by Gene Wolfe
Home Again
The waitress had brought Fanny’s salad and his fettuccine, with the tea and coffee, while Fanny was at the register. When she returned she asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’m starved,” he said, “but first I want to see what you got.”
“Two perfectly ordinary ten-dollar bills.” She held them out. “You really are crazy, that’s what I think.”
He shook his head and forked up fettuccine.
“And I asked if you were hungry.”
“I want to think,” he told her, “and I think better when I’m eating.” After another bite he asked, “Would you like a taste? It’s really very good.”
“Just to keep you happy.” She took a forkful, followed by two more. “You didn’t really get those bills you showed me from him, did you?”
He nodded, his mouth full.
“You’re saying that man knows, that he’s manipulating us.”
He swallowed. “I don’t think so. He talked to me about the fight, Joe’s fight.”
“Who’s Joe?”
“A boxer. I met him once. Everybody says what a nice guy he is, and he seemed like one, the one time I talked to him. Do you remember what Mama Capini said about the people Lara brought here?”
Fanny nodded. “The big man and the blonde? Sure.”
“Joe was the big man. Laura Nomos is Eddie Walsh’s lawyer. Eddie is Joe’s manager. All these people belong to your world, but Mama Capini doesn’t.” He sipped his water and went back to the fettuccine. “Joe paid for the dinner, remember? If it had been Lara—Laura Nomos—I would have understood, and maybe Joe used a credit card or wrote a check. But I don’t think either one would be like Joe. He bought me coffee from a machine and got a soft drink for himself, and he took the change out of one of those little coin purses that misers use on TV. I bet he’s had it since he was a kid. I think Joe would pay cash.”
“And not look at his change till later?”
“No, that’s just it. Joe would look at it. He’d count it, too. Probably Jennifer—that’s his wife, the woman in the red dress—takes care of most of the bills, but he wouldn’t want her to pay for a meal in a restaurant. That would embarrass him. So his change was right, in the right sort of money.”
“Then they’d have to know, here in this restaurant. That’s what I said.”
He shook his head. “If he’d known, he wouldn’t have talked to me about Joe. At first you don’t understand what’s happened. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience. What happened to him and this whole place is that they were pulled across, somehow. They went through a door—except they couldn’t have. One door couldn’t take a whole building, could it?”
Fanny laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s this about doors?”
“Lara told me, in a note. When you’ve been around someone from the other world, you see doors. Anything that’s closed on all four sides can be one. It looks significant; that was her word. If you go through, you cross over. But then if you turn around to go back, you don’t go back. It isn’t a door anymore, for you. You have to back out.”
He snapped his fingers, and Fanny said, “What is it now?”
“Why is it a door looks the same on both sides?”
“Do they? Beats me.”
“Because it is. That’s what makes it a door. Shut your eyes. Go on, this is a test.”
She did.
“Now, you’ve eaten here before, and you brought me here. What’s the full, official name of this restaurant?”
She considered for a moment. “There’s a sign outside with brass letters. Trattoria Capini.”
He sighed and said, “All right, now open them again.” He handed her a book of matches that had been lying on the table.
Fanny glanced at the cover. “‘Capini’s Italian Cuisine.’ Okay, it’s not quite the same.”
He put down his fork. “This restaurant—I call it Mama’s—is in my world. It’s the place where I’ve eaten for years. The other one—the Trattoria—is in yours. Maybe the family name’s being the same on both sides is a coincidence. Anyway, the door of the Trattoria is a Door. People from your world who’ve been with people from mine can get into mine by walking through it, like you did when you came in with me, or like Joe and his wife—her name’s Jennifer, I think—did when they came in with Lara. But things sort themselves out after awhile. People are pulled by their own worlds, which is why I’m back in mine now, I think. Money is really just pieces of paper. If it’s from one world it pulls others from the same world. Things move in ways that sort them out.”
Fanny said, “You’re implying that a piece of paper has a brain. I don’t believe you.”
“No, I’m not. Let me tell you about something they showed us in school. They tuned two strings to the same frequency. Do you follow me? Not the way you’d tune a piano, but so they made exactly the same note. Then whenever somebody plucked one, the other would start to shake. Not because it had a brain—it just did.”
“Then both worlds are only frequencies, and nothing’s solid at all.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
“But I would. Isn’t that how TV’s supposed to work? You tune to a certain channel and get two signals, one for picture, one for sound. The station fudges the frequency of each just a little all the time, and that’s what changes the picture and the noise from the speakers. When you change the frequency in your set a lot, it picks up a new channel, and the show you’ve been watching is gone. There’s a new show, with different people.”
He shook his head.
“Well, I think I’m right.” Fanny signaled the waitress. “Please, could I have more hot water for my tea?”
He wanted to say that although her world might be nothing more than the note of a piano string, his own was real; but he remembered its coins, the false faces and the brassy edges of them, and he felt that it had no more reality than her own, and perhaps less.
Fanny pointed a finger at him. “Now listen to me. Suppose you’d been watching TV for your entire life. Suppose it was the only thing you knew, and there were shows like Sunrise, Sunset, Work, and Shopping; and you were used to them and had never even thought about anything else at all.” She paused. “What do they call that little screen at the back of your eyes?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t know.”
