by Gene Wolfe
“Maybe I do.” He found he was rubbing his temples with his fingertips. “Everything’s so crazy.”
Sheng chuckled. “We joke for gods. Relax, enjoy, laugh too. Do not do mean. Mean not belong joke. Die, drink wine with gods, laugh more.”
Dr. Pille said, “The pressures of life become too much for all of us now and then.”
It occurred to him that North might come up the stairs at any moment and kill them all. It seemed there was not much he could do about it.
“You tell,” Sheng said. “Nephew very wise. Sheng fool, but old fool, see much. Even fool learn at last.”
When he did not answer, Sheng continued in a tone that was almost coaxing. “Say Dr. Pille. Your doctor. Sheng listen.”
“All right. To start with, that name. What sort of world is it when you wake up in the hospital and they tell you you’re being treated by Dr. Pille?”
The doctor smiled, hiding his mouth behind his hand. “Is that all? You see, my family name is Di; but when I was in med school it struck me that it wasn’t quite the thing for a young physician, so I changed it. I’ve often regretted that change, I admit; I fear I retained an undergraduate sense of humor when I made it. But now Pille is on all my diplomas and licenses, and it would be a great deal of trouble to change back.”
“Am I really an alcoholic?”
“I doubt it. But if you think you might be, you’d better cut down on your drinking.”
Sheng said, “Drink tea,” and poured steaming brown liquid into his cup.
“If I’m not an alcoholic, why did you say I was when they brought me in? It was on my chart.”
Dr. Pille looked grave. “The woman preferred charges, and my uncle here had asked me to look out for you. He had seen you fall, you see. Breach of promise is quite serious, as you must know. If I had said you were sound except for your concussion, you’d have been taken to another hospital, and eventually to prison. By classifying you as an alcoholic, I was able to keep you at United and keep you off psychoactive drugs.”
“All right.” He nodded; it seemed too much to assimilate all at once. “Mr. Sheng, I was in this theater. I went into a magician’s cabinet, and I fell down what I guess was a trap door onto some old mattresses. But when the man I was with lit his cigarette lighter, we were in your basement.”
“Building belong theater. Sheng rent store, good tenant, always pay. Theater not need all room underground, let Sheng store merchandise, give Sheng key.”
Dr. Pille said something to Sheng in rapid Chinese, then asked, “Who is this man who was with you?”
“North.”
“He’s very dangerous. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“If he’s really in my uncle’s basement, I must inform the authorities. You should have—”
At that instant there was an explosion beneath their feet, rapidly followed by another. A demon, an alien being, a thing of flame having nothing to do with the life of earth (that yet seemed to live), roared up the stair, crashed into a wall, and veered into the room where they were drinking tea.
There was a third explosion.
He was in the street, sitting up and drinking tea. No, coffee. A cop in a tight blue overcoat held the mug, a thick, cracked one of white china. A white-coated medic crouched on the other side.
“See?” the cop said. “He’s coming around.”
A building was on fire. Men from two fire trucks sprayed it with water. He asked, “Is Mr. Sheng all right?”
The medic said, “You were in the Chinese shop? Okay, that explains it.”
The cop said, “They took him to the hospital already. He was pretty shaken up.”
The medic said, “We’ll take you there too as soon as we get another ambulance.”
He shook his head. “I’m not hurt. Dizzy, a little, that’s all. What happened?”
The cop said, “There was a panic in the theater next door. Some Feds tried to bust some of the actors, and there was a lot of shooting. Something started a fire—probably a stray bullet messing up the high voltage for the lights.”
The medic said, “We thought that everybody got out of the theater before the fire got too bad. Then we saw you.”
The cop said, “You’re out at the Grand, right? We found your room key in your pocket.”
He nodded.
“We found your car keys too, but I don’t want you to drive tonight. If you don’t want to go to the hospital, I’ll get a cab to take you back to your hotel, understand? You can pick up your car tomorrow.”
