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

by Gene Wolfe

  In the end, he ran into Nitty. Nitty no longer had his sweat and woodsmoke smell, because of the rain; but he still had the same feel, and the same voice when he said: “There you are. I been lookin’ just everyplace for you. I thought somebody had run off with you to get you out of the wet. Where you been?” He raised Little Tib on his shoulders.

  Little Tib plunged his hands into the thick, wet hair and hung on. “On the stage,” he said.

  “On the stage still? Well, I swear.” Nitty was walking fast, taking big, long strides. Little Tib’s body rocked with the swing of them. “That was the one place I never thought to look for you. I thought you would have come off there fast, looking for me, or someplace dry. But I guess you were afraid of falling off.”

  “Yes,” Little Tib said, “I was afraid of falling off.” Running in the rain had let all the air out of the balloon; he felt empty inside, and like he had no bones at all. Twice he nearly slid from Nitty’s shoulders, but each time Nitty’s big hands reached up and caught him.

  The next morning a good-smelling woman came from the school for him. Little Tib was still in bed when she knocked on the door; but he heard Nitty open it, and her say, “I believe you have a blind child here.”

  “Yes’m,” Nitty said.

  “Mr. Parker—the new acting superintendent?—asked me to come over and escort him myself the first day. I’m Ms. Munson. I teach the blind class.”

  “I’m not sure he’s got clothes fit for school,” Nitty told her.

  “Oh, they come in just anything these days,” Ms. Munson said, and then she saw Little Tib, who had gotten out of bed when he heard the door open, and said, “I see what you mean. Is he dressed for a play?”

  “Last night,” Nitty told her.

  “Oh. I heard about it, but I wasn’t there.”

  Then Little Tib knew he still had the skirt-thing on that they had given him—but it was not; it was a dry, woolly towel. But he still had beads on, and metal bracelets on his arm.

  “His others are real ragged.”

  “I’m afraid he’ll have to wear them anyway,” Ms. Munson said. Nitty took him into the bathroom and took the beads and bracelets and towel off, and dressed him in his usual clothes. Then Ms. Munson led him out of the motel and opened the door of her little electric car for him.

  “Did Mr. Parker get his job again?” Little Tib asked when the car bounced out of the motel lot and onto the street.

  “I don’t know about again,” Ms. Munson said. “Did he have it before? But I understand he’s extremely well qualified in educational programming; and when they found out this morning that the computer was inoperative, he presented his credentials and offered to help. He called me about ten o’clock and asked me to go for you, but I couldn’t get away from the school until now.”

  “It’s noon, isn’t it,” Little Tib said. “It’s too hot for morning.”

  That afternoon he sat in Ms. Munson’s room with eight other blind children while a machine moved his hand over little dots on paper and told him what they were. When school was over and he could hear the seeing children milling in the hall outside, a woman older and thicker than Ms. Munson came for him and took him to a house where other, seeing, children larger than he lived. He ate there; the thick woman was angry once because he pushed his beets, by accident, off his plate. That night he slept in a narrow bed.

  The next three days were all the same. In the morning the thick woman took him to school. In the evening she came for him. There was a television at the thick woman’s house—Little Tib could never remember her name afterward—and when supper was over, the children listened to television.

  On the fifth day of school he heard his father’s voice in the corridor outside, and then his father came into Ms. Munson’s room with a man from the school, who sounded important.

  “This is Mr. Jefferson,” the man from the school told Ms. Munson. “He’s from the Government. You are to release one of your students to his care. Do you have a George Tibbs here?”

  Little Tib felt his father’s hand close on his shoulder. “I have him,” his father said. They went out the front door, and down the steps, and then along the side. “There’s been a change in orders, son; I’m to bring you to Niagara for examination.”

  “All right.”

  “There’s no place to park around this damn school. I had to park a block away.”

  Little Tib remembered the rattley truck his father had when they lived at the old place; but he knew somehow that the truck was gone like the old place itself, belonging to the real father locked in his memory. The father of now would have a nice car.

  He heard footsteps, and then there was a man he could see walking in front of them—a man so small he was hardly taller than Little Tib himself. He had a shiny bald head with upcurling hair at the sides of it; and a bright green coat with two long coattails and two sparkling green buttons. When he turned around to face them (skipping backwards to keep up), Little Tib saw that his face was all red and white except for two little, dark eyes that almost seemed to shoot out sparks. He had a big, hooked nose like Indra’s, but on him it did not look cruel. “And what can I do for you?” he asked Little Tib.

  “Get me loose,” Little Tib said. “Make him let go of me.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” Little Tib confessed.

  The man in the green coat nodded to himself as if he had guessed that all along, and took an envelope of silver paper out of his inside coat pocket. “If you are caught again,” he said, “it will be for good. Understand? Running is for people who are not helped.” He tore one end of the envelope open. It was full of glittering powder, as Little Tib saw when he poured it out into his hand. “You remind me,” he said, “of a friend of mine named Tip. Tip with a p. A b is just a p turned upside down.” He threw the glittering powder into the air, and spoke a word Little Tib could not quite hear.

