by Gene Wolfe
“Somebody come while you sleep last night, huh?”
He nodded, then added, “Not really while I was asleep. I was awake, and I saw her just as she was stepping out into the hallway.” He indicated the golden card attached to the roses. “This woman.”
“Listen.” W.F. stepped toward the bed again and lowered his voice. “Lots of dudes have some dreams like that. Don’t matter—don’t you worry ’bout it.”
Breakfast was Corn Flakes with a sliced banana, milk, and coffee. He ate listlessly, trying to recall what he had eaten for dinner the night before. The only thing he could be sure of was W.F.’s promised chocolate pudding. Had there been potatoes? He seemed to remember green beans and a scoop of mashed potatoes with a half tablespoon of gravy.
Was this what patients did? He had not thought of himself as a patient before, but as a wounded animal, a lost adventurer briefly exiled from the fields of life. Perhaps no one thought of himself as a patient until he was well, or almost well. He’d had a concussion, after all—a bad concussion. Perhaps this was how patients felt, how patients lived, waiting from one meal to the next, marking their whole lives with soggy Corn Flakes and cold coffee.
He tried to finish the coffee before it got any colder and discovered that his hand was shaking too much to hold the cup. This was a mental hospital. He had a concussion—or was that just what they told you? He felt his bandaged head.
There was a knock at the doorway; a man in coveralls stood there, artfully pretending that there was an actual door before him—a door impenetrable to the human eye.
“Yes?” he said.
“TV repair. You have a broken set?”
He had forgotten about it. “Yes,” he said again. “Or at least it was broken yesterday.” He picked up the remote control and pressed the On button. Nothing happened.
The man had stepped inside. “No picture. No sound.”
“That’s right,” he said.
“You didn’t mess with the knobs, did you?” The man edged in the direction of the set, keeping an eye on him.
“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic, a drunk. I fell down and hit my head. Read my chart. No, I didn’t touch the knobs at all; there’s nothing but that little chair to stand on, and it’s on wheels.”
Somewhat to his surprise, the television repair man did as he had suggested, bending to study the chart at the foot of his bed.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay.” The man straightened up, smiling. “You know how it is—some of the guys in this place are really nuts. I guess it’s worse for you, being in here all the time.”
“I haven’t met many of them. I only got here yesterday.” It struck him that he did not really know whether what he had said was true or not. “Or anyhow, I only woke up yesterday.”
“I had one guy try to jump me once. I had one guy tell me he was God.” The man chuckled. “And he hadn’t liked how the world was going, so he changed it. But he didn’t like the new way either, and he wanted it changed back. He was real mad.”
He smiled dutifully.
“There was a woman too that said she was a pilot. You ever hear of a woman that could fly an airplane?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Maybe she was, then. Only she said she was way up above all the clouds, and she didn’t know quite where she was, and she didn’t want to come down through them because sometimes you hit something doing that. So she saw this little bitty hole in the clouds, and lights on the ground, and she went through it, and everything was different.” The man chuckled again. “They used to have the women mixed in with the men, you know, what do some of these guys know? But one of the papers found out about it.” Expertly the man lifted the television from its slanted bracket.
He had put the telephone in his lap. Without much hope, he dialed his apartment.
“Knobs don’t work,” the man said. “Now I gotta see if you got power. Some of the outlets here are bad.”
Somewhere (where?) a telephone rang and rang again.
“You got power, so it’s the main fuse. Power, no light, no sound, it can’t be anything else.” The man whipped out a large screwdriver and began to take the back off the set.
“Hello?” It was a harsh male voice.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“You called me. Who do you want?”
“Lara.”
There was a long pause in which he heard faint music and children’s voices, as though a radio were playing in the next apartment, as though the apartment were by a school (it was not) and all its windows were open in this bitter cold, admitting the sounds of the playground with the snow.
“Lara’s not here. Who’s calling?”
“Tell me who you are,” he said, “and I’ll tell you who I am.”
“I see. Okay, I’ll tell Lara you called. Where are you?”
He hesitated. He wanted to be found, but did he want to be found by this man? Would this man really tell Lara anything?
She had brought the flowers. No, she had sent the flowers, but she had come later; she had even spoken to him on the phone, because it had been Lara, surely Lara, on the phone—Lara forced to use another name. “Lara knows where I am,” he said, and hung up.
“Yup, the main fuse,” the television repairman said. “I’ll have it working again for you in a jiffy.”
For want of anything better to say, he said, “I don’t suppose I could trade it for a color set?”
“Color? You mean colored pictures?”
He nodded.
The man’s face closed like the shutting of a door. In the tone of an adult explaining simplicities to an infant, the man said, “You can’t do that. Look here, the way these things work is that you’ve got a round screen coated with phosphors. When the electron beam hits them, they shine. If it hits them hard, they shine bright. If it isn’t so hard, they’re not so bright. That way you can have white, black, and various shades of gray on your screen. But if you wanted colors, you’d have to have a phosphor dot for, well, every color there is—blue, red, yellow, everything. They’d have to be put on real close together too, without them getting mixed up, and I guess you’d still need the regular phosphor for white. If it was ever built, a thing like that would cost a million dollars.”
