The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

by Gene Wolfe

  He wakes. It is dark but there is someone in the room, a pale presence. “Who’s there?”

  “Just making sure you’re all right. Go back to sleep.” Alvard could see the man’s teeth, dimly shining, when he spoke.

  “I’m not sleepy.” He moved his right hand in the way that kindled the lights. A long knife-scar split the brown skin of the orderly’s face; he appeared to be middle-aged. “What time is it?”

  “Twenty till twenty-four hundred.”

  “I was supposed to have visitors.”

  “Doctor prob’ly said for you to sleep.”

  “They wouldn’t wake me up?”

  “You been sick. If you can sleep without taking anything, that’s better. That’s the good way.”

  “What about the people who were coming?” Alvard felt furious, knowing it for weak, foolish anger even while it gripped him.

  “Told them to come back some other day, I suppose. Listen, I have to look in on the others, but I’ll tell you something about tomorrow that will be good for you to know. Before breakfast, if you’re awake then, call Nurse and tell him you’d like some sun. Then I’ll come and take you up on the roof. Wouldn’t you like to get out for a little? They’re supposed to do it, but they won’t unless you ask. I’m on till eight.”

  When the gray light of dawn was in the window, Alvard told the remote and invisible nurse that he would like to go up to the roof, and in half an hour the orderly with the scarred face returned with a wheelchair. “How old are you?” Alvard asked him.

  “Old enough. When they iced you down, I wasn’t even born yet. Is that what you’re thinking about?” On silent tires Alvard glided through the hospital halls. He tried to recall the color of the walls when he had worked here. Whatever it had been, they were mostly pinkish green now.

  “You are thinking,” the orderly began with the stilted formality of the uneducated, “if I am curious about those old times you come from and want to hear about them? No, I am not. If you wish to talk of it, I’ll listen; but I already know all I want to about those old days.”

  “Then why did you want me to come up on the roof with you?” The elevator seemed to be the one he remembered. It was slower and noisier now.

  “Because I like to my own self—why do you suppose? You know how I grew up? In a little bit of a apartment, with a old granny that was always wanting to talk about those old times. Mr. Kennedy and all that. She was so great on Mr. Kennedy.” Unexpectedly, the orderly laughed; it was a warm laugh, as though recalling the grandmother who had bored him as a child made him happy now.

  “That was before my time—Kennedy,” Alvard said.

  “Always Mister Kennedy. Don’t no one use that now, that Mister”

  The elevator jolted to a stop, and the doors slid back. The first thing Alvard was conscious of was the rush of cool air, fresh, with the undying newness of sunrise. Then of the fog, circling the roof until he could scarcely see the parapet. The light of day had not yet reached the rooftop. “They’ve made me immortal,” he said. “Do you know that?”

  “Me too.”

  “I didn’t know. No wonder you wanted to come up here.”

  “Sure.” The roofs surface was tar, slightly uneven. The orderly began to push Alvard’s chair slowly across it. Small, hard tar-bubbles shattered under the wheels.

  “When I smelled the air—just a minute ago, when the elevator doors opened—I understood what it meant. I don’t think I did before. A hundred thousand dawns. A million. Research for five hundred years, then rest and read for another five hundred. Only I think I’ll do the resting first.”

  The orderly chuckled. “That’s good. This is a good place to do it.”

  “They’ll release me, won’t they? What’s it like outside?”

  “Won’t do you no good to know. They won’t let you out. What do you think? They want us running around loose now that they’re all going to live for always?”

  The orderly had laid a blanket over Alvard’s legs before they started up. Alvard tucked it tighter now. He felt cold—yet he knew that what the orderly had said could not be the whole truth. A life sentence could not mean forever.

  “Not so many people out there now,” the orderly told him. “Nut like in your day, I guess. There’s a lots of houses and apartments vacant. That company that rented to us—when I was a kid, you know? They could have let us have a bigger space. Two apartments together. Only they wouldn’t.” His breath smelled of oatmeal, heavy and a trifle scorched.

