by Gene Wolfe
“They don’t,” he said. “It’s a lot like ours.” He paused, thinking. “I hadn’t really worked it all out before, but it has to be. Because the worlds are so close, because it’s so easy to go across. Suppose somebody there thinks up a new word. Pretty soon somebody switches over, maybe not even knowing that he did it, and hears the word and brings it back. Or maybe one of them comes here and uses the word. Probably a lot of customs that we think are ours are really theirs, like the groom wearing black at his wedding.”
There was a discreet tap at the door. Dr. Nilson called, “Come in.”
Two husky black men in the trousered white uniforms of male nurses entered. Both were about his own age, and it seemed to him that their dark, serious faces contrasted oddly with their clothes. One carried a small canvas bag.
“I don’t believe you’ll have trouble with Mr. Green,” Dr. Nilson said. “In many respects he seems quite rational, and it may be that he needs nothing more than a short rest.”
When he stood up, a man took each arm. Something with Lara at its heart exploded in him, and he fought them as he had not fought since he was a boy, shouting and kicking. They threw him down. One held him while the other unzipped the bag and forced him into a canvas and leather straitjacket.
Her voice kind, Dr. Nilson said, “Mr. Green, I’m going to telephone Mr. Drummond, where you work. If you want to make a disturbance—to cry out for help, for example—you may do so. But it will make a poor impression on Mr. Drummond; I think you realize that.”
She had picked up the handset and pressed numbers as she spoke. For a moment, the room fell silent as she listened to the instrument.
“This is Dr. Nilson, Mr. Green’s doctor? May I speak to Mr. Drummond please? It’s important.
“Mr. Drummond? Dr. Nilson. Mr. Green tells me you wanted him to bring you a letter to establish that he had seen me. I hope this call will do instead.
“Fine. I’m having Mr. Green hospitalized, Mr. Drummond. I don’t believe that his problems are very serious, but after such an extended absence, I consider it advisable.
“I can’t make a definite promise, Mr. Drummond. Perhaps around the end of the month, perhaps somewhat later.
“I don’t know. My professional opinion is that he will be ready and able to return to work when he is released, but that’s opinion, and not fact.
“Of course. Good-bye.”
She hung up, and for the first time he was conscious of her perfume, a slight flowery fragrance more suited to a young girl. “Mr. Drummond asked me to convey his good wishes to you, and his hopes for a speedy recovery. You work for a very enlightened company, Mr. Green, one by no means oblivious, as so many are, to the demands of humanity. I hope you appreciate it. You will have heard me tell him that I believe your hospitalization need be only a short time, and that I expect you to be able to return to work upon your release. I said those things because you had wisely chosen to remain silent, a hopeful sign.”
He said, “Thank you.”
“I can’t visit you every day in the hospital; my schedule is too crowded for that. But I will try to see you there three or four times a week. I hope to find you progressing, and I’m certain I shall.” She nodded to the men, who helped him to his feet.
He said, “I don’t think this is necessary.”
“But I do, and you must defer to my opinion.”
The words broke out, though he struggled to bite them back. “This will keep me from finding Lara.”
“It will certainly prevent you from looking, Mr. Green. I hope that soon we’ll be able to show you how pointless it is to look, just as it would be pointless to look for Cinderella.”
One of the white-uniformed men said, “Come on,” in a voice that was soft and even gentle. There was a tug on his arm.
He said, “All right,” and as he spoke, the telephone rang.
Dr. Nilson picked the handset up. “Oh, hello, Lora … No, I’m not angry. I know how trying it can be.”
They pulled him out of the office and closed the door firmly behind him. “Now walk.”
He did, down the stairs and out the back of the building. A small white ambulance—actually a van sporting red emergency lights—stood at the curb. One of the men opened the side door for him. He went in, and the man followed him. The other man got into the driver’s seat.
When he sat down, the first man slapped him hard on his left ear, the blow like an explosion at the side of his head. “That’s for kicking my knee,” the man said. “I want you to know.”
He could scarcely make out the words for the ringing that filled his head, but he nodded.
“We like it when they fight and yell,” the man told him. “It’s the yellers and the cussers that come out first—anybody tell you that. People like you still got some pepper in them, they don’t just knuckle down, they say, hey, I’m gonna get out of this place. Only if you kick and hit, you’re gonna get hit back.”
He nodded again and said, “I understand.”
“Only not ’cause I explained it to you. ’Cause I hit you, that’s why.”
“All right.”
“Don’t you kick me no more, and I won’t hit you.”
He asked, “Did you know Lora?”
“Dr. Nilson’s receptionist? Sure.”
“What was she like?”
The man shrugged. “White girl, so I didn’t pay her a whole lot of attention. No big tits or anything like that. Once in a while you get white girls that like blacks, only not too often. We’d joke around a little. She wasn’t stuck up.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“She ain’t gone.”
“Yes, she is. She quit suddenly and cleaned out her desk.”
The man looked skeptical. “Dr. Nilson had her on the phone when we left. Probably she’ll come back.”
He nodded and asked again, “Was she beautiful? Is she?”