  For just a second there were two things at once. There was the sidewalk and the row of cars on one side and the lawns on the other; and there was Ms. Munson’s room, with the sounds of the other children, and the mopped-floor smell. He looked around at the light on the cars, and then it was gone and there was only the sound of his father’s voice in the hall outside, and the feel of the school desk and the paper with dots in it. The voice of the man in the green coat (as if he had not gone away at all) said, “Tip turned out to be the ruler of all of us in the end, you know.” Then there was the beating of big wings. And then it was all gone, gone completely. The classroom door opened, and a man from the school who sounded important said, “Ms. Munson, I have a gentleman here who states that he is the father of one of your pupils.

  “Would you give me your name again, sir?”

  “George Tibbs. My boy’s name is George Tibbs too.”

  “Is this your father, George?” Ms. Munson said.

  “How would he know? He’s blind.”

  Little Tib said nothing, and the Important Man said, “Perhaps we’d better all go up to the office. You say that you’re with the Federal Government, Mr. Tibbs?”

  “The Office of Biogenetic Improvement. I suppose you’re surprised, seeing that I’m nothing but a dirt farmer—but I got into it througli the Agricultural Program.”

  “Ah.”

  Ms. Munson, who was holding Little Tib’s hand, led him around a corner.

  “I’m working on a case now … Perhaps it would be better if the boy waited outside.”

  A door opened. “We haven’t been able to identify him, you understand,” the Important Man said. “His retinas are gone. That’s the reason for all this red tape.”

  Ms. Munson helped Little Tib find a chair, and said, “Wait here.” Then the door closed and everyone was gone. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, and for an instant there were points of light like the glittering dust the man in the green coat had thrown. He thought about what he was going to do, and not running. Then about Krishna, because he had been Krishna. Had Krishna r
un? Or had he gone back to fight the king who had wanted to kill him? He could not be sure, but he did not think Krishna had run. Jesus had fled into Egypt, he remembered that. But he had come back. Not to Bethlehem where he had run from, but to Nazareth, because that was his real home. He remembered talking about the Jesus story to his father, when they were sitting on the stage. His father had brushed it aside; but Little Tib felt it might be important somehow. He put his chin on his hands to think about it.

  The chair was hard—harder than any rock he had ever sat on. He felt the unyielding wood of its arms stretching to either side of him while he thought. There was something horrible about those arms, something he could not remember. Just outside the door the bell rang, and he could hear the noise the children’s feet made in the hall. It was recess; they were pouring out the doors, pouring out into the warm fragrance of spring outside.

  He got up, and found the door-edge with his fingers. He did not know whether anyone was seeing him or not. In an instant he was in the crowd of pushing children. He let them carry him down the steps.

  Outside, games went on all around him. He stopped shuffling and shoving now, and began to walk. With the first step he knew that he would go on walking like this all day. It felt better than anything else he had ever done. He walked through all the games until he found the fence around the schoolyard; then down the fence until he found a gate, then out the gate and down the road.

  I’ll have to get a stick, he thought.

  When he had gone about five kilometers, as well as he could judge, he heard the whistle of a train far off and turned toward it. Railroad tracks were better than roads—he had learned that months ago. He was less likely to meet people, and trains only went by once in a while. Cars and trucks went by all the time, and any one of them could kill.

  After a while he picked up a good stick—light but flexible, and just the right length. He climbed the embankment then, and began to walk where he wanted to walk, on the rails, balancing with his stick. There was a little girl ahead of him, and he could see her, so he knew she was an angel. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “I mustn’t tell you,” she answered, “but you can call me Dorothy.” She asked his, and he did not say George Tibbs but Little Tib, which was what his mother and father had always called him.

  “You fixed my leg, so I’m going with you,” Dorothy announced. (She did not really sound like the same girl.) After a time she added: “I can help you a lot. I can tell you what to look out for.”

  “I know you can,” Little Tib said humbly.

  “Like now. There’s a man up ahead of us.”

  “A bad man?” Little Tib asked, “or a good man?”

  “A nice man. A shaggy man.”

  “Hello.” It was Nitty’s voice. “I didn’t really expect to see you here, George, but I guess I should have.”

  Little Tib said, “I don’t like school.”

  “That’s just the different of me. I do like it, only it seems like they don’t like me.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Parker get you your job back?”

  “I think Mr. Parker kind of forgot me.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” Little Tib said.

  “Well, little blind boy, Mr. Parker is white, you know. And when a white man has been helped out by a black one, he likes to forget it sometimes.”

  “I see,” Little Tib said, though he did not. Black and white seemed very unimportant to him.

  “I hear it works the other way too.” Nitty laughed.

  “This is Dorothy,” Little Tib said.

  Nitty said, “I can’t see any Dorothy, George.” His voice sounded funny.

  “Well, I can’t see you,” Little Tib told him.

  “I guess that’s right. Hello, Dorothy. Where are you an’ George goin’?”

  “We’re going to Sugarland,” Little Tib told him. “In Sugarland they know who you are.”

  “Is Sugarland for real?” Nitty asked. “I always thought it was just some place you made up.”

