by Gene Wolfe
I suppose I nodded.
“Oscar sees a lot of business magazines because he’s been into and out of a lot of businesses. Naturally he was interested in a story about his old roommate’s success. There were two pictures of Mariel in there, remember? One of us outside the house, and another in my study talking to her. Jack got very, very interested in Mariel as soon as he saw her. One of those crazy things, you know? Like falling for a girl you saw on TV.”
That was when the waiter came with our steaks, and I’ll tell you I was damned glad of it.
“So Oscar wrote to me. Would it be okay if Jack came for a visit? He would stay at our house and take Mariel to shows and so on. I suppose he’ll play tennis with her too. I’d be there, and if things looked like they might go too far, I could break it up.”
I nodded and pretended I was busy eating.
“Jack’s a Yale man. He’ll graduate this year. Mariel will graduate from high school, too. I doubt that you knew that, but it’s true. She’s been looking at colleges. Just fooling around with it, really. You know how kids are.”
“Sure.”
“So four years difference in their ages. That’s not a lot, and she’s mature for her age. When Jack’s forty, she’ll be thirty-six.”
I said a difference that small hardly mattered.
“Right. Just what I’ve been thinking myself. Now listen, I want a favor and a big one. Jack’s plane lands at nine twenty. United Airlines. I’d like you to meet him at the airport. You can drive out as soon as we finish here. Jack Pendelton. I want you to size him up for me, and I want you to meet me for lunch at noon tomorrow. Tell me what you think of him. Tell me everything the two of you said, and exactly how he seemed to you. I’ll have formed my own impressions by that time, but I want to check them against those of a man I can trust who’s closer to his own age. Can I count on you?”
Out at the airport, I didn’t have to ask which passenger was Jack Pendelton. He was six-foot-two and something about him made you think he was even bigger. He was plenty handsome enough for the movies, and he had on a Yale sweater. We shook hands. I explained that I worked for Mr. East; I said an important business matter had come up, and he was too busy to come in person, but he would probably be home by the time we got there. Jack nodded. He didn’t smile. I don’t think I ever saw him smile, except at Mariel; and I couldn’t get a dozen words out of him the whole time.
Here it is going to sound like I want to make myself out to be a lot smarter than I am. Riding back into town and then out to Mr. East’s it seemed to me that there was only one person in the car: me. And there was something else in there with me that wasn’t really an animal or a machine or even a plant or a rock—something else that wasn’t any of those things. We went into Mr. East’s and the two of them shook hands, and he introduced Jack to Mariel. I could see that Mariel was attracted to him and scared of him, both at once. I wasn’t attracted and I wasn’t scared, either, but I had the feeling I’d be scared half to death if I knew more.
Next day Mr. East and I had lunch at a little French place he liked. He asked what I thought of Jack, and I said he was big and strong and tough, from what I’d seen of him, and as hard as nails. But he wasn’t human.
“I know what you mean. Oscar says his IQ is in the stratosphere.”
“Maybe,” I said, “and maybe not. But what I mean is there’s nothing warm there. Suppose I had stopped the car, and we got out and fought.” (I said that because I had been thinking of it during the drive.) “He could have killed me and thrown my body in the trunk and never turned a hair.”
I pointed to my salad. “That stuff is alive. That’s why it’s nice and fresh and green. When I chew it up and swallow it, I’m killing it. Killing me would bother Jack about as much as killing this stuff bothers me.”
“I think he’s a fine young man,” Mr. East told me, and after that he changed the subject.
I had hoped that Mariel could go to a college in the town where Ellie Smithers lived. Ellie was the woman Mr. East was dating. So did Mariel, and she had said so in her letters. She went to a famous girl’s college in upstate New York instead. I won’t tell what it was, but if I said the name you’d recognize it. You could have gotten the best car at Bailey’s Cadillac & Oldsmobile for what it cost to go there for just one year.