“You want her to be, man?”
“I guess I do.”
“Then she was. Like, big blues and one of those china-doll faces, you know?”
The driver said, “Green.”
He answered, “Yes?” and the first man asked, “What you mean?”
“That Lora woman has green eyes, fool.”
“Don’t pay no mind to him,” the first man said. “He’s crazy. Now, you want out of that jacket?”
He had somehow expected that the hospital would be in the city. It was not, but in the suburbs, set among rolling lawns and beds of daffodils just coming into flower. The wind had a bite to it, yet was fresh and clean in a way winter winds never were. When he saw there were no bars on the windows, he said, “This doesn’t look like a mental hospital.”
“It isn’t, man. It’s just a regular hospital, and they do babies and triple bypasses and all like that. See, that way if people ask where you was, you can just tell them where like you was swearing in court, ’cause you might have had your appendix out. See?”
He nodded. They went inside, where one man talked briefly to a receptionist who motioned them toward an elevator. On the ninth floor (he was careful to note which button had been pushed) the same man conferred much longer with a nurse at a desk. When their conversation was over at last, the man said, “Now we gone take you to the lounge. I told her you’ll stay there nice and not make no trouble. You do it, hear? ’Cause we got to leave you there and go on back.”
He nodded again. He had nodded so often now that he had lost track of the number.
Although the lounge was clean, he missed the freshness of the spring wind. He tried to open both windows, but they would not open; when he examined their frames, he saw that the glass was very thick. There were seven varnished chairs in the room, and a low, varnished table supporting a stack of old magazines. After a time, it occurred to him that Lara’s picture might be in one. He picked up a magazine and began to page through it.
He was on his third when a weary-looking bald man came in and sat down. “You like to read?” the bald man asked.
> He shook his head.
“I do. I’d read all the time, if it weren’t that my eyes give out. Then I have to go off and take care of my patients.” The bald man chuckled.
“What do you read?”
“History, mostly. A little fiction. Of course I have to read the medical journals. We subscribe to Newsweek, The New Yorker, Psychology Today, and Smithsonian. My wife always reads them, and sometimes I do too.”
He said, “I’d like to see some movie magazines. I don’t suppose that impresses you very much.”
“More than you might think,” the bald man told him. “Most people don’t read at all.”
“Books always seemed like a waste of money to me.”
“You’re careful about money?”
“I try to be.”
“But you’re in the hospital, now. Hospitals are extremely expensive.”
“The store’s paying for everything,” he explained. He felt a sudden thrill of fear. Was it?
The bald man got out a notebook and a Cross pen. “What day of the week is this?”
He tried to remember and could not. “Wednesday?”
“I’m not sure myself. Do you know the date?”
“April sixteenth.”
“Do you know why the store’s paying for your treatment?”
“That’s the policy,” he said.
“But why do they feel you need treatment?”
“Because I was gone so long, I guess. Nearly a month. No, over a month.”
The pen danced over the notebook. Sunshine had come in the window; reflected on the pen’s bright gold, it made it seem that it was the pen who spoke, and not the man. “I want you to cast your mind back, back for an entire week. Don’t answer at once; shut your eyes and think back. Now, where were you a week ago?”
It was the day he had met Lara. “I was walking beside the river.”
“In the park.”
“Yes.”
“Why were you there?”
“I’d brought my lunch. I ate it there on a bench, and I had fifteen minutes before I had to be back at the store.” By way of explanation he added, “We’re close to the park.”
“You had worked in the store that morning?”
“Yes.”
He was taken to a new room and made to undress and put on hospital clothes. A man in a white uniform took his own away in a wire basket.
After a while a nurse came in and gave him medicine.
The Patient
There seemed to be things to do in the day room, but its games and pastimes were largely illusory. A cabinet on the west wall held half-a-dozen jigsaw puzzles, all with missing pieces—the basis for predictable jokes whenever someone got a puzzle out. The piano needed tuning; not that anyone in the ward could play more than “Chopsticks” anyway, though occasionally someone tried. The dog-eared cards in the drawer were short the ace, deuce, and four of hearts. The nurses guarded a container of Ping-Pong balls and usually said they were out of them to save trouble.
Or perhaps, he thought, they really were out. Perhaps the container was empty and had been so for years, as dusty within as without.
“Want to play some chess?”
He looked up. The man with the board and box was short and middle-aged, with haystack hair.
“Some of the chessmen are gone,” he said.
“We can use something else.”
He nodded and went over to the table. They used checkers—two black checkers for the missing black pawns, and a red king for the missing white queen.
“White or black?”
He considered. In some vague fashion, the decision seemed enormously important. He studied the white queen and the black, trying to decide which was Lara. The white, of course. White for her complexion, red for her hair. “White.”
His opponent spun the board. “Your move.”
He nodded and pushed a pawn at random. The black queen’s pawn advanced two squares. He moved his bishop. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we met awhile back,” he said. He added, “Outside,” though that did not seem quite right.
“Maybe,” his opponent said. “I’ve been getting shock, know what I mean? It makes you forget stuff.” He raised both hands to point to the inflamed marks at his temples. “You?”
