by Gene Wolfe
By the company’s medical plan, then, very likely; but that was administered by Personnel. If he asked Ella for the number of his doctor, she would tell Drummond. He could not just start telephoning doctors. How many doctors were there in the city? Thousands, probably. He tried to recall what Drummond had said about this one: “Your doctor will see you as soon as you get to his office. He doesn’t take appointments. There’s no reason you can’t be back before lunch.”
No, that was wrong. Not he. It was she. She doesn’t take appointments. The doctor was a woman. There might be thousands of doctors, but how many of those were women?
Fifty, maybe. And he wouldn’t go to a doctor out in the suburbs.
There was a phone in a corner of the room, with a tattered directory on a shelf under it. He opened it to the physicians’ listings and got out his pen.
Some of the doctors had provided only initials; he decided to consider them male for the purpose of his search. At least half the women were gynecologists or pediatricians; they could be eliminated too. He crossed off all those with addresses more than six blocks from the store and his apartment and was pleased to see that only three names remained. Pushing coins into the slot, he got out his wallet and checked the name he and North had chosen in the hotel. A. C. Pine—that was it. He laid the driver’s license on the shelf.
“Dr. Nilson’s office.”
Did this doctor take appointments? He said, “This is Adam Pine. I need an appointment with the doctor as soon as possible—this morning, if you can arrange it.”
“Dr. Nilson—” Faintly someone called, “Lara! Lara!” He could not tell whether the voice was male or female; it sounded far off and scratchy.
“Would you mind if I put you on hold, Mr. Green?”
She did not wait for his answer. Her voice was gone, and after a moment or two had passed, a piano began “Clair de Lune.”
He waited, telling himself he would stand there all day if necessary. “Clair de Lune” ended, and something else began, a piece he did not recognize.
At last a new voice said, “Dr. Nilson speaking.”
“I want to talk to Lara.”
“To Lora? She just left.”
“Then I want an appointment to see you as soon as possible.”
“I don’t take appointments—it’s first come, first served. Come to my office. It’s in the Downtown Mental Health Center, and I’ll fit you in when I can.”
He tried twice before he could get out the words. “I think you’ve treated me before. That you have a file on me.” He gave his name.
Dr. Nilson’s voice became warm. “Oh, of course, Mr. Green. Believe it or not, I was looking over your case the other night and hoping you’d drop in again. It’s been more than a month.”
He started, “If you’ve tried to phone—”
“I never do, except in emergencies. It’s so much better if the patient contacts me because he wants to. Come this morning, won’t you? I’ll see that you get in.”
“Yes.”
“And now, if you’ll excuse me—Lora’s not here, and there’s someone on the other line.”
His Doctor
The crisp air of morning had already been softened by the sun. He strode along with his topcoat folded over his arm, glancing into the store windows he passed. His department rarely got a window—windows went to the clothes people, mostly—but when it did, he was the one most often assigned to set up the display; he was professionally interested, or so he told himself.
As he looked, he wondered what to do with the money from Mr. Sheng’s package. Prudence (his mother’s ghost) advised him to bank it against a rainy day. Caution whispered that Internal Revenue might check his deposits.
How could he explain? And there would be no explaining the fact that he had not reported the income when he had filled out his 1040A. Instead he had asked for a refund, because he always had Accounting withhold more than he needed to cover his income taxes. No, he thought, even the IRS could not blame him for not reporting the money on that return; it was for last year, and he had bought the money this year.
Or had he? There had been something oddly old-fashioned about There, now that he considered it. Most of the buildings had looked old, and even the ones that had seemed new had been old in design, built of conservative brick, with windows that slid up and down like windows in a house. The cramped little cars had felt modern enough—old cars were bigger, with fins on their tails and doors as thick as a bank vault’s. So There had modern cars, except for their long-handled gear shifts; but the TV had been all black-and-white.
He tried to recall the date on the paper in which he had read about their escape and about Joe’s match with some other boxer whose name he could not remember. It was gone, faded to invisible ink.
Maybe he could take a Caribbean cruise, like on Love Boat. No, because you were supposed to fall for somebody, and he could not fall for anybody except Lara, and he had already fallen for her. He might think he had, as he had with Fanny, getting laid for two or three thousand dollars.
He laughed at himself. There had been a time when he had gone to singles bars one or two nights a week, a time that had ended when he realized the women were looking for husbands and not for love. (No, never for love.) If he just wanted to get laid, that could be arranged a lot cheaper.
Men in blue hardhats and International Orange safety vests were at work not far from the building. Hard-edged black wires traced languid curves in the street. He stopped a workman and rather timidly asked what they were doing, and the man explained that they were taking down overhead lines that had been replaced by underground cables.
He nodded, said thank you, and stood looking at the street, recalling the significant door that would not open for him again. A meter maid touched his arm and pointed out the Downtown Mental Health Center. “It’s right over there, sir. Would you like me to take you?”
“No.” He shook his head and realized with a start that he had been crying, bawling in public for the first time since he had been a small boy. Jerking the red handkerchief out of his breast pocket, he mopped his streaming eyes and blew his nose. When he felt presentable again, he went inside.
