There Are Doors

The Store

He had forgotten how new the store looked, how shiny everything was. The walls were faced with limestone, and the company had them sandblasted every other year. The curving show windows had bright brass frames. Maintenance washed all those windows every morning and polished the frames until they sparkled like gold.

“It’s not open,” a fat woman told him. She was standing in front of one of the windows eyeing a sundress.

“I work here,” he said, and hoped he still did. The store would open at nine-thirty sharp, but main-shift hourly employees were supposed to clock in by eight-thirty. It was three minutes after eight. He went around back and climbed the concrete steps to the employees’ entrance, where Whitey watched to make sure no one punched in for someone else.

“Hi,” Whitey said. “Have a nice vacation?”

He nodded. “Seems like I’ve only been gone for a couple of days.”

It did, and yet it did not. Nothing had changed except for himself.

He resisted the temptation to have a look at his department and took the elevator to the administrative floor. Lie, or tell the truth? Tell them the truth, he decided; he was a bad liar, and he could not think of a story that would explain such a long absence anyway.

The next question was: Mr. Capper or Personnel? Capper was (or he had been) in charge of the department; with Capper on his side, Personnel would not be too rough with him. On the other hand, if Cap was mad—and there was a good chance of that—the personnel manager would resent his not having gone there first, and would probably kill any chance of transferring.

Besides, Personnel was easy to find. Cap might be in the office doing paperwork, but might just as easily be out in the department helping stock. Cap might not even be in yet.

Ella was at her desk doing her nails. She said, “Well … hello!”

There were folding steel chairs for job applicants. He sat in the one nearest her desk. “I’m back,” he said.

“I see.” Ella hesitated. “Mr. Drummond’s not in yet.”

“I’ll wait.”

“I carried you sick for a week.” Although they were alone, Ella lowered her voice. “Then he made me start phoning. Once he even went to your apartment at night and rang your bell, but he said nobody answered.”

“I was away. I got back to my apartment yesterday, and I could see I hadn’t been there. Everything was dusty, you know?”

“You blacked out?”

“I don’t think so. I can remember two nights, one when I was in a hospital and one—no, two—when I was in a hotel room.” Not knowing what else to say, he added, “It was the same room.”

Ella leaned toward him and held out her hand for his. He noticed then how much she looked like Fanny, though perhaps he was just forgetting what Fanny looked like. Ella said, “You’ve been gone over a month.”

He nodded. “I think so.”

Unconsciously he had extended his own hand, and when Ella touched it she felt his bandage. “What in the world happened to you? Your face too—you’ve got a burn on your cheek and one on your forehead.”

“They’ve gone away, pretty much,” he said. “They weren’t very bad.”

“Were you in an accident? What happened?”

He nodded again. “I was in this Chinese shop—Mr. Sheng’s. He had fireworks stored in his basement, and something set them off. I think it was a guy named Bill North. Anyway, North was down there, and he’s a cigar smoker.” Though he felt it might be against his best interests, he grinned. “I was drinking tea with Mr. Sheng and his nephew, and a skyrocket came right up the stairs. It hit the wall at the top and came into the room where we were. It scared hell out of us. Then I guess some more must have gone off, because the next thing I knew I was in the street with my ears ringing and a cop and a paramedic bending over me. They said another ambulance had taken Mr. Sheng to the hospital, but—”

Drummond came in, nodded to Ella, raised an eyebrow at him, then smiled.

Ella said, “Good morning, sir.”

Drummond went into the little private office behind Ella’s reception room and shut the door.

Ella whispered, “I want to go in and talk to Dixie just for a minute. You wait here, okay?”

He nodded, studying her as she went into Drummond’s office. She was a little bit heavier than Fanny, he decided. That was an improvement, if anything. And her hair was brown. He felt sure Fanny’s had been black. Of course, no one was or could be like Lara, and he could never mistake any other woman for her. He had known right away that Marcella was really Lara, although Marcella had been a blonde, or at least had appeared to be. You could never tell, he thought, in black-and-white or in pictures drawn by a second-rate artist.

He glanced at his watch. It was eight twenty-eight, but he did not know just when he had come into the Personnel Office; it seemed to him Ella had been in the private office with Drummond a long time.

There was a drinking fountain in the hall outside. He got a drink, filling his mouth with icy water several times and each time making himself swallow it. He had the feeling that he did not always drink enough water, and ought to make himself drink more whenever he got the chance.

When he went back in, Ella was still in the private office with Drummond. He found Time in a pile of magazines on the end table and leafed through it. The President had reaffirmed his commitment to “ordinary Americans” and endorsed a reduction in Social Security benefits; the Near East seemed ready to explode. He wondered if it would help to send the President to the Near East, then tried to remember whether he had ever seen Time or a newspaper There. “There” was, he discovered, his private name for the other world, for the place where Lara was. He could not remember having seen one, although he could not be sure he had not—

Yes, of course, he had seen Walsh’s picture in the paper. This was Here and that was There. He could not remember if the comics had been the same, or whether that paper had carried any comics at all.

The door of the inner office swung open, and Ella came out. She said, “Mr. Drummond will see you now.” He put down Time and went in.

Drummond smiled and said, “Sit down. I’d like to start by admitting that most of this is my fault. I like to keep tabs on all our employees, and I certainly should have kept better tabs on you.”

He sat and found he was facing a large bronze nameplate as well as Drummond. The nameplate read:

He said, “That’s very nice of you, Mr. Drummond. Only it wasn’t your fault, I know that.” He counted silently to three and added, “I really don’t think it was mine either. It just happened.”

