To the Land of the Living

by Robert Silverberg

  “Easy, lady. Easy. Let him speak, okay? We can hear from you in a minute.” To Gilgamesh the guard said, “Well? You the one flung him down?”

  Gilgamesh struggled to keep his temper. The strident voices of these coarse little Later Dead folk, their insolence, even the way they framed their words, maddened him. Hovering around him, buzzing and droning, offering no respect, plaguing him with their incomprehensible lingo. “I slapped him, yes, when he began screaming at me, and he fell. But I never had any intention of—it was not my purpose to—you must believe that I was not—by Enlil, he is trash! He is nothing but trash! Let me be. I have done nothing. I have done—”

  “Hey! Hey, stay cool, big guy!”

  “Cool?” Gilgamesh said. “Cool?”

  The guard nodded. “Right, keep your cool and you’ll be okay. We aren’t going to book you. We got plenty of witnesses here to the whole thing, and they all say you were helping the lady out and he pulled a knife on you. But we still got procedures to follow here, you understand?”

  Gilgamesh frowned. “Procedures?”

  “First thing I need to know is your name, okay?”

  “Of course,” said Gilgamesh grandly. He drew himself up to his full heroic height. “Be it known that I am Gilgamesh, son of Lugalbanda, king of Uruk. The woman who is with me is Queen Helen of Sparta, once wife to Menelaus, famous throughout this world and the other by the name of Helen of Troy—”

  “Hinky?” Gallagher called. “Hey, Hinky! It’s for you. Phone call.”

  “Coming,” Enkidu said.

  He uncoiled himself from the narrow couch where he had been trying unsuccessfully to nap and went to the door of the dressing room at the back of the club that Gallagher had given him. Gallagher, drink in hand, was leaning against the wall just outside in the hall.

  “Phone’s right down that way,” he said.

  “Is it the police?”

  “Anybody else know you’re here?”

  “Nobody,” Enkidu said.

  “Must be the police, then.”

  “Have they found my friends?”

  “Look,” Gallagher said, “I don’t know. Call’s for you. You go and talk to them, you find out what’s what.”

  “Right,” Enkidu said. “Right.” He started down the hall. When he had gone a few paces he paused and said, “Will you get on the extension, the way you did before, Bill? In case I don’t know the words to say. You can cut in, you can keep me from sounding dumb.”

  “Yeah,” Gallagher said. “Yeah, I better do that.”

  They went down the hall to the telephone together.

  This was the third day that Enkidu had stayed here, in the little room in the back of the Club Ultra Ultra on West Fifty-fourth Street. Gallagher had found him wandering around in the place they called Times Square, looking for Helen and Gilgamesh. Gallagher was a small, agile-looking man with thick curling sandy-colored hair that grew close to his scalp, and the hardest, coldest blue eyes Enkidu had ever seen. He had lost no time opening a conversation.

  “In from out of town, are you?”

  Enkidu had smiled. “How can you tell?”

  “It isn’t really very hard. You a wrestler?” Gallagher asked. “Ex-football player, maybe? You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a job, would you?” His frosty eyes sparkled like polished marble. “Big guy like you, I could have some work for you if you wanted it.”

  There was something about Gallagher’s blunt, direct manner that appealed to Enkidu. And he was alone and more confused than he wanted to admit, even to himself, in this strange hectic city.

  Carefully he said, “What kind of work?”

  “Doorman. Nightclub. Bouncer, is what I’m saying.”

  “Bouncer,” Enkidu repeated, not understanding a thing. “Nightclub. Ah.”

  “Six fifty a week. Payable in cash, if that’s how you like to go. Sunday and Monday nights off. Free drinks, up to a point. You can probably snag all the nooky you like, backstage, if nooky is what you like.” Gallagher grinned. “You’re interested, huh? Yeah, you’re interested, all right. What’s your name?”

  “Enkidu.”

