by Gene Wolfe
O
utside, others, who presumably had not been given the remainder of the day off by Mr. Frick, were straggling toward their cars. As Forlesen walked toward his, feeling as he did the stiffness and the pain in his legs, a bright, new car pulled onto the lot and a couple got out, the man a fresh-faced boy, really, the girl a working-class girl, meticulously made up and dressed, cheaply attractive and forlorn, like the models in the advertisements of third-rate dress shops. They went up the sidewalk hand in hand to kiss, Forlesen felt sure, in the time clock room, and separate, she going up the steps, he down. They would meet for coffee later, both uncomfortable, out of a sense of duty, meet for lunch in the cafeteria, he charging her meal to the paycheck he had not yet received.
The yellow signs that lined the street read: YIELD; orange and black machines were eating the houses just beyond the light. Forlesen pulled his car into his driveway, over the oil spot. A small man in a dark suit was sitting on a wood and canvas folding stool beside Forlesen’s door, a black bag at his feet; Forlesen spoke to him, but he did not answer. Forlesen shrugged and stepped inside.
A tall young man stood beside a long, angular object that rested on a sort of trestle in the center of the parlor. “Look what we’ve got for you,” he said.
Forlesen looked. It was exactly like the box his watch had come in, save that it was much larger: of red-brown wood that seemed almost black, lined with pinkish-white silk.
“Want to try her out?” the young man said.
“No, I don’t.” Forlesen had already guessed who the young man must be, and after a moment he added a question: “Where’s your mother?”
“Busy,” the young man said. “You know how women are. . . . Well, to tell the truth she doesn’t want to come in until it’s over. This lid is neat—watch.” He folded down half the lid. “Like a Dutch door.” He folded it up again. “Don’t you want to try it for size? I’m afraid it’s going to be tight around the shoulders, but it’s got a hell of a good engine.”
“No,” Forlesen said, “I don’t want to try it out.” Something about the pinkish silk disgusted him. He bent over it to examine it more closely, and the young man took him by the hips and lifted him in as though he were a child, closing the lower half of the lid; it reached to his shirt pockets and effectively pinioned his arms. “Ha, ha,” Forlesen said.
The young man sniffed. “You don’t think we’d bury you before you’re dead, do you? I just wanted you to try it out, and that was the easiest way. How do you like it?”
“Get me out of this thing.”
“In a minute. Is it comfortable? Is it a good fit? It’s costing us quite a bit, you know.”
“Actually,” Forlesen said, “it’s more comfortable than I had foreseen. The bottom is only thinly padded, but I find the firmness helps my back.”
“Good, that’s great. Now have you decided about the Explainer?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer—in whatever form he chooses—at the end of his life. He—”
“It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”
“—may be a novelist, aged loremaster, National Hero, warlock, or actor.”
“None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.
“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”
“I don’t think I like those either.”
“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”
“That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.
After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”
“Your wife is dead,” the small man said “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?”
“I don’t know,” Forlesen said again. “I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed—and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free. And yet . . . it’s been a strange life.”
“You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”
“Those are the explanations?” Forlesen asked.
“Those are some of them.”
“I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it’s been worth it.”
“No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”
AFTERWORD
There are men—I have known a good many—who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company. They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place. Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them. They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do. And, failing that, just trying to look busy.
In time their lives end, as all lives do. As this world recons things they have spent eight thousand days, perhaps, at work; but in a clearer air it has all been the same day.
The story you have just read was my tribute to them.
WESTWIND
“. . . to all of you, my dearly loved fellow countrymen. And most
particularly—as ever—to my eyes, Westwind.”
O
ne wall of the steaming, stinking room began to waver, the magic portal that had opened upon a garden of almost inconceivable beauty beginning to mist and change. Fountains of marble waved like grass, and rose trees, whose flowery branches wore strands of pearl and diamond, faded to soft old valentines. The ruler’s chair turned to bronze, then to umber, and the ruler himself, fatherly and cunning, wise and unknowable, underwent a succession of transformations, becoming at first a picture, then a poster, and at last a postage stamp.
The lame old woman who ran the place turned the wall off and several people protested. “You heard what he said,” she told them. “You know your duty. Why do you have to listen to some simpleton from the Department of Truth say everything over in longer words and spread his spittle on it?”
The protestors, having registered their postures, were silent. The old woman looked at the clock behind the tiny bar she served.
