by Gene Wolfe
“I don’t suppose you have any tea?”
The clerk shook her head. “There’s a deli. I don’t know if they’re open, but they might be.”
He nodded. “Where?”
“In the annex. Know where that is? Down that way, and the entrance is on your left. Only one level in the annex.”
He thanked her and went out. When he reached the entrance, its arch of moldering marble looked dark and somehow ominous, as though all the stores beyond were closed and gates of steel bars might slam down behind anyone who dared to enter.
He went in anyway. A few shops were open even here. As he passed a haberdashery, a small, dark woman darted out and caught him by the sleeve. “There you are! What’s the matter with you, you don’t want your pants?”
He stared at her. She was sixty or so, graying hair knotted at the nape of her neck. “I think—”
“You think I’m trying to sell you something. Listen, your pants are all paid for. You paid so we’d make the alterations, remember? So how about picking them up? I need the space. Be an angel.”
“All right,” he said. As he followed her in, he felt that he should remember both the woman and her shop.
“With the pants, I got you a nice varnished hardwood hanger. Last you the rest of your life.” She glanced at the yellow tag pinned to its paper dust cover. “Four months now they’ve been waiting.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Oh, it’s okay.” She was studying his waistline. “They might not still fit. Bring them back if they don’t, and we’ll let them out.”
“This is the hotel, isn’t it? The Grand Hotel?”
She looked at him quizzically. “We rent from them.”
“This is where Fanny worked in the coffee shop. This is where Dr. Applewood has his office.”
The woman said, “He’s dead now.”
He nodded and walked out into the cavernous lower level. Why hadn’t he recognized those dusty flags at once, the clawed griffin, the eagle with two heads? And the woman in the toy shop had said the annex had only a single level. There were balconies. Dr. Applewood had leaned over one of those railings to call to him.
He saw the doors to the elevator—the elevator that would take him to the Grand Hotel, the hotel that was so much nearer Lara. He started toward them, slowing as he felt the chill of fear. In the hotel he would have no money and no friends, not even Tina. If he ever found Lara, she would see only a silly middle-aged man. Yes, he was middle-aged now, and it was better to face it. Lara would see a silly man carrying dolls’ clothes, a doll’s tea set, and slacks that were probably too small for him by a couple of inches.
His finger pressed the buzzer.
The elevator did not come at once, and indeed did not come for a long time. He waited, squaring his shoulders, adjusting the bag from the toy store and the paper-shrouded slacks; and at last the doors slid back.
He stepped in. “Ground floor, please.”
Slowly and distinctly, the operator announced, “This is the ground floor.”
He recalled stepping through a doorway and out into a snow-covered parking lot—the ground floor. “The lobby level, then.”
“There’s nobody there.”
“Take me there anyway,” he said.
The elevator rose slowly and smoothly, and it came to him that there was nothing of the Grand Hotel’s wire cage about it. When the doors separated, they revealed the deserted lobby of an office building, a lobby a floor above the street. He stepped out and said, “Thanks,” then watched the doors close behind him. The world he saw from the windows of the lobby was his own, he felt certain. United and North were not there, and if Lara came it was only briefly and temporarily, to live with some fortunate man or to store her coat.
He should have watched the furrier’s; just as the cold had reminded him of this wool overcoat, it would have made Lara (if Lara were here) get her coat out of storage. He had forgotten, and it was too late now.
He went back to the elevator and pushed the buzzer just as he had before. Now the elevator was his only hope; yet he knew the hope was vain.
“I get it,” the operator said. “You wanted to use the john. There’s some downstairs too—if you’d asked me I could have told you.”
He nodded, not speaking, waiting for the doors to open.
“Sometimes kids want to go up, you know? I don’t let ’em. I could tell you were okay.”
The doors slid apart, and he was in a wide low room without flags. Most of the shops were dark. He went out into the main arcade, drawing up his muffler around his neck and buttoning the topmost button of the overcoat.
The street was dark, empty of everything save the wind. A prowl car went by fast, cops staring threats at vacant doorways. The wind cut his fingers to remind him that he had forgotten to put on his gloves. He set his parcels down on the icy sidewalk and took the gloves from the pockets of the overcoat, pulled each on carefully and fastened its cuff. There was enough tea for tonight at any rate; he could buy more tomorrow if Tina was real. If Tina was really there.
Another bus stop, one stop nearer his apartment, would be nearly as close as his usual one. As he walked toward it, he discovered to his surprise that he was happy. It took him half a block to find the source of his happiness in the knowledge that Lara was real even if Tina was not.
She might laugh at him; she probably would; he laughed at himself, now and then. But he would rather listen to her laugh than to anything that anyone else in either world might say. On television, some woman had mentioned that wild dogs did not bark, that tame ones barked in imitation of human speech. What was the talk of anyone else, of Bridget Boyd or H. Harris Henry, but an animal’s imitation of Lara’s voice, of the laughter of the goddess? Though she would surely reject him as a lover, would she reject him as a servant? If she did, he would become her slave.
