There Are Doors

North

He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head once again; this time he was trying to sleep. The ward, or wing, or whatever the hell it was, slept already. Occasionally he heard the soft footsteps of the rubber-shod nurses; even more rarely, the shuffle of a patient’s thin slippers. He was thinking about the world.

Not the world in which he now found himself, but the real world, the normal world.

There, Chinese-Americans spoke ordinary English and became nuclear physicists; the girls on floats did not invite men into their floats. In the real world, he thought, alcoholics did not get private rooms. Probably.

Most significant of all, in the real world streetcars had been done away with long, long ago, their very tracks entombed in layer upon layer of asphalt. True, it hadn’t made sense to do away with them. They had been cheap, energy efficient, and nonpolluting. Yet they had been done away with, and a hundred harmful gadgets had been allowed to stay—that was the way you knew it was the normal world.

A trolley car was going past the hospital now. He heard the faint clang of its bell, and he knew that should he go to the window he would see its single headlight, shining golden through the falling snow.

The room had no door, and some feeble illumination entered from the softly night-lit hallway outside. Its sudden darkening made him sit up in bed.

A man was standing there. For a moment he thought the man was Walsh. But Walsh had been smoothly bald; this silhouetted man, although not much taller, had a luxuriant head of tousled hair.

“You’re awake,” the man whispered.

“Yes,” he said.

“I wanted to tell you—we have a kind of bush telegraph. Each one tells one. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“That way, whatever one knows, we all know. It’s the way we stay alive here. That Gloria Brooks, she did it to Bailey tonight. Billy North went to Al’s room to bum a smoke, and he caught her at it. Each one tells one.”

He nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell somebody. Who should I tell?”

“I saw you talking to Eddie.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him. Where is he?”

“Down the hall to the first turn, then two or three doors down.”

“Okay,” he said again. By the time he sat up the man was gone.

As he told himself, he had not been sleepy anyway, and he had been getting more and more depressed. A dozen times he had reached for the telephone; a dozen times he had pulled back his hand, telling himself that he would wake up Lara, that she would be angry with him; he knew that the truth was that he was afraid she would not be there, that there would be no one there, no one in the apartment at all. That there had never been anybody in the apartment but himself.

His chart said alcoholism. He remembered drinking a lot a few times, and he had drunk too much last night with Lara. His mother had said his grandfather had drunk a lot. Before he had died, he had seen a little boy with golden hair—a golden-haired boy no one else had ever seen. Was Lara like that? He tried to recall the golden-haired little boy’s name. Chester? Mortimer? She had said that his grandfather had mentioned it often in the months before he died, but it was gone now, gone utterly; nobody else had ever seen the little boy after his grandfather died.

Had anybody else ever seen Lara? Would anyone else ever see her if he died tonight? He did not intend to die tonight, yet he felt that this night would never end, that the brick-red trolleys would run on through the dark and the snow forever and ever.

Faint lights burned yellow-green in the hall. Chartreuse, he said to himself, and wondered if he were indeed an alcoholic, if naming colors for drinks was not some sign of his alcoholism, a vice he concealed even from himself. They had—once—had him in some kind of program at the store, hadn’t they? Had it been an alcoholism treatment program?

“Down the hall to the first turn, then two or three doors down.”

But was it two? Or three? He decided to try two first, and discovered that it was in fact no doors down, that all the rooms were as doorless as his own. Brass numbers on the wall beside each doorway told him that the second was 86E. A brass track below the number should have held a slip of paper with the occupant’s name. It was empty, though he could hear the soft sighing of the occupant’s breath within.

Briefly he considered the possibility that the occupant of the room was a homicidal maniac. This was some kind of mental hospital, after all. Walsh had said it was the good wing; that sounded encouraging.

He had not realized how dim the room would seem after the lights of the hall. The window looked out on a new scene, much darker than the busy street outside his own. He decided it was probably a park—a park full of large trees whose tops were as high as the windows on this floor, whatever floor this might be. The breathing of the occupant was as regular as the slow tick of a grandfather’s clock.

“Walsh?” he whispered. “Eddie?”

The occupant stirred in his sleep. “Yes, Mama?”

It was not a propitious beginning.

“Eddie, is that you?”

As though at the flick of a switch, the occupant was awake and sitting up. “Who are you?”

He gave his name and, idiotically, tried to touch the other man’s head.

At once his wrist was caught in a grip of steel. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” he said desperately.

“You know!”

“I fell. I got onto a float with this skater, and when I was coming out I slipped on her ice.”

The grip relaxed ever so slightly. “You didn’t make it with her.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No.”

“That’s why, then. It’s a trick that they use to put more pressure on the rest, see? If you start and then you think my God, I’m going to die, and you back out, they say you’re crazy. Same thing happened to me.”

He said, “My chart says alcoholism.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Would you please let go of my hand?”

“No. And if you don’t keep the other one to yourself, I’ll take it too.”

He groped for a way to prolong the conversation; it seemed dangerous to let it lapse. “I don’t think alcoholism’s lucky.”

“Could have been acute manic schizophrenia. How’d you like that? Know what the stuff they do to you for acute manic schiz does to you? Do you?”

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

“Drives you crazy. Want to read what it says on my chart?”

“Sure, but I’ll have to turn on the light.”

“I’ll tell you. Acute manic schizophrenia. Ask me the President’s name.”

“Okay,” he said. It seemed to him that the room was colder than his own had been; he shivered in his thin hospital pajamas. There was an odor like almond blossoms.

“Go on, ask! ‘Who is the President of the United States?”’

Obediently he said, “Who’s President of the United States?”

“Richard Milhous Nixon!”

“Now how about letting go of my wrist?”

“You admit, you concede, that Richard Milhous Nixon is our President?”

