by Gene Wolfe
“I don’t think it was him, then.”
“I don’t either.” The girl was silent for a moment, the said, “I wouldn’t have minded it so much if I hadn’t been so tired.”
“I understand.”
“Would you find the lady and ask her to show me to my room?”
“Maybe we could meet in the morning for breakfast.”
The blind girl smiled, the first time the scarred young man had seen her smile. “That would be nice,” she said.
He went behind the bar and touched the old woman’s arm. “I hate to interrupt the game,” he said, “but the young lady would like to go to her room.”
“I don’t care about the game,” the old woman said, “I just watch it because everybody else does. I’ll get Obie to take care of things.”
“She’s coming,” the scarred young man said to the blind girl. “I’ll go up with you. I’m ready to turn in myself.”
The woman was already motioning for them and they followed her up a narrow staircase filled with foul odors. “They pee in here,” she said. “There’s toilets down at the end of the hall but they don’t bother to use them.”
“How terrible,” the girl said.
“Yes, it is. But that way they’re getting away with something—they’ re putting one over on me because they know if I was to catch them I’d throw them out. I try and catch them, but at the same time I feel sorry for them—it’s pretty bad when the only wins you have left are the games on the wall and cheating an old woman by dirtying her steps.” She paused at the top of the stairs for breath. “You two are going to be just side by side—you don’t mind that?”
The girl said, “No,” and the scarred young man shook his head.
“I didn’t think you would and they’re the last I’ve got anyway.”
The scarred young man was looking down the narrow corridor. It was lined with doors, most of them shut.
“I’ll put you closest to the bathroom,” the old woman was saying to the girl. “There’s a hook on the bathroom door, so don’t you worry. But if you stay in there too long somebody’ll start pounding.”
“I’ll be all right,” the girl said.
“Sure you will. Here’s your room.”
The rooms had been parts of much larger rooms once. Now they were subdivided with green-painted partitions of some stuff like heavy cardboard. The old woman went into the girl’s place and turned on the light. “Bed’s here, dresser’s there,” she said. “Washstand in the corner but you have to bring your water from the bathroom. No bugs—we fumigate twice a year. Clean sheets.”
The girl was feeling the edge of the door. Her fingers found a chain lock and she smiled.
“There’s a deadbolt too,” the scarred young man said.
The old woman said, “Your room’s next door. Come on.”
His room was much like the girl’s, save that the cardboard partition (it had been liberally scratched with obscene words and pictures) was on the left instead of the right. He found that he was acutely aware of her moving behind it, the tap of her stick as she established the positions of the bed, the dresser, the washstand. He locked his door and took off his soaked coat and hung it on a hook, then took off his shoes and stockings. He disliked the thought of walking on the gritty floor in his wet feet, but there was no alternative except the soggy shoes. With his legs folded under him he sat on the bed, then unhooked the communicator from his belt and pushed 123-333-4477, the ruler’s number.
“This is Westwind,” the scarred young man whispered.
The ruler’s face appeared in the screen, tiny and perfect. Again, as he had so often before, the young man felt that this was his real size, this tiny, bright figure—he knew it was not true.
“This is Westwind and I’ve got a place to sleep tonight. I haven’t found another job yet, but I met a girl and think she likes me.”
“Exciting news,” the ruler said. He smiled.
The scarred young man smiled, too, on his unscarred side. “It’s raining very hard here,” he said. “I think this girl is very loyal to you, sir. The rest of the people here—well, I don’t know. She told me about a man in the terminal who tried to molest her and another man who wanted to protect her. I was going to ask you to reward him and punish the other one, but I’m afraid they were the same man—that he wanted to meet her and this gave him the chance.”
“They are often the same man,” the ruler said. He paused as though lost in thought. “You are all right?”
“If I don’t find something tomorrow I won’t be able to afford to stay, but yes, I’m all right tonight.”
“You are very cheerful, Westwind. I love cheerfulness.”
