The Way Through Doors (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jesse Ball

  Rita spun around. Her wool dress stopped well above the knee, and she wore knee-high socks.

  —Rita…said Selah.

  She looked back over her shoulder at him.

  —Yes?

  —Would you whisper something in my ear?

  —All right, she said, licking her lips like a cat. Close your eyes.

  Selah closed his eyes and sat very still. He was wearing a vest, trousers, black shoes, spats, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled. He rested his elbows on the desk and let his head sink into his hands. His breathing slowed. In his head he thought of the dog he had always wanted, a Kerry blue terrier. They were poacher’s dogs, from Ireland, and were not afraid of anything. If only he had his Kerry blue with him, things would be easier. This is how he felt often. Mora, Mora, Mora, he thought to himself, and the snowflakes spun down through the air. In what world were you lost, and which thread have you left me?

  —I can do a cartwheel, whispered Rita, and so can you. There were nine outside of the black house, and seven within. Nine defeat seven, but not beyond the walls, and so they waited within while planes passed overhead, and the battle of Britain continued, day after day, in an asylum just north of the Canadian border. Yes, I drove a truck while the war effort made its way south then east along the old road that’s now been paved over. I began with the gold rush and told my secrets in a million wild ways in the watery concourses that figure well in man’s esteem. I saved every penny I ever made and invested it all in U.S. Steel, and when the war came, my bank burst with gold, and I bought an island and manufactured servants from the earth like golems, and set them to serve me forever. But I won’t live forever.

  Selah breathed deeply. Rita’s lips brushed his ear.

  —I told men the way in which they might improve the world. Instead they improved themselves at the world’s expense. I wrote in a ledger the cost of each action, and how all things are linked, and any movement is a crime. I went on holiday as a child with a child, and as children we sat in low boats on the skin of streams and ate from baskets and called out to taller ones and were called out to in our turn. We laughed when we were told that we would one day lose our skin and become piles of bones that had no laughter in them. And we knew too that this was a lie, for once a thing has happened once, it cannot be stopped from happening again and again. Events are continuous, not broken, and they never move on. Stories tell themselves one to another, over and over, never ceasing, and we skip here and there, saying this is consciousness, this acrobatic feat, but what of remaining? What of the story of a stone in a field that is a stone and stays upon an evening when there will be rain but there is not yet, and the last moment of redness is paused about the tiny cloud that lingers on the sketched sky? Yes, the little cloud whose name is Sillen, who himself has seen all the wicked deeds that men to the west have done, and who goes now into the east, with word of new rebellion.

  Rita drew a breath, and he felt her body through her thin dress.

  —I cannot be sure how long I waited between worlds for this new post. I was a wisp, a saint, a gladiolus, a gladius in the beckoning hand of a gladiator. Who poured water in a windowsill down into the potted plant, longing that I might grow? And the sound from the street below, the courtship of earth and sky, the noise of radios and singing, of revelry. Names bear names upon themselves. They are of no use until afterwards, and at that time they have gone. Three things are required of you: the wishes you made when you first knew the breadth of this life; the contract you signed when you decided your wishes were not true or possible; and the exacting of the punishment you agreed to when you knew you would break the contract of your life.

  Rita’s lips touched Selah’s ear again. He could feel her breath. In her thin wool dress she was trembling.

  —There is in the little meadow beyond the mind’s reach a steeplechase being run by horses who were once riders of horses. They chase one another, and allow one another to pass in a dancing, laughing way. They cross the paths that cannot be crossed, and they tell the time as it has never been told. Beyond a bank of trees there is a little door, round and made of wood. Someone is behind it, knocking. He has been knocking for hours. Another passes that way. This person, broad-brimmed hat upon cloaked form, stops and unbolts the door. Out of the door steps S., the pamphleteer, the municipal inspector. He looks around at the wide, stretching lawn of the world, everywhere bedecked with huge oaks and stretching canopies that give shade when shade is needed. He is carrying a little bag full of books that he has made.

  —Thank you, says S. to the man in the broad-brimmed hat.

  —It was no trouble, says the man from beneath his hat. I had supposed that a person would come out from that door one day, and years without end I have walked only upon this road home so that every day there would be a chance that someone waiting to be let out might be let out by me. There are not many who walk upon this road. I have thought often of how it would be. Always in my idea of this moment, the door opened. Out stepped a man in a gray-blue suit, serious-looking but young, carrying a small slung bag.

  —Thank you, said the young man in the gray-blue suit each time he emerged.

  —It was no trouble, I replied. Will you come beneath my roof for a fine supper? My children are waiting, and my wife as well, away at the edge of the wood.

  —I would like that, said the young man in the gray-blue suit.

  We walked then along the path where always and every day I have walked come evening and came then soon to my house, which is truly not a house so much as a den, and came then to my wife and children who are my wife and children but who are also foxes, and who are pleased in themselves to be sometimes people and sometimes foxes, or always fox-people, creating illusion with the sweep of a sly grin.

  At the door to my den, the young man said,

  —But if I go within, is it certain that I will ever come out?

  —Not certain, no, I said. What is certain is that you will go in. I can see it in the tilt of your elbows.

