Jesse Ball - The Way Through Doors

Selah desperately checked his pockets and then all of his secret pockets. The rabbit was nowhere to be found.

— No, he said. No! It seems to be missing.

— Then there is no hope, said Ilsa Marionette. I don’t know what to tell you. I wish it were otherwise. You will never find her. Instead you will continue day and night through nineteen versions of confusion, becoming each day less than you were the day before. Eventually there will be nothing left of Selah Morse. Not even the ink of your calling card.

Selah stood then, looking into the perfect symmetry of Ilsa Marionette. There was nothing there, no clue to any possible solution.

— What of your husband? said Selah. He’s downstairs even now.

Ilsa held a piece of embroidery in her hands. It was a dog chasing a dog who was chasing the first dog unsuccessfully.

— If we can both forgive each other, there is a chance we might begin again, she said.

Just then the guess artist entered the room.

— My friend, said Selah, his voice choked. Mora’s gone away.

The guess artist put his arm around Selah.

— Is she really gone? he asked.

— Ilsa says that—

— Aren’t you tired? interrupted Ilsa. Haven’t you been speaking for a very long time?

Then the guess artist interrupted, making a loud, galloping, grinning noise. There was suddenly out of nowhere a broad and manifest delight in the depths of his face.

— What is it? asked Selah. Tell me, my comrade, tell me, my brother in arms, you who accompanied me through the snows of the Russian winter, tell me what you see.

It was difficult then for the world to bear the disparity between Selah’s grief and the guess artist’s happiness, so close together and impossibly cleaved they were. The room shuddered a little, and a lamp went out. Ilsa unshuttered the window and was profiled against it.

— They were a long time in the room at the top of the stairs, said the guess artist. She had been struck by a car that had come from nowhere and gone away afterwards to nowhere. She had been taken to a hospital by a young man whom she had never met. There she had been taken care of well, and it had been found that her memory was lost, perhaps for good, and she had left that place in the company of the young man who had found her. Together they had gone back to the young man’s rooms, where his printing press and lithograph machine and the tools of his trade were arrayed all about the spaces and belongings that made up his life. Amidst all this, he gave the girl a cool drink, and then began to speak to her in a layered, tortuous fashion, keeping always her past, and the things that might have been, foremost in his mind. He arrayed before her all the objects of his hope, all the things he wished had been and were, and so then they became what was real, and not imagined, and he placed his life in the context of hers, and together they drifted, questing, through the half-light, his resourcefulness all that stood between themselves and the devil, sleep. And when morning came and the sun arose in the east, the young man was speaking still, and the girl was still and slowly, beautifully, upon his arm, eyes wide, listening carefully to each syllable, carefully to each phrase and word and worded phrase. The whole was sewn together with paragraphs and dashes and went in a whirl around a pamphlet that the young man had made in truth, a pamphlet named WORLD’S FAIR 7 JUNE 1978. And the young man saw that the sun had risen, and the girl saw it too, and there was in their hearts a lightness and a pleasure with the things of this world, and they rose up from where they had been sitting and went down to the street and out into the morning city.

— Selah, said the girl Mora Klein, where shall we go?

— To the boardwalk, said Selah. It is proper there in morning, with the edges of things curled up. One can look underneath.

— I imagine, now, said Mora, that a taxi will draw up to the curb and we will get into it and the windows will be wide-open and we will drive brilliantly through the streets all the way to Coney Island in a swirling and impetuous fashion, and though things will rise up to stop us, nothing will have any power over a passage as splendid and daring as ours.

A taxi drew up then to the curb, and Mora and Selah got in. They hung from the wide-open windows as it drove at blinding speed through the streets and across a bridge and swept down Atlantic Avenue, down through Brooklyn to that always faraway and close Coney Island.

Then they alighted upon another curb and paid the cabbie with a gold doubloon, and ran up to the timbered boardwalk and the morning sand and mist upon the water.

— Selah, said Mora cautiously, her voice trembling. What about Sif? Is she real? Is she the girl you love? Or is she a version of myself that you invented for me, like the carefullest, most special set of clothes that anyone ever made?

— Sif, said Selah, is the girl I invented in order to fall in love with. I wrote a pamphlet about her in the hopes that she might be. You are the girl who was struck by a car, sent up through the air to land upon her head. You have yet to become what you will become.

— Then I may be Sif Aloud, and I may be Mora Klein, and I may be whom I like, said Mora. I may even be Rita the message-girl, though she gets the worst of it sometimes, always stuck in the ministry offices, never allowed to leave.

— Rita gets to leave, said Selah. Whenever she wants to. If you want, I can introduce you. She’s awfully nice.

Mora pulled Selah down to her and kissed him full on the mouth, and he was surprised with the ferocity of the gesture. He ran his hand along her back, and delight coursed along his arm.

— Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

— To madness! said Selah.

They were very close together, and this was immensely pleasing to the both of them. She pushed her face and cheek against his very hard, and he pushed back. What a creature! he thought. He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked up and down the boardwalk.

— I am going to get some breakfast for us. I will be back in a minute.

— Then we will meet over there, said Mora, pointing to a place on the beach. Let us agree to say when you return with our breakfast that you have been gone a month. This month to come will be my secret month, one of the two months that Eila Amblin slept. For even a girl without a memory should have secrets that she knows. She of all people for whom everything is a secret.

— But how will you live for a month? asked Selah.

He felt the hot morning sun on his face, and it was good. He could feel the circumstances all around him easing. And before him, this trick-some, winsome girl.

— A month is not so long when it is morning time, she said. Go get breakfast, and I will sit here looking out to sea like a widow whose sailor husband died in a storm long ago, although she is still young.

— Grand, said Selah. That is just what I was thinking it would be like.

He handed her the pamphlet, WF 7 J 1978, which he had in his pocket.

— Here is something to read, he said. I haven’t finished it yet. Mostly there are just schematics, no writing.

Mora was still wearing the dress that she had worn when the car had struck her, when he had first seen her standing staring up at the apartment. It was a fine affair, and left her shoulders bare. This drew him to her like a magnet. He kissed her again.

— Good-bye, she said. One month, don’t forget. And maybe buy one of those parasols while you’re at it.

She ran down a short stair to the sand. Away across the sand she went and sat upon the beach, staring out to sea.

One month, thought Selah to himself, and walked off down the boardwalk.

Mora looked after him as he went, a serious young man in a gray-blue suit walking along the wooden planks as quietly as he could.