“Not yet.”
“But you’re going to, huh?”
“I think so.”
“It doesn’t hurt. A lot of guys think it’s going to, but it doesn’t. Say, you’ve got the marks already.”
When the game was over, his opponent sat at the piano and played an old-fashioned song, “Find Your True Love,” singing to the out-of-tune music in a hoarse but not unpleasant voice. It was not until that night, when he lay in his narrow hospital bed with his hands in back of his head, that he placed his opponent as the patient who had sent him to tell Walsh about—someone and someone else. He could not recall the names.
There was a woman with dyed hair and a long face who was deeply concerned about his attitude toward sex. There was an Indian who explained to him why it was so much easier to cure people who believed in demons. There was the tired middle-aged doctor, whose name he could sometimes remember, and there was Dr. Nilson, whose name he sometimes forgot.
Then there was grass to be cut and a garden to be weeded, lawns to be raked, and russet, brown, and deeply golden leaves to be burned. There was snow to be shoveled. They gave him a warm jacket and gloves for that, clothing donated by some kind person who had left empty .22 calibre brass in the pockets of the jacket.
Some nights he wondered what had happened to the hospital to which the van had taken him, and sometimes he felt sure he was back in United. Once he told a smooth Korean about United and Dr. Pille, and the smooth Korean, Dr. Kim, giggled.
There was an attendant who was kind to him but eventually, behind the boiler in the steam plant, wanted him to do something he did not want to do. It was then, while he was walking alone back to the main building, that it came to him that he was there for a memory that was, after all, no more than a dream.
At his next interview, he asked the Indian doctor whether they had ever found out what had happened to him while he was gone.
“Ah, but do not you yourself know?” the Indian inquired. “You can tell us, I think.”
He shook his head and said it was all a blank, and watched with satisfaction as the Indian doctor (also with satisfaction) made a note on his pad.
He had lost his apartment, but the store found him another one that was if anything better. His clothes and furniture had been put in storage, and it was pleasant to see the old things smile as they came out of their boxes and to arrange them in the new places. Because it was summer, he left some winter clothing boxed up. The apartment included storage space in the basement of his new building; he tagged the carton as the building manager instructed him, and together they put it into the storage room and relocked the door.
Some of the people he had known at the store had left; some remained. At Mr. Capper’s urging—so he later learned—some of those who remained organized a welcoming dinner for him Tuesday night after work. His own dinner was free, the others chipping in enough to cover theirs and their share of his. It was not a big group as such things went—only a dozen diners and himself. Yet he was glad of it, and glad to find that he could remember the names of most of the people there.
At one point in the dinner, when most of them were through with their entrees and the waiters were waiting for the rest to finish so they could serve dessert, a woman who might have been Lara walked down the hallway outside their private dining room. It was as great temptation to say something or call out, but he did not. Later, when he excused himself to go to the bathroom, he kept his eyes open; but he did not look into the other private rooms, and he saw nothing.
The next day was his first real one back at work. He had been transferred out of Personal Computers—because personal computer sales were slacking
off—back into Furniture and Major Appliances. He was a little frightened until he dealt with his first customer, but she bought a sofa and a coffee table, and after that he was all right.
Bud van Tilburg was head of Furniture and Major Appliances, and thus his boss, whom he called Mr. van Tilburg and at whom he always smiled. It was not until several weeks had passed that he connected his transfer with Mr. van Tilburg’s friendship with Mr. Drummond. Then he marched into Mr. van Tilburg’s office and asked man-to-man if he was pulling his weight. Mr. van Tilburg punched up the figures for everybody in the whole department and showed him that he had outsold them all, had outsold the runner-up by well over a thousand dollars. “Getting you was the best break I’ve had in the past two years,” Mr. van Tilburg said.
After that he tried even harder. When he had been in the department before, it had never occurred to him that you could learn about furniture just like you learned about computers and video games.
Yet it was so. There were various fabrics and stuffings, for example; and finishes and methods of construction. Not to mention the innumerable styles: Chippendale, Queen Anne, Early American, Traditional, Jacobean, Italian Renaissance and Italian Decadent, Henry IV, Louis XIII, and French Renaissance—on and on. He learned them all, checking books out of the library so he could study the pictures and memorize what the experts said about each. He learned to tell red oak from white, white oak from maple, maple from walnut, walnut from pecan, pecan from teak, and at last false rosewood from real Brazilian rosewood.
There came a day when he realized as he walked home that he had sold something to every customer to whom he had spoken. It gave him a glow that lasted until he went to bed that night, and of which some trace remained even while he fixed his coffee and ate his sweet-roll the next morning.
He had to cross the park to reach his new apartment, but as far as he was concerned there were only two seasons—spring, during which the department carried lawn and patio furniture, and of course Christmas. Sometimes there were jonquils in the park, and sometimes there were chrysanthemums. Sometimes there was snow—no one ever seemed to shovel the park paths—and he wore the high, fleece-lined boots he had bought at discount in Men’s & Women’s Shoes and carried his working shoes in a brown paper bag.