by Gene Wolfe
Possibly it was my apartment after all, John Parker thought. I have done what the sign said.
The soles of his shoes were slightly sticky as he walked the corridor today. Now he read the graffiti, something he had not done for years. Yes, this was the seventy-fifth floor, to which a few new injunctions had been added. He searched it with his eyes—someone was assaulted in the building every month or so. He knocked at his own door, liberally besprinkled with short words, though most of the boys in this part of the building were supposed to be afraid of Robert.
“Yes?”
“Me. John.” It was what he always said. He listened to Roseanne unfasten the chain and turn the bolt, then stepped into the warmth—struck again, as he had been every day for the past week, by how little Roseanne resembled him. Or, he thought, as he stared at his reflection in the window later, how little he resembled her. Weren’t couples supposed to come to look alike? He and Roseanne had been together for nearly twenty years now.
Yet that was all right. Roseanne was no blood of his, not his sister, not his cousin. The children resembled neither of them, and that was not all right—not quite. Robert was tall and fair. Tina was fair, and would be tall. Both had blue eyes; his own were brown, Roseanne’s hazel. Marian was small and dark, much smaller than he—smaller, for that matter than his mother or his sisters. Her eyes were brown, but darker than his own; her hair nearly black.
An accident of the genes? Quite possibly, and it did not really matter. But none of them thought the way he did, they all thought he was eccentric or worse, and that mattered a great deal. He got out a sheet of paper and squared it on his board, using the inexpensive little drafting machine his scholarship had supplied him with when he had entered the university. It had had to be repaired many times since then, but now, when he had long since lost sight of every human friend he had made there, it still functioned. He thought, This is the big day. This is the day I’m going to do the park.
“Another park?” Roseanne asked.
John Parker nodded, not looking up.
She leaned over his board as she always did, her hair just brushing his cheek. “That’s a lovely one. What are these?”
“Habitats. It has a small zoo. African veldt here, pampas there. Andes over here. Refreshment complex—I’d like to have a real restaurant, but you can’t put that in a drawing, and you know they’d never do it. Rest rooms. Security station. Petting zoo for the children.”
“Maybe if you sent some of your plans to the mayor, he’d build them.”
“You have sent him some,” John Parker reminded her.
“I have, but you haven’t.” It was necessary to Roseanne’s peace of mind that she believe him vaguely important.
“Perhaps someday I will,” John Parker said.
“He was on TV just now. He looked very nice—you should have seen him. He asked everyone to cooperate with the police and refrain from vandalizing city property.”
“I’m not a vandal,” John Parker said.
Robert came in to borrow money. “Where’s this one?” he asked. “On the moon?”
“Mars,” John Parker said. “It would be perfectly possible to make Mars a world much like Earth. A cloud of finely powdered aluminum behind it would reflect back enough heat to raise the night temperature. Bringing down Deimos and Phobos and a little of the asteroid belt would increase the planet’s mass enough to let it hold an atmosphere, which you could make by breaking down the stony matter in the asteroids and moons. Pretty soon you’d turn the red planet green.”
“What’s this?”
“A hedge maze for children and lovers. There are seats, you see, and bowers. Sculpture the kids can climb on. They can wade in the pond too, and go up the tower in the middle to watch the people trying to find their way out. That’s the goal.”
“I bet I can solve it,” Robert said. He put his finger on the drawing to trace the paths, but soon gave up.
John Parker had expected a screen and a computer persona at the agency. He was surprised and pleased to be ushered into the presence of a human being, a gray-haired woman who did not even look particularly motherly. “I’m here to inquire about adoption,” John Parker said carefully.
“Certainly.” The woman paused. “I take it you are—how should I put it?—one half of a couple?”
John Parker shook his head.
Her hand went toward a button on her desk. “Perhaps we should have one of the legal staff present.”
He covered the button with his own hand and smiled. “That won’t be necessary. Really it won’t, Ms.—?”
“Harris. You needn’t be married, you understand, Mr. Parker.”
John Parker nodded.
“And of course the other member of the couple can be of your own gender—we don’t inquire. But there must be two persons willing to make a home, willing to take responsibility for the welfare of the child.”
“I don’t want to adopt a child. I want to be adopted myself.” Ms. Harris stared at him.
“I’m not being facetious. I want a group of children to take me as their father. I’m over forty, I have a good job and no criminal record.”
“You want them to adopt you,” Ms. Harris said.
John Parker nodded. “Is that ever done?”
Ms. Harris shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of it. I’ll bring it up at the next board meeting. It might be a good idea.”
“So much can be done with our minds now,” John Parker said. “Implanted learning and so on. It should be possible to erase whole areas of experience. After it was over, the man could forget it wasn’t his own family.” He leaned forward. “Honestly, Ms. Harris, didn’t they think of that long ago?”
Too quickly to be stopped, Ms. Harris’s hand stabbed one of the buttons. John Parker rose, got his overcoat, and walked out. No one attempted to stop him.
He got off at the sixty-seventh floor and went down the corridor counting doors. The old obscenity had been partially obscured by a new purple one. He knocked on it.
There was no answer.
