by Gene Wolfe
He could hear nothing. It was as though the entire world outside his room had ceased to exist. He tried to recall the hospital by night, as it had been when he worked there; there had been night-sounds, he felt certain: the soft trundling of carts in the halls; someone snoring; the noises, mostly faint but sometimes very horrible, of pain. Now there was—or seemed to be—nothing.
Greatly daring, he threw the blankets back and looked at his legs. They were covered with bruises, and as thin as stilts. He gripped the mattress and tried to swing them over the side of the bed; without warning he found himself plunged in a waking dream of his own childhood, of sliding from the straw stack. For a moment the sun shone again in his face and the air was full of dust, and a rich, dry odor.
His feet touched the floor, pain flashed through them, and the straw stack was gone. He felt that he had groaned or screamed. If so, there was no response; the hospital was as silent as before.
Half an hour later he was able to stand. For a time he held on to the headboard of his bed. When he could make his way over to the window, he found it closed by double panes of glass. The catch was of a design new to him, but not difficult; he loosed it and swung the halves back. In his own time, he was sure, such a window would have been covered with a grille of steel wire. Now there was nothing between his face and the night. It was dark, cool but not cold, and a gusty wind blew. Outside he could see nothing. There was no sound but the wind’s sighing—nothing at all. No far-off jets; no trucks on distant highways.
What floor was he on? He tried to remember the layout of the hospital. Somewhere near the top, it seemed. Near the incurable ward, then.
There had been a goldfish bowl in the cottage, on the bureau in the bedroom, with a little cardboard box of fish food from Woolworth’s; once or twice Jessie had mentioned it when they lay panting in the much-used bed. He had pretended each time that he had never noticed it; yet the truth was that that insignificant thing had become one of the central images of his thought. So that now, when it had surely been broken and forgotten for two generations, it reappeared as he stared out into the windy night—presenting itself so vividly to his imagination that he felt he could smell its dank marshiness and see each bit of green scum that clung to the sides. A ceramic mountain peak intended for a far larger aquarium thrust from the murky waters where snails crawled and the half-poisoned goldfish swam. Its lower reaches were imprisoned, like the fish, like the myriads of tiny snails, within the glass walls of the bowl; but its point, lifted in an island above the green water, was in air and free; yet it was without life, as dry and sterile as a bone: Death Island.
There was no difference between the ornament and the hospital in which he had worked but size. Like the ornament, the hospital had its lower six-sevenths thrust in the teeming life of the prison. Only its highest floor, Margotte’s ward, higher than all the surrounding buildings, was free to look out over the countryside, across the neatly tilled fields of the prison’s farm to woods and free farms and roads and houses; but the highest floor was the abode of Death, and the wind that breathed through its open windows carried away men.
Was he there now? He could not be sure. If there were, as the woman said there was, a cure that provided an unending health, what need would the prison have for a ward for incurables? No incurables would exist; no one need ever die.
No one need ever die.
Alvard found that his fingers were reaching for the steel mesh, seeking its support. It was not there, and for a moment it seemed that his arms would drag his body behind them, out the window. He drew back. The sill was no higher than his hips, and he had been leaning a long way out, with the veering wind tugging at his stiff white hospital gown. A question formed in his mind; and with it, an irrational need to shout it, to fling it on the wind. He tried to phrase it; but the words would not come. At last, feeling his legs weakening beneath him, he leaned out again, hoping that the thing he must ask would form itself in his mouth by its own energy.
He gasped for breath; then heard from somewhere nearby another voice shouting to the night. It, too, was a question; he could not make out the words (though he thought he heard instead) but the rising inflection of the last was unmistakable.
The young woman (her name is Megan Carstensen), comes the next day, bringing Alvard a Bible. She asks why he smiles, and he says, “It seems so old-fashioned.” But he takes it.
“We have a library here that trades books with libraries on the outside, so I ordered it for you. I thought you might like it—that it might remind you of your original period.”
“You said you were a trained counselor. Is that what they teach you?”
“More or less. I hope you didn’t think, though, that when I said that I meant I was trained in counseling cryogenic cases like yours. There aren’t that many of you. I am a counselor, though, and trained in psychology.”
“I suppose it’s different now,” Alvard said.
“Psychology? I suppose so. You were frozen before Kinglake’s The Death of Love was published, I think. So it ought to be quite different.”
“No more Freud.”
“Of course not. Did people really believe those things?”
“Sometimes.”
Idly, Alvard opened the pebble-grained black cover of the book she had given him. A voice said, “Who is the Son of Man?” and he slammed it closed at once.
“I suppose you’re not used to those. It’s a speaking book. There’s … a little person in the binding who’ll talk to you. If you don’t want to hear him, just don’t open to the endpapers—that’s where he lives.”
“I’m used to them. I developed them.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. We—Barry Seigle and I—called it Speaking Pages Corporation. That was our company. Didn’t they give you some sort of case data on me?”