  “How many people in the United States?”

  “That isn’t what they call it anymore. It’s the Unified States and Kingdoms. I don’t know for sure how many there is. Not as many as it used to be. You ever been out in the country?”

  “Yes,” Alvard told him, remembering boyhood.

  “I was, one time. What it was,” the orderly gave the wheelchair a little shake to express a smile Alvard could not see, “was, we went to hide out—you know? And there was all kinds of places. Old farms and buildings and even little towns where nobody lived. You know, in town sometimes there will be blocks where nobody lives except maybe winos at night? Out there, it’s whole towns.”

  “I see,” Alvard said. After he had spoken, he realized that he really was beginning to see; the fog was thinning now, the daylight had grown brighter and warmer. And what he saw was a band of night that would not fade. It seemed to be a half mile away, and it rose far (he could not be sure yet how far) above the roof where the orderly slowly pushed his chair.

  “They are always yellin’ at the women to have children; but it don’t do no good. A woman that has a child is riskin’ her life, you know? And now they can always put it off.”

  “I see,” Alvard said again. He pointed. “What is that?”

  “In the haze there? You mean the walls?”

  “Is that what they are?”

  “The walls to keep us in. Didn’t they have them when you were here?”

  Alvard tried to remember. “Not as big,” he said, “and closer. Those must be—I couldn’t say how high. And this place is bigger than it was.”

  “I suppose. I’m goin’ to have to take you down now. My shift’s about over.”

  Back in his room, a nursing aide gave him a recorder and a box of tiny tapes and told him to write letters. He began one to Jessica (“Dear Jessie: I know you tried to see me the other day. I fell asleep. I am sorry …”) but he found himself paralyzed with embarrassment time after time, and eventually erased it all, telling himself that Jessie would no longer be at the old address, the apartment he had taken for her. (Had Glazer continued to pay the rent?)

  In the now-familiar room, the walls he had seen from the rooftop seemed to hem him round. He had only to shut his eyes for them to appear again, distant, frowning, built of some dark material that could not be concrete. Perhaps it was stone. If the world were running out of people, it might be running out of concrete too. In his own time he had seen plastic give way and wood and metal return again as the supply of petroleum was exhausted. Outside, now, it might be that sidewalks were being laid of brick and stone once more—if any sidewalks at all were being built in the dwindling cities.

  The thought of those diminishing cities, he found, did not sadden him. For a time, there had been too many people; everyone had known it. Now there was no longer that urge to achieve immortality through children. Real immortality was at hand. Possibly that was why Catholic priests and nuns, for so many hundreds of years, had not cared about having children—they had felt immortality already, believing in the survival of the soul after death. Now everyone must feel like that, knowing of the survival of the body. The forests would be coming alive once more; growing. The deer, the wolves and the bears and the foxes, could have more children now.

  The walls circled him round again, reminding him that his own eternity was to be only here, in some long gray building filled with the sound of clanging steel. Atop them walked the tiny, white-coated figure of Dr. Margotte. He forced himself to
stare at the real walls of painted plaster.

  What of art and literature and science? Perhaps (though he found he did not think so) they were only snatches at immortality too. Gone now, if that were so, or perhaps only drowned in unending procrastination. No more Great Expectations, no more great works of any kind? Alvard did not, would not, believe it.

  Despite all the clichés of fiction, the gates do not slam shut behind visitors on visiting days. Several guards stand by. There are more guards in the towers, isolated behind crystal windows. Trusties in gray uniform walk, apparently aimlessly, across the courtyard stretching between the gate and the administration building. Visitors arriving by bus are herded through the gates, like geese being driven to the market of a walled French town. Like geese they talk to themselves more than to others; like geese they try to stray and are driven back; like geese they are mostly gray, and smaller than a man.

