by Gene Wolfe
She was gone before he could ask her another question. He sat up, finding that he was sore everywhere. The room was tiny, with just space enough for the narrow hospital bed, a dwarfish white-enameled chair, a white-enameled night table, and a white locker. The walls were white, too, and the floor was white tile.
Gingerly, he swung his feet over the side of the bed. The locker probably held his clothes, with the doll Lara—Tina. He laughed.
A dream! It had been a dream, and nothing more—the mental health clinic; the dolls’ infirmary; the strange, high shop that sold maps of elfland; the odd parade—all dreams.
But Lara?
Had Lara, too, been only a dream? If that were so, he did not wish to wake.
No, Lara was real, a real woman with whom he had talked and walked beside the river, ate and drank and slept only yesterday. Or perhaps, on the day before yesterday. Perhaps he had lost an entire day already, here in the hospital. Lara would be worried about him, back in that drafty old apartment. He ought to call, ought somehow to comfort her.
Yet it had been summer, surely, when they strolled beside the river. He recalled the smell of flowers, of green leaves; they must have been there. It was winter now, or was it?
Unsteadily, he went to the window. The hospital’s little patch of lawn was pale with snow; dark figures bundled in wool, wrapped in mufflers to the eyes, picked perilous paths down an icy sidewalk. The street was gray with slush; even the brick-red, clanging trolleys were roofed with snow.
The white locker was locked, and he had no key. He rattled the locker door until a black man in a white uniform looked in at him. “You! Get back in the bed!” The black man pointed a finger.
He said, “I want my clothes.”
“You get them when you get out. Till then, they stayin’ locked up safe.” The black advanced menacingly. “Now get in the bed or you don’t get no chocolate puddin’ for dinner. Want me to have to give you a shot? I got a needle ’bout as sharp as the end on a nail.” Without touching him, the black man crowded him back until he sat once more upon the bed.
“Who do I have to see to get that opened?”
“Your doctor.” The black man retreated to study the chart hanging from the foot of the bed. “He Dr. Pille. He make his rounds tomorrow. Till then, you stay in the bed ’less the nurse say you can get up.”
“All right.”
“You in for a sex change, huh?”
He jumped to his feet.
“Whoa-o! What I tell you? It don’t say nothin’ like that here. Just a concussion, and multiple bruises and stuff. Now you stay in the bed if you want puddin’.”
When the black man had gone, he considered getting out of bed again. There seemed no point to it. The locker was locked, and he had nothing with which to break into it. The key was no doubt in some drawer in the nurses’ desk. Still, he could call Lara and tell her he was alive and not seriously hurt.
There was no telephone on the night table. He looked about for the call button that would summon the nurse and discovered a remote control for the little TV high in one corner of the room; he switched it on, but nothing whatever happened.
The call button dangled from a white cord at the headboard of his bed. He pushed it and heard an indistinct chiming, as of bells on some far-off, fog-shrouded coast. Telling himself that he had done all he could at the moment, he lay back listening to the bells, his hands behind his head.
A gray radiance had enveloped the TV screen, flickering, waxing, and waning—lingering and at last growing brighter. Diagonal lines crossed the screen slowly, through a storm of snow. Lara’s face fluttered behind them like an overexposed photograph, then vanished.
“AND IN THE CAPITAL, THE PRESIDENT HAS—AS SHE THREATENED EARLIER—VETOED THE FAMILY MAINTENANCE—”
He found the Volume Down button.
“—bill that would have permitted involuntary sterilization of mothers of twenty-five or more children. A spokesman for—”
He was sure it had been Lara, perhaps on another channel, a channel with almost the same broadcasting frequency. This was Channel One. He tried Two and Thirteen, and got nothing. When he returned to One, mixed teams were playing some complicated game that involved the kidnapping of opposing players.
Restlessly he searched the other channels, finding only a lecturing teacher and soapy lovers engaged in the usual debate, enlivened now by contemporary role reversal.