He said, “I thought I saw an article that said they had them.”
The repairman tossed the burned-out fuse in the direction of the wastebasket in the corner. “Probably somebody playing guessing games. Or a real little one that some company’s made to show they could do it. I think they’d have to put out their own signal, though. The regular signal wouldn’t work.”
He nodded and lay still for a moment, watching the man put the back on his set. He knew he owned a color television, a GE as bright as Lara’s roses. He knew Lara had sent him the roses. He had sold color televisions, and he had seen Lara. His neck was still stiff from the fall, and it hurt to twist it to look at the roses. He decided he would sit up and hold the vase in his lap for a time, smelling the roses and visualizing how they would look on color television. When he picked up the vase, he saw a roll of bills beneath it.
“All set,” the repairman said, displaying the black and white picture. “I’ll put it back up for you.”
While the man’s back was turned, he grabbed the roll of bills and hid it under the sheet.
“Try out your remote.”
He did, changing channels, turning the set off and on, and raising and lowering the volume. “Works fine.”
“What’d I tell you? It was the main fuse, that’s all. You got a voltage spike, and it blew to protect your tubes.”
Recalling Lara’s fading, shrinking face on the screen, he asked what could have caused such a spike.
The repairman sighed. “Probably some equipment somebody’s hooked up wrong. A hospital’s got a lot, X-ray machines and all that stuff. Big elevators—if you wire them up wrong, they can generate voltages of their own and stick them in the system.”
&nb
sp; “I see,” he said. And then, “Thanks.”
When the man was gone, he let his fingers toy with the roll of bills, counting them by touch. Exactly ten. He wondered how big they were, and whether they were all the same denomination. What did they look like? Money here was not like his own money; the reaction of the girl in the map store had proved that, and it had been confirmed by the bundle of money—money meant to be burned—in the Chinese shop. He moved one of the bills until its corner protruded beyond the hem of the sheet and glanced at it. One hundred.
A voice from the television said, “Hello?” and he glanced up.
It was a moment before he recognized his own apartment, but it was all there—his worn couch, the vinyl-covered armchair the store had let him have for thirty-two fifty after someone burned a hole in the right arm with a cigarette, the telephone stand he had positioned to throw a shadow on that hole.
A faint, metallic voice asked, “Who is this?”
The man on the telephone in his apartment was not himself. This man was older than he, big, tough looking, starting to run to fat.
He pressed a button to increase the volume.
“You called me, fella,” the man in his apartment said. “What do you want?”
“Lara.”
There was a long pause. The big man seemed frozen. Slowly the image faded, replaced by a huge can of dog food. “It’s all meat,” said a new voice. “Give your pet just one can and watch him go for it.”
He turned the volume back down and lifted his knees so that the bedclothes were between his hands and the doorway; the bills were all hundreds, nearly new. None of them was completely new and unwrinkled. He had not seen hundred-dollar bills often, but the old-fashioned scrolling of these seemed familiar and right. The face on each bill was that of a woman, elderly, kindly, and intelligent—a lady who might, he decided, be a teacher close to retirement at some pricey finishing school. A footstep sounded in the hallway, and he thrust the bills under the sheet again.
It was the nurse, smiling and humming to herself as she entered his room. “Good morning, good morning! How are you today? Enjoy your breakfast?”
He nodded.
“Then I’ll just put it right over here on your little table for W.F., all right? How’s the head?”
“It doesn’t hurt much.”
“Well, if you want some aspenin, just ask. I know you can get up and walk around, because you were up so much yesterday—yes, I saw you, naughty boy! So you can come to Group Rec. Dr. Pille will be there today, and we want to show him a whole bunch of sunny faces. I know you haven’t been, so I thought you might like me to tell you about it.”
He said, “What do we do? Play softball?”
“That’s right. Only not in weather like this, of course. And not with a real bat, because someone might be hurt. But we have loads of fun. You see, the idea is for all of us on the staff to join all of you in recreational activities. That way, we get to know you better, and you get to know us better. Dr. Pille doesn’t really have to take part, but he’s such a good sport! So he comes whenever he can. Once he played run-sheep-run! But today we can’t have outdoor activities because of the snow, so we’ll have indoor moopsball. Won’t that be fun?”
“I’ve never played it.” Suddenly and irrationally, he was afraid that the bills were showing above the edge of the sheet. As unobtrusively as he could, he pushed them deeper.
“Then this is your big chance to learn, isn’t it! Up and out of bed, and don’t worry about your pajamas, everybody—I mean all the other patients—will be wearing the same thing.”
He had an apocalyptic vision of someone straightening up his bed while he was gone, and slipped the roll of bills into the waistband of his pajamas.
The nurse whispered, “This is the day. William will give you the signal.”
Freedom
“All right,” the new nurse said loudly, “I want you to divide into two teams.” She plowed through them like a white hospital ship through a sullen sea, pushing patients and staff to left and right. He found himself in the group on the right, with North standing beside him.
“Now I’m going to appoint two captains,” the new nurse announced. “Dr. Pille, will you be one?”
The man who nodded was a slender, smiling Oriental.
