There Are Doors

Decision

A nurse woke him to ask what he wanted for breakfast. “You lost a couple of teeth,” she told him. “So no toast or anything like that. Do you think you could manage a coddled egg?”

He nodded and sat up in bed. “I’m hungry. Guess I missed dinner last night.”

She grinned. “That would explain it.”

When she was gone, he looked around the room; it was bigger than the one he had occupied at United, much smaller than the open ward in which he had slept with nine other patients in the psychiatric wing of some hospital whose name he could not quite remember. Like his room at United, it held a locker, but this locker was unlocked. His jacket, his trousers, and his overcoat hung inside. His shoes were on the bottom. He recalled that he had not had his overcoat when he had been in the limousine with Klamm. Someone had brought it.

He peeked into the breast pocket of his jacket, and Tina said, “Hello-good morning,” and stretched.

“Good morning.” He held out his hand, and she climbed into it. “Back in the hospital,” he said.

“Were you in the hospital before?”

“Yes, but you were asleep. I’ve been in hospitals a lot.”

The nurse came in with his tray. “Those are against our regulations,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t know.”

“I really should take it and lock it up. But you’re going to be discharged today anyhow, so it’s really not worth all the trouble. Just don’t let anybody else see it.”

“I’ll hide,” Tina promised.

“What would you like to drink? We’ve got coffee, tea, and milk.”

He asked whether he could have both tea and milk, and she nodded and brought them in, managing to get a cup, a little hot-water pot, and the glass of milk all on his tray.

“The tea’s for you,” he told Tina when the nurse had gone. He put the teabag into the pot and sprinkled salt from an old-fashioned glass saltcellar into the cup.

“Goody!”

He held the cup for her while she drank. “You don’t need any food? Just this?”

“This is all,” Tina said. “And this was plenty. Eat your egg so you’ll grow up strong.”

With a napkin to protect his fingers, he unscrewed the top of the white porcelain dish.

“Don’t you have to go to school today?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. There was a soft roll on his tray as well. He tore it in small pieces and mixed the pieces with the egg, adding pepper and the pat of butter. “Somebody’s coming for me, but I don’t think it’s to take me to school.”

“Where are they going to take you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. After a moment he added, “I’m not sure I’ll even go.”

About an hour after the nurse took his tray, she returned with a wheelchair. “I’m afraid you’ve got to ride in this,” she said. “Regulations.”

He looked around for Tina.

“It’s under the sheet. You’ll be back in an hour or so.”

He hesitated, then said, “All right. Where are we going?”

“To see the dentist.”

He stared curiously as she wheeled him to the elevator; the hospital seemed merely a hospital like any other, a little less modern than the ones he recalled seeing on TV. Perhaps they all were.

The dentist was a large woman who gave the impression of disliking him and the nurse equally. “Open wide,” she told him, and when he complied leaned so close it seemed she was trying to thrust her head into his mouth. “One came out clean, and one left a piece of root.” She turned to the nurse. “This will be a local. You can go if you want.”

The nurse shook her head.

The dentist shot something into his gum, after which he and the nurse spent a quarter of an hour in the outer office waiting for it to take effect. “If I’d gone,” the nurse said, “she’d have had you out like a candle.” He nodded, wishing she had; he had never liked having his teeth worked on and saw nothing wrong with being out like a light.

There was a stack of magazines. As he leafed through one, it struck him that he had read almost nothing here. Tina would rebuke him if she knew; thinking of it made him feel guilty, and he studied the magazine with more care. It seemed very similar to those of his own world up until page forty, which showed Lara sitting with a pink drink in a tropical garden. Lara’s hair was gold, her skin bronze. “Marcella Masters relaxes at home before beginning work on Atlantis,” read the caption.

He tore the page out, folded it, and put it in the pocket of his pajama shirt. The nurse seemed scandalized but did not protest. After that he flipped through magazines energetically until the dentist summoned him back to her chair, but he found nothing more.

Fanny was waiting for them when they returned to his room. She showed the nurse her badge and a letter, at which the nurse appeared impressed. “He’s all yours, Sergeant, if you want him.”

Fanny grinned at him. “I do.”

The nurse opened his locker and glanced inside. “I’ll have to get his laundry. It shouldn’t take long.”

“Okay,” Fanny told her. To him she said, “You look pretty damned awful with all that tape on your face.”

He told her he felt all right.

The nurse said, “He’s lost a couple of teeth too, Sergeant. In a week or so he should see a dentist about getting a bridge. In two or three days a doctor should check his nose. You can take him to Dr. Pille’s office or bring him here. Dr. Pille set his nose last night.”

Fanny said, “Okay.”

When the nurse had gone, Fanny said, “You went back to wherever it is you come from, didn’t you? That time in the restaurant.”

He nodded. “I didn’t mean to, but I did, and I couldn’t get back. Well, once I did, but it only lasted a few minutes. Then I found Lara again and followed her—I think she let me—and here I am.”

“I hope you stay here,” Fanny told him. “I’m responsible for you now, and I’ll catch hell if I lose you. Do you have to sit in that thing?”

“No,” he said. He stood to show her, then sat beside her on the bed. That reminded him of Tina; he reached beneath the sheet and pulled her out.

She said, “Hey! They’re not supposed to see me here.”

He told her, “It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving.”