A board beside the elevators listed Dr. Nilson’s office on the fourth floor. He discovered that he had known that already; no doubt it had been part of the listing in the telephone book. He rang for the elevator and went up.
There were three patients in the doctor’s reception room: a thin and gloomy woman, a fat boy of sixteen or so who grinned at nothing, and himself. He chose a chair, necessarily between the other two, and wondered what they thought of him, how they would describe him. As a neat little clerk, perhaps—not that he felt so neat this morning.
There was nobody at the reception desk. The telephone rang six times as they sat waiting, but no one answered it.
When it had stopped ringing, he rose and examined the desk. Its top held a potted plant, a green blotter, and a silver ball-point pen embraced by a pink koala bear. The flat drawer under the desk top contained pencils, a ball-point office pen, a gross of paper clips in a small cardboard box, and some rubber bands. False drawer fronts on the left concealed an electric typewriter bolted to a swing-up typing stand. He lifted it to see whether there was anything hidden behind it, and the gloomy woman stared at him disapprovingly.
No wonder you’re so down, he thought. You won’t let anyone have any fun.
False drawer fronts on the right slid up to reveal bins for white and yellow paper, for stationery with the Downtown Mental Health Center letterhead, matching envelopes, carbon paper, and flimsy second sheets.
That was all. If the person who had used the desk had ever stored personal possessions in it, she had taken them with her. He reflected that even a desk dictionary might have revealed her name, scrawled inside the front cover. But the desk dictionary, if it had ever existed, was gone.
There was nothing beneath the blotter, no labels pasted to the telephone. The toy koala was cute and mute. He pul
led out the stationery, the white bond paper, and the yellow paper, and ruffled through them, thinking vaguely that something might have been concealed there. There was nothing, and the carbon paper (all unused) and second sheets were just as sterile. The pen in the drawer was plastic, the kind given away by office-equipment dealers in search of business. GOOD TIGER INC, with an address and telephone number, took up half the pen’s sides. The others read: DOWNTOWN MENTAL/HEALTH CENTER/ LORA MASTERMAN. He slipped the pen into his pocket and sat down.
A lanky woman with a wisp of beard marched out of the inner office, crossed the waiting room as if they were invisible, and went out. The buck-toothed woman with whom he had spoken the day he had discovered Lara was gone looked through the doorway, saw him, and said, “Please come in, Mr. Green.”
The fat teenager stood up. “Now wait a minute!”
The buck-toothed woman told him calmly, “Mr. Green’s case is something of an emergency, Mr. Bodin, and I reserve the right to see my patients in whatever order I choose.”
He said, “In a minute, he’ll tell you I took this pen from your receptionist’s desk, doctor.” He held it up so she could see it. “I thought I might want to make some notes about what we said, and I forgot to bring one of my own.”
“That’s perfectly all right, Mr. Green. Won’t you come in?”
Her office was smaller than Drummond’s, and much plainer. He sat down when she did and asked, “What’s the matter with me, doctor?”
“I really don’t know, Mr. Green. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“You’ve seen me before?”
She nodded.
“How often?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me. Very much. How often?”
She flipped through the file folder on her desk. “This is your eighth visit. Why is it so important?”
“Because I can only remember coming here once before.”
She frowned. “Interesting. When was that?”
“March fourteenth. Do you remember what I asked you then?”
“I have notes from our interview. You were looking for a young woman called Lara Morgan. Did you find her?”
“No. Do you have a picture of Lora Masterman?”
“If I did, Mr. Green, I wouldn’t let you look at it. Ms. Masterman no longer works here, and I wouldn’t want her annoyed by my patients.”
“She left you pretty suddenly,” he said. “I talked to her when I called from the store. She put me on hold, and after ten minutes or so you answered. When I got here, she was gone.”
The doctor nodded again. “It’s true she gave no notice, Mr. Green. Nevertheless, her resignation is my problem, not yours.”
“Tell me one thing, and I won’t ask you anything else about her. Does she fit the description of Lara I gave you when I was here in March?”
“I must have your solemn word, Mr. Green.”
“All right, I give you my solemn word that if you’ll answer that one question I won’t ask you anything else about her.”
Dr. Nilson nodded. “Agreed, then. Let me read over what you told me.” She scanned the paper before her. “You said that Lara Morgan had red hair and was about five feet, nine inches tall. You also said that she had freckles. She was wearing a green dress, silk or nylon, and gold jewelry. No, Mr. Green, the description doesn’t fit Lora at all.”
He leaned forward in the hard, wooden chair. “Is it just the hair color? Because—”
“Mr. Green, you gave me your word that you’d ask me no more questions if I told you whether Lora’s appearance corresponded to the description you gave. I have told you: it does not. My time isn’t unlimited, and there are patients waiting to see me—patients who were waiting before you came.”
He nodded and offered her the Lora Masterman pen. “I have to have a note from you saying I’ve been to see you. Otherwise they won’t let me come back to work. If you’ll give me that, I’ll go.”
