by Gene Wolfe
Then she told all about the box, and how it probably hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years, and how people in England had opened an old trunk they’d found in a bank and discovered a poem by Shelley that nobody’d known about.
Just then Aladdin Blue came by with a couple of books; they were cheap ones—I think it was only about three bucks for the two together. “Hi,” I said. “I thought you were curious about Pandora’s Box. You asked if I knew what was in it, remember?”
Blue nodded and looked worried. Through the window I could smell popcorn, and hear Elaine saying over the PA system, “I’m not going to pick it up and shake it for you, because it’s very heavy. There’s something in there, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask the men who carried it.”
I said, “Well, you can’t have found out, so why aren’t you out there watching?”
“I can see from here,” he told me. “So can you.”
“I’m here because I’m supposed to be working. Really, have you found out? Honest, now.”
Blue shook his head.
“Then what’s bugging you?”
“Do you recall the story? I’ve been refreshing my memory.” One of the books he had was a fat, red one, and he was holding a place in it with his finger. He opened it then, I guess to get all the names right. “Pandora was the Greek Eve,” he said, “the first woman, created to punish men for accepting Prometheus’ gift of fire. Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes persuasion, and so on and so forth; and when she was complete, they launched her like a missile at the then-wholly-male human race. Humanity had been the doing of the titan Epimetheus, and he’d set aside in a box all the qualities he felt people would be better off without—envy, malice, and so on. They gave her that box, and with it a name that meant all-gifted.”
I told him, “It sounds like a kid’s story to me.”
Blue shook his head. “Why is it that people will rave all afternoon over the philosophy, the art, the literature, and the architecture of the ancient Greeks, then dismiss something like the legend of Pandora as a fairy tale?” I didn’t answer, and he said, “I suppose it’s because fairy tales have their own depths and hidden caverns, and dismissing one is as easy as scoffing at the other.”
He laid a five on the table, but I wouldn’t take it. “Hey, prove it,” I said. “Show me some of those caves.”
(Outside, there was a little girl in a yellow dress up on the platform with Elaine, getting her blindfold on so she could pull a ticket stub out of the big wire drum.)
“In the first place,” Blue lectured, “it’s a commentary on Platonism—the idea that each real thing is an imperfect attempt to duplicate an ideal one. Epimetheus had made mankind like the gods, so the gods made Pandora like a goddess. The Greeks were saying that real people are caricatures of ideal people—their gods. In the second place, think of the pure fiendishness that the Greeks attributed to those perfect gods—Pandora was human herself, and thus a part of the target as well as a part of the weapon, like the wonderful guidance mechanism that directs an ICBM, a mechanism that is vaporized when the warhead—”
“Wait a minute. This is all so interesting I’m just damned near spellbound, but what does it have to do with the box Elaine found? Why are you so worried about it? If you think there’s really and truly such a thing as Pandora’s Box, and Elaine’s got it out there on the platform with her, you’re a lot crazier than your friend the judge and my Uncle Herbert put together. To get it to come out even, I’d have to throw in Daffy Duck.”
Blue got mad. “Of course there was a real Pandora’s Box. And of course your mother has it there on the platform with her, just as we’ve got it in here, with us.” Before I could jerk my head away, he tapped my temple with the knuckles of his free hand. “It’s the part of the human brain that’s suppressed in the interests of society. You just mentioned your uncle, and yesterday you telephoned to ask me about him. He killed Alice Nyman Hollander because Pandora’s Box had been opened, if you like. Didn’t I tell you Pandora was also a part of the target?”
“I’m starting to think you really are crazy. You get hold of some old story—”
Blue raised his hand to stop me. “Is that old sunshine out there? That sun’s been beating down on some part of this planet from the beginning. In this school they no doubt teach you that the difference between myth and history is that history concerns past events and myth events that never were—provided that they condescend to mention either. But the real difference is that the events that make up history are over and done with, while myth continues, circling our earth forever, like the chariot of Helios.”