Drummond shook his head. “No, I blame myself. I was on the phone with your doctor a moment ago, by the way. She says it’s been a long time since you’ve been to see her.”

He tried to remember whether he had ever been to a doctor. Surely he had, but he could not recall the occasion. Dr. Pille had been his doctor in the hospital, but that was certainly not what Drummond meant. He said, “I guess it has.”

“We want you to see her right away; let me make that clear. Not next week, not tomorrow, not this afternoon—this morning, as soon as you leave my office.”

“I was hoping to get back to my department, sir. There’s a sale, and they need me.”

“And you can,” Drummond told him, “just as soon as you get back from the doctor. Come up here, show me a note saying she’s seen you, and you can get right back to work.”

A great weight lifted from his chest.

“Your doctor will see you as soon as you get to her office—she doesn’t take appointments. There’s no reason you can’t be back at work before lunch.”

He nodded.

“She asked me to ask you whether by any chance you suffered a blow to the head.”

He nodded. “I slipped on some ice and hit my head on the pavement.”

Drummond smiled again. “It could’ve happened to any of us, couldn’t it? That’s all for now. You go over and see her, and don’t forget to bring me the note.”

He rose. “I won’t, sir.”

“One more thing.” Drummond raised a finger. “While you were missing, I had Ella phone your number. She was never able to reach you, but on one occasion she got someone who said his name was Perlman, or some such. Do you know why he was in your apartment?”

He shrugged. “I guess he must have been from the building management company, sir.”

When he was outside in the reception room again, he tried to remember the telephone calls he had made from United. The harsh male voice—had that been Perlman?

Ella asked, “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” he said absently, suppressing the fact that he had to go see some doctor he could not remember. Had there been a doctor’s bill in the mail in his box? Or in all the stuff that he had picked up at the post office? He had not paid a lot of attention to most of it; he could not remember that either.

“Ella, you said you called my apartment?”

She nodded.

“Mr. Drummond mentioned that, too. He said you talked to somebody named Perlman once.”

Ella shook her head. “I never got an answer at all.” She hesitated. “If you’re going to be here in the store about noon, how about letting Personnel buy your lunch? Sort of celebrate your coming back.”

“You didn’t talk to anybody named Perlman?”

“I didn’t talk to anybody,” Ella said. She seemed suddenly depressed, for no reason he could see. “But I was out for a week with my back, and they got a temp. Dixie’s been blaming me for her mistakes ever since, so she was probably the one that talked to Perlman. But if you ask me it was a wrong number.”

There was an employee lounge on the floor below, a bare and frequently dirty room in which associates who brown-bagged ate their lunches. He fed coins into the coffee machine (recalling Joe in the basement of the hospital), found a clean chair, and sat down.

Doctors had to be paid. He got out his checkbook and read through the stubs. He had written no check to any doctor. None at all. Yet doctors were paid, by someone.

By the company’s medical plan, then, very likely; but that was administered by Personnel. If he asked Ella for the number of his doctor, she would tell Drummond. He could not just start telephoning doctors. How many doctors were there in the city? Thousands, probably. He tried to recall what Drummond had said about this one: “Your doctor will see you as soon as you get to his office. He doesn’t take appointments. There’s no reason you can’t be back before lunch.”

No, that was wrong. Not he. It was she. She doesn’t take appointments. The doctor was a woman. There might be thousands of doctors, but how many of those were women?

Fifty, maybe. And he wouldn’t go to a doctor out in the suburbs.

There was a phone in a corner of the room, with a tattered directory on a shelf under it. He opened it to the physicians’ listings and got out his pen.

Some of the doctors had provided only initials; he decided to consider them male for the purpose of his search. At least half the women were gynecologists or pediatricians; they could be eliminated too. He crossed off all those with addresses more than six blocks from the store and his apartment and was pleased to see that only three names remained. Pushing coins into the slot, he got out his wallet and checked the name he and North had chosen in the hotel. A. C. Pine—that was it. He laid the driver’s license on the shelf.

“Dr. Nilson’s office.”

Did this doctor take appointments? He said, “This is Adam Pine. I need an appointment with the doctor as soon as possible—this morning, if you can arrange it.”

“Dr. Nilson—” Faintly someone called, “Lara! Lara!” He could not tell whether the voice was male or female; it sounded far off and scratchy.

“Would you mind if I put you on hold, Mr. Green?”

She did not wait for his answer. Her voice was gone, and after a moment or two had passed, a piano began “Clair de Lune.”

He waited, telling himself he would stand there all day if necessary. “Clair de Lune” ended, and something else began, a piece he did not recognize.

At last a new voice said, “Dr. Nilson speaking.”

“I want to talk to Lara.”

“To Lora? She just left.”

“Then I want an appointment to see you as soon as possible.”

“I don’t take appointments—it’s first come, first served. Come to my office. It’s in the Downtown Mental Health Center, and I’ll fit you in when I can.”

He tried twice before he could get out the words. “I think you’ve treated me before. That you have a file on me.” He gave his name.

Dr. Nilson’s voice became warm. “Oh, of course, Mr. Green. Believe it or not, I was looking over your case the other night and hoping you’d drop in again. It’s been more than a month.”

He started, “If you’ve tried to phone—”

“I never do, except in emergencies. It’s so much better if the patient contacts me because he wants to. Come this morning, won’t you? I’ll see that you get in.”

“Yes.”

“And now, if you’ll excuse me—Lora’s not here, and there’s someone on the other line.”