Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

Silence again, stretching on and on; this time he did not speak, and at last she said, “I’m president of the Collectors’ Club. Did you know that, Mr. Green?”

“No. No, I didn’t, Mrs. Foster. I know about your club, of course.”

“We’re serious collectors, Mr. Green. And I will not sell this desk.”

There was a metallic click as she hung up. He hung up too. The desk was gone. He tried tiredly to guess her age: fifty or fifty-five, perhaps. Perhaps there would be an estate sale in twenty years or so. No, she was the kind of woman who hung on forever. He could get her address, as he had her number, from Accounting. He could write her and suggest that she contact him if she ever wanted to sell the desk; but it would do no good.

“Staying late, Green?” It was Mr. Cohen, the Art Gallery supervisor.

“Had to make a phone call, sir. It took a while, I guess. How about you, sir?”

“Getting set for Christmas. You know, firelight, candles, and snow.”

The images danced through his mind as he walked to the bus stop: snow—candles—firelight—children and other gifts under the tree. The headline of the paper in the vending machine was SUICIDE RATE CLIMBS.

If I’d made the world, he thought, Christmas would be a good time for everybody.

Quite suddenly he recalled that he had promised Tina a tea set, new clothes, all sorts of things. He left the bus stop and walked down to the arcade, an old-fashioned sort of mall he had sometimes peered into, but never entered.

Old-fashioned or not, the arcade had already gone over to extended hours. More than half of its little shops were bright, and shoppers bundled against the cold stamped up and down the clangorous iron walkways. He passed a travel agency, a beauty salon, and a chiropractor’s office, the last dark. A toy store—in both senses of the word, for it was hardly larger than the make-believe stores given to children—provided dresses that he thought might fit Tina and a minute tea set of real china.

“I don’t suppose you have any tea?”

The clerk shook her head. “There’s a deli. I don’t know if they’re open, but they might be.”

He nodded. “Where?”

“In the annex. Know where that is? Down that way, and the entrance is on your left. Only one level in the annex.”

He thanked her and went out. When he reached the entrance, its arch of moldering marble looked dark and somehow ominous, as though all the stores beyond were closed and gates of steel bars might slam down behind anyone who dared to enter.

He went in anyway. A few shops were open even here. As he passed a haberdashery, a small, dark woman darted out and caught him by the sleeve. “There you are! What’s the matter with you, you don’t want your pants?”

He stared at her. She was sixty or so, graying hair knotted at the nape of her neck. “I think—”

“You think I’m trying to sell you something. Listen, your pants are all paid for. You paid so we’d make the alterations, remember? So how about picking them up? I need the space. Be an angel.”

“All right,” he said. As he followed her in, he felt that he should remember both the woman and her shop.

“With the pants, I got you a nice varnished hardwood hanger. Last you the rest of your life.” She glanced at the yellow tag pinned to its paper dust cover. “Four months now they’ve been waiting.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Oh, it’s okay.” She was studying his waistline. “They might not still fit. Bring them back if they don’t, and we’ll let them out.”

“This is the hotel, isn’t it? The Grand Hotel?”

She looked at him quizzically. “We rent from them.”

“This is where Fanny worked in the coffee shop. This is where Dr. Applewood has his office.”

The woman said, “He’s dead now.”

He nodded and walked out into the cavernous lower level. Why hadn’t he recognized those dusty flags at once, the clawed griffin, the eagle with two heads? And the woman in the toy shop had said the annex had only a single level. There were balconies. Dr. Applewood had leaned over one of those railings to call to him.

He saw the doors to the elevator—the elevator that would take him to the Grand Hotel, the hotel that was so much nearer Lara. He started toward them, slowing as he felt the chill of fear. In the hotel he would have no money and no friends, not even Tina. If he ever found Lara, she would see only a silly middle-aged man. Yes, he was middle-aged now, and it was better to face it. Lara would see a silly man carrying dolls’ clothes, a doll’s tea set, and slacks that were probably too small for him by a couple of inches.

His finger pressed the buzzer.

The elevator did not come at once, and indeed did not come for a long time. He waited, squaring his shoulders, adjusting the bag from the toy store and the paper-shrouded slacks; and at last the doors slid back.

He stepped in. “Ground floor, please.”

Slowly and distinctly, the operator announced, “This is the ground floor.”

He recalled stepping through a doorway and out into a snow-covered parking lot—the ground floor. “The lobby level, then.”

“There’s nobody there.”

“Take me there anyway,” he said.

The elevator rose slowly and smoothly, and it came to him that there was nothing of the Grand Hotel’s wire cage about it. When the doors separated, they revealed the deserted lobby of an office building, a lobby a floor above the street. He stepped out and said, “Thanks,” then watched the doors close behind him. The world he saw from the windows of the lobby was his own, he felt certain. United and North were not there, and if Lara came it was only briefly and temporarily, to live with some fortunate man or to store her coat.

He should have watched the furrier’s; just as the cold had reminded him of this wool overcoat, it would have made Lara (if Lara were here) get her coat out of storage. He had forgotten, and it was too late now.

He went back to the elevator and pushed the buzzer just as he had before. Now the elevator was his only hope; yet he knew the hope was vain.

“I get it,” the operator said. “You wanted to use the john. There’s some downstairs too—if you’d asked me I could have told you.”

He nodded, not speaking, waiting for the doors to open.

“Sometimes kids want to go up, you know? I don’t let ’em. I could tell you were okay.”

The doors slid apart, and he was in a wide low room without flags. Most of the shops were dark. He went out into the main arcade, drawing up his muffler around his neck and buttoning the topmost button of the overcoat.

The street was dark, empty of everything save the wind. A prowl car went by fast, cops staring threats at vacant doorways. The wind cut his fingers to remind him that he had forgotten to put on his gloves. He set his parcels down on the icy sidewalk and took the gloves from the pockets of the overcoat, pulled each on carefully and fastened its cuff. There was enough tea for tonight at any rate; he could buy more tomorrow if Tina was real. If Tina was really there.

Another bus stop, one stop nearer his apartment, would be nearly as close as his usual one. As he walked toward it, he discovered to his surprise that he was happy. It took him half a block to find the source of his happiness in the knowledge that Lara was real even if Tina was not.

She might laugh at him; she probably would; he laughed at himself, now and then. But he would rather listen to her laugh than to anything that anyone else in either world might say. On television, some woman had mentioned that wild dogs did not bark, that tame ones barked in imitation of human speech. What was the talk of anyone else, of Bridget Boyd or H. Harris Henry, but an animal’s imitation of Lara’s voice, of the laughter of the goddess? Though she would surely reject him as a lover, would she reject him as a servant? If she did, he would become her slave.