“It didn’t have that kind of information,” Megan told him. She looked, somehow, as if the small, square room had become a cage to her, her eyes straying toward the always-open door and the empty cream-and-green corridor outside.
“What do you know about me, then?”
“All of it? I don’t have time—I’m supposed to be seeing other patients, you know. If you want, I can lend you the file and let you read it over. You can give it back the next time I come.”
“My own file?”
She nodded, eager to placate him and go.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’d like to see it. We didn’t do things like that. Allow people to see their files.”
“Here.” From underneath her chair, she drew an object that seemed midway between a hatbox and a bureau, and took out a slender folder. “Before you start on that,” she said reluctantly, “I’d like to ask what happened last night. An orderly found you on the floor, under the window. The window was open.”
“I wasn’t trying to commit suicide. After coming all this way—”
“Pardon?”
So he had internalized what she had said earlier about a journey—time had become some vast voyage through the dark; and he an astronaut without ship or suit. “All this time,” he said. “I meant all this time. To kill myself. I wouldn’t do that now.”
“The doctor says you shouldn’t have gotten out of bed at all. You might have died from that alone. The cells of your body are regenerating themselves now; but it will take six weeks, at least, for the process to be complete. Your heart deteriorated to some extent during suspension.”
“I understand,” he said.
She smiled and stood up, leaning over his bed. “Then be careful,” she said. “If forever means a long, long time, then you’re going to live forever. There are a lot of things to do—even here.”
He managed to say, “They used to believe you’d get bored with it.”
“Nobody has yet.”
She turned to go, and he heard the tiny sound her trouser legs made as one thigh whisked against the other. He asked, “Do you have to go now?”
“I want you to talk to that ca
se record. I’ll be back—tomorrow—it will give me a chance to catch up with my schedule.”
She was gone before Alvard noticed the peculiarity of her phrasing. He put down the file; it slid from his lap and fell open on the floor, spilling papers.
A voice very like his own recorded voice, as he had sometimes heard it at the office when he played back his own dictation, murmured, “Good afternoon. I am Alan Alvard, number one eight three to eight. What may I tell you about myself?”
It was even in the files now. To have found it in the Bible did not, in retrospect, so much surprise him—the temptation to chat with Christ would be irresistible. But file folders? He wondered how they read the information in now, and where the microchips and the speaker were. When he had designed the first ones, he had had to make the covers twice the normal thickness.
“Would you like a straightforward account of my life?”
“No,” Alvard said involuntarily.
“Then you have questions to ask?”
“I suppose if I say no again, you’ll ask me to close you. I remember having programmed a routine something like that.”
“You’ll have to admit there isn’t much use in having me open if you’re not interested in my life experience.”
“Do you know where you are now?”
“Yes. I am a patient in the hospital of Greyhame Prison. Room six seventeen. Six seventeen is a private room.”
He was not on Death Island then; still down in the water. He tried to recall what side of the building six seventeen was on. At last he asked, “Is there a window in six seventeen? Do you know that kind of thing?”
“One window. The room is three meters by two hundred and fifty centimeters, roughly.”
“Which way does the window face?”
“West.”
He glanced at the window. “And what time is it now?”
“I cannot provide that information.”
“You said, ‘Good afternoon.’”
“My time sense is not precise.”
“There’s supposed to be a switch near the head of my bed somewhere. If I call the nurse, will she tell me what time it is?”
“I can’t provide that information either.”
Alvard fumbled at the headboard, remembering visits to his mother’s hospital room, so many years ago. A cord with a button at the end. There was nothing.
From a concealed speaker somewhere, a man’s voice asked, “What do you want, six seventeen?”
“What time is it?”
“Is that all? Eighteen thirty-one.”
Half past six in the evening, then. Again he looked toward the window. No light from the setting sun penetrated it.
The file folder on the floor asked, “Is there anything more I can tell you?” The voice was slightly muffled; no doubt the speaker was face down. Alvard leaned out of the bed painfully until he could pick the folder up, leaving the papers where they had fallen.
There was a disc of what looked like aluminum foil inside the front cover. “Is that your speaker?” he asked.
“I can’t provide that information.”
“Then you can talk only about …” He found that it was more difficult than he had expected to pronounce his own name as though it were that of a stranger. “About Alvard—I suppose. Is that right?”
“I can tell you anything you want to know about myself.”
“Have you talked to Megan?”
“You mean my counselor. Yes, I’ve spoken to her.”
“Has she …” Alvard hesitated. He had been going to say, Read the papers in you, but that would only have led to further fencing. He substituted: “Read your case record?”
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“A log is kept on every prisoner, listing everyone who reads the file.”
It would be futile to ask the folder why she had not. Instead, Alvard said, “Was she well informed already when she talked to you?”
“About me? She knew nothing about me.”
“How long did you talk?”
From the doorway, an orderly asked, “All right if I bring your supper in now?”
“I suppose so,” Alvard said, and closed the folder.
