Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

“Listen, you’ve got a customer who hangs around, tall man, about six one, one-seventy maybe one-eighty, Caucasian, clean shave, reddish hair going gray … . Yeah, that’s him, I want to talk to him … . Mike, this’s Jim. How’s it going? … Yeah, sure. Right … . Yeah, I figured you’d be in there, a night like this. No use freezing your butt off … . Listen, Mike, how’d it be if I came over and took it for an hour? Give you a chance to have a crap and maybe a look at the paper. What you getting an hour? Seven-fifty? … Mike, I didn’t say that’s what I’d want, I’d do it for five, and you’d be two fifty to the good. You know Cliff had me on it when they had six guys on him … . Mike, I’ll split it down the middle. Three seventy-five, and that’s my last offer.”

There was a click like the closing of the napkin holder. Stubb hung up and got down from his stool.

“You owe for the coffee,” Murray said. “And that’s not a public phone.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Stubb told him.

It had started to snow again, flakes drifting down around the street lights. He pulled his trenchcoat tight at the neck. When he was some distance from the diner, he turned and glanced back at its window, still shining among the darkened stores: SANDWICH SHOP. He shrugged.

Free’s house was dark. Stubb rummaged through the kitchen, found nothing, and at last returned to his room. From a dresser drawer he took a ring of keys. With them in his pocket, he made his way to the door of the room in front of his own.

The bolt squeaked back. He stepped inside and closed the door carefully behind him before switching on the light.

It was a much bigger room than his, with two windows facing the street. There was a smell of perfume and stale ashtrays. Soiled lingerie, peach, pink, and black, lay in a corner. Jars of cream and bottles of cologne littered the dresser; in the center, precisely parallel to the dresser top, lay a Baby Ruth of the dollar size. Stubb reached for it, then drew back.

Swiftly he searched the drawers, leaving them no more jumbled than he found them. He looked under the pillow and the mattress, and even under the tattered throw rug. Then he switched off the lights, stepped into the hall, and relocked the door.

He had taken several steps from it before he saw the witch standing on the other side of the stairwell watching him. He grinned at her, though he could not see her expression in the dim light. “I’ve got a key, Madame S. She gave me one. I was going to wait for her, only it’s getting too late.”

The witch said nothing. He could just make out the whites of her eyes and the darker dark that was her hair.

“It’d be better if you didn’t mention it. Nicer—you know what I mean?”

Slowly she vanished. There was no shimmer, and her disappearance was not sudden like the bursting of a soap bubble, nor did she disperse like smoke or melt like the ferns of frost on a windowpane. She was and was not, with between the two a moment, the knife edge of time, when she was and was not.

Stubb was alone in the hall. He went around the stairwell until he stood where she had, fished out the paper matches with which he had lit Candy’s cigarette, struck a match, and held it up until it scorched his fingers, peering at the floor. Shaking his head, he rapped his temple and returned to his room.

Once more stripped to his shorts, he lay in the dark with his hands beneath his head. When he had rested so for perhaps half an hour, he muttered, “She doesn’t think more of that Baby Ruth than I do of my prick.”

Barnes’s room was across from Stubb’s. It was larger than Stubb’s, smaller than the fat girl’s, cleaner than either. Its walls were decorated with ads for various jokes and novelties. These were:

a bottomless drinking glass;

a swizzle stick that smoked when put in a drink;

a cigarette lighter shaped like a dog, operated by lifting the dog’s hind leg;

a cigarette lighter shaped like a toilet, operated by lifting the seat;

a rubber fly;

a real fly entombed in plastic ice;

a deck of cards in which the spades and clubs were red and the diamonds and hearts black;

a deck whose backs could be read with tinted glasses;

a deck in which the jacks simpered, the queens winked and beckoned, and the kings leered;

semen, vomit, and excrement reproduced in soft plastic;

a watch decorated with a nude woman whose arms were its hands, depicted at a relatively modest 6:30;

and a watch numbered counterclockwise.

Besides all these, there was one picture that was more or less conventional. Suspended from a stick-on hook like an erectile penis, it showed a voluptuous blonde whose gown, brassiere, and panties would vanish if the room became humid.

It was not humid, however, and the blonde appeared fully dressed. Barnes was dressed too, in tattered nylon pajamas and a robe. His room boasted a small table in addition to the bed and dresser, and he sat before it composing a letter on the florid, gold-crested stationery of the nearby Hotel Consort. He wrote slowly and laboriously, the tip of his tongue occasionally protruding from one corner of his mouth. From time to time he kissed the point of his souvenir pen.

Dear Lois,

Wonderful to hear from you. I know now you don’t hold a grudge. Me neither. It’s over but it might have been different. I think about that alot and I bet you do to.

Can’t understand what happened to the child support. I would have my bank stop the check but then what would happen if it’s just stuck in the mail and later got delivered to you alright. Let me know when you write next—if not I’ll have them stop and send you a new one, no joke.

Doing alot of business but the weather is so bad I wish I was south like you. Rain and snow. I know you said I could visit Little Ozzie and of course Lois so did the judge.

But, I’m not sure you mean it. Tell you what. If you mean it get me a plane ticket and send it. (Address c/o Mr. B. Free who is District Manager here.) Then I’ll know you mean it and I’ll pay you back when I get there.

Kiss Little Ozzie for me.

See You soon.

When he had completed this letter, Barnes drew an S-shaped flourish under his signature. After carefully retracting the point of the souvenir pen, he picked up the letter and read it with evident satisfaction.

Taking up his pen again, he addressed an envelope, crossing out the location of the hotel and substituting that of Free’s house. When the letter had been folded and sealed inside, he took a quarter-sheet of stamps from the table’s shallow drawer, tore off one, moistened its back with the tip of his hard-working tongue, and (with the greatest attention to its position) gummed it on upside-down.

After satisfying himself that it had adhered, he added the letter to a modest stack of similar ones on the left side of the table, stood up, and stretched. In his stocking feet, he padded across the room to the light switch. Drawing the blind down the single window left the room in a darkness that was nearly total.

The whisper of his feet on the floorboards came again, followed by a nearly imperceptible scraping as he shifted the picture of the voluptuous woman with the disappearing gown to one side.

The hole in the wall behind it showed no light. His finger explored it, and at last he thrust the souvenir pen into it. When he had satisfied himself that it had not been blocked, he replaced the picture and switched on the light again. Taking up a soiled supermarket tabloid from the bed, he began to read the classifieds.