I think it was around Christmas when Mr. East told me about the double wedding. It would be in June, and I was invited. The couples would be Jack Pendelton and Mariel, and Mr. East and Ellie Smithers. It would be a garden wedding “with five hundred guests, if Ellie has her way,” and Jack’s father, mother, and sisters would fly out.
Mr. East cleared his throat and leaned back. “I’m telling you this in confidence. I want that understood. Oscar’s settling a portfolio of investments—stocks and bonds—on Mariel. I’ll manage it for her until she’s of age. I’ve checked out those investments, checked them very thoroughly, then had my broker check them over again for me. Two million, three hundred thousand and change if you sold everything today. The income should be around two hundred thousand a year. It could be more. Growth twelve percent or so. Mariel will always be taken care of.”
I came to the wedding, but Oscar Pendelton, his wife, and his daughters didn’t. Later I found out that Mr. East had gotten a phone call. The woman who called said she was Sara Pendelton, and he had no reason to doubt her. Oscar’d had a heart attack. He was in intensive care. She knew the wedding was all set, and couldn’t be postponed. But only Jack would be there.
After it was all over, and Jack and Mariel had flown to Boston to see Jack’s father in the hospital, supposedly, I did something I felt a little guilty about at the time. I phoned every last hotel and motel in the area. Nobody’ d had reservations for an Oscar Pendelton and family. Nobody’d had reservations for a Sara Pendelton, either. Mr. East and Ellie were honeymooning then, so I went out to the house and talked to the housekeeper. She didn’t know where the Pendeltons were going to stay, but she hadn’t been told to expect five house guests and there was no way in hell she wouldn’t have been.
“It wouldn’t be regular, anyway, would it? The groom in the house the day before the wedding? Him and his folks would put up at the Hyatt or something, I’m pretty sure.” So I checked with the Hyatt again, this time in person. Nothing. It wasn’t “I don’t know”; it was “absolutely not.”
By that time I was so worried I couldn’t eat. And I was fighting mad. It took a hell of a lot of doing, but I got Oscar Pendelton on the phone, long-distance. Certainly he remembered his old friend Art East. How was Art doing? Jack? No, he didn’t have a son with that name. Two sons, Donald and Douglas. Don and Doug, their friends said. Nobody ever called either one of them Jack. He had no daughters. His wife’s name was Betty.
You’re going to say that I should have told Mr. East before he got back from his honeymoon. I’ve told myself that about a thousand times. Only I kept thinking it might be some kind of silly mistake. By that time the honeymoon was nearly over; I told myself I would tell him when he got back.
But I didn’t. The thing was that I had called his broker. I told him Mr. East had put me in charge of his financial affairs while he was gone, and I wanted to make sure Mariel’s trust fund was in order. It was. The brokerage was holding everything, but they would not sell or buy, or make any other changes, without a signed authorization from Mr. East. I explained that I didn’t want to change anything, I just wanted to make sure everything was straight. It was. They’d had the whole trust portfolio in their hands two weeks before the ceremony. There was nothing to worry about.
After I hung up the phone I felt like I ought to laugh, but I didn’t. On the one hand I was damned sure something was terribly, terribly wrong. On the other it was a couple of million. Suppose the man I’d talked to hadn’t been Oscar Pendelton at all. Suppose it had been some joker, and he had been stringing me?
A few days later Mr. East got back all happy and tanned, and I asked as casually as I could where Mariel had gone on h
er honeymoon, and whether he had heard from her. They were going to tour Europe, he said, for a month. (He had taken two weeks, not wanting to be away from the business any longer than that.) He hadn’t heard from her, but then he hadn’t expected to.
I said I was worried, and he told me to forget it.
You can probably guess what I did next. I got hold of the girlfriend who had passed my letters to Mariel. She had heard nothing. She had been a bridesmaid, and she gave me the names of the other bridesmaids, and told me where they lived. None of them had heard from Mariel. I talked to every one of them in person, and if they had been lying I would have known it. They weren’t. None of them had heard a word from the girl who had liked writing letters enough to write me two and three times a week.
