The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  “Señor? Señor!”

  Hilgard turned. A driver—not his—had emerged from a shiny little Volkswagen cab and was waving to him.

  “Your wife, señor, she will be here in two more minutes. She is taking more pictures on the top of the big pyramid, and she says to please wait, she will not be long.”

  “I think you want someone else,” Hilgard said.

  The driver looked baffled. “But you are her husband, señor.”

  “Sorry. I am not anybody’s husband.”

  “Is a joke? I am not understanding.” The driver grinned uncertainly. “A blonde woman, dark glasses. I pick you and she up in front of the Hotel Century, Zona Rosa, ten o’clock this morning, you remember? She said to me, ten minutes ago, tell my husband wait a little, I go take more pyramid pictures, just a few minutes. And—”

  “I’m staying at the Hotel Presidente,” Hilgard said. “I’m not married. I drove out here this morning in a black Ford cab. The driver’s name was Chucho.”

  The Mexican’s grin, earnest and ingratiating, stayed on his face, but it grew ragged, and something hostile came into his eyes, as though he was beginning to think he was being made the butt of some incomprehensible gringo prank. Slowly he said, “I know Chucho, yes. He took some American people down to Xochimilco this morning. Maybe he was your driver yesterday.”

  “He met me outside the Presidente. We arranged it last night. The fare was seventeen hundred pesos.” Hilgard glanced around, wishing the man would show up before things got even more muddled. “You must be mistaking me for a different American. I’m traveling alone. I wouldn’t mind meeting an interesting blonde, I guess, but I don’t happen to be married to one, and I really am certain that you’re not the driver I was with this morning. I’m very sorry if—”

  “There is your wife, señor,” said the Mexican coolly.

  Hilgard turned. A trim, attractive woman in her late thirties, with short golden hair and an alert, open face, was making her way through the clutter of souvenir stands at the entrance to the parking area. “Ted!” she called. “Here I am!”

  He stared blankly. He had never seen her before. As she drew closer he forced a smile and held it in a fixed and rigid way. But what was he supposed to say to her? He didn’t even know her name. Excuse me, ma’am, I’m not actually your husband. Eh? Was there a television program, he wondered, that went to elaborate lengths to stage complicated hoaxes with hapless, unsuspecting victims, and was he at the center of it? Would they shower him with home appliances and cruise tickets once they were done bewildering him? Pardon me, ma’am, but I’m not really Ted Hilgard. I’m just someone else of the same name and face. Yes? No.

  She came up to him and said, “You should have climbed it with me. You know what they’ve been doing up there for the past half hour? They’re celebrating the spring equinox with some kind of Aztec rite. Incense, chanting, green boughs, two white doves in a cage that they just liberated. Fascinating stuff, and I got pictures of the whole thing. Hold this for me for a minute, will you?” she said casually, slipping her heavy camera bag from her shoulder and pushing it into his hands. “God, it’s hot today! Did you have fun at the other temple? I just didn’t feel like hiking all the way down there, but I hope I didn’t miss—”

  The driver, standing to one side, now said mildly, “It is getting late, Missus. We go back to the city now?”

  “Yes. Of course.” She tucked a stray shirttail back into her slacks, took the camera bag from Hilgard and followed the driver toward the Volkswagen cab. Hilgard, mystified, stayed where he was, scanning the parking lot hopelessly for Chucho and the old black Ford and trying to construct some plausible course of action. After a moment the blonde woman looked back, frowning, and said, “Ted? What’s the matter?”

  He made an inarticulate sound and fluttered his hands in confusion. Possibly, he told himself, he was having some sort of psychotic episode of fugue. Or perhaps that moment of dizziness at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl had in fact been a light stroke that had scrambled his memory. Could she really be his wife? He felt quite certain that he had been single all his life, except for those eight months a dozen years ago with Beverly. He could clearly envision his bachelor flat on Third Avenue, the three neat rooms, the paintings, the little cabinet of pre-Columbian statuettes. He saw himself at his favorite restaurants with his several lovers, Judith or Janet or Denise. This brisk, jaunty blonde woman fit nowhere into those images. But yet—yet—

  He had no idea what to do. His fingers began to tremble and his feet felt like blocks of frozen mud, and he started to walk in a numbed, dazed way toward the Volkswagen. The driver, holding the door open for him, gave him the sort of venomous look of contempt that Hilgard imagined was generally given to gringos who were so drunk at midday that they were unable to remember they were married. But Hilgard was not drunk.

