There Are Doors

don’t want to do that. So I says I would. Won’t take no pay—I sees all the fights for free, and everybody see me on TV ’cause one channel broadcasts. Sometimes we on the sports on the news, when they don’t have nothin’ else to show. Everybody say, Whoo! Look at ol’ W.F. swing that towel. Besides Joe usually win, and I like that.”

He said, “It’s nice of you to stand by Eddie. Nice of you both.”

For the first time, Joe had raised the bottle to his lips. It was large and flaunted its name—Poxxie—in raised lettering on the glass. Joe poured most of its poisonous-looking scarlet contents down his throat, which he seemed able to open and hold open, like a valve in a pipe. “I couldn’t leave Eddie when he thinks I’m the champion. I don’t want you to tell Eddie I’m not the champion. It upsets him.”

“I won’t.”

Joe belched solemnly. “And if you can help him …”

Moved by he did not know what spirit, he said, “I think the best way to help him might be for you to become champion. Then he’d be well.”

W.F. crowed, “What I say? You one smart dude. Right on!”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“I doubt that any champion thought he could do it before he did it.”

The very slightest of smiles touched Joe’s lips, a smile that could not have been seen at all were it not for the impassivity of the wide cheeks and heavy chin. As if to remove the last droplets of Poxxie, a large dark overcoat sleeve rose and scrubbed at that infinitesimal curve; yet the smile remained.

Without in the least intending to, he yawned.

W.F. said, “Guess I better get you into the bed. You did the job, and you about fagged out, I think.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said. He sipped his coffee, finding that it tasted even worse than it smelled. A moment later, W.F. was tucking a blanket around his shoulders. “You gets chocolate puddin’ every meal,” W.F. said. “Even for breakfasts.”

Lara, Tina, and Marcella

The ringing of the telephone beside his bed woke him. Groggily, he answered it. “Hello?”

A woman’s voice: “Here, Emma, give me that!”

“Lara?” he asked. “Is that you, Lara?”

“Darling, it’s me!” (Surely that was Lara’s voice, Lara composed and gracious.) “I hope—I really do hope—I haven’t roused you from a sound sleep, darling. But I just got back here—you know how it is—and dear, precious Emma had sat up. And there was absolutely nothing for her to do but this, so I said call the damned place and see if they won’t let me talk with him, there’s a darling, and she did and they would. But not till the poor old dear had talked herself positively blue, didn’t you, Emma? While it got later and later and later and later. What time is it there, darling?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

“It’s after one here, and all I’ve done is come home and call you. Except that I had a bath and a drink first.” Lara giggled. “Sounds as though I drank the bath, doesn’t it? No, Emma mixed me a toddy and made it strong enough to knock down a mare. I can say that now, darling, because she’s gone. Did you get my flowers? Are they pretty?”

“Yes,” he said. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”

“They should be, darling—they cost like gold. But I’m immensely glad you like them.”

He decided to come out with it. “You’re Marcella too.”

“You mean besides all those perfectly awful bitches I play? Yes, there’s a real Marcella too—a real Marcella still, though sometimes I have ever so much trouble getting in touch with her. Besides, it’s so much fun being a bitch, though one doesn’t like oneself half so well afterward. But darling, I want you to know it’s horrible, horribly dangerous, my talking with you, knowing you’re in that awful place, because I’m so tempted to be bitchy with you. Why couldn’t you be good? But I’m coming to see you just as soon as I can. Perhaps then we can find a door out for you together.”

There was no good-bye, only the terrible finality of the handset set down in the receiver. He hung up too and put his hands behind his head, as he always did when he had to think. Maybe Lara would call back, as Marcella or somebody else. As Tina? The Tina doll had been modeled on someone, surely—on a real woman who called herself Tina and was actually Lara. Or rather, who was really the woman he knew—who he had known—as Lara.

He stepped from the van onto ice, and his feet flew from under him. He jerked awake.

He had been sleeping, then; sleeping and dreaming. Perhaps even Lara’s call had been a dream. He got up, found the pick he had taken from North’s room, and opened his locker. His clothes were just as he remembered them. The charm Sheng had given him hung from a hook in the locker; the Tina doll was in the breast pocket of his jacket. The badly folded map was in one pocket of his topcoat. He took it out, but the room was too dark for him to read it.

As he replaced it, it met with some obstruction. He pulled it out again and thrust his hand into the pocket. A small box had appeared there—by magic it seemed, by the rankest sorcery. It rattled softly. One questing finger discovered a tiny drawer and pushed it open. There was a second, louder, rattle as small objects fell from the drawer to the floor. Matches, of course.

He squatted, found one, and struck it on the side of the box, producing an impressive flare of sulfurous light. A fat dragon writhed with astounding flexibility upon a paper label, floating upward, as it seemed, to kiss or perhaps to devour a Chinese character of astonishing complexity.

Afraid that a passing nurse might see the light, he blew out the match.

They were Sheng’s matches; he recalled them now. As he and Sheng had gone through the basement of