Storeys from the Old Hotel

by Gene Wolfe

  “What was it?” Gloucester asked when Kent stood on the floor of the room once more.

  Kent shrugged, and sheathed his dagger.

  “Are we high up?”

  “Very high. How can it be that there is air here?”

  “My theory is that the tower draws air with it,” Gloucester said. “Its mass is so great that it attracts its own atmosphere.”

  Kent spat, and watched his spittle fall. It struck the flagstones in a pattern that suggested the skull-face of the vampire; but he ignored this, and said, “If what you say is true, then the direction we call ‘down’ would necessarily be towards the center of the tower.”

  Gloucester shook his shaggy head. “No, down would be the resultant of the tower’s attraction, the earth’s, and the moon’s. The construction of the floors may take that into account.”

  “The moon’s? Do you think the tower rises high enough for that?”

  “The moon’s gravitation has an effect even on the earth’s surface,” Gloucester told him, “drawing the tides. And yes, I know that the tower rises very high indeed. One of its commonest names is Spire Sans Summit.”

  “Poetical exaggeration,” Kent said. Although he did not like turning his back to the open window, he had wandered over to the stairs—down which they had come, and down which, as he knew, they would eventually go again.

  “Suppose that it is not. Suppose that the king himself is the originator of that phrase, and that it reflects sober truth. How can it be true?”

  “If work is still in progress,” Kent said slowly, “the tower could be called summitless, because the summit is not yet in place.”

  “A mere quibble. But suppose another foundation exists—on another sphere. Imagine this tower stretched between the two, like a cobweb of stone.”

  “Then in going downward,” Kent said, “we may be progressing toward either end. Is that it? When we reach the lowest floor, we may step out onto the surface of the moon?”

  The other man nodded. “There are footprints on the surface of the moon, you know. Even though the king would have us believe all this is happening long before that time.”

  “Then let us go, even if it is to the moon, or a farther place; when we reach it we will be able to see the earth, and we will know where we are.” He began to descend the stair.

  “You’re going down again? I’ll come with you.”

  The room below might have filled all the tower, from wall to wall, with a domed ceiling higher in the center than the room was wide; so that it seemed like a world unto itself. The stone stair they trod might have been a bit of gossamer in the immensity.

  “It’s an orrery, by God,” Gloucester said. “At least it’s not another throne room.”

  “It may still be another throne room,” Kent cautioned him.

  In the center the sun burned with thermonuclear fire. Far away, at the dim borders of the room to which the two descended, cold Pluto circled. The walls were wainscoted, the wooden panels painted with the symbols of the zodiac; a rearing bison, shot to the heart, snorted gore near where they stood when they attained the floor at last.

  Here the stair ended. “We must find another way down,” Gloucester said.

  Kent nodded and added, “Or up, if we are going up.” The rearing bison seemed to speak: “Long have I ruled—a hundred years and more.” (But it was the king’s voice.)

  “Yes, monarch of the plain,” Kent answered, “long did you rule.”

  “Hush,” Gloucester whispered, “he’ll hear you.”

  “Long have I ruled,” the king’s voice continued. “I have starved my enemies; built my tower.”

  “You are old,” Gloucester ventured. There was a stirring behind the painted panel, but Kent knew that the king was not there.

  “In the dream of serving others, they have served me. Pisces the whale I penned in a tank of glass, sheltering her from the waters I poisoned. Does not that show the love I bore her? The poison was needed for the making: scientist and sorcerer am I.”

  From a hole gnawed between the rearing bison’s feet, a rat’s head peeped forth. It was as large as a bucket; seeing it, Kent drew his sword.

  “It is as I feared,” Gloucester said when his own blade was in his hand. “The lower parts of the tower are worse than the higher. Or the higher are worse than the lower, as may be.”

  The rat was through the hole now, edging along the wall, while a second rat glared out with shining eyes.

  “To the center of the room!” Kent urged.