The good side of the scarred young man’s face blushed. “It’s easy for me,” he said. “I’ve known all my life that I was your spy, your confidant—it’s like knowing where a treasure is hidden. Often I feel sorry for the others. I hope you’re not too severe with them.”
“I don’t want to aid you openly unless I must,” the ruler said. “But I’ll find ways that aren’t open. Don’t worry.” He winked.
“I know you will, sir.”
“Just don’t pawn your communicator.”
The image was gone, leaving only a blank screen. The young man turned out the light and continued to undress, taking off everything but his shorts. He was lying down on the bed when he heard a thump from the other side of the cardboard partition. The blind girl, feeling her way about the room, must have bumped into it. He was about to call, “Are you hurt?” when he saw that one of the panels, a section perhaps three feet by four, was teetering in its frame. He caught it as it fell and laid it on floor.
The light the old woman had turned on still burned in the girl’s room and he saw that she had hung up her coat and wrapped her hair in a strip of paper towels from the washstand. While he watched she removed her black glasses, set them on the bureau and rubbed the bridge of her nose. One of her eyes showed only white; the iris of the other was the poisoned blue color of watered milk and turned in and down. Her face was lovely. While he watched she unbuttoned her blouse and hung it up. Then she unhooked her communicator from her belt, ran her fingers over the buttons once and, without looking, pressed a number.
“This is Westwind,” she said.
He could not hear the voice that answered her, but the face in the screen, small and bright, was the face of the ruler. “I’m all right,” she said. “At first I didn’t think I was going to be able to find a place to stay tonight, but I have. And I’ve met someone.”
The scarred young man lifted the panel back into place as gently as he could and lay down again upon his bed. When he heard the rattle of her cane again he tapped the partition and called, “Breakfast tomorrow. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t. Good night.”
“Good night,” he said.
In the room below them the old woman was patting her straggling hair into place with one hand while she punched a number with the other. “Hello,” she said, “this is Westwind. I saw you tonight.”
Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee
THE RELATION BETWEEN SONYA AND CRANE WESSLEMAN WAS AN ODD ONE, and might perhaps have been best described as a sort of suspended courtship, the courtship of a poor girl by a wealthy boy, if they had not both been quite old. I do not mean to say that they are old now. Now Sonya is about your age and Crane Wessleman is only a few years older, but they do not know one another. If they had, or so Sonya often thought, things might have been much different.
At the time I am speaking of every citizen of the United States received a certain guaranteed income, supplemented if there were children, and augmented somewhat if he or she worked in certain underpaid but necessary professions. It was a very large income indeed in the mouths of conservative politicians and insufficient to maintain life according to liberal politicians, but Sonya gave them both the lie. Sonya without children or augmentation lived upon this income, cleanly but not well. She was able to do this because she
did not smoke, or attend any public entertainment that was not free, or use drugs, or drink except when Crane Wessleman poured her a small glass of one of his liqueurs. Then she would hold it up to the light to see if it were yellow or red or brown, and sniff it in a delicate and ladylike way, and roll a half teaspoon on her tongue until it was well mixed with her saliva, and then swallow it. She would go on exactly like this, over and over, until she had finished the glass, and when she had swallowed it all it would make her feel somewhat younger; not a great deal younger, say about two years, but somewhat younger; she enjoyed that. She had been a very attractive girl, and a very attractive woman. If you imagine how Debbie Reynolds will look when she attends the inauguration of John-John Kennedy, you will about have her. With her income she rented two rooms in a converted garage and kept them clean.
Crane Wessleman met Sonya during that time when he still used, occasionally, to leave his house. His former partner had asked him to play bridge, and when he accepted had called a friend, or (to be truthful) had his wife call the friend’s wife, to beg the name of an unattached woman of the correct age who might make a fourth. A name had been given, a mistake made, Sonya had been called instead, and by the time the partner’s wife realized what had occurred Sonya had been nibbling her petits fours and asking for sherry instead of tea. The partner did not learn of his wife’s error until both Crane Wessleman and Sonya were gone, and Crane Wessleman never learned of it. If he had, he would not have believed it. The next time the former partner called, Crane Wessleman asked rather pointedly if Sonya would be present.