I went to Mr. East and gave it to him straight. I said I was sure something had happened to Mariel, and he had damned well better get in touch with his friend Oscar and find out where Jack was. He got in touch with Oscar Pendelton all right, and you know what he found out: no Jack, no heart attack, no plans that had been canceled, no anything.
He hired a detective agency. All they were able to tell him was that there was no such person as Jack Pendelton. Yale had never heard of him. Neither had Social Security. And a lot more of that. They told Mr. East he’d better go to the police and have them list Mariel as a missing person. By that time Jack and Mariel should have been back from Europe for a couple of months, so Mr. East did. Nothing came of that either.
Years passed.
Oscar Pendelton had never had a heart attack, but Mr. East did. It was bad.
He’d had enough time in the hospital to write a will; and when his lawyer read it the audience was the housekeeper, Ellie, and me. The housekeeper got ten thousand. Ellie got the house, the cabin, the cars, and the rest of his money, and she was to administer Mariel’s trust fund. If Mariel could not be found, the trust fund went to charity.
Mariel got the business, which I was to run in trust for her, with a nice raise. If Mariel could not be found, the business was to be sold and the money given to charity.
All nice and neat. My folks died, and I sold the house and moved into an apartment.
Seven years after her wedding, Mariel was declared legally dead. And that was that.
I had an M.B.A. A night-school M.B.A., but still an M.B.A. I knew the furniture business backward and forward, and I had a lot of contacts in that business; I moved to a bigger town when a company there offered me a good job. I was thirty-six, going bald but not too bad-looking. All right, I wasn’t Jack. But Jack hadn’t been Jack either. I dated maybe half a dozen girls, but the more I saw of them the less I liked them.
One night my bell rang. I pushed the button to let my visitor in and went to the door to see who it was.
It was Mariel.
She was only twenty-five, but she looked like hell. Her cheeks had fallen in and you could see the fear in her eyes. (You still can.) I told her to come in and sit down, and said I was damned glad to see her—which I was—and I had wine and beer and cola, and could make coffee or tea if she’d like that. What did she want?
And she said, “Everything.”
Just like that.
She had no money and no place to stay. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but she couldn’t chew anything much because her back teeth were gone. She needed a bath and clean clothes.
I asked her how she’d found me, and I expected her to say Ellie’d told her, or at least somebody in the town where we were born. She didn’t. She had been wandering from city to city for months, hitchhiking, begging, doing time in jail for shoplifting canned soup from a supermarket. She couldn’t remember the town we had lived in or where it was. All she could remember was three names: Mary East, Arthur East, and my name. Mary East had been her mother. She had repeated those names a hundred times to people she met, and finally someone had pointed out my building, and of course my name had been on the plate beside the bell button. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, she kept switching to a foreign language, and I’d have to stop her and get her to speak English again. I can recognize quiet a few languages when I hear them, and it wasn’t remotely like Spanish or German or even Chinese or Arabic, and it certainly wasn’t Polish or Russian.
I got milk and soup into her, and crackers she soaked in her soup so she could eat them. She handed her clothes to me out the bathroom door, and I put them in the little washing machine off my kitchen. When she came out, all wrapped up in one of my robes, she asked me who I was, saying she had remembered my name and knew my face, but didn’t know how she had known me. I said I was the guy who wanted to be her husband, and she screamed.
We’re married now, Mariel and me; so I got what I had wanted so badly years ago. Eleven months after we were married, she had Een. She said he had to be named Een, and got hysterical when I argued; so I guess it’s a name from the place where she was. She won’t tell me where that is, and says she doesn’t know. She let me pick Een’s middle name, so his name is Een Richard and my name, and most people think it’s Ian Richard. Lauri and Lois came after that, and I know they’re mine.
Okay, you’re going to say it’s not possible, that human women carry children for nine months and that’s that. But when I look into Een’s eyes, I know.
He’s a good kid. Don’t get me wrong. He’s bright, and when you tell him to clean up his room he does it. He doesn’t play with other kids, but they respect him. Or else. In two more years, he’s going to be one hell of a high-school football player.
