The Way Through Doors (24 page)

—Oh, my God, said the pamphleteer. I totally forgot about the goat.

—Do you mean to say, asked Sif, that you didn’t put the goat in?

—Not yet, said the pamphleteer. But there’s still time. That was the goat that could do puzzles, right?

—Yes, said Sif. I believe it could also crochet.

A woman came into the room. She was very tall and wearing a long leather apron. At her side was a large cleaver, hanging from a loop on the apron.

—Hello, she said. You pay first. One hundred dollars each.

—A hundred dollars? said the pamphleteer to Sif. Really?

—Yes, she said. This is a nice place.

Sif untied a scarf that was wrapped tightly about the smooth upper reaches of her arm and took two hundred dollars out.

—You can pay next time, she said.

The woman accepted the two hundred dollars and tucked it behind her ear. She unhooked the cleaver, raised it up in the air, made a loud shouting noise, and slammed it down into the center of the table.

The pamphleteer and Sif leaped back in their chairs. The cleaver had sunk at least two inches into the tabletop. Now they noticed that upon the tabletop there were many such marks.

—The meal begins, said the woman in a quiet voice that had only ever been used just after slamming cleavers into wooden tables.

She left the room and returned a moment later with a beautiful bottle of wine.

—Chez Margot, she said, and poured them each a glass.

The pamphleteer tasted it.

—Lovely, he said. Just lovely.

The woman disappeared again and returned, this time with figs that had been stuffed with goat cheese and baked while wrapped in thin strips of moist lamb.

—Not bad, said Sif.

She took a bite and leaned back in her chair with a happy, distracted look on her face.

—Did you hear the latest bit of that business with Mora Klein? she asked the pamphleteer.

—No, he said. Who’s Mora Klein?

—The artist, Sif said. You know, she does that drawing, like this.

—I think I’ve seen that before, said the pamphleteer.

—Yes, well, anyway, said Sif. It turns out that children who are shown this drawing at an early age, and forced to look at it for long periods of time, say by having it on the walls of a nursery, have had their brains develop differently in such a way that they are able, at the age of five or six, to do complicated math and logic problems in their heads. The only strange thing is that they can’t explain how they know the answers; they just know them. Somehow the relationships between numbers make more sense to these children than they do even to the best mathematicians. Scientists who have studied the drawing say that it has to do with the precise angles involved. Facsimiles and copies of Mora’s drawing are not similar enough to the originals to achieve this effect. Only the originals accomplish it. Thus parents have begun to bring their children every day to the Metropolitan Museum to stare at the drawings for a while. The place has been mobbed. There’s been talk of creating a special viewing room. The price of her drawings has shot through the roof. They were already expensive. Now they simply can’t be bought unless you have more money than a bank.

—Good Lord, said the pamphleteer. What does she have to say about it?

—She won’t talk to the press. She lives now somewhere downtown in New York City and tries to have an ordinary life, but it’s difficult. Apparently international aid organizations are contacting her, trying to get her to start producing her drawings again, this time for charity.

—So, said the pamphleteer, the kids who were looking at these drawings while they were growing up can just take numbers and combine them in crazy ways?

—Yes, said Sif. Although, it doesn’t seem like it will be useful to our mathematics. The kids don’t seem very interested in math. They all think it’s too easy. None of them want to go into it because they don’t understand the way we do math in the first place. They started in a different way, and the ways can’t be combined.

The woman arrived again in the room, this time with a clay case in which had been baked an entire lamb.

—This is koucha, said Sif, getting her fork and knife ready.

The woman returned a moment later with couscous, a little cake, something that looked like ratatouille, and a soup.

—That’s chakchouka, bouza, brik, and chorba, said Sif, who was obviously very pleased with herself.

The woman, who now lingered at the room’s edge, also seemed pleased at Sif’s knowledge of Tunisian cuisine.

—Anyway, said Sif, we were talking on the balcony, the first time we met, and then we left together and went to a different party, the one on the rented subway car.

—That one, said the pamphleteer. That one I do remember. We rode on the roof when it went over the Williamsburg Bridge.

