by Gene Wolfe
“Only a dime,” Michael said.
“I don’t have a dime.”
“They’re real. Tell your friends. I’ll be back next week.” He took the cigar box from under his arm and began to replace the bright plastic figures on the cotton inside. “I’ve got Pinocchio and Geppetto and Stromboli. Did you ever try to buy Stromboli?”
“I gotta go back now.”
Michael watched the little boy march back to school, then turned away. There was a store, a store he hadn’t tried to sell to yet, way out on Forty-fourth. He pulled up the collar of his pea jacket and edged out into the street to hitch a ride. The pea jacket was a Size “S,” but Michael was thin and looked tall. The wind whipped his long hair around his face.
He thought: No black cars, looking behind him for a doorway or an alley in case one should come. They mostly use those big black ones with four doors and maybe shades on the windows. Those are the MM cars. A hearse turned the corner and he threw himself flat and rolled under a parked truck. They hadn’t expected him to do that, and didn’t see him.
He wiggled out and dusted himself off, and a bottle-green Pontiac driven by a stout woman with a mink stole picked him up. She said, “I have two sons at Antioch; they’re both doing very well. Are you in college? Where are you going?”
“Up on Forty-fourth Street.”
“Fine. I’m going right past there.” She smiled.
“There’s this store there that sells old books and knickknacks. I mean, like, if you want the 1943 Captain Midnight Secret Decoder they’ve probably got it. Want to see what I’m going to sell them?” Michael opened his cigar box and, when the Pontiac stopped for a light, held it up so the woman could see the contents.
“What are these?” She reached out plump, diamonded fingers. “Why it’s Snow White. I haven’t seen Snow White for years.”
“These were cast in 1935, two years before the movie was released. Only for collectors. Look at the detail on them.”
“I didn’t know they had plastic way back then.” The woman’s voice was interested and friendly.
“It’s Celluloid. They don’t look old because they’re mint specimens. They’ve been kept in a box, just like this, away from sunlight and everything, all this time. I got some at home that look older, but I usually take these when I’m going to try to sell to kids because the kids like them new. And look here.” He lifted the cotton and pulled a sheaf of glossy photographs from under it. “You’ll dig these. Dedicated photographs—not just autographed you understand, dedicated—of Tommy Kirk and Annette. See, where they signed it’s not just reproduced with the picture when they reprinted it. It’s signed on this copy with a real pen. And there’s something written underneath to a particular person. That’s Tommy Kirk you’re looking at. He was a lot younger then.”
“They’re beautiful,” the woman said. She was keeping one eye on her driving.
“He really wrote it himself. Now look here. Here’s a photostat of a real letter of his. See how he makes his y’s? See how the t’s are? Now look at this dedication.” Michael’s knee kept slipping through a tear in his blue jeans as he spoke, and all his gestures were interrupted by the desertions of his left hand, which made quick trips to draw the torn cloth together again. He straightened the leg as much as he could, putting his foot high up on the firewall.
“It’s very nice,” the woman said. “It makes me think of the time when my boys were smaller.”
“Well, say your name is Clarice, right? So,” Michael shuffled rapidly through the photographs, “so you could have a picture on your dresser that says, ‘To Clarice, my most beautiful and dearly beloved fan. Tommy Kirk.’ That’s cool, huh?”
“My name’s June. Do you have one that says June?”
“No, but I could get you one. Give me your address and I would bring it around.”
“I think I’ll just take Snow White. How much is Snow White?”
Michael reflected. The woman looked as if she might pay a dollar, and with a dollar … “Eighty-five cents,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s so much, but, you know, inflation.”
“My husband says the same thing,” June said, rummaging in her purse.
She let him out at the corner of Forty-fourth, but the store was closed. A sign on the door read: Closed Due to Illness of Proprietor. Michael rattled the knob, but the door was locked.
He thumbed for nearly an hour before a married couple named Harley and Amaryllis gave him a ride back on their Triumph bike. He bounced along behind Amaryllis; but there was too much noise for him to sell her anything, and the MM almost got him within a block of the place where he lived.