The medic asked, “Do you think you can stand up?”
He proved it by standing. His knees were a little weak, but he was able to walk. “I guess my coat’s ruined.”
“Yeah,” the cop said. “You’ll have to buy yourself a new one. That reminds me, I want you to check while Fred and I are here, so you’ll know we didn’t take anything.”
Feeling foolish he got out his wallet and carefully counted the money while another screeching fire truck arrived; there was a bit less than one thousand dollars in bills that looked nearly real. The thick sheaf marked ten cents was still in his topcoat pocket, as were his map and the doll.
At a corner far enough from the fire that traffic flowed unimpeded, the cop helped him into a taxi. The cop told the driver, “You take him out to the Grand, you got me? Nowhere else. He’s registered there, don’t worry, and he can pay you. If he passes out or anything on the way, tell ’em when you get there.”
“Okay,” the driver said. “Okay.” Then when the taxi’s door was shut, “Ya know, I hate these runs. Ya don’t hardly ever get no decent tip.”
He said nothing. He was staring out the window at the fire and thinking of Dr. Pille and North. He had forgotten to ask if Dr. Pille was all right. He had been afraid to ask about North, but North had probably been in the basement when the fireworks went off; North was almost certainly dead. Striking the trick match had made North drop that cigar, and the sparks had set off the fireworks, so he had killed North. He felt no regret, guilt only about having none. After a time it came to him that North had been courting death, had wanted to die, and in the effort to die had raised every encounter to the level of a life-and-death struggle.
“There won’t be nobody at the Grand wantin’ to go to town this late. Grand’s just about empty anyway. Have to deadhead all the way back.”
He said someone would probably want to go to the airport.
“Ya kiddin’? They don’t fly after dark.”
He put away the hundred he had been fingering and asked how far it was from the Grand to the airport.
“Twenty, thirty miles. But I got to take ya to the Grand. That son of a bitch has ya name and my number.”
“I was wondering if it was possible to go past the airport. I’d like to see it.”
“Be way out of ya way,” the driver told him.
“All right.”
He remembered driving North to the Grand, but they had not come by this route. Or at least, he recognized nothing he saw, though so many things were covered with snow that it was hard to be sure. The taxi dodged down a narrow street lined with bleak buildings with blazing windows. A drunk slept (or perhaps a man lay dead) in a doorway. He wondered if the dead man was dead in both worlds. Had Nixon felt a twinge, had Nixon shuddered, when North died? Perhaps. For Nixon had been loyal, or at least so he understood. Loyalty had been that President’s great, shining virtue, the thing that had made Nixon such a threat.
He said, “It’s the things that are most right about a man that make him a danger to everyone else.”
“Boy, you said a mouthful. The more man a man is …” The driver’s fingers snapped, sounding as loud as a pistol shot.
“If you want to stop at a bar, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Can’t drink on the job, buddy.”
The driver was silent after that, and so was he. Staring out of the window of the taxi, he tried to find a common thread among the things that h
ad happened to him, but time after time lost his thoughts among the looming buildings, the mystery and magic of the city. He remembered another city, his mother’s apartment and the way she had walked him to school every day in the first grade. There were bad men, she had said, in the city, who would steal little boys if they could. Perhaps they had.
Buildings spun by, then halted like Nazi soldiers, clicking their heels at the red lights. There were no freeways here, no overpasses, only narrow, twisting streets whose few inhabitants seemed sinister, and long, straight boulevards whose esplanades were buried in snow. He seemed to remember that Eisenhower had built the freeways, though he had been born during Eisenhower’s term of office. Eisenhower had brought Nixon; Nixon had brought North. His mind filled with lurid pictures of North trapped in the burning basement, firing at the flames.
Two boulevards met at an acute angle, and he recognized an evergreen near a streetlight, broken under its burden of snow. He had gone up or down this boulevard. He muttered, “Down,” to himself; it seemed to him that when he had seen the broken tree he had been going in the opposite direction, looking out of the opposite window, the window of the hunched little car that the nurse had given North. For what?
