by Gene Wolfe
He nodded and said, “At least I ought to be able to rip off some chocolate pudding.”
W.F. chortled. “You all right! No wonder Joe like you so fast.”
He glanced over at the big man, now moving slowly from one machine to another, a red bottle in his hand. “Is Joe really a prizefighter?”
“Don’t you know? I his handler. You see me on TV?”
He shook his head.
“Hey, man, you miss a good one—we the main attraction. Hey, Joe, tell him you the main event.”
Joe, coming toward them with the bottle in one hand and a steaming cup in the other, shook his head. “Last prelim.” He looked apologetic. “Five rounds to a decision.”
“Only you didn’t need no la-de-da five rounds. You KO’d him in the third.”
Joe slid the coffee cup over, and slowly, heavily, seated himself in one of the battered wooden chairs. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Eddie thinks I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.”
“I know.”
“I’m not. Probably I never will be.”
He nodded. “I never thought you were, Joe.”
W.F. put in, “But you goin’ to be the main event next time, if that sweet Jenny know her stuff.”
Joe nodded slowly. “Maybe.”
“Maybe! You means for sure.”
“Jennifer’s been managing me since this happened to Eddie. Eddie’s still my real manager. He’ll take over again when he’s feeling better.”
“Eddie used to handle Joe hisself,” W.F. explained. “Then he come here, and there wasn’t nobody ’cause Jenny don’t want to do that. So I says I would. Won’t take no pay—I sees all the fights for free, and everybody see me on TV ’cause one channel broadcasts. Sometimes we on the sports on the news, when they don’t have nothin’ else to show. Everybody say, Whoo! Look at ol’ W.F. swing that towel. Besides Joe usually win, and I like that.”
He said, “It’s nice of you to stand by Eddie. Nice of you both.”
For the first time, Joe had raised the bottle to his lips. It was large and flaunted its name—Poxxie—in raised lettering on the glass. Joe poured most of its poisonous-looking scarlet contents down his throat, which he seemed able to open and hold open, like a valve in a pipe. “I couldn’t leave Eddie when he thinks I’m the champion. I don’t want you to tell Eddie I’m not the champion. It upsets him.”
“I won’t.”
Joe belched solemnly. “And if you can help him …”
Moved by he did not know what spirit, he said, “I think the best way to help him might be for you to become champion. Then he’d be well.”
W.F. crowed, “What I say? You one smart dude. Right on!”
Joe shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“I doubt that any champion thought he could do it before he did it.”
The very slightest of smiles touched Joe’s lips, a smile that could not have been seen at all were it not for the impassivity of the wide cheeks and heavy chin. As if to remove the last droplets of Poxxie, a large dark overcoat sleeve rose and scrubbed at that infinitesimal curve; yet the smile remained.
Without in the least intending to, he yawned.
W.F. said, “Guess I better get you into the bed. You did the job, and you about fagged out, I think.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. He sipped his coffee, finding that it tasted even worse than it smelled. A moment later, W.F. was tucking a blanket around his shoulders. “You gets chocolate puddin’ every meal,” W.F. said. “Even for breakfasts.”
Lara, Tina, and Marcella
The ringing of the telephone beside his bed woke him. Groggily, he answered it. “Hello?”
A woman’s voice: “Here, Emma, give me that!”
“Lara?” he asked. “Is that you, Lara?”
“Darling, it’s me!” (Surely that was Lara’s voice, Lara composed and gracious.) “I hope—I really do hope—I haven’t roused you from a sound sleep, darling. But I just got back here—you know how it is—and dear, precious Emma had sat up. And there was absolutely nothing for her to do but this, so I said call the damned place and see if they won’t let me talk with him, there’s a darling, and she did and they would. But not till the poor old dear had talked herself positively blue, didn’t you, Emma? While it got later and later and later and later. What time is it there, darling?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
“It’s after one here, and all I’ve done is come home and call you. Except that I had a bath and a drink first.” Lara giggled. “Sounds as though I drank the bath, doesn’t it? No, Emma mixed me a toddy and made it strong enough to knock down a mare. I can say that now, darling, because she’s gone. Did you get my flowers? Are they pretty?”
“Yes,” he said. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”
“They should be, darling—they cost like gold. But I’m immensely glad you like them.”
He decided to come out with it. “You’re Marcella too.”
“You mean besides all those perfectly awful bitches I play? Yes, there’s a real Marcella too—a real Marcella still, though sometimes I have ever so much trouble getting in touch with her. Besides, it’s so much fun being a bitch, though one doesn’t like oneself half so well afterward. But darling, I want you to know it’s horrible, horribly dangerous, my talking with you, knowing you’re in that awful place, because I’m so tempted to be bitchy with you. Why couldn’t you be good? But I’m coming to see you just as soon as I can. Perhaps then we can find a door out for you together.”
There was no good-bye, only the terrible finality of the handset set down in the receiver. He hung up too and put his hands behind his head, as he always did when he had to think. Maybe Lara would call back, as Marcella or somebody else. As Tina? The Tina doll had been modeled on someone, surely—on a real woman who called herself Tina and was actually Lara. Or rather, who was really the woman he knew—who he had known—as Lara.
