Storeys from the Old Hotel

by Gene Wolfe

  I require the half advance now due on “Star Shuttle” immediately. North Velo Light & Power Co. is threatening to shut off my service.

  Wolf Moon

  (Gilmer C. Merton)

  Dear Gil,

  Saul assures me you will get your money as soon as everything clears CDPI’s Accounting Department. Have patience.

  Now—the most stupendous news I’ve passed along to one of my “stable” in many a year! Saul was absolutely bowled over by Come, Dark Lust! He plans sym. hc., trade, and mass market editions. He’s trying to get an advertising budget! He’s talking an advance of $9000, which is practically a signal that he’s willing to go to $10,000.

  Gil, I trust you’re working on a sequel already (Come Again, Dark Lust???), but meanwhile do you have any short stories or whatever kicking around? Particularly anything along the lines of your fabulous CDL? I’d love to see them.

  Fondly,

  Georgia

  Dear Miss Morgan:

  I have legally changed my name to Wolf Moon. Gilmer C. Merton is dead. (See the enclosed clipping from the No. Velo City Morning Advertiser.) In the future, please address me as “Mr. Moon,” or in moments of extreme camaraderie, “Wolf.”

  I require the monies due me IMMEDIATELY.

  Wolf Moon

  Dear Wolf,

  Saul assures me that your check is probably in the mail by this time.

  The obit. on Gilmer C. Merton was interesting, but didn’t you have to give the paper some disinformation to get it printed? I hope you haven’t got yourself into trouble.

  The 10:00 news last night carried about a minute and a half on the mysterious goings-on around No. Velo City. Have you thought of looking into them? They would seem to be right up your alley, and it is entirely possible you might get a nonfiction book out of them as well as a new novel. (But that poor guy from the electric company—ugh!)

  Since your name is now legally Wolf Moon, it would be well for us to execute a new agency agreement. I enclose it. All terms as before.

  Very fondly,

  Georgia

  Dear Georgia,

  I was sorry to hear of the unfortunate accident that befell Mr. Hearwell’s wife and children. Please extend my sympathy.

  While you’re doing it, you might mention my check, which has yet to arrive. If you could contrive to drop the words “disembodied claws” into your conversation, I believe you might find they work wonders.

  Now a very small matter, Georgia—a whim of mine, if you will. (We writers are entitled to an occasional whim, after all, and as soon as you have complied with this one of mine I will Air Express you the ms. of my latest, The Shrieking In The Nursery.) I have found that I work best when everything surrounding a new book corresponds to the mood. I am returning all four copies of our new letter of agreement. Can I, dear Georgia, persuade you to send me a fresh set signed in your blood?

  Very sincerely,

  Wolf

  Civis Laputus Sum

  I AM A SICK, lonely, and triumphant man looking through the pages of a book. You too are looking through this book, and you see me. Who were you, who lived in the pearl-white world below when sunlight reached the ground? I need your help, your advice; your world (which I once knew) was so much wider.

  I found this book yesterday and took it to my favorite reading spot, this bench beside the hawthorns. It is too near the edge, you see, for them to play most of their sports—they are afraid the ball would go over. Besides, these spiny bushes offer some protection. (I’d like to see one of them make a flying tackle into them!) My only fear is that they may decide that the area is suitable for horseshoes or quoits. But there are courts for those behind the Blue Fieldhouse, and more on the lawn beside the Library, where they broke a window once. You can go there and watch the red and blue quoits sail through the air all day long.

  It was in the Library that I discovered this book, in one of the incinerator bins, where it had wedged itself into a corner between the bin wall and the housing of the conveyor that would have fed it to the flames, and so survived these years. (Did you know you had escaped death so narrowly?) I am reading this story first because it is the shortest.

  When the helicopters were all gone, and everyone agreed that the fog below was permanent, a majority voted to burn the fiction. We Disagreeables (as we were called when we did not agree, and the name has stuck) who would not consent even when it was pointed out to us repeatedly that the Blazers were overwhelmingly in the majority, could think of nothing better to do that to hide a few of the most precious volumes and to memorize Moby Dick, in which my own part is that which begins: Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock, and ends: See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his later years.

  (And she does rock! O, my hearties, she does rock!)

  The wind—I think we are over the Pacific now—is rising, and it seems to swing the island, and causes us to revolve in slow circles as we scud before it at fifteen hundred feet. Every story ought to start, In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, but for brevity’s sweet sake cannot; it began a long time ago, but I will begin yesterday, before I had found your book.

  ‘Jeremy! Jeremy, are you down here?”

  It was Marcia, and I was tempted to keep quiet in the hope that she would not see me; but she caught me once, and I do not want to see the hurt in her eyes again. “Here. Behind the hawthorns.”

  “I thought so.” She was carrying a book of Ezra Pound’s, and wearing her red dress—so threadbare now under the arms that her skin and the thin structures of her chest and shoulders showed through plainly. She wears glasses from which one lens is missing; a brown eye swam hugely behind the other, dwarfing its companion. “I don’t know why you spend so much time here,” she said. “It frightens me. Suppose they were to roll something down on you?”