  The woman chattered pleasantly as they zipped back toward Mexico City. Evidently they were planning to visit the Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park that afternoon, and tomorrow morning they would move on either to Cuernavaca or Guadalajara, depending on which one of them won a low-keyed disagreement that had evidently been going on for several days. Hilgard faked his way through the conversation answering vaguely and remotely and eventually withdrawing from it altogether by pleading fatigue, a touch of the sun. Before long, gray tendrils of smog were drifting toward them: they were at the outskirts of Mexico City. In the relatively light Sunday traffic, the driver roared flamboyantly down the broad Paseo de la Reforma and cut sharply into the Zona Rosa district to deposit there in front of the slender black-and-white tower of the Hotel Century. “Give him a nice tip, darling,” the woman said to Hilgard. “We’ve kept him out longer than we were supposed to.”

  Hilgard offered the glowering driver a pair of thousand-peso notes, waved away the change, and they went into the hotel. In the small lobby she said, “Get the key, will you? I’ll ring for the elevator.” Hilgard approached the desk and looked imploringly at the clerk, who said in fluent English, “Good afternoon, Mr. Hilgard. Did you find the pyramids interesting?” and handed him, without being asked, the key to room 177.

  This is not happening. Hilgard told himself, thinking of his comfortable room on the seventh floor of the glossy Hotel Presidente. This is a dream. This is a hallucination. He joined the blonde woman in the elevator; she pressed 17 and it began to ascend slowly, pausing dismayingly for a fraction of a second between the tenth and eleventh floors as the power sagged. Room 177 was compact, efficient, with a semicircular double bed and a little bar unit stocked with miniature bottles of liquor, mixers, and such. The woman took a brandy from it and said to him, “Shall I get you a rum, Ted?”

  “No. Thank you.” He wandered the room. Feminine things all over the bathroom sink, makeup and lotions and whatnot. Matching his-and-hers luggage in the closet. A man’s jacket and shirts hanging neatly—not his, but the sort of things he might have owned—a book on the night-table, the new Updike novel. He had read it a few months ago, but in some other edition, apparently, for this had a red jacket and he remembered it as blue.

  “I’m going to grab a shower,” she said. “Then we go out to get lunch and head over to the museum, okay?”

  He looked up. She padded past him to the bathroom, naked; he had a sudden surprising glimpse of small round breasts and dimpled buttocks, and then the door closed. Hilgard waited until he heard the water running, and took her wallet from her open purse. In it he saw the usual credit cards, some travelers’ checks, a thick wad of well-worn Mexican banknotes. And a driver’s license: Celia Hilgard, thirty-six years old, five feet five, blond hair, blue eyes, 124 pounds, married. Married. An address on East 85th Street. A card in the front of the wallet declared that in case of emergency Theodore Hilgard was to be notified, either at the East 85th Street address or at the offices of Hilgard & Hilgard on West 57th Street. Hilgard studied the card as though it were written in Sanskrit. His apartment was on East 62nd Street, his gallery two bloc
ks south of it. He was sure of that. He could see himself quite sharply as he walked down Third every morning, glancing toward Bloomingdale’s, turning east on 60th—

  Two Ted Hilgards? With the same face?

  “What are you looking for?” Celia asked, stepping from the bathroom and toweling herself dry.

  Hilgard’s cheeks reddened. Guiltily he tucked her wallet back in her purse. “Ah—just checking to see how many pesos you have left. I thought we might want to cash some travelers’ checks when the banks open tomorrow.”

  “I cashed some on Friday. Don’t you remember?”

  “Slipped my mind, I guess.”

  “Do you want some of my pesos?”

