by Gene Wolfe
The opening was doubled, so that the light from the table lamp he had positioned for Tina shone into it more effectively. The rough dark surface, which he had imagined to be that of the object contained, was revealed to be only some sort of packing material or wrapping. He felt it and pushed against it; the object beneath seemed smooth and unyielding. There was no sign of Tina.
With the knife, he started to work on the third board, then realized he was neglecting a more powerful tool. He slipped the narrow end of the board he had just pulled loose under the third board and threw his weight on the opposite end, using the edge of the crate as a fulcrum. Though its nails complained like the rest, it came up fairly easily. So did the next, and only the board on which the table lamp stood remained.
He tried to grasp the rough packing material and tear it, but it was too tough to tear and too tightly stretched to afford him an effective grip. The big utility knife would cut it, he felt sure. But the knife might also damage whatever the packing sheet was protecting, might even harm Tina. He called to her again, softly, and tried to tell her how worried he was. There was no response.
When he had replaced the lamp on the end table, he tried to pry again with the detached board, but the mechanical advantage it had possessed was gone.
There was no convenient crack into which he could force his knife. He worked it beneath the end of the remaining board and wedged the tip of his screwdriver into the opening he had made; as soon as he tried to pry with the screwdriver, it bent like a coat hanger.
He discovered that he did not want to pry with the utility knife because he was afraid it might break. Earlier he had not cared about it and would have thrown it away any time he needed more space in the utensil drawer. Now it was truly his, like his order book and the silver pen whose writing element he had replaced so many times.
He wedged the blade under the other end of the board and made himself work the handle up and down, gently at first, with increasing force as the nails resisted. When he had enlarged the opening between the board and the top of the crate to about an eighth of an inch, he withdrew the blade and pulled up the end of the board, heaving backward again and again, so that one side of the crate was lifted from the floor.
With the top of the crate gone, he could see inside better than he had when the lamp had stood beside the opening. The rough, gray-brown sheet seemed to have been added when the crate was complete except for its top—draped over the rectangular object inside, its margins shoved down into the crate. Yellow mats of shredded wood had been pushed down around it to give extra protection to the sides. He pulled them out, and when the last was gone lifted off the rough sheet, which was only a kind of heavy cardboard, easily enough.
The rectangular object he had felt was the top of the desk, a single dark panel of tropical hardwood. He knew it at once, knew each scratch and honorable mark of service. The fold-down writing board was folded, the drawers taped shut; but it was the desk, his desk.
Somehow, he felt, the sides of the crate should simply fall away now. They did not; he was forced to pry the boards of one side off one at a time and pile them in a corner. It was only when he had removed the last and paused sweating to search once more through the heap of packing materials for Tina, and admire the desk, that he noticed that the masking tape meant to hold the writing board in place hung free. For a second or two he wondered whether Tina could have done it—whether she possessed the needed strength. She probably could, he decided; her tiny fingers could have loosened a corner easily, and with a corner up, she could peel the tape back. He tugged experimentally at the loose end and found the tape had not adhered well; the desk had been waxed.
Mentally, he traced Tina’s path. Finding herself on the thick cardboard sheet, she would have crawled across it just below the remaining boards. The mats of shredded wood would have blocked her at the sides, but she could have—must have —gone down one of the corners. Originally, the cardboard sheet had been flat; it had been bent to fit around the desk fairly tightly, but there had necessarily been a good deal of extra material at the corners. Tina could not have climbed the waxed legs of the desk, but the loose folds of rough cardboard at the corners would have offered her a choice of several easily scaled pipes.
He pulled away the piece of tape. Its makers had provided the desk with a brass lock; but the key had been lost, perhaps for a century or more.
“Here you are, Tina, I’ve found you,” he said as he opened the board.
She was not there. There were eight pigeon holes in the top row behind the board, six larger ones in the bottom row—he had counted them often at the store—and they were empty, all empty except for a single ivory-colored envelope of note-paper size. Thinking that Tina might somehow have secreted herself behind it, he pulled it out. She had not, and as soon as the envelope was out he realized that it would have been impossible. The fourteen empty pigeon holes stared blandly at him; he seemed to hear Tina’s delighted laughter.
Sitting in the old brown chair with the cigarette burn in its arm, he tore open the envelope.
Dear Mr. Green:
Mother gave me an antique doll when I was twelve, and I have been a collector ever since. That’s more than fifty years now. Do you know Kipling’s poem?
There was no worth in the fashion—
there was no wit in the plan—
Hither and thither, aimless,
the ruined footings ran—
Masonry, brute, mishandled,
but carven on every stone:
“After me cometh a Builder.
Tell him, I too have known.”
It was a favorite of my late husband’s.
Merry Christmas. You will pardon an old woman her sentimentalities.
Martha Foster
Mail. He read the letter again, as though there were some clue there. In cartoons, people were always climbing mountains and asking the robed and bearded freaks they met to explain the meaning of life. He would never be able to laugh at that again. How could anyone laugh? “There was no worth in the fashion—there was no wit in the plan—hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran—”
He picked up the money Tina had found for him, counted it, and stuffed it back into the pocket.