He knocked again, louder. There was still no reply, and he thumped the door with his fist, and at last began to kick it. At the thirteenth or possibly the fifteenth kick, wood shattered and it flew open.
The strange living room was cool. Not as cold as the corridor outside, but not nearly as warm as his own. It had been an ordinary enough living room once, perhaps—two chairs, a sofa, the television, an end table. Yet it appeared (John Parker smiled to himself) that now someone was actually living in it. There was an untidy knot of blankets at one end of the sofa, a half-full glass of water on the end table, crumpled foil packages on the floor. He thought, If only I were enough of a detective, I could tell how long it’s been since anyone was here—but there are no detectives now, only police … .
The back of the television felt slightly warm, but he might have been wrong.
In the kitchen, the sink was filled with dirty plates and gummy cups and glasses. A full canister of synthetic coffee and three unopened packages of irradiated food lay in one of the cabinets; they were HAM AND LIMA BEANS, LIVER AND ONIONS, and SMOKED TONGUE WITH AU GRATIN POTATOES. “A kid,” John Parker said under his breath. He went into the living room again. “Come on out. I know you’re in here.” He did not, not really.
There was only one bedroom, and he wondered why the child did not sleep in it. When he opened the door, it was like opening the door of the foyer. Worse. A blast of icy wind hit him. He stepped inside, leaving the door open so he could keep an eye on the one to the corridor.
A dead woman lay in the bed. Her face was uncovered, her eyes open. John Parker pulled down the sheet. She wore only a nightgown; there was no blood, and there were no marks on her neck. He tossed an empty pill bottle into a dresser drawer and slid it closed, then pulled the sheet over her face, obscurely glad he had not had to touch her.
In the living room again, he shut the bedroom door behind him. The bathroom was locked; he t
old himself he should have thought of the bathroom to begin with. “Come out,” he said. “It’s no use. I’ll just break the lock.” He turned on the television and sat down on the sofa.
Twenty minutes passed before he heard the rattle of the knob. Without turning his head he said, “Come on out. I won’t hurt you, and I might be able to help you. You’re almost out of groceries.”
It was a boy, small and dark as Marian. “How’d you know?” he said.
“That you were in here? Somebody was. The nightbolt was out in your front door—I could see it through the crack, and it has to be turned from inside. A grown-up would have answered when I knocked, or at least yelled for help when I kicked the door. Then too, I looked at what you ate. There’d been soft drinks, but they were all gone and you were drinking water. You never made coffee, and the meals you’ve got left are the kind my own kids—” John Parker stopped, unable to finish the sentence. “I suppose I’m lucky I wasn’t arrested. I don’t know what made me come here, except that I’d been here once before. For some reason I thought I’d find something out here. You try to go back …”
“What are you going to do, Mister?”
“I don’t know,” John Parker said slowly.
“Ain’t you a blue?”
John Parker shook his head. “I’m an architect. Why didn’t you go to the police, or somebody, instead of just staying here and playing games with the elevators? If you’d told your teacher at school, it would have called some social agency.”
“They would have taken me away from here,” the boy said. “I didn’t want to go.”
“So you just opened the window and closed off the bedroom. How long ago?”
“I don’t know.”
The boy began to cry; the sobs shook him like convulsions, and for the first time John Parker realized how young he was. He picked him up. The room was still cold, and he opened his overcoat, wrapping it about them both. “Less than three weeks anyway. It hasn’t been this cold for longer than that. What’s your name?”
“Mitch.” More sobs. “Why’d Mama die?”
“Heart attack, probably. Bad food, bad air. People die young, Mitch, but she’s gone and that’s the thing to remember, and whatever it was that hurt her can’t hurt her anymore. Did you ever play some game when you knew the other kid was going to beat you?”
Interested, Mitch looked up and nodded.
“Then remember how when he does beat you, the game is over and you can go away. Dying’s like that. Your mother’s gone away, and she’s finished with whatever it was.”
“Do you know my father?”
“Perhaps,” John Parker said. “Who is your father?”
“I don’t know his name. He lives here in this building.”
“Do you think it could be me?”
Mitch shook his head. “I don’t think so. Mama showed him to me once.”
“And that’s why you stayed. You’ve been trying to find him.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“No,” John Parker said. “But I know what he is. Do you know that, Mitch?”
“No,” the boy said softly.
John Parker set him down and began to pace the room. “He’s someone like you. That’s what makes him your father. Take my own children. If I have any, they’ll be more or less like me—in logic, that’s called a tautology. If you’re crazy, your kids are crazy too, and crazy in more or less the same way you are. That’s what makes them your kids.” His foot sent a yellow envelope skittering across the floor. He retrieved it and tore it open: “This is your FINAL warning. If we do not receive … .” “They’re going to throw you out of here,” John Parker said. “How long ago did this come?”
“I don’t know.”
“Today?”
Mitch shook his head.
“Yesterday?”
“Maybe.” Mitch shrugged.
“There are probably two or three more in the series after this, but there may not be two, and anyway it’s possible you’ve already got them. Did your mother keep any writing paper?”
