Jesse Ball - The Way Through Doors

— I’ll read it to you, said Sif. For though I am not deaf, it is after all true that you cannot see ordinary things like letters and books.

— Not letters or books or tables and chairs. Everything has to be precisely in the right place for me, said Claude. But this restaurant is a special place. I can find my way around here.

— Here, said Sif, you are the best waitress there has ever been.

— I know that, said Claude. There’s no need for you to say it.

— I’m not saying it for your benefit, said Sif. I just like to say things that are true.

Claude snorted.

— You? Say things that are true? Why, you’re the biggest liar ever to go uncaught! But as for me, alas, I may no more.

— That’s not true, said Sif. You lie too. And Selah catches me all the time. I like to let him catch me lying. It’s a game we play.

She picked up the W.F. from out of Claude’s hands and opened it.

— The true gambler resorts only to gambling when all other avenues have failed. In this he gambles not so much on his own future as on the futures of others. His actions are irrelevant insomuch as his choice is not to include himself but to absent himself from proceedings in order to lend clarity to the parade of events.

Claude nodded.

— I have a machine at home that my parents bought for me, she said. It is a combination of sound, smell, and touch that is supposed to simulate the act of sight. I have never used it, though. I wonder if it works.

— Was it expensive? asked Sif.

— Very, said Claude. It costs the same amount as an expensive college education.

— Your parents must have been hopeful that you would use it, said Sif, if it cost that much.

— No, said Claude. The point is that, now that I have that device, if I want to see, I can. It changes my blindness from an undismissable fact and makes it a sort of choice. Like the gambler. You know?

— Oh, yeah, said Sif. I guess so. Do you think I could try that thing out sometime?

— What are you talking about? said Claude. I was lying. There’s no device like that. You couldn’t tell I was lying?

She smirked and caught up one of Sif’s hands in her own.

— I’m glad you came by, she said. I have to get back to work, but I will stop by your table in an official capacity several times, and then return to speak to you privately again before the end.

— Okay, said Sif.

— By the way, said Claude, that book is pretty swell. It into my face presseth with bold pretense.

— Thanks, said Sif. I like it too.

Claude jumped up onto her feet, replaced the chair at its table nearby, tied on her apron, spun about, and approached Sif’s table again.

— Good afternoon, she said. Her face was now entirely composed and businesslike.

— Hello, said Sif.

— Have you had a chance to look at the menu? asked the waitress.

— Yes, said Sif. I would like a Thai iced coffee, and the spicy noodle with chicken. Please make the spicy noodle very spicy. Tell the cook I want it as spicy as he himself would like to have it.

— Very good, said the waitress. I’ll go put in your order.

Sif looked down at the book in her hands. She traced the cover with her fingertips and smiled. It was such an awfully nice-looking book. She reached into her bag and took out the policeman’s letter. What a swell boy, she thought. I hope he is put in charge of the whole city one day.

In her head then, a play began.

Two actors dressed as birds wore harnessed costumes that allowed them to flutter here and there throughout a high-ceilinged theater. Their voices were very loud and bright and delightful to listen to. In the theater there sat only Sif and Morris the far walker and tree climber. Morris was up front and very engaged. One could see that already he had made up his mind to grow up as fast as possible so that he too could be a bird flying around on a cable in a theater.

The more brightly plumed bird said something incomprehensible to the dark-plumed bird, and the dark-plumed bird darkened like an evening sky. He took off and flew to the farthest part of the theater. Thus began an aside on the part of the light-plumed bird.

— There was a woman, he said, whose husband was a gambler. They lived deep in the countryside, deep in a deep countryside, at such a depth that descending into it and returning from it took a very long time. Sadly, there was in this place no possibility of the gambler making a fortune, or continuing a fortune already held, and so periodically he was forced to leave the side of his wife and go off to a nearby city to gamble and procure for them the money that they needed to live.

And so, the gambler would go away for days on end, and leave his wife alone. At first there was no difficulty in this. She was a bright and clever girl and filled her time walking the woods of their small estate, discovering here and there in the country small things that she would tell the gambler of upon his return. And so for some time his absences did not pain or trouble her, for she acted and felt as though he were beside her, and when she went dancing through a stream on a wild and sunny afternoon with her skirt pulled up above her knees, she felt that he danced there beside her, and she was glad. And indeed when he was returned from any one of his trips, he would be dancing there beside her, and moving about at her side throughout the panoply of glittering incidents that well befitted their life together.

However, his trips continued to punctuate their life, and when he was away, a difficult thing began to happen. The woman, Ilsa, began to dream of a man in a green coat, a merchant. She dreamed of him while the gambler was away, and she dreamed of him when the gambler returned, and when the gambler went away again, and stayed away a week, the green-coated man rode up the path to Ilsa’s house. From that moment on her life was torn in two. When the gambler was home, she was as she had been, the gambler’s woman. But when he was away, even so far away as in another room, or on some other part of the property, she was the merchant’s woman, and she felt his hands upon her.

Forever the merchant would be bringing her things, gifts, jewels, dresses, and Ilsa would have to hide them to keep them from the gambler’s sight. She could not get rid of them, however, for the merchant demanded that she wear the dresses when he was present, that she have on display the tokens of his love. In the gambler’s absence she constructed throughout the house secret places for belongings until almost all the walls were riddled with these secrets, with the gifts that the merchant had brought. In her dreams the merchant had been one man, always the same, and he had been that man when he first arrived, riding up the path. However, as time passed, many men seemed to her to be the merchant, and they would come to her as she lay abed, or as she walked through the rooms of her house, or about the edges of her land. When they did she gave of herself freely, and took of them what they would, and it hurt her only when she thought of the gambler and how he loved her. But already the man she had married was changing. He suspected somehow, though he never could have known, the things that she was doing. He would burst in upon her as she was in the midst of sleeping with an unknown man. She would be upon her back, naked and crying out, and the door would burst open, revealing the gambler.

At which point, strangely enough, as though she were protected by some power, she would be removed already in a moment to the chair by the window, her dress done up and some bit of sewing placed into her lap. The man would be gone, and there would be only the gambler’s rage, and her sudden fear and confusion.

Events continued, and her husband’s fits of rage grew, until the two parts of her tore wholly the one from the other, and she no longer loved her gambler husband, for he had gone away entirely, replaced by this pale, ruinous man who himself had been ruined by the fates he had once held so easily in his hand. It was at this time that she fled their home, leaving in the company of a girl she had met upon the road, a strange girl who told her a story that made her heart light for a moment.