Tina was hiding, but it was only that she was hiding. She was in the desk or in the heap of packing materials and boards, or—barely possibly—she had slipped unseen out of the crate and was hiding somewhere else in the apartment. If he went to bed now, she would probably …
No. Tina might hide briefly as a joke, but not for this long; she would not want to worry him like this. Something had happened to her.
She could not be in one of the drawers because every drawer was still tightly taped. He tore the strips of tape away just the same and looked in all of them. He would have pulled them out of the desk if he could, but they were retained, apparently by stops attached before the back of the desk had been fastened in place.
But Tina had not gotten into any of them, anyway. He was behaving like the man in the joke who looked for his wallet on the corner because the light was better there. Tina had pulled loose the tape that had held up the writing board and slipped behind the board. Was it possible one of the pigeon holes had a false back? All of them were deep, and all looked equally deep, but he checked them one by one with a ruler. They were all of the same depth, and that depth was less than the width of the top of the desk by a scant three-quarters of an inch. There was nothing between the bottom of the lower row of pigeon holes and the work surface of the desk.
Or rather, there was nothing but a smooth panel of nearly black wood about three inches high. He tried to grasp it and pull it, but every edge was covered: the top by the bottoms of the pigeon holes, the ends by the sides of the desk, the lower edge by the fixed part of the writing surface.
He shifted the table lamp to the desk and studied the blank wood. How could Tina, under the thick cardboard sheet, have seen something that he could not see even under a bright light? Tina co
uld only have felt the panel; in the pitch darkness behind the writing board, she could not have seen it. Replacing the lamp, he shut his eyes and traced the panel with his fingers. He felt nothing.
Tina’s fingers were far smaller than his, hardly thicker than pins. He retrieved the utility knife and slid its point lightly across the surface of the panel, careful not to scratch it—or rather, not to scratch it more than it had been scratched already by two centuries of use, particularly, for some reason, on its left end.
When the tip of the blade reached that end, it slipped into the crack between the panel and the side of the desk. He pushed gently and felt rather than heard the click as the panel swung a quarter of an inch toward him.
Lunch with Lora
When the waitress had gone, he took out Tina and laid her on the checkered tablecloth.
“A doll?” Lora Masterman stopped fiddling with her chair and took gold-framed glasses from her purse to peer at Tina.
“I bought her because she reminded me of you,” he said.
“That was sweet of you.”
“She can walk around and talk, and even think about things a little bit, when she’s working. But she can’t read or crunch numbers. She’s not programmed for it, and I doubt if she’s got the capacity. If you ask her how much one and one is, she says it’s two or three. When you ask her four and four, she says a lot.” Hastily he added, “I don’t mean that I think you’re like that.”
Lora was still smiling. “I’m sure Dr. Nilson thinks I am, sometimes.”
“I want to tell you about Tina, and about my desk. Is that all right? Do you like antiques?”
“I like them. I don’t know much about them.”
“I do,” he said. “Even the dumbest person knows about some things. Did you ever notice? With me it’s antiques and personal computers. I know about those. When we lived together, it was just personal computers, but now I know antiques too. Computers are good, but antiques are better because there’s more to know.”
Lora said softly, “It was only for a couple of days.”
“I know, but I wanted it to last forever. I wasn’t smart enough or good-looking enough, and I didn’t make enough money. I understand. I’m not blaming you.”
“It really wasn’t any of those things.” Lora took off her glasses and returned them to her purse. “I wasn’t good for you. You were one of Dr. Nilson’s patients, I was working for her, and I was hurting you. After a few days I couldn’t stand that.”
The waitress brought icewater, a basket that held butter and a small loaf of warm Italian bread, and their wine.
“How did you hurt me?” he asked.
“You started blocking. You forgot—I mean on the conscious level—that you were a patient, and that was very bad. You even forgot that we’d met in Dr. Nilson’s office. You talked about us meeting in the park, because we took that walk during lunch. And now—” Lora’s voice had grown fainter as she spoke, until it seemed that she was close to tears, “I’m afraid you’re going to start it again. You’re constructing a delusional system, with me inside.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “You’re too big. I couldn’t wrap my mind around you.”
“You did before.”
He shook his head. “You were real, just like you’re real now. You changed the way you looked, changed it just a little, and you said your name was Lara Morgan. You let me pick you up in the park. But you’re telling the truth about one thing: I didn’t want to admit I’d been seeing a psychiatrist—not even to myself. Somebody like that wasn’t good enough for you—I knew that.
“Just the same, the place I went to when I went through the door, that was real. I met real people there, I ate real food, and I bought this doll. I even met a man there who was from our world, a man who used to work for Nixon.”
Lora reached for Tina, but he drew her away. “You think I’m going to break her,” Lora said; it was a statement, not a question.
He nodded.
“If you were to walk down this street until you came to a toy store, you could probably buy a doll—”
Smiling, Mama Capini stopped at their table. “You two, you’re back together? That’s good.”
