Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

One thing I came on straight off was the staircase. I had gone up it to take some pictures of the upstairs rooms, and Martya had climbed it so I could take pictures of her coming down. Only it had always seemed colder than the rest of the house—colder than it was outside, too.

Also it was too long. The first-floor rooms had really high ceilings. I think I have written about that before, and it is true. But that stairway seemed like it had too many steps. I wanted to get back to the Willows and count them, but I could not.

The next night I never got to sleep. They had given me a bed that had ARMY written all over it, a steel-frame bed with flat wire springs and a thin mattress. It was not as good as my bed at Kleon’s had been, but a ton better than sleeping on deck, which I had done out on the lake. I undressed and washed up as well as I could, then put on my clothes—the jeans and cool shirt I had been so happy to take out of my suitcase—and lay down and pulled the thin cotton blanket they had given me over me. I was thinking of the big dining room at the Hotel Sacher and how nice it would be to eat there again when I heard shots.

I jumped up and ran to the door of my room. It was locked and there was wire over the windows, which would not open anyway. The door was old and I had always thought it probably was not as strong as it looked. I kicked it a couple of times, knowing that would bring Vest in if he was still out there. Nobody came, so I hit it three or four times with my shoulder and it flew open.

The first thing I saw was a cop with a gun. He fired, and right then I thought he had missed me. Later I found out he had not.

I turned and ran, only not back into the room where they had kept me locked up. I got out into a big, dark place where they must have had a couple of hundred sewing machines in the old days. It would have been a good place to hide in, only getting shot at like that had put a real scare into me and I just wanted to get away.

Which I did. The cops had the place surrounded, or thought they did, but I guess they had not seen the door I found. It opened on a stack of old steel drums like you might ship diesel in, with just room enough for me to wiggle between the drums and the wall. When I got out of there, I saw a couple of police cars with searchlights aimed at the building, and soldiers, too, holding the kind of rifles soldiers have.

You can guess what I did next. I got out of there as fast as I could, you know it! I had not gone far when I saw a poster. It was half torn off and somebody had spray painted a short word I could not read on what was left. But it was a picture of the third border guard wearing a suit. Part of the face was gone and there was some spray paint on the rest, but it was him. After that I saw at least two others, not painted and not torn. They did not seem important; still I wondered about them. You would have, too.

The city was mostly dark, but I got lucky and found the district where the bars and clubs and so forth were. They call it the Mousukos. (I found that out later.) There were a lot of places I would have liked to see, only I did not have any money.

Also I was bleeding just above my belt. It was not all that bad until my side started to stiffen up. The bullet had almost missed me clean, just not quite. After I found out I had been hit, looking around the Mousukos was not as much fun as it had been, and it had not been a whole lot of fun then. Pretty soon I was just looking for any workable place where I could hole up. There were streets that were no better than alleys, but they stunk and there were rats in them. If I had been in New York or even New Orleans—in LA or Chicago or someplace like that—I might have been able to find a car somebody had forgotten to lock. Then I would have crawled into the back and gone to sleep there, and anybody who found me would just think I had gone over my limit and chase me out. Only this was not New York or New Orleans either, or even Chicago or LA. Those people in the bars and clubs had walked to get there, or maybe ridden in one of the wagons with long benches that would take you downtown for a little change.

I kept looking, but after a while the crowd thinned out and it started to get light. So I went up to a guy who looked pretty decent and asked the way to the park. His German was not as good as mine, but it was better than a lot of people’s and he told me.

There would be bushes in the park is what I thought, and I could hide in them and get some sleep. After I had rested up, I might be able to find something to eat. And after that I would start looking for the American embassy.

It seemed to me like a good plan, only I never even got started on it. A cop spotted the bloodstain on my shirt. When he found out I did not speak his language, he put cuffs on me, steel ones like Raincoat’s, and marched me off to a police station. By then I was so tired I could not walk fast for more than three or four steps. Pretty soon I would start lagging and he would hit me with his club. Cops here in the U.S. call that a baton, only it is really a club and not anything anybody would conduct an orchestra with.

In a way it was good that we had to walk, because it gave me time to think. I decided the way to handle things was to pretend I did not understand German. Or French, either, although my French is really pretty good.

So when we got to the station, I would talk nothing but English. They tried German on me, and a couple of languages I could not identify, maybe Polish and Russian, or Romanian and Hungarian. They were all Greek to me, and Greek might be a pretty good guess, too. How about Greek and Turkish?

Then a guy came in and looked at my wound. He could have been a doctor, but my guess is he was an ambulance attendant or something. He gave me shots and probed it a little, then he sewed up both holes.

When he had finished they shoved me in a cell. There were two other guys there already and no bunks, but one guy was asleep anyway, just lying on the floor. Which is what I did. The other guy was sitting in a corner and looking deep blue. He did not try to talk to me, and I did not try to talk to him, not even English.

I went to sleep, and pretty fast.

When I woke up it was afternoon, I think. My wound hurt again because the shots had worn off, and I had to pee. A slop jar took care of the peeing, but nothing stopped my wound from hurting. It just kept on and after a while I sort of got used to it.

Then they marched me out and put me in a car and drove me to a big gray building that might have been a couple of miles outside the city. Pretty soon I was sitting in a real honest-to-God waiting room with beat-up chairs, and old magazines I could not read, and a cop to make sure I did not run. He put cuffs on me, too, but with my hands in front instead of in back. That was really nice of him, and I tried to show him I appreciated it.

After about an hour I was taken to a little meeting room, and there was a red-headed guy in there who smiled at me and said, “How about a cigarette? Want one?” He was maybe two years older than I was, and he said it in English.

I said no thanks and asked if he was American.

“Nope. I did my growing up in Saint Louis, though. Went to high school there and all that crap.” He offered his hand. “Demetrios Bobokis—Butch Bobokis. How about some coffee?”

I shook and said I would love some, and something to eat if he could arrange for it. So he went to the door and talked to somebody out there, then came back and sat down. “It will be a while. Where you from?”

I said I had lived all over, which was the truth.

“Here?”

“No, that’s why I came here. I’d never been here before and I wanted to see it. Listen, I’m not a spy or anything like that.”

“You’re a revolutionary.” He grinned at me. “You were broadcasting for them, that crazy religion.”