He pulled out the keys on the rabbit’s foot and looked at them. The rabbit’s foot had not been lucky for the car, or for the rabbit. Could the car have been a Rabbit? No, it had been a Mink—a rabbit would have gotten away even in that alley, run from the flames, bouncing over the trash cans and the broken, empty bottles, bottles emptied of cheap wine in which there was no Christ, wine grown in the California sun to be pissed away in a corner.
Did they have a California here? That had surely, surely been where Marcella had been when she called, where Emma was, Emma who drew Lara’s bath. Emma stood at his elbow, and though he could not see her there, he knew her for a Nazi soldier, a transvestite of the S.S. He wanted to say, “So, Colonel Hogan,” but the words would not come. The drawer was open, and in it lay the unopened letter, the letter shut with red wax. He was afraid of the woman, of the man behind him.
Why, I’m back in that dream again, he thought, and maybe when I wake up I’ll be asleep beside Lara.
A single book lay upon the desk, pinned there with a nail so it could not be stolen. The title was stamped on the black morocco cover in German letters of tarnished gold: Das Schloss.
Grand Hotel
He woke when the taxi stopped, very possibly because the driver had made certain that the stop would wake him. “That’s twenty-seven ten,” the driver said.
He handed over thirty dollars and got out.
Instead of pulling onto the terrace, the driver had let him off at its edge. Snow still danced across the broad flagstones; it was a dance of ghosts, of whirling white shapes that advanced and retreated in profound silence. A distant clock struck once, the deep tone of its bell rendered thin and spectral by miles of snow-covered fields; a freezing wind touched him through all his clothes.
He could hear the surf, and he turned aside from the warmth and the bright windows of the hotel to go to it, propelled by an attraction he could neither understand nor resist. The sand was strewn with shattered ice piled higher than his head.
He climbed it slowly and patiently, gripping the slabs with stiff fingers, slipping and falling often until at last he stood at the summit and looked across the whispering dark. It seemed to him then that he was himself a creature of the sea, a seal, a dolphin, or a sea lion made human by some heartless magic, magic like that which had given the mermaid legs in the story that had made him cry long ago, cry at the thought of the little mermaid dancing, dancing with her prince in the big castle in Elsinore, dancing the minuet while at each moment the white-hot nails of the land pierced her poor feet.
And it came to him that in those days before television had wholly claimed him, he had received from the mouth of his mother all the instruction he would need to navigate this queer country in which he found himself; but that he had paid no heed, or at least not enough heed, so that he could not recognize as once he might have recognized all its ogres and its elves, the shambling trolls and the dancing peris. North had been a monster, surely; yet what if North had been a salamander, and the master of the flames? What if North were waiting now in the hotel, if North danced with impatience in the hotel this very minuet, waiting hungrily to fire?
Surely his mother had taught him a spell for salamanders?
Nor was she dead, as he had once foolishly imagined. He had always known that, in some deep part of himself that he had banished for fear it would make him strange to employers, to the various girls in Personnel, to the supervisors and submanagers who could no longer be called floorwalkers (not by him at least, not by any hourly employee) the floorwalkers he had so longed to be, though he had no college, though he was not considered—and had never been considered—managerial material.
His mother had never been the waxen thing they had buried. He wondered where she was and why she had not called or written, why she had not advised him in some way, though perhaps she had, perhaps it was her letter that lay in the green-lined drawer of the dream.
The snow clouds parted for an instant, and the moon touched the ocean. He, seeing that fragment of it tossing in the silver light, knew it and knew that in some previous life he had sailed there for decades; and that this previous life was returning to him. He remained poised upon the ice, but the knowledge passed. The moonlight upon the waves became only the moon on the waves, and he grew accustomed to the salt bite of the wind, so that he no longer rejoiced in its sting, but felt only its cold. And after a time he turned away from the ocean and clambered slowly down, often slipping, gripping the ragged ice-slabs with frozen fingers, and crossed the black road with its dancing ghosts, and crossed the broad terrace with its dancing ghosts, and went at last up the steps and into the Grand Hotel.