  But Gloucester cautioned: “No. Let us stay here, where we can guard one another’s backs, or put our own to the wall.”

  The king’s voice had continued all the while, though neither had heard it. Now it said: “Some insinuate that I grow old. Do they think that I, who know so much, cannot renew myself? And do they not know that if I should die, the tower will fall upon them? The rats are at the foundation even now.”

  The rat sprang for Kent’s throat. He hewed it with his sword, and plunged his dagger into its chest as it flew toward him; but as he struck, the septic fangs of the second rat opened his left leg from thigh to ankle. Grizzled Gloucester, awkward but bull-strong, clove its spine with a single stroke; still, it was too late.

  “I will carry you wherever you wish to go,” he told Kent when a tourniquet had eased the bleeding. “Back to earth or to the moon. Wherever you think there may be help.”

  The bison had fallen silent, but the claws of the dying rats still scrabbled on the floor. “I’ll carry you wherever you want to go,” Gloucester repeated, thinking Kent had not heard him.

  But Kent only said: “Be quiet. Someone is coming.”

  Gloucester thought him delirious. “I see no one.”

  “That is because the sun is at his back,” Kent said. “You cannot see him against the glare.”

  After a moment Gloucester muttered: “A boy. I see him now.

  The boy wore a crown. He was about thirteen, but his eyes were the cold, mad eyes of the king. Maidens followed him; these had no eyes at all—only little flames, like candles burning, in the empty sockets. “Who are you men?” the boy asked.

  Gloucester bowed as well as he could, still holding Kent, and said: “We are your courtiers, sire. Kent and Gloucester.”

  The boy shook his head. “I do not remember those names.

  “In the beginning you called us Youth and Learning, sir; you promised us a great deal.”

  “I don’t remember that either,” the boy king said. “But if you will behave yourselves and amuse me, I will give you whatever it was I promised you before.”

  Gloucester asked, “Will you heal my friend?” but the king had already turned away.

  Later Kent whispered, “Gloucester …”

  “Are you in much pain?”

  “Gloucester, I have been thinking.”

  Gloucester said, “That is always painful, I know,” but the younger man did not smile.

  “You said that if this tower reaches to the moon, it has no top … .”

  “Yes.”

  “But isn’t it equally valid to say both ends are the top? From the moon, the foundation on earth is the summit. Isn’t that correct?”

  “If you say so. But perhaps you should try to rest now.” The wound in Kent’s leg was bleeding freely again; Gloucester thrust the fingers of one hand through the tourniquet and twisted the cloth to tighten it.

  He was still fussing with it when Kent murmured: “Call back the king, Gloucester, and carry me to the window. With one single bound I will leap this tall building; and that is something a boy should see.”

  Parkroads—A Review

  ONE HARDLY KNOWS WHAT TO SAY ABOUT Parkroads. Released in 1939 and 1984, it violates many of the canons of cinematography and must be considered a failure. Yet it is impossible to understand this remarkable film without an enlightened awareness of its many inexplicable experiments.

  Strictly speaking, it is without opening credits. Instead the credits, such as they
are, continue throughout all six (possibly seven) reels, spoken by the cast at pseudoappropriate moments. For example, as Tanya (or Daisy) reclines beside Belvedere Lake, her face concealed by an immense straw hat, she is heard to murmur, “Choreography by …” Jonquils are tossed by the wind, but there is no dancing per se.

  Parkroads is neatly divided into alternating sequences, though in a few instances an episode of one type is followed immediately by another, quite different, episode from the same sequence. The later episodes—appearing generally in the first half of the film as it has been released in the U.S.—were produced in Brooklyn in the mid nineteen thirties, presumably between Roosevelt’s election and the dissolution of the NRA. They are set in Belgium (largely in Bruges) in the early years of the closing quarter of the present century.

