Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

“These doors would appear to indicate an institution of some kind, then,” the buck-toothed woman said.

“That’s how they sounded to me.”

“Has it struck you that the institution might be a prison, Mr. Green?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t seem that way. She seemed, well, smart. But a little disconnected.”

“Intelligent people who’ve been institutionalized often do. I take it she was about your own age?”

He nodded.

“And you are … ?”

“Thirty.”

“Then let us say this beautiful woman who calls herself Lara Morgan is thirty also. If she had committed a serious offense in her teens—a murder, perhaps, or if she’d had some complicity in a murder—she would have been sent to a girls’ correctional center until she was of age, and then transferred to a women’s prison to complete her sentence. Thus she might easily have spent the last ten or twelve years in one or the other, Mr. Green.”

He began, “I don’t think—”

“You see, Mr. Green, escapees from our mental hospitals are not punished. They are ill, and one does not punish illness. But prisoners—criminals—who escape are punished. I’m glad that you’ve come back to us, Mr. Green. I was getting rather worried about you.”

He was shaking when he left the Center; he had not really known he cared about Lara so much.

The Downtown Mental Health Center stood on one corner of a five-way intersection. The five streets were all congested, and when he looked down each they seemed to spin around him like the spokes of a wheel, each thronged, each noisy, each straight and running to infinity, thronged, noisy, and congested. None was like the rest; nor were any—when he looked again—exactly the way they had been when he had come in. Hadn’t that theater been a bowling alley? And weren’t fire trucks supposed to be red, buses yellow, or maybe orange?

Were the doors here? “It may be something like a guy-wire supporting a telephone pole.” That was what Lara had written. Looking up, he saw that he stood under a maze of wires. There were wires to hold traffic signals, thin black wires going from building to building, wires for the clanging trolleys. There were buildings on the sides, streets and sidewalks below, the wires above. A dozen—no, two dozen at least—two dozen doors, and all of them looked significant. Had there been a hospital for dolls there before? Had there ever been such a shop in the world? Feeling rather like a broken doll himself, he started toward it.

The room was lined with shelves eight or nine inches apart, and upon all these shelves stood little beds, dolls’ beds. In each bed lay a doll.

“Yes, sir. Have you come for a doll?”

He ducked the question. “What an interesting place you’ve got here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shop quite like this.” Lara would like it, he thought; aloud he added, “Are all these broken?”

“Why, no,” the shopkeeper said. He was about his own age, a stooped man who did not seem to know that the long hair that spilled to his thin shoulders was retreating.

“Then why—”

“All of them were broken when they came,” the shopkeeper explained. He pulled down the blanket and sheet of the nearest doll. “They’re fine now. ”

“I see.”

“You’ve got a doll to be fixed? We need a deposit. It’ll be refunded when you come back for your doll.”

“You’re holding deposits on all these?”

The shopkeeper spread his lean hands. “We’ve got to make money someway. We’ve got to keep the place going. We used to charge for the repairs, but hardly anyone came back when their doll was fixed. So now we take a pretty big deposit and charge nothing for the treatment. If the owner does come back for his doll—or like it is usually, the owner’s mother—we gain shelf space, and he gets his deposit back in full. If he doesn’t …” The shopkeeper shrugged.

“Don’t you ever sell the dolls?”

The shopkeeper nodded. “When the owner’s dead.”

“Then you must keep some of them for a long time.”

The shopkeeper nodded again. “There’s a few we’ve had ever since we opened. But see, sometimes when a boy gets older, he remembers about his doll. Sometimes he finds the receipt in his mother’s old papers. But we get the name of each owner when we accept his doll, and we watch the obituaries.” The shopkeeper reached up to the highest shelf behind him and took down a small bed. “Here’s one that’s for sale now. If there’s somebody you know …”

It was Lara.

Lara in miniature, ten inches high. But unmistakably Lara—her darkly red hair, her freckles, her eyes and nose and mouth and chin.

He managed to say, “Yes,” and reached for his wallet.

“It is a pretty expensive doll, sir,” the shopkeeper said. “Not just walk and talk—all the functions.”

“No kidding?” He tried to cock an eyebrow.

“Yes, sir. It’s the kind you wet with a salt solution. That’s what provides the electrolyte. It’ll be pretty well dried out now, I’m afraid. It’s been here a long time.”

“I see.” He examined the doll more closely. A name, Tina , was embroidered on the tiny blouse.

“It’s still the goddess, naturally, sir,” the shopkeeper said. “The goddess at sixteen. The boy who owned her’s been dead now for about eight years. Malicapata. Pretty sad, sir, isn’t it? Only now she’ll bring years of pleasure to another child. Life goes on.”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“Sir?”

“And where could I find the goddess herself?”

“In Overwood, I suppose, sir. I’m afraid I’ve got to ask a hundred and fifty for that, sir, if you really want it.”

“I’ll have to write a check.”

The shopkeeper hesitated, then said, “Okay.”

The doll fit nicely into the breast pocket of his topcoat, its slender form well suited to the pocket’s narrow shape.

Standing on the sidewalk once more, he looked around to get his bearings. Buildings rose from the five corners—a health-food store, a real-estate agency, a bookshop, a law office, a liquor store, a boutique advertising “Genuine Silk Artificial Flowers,” and an antique shop. The streets that stabbed the aching distance seemed utterly unfamiliar. A brick-red trolley rattled by, and he recalled that trolleys had not run even when he was a child.

As if his mind had room for no more than a single puzzle, the answer to the first occurred to him: he had turned wrong on leaving the doll hospital; this was a different intersection. He reversed his steps, waving to the shopkeeper as he went past and noting with some amusement that there was already a new doll in the tiny bed that had been Tina’s.

“Didn’t even change the sheets,” he muttered.

“They never do,” the red-faced man walking beside him said.

The red-faced man gestured toward a shop, and he saw that the sheet music in its window was yellowed and dusty. “Find Your True Love” was printed at the top in the florid lettering favored at the turn of the century. A dead fly lay upon its back at the bottom.

“Looks quaint,” he said. It was what they said at the store when they wanted to insult a rival operation.

“Get you anything you want,” the red-faced man said, and laughed.

The social ice had been broken, and he was eager to ask someone. “Could you direct me to Overwood?”

The red-faced man halted and turned to face him. “Why, no,” he said. “No, I can’t.”

“All right.”

“However,” the red-faced man raised a finger. “I can tell you how to get close, if you want to. Once you’re close, maybe you can get more specific directions.”