  “Hinkadoo? What kind of name is that? Pakistani? Israeli? No, wait, I got it: you’re Iranian. Right? All that thick black hair, that thick black beard. Jesus, I didn’t know they made Iranians big as you. What are you, six-seven, six-eight? Something like that for sure. Come on, let’s go over to the club, okay? Ten blocks, but who the fuck can get a cab around here this time of day? Well, you can walk. I know you can walk. Come on. My name’s Gallagher, Bill Gallagher. Only half Irish, but it’s the half that shows. The rest is Polish, believe it or not. Some combination, a Mick and a Polack, huh? I knew an Iranian once, name of Khalili, Aziz Khalili—maybe you knew him too, little guy, half your size, big beard, very sad eyes, dealer in fake antiquities, had a shop over on Fifty-seventh, always used to say, ‘I am not Iranian, I am Persian’—I think they sent him back, some trouble about a visa—”

  Enkidu stared, saying nothing.

  He had learned long ago, in another world entirely, that the less you said the better, when you were in an unfamiliar place where you barely knew what they were talking about. Here they spoke English, it seemed, though with an accent very different from anything he remembered from the Afterworld, and spoke it so quickly it was almost impossible to follow them. But even where he understood, he didn’t understand, not really. It might almost be another language. In two minutes this Gallagher had said fifty or a hundred things that made no sense at all to Enkidu. The wise thing was to keep quiet, nod a lot and shrug a lot, let Gallagher do all the talking.

  The Club Ultra Ultra turned out to be a dark, smoky place where people came to drink and dance, and where, every hour or so, girls came out and took their clothes off to music. Enkidu’s job was to stand at the door and make sure that no one who was drunk or disorderly went inside; and when someone became drunk and disorderly after he was inside, Enkidu was supposed to go in and get him, and encourage him to leave quietly. It didn’t seem like terribly difficult work. And it provided him with a place to stay, and with a useful ally who knew his way around this mysterious world that he had landed in.

  Before Enkidu went on duty the first evening, Gallagher came to him with a sheaf of papers to fill out. They were tax forms, he said, and employment department forms, and other official things, standard new employee stuff, strictly regulation. But when he asked Enkidu where he lived, Enkidu said that he didn’t live anywhere, at the moment, and when Gallagher asked him what his last name was, Enkidu was silent for a long while and finally said simply that his name was Enkidu. Gallagher gave him a strange look. “Hinkadoo Hinkadoo, that’s your name? And you don’t live anywhere. And of course you’re not an American citizen, no, so you don’t have a driver’s license or a social security card or a passport or any goddamned kind of I.D., right? Right. Somehow I didn’t think you did. A green card? I should save my breath, asking. And no papers from wherever it is you come from, either, right? Right.” He shook his head. “You know, Hinky, I could get into the most humongous kind of trouble with the state liquor board, and the immigration service, and the I.R.S., and Christ knows who-all else. Man drops in from Mars and I just find him in the street and hire him to be my doorman, just like that, no papers at all, no scrap of I.D., won’t even tell me his fucking last name, right?” Enkidu stared, comprehending almost none of this. Gallagher went right on. “They could close this place down. I got to have my head examined. But I like you. I like you. And I need somebody who can keep the fucking drunks under control. I dragged you in, now I might as well keep you. All right, you get the job, but you stay off the books, clear? Anybody looking official comes around and asks you if you work here, you say no, no, you just stopped by for a visit. And you better stay out of trouble, too, and if you get into any, well, I never saw you in my life. Capisce? Farschtey? You understand me?” Gallagher took a deep breath. “I got to be fucking crazy, doing this. Tell me one little thing, okay, H
inky? Will you do that? Just tell me what you’re doing in New York in the first place.”

  “Trying to find my friends,” Enkidu said. “Gilgamesh who is like a brother to me. And Helen. They are here in this city somewhere. Somewhere.”

  “Somewhere. It’s a pretty big city. You don’t know where?”

  “We were separated as we came here. That was—yesterday, I think. He is very tall, like me. She is very beautiful, with dark hair. I must find them.”

  “You try the police?” Gallagher laughed. “No, of course you didn’t try the police. Well, look, we’ll do that now. What’s his name?”

  “Gilgamesh.”

  “He’s Iranian too?”

  Enkidu shrugged. “We are Sumerian.”

