There Are Doors

or wrote a check. But I don’t think either one would be like Joe. He bought me coffee from a machine and got a soft drink for himself, and he took the change out of one of those little coin purses that misers use on TV. I bet he’s had it since he was a kid. I think Joe would pay cash.”

“And not look at his change till later?”

“No, that’s just it. Joe would look at it. He’d count it, too. Probably Jennifer—that’s his wife, the woman in the red dress—takes care of most of the bills, but he wouldn’t want her to pay for a meal in a restaurant. That would embarrass him. So his change was right, in the right sort of money.”

“Then they’d have to know, here in this restaurant. That’s what I said.”

He shook his head. “If he’d known, he wouldn’t have talked to me about Joe. At first you don’t understand what’s happened. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience. What happened to him and this whole place is that they were pulled across, somehow. They went through a door—except they couldn’t have. One door couldn’t take a whole building, could it?”

Fanny laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s this about doors?”

“Lara told me, in a note. When you’ve been around someone from the other world, you see doors. Anything that’s closed on all four sides can be one. It looks significant; that was her word. If you go through, you cross over. But then if you turn around to go back, you don’t go back. It isn’t a door anymore, for you. You have to back out.”

He snapped his fingers, and Fanny said, “What is it now?”

“Why is it a door looks the same on both sides?”

“Do they? Beats me.”

“Because it is. That’s what makes it a door. Shut your eyes. Go on, this is a test.”

She did.

“Now, you’ve eaten here before, and you brought me here. What’s the full, official name of this restaurant?”

She considered for a moment. “There’s a sign outside with brass letters. Trattoria Capini.”

He sighed and said, “All right, now open them again.” He handed her a book of matches that had been lying on the table.

Fanny glanced at the cover. “‘Capini’s Italian Cuisine.’ Okay, it’s not quite the same.”

He put down his fork. “This restaurant—I call it Mama’s—is in my world. It’s the place where I’ve eaten for years. The other one—the Trattoria—is in yours. Maybe the family name’s being the same on both sides is a coincidence. Anyway, the door of the Trattoria is a Door. People from your world who’ve been with people from mine can get into mine by walking through it, like you did when you came in with me, or like Joe and his wife—her name’s Jennifer, I think—did when they came in with Lara. But things sort themselves out after awhile. People are pulled by their own worlds, which is why I’m back in mine now, I think. Money is really just pieces of paper. If it’s from one world it pulls others from the same world. Things move in ways that sort them out.”

Fanny said, “You’re implying that a piece of paper has a brain. I don’t believe you.”

“No, I’m not. Let me tell you about something they showed us in school. They tuned two strings to the same frequency. Do you follow me? Not the way you’d tune a piano, but so they made exactly the same note. Then whenever somebody plucked one, the other would start to shake. Not because it had a brain—it just did.”

“Then both worlds are only frequencies, and nothing’s solid at all.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.

“But I would. Isn’t that how TV’s supposed to work? You tune to a certain channel and get two signals, one for picture, one for sound. The station fudges the frequency of each just a little all the time, and that’s what changes the picture and the noise from the speakers. When you change the frequency in your set a lot, it picks up a new channel, and the show you’ve been watching is gone. There’s a new show, with different people.”

He shook his head.

“Well, I think I’m right.” Fanny signaled the waitress. “Please, could I have more hot water for my tea?”

He wanted to say that although her world might be nothing more than the note of a piano string, his own was real; but he remembered its coins, the false faces and the brassy edges of them, and he felt that it had no more reality than her own, and perhaps less.

Fanny pointed a finger at him. “Now listen to me. Suppose you’d been watching TV for your entire life. Suppose it was the only thing you knew, and there were shows like Sunrise, Sunset, Work, and Shopping; and you were used to them and had never even thought about anything else at all.” She paused. “What do they call that little screen at the back of your eyes?”

He shook his head again. “I don’t know.”

“The retina, that’s it. Well, suppose somebody changed the show there.”

“Are you testing me somehow?”

Fanny grinned. “Nope, just making conversation. You tell me that if we walk out the door backwards, we’ll be in my world. And you want to be there with me, so you can find your Lara—who’s really Laura Nomos. And I think what’s going to happen is that we’re going to back through the door and be on the sidewalk again, and then you’re going to say, ‘See, it worked!’ I may be a sucker, but I’m not that big a sucker.”

“I’m serious,” he said.

“Me, too. And I think I know why your doors work. Suppose two channels show the same thing, but in opposite