There Are Doors

Freedom

“All right,” the new nurse said loudly, “I want you to divide into two teams.” She plowed through them like a white hospital ship through a sullen sea, pushing patients and staff to left and right. He found himself in the group on the right, with North standing beside him.

“Now I’m going to appoint two captains,” the new nurse announced. “Dr. Pille, will you be one?”

The man who nodded was a slender, smiling Oriental.

“And you, Mr. Walsh. You be the other.”

“Sure!” Walsh called. “Come ’ere, ya tigers! Listen up.”

“You must each appoint a wizard.”

“Ya,” Walsh said, and touched him on the shoulder. “Ya my wizard.”

He asked what a wizard had to do.

“Put the whammy on the enemy. I’ll be out there leading the troops. Ya got magic powers I just invested ya with, kid.” Someone handed Walsh a red bat of soft plastic and a plumed red plastic helmet. “Thanks,” Walsh said.

“I’m not magic.”

“Not before, maybe, but ya are now. Lookit their guy, he’s working already. Ya gotta beat his spells, so get busy.” Walsh turned away. “I got three staff. Staff’s all cavalry, got it? Cohn, ya cavalry too! Cavalry, go get ya ’orses.”

The “’orses” were bright red and blue plastic tricycles. In the center of the floor, a couple of patients armed with plastic garbage-can lids and huge, soft plastic mallets were already flailing away at each other. Between them was a gaily colored plastic beachball, presumably the moopsball.

It was probably good therapy, he decided. How could you stay mad at a nurse or a doctor you’d just banged on the head with a plastic mallet? Nevertheless, he didn’t want to play. He yawned.

As if picked out by a spotlight, he saw the face of the blue wizard, the man Walsh had pointed out to him. It was a thin and even skeletal face, on a head that appeared to have been shaved. Its owner stood motionless in the midst of the hubbub, smiling a little, arms extended, eyes fixed upon him.

My God, he thought, it’s working! He began to dance as he had seen Indians dance in movies, stamping his feet, pumping his arms, patting his mouth as he yelled.

“Woo, woo, woo! Pawnee gitchya! Scalp ’um white man!” After a moment or two, he noticed that several members of the blue team had stopped playing to stare at him.

“Pretty soon they’ll put the captain of the winning team up on their shoulders and march him all around. Go to your room as fast as you can and get your street clothes on. Come to Door C. It’ll be open, and I’ll be right inside.” It was North, fading into the melee as he turned to look.

A red-helmeted mob surged about the wide plastic tube the blues had defended, red cavalry fending off blue players with padded broomhandles. Walsh, conspicuous in the plumed helmet, scored the goal.

The hallway was deserted, and he wondered whether North was ahead of him or behind him. Ahead, most likely. North had seen games before and probably had a better idea of what would happen when.

The roll of bills had slipped almost out of his waistband; it struck him that he had been an idiot to do that Indian dance when the money could have fallen out at every step. But it had not, and the dance had worked. He put the bills into his wallet in front of his real money, three singles, a five, and a twenty from the place North called C-One, the sane and sober reality in which Richard Milhous Nixon had twice been elected President.

There seemed to be no point in bothering with a tie—yet he did, knotting it swiftly but carefully before his dim reflection in the window. As he pulled it tight, he realized that in the depths of his soul he believed the last few days had been only a nightmare, that everything that had taken place since he had met Lara had been a dream, that he must soon wake up and go to work; and if he went to work without his tie, he would have to buy one in Men’s Wear.

North was waiting, dressed in a neat blue suit. “Here’s the keys. She says it’s a chocolate Mink. Middle of the lot.”

The keys shared their chain with a rabbit’s foot. He put the whole affair in his pocket as they clattered down the steps. “Won’t they hear us?”

“They’re still whooping and hollering about the game. The thing is to get out fast before they stop.”

Instead of turning off into the room in which he had drunk coffee with Joe and W.F., they emerged into a snowy parking lot from what was clearly the back of the hospital. The brown car was bigger than he had expected—yet hunched-looking, with its short hood, high trunk, and roomy passenger compartment.

He twisted the key in the ignition, but in vain.

“I thought you said you knew how to drive.”

“It won’t start, that’s all. Won’t even crank.” Prompted by a dim and almost racial memory, he stared down at the pedals. There were three, and a wear-polished steel button to the left of the clutch. He pressed it with his foot; the engine sprang to life.

“That’s better,” North said.

He nodded, wondering about the floor shift. It had been a long time since he had driven a stick, and that had been a short lever on the doghouse of a sports car. This was an ungainly rod topped by a knob of hard, black rubber. He tried out the gears.

“Get moving, damn it!”

“Do you want to get out of here, or do you want to have an accident?” The car rolled smoothly back; he clashed the gears a little shifting into first, but second and third were smooth and firm. “We’re thieves now, I guess,” he said as they turned out of the hospital’s parking lot. “If we don’t get sent back here, we’ll be put in jail.”

Edged into the corner, North grinned at him. “How do you think I got the keys? Or got that door unlocked? I got money too.”

“How much?”

“None of your God-damned business. You got any?”

He said, “Same answer.”

“You know, I kind of like you.” North chuckled. “Which is too bad because I’m going to have to bust your God-damned snotty nose for you someday.”

“I hope it’s not before you’re through having me drive for you. Can’t you drive? You said you could.”

“I’ve been through the FBI’s chauffeur course.”

He asked, “Then why’d you take me with you?”

“Because I felt sorry for you, you jerk.”

He glanced across at North and saw that North was no longer grinning.

