Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

When the waitress had gone, he took out Tina and laid her on the checkered tablecloth.

“A doll?” Lora Masterman stopped fiddling with her chair and took gold-framed glasses from her purse to peer at Tina.

“I bought her because she reminded me of you,” he said.

“That was sweet of you.”

“She can walk around and talk, and even think about things a little bit, when she’s working. But she can’t read or crunch numbers. She’s not programmed for it, and I doubt if she’s got the capacity. If you ask her how much one and one is, she says it’s two or three. When you ask her four and four, she says a lot.” Hastily he added, “I don’t mean that I think you’re like that.”

Lora was still smiling. “I’m sure Dr. Nilson thinks I am, sometimes.”

“I want to tell you about Tina, and about my desk. Is that all right? Do you like antiques?”

“I like them. I don’t know much about them.”

“I do,” he said. “Even the dumbest person knows about some things. Did you ever notice? With me it’s antiques and personal computers. I know about those. When we lived together, it was just personal computers, but now I know antiques too. Computers are good, but antiques are better because there’s more to know.”

Lora said softly, “It was only for a couple of days.”

“I know, but I wanted it to last forever. I wasn’t smart enough or good-looking enough, and I didn’t make enough money. I understand. I’m not blaming you.”

“It really wasn’t any of those things.” Lora took off her glasses and returned them to her purse. “I wasn’t good for you. You were one of Dr. Nilson’s patients, I was working for her, and I was hurting you. After a few days I couldn’t stand that.”

The waitress brought icewater, a basket that held butter and a small loaf of warm Italian bread, and their wine.

“How did you hurt me?” he asked.

“You started blocking. You forgot—I mean on the conscious level—that you were a patient, and that was very bad. You even forgot that we’d met in Dr. Nilson’s office. You talked about us meeting in the park, because we took that walk during lunch. And now—” Lora’s voice had grown fainter as she spoke, until it seemed that she was close to tears, “I’m afraid you’re going to start it again. You’re constructing a delusional system, with me inside.”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “You’re too big. I couldn’t wrap my mind around you.”

“You did before.”

He shook his head. “You were real, just like you’re real now. You changed the way you looked, changed it just a little, and you said your name was Lara Morgan. You let me pick you up in the park. But you’re telling the truth about one thing: I didn’t want to admit I’d been seeing a psychiatrist—not even to myself. Somebody like that wasn’t good enough for you—I knew that.

“Just the same, the place I went to when I went through the door, that was real. I met real people there, I ate real food, and I bought this doll. I even met a man there who was from our world, a man who used to work for Nixon.”

Lora reached for Tina, but he drew her away. “You think I’m going to break her,” Lora said; it was a statement, not a question.

He nodded.

“If you were to walk down this street until you came to a toy store, you could probably buy a doll—”

Smiling, Mama Capini stopped at their table. “You two, you’re back together? That’s good.”

“I’m back together,” he told her. “I’m trying to get Lara back with me.”

“Girl’s got your order?”

He shook his head.

“Take the clams. They’re good today.”

“All right,” he said.

“I’ll tell the girl.” Mama Capini drifted away.

Lora said, “She remembered me. It’s been years.”

“You’re not that different. Besides, who could forget you? I didn’t buy Tina because I thought I was going to forget you. I knew I’d always remember you, that everything that I saw would remind me of you. I got Tina because I wanted to own a little piece of you. If you can’t have somebody, you want to have her picture, and you were the model for Tina. You had to be.”

She began to object, but he waved it aside. “Okay, Tina just happens to look exactly like you. Let’s not fight about that. Anyway, a lady I thought was a bitch sent me the desk, because she knew how much I wanted it. It turns out she’s a saint, really, underneath.”

“Sometimes it turns out the other way, too,” Lora told him.

He nodded again. “You mean I think you’re an angel, but you might be a devil—a fallen angel—really. That’s all right; I’ll follow you back to Hell, if that’s where you’re going.”

He paused to think, but Lora did not speak.

“We’ve got this Victorian tapestry. It shows a knight and a lady, and behind the knight it’s just ordinary. You know, a lot of grass and trees. But behind the lady, everything’s very strange. It illustrates a poem, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ by John Keats. That was you too, wasn’t it? I didn’t think of it until just now, because the lady doesn’t look much like you. I doubt if Keats had really seen you either—he probably just took some old legend—but maybe he had.”

Lora grinned. “This is better than the talking doll. I’ve always wanted to be in a tapestry.”

“Come by the store, and I’ll show it to you. Anyway, the desk was packed in a wooden crate. I suppose she had a moving company come in and do it; it looked like a professional job.”

Lora nodded.

“I didn’t know what was inside it, and I had some trouble getting it open; so when I got the first board off, I sent Tina in to look.”

“You really believe all this, don’t you?” Lora tossed lustrous brown hair back with an impatient jerk of her head. “You actually think that doll can walk around and talk.”

“It’s not that far out,” he said. “I thought it was myself at first, like magic. The Amazing Tina, that’s what she called herself once. But Heathkit will sell you a little robot you put together yourself, and the Air Force has airplanes that will fly and fight and go back to base and land, all with the pilot dead. I couldn’t build her, and I don’t know anybody who could. But somebody here might be able to, if we put our minds to it.”

Tina lay face down on his side of the table, almost beneath his forearms. He had picked up the saltcellar; he toyed with it as he spoke, passing it from one hand to the other.

The waitress brought their clams.

“She didn’t come out. I pulled the crate apart and looked everyplace, you know? But I couldn’t find her at all. Finally I found out there was a secret compartment in the desk. I don’t think the lady who gave it to me even knew about it. I opened it, and Tina was inside. She didn’t walk or talk any more—she was just like this.” He gestured.

Lora was chewing pasta and clams. She nodded skeptically.

“I should have told you before that Tina was like this when I got her. The clerk told me how to make her work, but I didn’t pay much attention.” He paused. “I should have known better. I’ve seen it myself a thousand times when I was selling personal computers and peripherals—I’d tell a customer something, and next day he’d be back in the store asking. Anyway, I wondered what had happened to her, but after a while I figured it out. When you’ve got a mechanical toy, you don’t keep it running all the time; you turn it off when the child’s not playing with it. If it’s a windup toy, you don’t even have to. It runs down. I won’t tell you how I started up Tina the first time, but I did it by accident.”

Lora patted her mouth with her napkin. “So you couldn’t do it again.” He shook his head. “That’s right. I’m too happy, because I’ve found you and you’re going to take me back.”