There Are Doors

The Patient

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.

Then there was grass to be cut and a garden to be weeded, lawns to be raked, and russet, brown, and deeply golden leaves to be burned. There was snow to be shoveled. They gave him a warm jacket and gloves for that, clothing donated by some kind person who had left empty .22 calibre brass in the pockets of the jacket.

Some nights he wondered what had happened to the hospital to which the van had taken him, and sometimes he felt sure he was back in United. Once he told a smooth Korean about United and Dr. Pille, and the smooth Korean, Dr. Kim, giggled.

There was an attendant who was kind to him but eventually, behind the boiler in the steam plant, wanted him to do something he did not want to do. It was then, while he was walking alone back to the main building, that it came to him that he was there for a memory that was, after all, no more than a dream.

At his next interview, he asked the Indian doctor whether they had ever found out what had happened to him while he was gone.

“Ah, but do not you yourself know?” the Indian inquired. “You can tell us, I think.”

He shook his head and said it was all a blank, and watched with satisfaction as the Indian doctor (also with satisfaction) made a note on his pad.

He had lost his apartment, but the store found him another one that was if anything better. His clothes and furniture had been put in storage, and it was pleasant to see the old things smile as they came out of their boxes and to arrange them in the new places. Because it was summer, he left some winter clothing boxed up. The apartment included storage space in the basement of his new building; he tagged the carton as the building manager instructed him, and together they put it into the storage room and relocked the door.

Some of the people he had known at the store had left; some remained. At Mr. Capper’s urging—so he later learned—some of those who remained organized a welcoming dinner for him Tuesday night after work. His own dinner was free, the others chipping in enough to cover theirs and their share of his. It was not a big group as such things went—only a dozen diners and himself. Yet he was glad of it, and glad to find that he could remember the names of most of the people there.

At one point in the dinner, when most of them were through with their entrees and the waiters were waiting for the rest to finish so they could serve dessert, a woman who might have been Lara walked down the hallway outside their private dining room. It was as great temptation to say something or call out, but he did not. Later, when he excused himself to go to the bathroom, he kept his eyes open; but he did not look into the other private rooms, and he saw nothing.

The next day was his first real one back at work. He had been transferred out of Personal Computers—because personal computer sales were slacking off—back into Furniture and Major Appliances. He was a little frightened until he dealt with his first customer, but she bought a sofa and a coffee table, and after that he was all right.

Bud van Tilburg was head of Furniture and Major Appliances, and thus his boss, whom he called Mr. van Tilburg and at whom he always smiled. It was not until several weeks had passed that he connected his transfer with Mr. van Tilburg’s friendship with Mr. Drummond. Then he marched into Mr. van Tilburg’s office and asked man-to-man if he was pulling his weight. Mr. van Tilburg punched up the figures for everybody in the whole department and showed him that he had outsold them all, had outsold the runner-up by well over a thousand dollars. “Getting you was the best break I’ve had in the past two years,” Mr. van Tilburg said.

After that he tried even harder. When he had been in the department before, it had never occurred to him that you could learn about furniture just like you learned about computers and video games.

Yet it was so. There were various fabrics and stuffings, for example; and finishes and methods of construction. Not to mention the innumerable styles: Chippendale, Queen Anne, Early American, Traditional, Jacobean, Italian Renaissance and Italian Decadent, Henry IV, Louis XIII, and French Renaissance—on and on. He learned them all, checking books out of the library so he could study the pictures and memorize what the experts said about each. He learned to tell red oak from white, white oak from maple, maple from walnut, walnut from pecan, pecan from teak, and at last false rosewood from real Brazilian rosewood.

There came a day when he realized as he walked home that he had sold something to every customer to whom he had spoken. It gave him a glow that lasted until he went to bed that night, and of which some trace remained even while he fixed his coffee and ate his sweet-roll the next morning.

He had to cross the park to reach his new apartment, but as far as he was concerned there were only two seasons—spring, during which the department carried lawn and patio furniture, and of course Christmas. Sometimes there were jonquils in the park, and sometimes there were chrysanthemums. Sometimes there was snow—no one ever seemed to shovel the park paths—and he wore the high, fleece-lined boots he had bought at discount in Men’s & Women’s Shoes and carried his working shoes in a brown paper bag.