“Don’t you see I want to make the way we feel about each other immortal, Beverly? Our love marching down the endless track of Time, showing the whole darn selfish human race that there are higher values than self.”
“No, Robin. You want to end our love forever.”
Slowly it dawned on him that he was in another city. At home there would have been eight working channels. He turned the lovers down to inaudibility, found the complex game again.
The nurse bustled in carrying a big vase of roses. “That was lucky! You rang for me, and I have these to deliver. I get to kill two birds with one stone. Aren’t they lovely?”
He nodded. Red, yellow, white, and pink roses, and roses of a dozen colorful mottlings, cinnabar shot with bronze, old gold touched with flame, seemed ready to spill—almost to leap—from the bowl.
“There’s a card table up in Furniture with a picture like that on it,” he said. “I’ve never seen a bouquet like that in real life. They’re always all one kind.”
The nurse looked arch. “Your little friend doesn’t believe in ho-hum arrangements, it seems. She went all out. Naturally, with her money …” She set the vase on the tiny white table, a few inches from his head. A minute card dangled from one of the handles of the vase on a gold thread.
He said, “I was wondering if you could bring me a phone. There’s somebody I ought to call.”
“Ahh!” Cupping spread fingers over her formidable breasts, the nurse inhaled deeply. “Don’t they smell lovely! Of course there is. I’ll get you a phone right away. You know, we would never have guessed you knew somebody like that.”
“Like Lara?” Who but Lara would have sent him flowers?
The nurse shook her head. “No, no! The goddess.” Seeing his startled look, she added, “The goddess of the silver screen—isn’t that what they call her? I’ll get your phone.”
As soon as she was gone, he turned on his side to examine the card. There was a border of gold surrounding a completely illegible monogram. He opened the card and found a photograph of Lara and the name “Marcella” printed in florid gold script.
Lara was a movie star—a star called Marcella. The nurse had looked at her picture and recognized her.
Yet he rented movies two or three times a week, and watched still more movies on Home Box Office; if Lara had been so much as a featured player, he would have recognized her at once. Nor did he recognize the picture inside the card, save as a picture of Lara—even her hair style was the same.
His bruised muscles ached. He rolled onto his back and saw that Lara’s face was once more on the screen; he reached for the remote control, but as soon as he moved his hand Lara shrank and vanished. Although he pushed the On button again and again, her face did not return. No button on the remote control made the set respond, and at length he pulled over the dwarfish chair and stood upon its seat to turn the knobs. Nothing he tried brought light to the screen again. He recalled a term from his days in Home Entertainment; there was no raster.
By the time the nurse returned with a telephone, he was back in bed. “I really hate to keep bothering you,” he said, “but my television seems to be broken.”
She tried the remote control without result. “No trouble. I just call the service. They’ll bring you a new one tomorrow.”
He felt a distinct thrill of triumph as she bent over to plug his telephone into the jack. “One more thing,” he said. “Would you please read my diagnosis from that chart down by my feet?”
Like the black attendant, she lifted the chart from its hook. “Concussion, multiple bruises, alco
holism.”
“Alcoholism?”
“I don’t diagnose,” she told him briskly. “Your doctor does that.”
“I’m not an alcoholic!”
“Then you shouldn’t have much trouble getting Dr. Pille to change your diagnosis. Do you drink?”
“Occasionally. It isn’t a problem.”
“Maybe the doctor sees it as more of a problem than you do. Particularly when he has a patient who falls down in the street and gets himself a concussion.”
“It really does say alcoholism?”
“I told you. Want to see it?”
“But it doesn’t say anything about a sex change?” That had been a lingering fear.
The nurse chuckled. “Somebody told you that. That’s what we call alcoholism sometimes. It cuts down on the testosterone in men. Your beard stops growing, and you hardly ever get bald.”