  “I’ve got enough for now,” he said.

  They had lunch at the hotel. For Hilgard it was like sitting across the table from a keg of dynamite. He was not yet ready to admit that he had gone insane, but very little that he could say to her was likely to make any sense, and eventually she was bound to challenge him. He felt like someone who had come into a movie in the middle and was trying to figure out what was going on, but this was worse, much worse, because he was not merely watching the movie, he was starring in it. And found himself lunching with a total stranger to whom he had been married, it seemed, for years. But people who have been married for years have little new to say to one another at lunch, usually. He was grateful for the long silences. When she did speak, he answered cautiously and briefly. Once he allowed himself the luxury of calling her by name, just to show that he knew her name; but his “Celia” provoked a quick frown in her that puzzled him. Was he supposed to have used some pet name instead? Or was there a name other than Celia by which everybody called her—Cee, perhaps, or Cele, or Charley? He was altogether lost. Lingering over his coffee, he thought again of that dizzying moment at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, when everything had swayed and swirled in his head. Was there such a thing as a stroke that affected one’s memory without causing any sort of paralysis of the body? Well, maybe. But he wasn’t suffering merely from amnesia; he had a complete and unblurred set of memories of a life without Celia, as a contented single man running a successful art gallery, living a fulfilling existence, friends, lovers, travel. Arriving in Mexico City three days ago, looking forward to a week of cheerful solitude, warm weather, spicy food, perhaps some interesting new pieces for his collection. How could a stroke build all that into his mind? With such detail, too: the black Ford cab, Chucho the amiable driver, the seventh-floor room at the Hotel Presidente—

  “I’ve left something upstairs,” he told Celia. “I’ll just run up for it, and then we can go.”

  From the room he dialed the Presidente. “Mr. Hilgard, please.”

  “One moment.” A long pause. Then: “Please repeat the name.”

  “Hilgard. Theodore Hilgard. I think he’s in room 770.” A longer pause.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We have no one by that name.”

  “I see,” Hilgard said, not seeing at all, and put the phone down. He stared at himself in the mirror, searching for signs of a stroke, the drooping eyelid, the sagging cheek. Nothing. Nothing. But his face was gray. He looked a thousand years old.

  They hailed a cab outside the hotel and went to the Museum of Anthropology. He had been there several times, most recently yesterday afternoon. But from what Celia said it was apparent she had never seen it, which was a new awkwardness for him: he had to pretend he had no familiarity with that very familiar place. As they wandered through it he did his best to feign fresh responses to objects he had known for years, the great Olmec stone heads, the terrifying statue of the goddess Coatlicue, the jade-encrusted masks. Sometimes it was not necessary to feign it. In the Aztec room there was an immense marble stela just to the left of the calendar stone that he could not recall from yesterday’s visit, and there was a case of amazing little Olmec figurines of polished jade absolutely new to him, and the Mayan room seemed arranged in an entirely different way. Hilgard found all that impossible to comprehend. Even the huge umbrella-shaped fountain in the museum courtyard was subtly different, with golden spokes now sprouting from it. The cumulative effect of the day’s little strangenesses was making him feel giddy, almost feverish: Celia several times asked if he was getting ill.

  They had dinner that night at an outdoor café a few blocks from their hotel, and strolled for a long time afterward, returning to their room a little before midnight. As they undressed Hilgard felt new dismay. Was she expecting him to make love? The thought horrified him. Not that she was unattractive, far from it. But he had never been able to go to bed with strangers. A prolonged courtship, a feeling of ease with the other person, of closeness, of real love—that was what he preferred, indeed what he required. Aside from all that, how could he pretend with any success to be this woman’s husband? No two men make love quite the same way; in two minutes she’d realize that he was an impostor, or else she’d wonder what he thought he was up to. All the little sexual rituals and adjustments that a couple evolves and permanently establishes were unknown to him. She would be confused or annoyed or possibly frightened if he betrayed complete ignorance of her body’s mechanisms.