Thus three Christmases came (in October) and went (in early December). One day in February he spoke for nearly an hour to a fat man of sixty or so who seemed to be interested in bookcases. The fat man left without buying anything, and as soon as he was gone Bridget Boyd came hurrying over from Small Appliances. “Do you know who that was?”

He shook his head.

“That was H. Harris Henry himself!” She sensed his lack of comprehension. “Our president, the honcho of the whole company. You must be in the stock plan.”

He nodded.

“Then you get the annual report. Don’t you even look at the pictures? You’d better start.”

He decided he would not start; he had never felt the least inclination to read the thing, and now it was clearly too late. “You could have told me,” he said.

“How could I? You were with him.” She nibbled her lower lip. “If we ate our lunches together, I could fill you in on the Corporate Structure.”

She pronounced it like that, with capitals, and he turned away.

A week later, an order came transferring him to Antiques in the uptown store. The new job carried a healthy raise but meant he had to ride a bus for twenty minutes, morning and night. In addition, he usually had to spend another twenty minutes waiting for a bus to come. The wait at the bus stop was miserably cold until April, and the buses were unbearably hot from June through August and most of September.

He liked the job, though he had immediately spotted several pieces on the floor as rank forgeries. When his customers asked about those he simply read the description on the tag, prefacing the reading with, “Well, it says.” If he liked the customer, he might also shake his head slightly. Since the items in question were large and showy, they generally sold well enough even with his negative endorsement.

There was one particular piece he wanted himself, a small desk of unimpeachable pedigree that had begun its career nearly two hundred years ago in the service of a British sea captain. As well as he could judge, it had been built in India of native sandalwood, using milk-glass drawer pulls salvaged from a still earlier piece. Three of the drawers retained their original green-baize linings; and when he had nothing better to do, he liked to examine them, always feeling when he opened them he was going to find something in them that he had never found before, sometimes actually bending down to sniff the faded cloth. The old captain had kept his tobacco in the upper left drawer, he thought; the other odors were fleeting and deceptive —so much so that he was never certain he was not imagining them.

One night he dreamed he was actually sitting at that desk. The floor moved beneath him, gently rocking, rising and falling with a motion he saw echoed ever so faintly in the well of black ink into which he dipped a feather pen. “My Dearest Heart,” he wrote. “My good friend Captain Clough, of the China Doll, has promised to post this in England. She is a clipper, and so …”

There was a hail, and hurrying feet drumming the deck over his head. He sat up, and in a second or two he was laughing at himself, though there was something within him—some part that was still the old captain—that was not laughing.

The next day an ugly middle-aged woman made him show her the desk. “The chair’s missing,” he said. “It really ought to have the chair.”

“That’s all right,” she told him. “I can get one made for it. It’s simple enough.”

He told her the price, trying to sound as though he thought it too high.

“Not bad,” she said, poking and prying.

He lowered his voice. “They should take off three hundred in January.”

The woman smiled, the smile of a cat that feels a bird in its claws. “Fine, have them send me a check.”

When he had written the order and turned it in, he glanced up at the clock. The woman had used a store charge, and for a moment he dared to hope that the sale would not be approved.

It was ten till six, ten minutes until quitting time. Next week—only next week—the store would stay open till ten, and on alternate weeks he would have to come in at two and remain until ten. There would be temporaries who could not make change, and temporaries who had taken their jobs to steal. Not too many of either on his floor, thank God.

The first warning chime sounded.

At the second, he strolled into the Employees’ Lounge to get some coffee. The windows were dark. He walked across to them, surprised that it had gotten dark so soon. They had gone off Daylight Savings, of course. He had forgotten.

People had been talking for weeks about what a beautiful fall they were having, about Indian Summer. It seemed to him, looking through the dark glass at the bent, hurrying figures on the sidewalk, that winter had arrived at last, and that it was likely to be a hard winter. He had a heavier coat, a long wool coat of a gray so deep it was almost black, put away somewhere. He reminded himself to get it out.