—Yeah, that was fun, said Sif. But we got awfully dirty. They don’t clean the roofs really enough, at least not enough to make it a clean business to ride on top of the subway cars. Anyway, I told you that I wanted to show you my place. We got off somewhere and took a taxi. After a while we got back to my place. We had just gotten through the door, and then you said to me:

—Let’s pretend that we’ve never met before. I just invented a criminal organization that can have two members. I think you should join it. I’ll go back outside, knock twice, then four times, then once. That’ll be the signal for you to whistle. You whistle once. Then I’ll knock once. Then you let me in. I’ll come in, and pretend that we have never kissed before. I’ll touch your face with my hand and run my finger along your cheek. Then you kiss me. Then we talk about what crime we are going to pull off.

—All right, said the then-Sif.

And so you went back out the door. I shut it after you and waited. After about five minutes you knocked twice. I waited. You knocked four times. I waited. You knocked once. I tried to whistle, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t; I don’t know why. So I ran to the stove and I put just a small amount of water on to boil. I’m sure you were waiting in the hall, wondering what was going on. Anyway, finally, the water began to boil. I was jumping out of my skin waiting for it. It let out this shrill, shrill whistle. You knocked once more, and I threw open the door.

Then you came in, looking at me in this funny, I-have-never-seen-you-before sort of way. I smiled. You reached out and touched my face, and then I came closer to you. I came closer and then closer still and started to kiss you. Your hands moved around me, and I felt bathed in the odd sort of light that I had always hoped would accompany my life. Afterwards we lay out on the roof on blankets and talked of what crimes we would commit.

—I think, said the pamphleteer, that you’re thinking of a different guy. I’m not that clever.

—I know who I’m thinking of, said Sif, taking a sip of her wine.

A little turtle had come into the room. It rubbed up against the pamphleteer’s leg. Somehow there was no longer anything on the table. It had happened, as it sometimes does in good restaurants, that the waiter was able to remove everything from the table without anyone noticing. The pamphleteer lifted the turtle up onto the table. There was a note tied to its leg. He took the note and opened it. The note said,

Without pause then, the municipal inspector returned to the Seventh Ministry. The streets were loud with winter, that is, loud with the winter sort of quiet that the snow brings. Amidst it, the municipal inspector hurried. He wore over his customary gray-blue suit an overcoat as well as gloves and the sort of hat that a fighter pilot would wear when not in his plane.

He crossed the small park that adjoined the Seventh Ministry. No one had shoveled the walkway.

He said to himself then, Either no one is there, which has never happened, or all this snow has fallen since they arrived. Or, he added, they arrived by a different route.

He opened the door and entered. Rita was sitting behind her desk wearing a strapless thin wool dress with a pair of wool mittens tied together and thrown over her shoulder, one in front, one behind. Her hair was up in a French braid, and she was in the midst of writing out a message.

—You! she said. You were supposed to meet me yesterday for tea at the Covenant Café in the old subway station. What happened?

—I’m sorry, said Selah. I was imprisoned in a Victorian house by a cruel man named Patrick and his crueler wife, a woman named Caroline.

—I don’t believe that at all, said Rita the message-girl. If so, how did you get out?

—I don’t remember, said Selah. The circumstances are unclear.

—Ah, said Rita. What if I were to say, The circumstances are unclear; I don’t know what happened to your messages? What if I was to say, the circumstances are unclear, I don’t know what happened to the person who is upstairs waiting in your office? He has been here so long that I had to bring him four cups of tea and four petit fours.

—You’re a darling, said Selah. I will make it up to you. You remember that Darger original I stole from that Wall Street office? I’ll give it to you. It has the little girls all rolled up in carpets.

Rita’s eyes flashed with sudden delighted avarice.

—Really? You will?

—It’s yours, said Selah.

After all, he thought to himself, I have three others, and it’s not fair for one person to have that much of a good thing. Not fair at all. I wonder what would happen, he thought, if a child stared at Darger artwork the entire time he was growing up. Would he be able to do a strange mathematics that no one had ever conceived? Or would he just become very good at helping little girls who were engaged in child-slave rebellions?

—Upstairs, you say? asked Selah.

—Yes, he’s upstairs, she continued.

Selah hurried down the hall, climbed up the ladder, and passed through his own fine door into his glorious, comfortable, lovely office, a place he delighted in and was always happy to return to. Seated upon a leather sofa in the center of the room and staring calmly out the window at the falling snow sat Selah’s uncle. He was holding in his hand a copy of a book. On the cover it said:

WF 7 J 1978

—Have you read it? cried out Selah suddenly.

—I have, my young man, said his uncle, standing and giving to Selah a resounding hug, the sort of hug that can be given only in winter when one is wearing a great quantity of clothing.