“Game in twenty minutes,” she said. “Folks will be coming in then, rain or no rain, wanting drinks. You want some, you better get them now.”
Only two did: hulking, dirty men who might have been of any dishonest trade. A few people were already discussing the coming game. A few others talked about the address they had just heard—not its content, which could not have meant much to most of them, but the ruler and his garden, exchanging at hundredth hand bits of palace gossip of untold age. The door opened and the storm came in and a young man with it.
He was tall and thin. He wore a raincoat that had soaked through and an old felt hat covered with a transparent plastic protection whose elastic had forced the hat’s splayed brim into a tight bell around his head. One side of the young man’s face was a blue scar; the old woman asked him what he wanted.
“Yo
u have rooms,” he said.
“Yes, we do. Very cheap too. You ought to wear something over that.”
“If it bothers you,” he said, “don’t look at it.”
“You think I’ve got to rent to you?” She looked around at her customers, lining up support, should the young man with the scar decide to resent her remarks. “All I’ve got to do if you complain is say we’re full. You can walk to the police station then—it’s twenty blocks—and maybe they’ll let you sleep in a cell.”
“I’d like a room and something to eat. What do you have?”
“Ham sandwich,” she said. She named a price. “Your room—” She named another.
“All right,” he said. “I’d like two sandwiches. And coffee.”
“The room is only half if you share with somebody—if you want me to I can yell out and see if anybody wants to split.”
“No.”
She ripped the top from a can of coffee. The handle popped out and the contents began to steam. She gave it to him and said, “I guess they won’t take you in the other places, huh? With that face.”
He turned away from her, sipping his coffee, looking the room over. The door by which he had just entered (water still streamed from his coat and he could feel it in his shoes, sucking and gurgling with his every movement) opened again and a blind girl came in.
He saw that she was blind before he saw anything else about her. She wore black glasses, which on that impenetrable, rain-wracked night would have been clue enough, and as she entered she looked (in the second most terrible and truest sense) at Nothing.
The old woman asked, “Where did you come from?”
“From the terminal,” the girl said. “I walked.” She carried a white cane, which she swung before her as she sidled toward the sound of the old woman.
“I need a place to sleep,” the girl said.
Her voice was clear and sweet and the young man decided that even before the rain had scrubbed her face she hadn’t worn makeup.
He said, “You don’t want to stay here. I’ll call you a cab.”
“I want to stay here,” the girl said in her clear voice. “I have to stay somewhere.”
“I have a communicator,” the young man said. He opened his coat to show it to her—a black box with a speaker, keys, and a tiny screen—then realized that he had made a fool of himself. Someone laughed.
“They’re not running.”
The old woman said, “What’s not running?”
“The cabs. Or the buses. There’s high water in a lot of places all over the city and they’ve been shorting out. I have a communicator too”—the blind girl touched her waist—“and the ruler made a speech just a few minutes ago. I listened to him as I walked and there was a newscast afterward. But I knew anyway because a gentleman tried to call one for me from the terminal, but they wouldn’t come.”
“You shouldn’t stay here,” the young man said.
The old woman said, “I got a room if you want it—the only one left.”
“I want it,” the girl told her.
“You’ve got it. Wait a minute now—I’ve got to fix this fellow some sandwiches.”
Someone swore at the old woman and said that the game was about to start.
“Five minutes yet.” She took a piece of boiled ham from under the counter and put it between two slices of bread, then repeated the process.
The young man said, “These look eatable. Not fancy, but eatable. Would you like to have one?”
I have a little money,” the blind girl said. “I can pay for my own.” And to the old woman: “I would like some coffee.”
“How about a sandwich?”
“I’m too tired to eat.”
T
he door was opening almost constantly now as people from the surrounding tenements braved the storm and splashed in to watch the game. The old woman turned the wall on and they crowded near it, watching the pregame warm-up, practicing and perfecting the intentness they would use on the game itself. The scarred young man and the blind girl were edged away and found themselves nearest the door in a room now grown very silent save for the sound from the wall.
The young man said, “This is really a bad place—you shouldn’t be here.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I don’t have much money,” he said. “It’s cheap.”
“You don’t have a job?”
“I was hurt in an accident. I’m well now, but they wouldn’t keep me on—they say I would frighten the others. I suppose I would.”
“Isn’t there insurance for that?”