Elaine’s voice crackled from the loudspeakers again: “Five hundred and ninety-six. Is number five hundred and ninety-six here? You have to be present to win.”
Some people in the crowd outside took it up, yelling, “Five ninety-six!” Feeling in some dumb way that I was in a position of responsibility because Uncle Dee had handed me a cash box, I announced, “Five ninety-six,” to the assembled browsers. “Are any of you five hundred and ninety-six? If you are, you’ve won Pandora’s Box.”
A middle-aged guy in a Hawaiian sport shirt looked around. “That’s me!”
He scooted toward the stairs, and I went over to the window and stuck my head out. “He’s coming!” I yelled at Elaine. “The winner’s on his way!”
“How about that,” one of the other browsers said. “He was right in here with us.” He had a whole stack of books, and I pushed the prices into the little calculator that went with the job and gave him a shopping bag for them. “Got to wait on cash customers,” I told Blue. “Sorry, Professor.”
He chuckled. “I hope you realize what a customer you lost. That was mankind. He just heard his cue, and dashed on stage to speak his lines in the five hundredth—or five hundred millionth—performance of a drama that was ancient already when some wise Greek provided it with a name.”
Looking out the window, I could see the man in the Hawaiian shirt pushing through the crowd around the platform, holding his ticket over his head. I asked, “Do you really believe something bad’s about to happen, Mr. Blue?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think that I’ve been carrying on like an old woman. But I’m afraid something may, just the same—so often the old women are right. I don’t suppose you know where your mother acquired that box?”
“She bought it down in Chicago someplace.”
“Was there a price tag on it when you first saw it?”
“Not that I remember. What difference does it make?”
“None, I suppose. But I can tell you why I’m worried. Do you know much about the century before our own, Holly?”
“Sure, how much do you want? Abe Lincoln, the Civil War, the only good Injun’s a dead Injun, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Remember the Maine … .”
Larry was on the platform now holding a black leather case of lock tools. Somebody had taken the wire drum and the little girl down, but even so there was barely room for him and the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and Pandora’s Box on its stand; Elaine was starting down the rickety steps, with Larry holding one hand to help her keep her balance.
“All right,” Blue said, “that’s enough, and I think you’ve made my point for me. It was a rough hundred years. We haven’t—thank God—had a war on American soil in this century, but the Civil War was fought across half the continent. The west was lawless, and the east criminal. Indians killed whites and were killed themselves where you and I are standing now.”
Out on the platform, Larry was on his knees in front of the box, monkeying with the lock.
“It was a rough era,” Blue said again, “and if those people built a solid, clearly expensive chest and wrote Pandora on the lid, I wouldn’t advise anyone to open it—and particularly not at the urging of a woman—unless he was quite confident he knew what was inside.”
I guess the explosion knocked me off my feet, but really I don’t remember it. I was talking with B
lue, and I heard a ringing, just for a moment, like a phone or maybe an oldfashioned alarm clock. Then I was underneath a table, with books scattered all around me on the floor and my blood ruining them.
How I Had Breakfast in Bed and Received Visitors
Somehow I rolled out from under the table and got up. Maybe it was quiet—I don’t know. My ears were ringing so bad I couldn’t have heard a garage band from the front row.
I stared at the wall, because some way I’d gotten the idea it had been blown down. It hadn’t, and if it had I don’t think I’d have been standing there; but at the moment it seemed like a miracle to see it where it had always been.
I was all alone there in the chem lab, with so many books and so much broken glass and stinking chemicals all around that I could hardly walk. I don’t suppose I would have balanced very good even if the floor had been clean. I was wearing my boots, and I could feel blood sloshing in the right one.
Just about when I got to the door, people started screaming—or maybe it was only that my ears had quieted down to where I could hear them.