He stepped from the van onto ice, and his feet flew from under him. He jerked awake.
He had been sleeping, then; sleeping and dreaming. Perhaps even Lara’s call had been a dream. He got up, found the pick he had taken from North’s room, and opened his locker. His clothes were just as he remembered them. The charm Sheng had given him hung from a hook in the locker; the Tina doll was in the breast pocket of his jacket. The badly folded map was in one pocket of his topcoat. He took it out, but the room was too dark for him to read it.
As he replaced it, it met with some obstruction. He pulled it out again and thrust his hand into the pocket. A small box had appeared there—by magic it seemed, by the rankest sorcery. It rattled softly. One questing finger discovered a tiny drawer and pushed it open. There was a second, louder, rattle as small objects fell from the drawer to the floor. Matches, of course.
He squatted, found one, and struck it on the side of the box, producing an impressive flare of sulfurous light. A fat dragon writhed with astounding flexibility upon a paper label, floating upward, as it seemed, to kiss or perhaps to devour a Chinese character of astonishing complexity.
Afraid that a passing nurse might see the light, he blew out the match.
They were Sheng’s matches; he recalled them now. As he and Sheng had gone through the basement of Sheng’s shop, the Chinese had handed him this box of matches and urged him to strike one. When he had refused, Sheng had struck a match from another box. He must have put this one in his pocket.
He swept up as many matches as he could find and restored them to the box. Thrusting his head and shoulders inside the locker so that it would contain the light, he struck a second match and examined the doll.
It was Lara, beyond a doubt. Perhaps its hair was a shade less red—though by the light from the match it was hard to be sure; girls—women—often changed their hair colors anyway. And the cheekbones might be a bit less pronounced, but it was Lara. The flame reached his fingers, and he blew the match out.
After replacing the doll and the
box of matches, he closed the locker door, wedging the burnt matchstick under it to hold it shut. Should he return the pick to North? For a moment he debated it with himself. It was certain North would notice its absence, but he did not know what North’s hiding place had been; North might notice that it was out of place just as easily.
Furthermore, he could not go with North now.
He tilted the vase and slid the pick beneath its base, got back into bed and pulled up the sheet and the thin blanket. As if the tilting of the vase had released them, the perfumes of the roses seemed to fill the air. He found that he could tell one from another, though he had no idea which belonged to which blossom.
One seemed darkly amber, languid, sultry and freighted with spice. Another, light yet evocative of ripe pears and apples, suggested a pink flower. Between these two, sometimes subtle, sometimes wanton, danced a third, insinuative of no color, but daring, seductive, and ravishing. By one of those insights that come when we are near sleep, he knew that this was Lara herself, the first Marcella, the second Tina.
As though his guessing the secret had ended the game, Lara appeared to take him by the hand. The matchstick dropped to the floor and the door of the locker flew open. Beyond it spread a garden filled with sun and flowers. At its center, in a small lawn, stood a stone arch draped in wild profusion with roses: yellow, pink, and white, and a hundred other colors, tinctures, and mottlings. For some reason the sight of this arch filled him with a cold terror, like the dread inspired by the sight of a scalpel in a man about to be operated upon.
Seeing his fear, Lara released his hand and went into the garden alone. Horrified yet fascinated, he watched her as she crossed the little lawn, passed under the arch, and vanished.
Though Lara was gone, he could not bring himself to enter the garden or to close the locker. A playful breeze teased the garden, ruffling its gay beds of tulips and swaying its bowing lilacs. Red and yellow birds fluttered through the air, singing as they flew, sometimes perching on the stems of the roses that shrouded the sinister arch.
When he had waited for a long time, so long that his arms and legs had grown stiff and cold, Tina emerged from the arch; her features—delicate and childlike, yet Lara’s—belied her jutting breasts. Smiling and extending her hand to him, she crossed the lawn. At his touch she became Marcella, blond and elegant, bright with diamonds and swathed in mink. He was so startled by the transformation that he jerked his head out of the locker and slammed the door.
He sat up in bed, but the slamming of the door continued relentlessly, as though ten thousand schoolboys were selecting books, rejecting them, and choosing new ones, forever. Intense light flashed starkly from the curtained window.
Shivering in his pajamas, he watched a winter thunderstorm. Snow and hail filled the air, vanished, and returned triumphant. Thunder rattled the frozen limbs of trees, and lightning played among the towers of the city; by its fevered illumination he saw that they were of shapes never seen in his own, nor in any other city with which he was familiar: pagodas, pyramids, pylons, and ziggurats.
“You get back in the bed!” W.F. said behind him.
“I was just watching the storm.”
“I know what you was doin’. Get in the bed this minute, and you can tell me all about it. If you don’t,” W.F. sounded threatening, “you don’t get no ’nanas with your Corn Flakes in the mornin’. Pretty near mornin’ now.” W.F. strode into the room. “Now get back in there!”
Obediently and even gratefully he climbed back into bed, drawing up the warmth of the blanket.
W.F. tucked him in, then bent over the roses, sniffing at one, then another. “You lucky you got these, you know? Joe like flowers so much he got me likin’ ’em too. When he’s home with that Jennifer, that’s about all he do, is work with those flowers. He got a li’l greenhouse.”