A glance behind him showed a bus coming down the street. Hurrying, he got to the stop just as it pulled up.
It was not until he had risen to get off that he remembered he would have to tell Tina. She would be there, waiting for him in the living room, hiding among the sofa cushions in the place she called her secret fort; she would pop out when she heard his key in the lock. He would have to admit to her then that he had not been able to buy the desk.
Already the taste of failure was bitter in his mouth.
The Story
“I’m good at looking for stuff,” Tina said. When his expression betrayed his skepticism, she added, “Yes I am! And I don’t like to watch TV.”
“Neither do I,” he told her mildly. “But at night there’s not much else to do.”
“There’s looking, and you could read me a story while I do it.”
“You could listen to the TV,” he said. “That would be the same thing.” It was not until he had finished speaking that he realized he had conceded Tina’s ability as a searcher—probably much too soon.
“It isn’t the same thing at all.”
He had already turned down the volume; now he switched the television off. “Why not?”
“Reading would help you in school.”
“I don’t have to go to school any more.”
Tina stamped, impatient with his stupidity; the sound was like the tapping of a fingernail. “You’ll have to go back next year. It will help you then.”
“All right,” he said.
“Besides, you would be reading me stories. TV’s just—just talk to use up the time.”
He nodded. It was something that he had felt as well, but never expressed.
“What does it look like?”
He took out his wallet and showed her a dollar bill and a five. “Like these, except for the pictures. They’ll be women’s pictures instead of men’s.” He paused. Women and men thought different things important; it was something he had understood half his life, because of his job. Now it seemed to him that it might be important in itself: women would not care as much about cars; women would care far more about
children’s loneliness, and their education. Women in power might even see to it that there were dolls like Tina.
“Pictures of ladies,” she prompted him.
“Really it doesn’t matter. Pieces of paper that look like this. Money.” He found he associated the money with the smell of roses, though he could not have said why. He was not certain there had been much left—but if he found Lara’s world again, even a few dollars might be useful.
“I’ll start by looking under things. I’m built for that. When I’m through, I’ll need a bath. Then you’ll have to pull out the drawers for me, so I can get inside.”
He protested that he could look in drawers as well as she could.
“No, you can’t,” she told him. “I can go inside and poke around. It’s not the same at all. Now read me a story while I look under the dresser.”
He had fewer than a dozen books, all of them inherited from his mother, and little idea what might be in any. At random he pulled a faded red volume from the shelf and flipped through it until he discovered what appeared to be the beginning of a fresh narrative.
“Once upon a time,” he read, “there were two brothers who lived by themselves in a little house deep in the Black Forest. Their names were Joseph and Jacob, and Jacob was blind.”
Tina emerged from beneath the dresser pushing a dust ball almost as large as herself and coughing histrionically. “You don’t dust under here nearly enough,” she said. “I don’t think you do it at all.”
“Joseph took good care of his brother, and Jacob did all he could to help, and because they loved each other they were very happy.”
“I’ll look under the bed now,” Tina announced. “Then you’ll have to go into the living room so I can look in there.”
“But they had little money, and their situation became more precarious every year.”
“It’s dusty under here, too.” Tina’s voice sounded faint and hollow.
“Because so much snow falls in the Black Forest during the winter, making it a white forest for whole months at a time, the brothers had to buy enough food in autumn to last until spring. And after several years had gone by, there came an autumn when it could be seen that they could not.”
Tina called, “Here’s a button. A shiny one!”
He decided she must have spun around with it as a full-sized woman would have thrown a discus; it came flying out like a bullet.
“One day Jacob said, ‘Joseph, do you recall how beautifully I used to write?’ And when Joseph replied, ‘Indeed I do!’ Jacob showed him a frame he had made to hold a sheet of paper, a frame with violin strings stretched across it and spaced so that a man might barely have thrust his thumb between them.”
“Here’s a dime!” The dime shot out like the button and rolled until it struck the wall.
“‘With this,’ Jacob explained, ‘and you, dear brother, to sharpen my pen for me now and then, I can write just as I used to. Perhaps the Schwarzwald Gazette will take one of my tales. Then we’ll be able to buy more food for the winter.’”
“That’s all there is under there,” Tina told him, “except for a lot more dust. Don’t I look like a chimney sweep?”
In fact she looked like a long-lost toy that had just been found and was about to be thrown away because it would be too much trouble to clean it, but he nodded and smiled, and followed her docilely into the living room.
“So Joseph sharpened a gray goose-quill with Jacob’s little knife. He put paper into the frame and made sure there was ink in the inkwell. That done, he went about his work, leaving his brother alone to write.”
“Nothing under the couch or the big chair but a lot more dust,” Tina reported. “Now take me into the bathroom and run some warm water into the bowl. It would be better if you left it running.”
He put his hand down so she could step into the palm and did as she asked. When he was seated on the lid of the commode with the red book open on his lap, he noticed that the light was actually better in the bathroom than it had been in the bedroom and the living room.
No one reads anymore, he thought, but men still shave.