He hesitated, fearful of some trap. “Well, they still call him President Nixon on the news.”

There was a long silence, a stillness that throbbed with the blood in his ears.

“He isn’t President any more?” the occupant of the room whispered. “But he was?”

“He was, sure. He resigned.”

“For the good of the nation, right? That would be just like him—give it up if he had to for the good of the nation. He was a patriot. A real patriot.”

He said diplomatically, “I suppose he still is. He’s still alive, I think.”

There was another long silence while the occupant digested this fact. He heard someone walk past, shuffling down the hall, passing the doorless doorway; he wondered if he should yell for help, but he did not even turn his head to look.

At last the occupant said, “Why didn’t you give it to that skater?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me!” The grip on his wrist tightened again.

“It just didn’t seem right. I’ve got a—” he groped for a word. “Somebody I care a lot about.”

“Girlfriend or boyfriend?”

“My girlfriend; I’m not gay. Lara. I’m looking for her.” Unable to help himself, he added, “She was gone this morning when I woke up.”

The occupant grunted. “And you know about the President. Tell me something—how about yesterday morning? Was she there when you woke up then?”

“Sure,” he said. “We had breakfast together, then I went to work and Lara went to look for a job.”

“You were shacking up.”

That was an old term, and it struck him that the occupant was older than he had thought, ten years older than he was at least. He said carefully, “We’ve been living together for the past few days. With no job, Lara couldn’t pay her rent.” The memory of his message, which had been driven from his mind by the occupant’s grip on his wrist and all the talk about Nixon, returned. He said, “I was supposed to tell somebody that Gloria Brooks did it to Al Bailey tonight. Billy North went into Al’s room to borrow a cigarette, and he caught her at it.”

The palm of the occupant’s hand slapped his right cheek with a forehand, twisting his head so far that the returning backhand struck him across the lips.

“My name’s William T. North,” the occupant told him softly. “You refer to me as Mr. William T. North or Mr. North. Get it?”

He jabbed for North’s face with his free hand, and though he could not get much weight behind the punch, he felt North’s nose give under his knuckles in a satisfactory way.

“Say, that was all right.” North’s voice was so calm they might have been discussing the weather. “I’d break your neck for you, but they’d put me in the violent ward. I’ve been there, and it’s no fun. Besides, I’ve got a little thing cooking. You want out of here?”

“Not without my clothes.”

“Right. Absolutely right. In hospital rags they’d spot us in half a minute, just in time to keep us from freezing to death. But if you could take your clothes?”

“Hell, yes.”

“Can you drive?”

“Sure,” he said. It had been a long time—he was not sure just how long—since he had driven.

“Now I’m going to let go of your wrist. If you don’t want to get out, all you’ve got to do is duck through that door. But if you want to come—well, you’ve got some guts and you’re from C-One. That counts with me.”

There was a delay, almost as if the hand that grasped his wrist were arguing with its owner. Then it loosened, released its grip entirely, and drew away.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Step One: you must learn how to open these lockers. You can practice on mine, using my equipment; but you’re going to have to get your own and open your locker yourself, understand? I’m not going to do it for you.”

“You said I came from C-One,” he said. “What did you mean by that?”

“C-One’s the place we’re trying to get back to—President Nixon, and all that. Now listen. Here’s my pick.”

A small, stiff piece of metal was put into his hand. It had a small bend at one end, a much larger one at the other.

“These lockers have very simple locks. Have you seen one of the keys?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“They’re flat pieces of steel with one jagged side. The notches along that side are just to go around the wards of the lock, get it? When you use a pick, you bypass all the wards. The thing that does the business is the tip of the pick. All you have to do is get the tip of the pick where the tip of the key would be and work it around. Try it.”

It was remarkably easy. He seemed to become the bent wire, encountering the unyielding wards, and then, at the very back of the lock, something like a ward that gave to his pressure.

“That’s copper wire from a wall plug,” North told him. “Find one that’s got nothing plugged into it. There’s a wall plate held by a little screw; you can unscrew it with any piece of thin, flat metal. Pull the plate off. The plug’s held by two long screws. Take them out and pull the plug out. Don’t touch anything metal while you’re doing it, and work with your right hand only. Keep your left stuck in the shirt of your PJs, so you won’t forget and use it—that way a shock can’t go across your heart.”

He nodded, fairly sure he knew what would happen if one did.

“There’ll be two wires on the plug—a red one and a black one. The red one should be live; don’t touch it. The black one should be return. It’ll be insulated, and you touch it only by the insulation. That’s what’s black; the inside’s copper. Pull it out as far back as you can and bend it back and forth until it breaks. Then bend the part next to the plug back and forth the same way. When you’ve got your wire, put the plug back like it was and screw on the wall plate again. Then wipe the floor—there’ll be plaster dust on the floor. Meet me in the rec room after lunch and I’ll tell you the rest.”

“All right,” he said.

When he returned to his own room, he was exhausted and very sleepy. His cheek still hurt where North had slapped him. He rubbed it and discovered that his lower lip had split. A thin trickle of blood had run to his chin without his being aware of it. He groped for the light switch so that he could examine his face in the mirror, but there was no light switch.

He considered opening the wall plug, but he had no piece of metal to turn the screw, and he would not be able to distinguish the red wire from the black one in any case.

Determined at last, he picked up the telephone. Slowly, counting holes in the old-fashioned spinning dial, he entered the number of his apartment.

For a long time the earpiece buzzed and clicked. There was a twitter of bird-like voices, the voices of Japanese children, or of music boxes tuned to speak. At last a man’s deep voice asked, “Kay? Ist dis you, Kay?”

“I’m calling for Lara,” he said. He gave the address. “I think I must have the wrong number.”

The man announced, “Dis ist Chief of Department Klamm, Herr Kay,” and he slammed down the receiver.