“The retina, that’s it. Well, suppose somebody changed the show there.”
“Are you testing me somehow?”
Fanny grinned. “Nope, just making conversation. You tell me that if we walk out the door backwards, we’ll be in my world. And you want to be there with me, so you can find your Lara—who’s really Laura Nomos. And I think what’s going to happen is that we’re going to back through the door and be on the sidewalk again, and then you’re going to say, ‘See, it worked!’ I may be a sucker, but I’m not that big a sucker.”
“I’m serious,” he said.
“Me, too. And I think I know why your doors work. Suppose two channels show the same thing, but in opposite ways. Say the thing’s a door—or anyhow a doorway—and the first channel shows one side at the same time the other channel’s showing the other. Wouldn’t their frequencies have to come closer to each other? If there were a lot of channels, some would get so close they’d touch. Then you could turn the knob just a little and skip from one channel to the next, right? But if you wanted to go back, you’d have to turn the knob backwards. You couldn’t just keep twisting it in the direction you’d turned it the first time and get back. So that’s what we’ll be doing if we back through the door, turning the knob back. But I’d feel awfully silly.”
He said, “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
Fanny shrugged. “I didn’t think you cared about me. Only about your Lara.”
“Do I have to choose? Right now?”
She grinned again. “Yep.”
“Then I choose Lara.”
“Which means you’re going
to have to let me pay for my own lunch.”
“Back out,” he said. “I mean it. It may not work—Lara’s note said you should do it right away, and we certainly haven’t. But at least we won’t be any worse off. You’d be as lost in my world as I was in yours.”
“That’s a myth,” Fanny said. “Isn’t it?”
“Isn’t what?”
“The lost traveler who meets somebody, or finds a city that no one else can ever find again. I’m not so sure I’d mind being one, even if the Department thought I’d gone over to the enemy.”
He said, “Those shows usually have sad endings.” He had seen Brigadoon on HBO, and he tried to recall how it had ended so he could tell her. Nothing remained in his memory but the name and the swirl of plaid skirts, the skirling of bagpipes.
That isn’t how it really is, he thought.
Fanny stood, taking her coat from the back of her chair. “Well, come on. Here goes nothing.”
“Right now? We’ve got to get the check.”
“Here it is.” She held it up. “The waitress put it here when she brought the water for my tea.”
He took it from her fingers (a bit too easily, he thought) and held her coat for her. He discovered that he did not really think backing through the door would work. He was home, in his own world once more after—what? A Saturday morning adventure? Some kind of a mental seizure? Things sort themselves out. He had said that.
His coat was on a hook near the table. It was, of course, still the heavy wool one he had bought in the hotel. Too heavy, probably, for the weather here. But the package of fifties he had bought for a dime from Mr. Sheng was real money now, as the still substantial remainder of the thousand he had found under the vase in his hospital room was not.
With a second bill from the packet he paid the new cashier, another of Mama Capini’s sons, a little older and a bit bigger than the one he had met in the men’s room. As a test he asked, “What do you think about the fight?”
“What fight?”
“Joe’s fight. I thought Joe was a customer of yours.”
The cashier chuckled and rang up their total. “You been talkin’ to Guido. He’s a crazy one, that Guido.”
He started to return to their table, but Fanny whispered, “I left the tip.”
“Backwards,” he told her. “Remember, we’ve got to walk backwards.” He took an awkward backward step toward the door.
“No,” Fanny whispered. “I won’t.” She caught his arm and spun him around.
Desperately he began, “You’ll be—”
“No, I won’t. The joke’s gone far enough.” She tugged at his arm.
Lara was standing across the street, snow blowing past her face as she studied the restaurant. He started toward her, and as he did he heard Mama Capini call, “Arrivederci!” behind them. At the edge of vision he saw Fanny look back, wave, and smile as she stepped through the door.
Then he was on the street, and alone. Snowflakes sparkled in the sun, blown from the rooftops by a spring wind. Lara had already turned away; as he watched, she vanished through the revolving door of a fur store.
Recklessly he dashed into the traffic.
Brakes squealed. A white truck like a huge refrigerator on wheels slewed sideways until it nearly struck his shoulder with its own. Triumphantly, he leaped across the curb and straight-armed the revolving door.
A sale was in progress; the furrier’s swarmed with women, many of them accompanied by husbands variously impatient. He raced among them, trying to decide whether Lara had worn a hat, whether her lovely hair had been on her shoulders or piled upon her head to form the covering he half recalled having seen while Fanny faded like a cheap photo at his side.
Twice he pushed his way completely around the store. Women were everywhere, with and without hats; none was Lara.
In desperation he snatched away a clerk, rescuing her from an angry-looking customer with blue hair who was disparaging two coats to her in tandem. He described Lara as well as he could.
The clerk shook her head. “Have you tried upstairs?”
He stared at her.
“In the salon.” The clerk lowered her voice. “The more expensive things are up there, and they get a better class of people.”