  For the young man’s elbows were tilted in an odd sort of way. From looking at them it was obvious the young man was going to enter the den. Enter he did, ducking his head and stepping inside.

  The inside of the den was cozy as could be. A little window was set in the side of a hill, and it shone down through onto a little kitchen. A wooden table was pressed up against the wall with chairs. It was heaped with every comforting sort of food that the young man had ever imagined, scones and pancakes and Danish, doughnuts and waffles and cookies, a turkey, a ham, a London broil, baked breads of every description, butters and cheeses and sausages.

  —Sit, please, said the man.

  Then out from an inner room rushed the children, and after them the wife, a slender woman with a soft fur that bristled ever so slightly in the wind. Her husband took off his hat, and his muzzle was a proud and handsome muzzle. The children sat about the young man with the gray-blue suit and they asked him for things, and everything that he was asked for he had somehow to give them. One asked him for a pocketknife, and he gave the little fox a pocketknife. Another asked him for a disguise box, and the young man took from his coat a disguise box, ready-made in Switzerland in 1932, of the very best quality, number seven of twenty-six ever made. The third fox-boy asked him for a kite, and from a secret pocket the young man with the gray-blue suit drew forth a fighting kite made in Japan, a kite that would allow the young fox upon a trip to some distant fox-meadow, where foxes kite and play in the windy autumn, to cut the strings of others foxes’ kites, and watch them plummet to earth, all the while laughing in that peculiar fox way and dancing about on one’s hind legs.

  As well, the young man had brought a gift for the fox-wife, a great pottery bowl blessed within it with the image of a morning town.

  The town was beautiful, and no one could say its name until the fox himself roused himself from a sudden sort of slumber and said,

  —That is Som, where sometimes I have been.

  The young man said
then that he would rather go there than anywhere, and the fox leaped upon him with his rows of teeth and sharpness and great fox-suddenness and strength and tore open his throat. Then into the bowl the young man’s life poured, and it filled the bowl all the way to the brim, and there was in the town of Som a great eruption, and a statue in the westward-tending square facing the west road burst open, the old statue of Marionette. Out of it stepped the municipal inspector.

  He leaped down to the ground and surveyed the square. People had come out of stores and houses and were staring at him strangely. He felt at his throat. The skin was unbroken. He brushed the stone dust off the arms and legs of his clothing, and crossed the square towards the little alley that led along the backs of houses to another thoroughfare that in time would reach the road upon which sat the inn. And so in time, a minute or two of walking followed by a moment, and that moment followed by a long moment of thought concerning the depth of a well he had seen once in passing from a horse, and how wells seem different from horseback than they do from afoot, and how they seem different to grown men than to children, and how perhaps the feelings of men and children for wells might not prove a good index for how life has changed a man in general, the better to judge how he might return once again to his grander beginnings. And then he was before the inn.

  He approached the door. It was a dark wood, and said something on it in a language that no one living now spoke. He opened the door and entered. To his right there was a bat, leaning against the door. The common room was full of voices. A bearded man came around the bar.

  —Hello, he said. You are not early, but you are not so late, either.

  The man had a funny look in his eye.

  —I am going upstairs, said Selah.

  —I expect you are, said the man.

  In the background, Selah could see a dog standing upon its hind legs playing upon a fiddle a song he remembered. Another man sat in the corner facing the corner with a sadness of corners and places of ending that Selah could not look long upon. About this man too there was the filthy rag of squandered luck. Selah turned from him then and sprang up the stairs. Yes, up the stairs and onto the landing. This place was as familiar to him now as the house in which he had been born, a little clapboard farmhouse on the edges of a great lake, where questions were often asked, but rarely answered, in training for a larger world.

  Selah burst through the door he had so long been standing somehow impossibly before.

  In the room, a beautiful woman was sitting upon a rocking chair. She was sewing something, and her needle never ceased its movements, back and forth, darting implacably through the pierced and repierced cloth.

  —You are Selah, she said. I am Ilsa Marionette. I did not think you would come through the statue of my father.

  —I’m sorry, said Selah. I did not know it was his statue.

  —There are many, she said. It is a good use for a statue, and one to which no statue has ever been put. I think he would be glad to have been a part of it. Grace in circumstance, he always said, was the true matter of life.

  —Where is Mora? asked Selah.

  For the girl was nowhere in the room.

  —She has gone, said Ilsa. She waited quite a while, you know.

  Ilsa narrowed her eyes.

  —Quite a while.

  —I came as soon as I could, said Selah. No one else could have come sooner or swifter. Where has she gone?

  Ilsa Marionette smiled, and her smile was the delight of a thousand children placed all in a row in a happy and enduring place.

  —Selah Morse, she said. Was Mora ever here? Did she ever come to fetch me away from my husband? Are you not tired from speaking so long? Sleep beckons from every cabinet, from every bed, from every scrap of cloth. Sleep beckons from trunks, from windows, from tree limbs and pie safes. Beneath doors sleep beckons. You are tired, yes. You have spoken so long now. Mora was here, she was here, but she has gone. For an instant she faltered in her thought, and disappeared.

  There is a chance, however.