Fanny sighed. “You’ll throw that thing away when you’ve been with me for a week or two.”

He wanted to shake his head, but he did not.

“You don’t die, do you?” Fanny whispered. “They don’t die where you come from. We can do it over and over, as often as we want to.”

Her dark eyes made him uncomfortable, so that this time he did shake his head, thinking of Lara.

The nurse returned with a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She handed it to him, and she and Fanny left his room, shutting the door behind them. He broke the string, unwrapped the bundle, and unfolded his shirt on the bed. The laundry had bleached out the bloodstains, leaving the shirt as white as it had been when it was new. He took Lara’s picture from the pocket of his pajamas and put it into the pocket of the shirt.

Tina asked, “Are we going with that lady?”

“For a while,” he told her.

“I don’t like her,” Tina said.

“I do,” he told her. “But not enough.” He pulled off the pajama top and tossed it onto the bed. “Now turn around and shut your eyes.”

She did, and he untied the cord of his pajama bottoms and let them drop to the floor. When he had buttoned the clean shirt, he permitted her to look again.

“You should have waited till you had your pants on,” Tina lectured him. “Are you going to let those ladies come back in now?”

“I’m wearing jockey shorts,” he explained. “Besides, the shirttail covers me.” He carried his trousers to the window, where the light was better; they were dotted with dried blood, rusty and stiff. “I wish they’d sent these to the cleaner,” he said.

His wallet was in the hip pocket, still holding money that would be useless here. Bills that could buy things were in the double pocket of the overcoat, though his gloves seemed to have fallen out; the map was in the other pocket. He put the scarlet thread that held Mr. Sheng’s charm about his neck and thrust the charm inside his undershirt, then knotted his blood-smeared tie as neatly as if he were going to work at the store. When he was fully dressed and Tina had been stowed in his jacket pocket and cautioned to keep quiet, he opened the door.

“I’m afraid you have to ride in my chair again,” the nurse told him. “We can’t let you walk until a doctor says you can walk.”

He sat down obediently, and she pushed him as before, this time with Fanny walking beside them. Fanny signed him out at the main desk. “You won’t need your coat,” she told him. “It’s beautiful outside.” He folded the coat over his arm.

She was right. A spring breeze stroked his cheek as soon as they had left the hospital smells behind them. Jonquils in stone tubs waved to them from both sides of the walk leading to the street.

“You’re not too steady on your pins, are you?”

He was holding on to the rail as he went down the steps. “I’m fine,” he said.

“We can take a cab. They gave me expense money.”

“I can walk.” He was looking up and down the street; it was hauntingly familiar. “And I think we’ll have to. Do you see any cabs?”

Fanny shook her head.

“You didn’t bring your car?”

“No,” she said. They had started down the street. “You’re thinking of that time I was at the Grand, but that wasn’t really my car.”

“How did you get to the hospital?”

“On the trolley,” Fanny said.

“Then we can ride the trolley back. Is there a stop around here?”

“A stop?”

“Where the trolley stops and you get on.”

Fanny shook her head again, making her tight black curls bounce in the sunshine. “Is that how you do it where you come from? Here we just flag them down. What are you staring at?”

It was a shop window, the window of a narrow little store that sold sheet music. The song displayed there, open upon a gilded music stand, was “Find Your True Love.” It had been in the window so long that its dusty paper had turned yellow.

“There’s a cab,” Fanny said, and called, “Taxi!”

He looked down the street for the doll hospital. Its sign hung there, displaying a picture of a doll dressed like a nurse.

“The cab’s stopping.” Fanny tugged his sleeve. “Come on.”

He nodded and turned to follow, feeling more lost than he ever had since he had run down Mr. Sheng’s alley. Fanny opened the door for him, and he said, “Thank you,” and got in.

“Where to, sir?” The driver was a man, a bit younger than he was and surprisingly clean. Fanny was walking around the rear of the cab. He considered the matter.

“Where are you and the lady going, sir?”

Casually, he reached across the seat and depressed the lock button. “To the railway station,” he said, rolling up the window. “But she’s not coming.”

“Like that, huh?” The driver grinned as he put the cab in gear.

“Yes,” he said. “Like that.” He turned to look at Fanny, left standing in the street. He felt that she should have drawn her gun or at least shaken her fist at them. She did neither, and there was something achingly forlorn about her small, dark figure.

“We’re out of that hospital, aren’t we?” It was Tina, thrusting her head past the lapel of his jacket.

“Yes,” he told her.

“Where are we going?”

“To Manea.” He spoke softly, so that the driver would not overhear him; the driver might be questioned by the police.

“Lovely country, they tell me,” the driver remarked. “Close to Overwood.”

“I didn’t think that you heard me,” he said. “Yes, I know it must be.”

They passed a fountain, and its splashing recalled Klamm—the tears in Klamm’s eyes. Klamm had followed the letter of the law; but suddenly he knew that no one would question the driver or pursue them. Fanny might be reprimanded; but there would be no investigation, no all-points bulletin.

Not far away the whistle of a steam locomotive blew, echoing and re-echoing among the surrounding buildings. He smiled. It blew again, singing of lovers’ meetings in distant places.

Tina looked out from her vantage point beside his necktie. “Whooee!” Tina said. “A-whooee, a-whooee!”