The Way Through Doors (4 page)

Senior Inspector, Seventh Ministry

Mars Levkin

I set the paper down. By the window I found my tea. It was quite warm still. The appropriate amount of milk and sugar was in it.

—Don’t drink too much, said Rita, opening the door again. It’s poisoned. Only slightly, but still poisoned. I had decided to poison you and give you the antidote every day so that you would be forced to obey me, but now I’ve changed my mind.

She had a tray this time. On the tray was another envelope, and a cup of tea. She brought it over and set it down gently.

—I’m Rita the message-girl, she said.

—I’ve been told that, I replied.

She adjusted the hem of her skirt.

—Any messages to send? she said.

—Could you tell Levkin that—

—No! she said. Only written messages. Or phone messages. What sort of message girl do you think I am?

She stalked off, leaving me with the tea and letter.

I took a sip of the tea. Earl Grey, with just the right amount of milk and sugar. Thank you, Rita. I opened the letter.

Seventh Ministry

20st July xxxx

M.I. Selah Morse,

I do hope you’re settling in. Things have been dreadfully strange around here ever since Maude ran away (the gray tabby with the cute limp). I think you are quite handsome and pleasant to talk to, and you mustn’t get the wrong idea about me. I am excited to see if you can do the work, and if you like it. Also, I had a cousin named Selah who died when he was very young. He died right after he learned to read. The doctor said some people aren’t meant to read. Giving him a book, say,
Goodnight, Moon,
was as good as murder. No one knows if he was joking or not, but we have to assume so. Was it a funny joke? I have never been in a position to tell. Anyway, good-bye for now.

Rita Liszt, M.G.

Seventh Ministry

I closed the letter and smiled to myself. On an ordinary day, I would be reading in the park or working on one of my pamphlets in my cramped apartment. Was it true? Had I really come up in the world?

I went back into the bathroom and examined myself in the mirror. The suit did fit rather well. This was the first
uniform
I had ever worn, and it was pleasing to me in some sense to be a part of a larger endeavor. When I came out of the bathroom, Levkin was seated by the window.

—Can’t stay in one place, can you? I said.

—Mostly, he said. Anyway, that’s the job. Do you understand what’s involved?

—When do we leave? I asked.

—Let me tell you a story, he said. By way of illustrating a point. There was a man named Carlov. He was a strongman in a circus. His trick—you know, all performers have to have some trick—was to pick himself up. Now most people, no matter how strong they are, cannot pick themselves up. Somehow Carlov was able to do this, I guess it was a matter of leverage or something. You know, where his muscles were connected, etc. In any case, he would come out onstage, pick himself up, stand there for a while, while everyone gawked—I mean, the thing looked totally impossible—and then put himself back down. He made loads of money, but most of it went to his manager, a guy named Wales Carson. In the end, I was asked by the city to investigate these proceedings. I went down there and watched the performance for days. I went dozens of times. I just couldn’t figure out how he was managing to pick himself up.

Levkin took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one, and leaned back in his chair.

—So what happened? I asked. How was he doing it?

—No one knows, said Levkin. Two days later he got pushed out a window on Fortieth and Third Avenue.

He took another puff of his cigarette.

—The point is, don’t work too hard. Most things solve themselves. However, it is important for us to be mixed-up in things. You understand.

I said that I most certainly understood and that definitely we were all going to get on well together.

—Good, he said.

And so my time at the Seventh Ministry began. At first I accompanied Levkin on inspections. We burst into a tax office off Varick Street, demanding that all documents pertaining to the twelfth of February, 1995, be summarily destroyed. We watched over this destruction with a baleful eye, and forced the supervisor to sign a form agreeing that we had never been there. This form we posted on his office wall. Later that day we visited the police horse stables below Canal and spent a while feeding the horses carrots and cubes of sugar.

Slowly, I began to understand what was expected of me. We were a randomizing element in the psychology of the city. We were the practical element of the philosophy that all parts in a system should not react the same way. As you may expect, this was enormously pleasing to me. I had never expected that my uncle, a man of sober resolution, could ever countenance such behavior. And yet he knew of it. In part it was his power, the power of men like him, that helped to lend the Ministry its dubious clout. All along I must have misjudged the man. Of course, I would never tell him. If he did in fact deserve this new standing in my esteem, then telling him would be pointless. He would already know.