  The earlier episodes, in which each character explains or at least attempts to explain the plot, were completed in various parts of the Low Countries several years ago. They are laid in and around New York, and the effect of traffic simulated by putting cars, trucks, buses, and subway trains aboard canal boats is at times very pleasing. The plot (and unlike so many experimental films Parkroads has one and is almost too concerned with it) involves a Chinese family called Chin.

  Or rather, it involves a Korean-Chinese family called Park, founded when a Chin daughter weds a Korean as the Chins pass through Korea while moving eastward to the West. A letter (possibly forged) received by another family in the Chins’ native village in Hunan speaks of a paradisiacal “Golden-Mountain-Land.” Chin Mai and Chin Liang resolve to undertake the trip, and the rest of the family—parents, three sisters, and a grandmother—accompanies them.

  They travel to Wu-Han, Nan-Ching, and eventually to Peking (Beijing). While working as scullions in the famous Sick Duck, they encounter a wily junk captain who promises to transport them to Golden-Mountain-Land in return for one of the daughters. (There is an amusing scene in which the three vie in bad cooking.) His choice falls on Pear Blossom, whom he sells to a brothel.

  The remainder of the family takes ship at Tsingtao and crosses the Yellow Sea. They disembark at Inchon, believing the junk will anchor there for several days; it sails without them.

  One of the remaining sisters, Cloud Fairy, is betrothed to Park Lee, a Korean. With the aid she persuades him to provide, the other Chins move on, vaguely eastward, to Pohang and perhaps eventually to Japan. Cloud Fairy lives out the remainder of her life in the Land of Morning Calm but bequeaths to her descendants a yearning irresistible and indefectible.

  Drawn by their inherited memories, they reach California but fail to identify it as Golden-Mountain-Land (if indeed it is). They continue eastward, hitching rides with disappointed Okies returning to the Dust Bowl. In New York (these are the episodes recently completed in Belgium) they are befriended by a Turk who tells them that the world is circular, being in fact the crater of a quiescent cosmic volcano, Mt. Kaf, which surrounds it upon all sides. The slopes of the crater, says the Turk, are doubtless Golden-Mountain-Land, but to reach them it is necessary to walk straight through the world, whose roads have the trick of bending human steps. Frank Park nods and soon vanishes. This bald stating of its theme is perhaps the weakest element in Parkroads.

  As already indicated, Parkroads has been released in six reels; they are so staged that it is by no means easy to determine the order in which they are to be shown. There is, of course, a conventional indication on the film cans for the guidance of the projectionist; but this is almost certainly incorrect. The incidents in Hunan now given in flashback may have well been intended, at least at one time, as the opening of the picture. The sequence in the public gardens of Ghent during which Doris is asked why she has embraced decadence and answers, “Directed by Henry Miller” (or perhaps Müeller), was surely intended as the last, or next to last. Publicity releases from 1939 assert that if all the reels are projected in the correct order, it will be apparent the Parks have discovered that the village in Hunan that was the original home of the Chins was in fact Golden-Mountain-Land; in short, that the paradise described in the letter was merely that of nostalgia. One hopes not.

  If so, it is a problem readily amenable to mathematical treatment. Any of the six reels could be chosen as the first. Five then remain for the second, yielding thirty combinations. Four remain for the third—one hundred and twenty combinations. Three remain for the fourth, two for the fifth, and only one for the last—total of seven hundred and twenty showings, surely not an impossible number.

  However, there are references to a missing seventh reel. If such a reel exists, the number of showings is substantially increased (to five thousand and forty), and the reel must first be found. But it is probable that the veiled hints in the old press releases only mean that when the six reels are projected in the correct order someone will be inspired to produce a seventh, in which the Parks’ unwearied journeying returns them to the Far East.

  In the brief space allowed me, I have been unable to comment on the performances of individual cast members; but it would be unjust to close without mentioning the late William Chang, who portrayed the captain of the junk. His scenes aboard seem initially grandiose. The vessel is too large, its mast impossibly tall, its rigging unnecessarily mysterious. Then we realize we are seeing it through the Chins’ eyes. The Chins themselves appear small, shabby, and awkward, Chang a demigod; eventually we realize we are seeing him and them through the junk’s eyes. Distributed by Unconscious Artists Inc. Rated R. Two and a half stars.