“I wasn’t there long enough to qualify.”
“I see,” she said. She raised her coffee carefully, holding it with both hands. He wanted to tell her that it was about to spill—she did not hold it quite straight—but dared not. Just as it was at the point of running over the edge it found her lips.
“You listened to the ruler,” he said, “while you were walking in the storm. I like that.”
“Did they listen here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t here. The wall was off when I came in.”
“Everyone should,” she said. “He does his best for us.”
The scarred young man nodded.
“People won’t cooperate,” she said. “Don’t cooperate. Look at the crime problem—everyone complains about it, but it is the people themselves who commit the crimes. He tries to clean the air, the water, all for us—”
“But they burn in the open whenever they think they won’t be caught,” the young man finished for her, “and throw filth in the rivers. The bosses live in luxury because of him, but they cheat on the standards whenever they can. He should destroy them.”
“He loves them,” the girl said simply. “He loves everyone. When we say that, it sounds like we’re saying he loves no one, but that’s not true. He loves everyone.”
“Yes,” the scarred young man said after a moment, “but he loves Westwind the best. Loving everyone does not exclude loving someone more than others. Tonight he called Westwind ‘my eyes.’ ”
“Westwind observes for him,” the girl said softly, “and reports. Do you think Westwind is someone very important?”
“He is important,” the young man said, “because the ruler listens to him—and after all, it’s next to impossible for anyone else to get an audience. But I think you mean ‘does he look important to us?’ I don’t think so—he’s probably some very obscure person you’ve never heard of.”
“I think you’re right,” she said.
He was finishing his second sandwich and he nodded, then realized that she could not see him. She was pretty, he decided, in a slender way, not too tall, wore no rings. Her nails were unpainted, which made her hands look, to him, like a schoolgirl’s. He remembered watching the girls playing volleyball when he had been in school—how he had ached for them. He said, “You should have stayed in the terminal tonight. I don’t think this is a safe place for you.”
“Do the rooms lock?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them.”
“If they don’t I’ll put a chair under the knob or something. Move the furniture. At the terminal I tried to sleep on a bench—I didn’t want to walk here through all that rain, believe me. But every time I fell asleep I could feel someone’s hand on me—once I grabbed him, but he pulled away. I’m not very strong.”
“Wasn’t anyone else there?”
“Some men, but they were trying to sleep too—of course it was one of them, and perhaps they were all doing it together. One of them told the others that if they didn’t let me alone he’d kill someone—that was when I left. I was afraid he wasn’t doing it—that somebody would be killed or at least that there would be a fight. He was the one who called about the cab for me. He said he’d pay.”
“I don’t think it was him, then.”
“I don’t either.” The girl was silent for a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t have minded it so much if I
hadn’t been so tired.”
“I understand.”
“Would you find the lady and ask her to show me to my room?”
“Maybe we could meet in the morning for breakfast.”
The blind girl smiled, the first time the scarred young man had seen her smile. “That would be nice,” she said.
He went behind the bar and touched the old woman’s arm. “I hate to interrupt the game,” he said, “but the young lady would like to go to her room.”
“I don’t care about the game,” the old woman said. “I just watch it because everybody else does. I’ll get Obie to take care of things.”
“She’s coming,” the scarred young man said to the blind girl. “I’ll go up with you. I’m ready to turn in myself.”
The woman was already motioning for them and they followed her up a narrow staircase filled with foul odors. “They pee in here,” she said. “There’s toilets down at the end of the hall, but they don’t bother to use them.”
“How terrible,” the girl said.
“Yes, it is. But that way they’re getting away with something—they’re putting one over on me because they know if I was to catch them I’d throw them out. I try and catch them, but at the same time I feel sorry for them—it’s pretty bad when the only wins you have left are the games on the wall and cheating an old woman by dirtying her steps.” She paused at the top of the stairs for breath. “You two are going to be just side-by-side—you don’t mind that?”
The girl said, “No,” and the scarred young man shook his head.
“I didn’t think you would and they’re the last I’ve got anyway.”
The scarred young man was looking down the narrow corridor. It was lined with doors, most of them shut.
“I’ll put you closest to the bathroom,” the old woman was saying to the girl. “There’s a hook on the bathroom door, so don’t you worry. But if you stay in there too long somebody’ll start pounding.”
“I’ll be all right,” the girl said.