A street he did not know unreeled before them; it was wide, with two traffic lanes on each side of two sets of shiny trolley tracks. There were trees, bare and yet snow-laden, between the street and the sidewalk. He thought of the streets he had seen radiating from the intersection outside the mental health center. This was one of them, he felt certain. But which? It seemed to him that though all had run straight, none had run in a definable direction—neither north nor south, east nor west. And yet this street had surely run to North.

“Stop up there,” North told him, “where it says guns. See the sign?”

“You’re going to get a gun?”

“Stop or I’ll break your God-damned neck.”

North seemed to mean it. He pulled to the curb in front of the gun store and switched off the ignition. North got out, and he sighed with relief as he saw North walk past the show window and go into the haberdashery beside it.

He took out the Tina doll and studied its enigmatic smile for what felt like a long time, then pulled the charm Sheng had given him free of his shirt. It was a root, a dry, hard thing shaped like a tiny wrinkled man no taller than Tina’s forearm.

A passing woman glanced through the window, and he realized how strange he must have looked to her with the doll in one hand and the charm in the other. She probably thought he was crazy, and if she called the police, she would find out she was right.

Except that even United had not thought him crazy, only an alcoholic. He was—supposedly—a drunk, and North was what? A schizophrenic maniac. Something like that.

He put the charm and the doll away and turned his attention to the passersby. At first they looked ordinary enough, though a little old-fashioned in their dress. He had seen pictures set in the thirties and forties, and he felt that these quiet, dark figures hurrying through the cold were costumed for just such a picture, girls and women and a few men, all in heavy coats that reached nearly to their shoe-tops, the men in wide-brimmed felt hats, the women and girls in head-hugging cloches.

Or that he was somewhere in Eastern Europe, where according to the evening news such clothing was still worn. One young man who passed him had a fur hat, and several women were wearing fur coats. Was there a place in Eastern Europe where they spoke English? A training city, perhaps, for Russian spies? Yet such a city should have been far more accurate. American clothes and American cars were not hard to get.

Three middle-aged women passed, each with an attache case or a briefcase. It occurred to him that he had seen very few older men, and he began to count. He had counted twenty-three women and three men who looked middle-aged when North came out of the gun store.

“All set,” North told him. “Let’s roll.”

“I thought you were in the other place.”

“I was. I got this coat. Like it?”

It was single-breasted, of thick, brown tweed. “Sure,” he said.

“I got to feeling a little chilly. Now I’m fixed.” North unbuttoned the coat and the jacket beneath it, and spread them wide. There was a shoulder holster on each shoulder; the butt of an automatic protruded from each holster. “Nine millimeters. I was afraid they wouldn’t have them, but they did. Okay, let’s get rolling. We’ve got places to go and people to see.”

He shook his head. “Not as long as you’ve got those.”

“You’re afraid of me. I guess that’s only natural. Here.” North dropped one of the pistols into his lap. “Now we’re even. I’ll give you the shoulder rig as soon as we get someplace where I can take off the coats. Let’s roll.”

He shook his head.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve tried—”

He didn’t want to pick up the pistol, but he did. “Here. Take it back. Take them both back to the store. They’ll give you your money.”

North’s right fist crashed into his jaw, driving his head against the window glass. For a moment he saw intense flashes of pale yellow.

“Next time I hit you, it’ll be with the gun, not my hand.”

He tried to open the door, but North caught him by the arm. “You got a gun,” North said. “Go for it.”

He shook his head, trying to clear his vision.

“Go for it! It’s loaded, ready to shoot. Pick it up and try to kill me. I’ll go for mine. One of us wins.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You really are crazy.” He felt the checkered grip of the automatic pushed into his hand; North had it by the barrel, trying to make him take it. Instead he held up both hands as he had seen people hold up their hands in movies, as he had seen suspects hold them up on television. He hoped a passing cop would see them.

North said, “You got no guts. No guts at all. I thought you had some, but I was wrong.”

“If it takes guts to shoot an empty gun at a man with a loaded one, you’re right; I don’t have a bit.”

North jerked back the slide; a cartridge flew out, striking the windshield. North caught it, took out the clip, jammed the cartridge into it, and slammed it back into the butt of the gun. “Want to try again?”

He shook his head and turned on the ignition.

“Then get it in gear.”

As they pulled away from the curb, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“A hotel to start with. I need more clothes, documents, newspapers, a base to work from.” North snapped his fingers. “The Grand! Keep moving, I’ve got to get myself located.”

He wondered—very much—what sort of work was to be carried out from that base. He thought it better not to ask.

The street lost its trolley tracks and became a boulevard flanked by imposing buildings of granite and marble, buildings guarded by snow-draped statues and in one case by a live sentry who might have been a United States Marine in dress blues. At last they were drawn into a traffic circle in which cars, small trucks, double-decked buses, and an occasional bike spun dizzily around a bronze general with a sword and a cocked hat. There was a moment of wild disorientation before he realized that the general, his rearing charger, and his pointing sword were all circling too, that the statue was revolving counterclockwise, like the traffic.

A small green car cut in front of them, and North reached for a gun.

“Easy,” he said, and laid his hand on North’s until the green car was gone.

“By God, I would have rammed the bastard,” North whispered through clenched teeth. “Rammed him!”

“And the police would have got us. Where do I turn off?”

North said nothing, staring straight ahead. Cars, mostly black, wove in and out. A policeman and a policewoman passed them in a black-and-white squad car. The woman glanced at them incuriously before her squad car moved off through the traffic.

His jaw still hurt; he rubbed it with one hand as he drove. “Keep circling,” North told him. “It’s one of these.”