Mitch went into the little kitchen and brought a stack of cheap white stationery from a drawer. “We only need one envelope,” John Parker said. He wrote the Housing Authority’s address on it and added a stamp from the supply he carried in his check folder, then dropped the bill in.
“Are you going to pay?”
“Your mother must have been at least four months behind,” John Parker said, “and I can’t afford to. But this will buy us some time.” He tore out a check and crossed off his own name and Roseanne’s, then drew a line through the account number and wrote in a fictitious one. He made the check out for the amount specified on the bill, and signed it Robert Roberts-Parker, explaining, “The bank’s computer will read my account number anyway—it’s printed in magnetic ink. When I send the check back, they’ll credit my account and go looking for Robert, who’ll be hard to find since he doesn’t have an account and isn’t in the telephone directory. With any luck, they’ll spend a while on the number I gave them too.”
Mitch stared at him without comprehension.
“Eventually they’ll disallow the check and send you more letters. Something may have turned up by then. If it hasn’t, we’ll have to think up another game.” John Parker thrust the check into the envelope and licked the flap. “It’s a great principle—you could call it the principle of adventure or even the principle of play. Robert—that’s the young man who just paid your rent—tried to solve my maze and couldn’t, even after I told him that the tower was for the kids to climb, and the pond was for them to wade in. You have to wade across the pond to reach the tower, of course. He saw a barrier when he should have seen an invitation. I’ll show you that maze sometime. You like to play, Mitch?”
The boy nodded.
“Me too.” John Parker crossed to the window and stared at the dark sky beyond the glass. “That’s coal smoke, the technology of the nineteenth century brought into the twenty-first and hard at work. They could have conquered the solar system and harnessed the sun, but they did this instead, because there was no fun involved. Their great-grandfathers had done it, and they knew it would work. Tom Swift and His Steam Everything. I’ve got most of the Tom Swift books, Mitch, and I’ll let you read them when you’re a little older. Coal makes great buttons for snowmen, though.”
“Are we going to look for my father now?”
“As soon as I fix your lock,” John Parker said. He found epoxy in the kitchen and re-created the wood around the shattered socket. “That’ll set in three or four hours,” he told the boy. “If no one pushes on your door before then, this place will be all right. Tonight we’ll do something about your mama, put her where the right people will find her and take care of her.”
In the elevator, he grasped the boy’s shoulder. “You know what we’ve been doing wrong, Mitch? We’ve been looking seriously—me for my own kids, you for your dad. Looking seriously only finds little things, and those aren’t little things. We have to have fun. Then maybe we’ll both find what we want. I know a place that has a heated pool. Let’s go swimming.”
The elevator jolted to a stop. Three young men were waiting in the foyer. One held a tire iron, one a doubled length of chain. John Parker thrust a hand into his coat pocket. “This fires high-energy gamma rays,” he said levelly. “You don’t feel a thing now, but within six weeks you’ll develop leukemia and in six more you’ll be dead.”
The three hesitated, and he flipped open a match box with his other hand. “I’m calling in Star Patrol to pick up the pieces,” he announced.
When they were safely outside, John Parker told Mitch, “See, you just learned something—be crazy. Nobody bothers the crazy people.” He paused. “In the end, maybe it’s the crazy people who win after all. Is swimming okay? You like to swim?”
Mitch nodded, his eyes shining.
John Parker raised the match box to his lips. “We’re in trouble down here,” he whispered, “but don’t beam us up qui
te yet.” The hand that a moment before had been a radiation pistol was hailing a cab.
LABOR DAY
Forlesen
When Emanuel Forlesen awoke, his wife was already up preparing breakfast. Forlesen remembered nothing, knew nothing but his name, for an instant did not remember his wife, or that she was his wife, or that she was a human being, or what human beings were supposed to look like.
At the time he woke he knew only his own name; the rest came later and is therefore suspect, colored by rationalization and the expectations of the woman herself and the other people. He moaned, and his wife said: “Oh, you’re awake. Better read the orientation.”
He said, “What orientation?”
“You don’t remember where you work, do you? Or what you’re supposed to do.”
He said, “I don’t remember a damn thing.”
“Well, read the orientation.”
He pushed aside the gingham spread and got out of bed, looking at himself, noticing first the oddly deformed hands at the ends of his legs, then remembering the name for them: shoes. He was naked, and his wife turned her back to him politely while she prepared food. “Where the hell am I?” he asked.
“In our house.” She gave him the address. “In our bedroom.”
“We cook in the bedroom?”
“We sure do,” his wife said. “There isn’t any kitchen. There’s a parlor, the children’s bedroom, this room, and a bath. I’ve got an electric frypan, a tabletop electric oven, and a coffeepot here; we’ll be all right.”
The confidence in her voice heartened him. He said, “I suppose this used to be a one-bedroom house, and we made the kitchen into a place for the kids.”
“Maybe it’s an old house, and they made the kitchen into the bathroom when they got inside plumbing.”
He was dressing himself, having seen that she wore clothing, and that there was clothing too large for her piled on a chair near the bed. He said, “Don’t you know?”
“It wasn’t in the orientation.”