He was going into the White Castle for a bowl of chili when he saw the ears of the man at the counter. Not human ears. Soft ears, ears that hung straight down like the ears of a beagle puppy, but smaller. He started to run, but that would tip them off; they would expect that. He crossed the street and sat at the soda fountain where he could watch the man in the White Castle. Keep them under surveillance, he thought, that’s tough. If you know where they are you can be where they’re not looking.
Across the street in the White Castle the man with the soft ears sat hunched over his hamburger. Michael wanted to say to the white-capped, white-coated boy behind the marble counter, Hey, man, look over across the street. The guy with the black coat and the rolled down white gloves, with the soft ears, he’s from the Mickey Mafia, man, and he’s after ME. I steal their stuff all the time, and they don’t like that. But the poor goop probably didn’t even know what the MM was, and instead Michael took out his pen and did Tommy Kirk’s signature perfectly on the counter top, then put Annette’s under it and drew a heart around them. That made him think of a shield, so he gave the heart Ben Ali Gator and Hyacinth Hippo for supporters and a sailor cap with a ribbon for a crest. Then the boy who fixed sodas made him leave.
It was cold outside and he tried to sell one of Annette’s pictures and a statuette of Pinocchio without success. The woman who ran the place where he lived said, “Did you have a nice walk, Mr. Moss?”
“Okay, I guess. Awfully cold. No callers for me?”
“No callers, Mr. Moss.”
“You wouldn’t let them in if they came, would you? I mean even if they knew my name and said they were friends of mine. You wouldn’t let them into my room?”
The woman smiled, smoothing her white dress with her hands, wanting to be busy again. “I wouldn’t let them in, Michael.”
He went upstairs, his chest tightening all the time as the fear built up in him. When he had found his key he waited outside the door, not wanting to open it for fear he would find everything gone.
Then he did, and it was okay. If they had come they would have wrecked everything, but his injection molding machine—the smallest size built, but it still dwarfed the room—stood as he had left it. His molds, carved from aluminum with the Dremel Moto-Tool and finished after long hours of work with the needle files, were heaped beside it. Nearby were the cans of multicolored polyethylene granules. One (yellow for dancing mushrooms) was spilled on the floor—but he had done that himself. He hung up his coat and warmed his fingers under his arms.
What now? A wristwatch? They sold best of all, and he could use the money. He picked up one of the inexpensive watches he bought to convert and looked at it, then took down his cap, the cap that had begun it all, from its peg of honor over his bed. The round ears he had cut from black felt were soft and floppy now, but they reminded him of home. The others had had them and he had not wanted to wait. He had made his own, sewing the ears—with a little help from his mother—to an old skull cap of his father’s. He brushed his hair back with his hand and set the cap firmly on his head.
Then, as though that had been what they were waiting for, they came out.
Captain Hook, with his cruel steel hand and the long curls down to his shoulders, came out of the lavatory. His Captain-Hook face was a latex Halloween mask, but Michael had not made it.
The Big Bad Wolf
came from the closet. His rubber mask had a grotesquely upturned snout, his rubber eyes a sly glint (with the holes for real eyes two dark dots below them), and his rubber teeth were huge. He wore a red flannel shirt and dirty overalls with a broken strap.
And the Wicked Queen came from the dark corner where his books were piled. Her face was hard and cold, and her black robe swept the floor. A poisoned dagger hung at her waist on a thin gold chain.
“All right,” Michael said. “I guess it’s all over.”
“It is indeed,” said Captain Hook.
“I guess I don’t get a last request.”
“No,” Captain Hook said, “you do not.” He was opening a package. “We have a certain ceremony to observe, a ritual of execution, but last requests are not included.”
“I was going to ask you to take off your masks.”
“And why,” inquired the Wicked Queen, “were you going to ask that?”
“Because I’ve worked with all of you so long that I think I know who you are really, and I’d like to see if I’m right.”
Captain Hook laughed. “And who am I?”
“Blackbeard and Captain Kidd and Sir Henry Morgan, and Calico Jack and Barbarosa and maybe a little Captain Bligh.”
“And me,” said the Big Bad Wolf, leering. “Who’m I, huh?”