“And you, Mr. Walsh. You be the other.”
“Sure!” Walsh called. “Come ’ere, ya tigers! Listen up.”
“You must each appoint a wizard.”
“Ya,” Walsh said, and touched him on the shoulder. “Ya my wizard.”
He asked what a wizard had to do.
“Put the whammy on the enemy. I’ll be out there leading the troops. Ya got magic powers I just invested ya with, kid.” Someone handed Walsh a red bat of soft plastic and a plumed red plastic helmet. “Thanks,” Walsh said.
“I’m not magic.”
“Not before, maybe, but ya are now. Lookit their guy, he’s working already. Ya gotta beat his spells, so get busy.” Walsh turned away. “I got three staff. Staff’s all cavalry, got it? Cohn, ya cavalry too! Cavalry, go get ya ’orses.”
The “’orses” were bright red and blue plastic tricycles. In the center of the floor, a couple of patients armed with plastic garbage-can lids and huge, soft plastic mallets were already flailing away at each other. Between them was a gaily colored plastic beachball, presumably the moopsball.
It was probably good therapy, he decided. How could you stay mad at a nurse or a doctor you’d just banged on the head with a plastic mallet? Nevertheless, he didn’t want to play. He yawned.
As if picked out by a spotlight, he saw the face of the blue wizard, the man Walsh had pointed out to him. It was a thin and even skeletal face, on a head that appeared to have been shaved. Its owner stood motionless in the midst of the hubbub, smiling a little, arms extended, eyes fixed upon him.
My God, he thought, it’s working! He began to dance as he had seen Indians dance in movies, stamping his feet, pumping his arms, patting his mouth as he yelled.
“Woo, woo, woo! Pawnee gitchya! Scalp ’um white man!” After a moment or two, he noticed that several members of the blue team had stopped playing to stare at him.
“Pretty soon they’ll put the captain of the winning team up on their shoulders and march him all around. Go to your room as fast as you can and get your street clothes on. Come to Door C. It’ll be open, and I’ll be right inside.” It was North, fading into the melee as he turned to look.
A red-helmeted mob surged about the wide plastic tube the blues had defended, red cavalry fending off blue players with padded broomhandles. Walsh, conspicuous in the plumed helmet, scored the goal.
The hallway was deserted, and he wondered whether North was ahead of him or behind him. Ahead, most likely. North had seen games before and probably had a better idea of what would happen when.
The roll of bills had slipped almost out of his waistband; it struck him that he had been an idiot to do that Indian dance when the money could have fallen out at every step. But it had not, and the dance had worked. He put the bills into his wallet in front of his real money, three singles, a five, and a twenty from the place North called C-One, the sane and sober reality in which Richard Milhous Nixon had twice been elected President.
There seemed to be no point in bothering with a tie—yet he did, knotting it swiftly but carefully before his dim reflection in the window. As he pulled it tight, he realized that in the depths of his soul he believed the last few days had been only a nightmare, that everything that had taken place since he had met Lara had been a dream, that he must soon wake up and go to work; and if he went to work without his tie, he would have to buy one in Men’s Wear.
North was waiting, dressed in a neat blue suit. “Here’s the keys. She says it’s a chocolate Mink. Middle of the lot.”
The keys shared their chain with a rabbit’s foot. He put the whole affair in his pocket as they clattered down the steps. “Won’t they hear us?”
“They’re still wh
ooping and hollering about the game. The thing is to get out fast before they stop.”
Instead of turning off into the room in which he had drunk coffee with Joe and W.F., they emerged into a snowy parking lot from what was clearly the back of the hospital. The brown car was bigger than he had expected—yet hunched-looking, with its short hood, high trunk, and roomy passenger compartment.
He twisted the key in the ignition, but in vain.
“I thought you said you knew how to drive.”
“It won’t start, that’s all. Won’t even crank.” Prompted by a dim and almost racial memory, he stared down at the pedals. There were three, and a wear-polished steel button to the left of the clutch. He pressed it with his foot; the engine sprang to life.
“That’s better,” North said.
He nodded, wondering about the floor shift. It had been a long time since he had driven a stick, and that had been a short lever on the doghouse of a sports car. This was an ungainly rod topped by a knob of hard, black rubber. He tried out the gears.
“Get moving, damn it!”
“Do you want to get out of here, or do you want to have an accident?” The car rolled smoothly back; he clashed the gears a little shifting into first, but second and third were smooth and firm. “We’re thieves now, I guess,” he said as they turned out of the hospital’s parking lot. “If we don’t get sent back here, we’ll be put in jail.”
Edged into the corner, North grinned at him. “How do you think I got the keys? Or got that door unlocked? I got money too.”
“How much?”
“None of your God-damned business. You got any?”
He said, “Same answer.”
“You know, I kind of like you.” North chuckled. “Which is too bad because I’m going to have to bust your God-damned snotty nose for you someday.”
“I hope it’s not before you’re through having me drive for you. Can’t you drive? You said you could.”
“I’ve been through the FBI’s chauffeur course.”
He asked, “Then why’d you take me with you?”
“Because I felt sorry for you, you jerk.”