A pokey elevator carried him to the second floor, wheezing like an asthmatic old man. Here the carpets were white and the lights seemed touched with blue. He located a male clerk and described Lara again, adding that it was extremely urgent that he speak to her.
The clerk asked frostily, “You don’t by any chance recall the young lady’s name?”
“Lara Morgan,” he said. “She sometimes uses the name Laura Nomos.”
The clerk did not turn a hair. “Then if you’ll come with me, sir, I can examine the book for today and tell you whether she’s been here.”
They went to the back of the store, where a ledger lay open on a desk. The clerk studied its pages. “Ms. Morgan was indeed here today, sir. At eleven thirty.” The clerk glanced at his watch. “It’s now nearly eleven forty, so I would imagine she’s left the store. Ms. Morgan left her coat with us for cleaning and storage, as I believe she always does.”
A tiny flower of hope blossomed in him. He asked, “She’ll come for it, then, in the fall?”
“Or send someone, sir, if she wants it taken from storage.” The clerk flipped pages. “Here we are, sir. She picked it up last October. But it had been with us for twenty-six months, sir.”
His Apartment
The mailbox was full, and among its bills and ads he discovered a yellow ticket advising him that still more were being held for him at the post office. A little strawberry-shaped clock he had gotten in a drugstore clung to the door of his refrigerator, its display faithfully flashing the time and date—1:38, 4 15, 1:38, 4 15, 1:39, 4 15.
It was the middle of April; he tried to remember when Lara had left him, but could not. Her note lay on the coffee table, undated save for a light coating of dust. He read it again.
Darling,
I tried to say good-bye last night, but you wouldn’t listen. I’m not a coward, really I’m not.
If it weren’t for the doors I wouldn’t tell you a thing—that would be the best way. You may see one, perhaps more than one, at least for a little while. It will be closed all around. (They must be closed on all sides.) It may be a real door, or just something like a guy-wire supporting a phone pole, or an arch in a garden. Whatever it is, it will look significant.
Please read carefully. Please remember everything I’m saying. You must not go through.
If you go through before you realize it, don’t turn around. If you do it will be gone. Walk backward at once.
Lara
Her signature was exactly as he remembered it, its first A a continuation of the capital L. He did not read the postscript (which he called the PS), feeling that he would quite literally die, that his heart would somehow burst, if he did.
A paper lay under the coffee table. March 13th—thirty-three days since Lara had gone. A night in the hospital, or perhaps two. Say two nights in the hospital, a night in the hotel with North, a night in the hotel alone. That was four nights, for thirty-three days.
He switched on the television and chanced upon a feature story about the rush to file income tax returns. April 15th; this was the day you were supposed to file. Mechanically, he walked to the post office and got the rest of his mail. His form was there, and the store had sent his W2 already—it was in the pile of papers on the bedside table. The bed was still unmade, still rumpled from the night he had staggered into it with Lara and the day he had awakened alone.
He used the short form and had nothing to report but his salary; it was complete, sealed and stamped, in twenty minutes. He had not worn the overcoat when he went to the post office, and now he debated whether to wear it when he went out to mail his return. The packet of fifties was still in the right side pocket. He took it out, wondering what Internal Revenue would do if they knew he had it; no doubt pro
fits had to be reported, even if they were the profits of buying several thousand dollars for a dime. The brown paper wrapper was still stamped PUROLATOR COURIER, still marked with a Chinese character and the symbols for ten cents by Mr. Sheng’s industrious brush. Where was Mr. Sheng now? And his nephew, Dr. Pille? On a different channel, in another show.
Taking Marcella’s bills out of his wallet, he folded them, bound them with a rubber band, and put them in the pocket of the overcoat. Slipping the paper wrapper from Mr. Sheng’s fifties, he crumpled it and tossed it into a wastebasket, and deposited the fifties in his wallet.
He felt like an international traveler—like James Bond—felt that he should have a small but deadly automatic tucked away somewhere, and several passports. He laughed at himself as he hung the coat in the closet, draping the muffler over its collar while he resisted, always resisted, the impulse to take out the Tina doll and study it, to kiss it perhaps, and comb its hair as the woman in the haberdashery had.
“Too old to play with dolls.” He spoke the words aloud, but softly.
Returning from the post office a second time, he felt cold despite the sweater-vest and stopped to buy a new topcoat. At his own store—the store where he worked, or at least where he had worked—he could have gotten an employee discount. But the topcoat was on sale, and his discount would not have made it any cheaper; the discount applied only to the full price, never to a sale price. His new topcoat was tan, like his old one.
Back at his apartment, he stripped the bed, showered, and changed clothes, discarding his scorched slacks. There was a musty shirt on the floor of his closet. He bundled it with the sheets and pillow slips, and the soiled shirt, socks, and underwear he had removed, and looked around to see whether Lara had left anything.
She had owned very little, now that he thought of it. Two dresses, but perhaps, since he remembered both as green, there had been only one, a single dress that could be worn differently at different times, with different pins and so on. He tried to recall what they said in Better Dresses—accessorized, that was it. It occurred to him that Lara would never have used that word and would not have liked it, and he realized that he himself did not like it now.