“Then I won’t, at least not right this moment. You have no more questions for me, Mr. Green. At least, no more about Lora; so you promised. But I have several for you. My first was why you’ve come to see me today, but you’ve just answered that. The second is why you must have this note. You haven’t been at work for some time?”
He shook his head. “Not since March thirteenth, the day before I came to see you last.”
“You devoted your full time to your unsuccessful search for Lara Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Dr. Nilson made a notation on her pad. “Prove to me that Lara Morgan exists, Mr. Green.”
“All right, I will—if you’ll prove to me first that Lora Masterman existed.”
For a second or two Dr. Nilson glared at him, then a smile tugged at her lips. “You’re either much worse or much better, Mr. Green, and I swear I don’t know which. You’re a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. Winston Churchill said that about Russia, I believe.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes, indeed. Quite easily, as it happens. We now have a full-time attorney here. About two weeks ago, he bought a new camera and went through the building snapping pictures to try it out. One he took of Lora and me was so good—at least, in his opinion—that he had prints made for both of us.” Dr. Nilson pulled out one of her desk drawers. “I still have mine, right here.”
She produced a brown envelope about five by seven, with the words CANDID CAMERA SHOPS across the top.
“Don’t!”
“Don’t what, Mr. Green?”
He did not reply.
“You don’t want to see my picture?”
“There isn’t any picture there,” he said. “Or if there is, it won’t show Lara. Lora.” He did not know how he knew, yet he did.
“You’re quite correct in thinking that it doesn’t show your Lara Morgan, but it shows Lora Masterman and me. As a matter of fact, I was looking at it just a few minutes ago, after Lora left so abruptly. She was the best receptionist I’ve ever had.”
She pulled a print from the brown envelope and held it up for him. In it, she stood in the waiting room, her hand upon the shoulder of a smiling, brown-haired girl seated at the desk. A modest plastic nameplate, barely visible in the lower right corner of the picture, read Lora Masterman.
“There she is, Mr. Green; no freckles, very little jewelry, no green silk dresses—or at least, I never saw her wear one—and no fur coat. Brown hair, not red. Brown eyes, not green.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s Tina.”
“Tina?”
“Tina’s one of the names she uses. I think that when she looks like that, she calls herself Tina.”
“I see.” Dr. Nilson gave the words no inflection at all. “Can you tell me why she changes her name?”
“No,” he said. And then, “Maybe I can, a little. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”
“I can see you have.”
He said slowly, “Have you ever looked at the sky at night, Doctor?”
“Yes, often. Not really as often as I’d like; there’s so much light from the city that one seldom sees the stars. But last winter there was a blackout—perhaps you remember. I stood on my balcony until I was nearly frozen.”
“And you know how far away they are.”
“Vaguely. I’m not an astronomer.”
“I watched Carl Sagan once, and he said most of them are so far away it takes millions of years for a beam of light to get from them to us, and light’s the fastest thing there is. Haven’t you ever wondered why God put them so far away?”
“I suppose everyone has, Mr. Green.”
“And yet we have Visitors sometimes, and things from our world that just go away.”
Dr. Nilson nodded. “Like the sign at the airport—arrivals and departures.”
“I guess so. I’ve never ridden in a jet, or any other kind of airplane. But I know that people and things just vanish, and sometimes other people and other things show up here.” He tried to recall what Fanny had sa
id about the television channels but decided he could not explain it well enough. He said, “There’s another world, just next door, if you go through the right door.”
Dr. Nilson did something on the underside of her desk top. “Please go on, Mr. Green.”
Explanations
“Suppose that in that world there was a woman—a goddess, really—who wanted to make love to a man from our world.”
Dr. Nilson smiled. “Why should she want to do that, Mr. Green?”
“Because in her world men die after they make love.”
“Like drones, is that what you mean? I must say it would be a nice reversal; here so many of us die after rape, or even before it.”
He said, “I don’t understand about the drones.”
“Male honeybees. Most bees are sterile females; they’re the ones who do the work. A few are fertile females, I suppose they’re called princesses. A few others are fertile males: drones. At the nuptial flight, the strongest drones mate with the princesses, who become queens. Then the drones die.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t really like that, there. The men do a lot of the work. The cop that talked to me at the fire was a man and so was the medic, and later the clerk who wouldn’t let me back into the hotel. But when they make love, they die. Their immune systems collapse. A doctor there told me that—Dr. Applewood.”
Dr. Nilson smiled again. “You mean they have doctors, just as we do? And policemen? I suppose they speak English?”
“Yes, at least in the part I visited. But they must have different languages in different places. I know there’s a man who talks with a German—” Abruptly he fell silent.
“What is it, Mr. Green?”
“I just realized who it was I heard calling Lara when I was talking to her—to your Lora—on the phone. It was him. It was Klamm.”
Dr. Nilson leaned toward him, her hands clasped beneath her chin. “Don’t you realize, Mr. Green, that if there were a world like the one you’ve been telling me about, a world where men die after intercourse, it would have customs—a whole culture—quite different from ours?”