“Want me to pick up that stuff on the floor for you?”
Alvard nodded, flattening his lap to receive the tray. “Thank you very much.”
“No trouble. You’ll be able to do for yourself pretty soon. I went by here with your slum once before, but the yap was in here.”
“Thank you for waiting.”
“I just wanted to tell you what happened. The nurse said you called and asked what time it was, so I figured you wanted to eat.” The orderly picked up the folder, thrust papers into it, and put it beside Alvard’s tray. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“You can tell me why the sun doesn’t come in the window,” Alvard said.
The orderly stared at him.
“I used to work here in the hospital. We’re high up, and unless I’m mistaken, that window looks west. Even if the sun is too low now, the light should have been coming through it a little earlier.”
“I’m not so damn sure this is the west side,” the orderly said.
“I am.”
“Well, I don’t know about the sun—I’m no astronomer, you know what I mean? I don’t spend my time sticking my head out of windows to see where the sun is or where the light falls. When I get out of this place, then I’ll look at the sun.” The orderly glanced around the room as if to see if he had forgotten anything, and wiped the palms of his hands on his tunic. “You get sunshine in here earlier, don’t you?”
“Much earlier,” Alvard said, “yes.”
“Then be happy with what you got. I have to go now.” He was out the door before Alvard could think of some remark that might have stopped him.
The room’s artificial lights were brighter now than they had been the last time Alvard had noticed them. For a time he sat with the folder closed in his hands; his shoulders hurt where their protuberant bones had pressed the mattress too long.
“Good evening. I am Alan Alvard, number one eight three two eight. What can I tell you about myself?”
“You can tell me about the way you’re built—the design of this file folder that talks to me.”
“I can’t provide that information.”
“What was Alan Alvard’s profession before his arrest? How did he make his living?”
“I was vice president and research director of a specialty publishing company.”
“How did you get that position?”
“I invented a device I called the Genre Jinn. It consisted of a microminiaturized computer implanted in the binding of a book. The computer was programmed at assembly to discuss the content of the book with the readers.”
Alvard closed the folder, and after a time a shudder passed through his thin body. There was no one there to see it, but the springs of the bed gave witness with a low creaking and rattling that continued even after he thought his emotions were under control. When he opened the folder again, he asked, “Was the invention a commercial success?”
“Yes, it approximately tripled the cost of each book, but volumes of my design largely replaced the expensive, illustrated ‘coffee table’ books that had been popular gift items previously. The idea was expanded and improved to include textbooks and books of other kinds.”
“Is it still in use?”
“Yes, but my patent was effectively broken in …” (The voice—his own-droned on for a long time.)
When an hour or more had passed, the orderly returned and found Alvard still sitting up in bed with the file folder and the Bible on his lap. “Want me to take those?” he asked, and when Alvard nodded, he laid them on the table beside the bed. “I thought you might want me to dial you down for the night.”
“Thank you,” Alvard said.
Morning brings a new orderly, a stout woman, with his breakfast. She spins the control until Alvard sits again. Her hands
are rough; her hair, when she bends to put the tray on Alvard’s legs, smells of disinfectant.
“Megan is waiting to see you. You want me to tell her to come back when you’ve finished?”
“I’ll talk to her now,” Alvard said.
The orderly shook her head. “You ought to wait until you’ve had something. It’s just morning squares and tea.”
“Then I can eat while I talk to her. Perhaps she’d like some.”
“She already ate. It’s oh nine five three. I’ll tell her you’ll talk to her.”
Alvard picked up a pink-frosted square and bit into it. It was rich and chewy, but not actually very good; he sipped the cooling tea.
“Hello, Alan. Sleep well?”
He nodded. “You’re prettier than I remembered.”
“And I poisoned a young man who was much prettier than I am.” She drew the room’s one chair up to his bed. “So how do you like having me sit beside you while you eat?”
“Fine,” Alvard said. “But aren’t you afraid I might push you out the window?”
“You couldn’t, which brings me to one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. You’re going to have visitors, which means that you’re going to have to go down to the visiting rooms in a wheetchair—they won’t allow them up here. Think you can stand it?”
“Who?”
Megan produced a slip of paper. “Jessica Alvard, Lisa Stewart, Jerome Glazer.”
When she had gone, the three names continued to repeat themselves in his mind. Jessica Alvard would be Jessie; she had had to use his name to see him. His lawyer’s name had been Glazer, but the first name was not Jerome. He could not recall it, but not Jerome. Lisa Stewart (a false, would-be stage name, surely) he could not remember at all. He wanted to review his file to see if there was some mention of Lisa Stewart there, but Megan had taken it with her. The Bible remained; he opened the cover, and heard: “He makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.” It seemed to have no application to him—was Lisa Stewart a spirit, or a flame of fire? He put the book aside, reflecting that his behavior was being shaped by Megan’s expectations; he had not looked into the Bible since he was a child.