“You’re the wolf of old Europe, the wolf that tore the sentries to bits in front of the winter palace at St. Petersburg. The wolf that was killed by the invention of firearms like the great god Pan by the coming of Christ. The wolf people now say never existed, and forget all the stories. The wolf that took the baby pigs from the farmyard at noon, and children when they walked through the forest. You are Baron Isengrim.”
“And I,” said the Wicked Queen. “If I were to take this mask off who would I be, wise boy?”
“Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine de Medici. Morgan le Fay and all the ladies who beat the peasant children to frighten their own.”
“As my colleague told you,” said the Wicked Queen, “we have a certain ritual of death. Captain, show him what you have.”
Captain Hook held out an open candy box. The cardboard, once highly ornamented, was crumbling with age now, and the bright inks had faded. It held bonbons of a fondant that time was turning back to sugar and a cloying perfume. Two red jelly beans rolled loose in the lid.
“We shall kill you with these,” the Wicked Queen told Michael. “It is—perhaps you will appreciate this—the most honorable of the means of execution we use. The jelly beans will be thrust up your nostrils; then the bonbons will be stuffed into your throat until you suffocate of surfeit of sweetness. But first we will grant your last request.” She raised her arms, as though invoking some high power. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is underneath it all?”
The Big Bad Wolf drew off his mask, pulled off his flannel shirt, stepped out of his overalls, and was a paunchy man in a business suit. Captain Hook set the bonbons on a table, dropped his hook, peeled off his mask and wig, and was a paunchy man in a business suit. The Wicked Queen unhooked the mask from behind her ears, slid out of her black robe, and was a paunchy woman in a tailored suit. Before Michael could resist, the man who had been Captain Hook and the man who had been the Big Bad Wolf had seized him by the arms and the woman who had been the Wicked Queen was pushing the red jelly beans into his nose. He tried to hold his mouth shut, but she pried his jaws open and forced in a yellow bonbon.
He tried to swallow it before she could get in another, and found that it had become a red jelly bean too, and went down easily.
“What is it?” said the man who had been Captain Hook.
“Synthetic para-reserpine,” said the woman. “I’ve had good luck with it on him.” She touched Michael’s face with a white/red rubber-gloved hand that had four/three fingers.
THE DEATH OF DR. ISLAND
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the heavens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
—GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
A grain of sand, teetering on the brink of the pit, trembled and fell in; the ant lion at the bottom angrily flung it out again. For a moment there was quiet. Then the entire pit, and a square meter of sand around it, shifted drunkenly while two coconut palms bent to watch. The sand rose, pivoting at one edge, and the scarred head of a boy appeared—a stubble of brown hair threatened to erase the marks of the sutures; with dilated eyes hypnotically dark he paused, his neck just where the ant lion’s had been; then, as though goaded from below, he vaulted up and onto the beach, turned, and kicked sand into the dark hatchway from which he had emerged. It slammed shut. The boy was about fourteen.
For a time he squatted, pushing the sand aside and trying to find the door. A few centimeters down, his hands met a gritty, solid material which, though neither concrete nor sandstone, shared the qualities of both—a sand-filled organic plastic. On it he scraped his fingers raw, but he could not locate the edges of the hatch.
Then he stood and looked about him, his head moving continually as the heads of certain reptiles do—back and forth, with no pauses at the terminations of the movements. He did this constantly, ceaselessly—always—and for that reason it will not often be described again, just as it will not be mentioned that he breathed. He did; and as he did, his head, like a rearing snake’s, turned from side to side. The boy was thin, and naked as a frog.
Ahead of him the sand sloped gently down toward sapphire water; there were coconuts on the beach, and sea shells, and a scuttling crab that played with the finger-high edge of each dying wave. Behind him there were only palms and sand for a long distance, the palms growing ever closer together as they moved away from the water until the forest of their columniated trunks seemed architectural; like some palace maze becoming as it progressed more and more draped with creepers and lianas with green, scarlet and yellow leaves, the palms interspersed with bamboo and deciduous trees dotted with flaming orchids until almost at the limit of his sight the whole ended in a spangled wall whose predominant color was black-green.