That’s almost all I have to say. One night I woke up, and Mariel wasn’t in the bed. I happened to look out the back window, and she was out there with Een pointing out stars and stuff.
So I thought I ought to warn people, and now I have. While I was telling all this, the man who’s going to write it showed me one of his old pulp magazines. It has a monster with great big eyes and tentacles on it, and this monster is chasing a girl in a one-piece tin swimsuit. But it’s not really like that.
It isn’t really like that at all.
Of Soil and Climate
I have been looking into the crystal and have seen myself. I am tempted to put quotation marks about that last word, but I shall not. Is the self I have seen in crystal NOT the self I feel myself to be? Very likely it is. Very likely this second dubious self is someone else, an accessory to nothing—or so I would like to believe. But really now? There is no evidence for that.
I wonder what Jung would say. How I would love to know! Might it be possible? Hummm! Could I summon up his spirit and question him? I may well attempt the experiment, although it would be dangerous.
What my dear Estar says—what Her Royal Highness the Most Puissant Princess Plenipotentiary says—I know already. “That’s not you.”
And yet, the face. It’s the face I shaved for years, and my prison hospital office.
I cannot hear through the crystal, yet I know what is being said. It is all so terribly, awfully familiar.
Me (motioning toward the couch): “We don’t have to use that. To tell you the truth, they only let me have it in here because so many patients expect it. If you’d rather sit the way you are now and just tell me, that’s fine.”
He (squirming): “I’ll stay here.”
Me: “Good. It’s actually very comfortable, though. That leather’s as soft as a glove, and it’s nicely upholstered. To confess, I have napped there sometimes. Now let’s begin. What’s troubling you, Jim?”
Jim: “When I was a kid … I think you ought to know this to start with, Doc. I always felt like everybody was, you know, shutting me out … .”
Me: “Yes?”
Jim: “I wasn’t, you know, very good at anything. Baseball or anything.”
Me: “Neither was I.”
Jim: “I—I watched a lot of TV.”
Me: “You feel that led you to your present difficulties?”
Jim: “Uh … No. Maybe it really would be better if I could lay down.”
And
so on. It will not do to be contemptuous of these men, and now that I find myself as I am, a head taller than anyone, with a sword at my side, I find myself less tempted to contempt.
Which is good. If I watch the crystal long enough will I not see myself in the office of some other psychiatrist? Perhaps my patients—but no. I am here. A stroke, perhaps?
Later. The bird has returned. The Armies of Night are mobilizing. We were fools not to attack while the sun was up—but we were such fools, and there is no point in denial. I could have ridden. With what? Half the Palace Guard, twenty or thirty other men-at-arms, and a few boys. Or a dozen men-at-arms. Half a dozen. We would have been wiped out in the Pass of Tears if not before. Perhaps after this …
If there is any “after this.”
The light had awakened him. He had yawned and stretched, blinked in the sunshine, and wondered where he was. Wondered with the comforting certainty that he would soon remember.
A certainty that had proved entirely unfounded. There were no bars, and there was no cot. The horrors of imprisonment had vanished, and with them the certainty of regular meals, books, and the net. He had slept in fern, in a cool and shadowy place where a beetling cliff held off the sun. The sun was setting … .
He squinted up at it: half down the sky. It might, he told himself, be midmorning instead; he knew that it was not. There was a warm, sleepy feel to the air that could not have come before late afternoon.
How did you tell time save by looking at the sun? He glanced at his wrist. Numbers? Why weren’t there numbers there?
There were none, and he began to walk. Surely numbers were attached, somehow, to the gauging of time.
A tree of a species he did not know stood at the edge of the clearing, a graceful tree with light gray bark and leaves that turned copper when the wind blew. He paused to admire it.
“You’ll need a sword.”
Who had spoken? He saw no one until a slender girl in russet silk stepped from behind the tree. “You’ll need a sword,” she repeated. “I know of one. I’d better not leave my husband to show you where it is, but I can tell you.”