“I’m back together,” he told her. “I’m trying to get Lara back with me.”
“Girl’s got your order?”
He shook his head.
“Take the clams. They’re good today.”
“All right,” he said.
“I’ll tell the girl.” Mama Capini drifted away.
Lora said, “She remembered me. It’s been years.”
“You’re not that different. Besides, who could forget you? I didn’t buy Tina because I thought I was going to forget you. I knew I’d always remember you, that everything that I saw would remind me of you. I got Tina because I wanted to own a little piece of you. If you can’t have somebody, you want to have her picture, and you were the model for Tina. You had to be.”
She began to object, but he waved it aside. “Okay, Tina just happens to look exactly like you. Let’s not fight about that. Anyway, a lady I thought was a bitch sent me the desk, because she knew how much I wanted it. It turns out she’s a saint, really, underneath.”
“Sometimes it turns out the other way, too,” Lora told him.
He nodded again. “You mean I think you’re an angel, but you might be a devil—a fallen angel—really. That’s all right; I’ll follow you back to Hell, if that’s where you’re going.”
He paused to think, but Lora did not speak.
“We’ve got this Victorian tapestry. It shows a knight and a lady, and behind the knight it’s just ordinary. You know, a lot of grass and trees. But behind the lady, everything’s very strange. It illustrates a poem, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ by John Keats. That was you too, wasn’t it? I didn’t think of it until just now, because the lady doesn’t look much like you. I doubt if Keats had really seen you either—he probably just took some old legend—but maybe he had.”
Lora grinned. “This is better than the talking doll. I’ve always wanted to be in a tapestry.”
“Come by the store, and I’ll show it to you. Anyway, the desk was packed in a wooden crate. I suppose she had a moving company come in and do it; it looked like a professional job.”
Lora nodded.
“I didn’t know what was inside it, and I had some trouble getting it open; so when I got the first board off, I sent Tina in to look.”
“You really believe all this, don’t you?” Lora tossed lustrous brown hair back with an impatient jerk of her head. “You actually think that doll can walk around and talk.”
“It’s not that far out,” he said. “I thought it was myself at first, like magic. The Amazing Tina, that’s what she called herself once. But Heathkit will sell you a little robot you put together yourself, and the Air Force has airplanes that will fly and fight and go back to base and land, all with the pilot dead. I couldn’t build her, and I don’t know anybody who could. But somebody here might be able to, if we put our minds to it.”
Tina lay face down on his side of the table, almost beneath his forearms. He had picked up the saltcellar; he toyed with it as he spoke, passing it from one hand to the other.
The waitress brought their clams.
“She didn’t come out. I pulled the crate apart and looked everyplace, you know? But I couldn’t find her at all. Finally I found out there was a secret compartment in the desk. I don’t think the lady who gave it to me even knew about it. I opened it, and Tina was inside. She didn’t walk or talk any more—she was just like this.” He gestured.
Lora was chewing pasta and clams. She nodded skeptically.
“I should have told you before that Tina was like this when I got her. The clerk told me how to make her work, but I didn’t pay much attention.” He paused. “I should have known better. I’ve seen it myself a thousand times when I was selling personal computers and peripherals—I’d tell a customer something, and next day he’d be back in the store
asking. Anyway, I wondered what had happened to her, but after a while I figured it out. When you’ve got a mechanical toy, you don’t keep it running all the time; you turn it off when the child’s not playing with it. If it’s a windup toy, you don’t even have to. It runs down. I won’t tell you how I started up Tina the first time, but I did it by accident.”
Lora patted her mouth with her napkin. “So you couldn’t do it again.” He shook his head. “That’s right. I’m too happy, because I’ve found you and you’re going to take me back.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. I may date you again, sometime. I may not.”
He nodded. “Tina had told me how she liked her tea, and I made her some; but she only told me that once, and after a while I forgot. When I thought about her lying there, it made sense. She tells the child one time, and as long as the child’s really interested he keeps her going. But if he isn’t he doesn’t do it any more, and she puts herself away so his mother doesn’t have to pick her up. Pretty soon she runs down, or maybe she shuts herself off. That way she doesn’t get broken, and she doesn’t wear out. I wasn’t really that interested in Tina any more; I was interested in the crate and you.”
He sipped his wine. Lora said, “You expect me to believe all this.”
“I know you believe it—you know all about these toys. I think you probably know a lot more than I do. What I expect is for you to admit it, when you see that it’s no use to go on the way you are now.” He put down his wineglass and picked up the saltcellar again. “Anyway, that’s what she’d done. She would always put herself away, more or less, when I wasn’t going to be around. She called whatever place she liked that day her secret fort. This time she crawled into that secret compartment.”
He unscrewed the top of the saltcellar, poured salt into his icewater, and stirred it with a spoon. When most of the salt had dissolved, he dipped his fingers into the cold salt solution and sprinkled Tina. “When they’re already going, they can drink it,” he told Lora. “Tea, or plain water with salt in it, I suppose. Once they’re off, you’ve got to do this. It’s an electrolyte. Don’t bother to act surprised.”