  And until he understood what had happened to him, he was terrified of revealing his sense of displacement from what he still regarded as his real life. Luckily she seemed not to be in an amorous mood. She gave him a quick kiss, a light friendly embrace, and rolled over, pressing her rump against him. He lay awake a long time, listening to her soft breathing and feeling weirdly adulterous in this bed with another man’s wife. Even though she was Mrs. Ted Hilgard, all the same—all the same—

  He ruled out the stroke theory. It left too much unexplained. Sudden insanity? But he didn’t feel crazy. The events around him were crazy; but inside his skull he still seemed calm, orderly, precise. Surely true madness was something wilder and more chaotic. If he had not suffered any disruption of his brain or some all-engulfing delusional upheaval, though, what was going on? It was as though some gateway between worlds had opened for him at Teotihuacan, he thought, and in that instant of dizziness he had stepped through into the other Ted Hilgard’s universe, and that other Hilgard had stumbled past him into his own world. That sounded preposterous. But what he was experiencing was preposterous, too.

  In the morning Celia said, “I’ve got a solution to the argument over Cuernavaca versus Guadalajara. Let’s go to Oaxaca instead.”

  “Wonderful!” Hilgard cried. “I love Oaxaca. We ought to phone the Presidente Convento to see if they’ve got a room—that’s such a splendid hotel, with those old courtyards and—”

  She was staring strangely at him. “When were you in Oaxaca, Ted?”

  Hesitantly he said, “Why—I suppose—long ago, before we were married—”

  “I thought this was the first time you’d ever been in Mexico.”

  “Did I say that?” His cheeks were reddening. “I don’t know what I could have been thinking of. I must have meant this was our first trip to Mexico. I mean, I barely remember the Oaxaca trip, years and years and years ago, but I did go there, just for a weekend once—”

  It sounded terribly lame. A trip that was only a vague memory, though the mere mention of Oaxaca had made him glow with recollections of a lovely hotel? Celia had registered the inconsistency, but she chose not to probe it. He was grateful for that. But he knew she must be adding up all the little contradictions and false notes in the things he was saying, and sooner or later she was apt to demand an explanation.

  Within an hour they had everything arranged, and that afternoon they flew down to Oaxaca. As they checked in at the hotel, Hilgard had a sudden horrified fear that the clerk, remembering him from two years ago, would greet him by name, but that did not happen. Sitting by poolside before dinner, Hilgard and Celia leafed through their guidebooks, planning their Oaxaca excursions—a drive to the ruins at Monte Albán, a trip out to the Mitla site, a visit to the famous Saturday morning market—and once again he found it necessary to pretend little knowledg
e of a place he knew quite well. He wondered how convincing he was. They had dinner that night at a splendid Basque restaurant on a balcony overlooking the main plaza, and afterward they strolled back slowly to their hotel. The night air was soft and fragrant, and music floated toward them from the plaza bandstand. When they were halfway back, Celia reached for his hand. He forced himself not to pull away, though even that innocent little contact between them made him feel monstrously fraudulent. At the hotel he suggested stopping in the bar for a nightcap, but she shook her head and smiled. “It’s late,” she said softly. “Let’s just go upstairs.” At dinner they had had a carafe of sangria and then a bottle of red Mexican wine, and he felt loose-jointed and tranquil, but not so tranquil that he did not fear the confrontation that lay just ahead. He halted a moment on the landing, looking toward the glittering pool. By moonlight the heavy purple clusters of bougainvillea climbing the ancient stone walls of the courtyard seemed almost black. Huge hibiscus blossoms were strewn everywhere on the lawn and strange spiky flowers rose from a border of large bizarre succulents. Celia touched his elbow. “Come,” she said. He nodded. They went into their room. She turned on a lamp and began to undress. Hilgard’s eyes met hers and he saw a host of expressions cross her face in an instant—affection, desire, apprehension, perplexity. She knew something was wrong. Give it a try, Hilgard told himself fiercely. Fake it. Fake it. He ran his hand timidly along her hips, her thighs. No.

  “Ted?” she said. “Ted, what’s going on?”

  “I can’t explain. I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “You’ve been so strange. Since yesterday.”