The Best of Gene Wolfe

“I can’t—I’m too nervous.”

“Well, you could have prepared a better lunch than this.”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.” She was suddenly angry, and it struck him, as he looked at her, that she was a stranger, that he knew Fields and Miss Fawn and even Mr. Freeling better than he knew her.

“The morning’s over,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t give it back to you, but I can’t; what I did—that was nothing too.”

“Please,” she said, “won’t you go? Having you here makes me so nervous.”

He said, “Try and find something to do.”

“All right.”

He wiped his mouth on the paper she had given him and took a step toward the parlor; to his surprise she walked with him, not detaining him, but seeming to savor his company now that she had deprived herself of it. “Do you remember when we woke up?” she said. “You didn’t know at first that you were supposed to dress yourself.”

“I’m still not sure of it.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he said, and he knew that he did, but that she did not.

 T

he signs said: NO TURN, and Forlesen wondered if he was really compelled to obey them, if the man in the blue car would come after him if he did not go back to Model Pattern Products. He suspected that the man would, but that nothing he could do would be worse than M.P.P. itself. In front of the dog-food factory a shapeless brown object fluttered in the road, animated by the turbulence of each car that passed and seeming to attack it, throwing itself with desperate, toothless courage at the singing, invulnerable tires. He had almost run over it before he realized what it was—Abraham Beale’s hat.

The parking lot was more rutted than he had remembered; he drove slowly and carefully. The outbuilding had been torn down, and another car, startlingly shiny (Forlesen did not believe his own had ever been that well polished, not even when he had first looked out the window at it), had his old place; he was forced to take another, farther from the plant. Several other people, he noticed, seemed to have gone home for lunch as he had—some he knew, having shared meeting rooms with them. He had never punched out on the beige clock, and did not punch in.

There was a boy seated at his desk, piling new schoolbooks on it from a cardboard box on the floor. Forlesen said hello, and the boy said that his name was George Howe, and that he worked in Mr. Forlesen’s section.

Forlesen nodded, feeling that he understood. “Miss Fawn showed you to your desk?”

The boy shook his head in bewilderment. “A lady named Mrs. Frost—she said she was Mr. Freeling’s secretary; she had glasses.”

“And a sharp nose.”

George Howe nodded.

Forlesen nodded in reply, and made his way to Fields’s old office. As he had expected, Fields was gone, and most of the items from his own desk had made their way to Fields’s—he wondered if Fields’s desk sometimes talked too, but before he could ask it Miss Fawn came in.

She wore two new rings and touched her hair often with her left hand to show them. Forlesen tried to imagine her pregnant or giving suck and found that he could not, but knew that this was a weakness in himself and not in her. “Ready for orientation?” Miss Fawn asked.

Forlesen ignored the question and asked what had happened to Fields.

“He passed on,” Miss Fawn said.

“You mean he died? He seemed too young for it; not much older than I am myself—certainly not as old as Mr. Freeling.”

“He was stout,” Miss Fawn said with a touch of righteous disdain. “He didn’t get much exercise and he smoked a great deal.”

“He worked very hard,” Forlesen said. “I don’t think he could have had much energy left for exercise.”

“I suppose not,” Miss Fawn conceded. She was leaning against the door, her left hand toying with the gold pencil she wore on a chain, and seemed to be signaling by her attitude that they were old friends, entitled to relax occasionally from the formality of business. “There was a thing—at one time—between Mr. Fields and myself. I don’t suppose you ever knew it.”

“No, I didn’t,” Forlesen said, and Miss Fawn looked pleased.

“Eddie and I—I called him Eddie, privately—were quite discreet. Or so I flatter myself now. I don’t mean, of course, that there was ever anything improper between us.”

“Naturally not.”

“A look and a few words. Elmer knows; I told him everything. You are ready to give that orientation, aren’t you?”

“I think I am now,” Forlesen said. “George Howe?”

Miss Fawn looked at a piece of paper. “No, Gordie Hilbert.”

As she was leaving, Forlesen asked impulsively where Fields was.

“Where he is buried, you mean? Right behind you.”

He looked at her blankly.