Soon things started settling into a routine. I moved into a better apartment with the better money I was making, a place closer to the Ministry. I was provided with many iterations of my suit, the which I kept in a large wardrobe. I began to feel confident about my work, and went around on my own, inspecting and interrogating. I found that the authority of the badge was virtually unlimited. Even the police force seemed to be a bit in awe of it. There was a number on the badge, and when they ran it in their squad-car computers, they would invariably return with apologies and a general go-ahead on whatever I intended.

In short, it was a very good life. I would wake up early in the morning, work for an hour or two on my pamphlets (which I had never stopped making), and then head down to the Ministry. Rita would be there. She was always there. Levkin said once that it was likely there was more than one Rita, identical twins or triplets. Whatever the explanation, she was always there, with messages and a bit of repartee. If Levkin had requested me to make a particular inspection, I would go off to that. If not, I would sit around the office for a while, thinking up one or another scheme for the day. For instance, I once decided that all the dog parks in the city should be tested. So, I borrowed a friend’s Airedale and went about from dog park to dog park seeing how he liked them. His name was Osip, and he was a rascally dog who was most certainly an expert on how much pleasure could be afforded any particular dog by any particular dog park. Once we had gone from park to park, and I had gotten a general sense of Osip’s feelings on the matter, I wrote up a deafening memorandum on the subject, complete with schematics, possible improvements, dog baths, dog bridges, etc. I forwarded this to the Parks Department under the seal of the Seventh Ministry. Within three months, the dog parks had been altered.

For so long I had gone about giving my opinion freely, never supposing that it would be taken. This is a great freedom, and makes it much easier to say whatever comes to one’s mind. However, once one’s opinion begins to be heeded, well, then one must take a bit of care.

Nevertheless, my career continued. Every Wednesday, before going to the big public library to annotate the permanent copies of the encyclopedia with my own insightful commentary in neat red pen, I would stop down on Bayard Street to visit a Shanghai joint of the old-style called New Green Bo. I was in the middle of eating a plateful of the best vegetable steamed dumplings in the whole city when one of the chefs, a Chinese woman, turned to me. Her face was stern, and I immediately knew she was going to tell me something of great weight.

—Have you heard of the
curling touch
?

—No, I replied.

—Well, she said, when I was a child, we would go often through the countryside to visit my grandmother, who lived near a shrine. She was very old, and lived alone in a country of great rain. In her district, for whatever reason, the waters were always rising. Rain was always on the horizon or coming hard upon one. Lightning figured as certainly as the sun in one’s estimation of the sky. It was on one such rainy day that we climbed the gray-green slope leading up to the shrine. Mist clung to the edges of everything, even to our clothing. We trailed little flags of mist as we ran back and forth along the slope. My mother called to us, and her voice was like the hailing of an unknown ship. We called back as though returning from impossible destinations. And up ahead, the light of my grandmother’s house. For a moment we were far from it; the slope seemed to go on forever up and up. Then a bank of mist passed before us and passed away again, and there the house was, before us. My grandmother stood at the open door, beckoning. I ran to her, and she lifted me into her arms and said, Today my dear, I am going to tell you about the
curling touch.

We gathered inside and were given something hot to drink and a sort of sweet grain cake to eat, and the fire was stoked, and the door shut. Outside the rain had begun in earnest. In my mother’s eyes shone the old happiness that had always been hers when my grandmother was near. Then my grandmother began to speak.

—There was a man, a handsome man. He was not much to look at, no, he was not handsome in that way. No, he was handsome in that he was the beloved of the world. Everything he did went well; everything he touched turned to gold. He was a gambler, but what he did was never gambling, for it seemed impossible that he should ever lose. If he touched a deck of cards, then they were blessed for him. If he lifted knucklebones, then they would only ever fall in patterns betokening victory. His name was Loren Darius.