  “New one on me, Sumerian. But all right. We’ll try it. We want a missing-persons report on a big Sumerian named Gilgamesh. You know how to use the phone, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. They are different where I come from.”

  “Well, I’ll show you. You call up, ask for Missing Persons, maybe that’ll work—that’s how they do it on television, anyway. They’ll switch you around until you hit the right department. Tell them you’re his brother—friend isn’t good enough, they won’t give a shit about that, but a brother, maybe—and the girl, she’s your fiancée, right? You understand what I’m saying? You can’t just ask them to trace any girl you might want to find, but your fiancée, yeah, they’ll help you with that, especially if you sound foreign the way you do and act a little confused, which you are anyway. Come on, let’s go make the call, okay? Okay?”

  That had been two days ago, when Enkidu told the police that he and his fiancée and his brother had become separated from one another on their first day in New York—with Gallagher on the extension phone, prompting him whenever he didn’t know the right thing to say—and here he was now, two days later, on the phone again, listening to a rasping New York voice telling him, “Look, the tracer on your brother just came through, okay? Report out of Bellevue, guy calling himself Gilgamesh who fits the description, bearded, extremely tall and brawny, foreign accent, brought in for observation, girl named Helen, neither of them any I.D. at all, involved in an incident on steps of Forty-second Street Library—unidentified drifter seriously injured, attempting rape on the girl, Gil broke it up and hurt the guy, no charges pressed but looks like a psycho case, they say—”

  Enkidu, utterly lost, signaled frantically. Gallagher cut in: “I’m Mr. Hinkadoo’s friend and representative, William Gallagher. How can we go about arranging the release of Mr. Hinkadoo’s brother and fiancée into our custody?”

  “You might try getting yourselves down to Bellevue, for starters.”

  “Is there any sort of case number that we—”

  There was a click at the other end. Gallagher scowled and put down the phone. To Enkidu he said, “You follow any of that?”

  “They have found them, right?”

  “Right. Some sort of fracas outside the library, police took them in for storage at Bellevue on account of no I.D. and generally off-center behavior, I guess.”

  “What is this I.D. everyone talks about, that we have none of?”

  “Identification, it means.”

  “Ah. And this Bellevue?”

  “It’s the local funny farm.”

  “Funny farm?”

  “You know. The bughouse.”

  “Ah. The bug house. But why would they put Gilgamesh in a house for bugs?”

  “Because—” Gallagher put his hands over his eyes. “They ought to put me in a bughouse, you know? But of course you wouldn’t understand. Of course.” He said, peering through his fingers at Enkidu, “It’s a psycho ward, a loonybin, a place for the insane. Does any of that make sense to you? Yes? No. Never mind. Let’s go down and get them out of there, that’s all. Remember that he’s your brother, not your friend. Your name is Hinkadoo Khalili, and you come from Iran, and so does he, and so does the girl, and you all came here seeking political asylum if they ask, but let’s hope they don’t ask, and you left your passport in your hotel room, and if they ask you what hotel let me do the answering, and in general don’t say any more than you have to.”

  “She is Greek,” said Enkidu.

  “Look, today she’s from Iran, okay? It’s simpler if all three of you came from the same place, even if you don’t come from there.” He rubbed his scalp, carefully, thoughtfully. “I should have my head examined. I should have my fucking head examined. Come on, put your shoes on and let’s get going.”

  Gilgamesh looked in bewilderment from Enkidu to Helen to the little hard-faced blue-eyed man, and back to Enkidu. Enkidu made a quick and barely perceptible gesture that said, Just keep quiet and let this man handle everything.

  Fine, Gilgamesh thought. In the Afterworld he might be a hero among heroes, but in this foul despicable sumphole of a world he was hopelessly lost. This man whom Enkidu somehow had found seemed to know the right things to do and say here. Fine. Fine. Just get me out of here, is all I ask.

  The other little man, the one in the soiled white coat who had been asking him so many absurd questions these past two days, said to the new one who had arrived with Enkidu, “You’re William Gallagher?”

  “That’s right, doctor.”

  “What’s your relationship to these people?”

