Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

There was scattered applause from the darkened part of the room.

“What about this man with you, sir?” the man in the yellow pajamas asked. “Can he be trusted?” Older than the rest, this man was thick-waisted and white-haired; his voice was deep and gelatinous, as if it proceeded from the bottommost cavities of lungs choked with fat.

“No! No man can be trusted. You know that better than any of us—but when we betray our trust we die. We have been taught all our lives—taught by them—to think of that as our weakness. I tell you that it is our strength! We are supernatural beings chained by beings merely natural, and we must not turn our backs on the hand of God within us. We are a sacred band of brothers, and when every one of us knows that, we will be unconquerable!”

A curtain of thick, purple plush fell between the lighted part of the room and the dark. From the other side of it came the noise like distant thunder that he had heard earlier. The men at the table rose, the two in suits taking off their hats and wiping their faces. A balding man in shirtsleeves looked into the room. “Curtain call! One bow, everybody. One bow.”

North took his right hand, the fat man his left. The man in uniform took North’s right hand, and the two who wore suits separated so that there was one at each end of the line. Like so many children playing a game, they went through a break in the curtain and bowed—North twice—to an audience they could barely see.

“It’s working,” North told him when they were back in the shadowy corridor. “You heard them.”

“I thought you meant it. I thought you really were going to overthrow the government.”

“We are. This is how you start getting your ideas across to people. It’s the same where we come from.”

The man in shirtsleeves appeared, waving a slip of paper. “If you want to sit out front, here’s two together. Your next call’s at ten sharp. I’ve written it down here.”

North glanced at the paper and muttered thanks. “Come on, there’s a passage around the seating area, where the fire exits are. I used to work here before they put me in that place.”

Their seats were only three rows from the stage. He wanted to ask North if there was popcorn, though he knew that popcorn was only in movie theaters. Or at least that in the real world it was sold only in movie theaters. He felt that Lara was in the theater somewhere, and if he could only find some excuse to leave his seat he might meet her.

A slight, blond girl came on stage carrying a stool and an instrument that seemed to be a cross between an electric guitar and a balalaika. She sat down on the stool and played, singing a song about pirates; as she sang, three swarthy pirates danced silently behind her. One had a black patch over one eye, one a steel hook to replace a missing hand, and one a wooden leg; the one with the wooden leg accompanied her on the concertina and danced too, his leg beating the air like the stick of a witch’s broom. When the pirate ship lay half a cable from its victim, the rolling of the broadsides filled the theater and the three dancers seemed to have become fifty.

“It was kind of sad, wasn’t it?” North whispered. “Her out there all alone. They didn’t like her much either. An act like that’s better in a supper club.”

A piano was wheeled on stage, and an old woman who might have been a scrubwoman anywhere played “L’isle Joyeuse.” The name was lettered on a card. He closed his eyes to listen to the music, conscious that though he had done nothing but hang around the hotel room he was very tired. The dancing pirates became harlequins and harlequinas, their ship long-prowed and slender with strangely shaped sails. He had seen such figures and such a ship somewhere, perhaps in a picture or on a painted screen in Furniture.

Though he could not see her through his eyelids, Lara had stepped from the piano. He knew it almost at once, opened his eyes, and sat up; she had already left the stage. He stood up. When North grabbed his sleeve, he muttered, “I’m getting sick,” and rushed down the aisle and into the empty passageway behind the exits.

To his surprise, it was empty no longer; a tall, unsmiling man was stationed before each of the fire doors. None spoke or moved to stop him; but he had the feeling they would, if he had tried to leave the theater.

He ran backstage instead, certain that Lara had gone there, exiting stage right or stage left as they said, and that she had not come down into the audience.

It was as dark as ever, though he felt that the melody of the old woman’s piano, the shining, sparkling notes, should have illuminated it—for it seemed to him that the crystal prisms of some priceless old chandelier had been turned to birds, and the birds set free. Cheered by this light, by which he could almost see, he flung open a door and saw the bear. It rose growling on its hind legs, and though it was muzzled and chained, he felt a sudden thrill of fear.

“Here you are,” the man in shirtsleeves said. “I thought you were going to miss your cue.” He closed the door.

“No, no,” he said. “I can’t do that again.” He tried to explain about Lara.

“You had a dream, my friend,” the man in shirtsleeves told him. “That’s all it was—Madame was playing out there, and you had a little nap.”

He said, “Even if it was just a dream, I’ve got to look. Even if there’s only one chance in a million, because it’s the only chance I’ve got.”

“No, even if it wasn’t a dream, you have to go on tonight. Klamm’s here—the President’s advisor, one of the most important men in the whole country.”

“Klamm?” he asked. “I talked to him once on the phone, but that man was German.”

The man in shirtsleeves looked at him with new respect. “That’s right, Klamm’s German.”

“I didn’t think the President would have a German advisor.”

North walked past them rapidly without looking at either of them.

“Klamm’s an immigrant, but very high up in the government. Now you have to go on. He’s in the box on your left.”

He tried to protest, but the man in shirtsleeves shoved him toward the stage. “If I see your Lara, I’ll send her on, make her part of the play. That’s a promise.”

North was already entering. He followed, trying to look like a plotter but feeling his face pale with shock. He had lost the gray hat somewhere; he could not remember where.

The stage had changed. The man in uniform lay on a cot covered with a thin blanket. “And so you see.”

“I’ve seen it before,” North said.

He wanted to look for Lara in the audience, for Klamm in his box, but the lights blinded him. He felt that his first impression had been correct, that they were in a basement room, that it was the theater that was illusion, not the play. I’ve been an actor in a play all my life, he thought, and not known my lines. The only difference is that I know it now.

North asked the fat man, “How long?”

The fat man shrugged. “Today, sir. Tomorrow perhaps, at the very latest. The immunological system goes, and after that it’s just a question of what gets there first.”

One of the men in suits asked, “Why, Nick? Why did you do it?”

“I’m sorry, David,” the man in the cot answered. “I simply couldn’t help myself.”

North turned away. “And there was nobody to help him.”

His eyes had adjusted to the bright stage lights. He could see the audience now, oblique lines of pale, blurred faces that stretched into the darkness, here and there broken by an empty seat. Standing (as always) at North’s shoulder and pretending to watch the man in the cot, he studied the faces in the hope of seeing Lara’s; and when he did not see her, he thought to look for Klamm in his box, though he could not recall whether the man in shirtsleeves had said it was to the right or to the left, or whether the directions had been given from the point of view of the actors or the audience.