When she had gone, he reached for the telephone, but his hand was shaking so badly he drew it back. There was no mirror in the room. He got up anyway, feeling vaguely that there had to be one somewhere, and was startled to see his own drawn face reflected in the dark window glass.
The short winter day had ended. Outside, cars as high and awkward as Jeeps crawled along the street with blazing lights. Pedestrians were individually invisible; but it seemed to him that some black fluid, as thick and slow as heavy oil, flowed and swirled at the edges of the traffic.
And it came to him that this viscous ichor was perhaps the reality, that the faces and figures to which he was accustomed might be as false in essence as the photomicrographs printed in the newspapers on slow news days, pictures that showed human skin as a rocky desert, an ant or a fly as a bewhiskered monster. This was how God saw men and women; who could blame him then, if he damned them all or forgot them all?
“I know what ya thinking.”
He turned quickly, more than half embarrassed, at the sound of the voice. An extremely erect little man with a head like a polished ivory ball was looking through the doorway. He noticed with some relief that the little man wore hospital pajamas like his own.
“I was thinking about mail,” he lied. “Today somebody gave me a charm that’s supposed to bring you mail, and it seems to me that maybe I’ve been getting it.”
The little man stepped inside. “Let’s see it.”
“I meant these roses. And something I just saw on TV, but I can’t show you that.”
“Ya charm. Let’s see it.”
He shrugged. “I can’t show you that either. It’s in this locker, I suppose.”
“If Joe was ‘ere, ’e’d bust open this tin box for ya like dynamite.” The little man rattled the door.
“Is Joe the attendant?”
The little man grinned and shook his shiny head. “Joe’s my fighter. I’m a fight manager. Joe, he’s strong as a couple of bulls. ‘E’d tear this tin box apart for ya if I told ’im ta.”
“I doubt if the hospital would like that. Anyway, that’s where I think my charm is. I don’t really know; they’ve never given me an inventory or anything.”
“Joe’s ‘eavyweight champeen of the world. I used ta ’ave a couple other fighters, Mel and Larry. Only when Joe won us the champeenship, I dropped ’em. I made sure another manager took ’em on, a good manager. They understand. They know I’ll give ’em a break whenever I can. ’Ere’s my card.” The little man’s hand went toward the place where the breast pocket of his suit coat would have been, had he been wearing a suit instead of his hospital pajamas, and came away empty. The little man grinned again, this time sheepishly.
He sat on the bed and waved toward the chair. “Why don’t you sit down? I had an accident, and I guess I’m still a bit shaky; besides, we might as well sit if we’re going to talk.”
“Thanks,” the little man said. “I like ta sit around and gab—makes me feel like I’m about ta cut a deal for Joe, ya know what I mean? So listen up! We gotta have a ’undred thousand up front, or we don’t play.”
He said, “You’ll get it, don’t worry.”
The little man nodded. “That’s the way, pal. ’Ey, I got ya name from the chart on ya bed. I’m Eddie Walsh, President, Walsh Promotions.” Walsh’s hand was small, cool, and hard.
“Pleased to meet you. Where are we anyway, Eddie? What is this place?”
“United,” Walsh told him. “I thought ya was thinking of getting out.” Then, seeing his look of incomprehension, Walsh added, “The United General Psychiatric Hospital, they call it. This ’ere’s the good wing.”
North
He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head once again; this time he was trying to sleep. The ward, or wing, or whatever the hell it was, slept already. Occasionally he heard the soft footsteps of the rubber-shod nurses; even more rarely, the shuffle of a patient’s thin slippers. He was thinking about the world.
Not the world in which he now found himself, but the real world, the normal world.
There, Chinese-Americans spoke ordinary English and became nuclear physicists; the girls on floats did not invite men into their floats. In the real world, he thought, alcoholics did not get private rooms. Probably.
Most significant of all, in the real world streetcars had been done away with long, long ago, their very tracks entombed in layer upon layer of asphalt. True, it hadn’t made sense to do away with them. They had been cheap, energy efficient, and nonpolluting. Yet they had been done away with, and a hundred harmful gadgets had been allowed to stay—that was the way you knew it was the normal world.