  “They wouldn’t do that. They’d have no one to bedevil then.”

  “As a joke. They might do it as a joke.” Without being asked she sat on the bench beside me, then stood immediately and went to the balustrade to look over. “I feel we’re clinging to the bottom of this thing,” she said.

  “You can look down better here than anywhere else,” I told her. “Sometimes I can see the sea.”

  “The sea?”

  “The clouds part sometimes. I think we’re over the Pacific.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “By the clock in the Library. It’s supposed to keep Greenwich time, and I don’t think it’s ever stopped. When it says midnight, the sun is at the zenith here.”

  “You can’t tell midnight from noon. We could be at the longitude of Greenwich. That could be the Atlantic under us”.

  I had hoped she would not think of that. To distract her I said: “Once I saw a whale. I was sitting here like this, reading. I looked over the top of my book, and as if it were done especially for me the clouds divided and I saw a whale basking in the water.”

  “You couldn’t have seen a whale,” she said. She was trying, as she has tried during the fifteen years I have known her, to force a roguish impudence into her thin, freckled face. “‘Lamatins and Dugongs, Pigfish and Sowfish of the Coffins of Nantucket,’” she quoted, “‘are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pigfish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.’” She has never yet succeeded.

  A voice on the other side of the hawthorns called: “Aren’t you people coming to the reading? It’s nearly eleven.”

  It was Alice, and we went docilely with her. Ever since this is
land first lifted above Philadelphia, the third (and I believe the last before the world-fog ended the civilization we had known) to take advantage of the then-new antigravitational effect, Alice has held her literary afternoons. Only they, and of course the games, remain intact, the last remnants of the two colleges that were to share the Library and the Stadium. Alice said, “It’s not tilting as badly as it did, is it?” as we climbed the slope with her. She is deathly afraid of falling off—knowing, like all of us, that in time the Number Three gyrograv will die altogether (though they are supposed to be self-repairing) and that when it does, the island will turn turtle, spilling us into the fog—afraid of falling off, but not reconciled to it as the rest of us are. Or tell ourselves we are. Sometimes I am sorry that the absence of those who tried to escape by helicopter has left us with so much dried food.

  The gravel of the path rolled under our feet as we climbed. The little stones accumulated against the balustrade, and Marcia and I carry them back up and spread them on the path again. Sometimes Peter helps us. “It was a lovely idea, wasn’t it,” Alice said suddenly. “The flying island. The two schools. Have you written anything for this afternoon?”

  I shook my head. Marcia nodded.

  “Why did the fog have to come?”

  Surrendering to my irritation with her I said: “Because they released some finely divided substance that catalyzes and maintains it. Fifty years ago they knew that pollution over St. Louis was causing fine, dirty rains—”

  A big, thick-armed, heavy-faced man in a blue jersey sprawled at Alice’s feet, and would have knocked her down if I had not held her arm. Marcia stooped to help him up, and several of the other players, twenty yards away across the smooth turf of the Library lawn, laughed. He shook her off, tightened his fleshy lips, and trotted back to the game, limping. Peter came over to join us, holding his camera. “I got it,” he said. “Good old telephoto lens. Zoom! I think you’ll even be able to see the expression when he falls. I had to erase the volleyball playoffs from two years ago so I could use the tape over, but it was worth it.”

  Marcia asked, “Isn’t he one of the best players? Charlie Stursa?”

  “He used to be.” Peter, a balding little man who looked as complex and precise as one of his own cameras, was fussing with an exposure meter. “Getting a little old these days.”

  Alice said, “Only the mind does not age.” She must be sixty now.

  “Two years ago he was a big hero,” Peter continued. “Now I notice they laugh at him more often than not.”

  I protested that Stursa wasn’t getting old faster than the rest of us.

  “He was a little older than most of us to start with,” Peter said. “And it comes bang for an athlete. One day he’s as good as he ever was. But on the next he’s perceptibly worse, and he stays that way. He’s gone over the hill, and he’ll never come back.”

  Marcia said, “He looks so strong.”

  “He is strong. It’s the coordination that goes. Did you see him running wide for that pass? Jeremy here could have done it just as well—so could I. In the end he fell over his own feet.”

  “I saw him throw Jeremy into a honeysuckle bush once—the one next to the statue in the blue quadrangle. Do you remember that, Jeremy? You called him an ignorant ox.”

  The doors of the Library were before us now, and since no one else made a move to open them, I pulled one back and stood aside for the women. We went down Corridor Three, past what had once been the fiction section but was now a makeshift gym—built so the Blazers could play their championship basketball game, one each year, on neutral ground: Dostoevsky and Turgenev, Dickens and Orwell, Mark Twain and James Agee, all into the fire.

  “Professor Conne is coming,” Alice said, “and Mr. Dunwether and Mrs. Blake. Have you written anything, Peter?”

  “The script I told you about,” Peter said. “I’ve several scenes in first draft.”

  Marcia pushed open the door of our conference room. “I know. You’ve a wonderful surprise for us. We get to make the costumes.”