  In the administration building, trusty clerks—nearly all of them women too—ask whom they wish to see, and what their relationship to the prisoner may be, and the nature of their business. If the prisoner is being disciplined, he or she will not be permitted visitors. One of the deputy wardens will be available if the matter seems urgent. If the visit is merely social, close relatives will be given preference—an hour a day is allotted, but only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Unsuccessful visitors are invited to wait until the next visiting day in the Lodge—technically a commercial enterprise, but in practice a part of the prison administration. The Lodge is twenty-two kilometers from the prison gate.

  “Next. Name?”

  “Jessica Bonner Alvard.”

  “Uh-huh. I had you yesterday.” The trusty was a heavy, dark-haired woman, puffy-faced. “And you want to see … ?”

  “My husband. Alan Alvard.”

  “You know the case number?”

  Jessie shook her head.

  “You ought to learn it. It would save you a couple of minutes here.” The trusty went to the rear of the room to ask a computer terminal, and after five minutes or so returned. “You had a girl with you last time.”

  “Yes,” Jessie said. “She had to go back to the city.”

  “Your daughter?”

  Jessie thinks about it. “In a way.”

  Alan Alvard moves his hand in the way that summons the nurse’s voice. The hand is heavy as lead, and for a time he understands, though he could not explain, that it is in some way the wrong kind of hand, one that will not activate the proximity switch that controls the speaker and (someplace far off) the microphone and signal light on the nurse’s desk.

  “What do you want, six seventeen?”

  It is not the nurse’s voice, nor does it come from the speaker. Dr. Margotte is standing, just out of sight, beside the door. Beyond him, on silent rubber wheels, is the deadcart with its folded sheet.

  “What do you want?”

  Afraid to reply, Alvard waits.

  The orderly with the scar wakes him, balancing his breakfast tray while he shakes him by the shoulder.

  “Did you want me before?”

  Alvard stared at him.

  “I thought maybe you did. Nurse said you called, but then you didn’t answer.”

  “Didn’t they send someone?”

  “They were too busy. To tell the truth, a patient doesn’t get too much attention here unless he asks for it.”

  Alvard nodded. “It was the same way before.”

  “Sure. They don’t want too many of us pokin’ around, gettin’ into trouble, stealin’ the medications. You want to go up on the roof again after you eat? It’ll be sunny up there now.”

  Alvard looked at the window. Clear light was pouring in. “What time is it?”

  “’Bout ten-thirty.”

  “I thought you were on nights.”

  “I was, but we change around every couple of weeks. I’m on days now. I could leave you up there awhile. A lot of them like that. Maybe you would like to push yourself around in the chair a little. You strong enough for that?”

  “I think so,” Alvard said.

  “I’ll come back when you finish your breakfast.”

  Alvard watched the orderly as he left. His neck was as wide as his head, his shoulders bulky and bunchy under the white uniform tunic. He might have been an iron pumper, a weight lifter.

  There was a mirror on the little table. He slid out of bed and stood in front of it for a few seconds, supporting himself by clenching the tabletop with both hands. He had been as big as the scarred man. In college he had wrestled and boxed, and even played two years of football, though he had always felt out of place; the only engineer on a team of future high-school coaches, unable to share its arrogance and clannishness.

  He would be no match for the scarred man now, even when his legs had strengthened. The face that stared from the mirror was hollow-cheeked and livid with bruises: the hospital gown below it looked as though it hung on the back of a wooden chair. A corpse alive.

  When he was a boy he had gone to church with his father. It was only long afterward that he had understood that his father’s devotion was of the kind that had been new in his young manhood in the seventies—the newly old Jesus-people almost indistinguishable now from the ancient tradition of Pentecostalism. His mother had died when he was too young to recall the details, and lay in the crowded yard west of the little building, under a chaste white stone with an Egyptian cross cut into the top. A place among friends in the country—a commune—had been the dream of her generation.

