bed the way it always does, and then slowing, and making a small, careful square around a point on the rug beside my head, and then continuing on.
The log says it spent four minutes there. Four minutes, in a two-by-two square, beside my bed.
I slept through it. I sleep through anything.
I don’t sleep in that room now. I sleep on the couch. I’ve moved the cat’s bed out there and put the vacuum’s dock in the kitchen with a wedge under the bedroom door. I’ve stopped emptying the bin into the trash. I keep the gray fluff in a jar. I’m not sure why.
I haven’t changed the schedule. It still runs at 2 a.m. This morning, when I checked, the obstacle icon was in the living room.
The path line comes in from the hall, as usual, and loops around the coffee table, and then it slows, and makes a small, careful square, right at the head of the couch.
It says Photo available, this time. A thumbnail. I haven’t opened it.
I’m writing this at the kitchen table with the app open on the phone in front of me, and my thumb is right over the little gray triangle, and I keep thinking that the vacuum didn’t take a photo for weeks. It couldn’t, or it wouldn’t. And now it can.
I keep thinking about what’s different now.
I think the difference is it’s out of the room.