  Alice called: “Hello, Professor Conne. It’s not tipping quite so much—don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps not,” Professor Conne said. “But I believe it’s swinging more. Have you ever thought of what might happen if we were to drift into the Antarctic? We could be driven to the ground by snow and ice. From that standpoint the listing is actually beneficial, since it will enable the island to shed the stuff more readily. Until we get our guidance system back—if we ever do—I say list away.

  “Marcia, you look as charming as ever; still my favorite graduate student. Won’t you sit down? Mina Pink says she’s coming, but let’s not wait for her. Do you have something?”

  Nervously Marcia read: “Mist maidens, a prose-poem by Marcia Laudermilk. What do they do in the fog-locked cities, in the dripping towns of Rome and Albuquerque and Damascus? There is vegetation, says one who watches—the iron observer of the stone bench beneath the hawthorns. Through the parting mists he has seen great trees. Always great trees. And we know what grew before the Covering, in rain-forests where no sun came.”

  The door opened. I took my attention from Marcia for a moment (fairly easy to do, despite her flattering remarks about the “iron watcher”) and saw Charlie Stursa come in, still limping. He found a chair and sat down without meeting anyone’s eyes.

  “The Sahara is a rain-forest now. Arizona another rain-forest. The Sierra Nevadas are wreathed in ferns.”

  We were all looking at him, when we were not looking at each other. Blazers never came, but he was here. Silently, he stared at his lap and took paper and a chewed pencil from one of his jacket pockets. Marcia was saying something about maids around a well, and Earth wrapped in a bridal veil like Venus, but no one except Charlie was listening to her, not even herself.

  He stayed for the rest of the meeting, answering in monosyllables when anyone spoke to him. Professor Conne read an essay on the French drama of the nineteenth century, Peter two scenes from his scenario, and Alice a sonnet that sounded like Elizabeth Barrett cut with water, and we broke up.

  I went down into the Library basement to poke around because I knew the others would be whispering about Stursa even when he was present; and found you, my book, and carried you away from the threat of the dead fires. I had hardly begun to read before Charlie stepped out of the hawthorns and sat down beside me. I never know what to say at times like these and tried to pretend he wasn’t there.

  “Doesn’t it bother you, looking over the edge all the time like this?” He sounded friendly.

  I shook my head. It was then, I think, that I had my great idea, which grew and flowered in my mind during the next few moments of talk.

  “Me neither. I used to do the same thing when I was a kid—only I looked out of the window of my room in the athletic dorm. I was on the top floor then.”

  I nodded.

  “Only nobody likes to be up there because of all the steps. So when I won a couple of games for them I made them move me down. Now I’m on the first floor, but they’re starting to bitch about it. I think I’ll be up there again pretty soon.”

  I said I was sorry to hear that.

  “It won’t be so bad. I’ll be able to see over the side again, and it’s good for your legs. I guess everybody was surprised when I came to the reading today.”

  “Yes.”

  “I always kind of liked that stuff; only I didn’t want to say so. You know how the guys are. Anyway, I’m a Slav—Stursa’s Czech—and us Slavs have a lot of soul. It isn’t just the blacks that’s got it, like they say. Any people that’s been stepped on for a long time gets soul.”

  I said, “I know.”

  He stood up. “Well, it was nice bullshitting with you. I don’t want to interrupt your reading. I just wanted to say, you know, that a guy does what he’s good at. You know what I mean? When we—you and me—were thirteen, maybe, we found out what we were good at and we did it. You wrote, or whatever it is you do, and I played ball. Y
ou can’t blame us, can you? We were just kids.” He rubbed his heavy jaw, and I noticed the beginning of gray there. “Tell the old guy, and the little one with the camera, that I had a good time.”

  It was now or never. I have missed chances all my life, but I caught this one. I said, “You could be Queequeg.”

  “What?”

  “In Peter’s picture. We’re going to produce Peter’s picture—an existentialist dramatization of Moby Dick. The island will be the Pequod, and Earth—down there—will be the whale. Professor Conne is going to play Ahab, and I’m Ishmael. We’ll have women as well as men in the crew—Marcia’s going to take Mr. Starbuck—but we haven’t got anyone for Queequeg yet. He’s a harpooner, a very powerful, muscular man. You’d be perfect for the part.”

  I saw him begin to smile and swell with pleasure.

  “I ought to tell you, though,” I continued, “that there’s one scene we’ve been worrying about. Queequeg is supposed to hang over the side of the ship—for a few minutes—with a rope around his waist. The book says: ‘So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooner flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a treadmill beneath him.’ Do you think you could do that? We’ll get a strong rope and tie it to something very secure. There wouldn’t be any real danger, and Peter could take his pictures from over the railing. You wouldn’t be afraid?”

  And of course he said that he would not.

  And I did not tell him then that it would be I, Ishmael, who would pretend to hold the rope. It will be easy enough to filch a small, sharp knife from the kitchen; and the first time in five thousand years that one of us has taken the life of one of them. When Charles Stursa plummets into the fog it will be some small payment for all the scholars and artists they have trampled down. But should I show him the knife first? Should I let him hang awhile? Oh, I can see that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel’s side. Should I let him hang, watching the knife? Should I show him the knife?