Outside was a mess. Nobody had gotten there yet—no fire trucks, no ambulances, no cops. There were people all over the ground—I thought a hundred of them were dead at least. There were others staggering around like me and half the time stepping on them. There was blood all over—some alongside people where it ought to be, and some out on the grass as if it had dropped from the sky, which maybe it had. I tripped over something and looked down, and it was a shoe, a man’s brown shoe; it had laces and they were still tied, but there was no foot in it.
There were people giving first aid, and a lot more who were trying to but had forgotten anything they ever knew about it. I saw one man working over another man who looked better than he did. There were maybe a couple dozen people who were hysterical—most of them were women, but some were kids and some were men. There were dazed people wandering around for reasons they didn’t understand, looking for something that made no sense; and after a while I realized I was one of them.
Then the sirens started. I don’t know who got to the high school first, but the first thing I saw was the hook-and-ladder. There are some little trees about as tall as a good basketball player out front, and I remember having some crazy idea that the firemen would use the ladders to climb them and get bodies down. I don’t know what crazy idea the firemen themselves had; maybe they just brought along their hook-and-ladder thinking it might be useful, the way you drop a pair of scissors into the basket when you’re packing for a picnic.
So all of a sudden there were guys in white coats running around carrying stretchers, and firemen with stretchers and aid kits, too, only the firemen had on slickers, and those terrific hats they always have. Lots of people were finding each other: “Bob! Oh, Bob!” Sob, sob. “Betty! You’re okay!” Pant, pant. “Billy! Billy!” “Let go, Mom!”
Just about then I caught sight of Aladdin Blue. Something had happened to his shirt, and he was knotting a rag around some other guy’s hand. I ran to him and grabbed him and hollered, “I thought you were dead!”
He said, “You’re hurt,” and bum leg and all hauled me over to an ambulance. A couple of guys there cut open my jeans and bandaged my leg, working so fast I hardly knew what they’d done. Next minute we were swaying along, going like hell and hitting every chuckhole on Main Street. Somebody’d shot me up, and I was dizzy from it. A woman on one of the other stretchers said, “Where’re they taking us?” and I said, to the hospital, meaning Barton Community Hospital.
Only we never got there. We just went on and on, “Rrrr, rrrrr, rrrrrrr … ,” until I thought we had to be in Wisconsin, or maybe Canada.
I’ll spare you the rest of the bloody details. There were lots of people hurt worse than I was. It turned out that B.C.H. had been full, or maybe they were saving it for the people who might really die or something, and they’d taken us to Palestine, which isn’t where you think but a suburb closer to Chicago than Barton is. The emergency ward there patched me up some more—stitches and about two pints of blood this time instead of just gauze and pads—and told me I’d been cut by flying glass (which I’d already figured out for myself) and not zapped by shrapnel. That was the first time I heard of shrapnel. Then they tucked me away in one of those nice cozy hospital beds that are about five feet off the floor and eighteen inches wide, and gave me a pill, and after a while I went right to sleep.
When I woke up it was morning; and believe it or not for ten minutes or so I wasn’t sure what had happened or where I was. I felt like I’d had terrible dreams all night, but whenever I tried to put a finger on them, they turned out to be something that had really happened, like my throwing my arms around Aladdin Blue and getting my blood on him. I felt, too, that somehow something had changed—that my old world had stopped while I was sitting behind the card table, and a new one had started when I came to under one of the lab tables; and I would never in my whole life ever be able to get back to my old world again. I kept telling myself it was crazy, and it’s only about now that I’ve come to realize that it was absolutely true.
I was in a private room with nobody around to talk to me or answer questions. Instead of medicine, all I could smell was flowers; there was a big bouquet on the table beside my bed. My head hurt and my leg hurt, but I couldn’t do anything about them and I wanted something that would take my mind off them. There was a TV up almost at the ceiling, looking down as you might say at me in my bed; but I didn’t know how to switch it on. I kept thinking how lucky it was I’d ridden into town in the Caddy with Elaine, because if I hadn’t I’d have been worried to death about Sidi, and the way it was I knew Bill would take care of him till I got back. Then I started thinking about everybody I thought might’ve been at the Fair and wondering if they were all right. Aladdin Blue was okay or pretty close to it, because I’d seen him. But what about Elaine? Uncle Dee? Les? Megan? Larry?