  At first his father had him wait on the steps while he visited his wife before going in. But when he was nine, he made him come with him, and stand under the drooping branches of the willows. It had reminded Alan, then, of the death of Little Nell. One autumn he had wanted to brush the leaves away, and his father had prevented him. Perhaps he had felt they would keep her warm somehow, all those little leaves shaped like the blades of knives. His father had burned most of his mother’s pictures, but one that had remained showed her with long fair hair—no doubt it was from her that he had inherited his own blondness—falling over her shoulders. His father had told him once that that had been the style when they were married—long hair, straight, worn down. He had said that women sometimes ironed their hair to keep it straight; but somehow the picture reinforced his belief that his mother (her name had been Ellen) and Little Nell were one and the same. Perhaps there had been an illustration in The Old Curiosity Shop, and his father had let him see it; perhaps the two faces were something alike.

  That was why he had done it, of course. Made books talk. He thought: “I should have known it before—but then I suppose I wouldn’t have done what I did.” Little Nell could speak now, thanks to him; all the others too, thanks to Little Nell.

  Sentimental slop for sure. Even the people who liked that book did not like Little Nell. But they had had their mothers for as long as they wanted them—not had to remember a girl-mother who was only a picture, not listened to Dad reading books in the evening because only books could comfort him for long, not heard the guitar music played over and over in the front room at night because she had taped it for Dad. Still, it wasn’t Little Nell who played the guitar; it was Dora, with a Ta ra la! Ta ra la!

  No wonder he had seen old Doc Margotte and his meat wagon waiting outside through the solid wall. He was morbid. Well, who wouldn’t be, forty years dead—that was it, that was right, dead, as dead as poor Ellen Alvard, as Dad-dead as Raymund Alvard her husband, now.

  Not frozen, not sleeping, not hibernating. Dead.

  They had drugged him and let the cancer kill him, and frozen his corpse before it had time to rot. Dead, indubitably dead.

  What was death? The cessation of breath? They had waited for that. The end of heart action? They had that too. The termination of cellular processes? That had occurred on freezing.

  Where had he been then? Or was he only a wind-up toy, equipped now with the near miraculous battery (originally intended for wristwatches) with which he had equippe
d his books? If only a toy, did it matter—even to him—if he was wound up or not, if there was no child to see?

  A book then. He was a book, of course. (He laughed aloud, then held his hand over his mouth for fear someone might come in.) And this, this was a bookcase. This prison. How could it have taken so long for him to understand? Not a goldfish bowl, not a cage, not even a jail. A bookcase. Not open shelves either—a cabinet with solid doors of dark wood, doors that closed.

  He got out of bed and tottered to the window to look out, and there they were, half a mile away, the towering, dark doors. And he could see across the roofs of the surrounding buildings—so this was the seventh floor after all. What was it the orderly had said the country was called now? The Unified States and Kingdoms. The U.S.K. They must have adopted the British system for numbering the floors of buildings.

  Death Island—here he was. Looking carefully now, out into the sunlight, he could even see the old walls, the brick walls he remembered, much nearer than the new, dark ones. They had expanded the place then—built the new prison in a ring around the old one. No wonder the grille had been done away with—who, climbing from that window, could escape through all the maze of walls and cell-block buildings? It was a city, and it seemed a bigger city than any he had known.

  But it was only a bookcase. The trick was to get off the shelf, to get into circulation. He looked up at the cerulean sky, and the white clouds, still symbols of freedom, unchanged since his own time. From forty years since. And then …

  Leviathan!

  It was as though in looking up he had looked down instead, and beheld a planet turning beneath him. Too big—oh, far too large a thing to be in air. High up, but so large, still, that even so it seemed to fill the sky. As he watched, its shadow came, dyeing the prison inky black. It was a … what? Not an airplane. Not like a ship either—a thing of the air surely, or of the space above the atmosphere, a thing of heights. Not silver; steely metal splashed with brown. As a dam massive; ruined, crazily aslant, and drifting, with the sun shining through rents where the hull plates and internal fittings had been torn away and only the great, curved beams of the skeleton remained.