The boy walked toward the beach, then down the beach until he stood in knee-deep water as warm as blood. He dipped his fingers and tasted it—it was fresh, with no hint of the disinfectants to which he was accustomed. He waded out again and sat on the sand about five meters up from the highwater mark, and after ten minutes, during which he heard no sound but the wind and the murmuring of the surf, he threw back his head and began to scream. His screaming was high-pitched, and each breath ended in a gibbering, ululant note, after which came the hollow, iron gasp of the next indrawn breath. On one occasion he had screamed in this way, without cessation, for fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes, at the end of which a nursing nun with an exemplary record stretching back seventeen years had administered an injection without the permission of the attending physician.
After a time the boy paused—not because he was tired, but in order to listen better. There was, still, only the sound of the wind in the palm fronds and the murmuring surf, yet he felt that he had heard a voice. The boy could be quiet as well as noisy, and he was quiet now, his left hand sifting white sand as clean as salt between its fingers while his right tossed tiny pebbles like beachglass beads into the surf.
“Hear me,” said the surf. “Hear me. Hear me.”
“I hear you,” the boy said.
“Good,” said the surf, and it faintly echoed itself: “Good, good, good.”
The boy shrugged.
“What shall I call you?” asked the surf.
“My name is Nicholas Kenneth de Vore.”
“Nick, Nick … Nick?”
The boy stood, and turning his back on the sea, walked inland. When he was out of sight of the water he found a coconut palm growing sloped and angled, leaning an
d weaving among its companions like the plume of an ascending jet blown by the wind. After feeling its rough exterior with both hands, the boy began to climb; he was inexpert and climbed slowly and a little clumsily, but his body was light and he was strong. In time he reached the top, and disturbed the little brown plush monkeys there, who fled chattering into other palms, leaving him to nestle alone among the stems of the fronds and the green coconuts. “I am here also,” said a voice from the palm.
“Ah,” said the boy, who was watching the tossing, sapphire sky far over his head.
“I will call you Nicholas.”
The boy said, “I can see the sea.”
“Do you know my name?”
The boy did not reply. Under him the long, long stem of the twisted palm swayed faintly.
“My friends all call me Dr. Island.”
“I will not call you that,” the boy said.
“You mean that you are not my friend.”
A gull screamed.
“But you see, I take you for my friend. You may say that I am not yours, but I say that you are mine. I like you, Nicholas, and I will treat you as a friend.”
“Are you a machine or a person or a committee?” the boy asked.
“I am all those things and more. I am the spirit of this island, the tutelary genius.”
“Bullshit.”
“Now that we have met, would you rather I leave you alone?”
Again the boy did not reply.
“You may wish to be alone with your thoughts. I would like to say that we have made much more progress today than I anticipated. I feel that we will get along together very well.”
After fifteen minutes or more, the boy asked, “Where does the light come from?” There was no answer. The boy waited for a time, then climbed back down the trunk, dropping the last five meters and rolling as he hit in the soft sand.
He walked to the beach again and stood staring out at the water. Far off he could see it curving up and up, the distant combers breaking in white foam until the sea became white-flecked sky. To his left and his right the beach curved away, bending almost infinitesimally until it disappeared. He began to walk, then saw, almost at the point where perception was lost, a human figure. He broke into a run; a moment later, he halted and turned around. Far ahead another walker, almost invisible, strode the beach; Nicholas ignored him; he found a coconut and tried to open it, then threw it aside and walked on. From time to time fish jumped, and occasionally he saw a wheeling sea bird dive. The light grew dimmer. He was aware that he had not eaten for some time, but he was not in the strict sense hungry—or rather, he enjoyed his hunger now in the same way that he might, at another time, have gashed his arm to watch himself bleed. Once he said, “Dr. Island!” loudly as he passed a coconut palm, and then later began to chant “Dr. Island, Dr. Island, Dr. Island” as he walked until the words had lost all meaning. He swam in the sea as he had been taught to swim in the great quartanary treatment tanks on Callisto to improve his coordination, and spluttered and snorted until he learned to deal with the waves. When it was so dark he could see only the white sand and the white foam of the breakers, he drank from the sea and fell asleep on the beach, the right side of his taut, ugly face relaxing first, so that it seemed asleep even while the left eye was open and staring; his head rolling from side to side; the left corner of his mouth preserving, like a death mask, his characteristic expression—angry, remote, tinged with that inhuman quality which is found nowhere but in certain human faces.