Then it hit me. What had blown up must have been Pandora’s Box; and if that was right, Larry’d been right on top of it.
After about half an hour a nurse came in. She sure wasn’t like the beautiful nurses you see on the tube, but she wasn’t a battle-ax either, and she gave me a little smile. “We’re awake! Could we see someone now? We have a visitor.”
I thought it was going to be Aladdin Blue, so I said yes, but the truth was I’d have seen anybody. I also asked if there was any chance of getting some breakfast.
The nurse said she was sure there was, and a minute later a young cop I’d seen around Barton once or twice came in. Uniform, gun, the whole nine, except instead of wearing his hat he had it with his clipboard. He smiled and told me he was Officer Ritter. Blue eyes and crew-cut blond hair made him look like a handsome storm trooper. I told him I was Patient Hollander.
He sat down and laid his hat on my table and fixed up his clipboard on his knee. “I’ve got your name already, and your age. Where were you when it happened?”
“Why is it you that’s asking me? Aren’t you going to call in the Bomb Squad from Chicago?”
“We already have,” he said, “but that’s just for technical advice on the bomb.”
“Who’s we?”
I expected him to tighten up, but he didn’t. “The Barton Police and the Pool County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Aren’t you going to call in the FBI or something?” He shook his head. “Only if we uncover evidence indicating that a federal law’s been violated.”
“Maybe I could pray in school.”
“I wish you would,” he said straight-faced. “I’d appreciate it. Where were you when it happened?”
So I told him just like I’ve told you, but in a whole lot more detail because he kept going over it and over it and asking screwy questions like how far was my table from the window, and had Blue flinched before the bomb went off. I said how could he have flinched when he didn’t know there was a bomb, and he read me back all that stuff Blue had reeled off about Pandora before the explosion.
“Okay,” I said, “you got me. Or anyway you got him because I shot off my mouth. But do you think he’d be dumb enough to go around talking like that if there was a bomb and he planted it?”
Straight-faced again, he said, “I don’t know. Would he?”
“Heck, no. Listen, nobody’s ever told me—is my mother all right? Elaine Hollander?”
He studied his clipboard. “She must be. She’s not on the injured list.”
“And she’s not dead?”
He shook his head. “So far the only identified fatalities are Drexel K. Munroe and Lawrence L. Lief.”
“So far?”
He looked grim, like it might actually be getting to him a little. “A lot of the injured are hurt worse than you are, Miss Hollander.”
“I’m hip.”
Just then the nurse came in with my breakfast tray: coffee, vitamin, fake orange juice, small bowl of oatmeal, tablespoon of cold scrambled eggs, and half a slice of toast. Whoopee. “I’ll let you eat now,” Ritter told me. “Somebody will come by to see you again later.”
“Don’t be a party pooper. Stay and join me.”
It was too late—he was halfway to the door. The truth was I had a lot more questions to ask him; I think he must have seen them coming, and that was why he beat it. I decided next time I’d ask questions first, and if I didn’t get answers I wouldn’t give any.
And by golly I stuck to it, too. Next time turned out to be some kind of plainclothes detective—I never got it straight where he was from, maybe Illinois Bureau of Investigation, which is a ripoff of the FBI, exactly like it sounds. He wasn’t giving any info and wasn’t getting any info, and pretty soon he went away.
Lunch was peachy keen—a li’l square of broiled fish, the cutest tiny paper cup of tartar sauce, some boiled carrots, two slices of white bread, a pat of margarine, and a glass of milk. I could have cried.