The hotel had double walls of glass, with a double door in each. Between the first glass wall and the second stood a lone bellboy, like a sentinel guarding a castle without a garrison, a last sentinel left behind by Caesar to watch over the Roman Wall or the Rhine. This bellboy looked at his burned and perforated topcoat and his seared face and said, “Can I help you, sir?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you can. At least, I hope you can.” He wanted to tell this bellboy his room number, but he could not remember it, so he said, “There was a fire. In a theater and a Chinese shop.”
The bellboy nodded wisely. “What theater was it, sir?” The bellboy had curly hair as blond as excelsior and wore his pillbox cap over one ear.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “There was some sort of play, about a revolution.”
“Ah, that’d be the Adrian, sir. Nice place.”
“Not any more,” he said. “It burned to the ground.”
“Prob’ly the Government did it, sir. You know how they are.”
He nodded (though he did not know) and asked, “Isn’t there anyone at the desk?”
“Not this late there isn’t, sir. I’m supposed to take care of it. I’ll take you up in the elevator too, sir.” The bellboy shrugged. “It’s our off season, sir. You know how it is. If we had fireplaces in the rooms …” The bellboy shrugged again, a minute movement of thin shoulders beneath his skin-tight red jacket.
“My friend rented our room. I’d like to know how long it’s paid for.”
“I can look that up for you, sir.”
He nodded, took his hotel key out of his pocket and handed it to the bellboy, who opened the inner glass door for him and showed him into the lobby.
At the desk, the bellboy opened an enormous book and paged through it. “Here you are, sir. That was yesterday, or rather the day before, the way it is now. For a week, sir, so you’ve got six more nights left, counting tonight.”
In the elevator, he asked the bellboy where he could buy a new coat. He was fairly sure that North had bought the shirts, ties, and hats without leaving the hotel; perhaps North really could drive, but he had always
been asked to drive, been ordered to drive.
He said, “I beg your pardon?”
“I was saying there’s a place here, sir. In fact, they’re having a big sale, because of it being the off season. In the lower level, sir. There’s a barber shop down there too, and a billiard parlor. Lots of things.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I got lost in what I was thinking.”
“It’s natural you’re shaken up, sir. You must have just barely got out alive.”
He said, “I don’t know,” wondering if he was not in fact dead. He remembered hearing about Purgatory as a child; even then he had not believed it, but perhaps he had been wrong, as he had been wrong about things so many times since, wrong about a whole series of wrong choices that had seemed likely never to end—until at last Lara had chosen him. Did they have fires in Purgatory? No, they had fires in Hell.
He felt that the elevator had started too fast, wrenching and shaking him. And yet he had not noticed at the time, not noticed until its motion had become smooth, showing him all the floors, all the hallways of the hotel, its veins and nerves laid bare by this cage of wrought iron, which displayed to him water lilies and pyramids at one level, golden cattle and sheaves of wheat at the next.
And at every level, empty veins and silent nerves. This was what a scalpel saw as it sliced flesh, this sectioned view that could not live.
He had undergone several operations as a child, none since, and thus he found that his view of surgery was still a child’s—you went to sleep in the daytime and woke sick. This had been the reality, this surgeon’s elevator touring his body to learn how it was made; the wrought iron glared at him with the faces of jungle beasts, from the rolling eyes of a bull with the wings of a vulture and the bearded head of a man.
“Top floor, sir.” The bellboy took out the key. “I’ll see you to your room, sir.”
“Do I look that bad?”
“I’ll feel better if I do, sir.” The bellboy hurried down the hallway ahead of him. “Here we are, sir. Imperial Suite.” With a rattle of the lock, he opened the door. “You and your friend are the only ones on this floor, but if you have trouble or anything just call the desk. I’ll hear the phone.”
