A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The deep-freeze or whatever it was that had held me, thawed and dissolved, and I’d broken stance and was starting to go across at last. I almost wouldn’t have noticed it myself, but the ground seemed to be slowly moving backward under me like some sort of conveyor-belt, or a flattened-out escalator-tread going the other way. And now that I’d started, I didn’t stop anymore after that. That had been the last time.

I moved slowly, but I kept moving. Going down the street, just going down the street. Like I had no reason, had no purpose, had no thought in mind. I touched the gun once, it was still there.

It felt heavier than it had in the old days, but I’d been in the hospital meantime and had lost weight. It was Government Issue, I’d brought it back with me from Saigon. You’re supposed to turn them in when you’re separated, but I hadn’t.

I looked up at an ascending angle and recognized the building where I’d used to live. I even saw the windows which had once been mine. I counted up to them, that’s how I knew them, but I didn’t use my finger, I didn’t want anyone to notice me do that. I just counted with my eyes instead.

I didn’t see the man on door-duty outside, when I turned and went in. Then when I entered, he was in there but he didn’t see me. He had his back to me, he was on the house-phone and he was talking to someone in the building, and he seemed very engrossed. More than engrossed, he seemed very excited. Or they were, which amounted to the same. “Now take it easy,” I heard him say. “Now pull yourself together and try to talk more slowly so I can understand you.”

I went around the turn to the elevator-bank, off-side to the front entrance, and pushed for the car. It came gliding down silent as a pin-drop, all glossy chrome and all empty. I got in and pushed the six-button and it closed and started to take me up.

It had been so easy to get in here unobserved, I almost couldn’t believe it. I’d never been able to pass him like that in the old days when I’d still lived here. But maybe it wasn’t the same guy, I hadn’t seen his face, and they all looked alike in the uniform.

The minute I got out, somebody unseen called it away from me, and it went on further up somewhere else, so it didn’t even leave a trace of which floor I was on.

And then I came to the door, the door that had been our door, but wasn’t anymore.

I remembered how many times I’d come to it before, cold from being outside, overheated from being outside, tired from being outside. Now I was bringing a gun to shoot and kill with, in from being outside.

Once we’d hung a Christmas-wreath on it.

I remembered the last time, how it had slammed. And I’d thought of a line from a song I used to know: “And as the door of love between us closes—”

I got out the key I’d still kept, and opened it, and went in.

I saw the chairs I knew, the lamps I knew, the windows, the walls, the doors I knew. That same water-color in its same white-leather frame, of a Montmartre street-scene signed by someone named either Cobelle or Cubelle (I’d never been able to make sure) was still on the wall up there. A book on the table said: Tom Jones. We’d had that one then. A record on the player said: Once Upon a Time, Never Comes Again. We hadn’t had that one then.

She must have just come in. Her coat was over a chair-seat dribbling downward to the floor. A glass with half a highball in it that she was coming back to in a minute was on a stand beside the chair. She’d never drunk before. Not by herself I mean. At parties, out with friends. Maybe she had something now to drink by herself about.

I knew she was in the bedroom, must be, although I couldn’t hear her making any sound.

I called her name, not loudly, routinely as though we both still lived there in those rooms together, and she came in to me.

She wasn’t frightened. She was surprised but she wasn’t frightened. She must have been changing her clothes: to rest, to be more comfortable, maybe to get ready for a bath. When she came in she had on just a light-blue corduroy wrap-around over her foundation pieces.

I saw her pull it more closely closed across her when she looked at me. It couldn’t have been modesty. We’d been married. It must have been apprehension. Must have been apprehension; she sensed.

“What’d you come back for?” she said. “You said you never were, you never would.”

“For this,” I said. I took out the gun. “I came back for this.”

She stared at it with an odd look of fascination, as though she’d never seen one before. I knew that wasn’t it, I knew that was a misreading. It was fear, but it looked like hypnotic fascination.

“Will that,” she asked me vaguely, the pupils of her eyes a thousand miles away, on the gun, “undo anything that’s been done? Will that rub out the past?”

“It’ll rub out the future,” I said, “and that’s even better.”

“There is no future,” she said. “It doesn’t need a gun to tell us both that.”

“No, but it says it awful well.”