He would have returned to the locker and its haunted garden if he could. Instead he found himself at work, confronted by an angry-looking woman who told him, “I want to buy some furniture. Show me furniture, young man.”
The aisles of Furniture had become deserted highways lit by the level radiance of a setting sun and stretching for hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles, lined with brass beds, bookcase beds, and big waterbeds, all of which he showed the woman; there were gateleg tables too, cute dinettes, and formal walnut dining room ensembles. When they had seen innumerable beige sofas and cozy wingback chairs, they came at last to a Chippendale writing desk. He pulled out a drawer to show her its green baize lining and found that it contained an unopened letter sealed in red wax imprinted with a heart.
Aware that the woman strongly disapproved of what he was about to do, he nevertheless took out the letter and broke the wax, which snapped like glass.
The snap was also the flicking of a switch. The infinite furniture aisles and the finite world were plunged alike into night. A woman stood in the dim doorway; from the gesture she made of thrusting her purse beneath her arm, he knew that the snap he had heard had been the sound of its clasp.
He sat up, but the woman had already turned away. For an instant her face was lit by the hall light, and he saw that she was Marcella, the woman whose picture (but it was Lara’s) was on the card that had come with the roses, the woman he had seen in the garden. He sprang from the bed and rushed down the hallway, but she was gone.
When he returned to his room, North was sitting in the tiny chair beside the bed. “Hello,” North said. “Thought I’d have to wake you. What’s up?”
“I had another visitor.”
“Anything to do with our plan for tomorrow?”
“Today, you mean. It must be a long time after midnight. No, it isn’t.”
“You got your locker open. I checked. That’s good, that was the test. What we’re going to do—”
“I’m not going,” he said.
There was a long silence. At last North said, “You think you’ve got a better way now.”
“That’s right.”
“I need somebody to drive me. You’re the only one around.”
He asked, “Can’t you drive?”
“Hell, yes. But I’m not going to.”
He hesitated. Marcella (who might or might not be the same as Lara, though he was sure she was) was going to try to get him out. But would her chances be worse if he’d gotten himself out before? “All right,” he said. “But there’s a price.”
“Name it.”
“You’re from the real world—the world where Richard Nixon was President. So am I. But I think you’ve been in this one a lot longer than I have. How long?”
North shrugged, his shadowy shoulders almost invisible in the faint light. “I’ve lost track.”
“More than a year?”
“Sure.”
“Then I want you to answer three questions for me, openly and honestly. Three questions about this world. Will you do that?”
“Shoot.”
He hesitated. There were so many questions, and some of them were questions he had to ask himself. Did he want to go home? Or to find Lara? He asked, “Who is the woman they call the goddess?”
“Hold it,” North said. “I can’t answer questions that don’t make sense. Do you mean the real goddess?”
“When I first got here, I bought a doll. The clerk said it was the goddess at sixteen. I mean whatever goddess he meant.”
“All right, that’s the real goddess. Only she’s not real. She’s just like Christ or Buddha, you get me? She represents the God-damned feminine ideal or whatever. There’s a big place out west that’s sacred to her—ten thousand square miles, they say. Nobody can live out there. Nobody’s even supposed to go into it.”
“No one ever sees her?”
“That’s your second question?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Sure, people see her. They see ghosts and flying saucers—all sorts of crap. She’s supposed to go around looking for her lost lover, some guy she ditched thousands of years back.” North paused; it
was impossible to make out his expression in the faint light from the doorway. “If you ask me, she’s Mary Magdalene, and she’s looking for Jesus. Anyway, sometimes they see him too—the lost lover.”
“This is my third. What do they call him?”
There was a noticeable hesitation before North answered. “I won’t count this one. There’s a bunch of names, and I’ve never paid much attention to them.” Another hesitation. “Attis, he’s one. He’s got something to do with spring, and the harvest. Or he did.”
“I still have a question left?”
“Right.”
“Then I’ll save it for later. Are you going to tell me how we’re going to get out? Or do you want me to play it by ear?”
“I’m going to tell you. Just before noon they’ll herd all of us into the rec room. It’s called group recreation, but it’s really a get-acquainted party and gripe session. All the staff will be there, so that’s the best time for it. What we have to do then—”
The light came on.
Indoor Moopsball
He had barely gotten into bed when W.F. carried in his breakfast tray. “You was pretty good,” W.F. said, “so you get’nanas with your cereal.”
He said, “You work some awful hours.”
“Not really. I work days. See, the first time I see you yesterday, I was ‘bout to go off. Then I went to the arena to handle Joe. Then I come back with him, ’cause I live out this way. I had a little talk with Joe ‘bout strategy an’ all that after you gone. I always do it with him after a fight, but he won’t do it right after. He want to cool down and think ‘bout things hisself. So then I think why don’t I have a look in an’ see how everybody’s doin’.”
“You can’t have had much sleep.”
“Don’t need much. Never have. I’ll sleep good tonight, though.”
“W.F.?”
“What?” Already at the doorway, W.F. turned to look back.
“Did you see a blond woman here last night? A visitor?”