“But when Joseph returned, there were only a few words on Jacob’s paper, and Jacob was drumming his fingers on the table. ‘I can’t write,’ he said. ‘I used to look out of the window to write. Then I had no difficulty. But now …’Jacob lifted his shoulders and let them fall.”
Tina pointed to her hair, not wanting to interrupt the story. He poured out a drop of shampoo for her.
“‘Perhaps I could look out of the window for you, dear brother,’ Joseph suggested.
“Jacob nodded slowly. ‘It’s worth trying. Look outside and tell me what you see.’
“So Joseph looked, but there were only trees waving their arms in the wind. ‘Hmm,’ he said.
“Jacob smiled. ‘I always felt the same way myself,’ he said.”
Tina asked, “Felt what way?”
He pulled at his jaw, scratched his ear. “As if there was nothing going on, I guess. And yet, so much going on—so many things that it was hard to choose.”
“Uh huh, that must be it. Read some more.”
“Joseph saw how silently the blue shadows crept across the hoarfrost beside the trees. ‘I see a black wolf,’ he said, and Jacob’s pen flew faster than the wind. Joseph tiptoed away as quietly as he could.”
He paused and glanced at Tina, who was rinsing her hair in the trickle from the tap. “I can hear,” she told him. “Don’t stop.”
“When he came back next time, Jacob was waiting. ‘You must look outside again, I fear,’ Jacob said.
“So Joseph looked out. A bright bird fluttered above the brambles. ‘I see an enchanted princess picking blackberries,’ he told Jacob. ‘An enchanted princess with wings,’ he added after a moment, and Jacob’s pen flew faster than the bird.”
Tina was drying herself with Kleenex. “Do you think the Schwarzwald Gazette will buy Jacob’s story?”
He nodded. “I’m sure they will. It’s such a good one.”
“So am I,” Tina said. “Now read some more.”
“Soon Jacob’s story was finished. He addressed an envelope, and that night Joseph walked to the village to mail it.
“After that, Jacob wrote another story and another, but no answering letter arrived from the Schwarzwald Gazette. When the last leaves had fallen, Joseph bought as much food as he could; and when winter came in earnest, and the snow was higher than a man’s knees, he made snowshoes. Each day, after he had dressed himself as warmly as he could, he went hunting. He shot several hares in that way, and at Christmas he and Jacob feasted upon a partridge.”
Tina stepped into the blue teddy he had bought her in Toys. “All clean,” she announced. “We can start on the drawers, but you’ll have to open them for me and lift me up.”
He carried her into the bedroom and (deciding they might as well be systematic) opened the upper left drawer of his bureau. “You can start in here,” he told her. “But I don’t think you’ll find anything except handkerchiefs.”
She hopped from his palm. “I like your hankies. They’re so clean. Now go on with the story.”
He sat down on the bed and found his place. “And yet there were many days when Joseph shot nothing at all, and he and Jacob supped upon pease porridge and water, for dried peas, water, and firewood were the only supplies that the winter had left them; and on such days, Joseph filled Jacob’s bowl to the rim but took only a few spoonsful for himself.
“But on this day, when he saw how few dried peas remained, Joseph resolved that Jacob should have them all and that he himself should have nothing, for he blamed himself bitterly for returning with an empty bag. He set out Jacob’s bowl and a spoon, filled two pots with snow, sprinkled all the remaining peas into one, and hung them over their little fire.
“Then Jacob said, ‘Brother, I am hard at work on a new tale, but you must look out the window for me.’
“Joseph looked, and to his astonishment saw a fine sleigh
drawn by four—”
Tina called, “Look!” She was holding up something thin and brown and shapeless, suspended on a scarlet thread.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Don’t you know? I found it in your drawer.”
He took it from her and held it up to the light. “It’s a root,” he said. At once Mr. Sheng’s shop rose before his mind’s eye, complete with all its queer boxes of incense, paper horses, blue-haloed gas ring, and steaming teapot. “It’s a magic charm,” he told Tina.
“A real charm?”
“The man who gave it to me said it was.”
“Will it make you as little as me?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She seated herself on the edge of the drawer, slender legs dangling over what was to her an abyss. “I didn’t think so—not really. But we could pretend. Will it make you invisible?”
He shook his head. “It was supposed to bring mail.”
“But it doesn’t work?”
“I don’t know. There was a lot of mail when I got back, but then I’d been gone for a month.”
“Will it bring a sleigh with reindeer, like the one in the story?”
“I don’t think they were reindeer.” He glanced down at the page. “No, chargers.”
“I don’t know that word.”
He groped. “Like ponies,” (Tina would surely know pony) “but bigger. I don’t think it will bring any kind of sleigh.”
“Aren’t you going to put it on?”
“I hadn’t planned to,” he said.
“It’s the first thing I’ve found. Or anyway the first real thing, because you didn’t even pick up the dime and the button. Besides, if you don’t put it on how are you going to know if it works?”
“The mail carrier’s been here already today,” he pointed out.
“Then if you get some more letters or something, you’ll know it’s a real charm.”