She played well with him, perhaps because she was what Harlan Ellison would call an empath—Harlan meaning she gut-dug whether or not Crane Wessleman was going to make the trick—or perhaps only because she had what is known as card sense and the ability to make entertaining inconsequential talk. The partner’s wife said she was cute, and she was quite skillful at flattery.
Then the partner’s wife died of a brain malignancy; and the partner, who had only remained where he was because of her, retired to Bermuda; and Crane Wessleman stopped going out at all and after a very short time seldom changed from his pajamas and dressing gown. Sonya thought that she had lost him altogether.
Sonya had never formed the habit of protesting the decisions of fate although once when she was much, much younger she had assisted a male friend to distribute mimeographed handbills complaining of the indignity of death and the excretory functions—a short girl with blond braids and chino pants, you saw her—but that had been only a favor. Whatever the handbills said, she accepted those things. She accepted losing Crane Wessleman too, but at night when she was trying to go to sleep, she would sometimes think of Crane Wessleman among The Things That Might Have Been. She did not know that the partner’s wife was dead or that the partner had moved to Bermuda. Nor did she know how they had first gotten her name. She thought that she was not called again because of something—a perfectly innocent thing which everyone had forgotten in five minutes—she had said to the partner’s wife. She regretted it, and tried to devise ways, in the event that she was ever asked again, of making up for it.
It was not merely that Crane Wessleman was rich and widowed, although it was a great deal that. She liked him, knowing happily and secretly as she did that he was hard to like; and, deeper, there was the thought of something else: of opening a new chapter, a wedding, flowers, a new last name, a not dying as she was. And then four months after the last game Crane Wessleman himself called her.
He asked her to have dinner with him, at his home; but he asked in a way that made it clear he assumed she possessed means of transportation of her own. It was to be in a week.
She borrowed, reluctantly and with difficulty, certain small items of wearing apparel from distant friends, and when the evening came she took a bus. You and I would have called it a helicopter, you understand, but Sonya called it a bus, and the company that operated it called it a bus, and most important, the driver called it a bus and had the bus driver mentality, which is not a helicopter pilot mentality at all. It was the ascendant heir of those cheap wagons Boswell patronized in Germany. Sonya rode for half because she had a Golden Age card, and the driver resented that.
When she got off the bus she walked a considerable distance to get to the house. She had never been there before, having always met Crane Wessleman at the former partner’s, and so she did not know exactly where it was although she had looked it up on a map. She checked the map from time to time as she went along, stopping under the infrequent streetlights and waving to the television cameras mounted on them so that if the policeman happened to be looking at the time and saw her he would know that she was all right.
Crane Wessleman’s house was large, on a lot big enough to be called an estate without anyone’s smiling; the house set a hundred yards back from the street. A Tudor house, as Sonya remarked with some pleasure—but there was too much shrubbery, and it had been allowed to grow too large. Sonya thought roses would be nicer, and as she came up the long front walk she put pillar roses on the gas lantern posts Crane Wessleman’s dead wife had caused to be set along it. A brass plate on the front door said:
C. WESSLEMAN
AND
KITTEE
and when Sonya saw that she knew.
If it had not been for the long walk she would have turned around right there and gone back down the path past the gas lamps; but she was tired and her legs hurt, and perhaps she could not really have gone back anyway. People like Sonya are often quite tough underneath.