  “No, Sugarland is in Texas.”

  “How about that,” Nitty said. The light of the sun, now setting, made the railroad ties as yellow as butter. Nitty took Little Tib’s hand, and Little Tib took Dorothy’s, and the three of them walked between the rails. Nitty took up a lot of room, but Little Tib did not take much, and Dorothy hardly took any at all.

  When they had gone half a kilometer, they began to skip.

  SEVEN AMERICAN NIGHTS

  ESTEEMED AND LEARNED MADAME:

  As I last wrote you, it appears to me likely that your son Nadan (may Allah preserve him!) has left the old capital and traveled—of his own will or another’s—north into the region about the Bay of Delaware. My conjecture is now confirmed by the discovery in those regions of the notebook I enclose. It is not of American manufacture, as you see; and though it holds only the records of a single week, several suggestive items therein provide us new reason to hope.

  I have photocopied the contents to guide me in my investigations; but I am alert to the probability that you, Madame, with your superior knowledge of the young man we seek, may discover implications I have overlooked. Should that be the case, I urge you to write me at once.

  Though I hesitate to mention it in connection with so encouraging a finding, your most recently due remission has not yet arrived. I assume that this tardiness results from the procrastination of the mails, which is here truly abominable. I must warn you, however, that I shall be forced to discontinue the search unless funds sufficient for my expenses are forthcoming before the advent of winter.

  With inexpressible respect,

  HASSAN KERBELAI

  Here I am at last! After twelve mortal days aboard the Princess Fatimah—twelve days of cold and ennui—twelve days of bad food and throbbing engines—the joy of being on land again is like the delight a condemned man must feel when a letter from the shah snatches him from beneath the very blade of death. America! America! Dull days are no more! They say that everyone who comes here either loves or hates you, America—by Allah I love you now!

  Having begun this record at last, I find I do not know where to begin. I had been reading travel diaries before I left home; and so when I saw you, O Book, lying so square and thick in your stall in the bazaar—why should I not have adventures too, and write a book like Osman Aga’s? Few come to this sad country at the world’s edge after all, and most who do land farther up the coast.

  And that gives me the clue I was looking for—how to begin. America began for me as colored water. When I went out on deck yesterday morning, the ocean had changed from green to yellow. I had never heard of such a thing before, neither in my reading, nor in my talks with Uncle Mirza, who was here thirty years ago. I am afraid I behaved like the greatest fool imaginable, running about the ship babbling, and looking over the side every few minutes to make certain the rich mustard color was still there and would not vanish the way things do in dreams when we try to point them out to someone else. The steward told me he knew. Golam Gassem the grain merchant (whom I had tried to avoid meeting for the entire trip until that moment) said, “Yes, yes,” and turned away in a fashion that showed he had been avoiding me too, and that it was going to take more of a miracle than yellow water to change his feelings.

  One of the few native Americans in first class came out just then: Mister—as the style is here—Tallman, husband of the lovely Madam Tallman, who really deserves such a tall man as myself. (Whether her husband chose that name in self-derision, or in the hope that it would erase others’ memory of his infirmity; or whether it was his father’s, and is merely one of the countless ironies of fate, I do not know. There was something wrong with his back.) As if I had not made enough spectacle of myself already, I took this Mr. Tallman by the sleeve and told him to look over the side, explaining that the sea had turned yellow. I am afraid Mr. Tallman turned white himself instead, and turned something else too—his back—looking as though he would have struck me if he dared. It was comic
enough, I suppose—I heard some of the other passengers chuckling about it afterward—but I don’t believe I have seen such hatred in a human face before. Just then the captain came strolling up, and I—considerably deflated but not flattened yet, and thinking that he had not overheard Mr. Tallman and me—mentioned for the final time that day that the water had turned yellow. “I know,” the captain said. “It’s his country” (here he jerked his head in the direction of the pitiful Mr. Tallman), “bleeding to death.”

  Here it is evening again, and I see that I stopped writing last night before I had so much as described my first sight of the coast. Well, so be it. At home it is midnight, or nearly, and the life of the cafés is at its height. How I wish that I were there now, with you, Yasmin, not webbed among these red- and purple-clad strangers, who mob their own streets like an invading army, and duck into their houses like rats into their holes. But you, Yasmin, or Mother, or whoever may read this, will want to know of my day—only you are sometimes to think of me as I am now, bent over an old, scarred table in a decayed room with two beds, listening to the hastening feet in the streets outside.

  I slept late this morning; I suppose I was more tired from the voyage than I realized. By the time I woke, the whole of the city was alive around me, with vendors crying fish and fruits under my shuttered window, and the great wooden wains the Americans call trucks rumbling over the broken concrete on their wide iron wheels, bringing up goods from the ships in the Potomac anchorage. One sees very odd teams here, Yasmin. When I went to get my breakfast (one must go outside to reach the lobby and dining room in these American hotels, which I would think would be very inconvenient in bad weather) I saw one of these trucks with two oxen, a horse, and a mule in the traces, which would have made you laugh. The drivers crack their whips all the time.