A trolley car was going past the hospital now. He heard the faint clang of its bell, and he knew that should he go to the window he would see its single headlight, shining golden through the falling snow.
The room had no door, and some feeble illumination entered from the softly night-lit hallway outside. Its sudden darkening made him sit up in bed.
A man was standing there. For a moment he thought the man was Walsh. But Walsh had been smoothly bald; this silhouetted man, although not much taller, had a luxuriant head of tousled hair.
“You’re awake,” the man whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
“I wanted to tell you—we have a kind of bush telegraph. Each one tells one. Know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“That way, whatever one knows, we all know. It’s the way we stay alive here. That Gloria Brooks, she did it to Bailey tonight. Billy North went to Al’s room to bum a smoke, and he caught her at it. Each one tells one.”
He nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell somebody. Who should I tell?”
“I saw you talking to Eddie.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him. Where is he?”
“Down the hall to the first turn, then two or three doors down.”
“Okay,” he said again. By the time he sat up the man was gone.
As he told himself, he had not been sleepy anyway, and he had been getting more and more depressed. A dozen times he had reached for the telephone; a dozen times he had pulled back his hand, telling himself that he would wake up Lara, that she would be angry with him; he knew that the truth was that he was afraid she would not be there, that there would be no one there, no one in the apartment at all. That there had never been anybody in the apartment but himself.
His chart said alcoholism. He remembered drinking a lot a few times, and he had drunk too much last night with Lara. His mother had said his grandfather had drunk a lot. Before he had died, he had seen a little boy with golden hair—a golden-haired boy no one else had ever seen. Was Lara like that? He tried to recall the golden-haired little boy’s name. Chester? Mortimer? She had said that his grandfather had mentioned it often in the months before he died, but it was gone now, gone utterly; nobody else had ever seen the little boy after his grandfather died.
Had anybody else ever seen Lara? Would anyone else ever see her if he died tonight? He did not intend to die tonight, yet he felt that this night would never end, that the brick-red trolleys would run on through
the dark and the snow forever and ever.
Faint lights burned yellow-green in the hall. Chartreuse, he said to himself, and wondered if he were indeed an alcoholic, if naming colors for drinks was not some sign of his alcoholism, a vice he concealed even from himself. They had—once—had him in some kind of program at the store, hadn’t they? Had it been an alcoholism treatment program?
“Down the hall to the first turn, then two or three doors down.”
But was it two? Or three? He decided to try two first, and discovered that it was in fact no doors down, that all the rooms were as doorless as his own. Brass numbers on the wall beside each doorway told him that the second was 86E. A brass track below the number should have held a slip of paper with the occupant’s name. It was empty, though he could hear the soft sighing of the occupant’s breath within.
Briefly he considered the possibility that the occupant of the room was a homicidal maniac. This was some kind of mental hospital, after all. Walsh had said it was the good wing; that sounded encouraging.
He had not realized how dim the room would seem after the lights of the hall. The window looked out on a new scene, much darker than the busy street outside his own. He decided it was probably a park—a park full of large trees whose tops were as high as the windows on this floor, whatever floor this might be. The breathing of the occupant was as regular as the slow tick of a grandfather’s clock.
“Walsh?” he whispered. “Eddie?”
The occupant stirred in his sleep. “Yes, Mama?”
It was not a propitious beginning.
“Eddie, is that you?”
As though at the flick of a switch, the occupant was awake and sitting up. “Who are you?”
He gave his name and, idiotically, tried to touch the other man’s head.
At once his wrist was caught in a grip of steel. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” he said desperately.
“You know!”
“I fell. I got onto a float with this skater, and when I was coming out I slipped on her ice.”
The grip relaxed ever so slightly. “You didn’t make it with her.” It was a statement, not a question.