Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

“See?” the cop said. “He’s coming around.”

A building was on fire. Men from two fire trucks sprayed it with water. He asked, “Is Mr. Sheng all right?”

The medic said, “You were in the Chinese shop? Okay, that explains it.”

The cop said, “They took him to the hospital already. He was pretty shaken up.”

The medic said, “We’ll take you there too as soon as we get another ambulance.”

He shook his head. “I’m not hurt. Dizzy, a little, that’s all. What happened?”

The cop said, “There was a panic in the theater next door. Some Feds tried to bust some of the actors, and there was a lot of shooting. Something started a fire—probably a stray bullet messing up the high voltage for the lights.”

The medic said, “We thought that everybody got out of the theater before the fire got too bad. Then we saw you.”

The cop said, “You’re out at the Grand, right? We found your room key in your pocket.”

He nodded.

“We found your car keys too, but I don’t want you to drive tonight. If you don’t want to go to the hospital, I’ll get a cab to take you back to your hotel, understand? You can pick up your car tomorrow.”

The medic asked, “Do you think you can stand up?”

He proved it by standing. His knees were a little weak, but he was able to walk. “I guess my coat’s ruined.”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “You’ll have to buy yourself a new one. That reminds me, I want you to check while Fred and I are here, so you’ll know we didn’t take anything.”

Feeling foolish he got out his wallet and carefully counted the money while another screeching fire truck arrived; there was a bit less than one thousand dollars in bills that looked nearly real. The thick sheaf marked ten cents was still in his topcoat pocket, as were his map and the doll.

At a corner far enough from the fire that traffic flowed unimpeded, the cop helped him into a taxi. The cop told the driver, “You take him out to the Grand, you got me? Nowhere else. He’s registered there, don’t worry, and he can pay you. If he passes out or anything on the way, tell ’em when you get there.”

“Okay,” the driver said. “Okay.” Then when the taxi’s door was shut, “Ya know, I hate these runs. Ya don’t hardly ever get no decent tip.”

He said nothing. He was staring out the window at the fire and thinking of Dr. Pille and North. He had forgotten to ask if Dr. Pille was all right. He had been afraid to ask about North, but North had probably been in the basement when the fireworks went off; North was almost certainly dead. Striking the trick match had made North drop that cigar, and the sparks had set off the fireworks, so he had killed North. He felt no regret, guilt only about having none. After a time it came to him that North had been courting death, had wanted to die, and in the effort to die had raised every encounter to the level of a life-and-death struggle.

“There won’t be nobody at the Grand wantin’ to go to town this late. Grand’s just about empty anyway. Have to deadhead all the way back.”

He said someone would probably want to go to the airport.

“Ya kiddin’? They don’t fly after dark.”

He put away the hundred he had been fingering and asked how far it was from the Grand to the airport.

“Twenty, thirty miles. But I got to take ya to the Grand. That son of a bitch has ya name and my number.”

“I was wondering if it was possible to go past the airport. I’d like to see it.”

“Be way out of ya way,” the driver told him.

“All right.”

He remembered driving North to the Grand, but they had not come by this route. Or at least, he recognized nothing he saw, though so many things were covered with snow that it was hard to be sure. The taxi dodged down a narrow street lined with bleak buildings with blazing windows. A drunk slept (or perhaps a man lay dead) in a doorway. He wondered if the dead man was dead in both worlds. Had Nixon felt a twinge, had Nixon shuddered, when North died? Perhaps. For Nixon had been loyal, or at least so he understood. Loyalty had been that President’s great, shining virtue, the thing that had made Nixon such a threat.

He said, “It’s the things that are most right about a man that make him a danger to everyone else.”

“Boy, you said a mouthful. The more man a man is …” The driver’s fingers snapped, sounding as loud as a pistol shot.

“If you want to stop at a bar, I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Can’t drink on the job, buddy.”

The driver was silent after that, and so was he. Staring out of the window of the taxi, he tried to find a common thread among the things that had happened to him, but time after time lost his thoughts among the looming buildings, the mystery and magic of the city. He remembered another city, his mother’s apartment and the way she had walked him to school every day in the first grade. There were bad men, she had said, in the city, who would steal little boys if they could. Perhaps they had.

Buildings spun by, then halted like Nazi soldiers, clicking their heels at the red lights. There were no freeways here, no overpasses, only narrow, twisting streets whose few inhabitants seemed sinister, and long, straight boulevards whose esplanades were buried in snow. He seemed to remember that Eisenhower had built the freeways, though he had been born during Eisenhower’s term of office. Eisenhower had brought Nixon; Nixon had brought North. His mind filled with lurid pictures of North trapped in the burning basement, firing at the flames.

Two boulevards met at an acute angle, and he recognized an evergreen near a streetlight, broken under its burden of snow. He had gone up or down this boulevard. He muttered, “Down,” to himself; it seemed to him that when he had seen the broken tree he had been going in the opposite direction, looking out of the opposite window, the window of the hunched little car that the nurse had given North. For what?

He pulled out the keys on the rabbit’s foot and looked at them. The rabbit’s foot had not been lucky for the car, or for the rabbit. Could the car have been a Rabbit? No, it had been a Mink—a rabbit would have gotten away even in that alley, run from the flames, bouncing over the trash cans and the broken, empty bottles, bottles emptied of cheap wine in which there was no Christ, wine grown in the California sun to be pissed away in a corner.

Did they have a California here? That had surely, surely been where Marcella had been when she called, where Emma was, Emma who drew Lara’s bath. Emma stood at his elbow, and though he could not see her there, he knew her for a Nazi soldier, a transvestite of the S.S. He wanted to say, “So, Colonel Hogan,” but the words would not come. The drawer was open, and in it lay the unopened letter, the letter shut with red wax. He was afraid of the woman, of the man behind him.

Why, I’m back in that dream again, he thought, and maybe when I wake up I’ll be asleep beside Lara.

A single book lay upon the desk, pinned there with a nail so it could not be stolen. The title was stamped on the black morocco cover in German letters of tarnished gold: Das Schloss.

He woke when the taxi stopped, very possibly because the driver had made certain that the stop would wake him. “That’s twenty-seven ten,” the driver said.

He handed over thirty dollars and got out.

Instead of pulling onto the terrace, the driver had let him off at its edge. Snow still danced across the broad flagstones; it was a dance of ghosts, of whirling white shapes that advanced and retreated in profound silence. A distant clock struck once, the deep tone of its bell rendered thin and spectral by miles of snow-covered fields; a freezing wind touched him through all his clothes.