  The Flag

  WHEN WE WERE BOYS WE PLAYED IN THE SQUARE, and he was always the last to be chosen. He could run on that leg, but not well, and he was the smallest. We went flying just the same, scattering the pigeons the old people fed. Sending thin, brave shouts to the pigeon-gray sky. Once I saw him looking up the column; he was the only one who looked, but I never asked him about it. We did not ask one another such things.

  When we were older and quite drunk one night, he told me the story. I had learned it in school as he had; but I nodded solemnly at every pause and cried at the end as a good fellow should.

  The hero had been the youngest knight in that battle with the Turk. The others had mocked him, he the youngest, without a beard. But when the host fled, with the horde roaring behind them, he it was who snatched our banner from the mud, he who advanced once more though there seemed none to follow. Then the others, the strong, the war-hard knights, had turned in shame. So the heathen had been driven from our homeland, nearly a thousand years ago.

  In the morning, while I nursed my aching head, I recalled the story. There were gray pigeons on my windowsill, and I looked beyond them to see the hero standing yet upon his column with his tattered flag upraised, the bronze guardian of the city. And it seemed to me that one leg was bent a bit beneath him.

  We grew older and watched the dreams of youth join the games of boyhood in dust—I pass over much history.

  The gray-uniformed soldiers came. The paper where I worked was forbidden to publish, and night after night, when everyone slept save I, the trucks came rumbling down the street. I used to lie awake listening for the rifle butts that pounded down the doors, and shrieking women and the cursing men. Some night, I knew, the trucks would come for me, but what was there to do?

  One night, before the trucks came shaking over the cobblestones, I heard a stealthy slithering. A rat, I thought.

  In the morning I found a paper before the door. Just a single sheet of paper mimeographed (and badly) on both sides. It told what they had done: who had been arrested, taken, what the charges were, and even the prisons and camps where some were held. There was no name, to be sure; but printed large across the top, with the day, month, and year, was The Flag.

  Now he is gone, and no one knows where. No doubt his body rots in some grave hidden among black pines. But there are many such papers, passed from hand to hand. They cannot stamp them out; where one is destroyed five more spring up. I work for one, and we have already chosen the spot where we will
never erect his monument.

  Alphabet

  THE PET HELD UP A DEAD SNAKE, then laid it on the stony hillside belly down, carefully arranging it in a full sine curve while making a noise like a leaky valve.

  “I see. You have killed a reptile for me. She is very pretty. You are very brave.”

  The pet repeated its noise, exhaling between its yellow teeth: “Sssst!”

  “You are a good pet. You have brought the dead reptile and a flap-winged flier and many others. Now be still, if you will not learn. I want to write.”

  But the truth was that he did not. He did not—above all else—want to write. When he closed all his eyes, he saw the flaw that had brought him to this insane world where life ran riot, saw the flaw hanging like a pink haze in space. It was absurd, of course. But then everything was absurd, most of all, the message he had hoped to leave behind him.

  When he opened his eyes again, the pet was reaching, with elaborate stealth, for his pen.

  He snatched it away and tried to think of something that might hurt, or at least frighten, the pet. One of the big, horned beasts. He thought at the pet and it recoiled, its face losing its hairy brownness for the hue of dried mud.

  “Never touch the pen. Never.”

  The pet groveled, whimpering.

  “Never touch it! Look! See what the pen can do.” Eager to seize any relief, he picked up his pen and scrawled the lovely, angular characters for many-colored limbless reptile on a boulder. The stone ran in smoking streams, and the pet whimpered more loudly.

  “There! That is the sign.” He turned away from the scrawled words and, without in the least willing it, sought the cliff of the message. “Do you understand? Do you even begin to understand reading?”