Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

“All right.”

“Don’t you kick me no more, and I won’t hit you.”

He asked, “Did you know Lora?”

“Dr. Nilson’s receptionist? Sure.”

“What was she like?”

The man shrugged. “White girl, so I didn’t pay her a whole lot of attention. No big tits or anything like that. Once in a while you get white girls that like blacks, only not too often. We’d joke around a little. She wasn’t stuck up.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“She ain’t gone.”

“Yes, she is. She quit suddenly and cleaned out her desk.”

The man looked skeptical. “Dr. Nilson had her on the phone when we left. Probably she’ll come back.”

He nodded and asked again, “Was she beautiful? Is she?”

“You want her to be, man?”

“I guess I do.”

“Then she was. Like, big blues and one of those china-doll faces, you know?”

The driver said, “Green.”

He answered, “Yes?” and the first man asked, “What you mean?”

“That Lora woman has green eyes, fool.”

“Don’t pay no mind to him,” the first man said. “He’s crazy. Now, you want out of that jacket?”

He had somehow expected that the hospital would be in the city. It was not, but in the suburbs, set among rolling lawns and beds of daffodils just coming into flower. The wind had a bite to it, yet was fresh and clean in a way winter winds never were. When he saw there were no bars on the windows, he said, “This doesn’t look like a mental hospital.”

“It isn’t, man. It’s just a regular hospital, and they do babies and triple bypasses and all like that. See, that way if people ask where you was, you can just tell them where like you was swearing in court, ’cause you might have had your appendix out. See?”

He nodded. They went inside, where one man talked briefly to a receptionist who motioned them toward an elevator. On the ninth floor (he was careful to note which button had been pushed) the same man conferred much longer with a nurse at a desk. When their conversation was over at last, the man said, “Now we gone take you to the lounge. I told her you’ll stay there nice and not make no trouble. You do it, hear? ’Cause we got to leave you there and go on back.”

He nodded again. He had nodded so often now that he had lost track of the number.

Although the lounge was clean, he missed the freshness of the spring wind. He tried to open both windows, but they would not open; when he examined their frames, he saw that the glass was very thick. There were seven varnished chairs in the room, and a low, varnished table supporting a stack of old magazines. After a time, it occurred to him that Lara’s picture might be in one. He picked up a magazine and began to page through it.

He was on his third when a weary-looking bald man came in and sat down. “You like to read?” the bald man asked.

He shook his head.

“I do. I’d read all the time, if it weren’t that my eyes give out. Then I have to go off and take care of my patients.” The bald man chuckled.

“What do you read?”

“History, mostly. A little fiction. Of course I have to read the medical journals. We subscribe to Newsweek, The New Yorker, Psychology Today, and Smithsonian. My wife always reads them, and sometimes I do too.”

He said, “I’d like to see some movie magazines. I don’t suppose that impresses you very much.”

“More than you might think,” the bald man told him. “Most people don’t read at all.”

“Books always seemed like a waste of money to me.”

“You’re careful about money?”

“I try to be.”

“But you’re in the hospital, now. Hospitals are extremely expensive.”

“The store’s paying for everything,” he explained. He felt a sudden thrill of fear. Was it?

The bald man got out a notebook and a Cross pen. “What day of the week is this?”

He tried to remember and could not. “Wednesday?”

“I’m not sure myself. Do you know the date?”

“April sixteenth.”

“Do you know why the store’s paying for your treatment?”

“That’s the policy,” he said.

“But why do they feel you need treatment?”

“Because I was gone so long, I guess. Nearly a month. No, over a month.”

The pen danced over the notebook. Sunshine had come in the window; reflected on the pen’s bright gold, it made it seem that it was the pen who spoke, and not the man. “I want you to cast your mind back, back for an entire week. Don’t answer at once; shut your eyes and think back. Now, where were you a week ago?”

It was the day he had met Lara. “I was walking beside the river.”

“In the park.”

“Yes.”

“Why were you there?”

“I’d brought my lunch. I ate it there on a bench, and I had fifteen minutes before I had to be back at the store.” By way of explanation he added, “We’re close to the park.”

“You had worked in the store that morning?”

“Yes.”

He was taken to a new room and made to undress and put on hospital clothes. A man in a white uniform took his own away in a wire basket.

After a while a nurse came in and gave him medicine.

There seemed to be things to do in the day room, but its games and pastimes were largely illusory. A cabinet on the west wall held half-a-dozen jigsaw puzzles, all with missing pieces—the basis for predictable jokes whenever someone got a puzzle out. The piano needed tuning; not that anyone in the ward could play more than “Chopsticks” anyway, though occasionally someone tried. The dog-eared cards in the drawer were short the ace, deuce, and four of hearts. The nurses guarded a container of Ping-Pong balls and usually said they were out of them to save trouble.

Or perhaps, he thought, they really were out. Perhaps the container was empty and had been so for years, as dusty within as without.

“Want to play some chess?”

He looked up. The man with the board and box was short and middle-aged, with haystack hair.

“Some of the chessmen are gone,” he said.

“We can use something else.”

He nodded and went over to the table. They used checkers—two black checkers for the missing black pawns, and a red king for the missing white queen.

“White or black?”

He considered. In some vague fashion, the decision seemed enormously important. He studied the white queen and the black, trying to decide which was Lara. The white, of course. White for her complexion, red for her hair. “White.”

His opponent spun the board. “Your move.”

He nodded and pushed a pawn at random. The black queen’s pawn advanced two squares. He moved his bishop. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe we met awhile back,” he said. He added, “Outside,” though that did not seem quite right.

“Maybe,” his opponent said. “I’ve been getting shock, know what I mean? It makes you forget stuff.” He raised both hands to point to the inflamed marks at his temples. “You?”

“Not yet.”

“But you’re going to, huh?”

“I think so.”

“It doesn’t hurt. A lot of guys think it’s going to, but it doesn’t. Say, you’ve got the marks already.”

When the game was over, his opponent sat at the piano and played an old-fashioned song, “Find Your True Love,” singing to the out-of-tune music in a hoarse but not unpleasant voice. It was not until that night, when he lay in his narrow hospital bed with his hands in back of his head, that he placed his opponent as the patient who had sent him to tell Walsh about—someone and someone else. He could not recall the names.

There was a woman with dyed hair and a long face who was deeply concerned about his attitude toward sex. There was an Indian who explained to him why it was so much easier to cure people who believed in demons. There was the tired middle-aged doctor, whose name he could sometimes remember, and there was Dr. Nilson, whose name he sometimes forgot.