Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

He could hear the surf, and he turned aside from the warmth and the bright windows of the hotel to go to it, propelled by an attraction he could neither understand nor resist. The sand was strewn with shattered ice piled higher than his head.

He climbed it slowly and patiently, gripping the slabs with stiff fingers, slipping and falling often until at last he stood at the summit and looked across the whispering dark. It seemed to him then that he was himself a creature of the sea, a seal, a dolphin, or a sea lion made human by some heartless magic, magic like that which had given the mermaid legs in the story that had made him cry long ago, cry at the thought of the little mermaid dancing, dancing with her prince in the big castle in Elsinore, dancing the minuet while at each moment the white-hot nails of the land pierced her poor feet.

And it came to him that in those days before television had wholly claimed him, he had received from the mouth of his mother all the instruction he would need to navigate this queer country in which he found himself; but that he had paid no heed, or at least not enough heed, so that he could not recognize as once he might have recognized all its ogres and its elves, the shambling trolls and the dancing peris. North had been a monster, surely; yet what if North had been a salamander, and the master of the flames? What if North were waiting now in the hotel, if North danced with impatience in the hotel this very minuet, waiting hungrily to fire?

Surely his mother had taught him a spell for salamanders?

Nor was she dead, as he had once foolishly imagined. He had always known that, in some deep part of himself that he had banished for fear it would make him strange to employers, to the various girls in Personnel, to the supervisors and submanagers who could no longer be called floorwalkers (not by him at least, not by any hourly employee) the floorwalkers he had so longed to be, though he had no college, though he was not considered—and had never been considered—managerial material.

His mother had never been the waxen thing they had buried. He wondered where she was and why she had not called or written, why she had not advised him in some way, though perhaps she had, perhaps it was her letter that lay in the green-lined drawer of the dream.

The snow clouds parted for an instant, and the moon touched the ocean. He, seeing that fragment of it tossing in the silver light, knew it and knew that in some previous life he had sailed there for decades; and that this previous life was returning to him. He remained poised upon the ice, but the knowledge passed. The moonlight upon the waves became only the moon on the waves, and he grew accustomed to the salt bite of the wind, so that he no longer rejoiced in its sting, but felt only its cold. And after a time he turned away from the ocean and clambered slowly down, often slipping, gripping the ragged ice-slabs with frozen fingers, and crossed the black road with its dancing ghosts, and crossed the broad terrace with its dancing ghosts, and went at last up the steps and into the Grand Hotel.

The hotel had double walls of glass, with a double door in each. Between the first glass wall and the second stood a lone bellboy, like a sentinel guarding a castle without a garrison, a last sentinel left behind by Caesar to watch over the Roman Wall or the Rhine. This bellboy looked at his burned and perforated topcoat and his seared face and said, “Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you can. At least, I hope you can.” He wanted to tell this bellboy his room number, but he could not remember it, so he said, “There was a fire. In a theater and a Chinese shop.”

The bellboy nodded wisely. “What theater was it, sir?” The bellboy had curly hair as blond as excelsior and wore his pillbox cap over one ear.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “There was some sort of play, about a revolution.”

“Ah, that’d be the Adrian, sir. Nice place.”

“Not any more,” he said. “It burned to the ground.”

“Prob’ly the Government did it, sir. You know how they are.”

He nodded (though he did not know) and asked, “Isn’t there anyone at the desk?”

“Not this late there isn’t, sir. I’m supposed to take care of it. I’ll take you up in the elevator too, sir.” The bellboy shrugged. “It’s our off season, sir. You know how it is. If we had fireplaces in the rooms …” The bellboy shrugged again, a minute movement of thin shoulders beneath his skin-tight red jacket.

“My friend rented our room. I’d like to know how long it’s paid for.”

“I can look that up for you, sir.”

He nodded, took his hotel key out of his pocket and handed it to the bellboy, who opened the inner glass door for him and showed him into the lobby.

At the desk, the bellboy opened an enormous book and paged through it. “Here you are, sir. That was yesterday, or rather the day before, the way it is now. For a week, sir, so you’ve got six more nights left, counting tonight.”

In the elevator, he asked the bellboy where he could buy a new coat. He was fairly sure that North had bought the shirts, ties, and hats without leaving the hotel; perhaps North really could drive, but he had always been asked to drive, been ordered to drive.

He said, “I beg your pardon?”

“I was saying there’s a place here, sir. In fact, they’re having a big sale, because of it being the off season. In the lower level, sir. There’s a barber shop down there too, and a billiard parlor. Lots of things.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I got lost in what I was thinking.”

“It’s natural you’re shaken up, sir. You must have just barely got out alive.”

He said, “I don’t know,” wondering if he was not in fact dead. He remembered hearing about Purgatory as a child; even then he had not believed it, but perhaps he had been wrong, as he had been wrong about things so many times since, wrong about a whole series of wrong choices that had seemed likely never to end—until at last Lara had chosen him. Did they have fires in Purgatory? No, they had fires in Hell.

He felt that the elevator had started too fast, wrenching and shaking him. And yet he had not noticed at the time, not noticed until its motion had become smooth, showing him all the floors, all the hallways of the hotel, its veins and nerves laid bare by this cage of wrought iron, which displayed to him water lilies and pyramids at one level, golden cattle and sheaves of wheat at the next.

And at every level, empty veins and silent nerves. This was what a scalpel saw as it sliced flesh, this sectioned view that could not live.

He had undergone several operations as a child, none since, and thus he found that his view of surgery was still a child’s—you went to sleep in the daytime and woke sick. This had been the reality, this surgeon’s elevator touring his body to learn how it was made; the wrought iron glared at him with the faces of jungle beasts, from the rolling eyes of a bull with the wings of a vulture and the bearded head of a man.

“Top floor, sir.” The bellboy took out the key. “I’ll see you to your room, sir.”

“Do I look that bad?”

“I’ll feel better if I do, sir.” The bellboy hurried down the hallway ahead of him. “Here we are, sir. Imperial Suite.” With a rattle of the lock, he opened the door. “You and your friend are the only ones on this floor, but if you have trouble or anything just call the desk. I’ll hear the phone.”

He nodded.

The room, which had been cold before, was frigid now. As he got out his wallet, he tried to recall whether he had drunk with the taxi driver; surely he had, or he would not have slept in the taxi. There was nothing smaller than a ten, but he felt that the bellboy deserved a ten after all they had been through together, studying the great book, watching the sea, performing their autopsy on the bellboy’s place of employment.