She rang the bell and Kittee opened the door. Sonya knew of course, that it was Kittee, but perhaps you or I might not. We would have said that the door was opened by a tall, naked girl who looked a good deal like Julie Newmar; a deep-chested, broad-shouldered girl with high cheekbones and an unexpressive face. Sonya had forgotten about Julie Newmar; she knew that this was Kittee, and she disliked the thing, and the name Crane Wessleman had given it with the whining double e at the end. She said in a level, friendly voice, “Good evening, Kittee. My name is Sonya. Would you like to smell my fingers?” After a moment Kittee did smell her fingers, and when Sonya stepped through the door Kittee moved out of the way to let her in. Sonya closed the door herself and said, “Take me to Master, Kittee,” loudly enough, she hoped, for Crane Wessleman to hear. Kittee walked away and Sonya followed her, noticing that Kittee was not really completely naked. She wore a garment like a short apron put on backward.
The house was large and dirty, although the air filtration units would not allow it to be dusty. There was an odor Sonya attributed to Kittee, and the remains of some of Crane Wessleman’s meals, plates with dried smears still on them, put aside and forgotten.
Crane Wessleman had not dressed, but he had shaved and wore a clean new robe and stockings as well as slippers. He and Sonya chattered, and Sonya helped him unpack the meal he had ordered for her and put it in the microwave oven. Kittee helped her set the table, and Crane Wessleman said proudly, “She’s wonderful, isn’t she.” And Sonya answered, “Oh yes, and very beautiful. May I stroke her?” and ran her fingers through Kittee’s soft yellow hair.
Then Crane Wessleman got out a copy of a monthly magazine called Friends, put out for people who owned them or were interested in buying, and sat beside Sonya as they ate and turned the pages for her, pointing out the ads of the best producers and reading some of the poetry put at the ends of the columns. “You don’t know, really, what they are anymore,” Crane Wessleman said. “Even the originators hardly know.” Sonya looked at the naked girl and Crane Wessleman said, “I call her Kittee, but the germ plasm may have come from a gibbon or a dog. Look here.”
Sonya looked, and he showed her a picture of what seemed to be a very handsome young man with high cheekbones and an unexpressive face. “Look at that smile,” Crane Wessleman said, and Sonya did and noticed that the young man’s lips were indeed drawn back slightly. “Kittee does that sometimes too,” Crane Wessleman said. Sonya was looking at him
instead of at Kittee, noticing how the fine lines had spread across his face and the way his hands shook.
After that Sonya came about once a week for a year. She learned the way perfectly, and the bus driver grew accustomed to her, and she invented a pet of her own, an ordinary imaginary chow dog, so that she could take a certain amount of leftover meat home.
The next to last time, Crane Wessleman pointed out another very handsome young man in Friends, a young man who cost a great deal more than Sonya’s income for a year, and said, “After I die I am going to see to it that my executor buys one like this for Kittee. I want her to be happy.” Then, Sonya felt, he looked at her in a most significant way; but the last time she went he seemed to have forgotten all about it and only showed Sonya a photograph he had taken of himself with Kittee sitting beside him very primly, and the remote control camera he had used, and told her how he had ordered it by mail.
The next week Crane Wessleman did not call at all, and when it was two days past the usual time Sonya tried to call him, but no one answered. Sonya got her purse, and boarded the bus, and searched the area around Crane Wessleman’s front door until she found a key hidden under a stone beneath some of the shrubbery.
Crane Wessleman was dead, sitting in his favorite chair. He had been dead, Sonya decided, for several days, and Kittee had eaten a portion of his left leg. Sonya said aloud, “You must have been very hungry, weren’t you, Kittee, locked in here with no one to feed you.”
In the kitchen she found a package of frozen mouton Sainte-Menebould, and when it was warm she unwrapped it and set it on the dining-room table, calling, “Kittee! Kittee! Kittee!” and wondering all the time whether Crane Wessleman might not have left her a small legacy after all.
The Packerhaus Method
THE SOCIAL WORKER SAT PRIMLY, knees together, hands in lap. She looked the part, with short, sensible hair, round-lensed glasses and large, kind, brown eyes.