  “It’s my sister Marie, actually. She works for the Iranian-American Friendship League, which has an office up on Morningside Heights, you know, and she asked me to pick all three of these people up and deliver them to some address around West One hundred twelfth Street where they’ll be looked after. They’re political refugees. Unfortunately there was a mixup out at the airport and they got separated boarding the bus that was going to take them to the West Side Terminal, where I was supposed to meet them, and—”

  “All right,” the one in the white coat said. “I assume you’re authorized to sign for their release on your sister’s behalf, or will she have to come in?”

  “I can sign. My God, she’ll be so glad to have them show up, finally! She’s been practically beside herself since Gil and Helen disappeared. Marie is such a wonderfully concerned woman, you know—so dedicated to helping the unfortunate—”

  The doctor scribbled things in a notebook. Then he looked up and nodded toward Gilgamesh. “Speaking of help, does your Iranian Friendship League have any sort of arrangements for mental health programs? This man needs treatment very badly.”

  “Is that so?” said the one called Gallagher in a solemn voice. “My sister will need to know that. Can you be more specific, doctor?”

  “I’ll give you the print-out on him. But it’ll be evident to you after just a moment or two of listening to what he says how profoundly disturbed he is. The Helen of Troy fantasy, the Gilgamesh fantasy, quite massively worked out in truly obsessive detail—is Gilgamesh really his name, by the way? It is? Well, obviously that’s had some influence on the nature of his disturbance. Basically, it’s a delusional psychosis, a classic case, very deeply rooted. He seems to be living in some other world entirely, which so far as I’ve been able to judge in the day or two that he’s been under observation here he seems to have developed with extraordinary depth and conviction. If I weren’t so hellishly overloaded I’d want to do a paper on him. But of course, the press of daily work here, the press of routine work—” He nibbled the end of his pen a moment. “Actually, it makes one wonder how he got into the country at all, considering how badly deranged he is. Refugee or no refugee, one would think that there would have been difficulties in obtaining a visa, considering the provisions of the Immigration Act of—”

  “A compassionate exception was made,” Gallagher said. “As I understand it, these men were considerable heroes of the underground resistance, and in recognition of their extraordinary services both of them were granted entry. What you see here in Gil is a man who withstood the worst that the Ayatollah’s torturers could throw at him, with the inevitable tragic result. He’s supposed t
o be in his brother Hinkadoo’s custody at all times, you understand, but because of the unfortunate mixup at JFK—”

  “I see. I see,” said the doctor, still scribbling.

  Gilgamesh, frowning, looked toward Helen, who was nestling up against Enkidu. She seemed to be working hard to smother a laugh. He felt his anger rising. First to put up with hour after hour of interrogation by these dwarfs, these buzzing little insects—and now this, all these lies and fantasies, this long-winded dispassionate discussion of him as though he were nothing but a pitiful madman—

  Well, it was all simply a maneuver designed to get him out of this place, he saw that quite clearly, but nevertheless—nevertheless—how humiliating, to have to sit here like a sheep while all this nonsense about him was being spilled forth—

  Be silent, he told himself. Let this Gallagher say whatever he must say.

  But it was too much. Why did he have to pretend to be insane to win his freedom? He could keep quiet no longer. The words came bursting from him despite all his efforts. “This chatter begins to offend my ears. I ask that an end be made of it and that we be released at once without further foolishness.”

  “Ah, brother, brother!” Enkidu said, in a syrupy voice that one might use in addressing a child. “It is all right, brother! You will leave here very soon.” Gilgamesh felt a quick sharp kick against his ankle. “There are just a few little formalities, which Mr. Gallagher will handle—and then you will be taken from here, to an extremely nice place where you’ll be very comfortable, where Mr. Gallagher’s sister will give you everything you need, where you will have help for the things that torment you—a soft bed, a quiet room, medicines to soothe your troubled mind—”

  You shaggy bastard, Gilgamesh thought in fury. I’ll make you pay for this afterward!

  But then he caught the playful twinkle in Enkidu’s eyes, and his anger melted, and his heart overflowed with love for his friend who had come here to save him, and laughter began to well up in him with such force that he had to struggle fiercely to throttle it back.