  Her voice had changed slightly. She had remembered something hopeful.

  —There was a little rabbit made of knotted hair…do you still have it?

  Selah desperately checked his pockets and then all of his secret pockets. The rabbit was nowhere to be found.

  —No, he said. No! It seems to be missing.

  —Then there is no hope, said Ilsa Marionette. I don’t know what to tell you. I wish it were otherwise. You will never find her. Instead you will continue day and night through nineteen versions of confusion, becoming each day less than you were the day before. Eventually there will be nothing left of Selah Morse. Not even the ink of your calling card.

  Selah stood then, looking into the perfect symmetry of Ilsa Marionette. There was nothing there, no clue to any possible solution.

  —What of your husband? said Selah. He’s downstairs even now.

  Ilsa held a piece of embroidery in her hands. It was a dog chasing a dog who was chasing the first dog unsuccessfully.

  —If we can both forgive each other, there is a chance we might begin again, she said.

  Just then the guess artist entered the room.

  —My friend, said Selah, his voice choked. Mora’s gone away.

  The guess artist put his arm around Selah.

  —Is she really gone? he asked.

  —Ilsa says that—

  —Aren’t you tired? interrupted Ilsa. Haven’t you been speaking for a very long time?

  Then the guess artist interrupted, making a loud, galloping, grinning noise. There was suddenly out of nowhere a broad and manifest delight in the depths of his face.

  —What is it? asked Selah. Tell me, my comrade, tell me, my brother in arms, you who accompanied me through the snows of the Russian winter, tell me what you see.

  It was difficult then for the world to bear the disparity between Selah’s grief and the guess artist’s happiness, so close together and impossibly cleaved they were. The room shuddered a little, and a lamp went out. Ilsa unshuttered the window and was profiled against it.

  —They were a long time in the room at the top of the stairs, said the guess artist. She had been struck by a car that had come from nowhere and gone away afterwards to nowhere. She had been taken to a hospital by a young man whom she had never met. There she had been taken care of well, and it had been found that her memory was lost, perhaps for good, and she had left that place in the company of the young man who had found her. Together they had gone back to the young man’s rooms, where his printing press and lithograph machine and the tools of his trade were arrayed all about the spaces and belongings that made up his life. Amidst all this, he gave the girl a cool drink, and then began to speak to her in a layered, tortuous fashion, keeping always her past, and the things that might have been, foremost in his mind. He arrayed before her all the objects of his hope, all the things he wished had been and were, and so then they became what was real, and not imagined, and he placed his life in the context of hers, and together they drifted, questing, through the half-light, his resourcefulness all that stood between themselves and the devil, sleep. And when morning came and the sun arose in the east, the young man was speaking still, and the girl was still and slowly, beautifully, upon his arm, eyes wide, listening carefully to each syllable, carefully to each phrase and word and worded phrase. The whole was sewn together with paragraphs and dashes and went in a whirl around a pamphlet that the young man had made in truth, a pamphlet named WORLD’S FAIR 7 JUNE 1978. And the young man saw that the sun had risen, and the girl saw it too, and there was in their hearts a lightness and a pleasure with the things of this world, and they rose up from where they had been sitting and went down to the street and out into the morning city.

  —Selah, said the girl Mora Klein, where shall we go?

  —To the boardwalk, said Selah. It is proper there in morning, with the edges of things curled up. One can look underneath.

  —I imagine, now, said Mora, that a taxi
will draw up to the curb and we will get into it and the windows will be wide-open and we will drive brilliantly through the streets all the way to Coney Island in a swirling and impetuous fashion, and though things will rise up to stop us, nothing will have any power over a passage as splendid and daring as ours.

  A taxi drew up then to the curb, and Mora and Selah got in. They hung from the wide-open windows as it drove at blinding speed through the streets and across a bridge and swept down Atlantic Avenue, down through Brooklyn to that always faraway and close Coney Island.

  Then they alighted upon another curb and paid the cabbie with a gold doubloon, and ran up to the timbered boardwalk and the morning sand and mist upon the water.

  —Selah, said Mora cautiously, her voice trembling. What about Sif? Is she real? Is she the girl you love? Or is she a version of myself that you invented for me, like the carefullest, most special set of clothes that anyone ever made?

  —Sif, said Selah, is the girl I invented in order to fall in love with. I wrote a pamphlet about her in the hopes that she might be. You are the girl who was struck by a car, sent up through the air to land upon her head. You have yet to become what you will become.

  —Then I may be Sif Aloud, and I may be Mora Klein, and I may be whom I like, said Mora. I may even be Rita the message-girl, though she gets the worst of it sometimes, always stuck in the ministry offices, never allowed to leave.

  —Rita gets to leave, said Selah. Whenever she wants to. If you want, I can introduce you. She’s awfully nice.

  Mora pulled Selah down to her and kissed him full on the mouth, and he was surprised with the ferocity of the gesture. He ran his hand along her back, and delight coursed along his arm.

  —Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

  —To madness! said Selah.

  They were very close together, and this was immensely pleasing to the both of them. She pushed her face and cheek against his very hard, and he pushed back. What a creature! he thought. He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked up and down the boardwalk.