Mama Capini pulled out the empty chair and sat down. “Hey, what’s the matter with you? You didn’t get full at lunch? You should of said somethin’, I’d have got you some garlic bread.”
He asked, “Do you remember the girl I brought here for lunch, Mama?”
Mama kissed her fingers. “Sure. You gonna get married?”
“If she comes in, will you tell me?”
“Sure!”
“And remember Lara? Tell me if Lara comes in. Especially if Lara comes in.”
“Sure. You lookin’ for a date?”
“No, I’m just trying to find these people. And if the big man and his wife—that’s the lady in the red dress—come in, let me know about them, too.”
He dawdled over his salad for an hour and half, drinking an espresso and a couple of amarettos. He saw no one he knew, and nothing happened.
At last he paid the check. When he counted his change, it was just money; nor had he seen any bills with strange pictures in the drawer. The man at the register was the one who had told him Guido was crazy, bigger and older than Guido. As he trudged back to his apartment, he wondered vaguely where Guido had gone. Had Guido been drawn into the other world? If so, did he know it yet? Perhaps Gina came from there; if customers could walk through the door from another world, as Joe and Jennifer had, it seemed likely enough that a waitress looking for work might walk through it, too.
Back at the apartment he put on one of his favorite albums, but found that the music that had once charmed him was harsh and ugly now. He turned on the television. After an hour or so, he realized he had no idea what the show was or why he was watching it.
The Store
He had forgotten how new the store looked, how shiny everything was. The walls were faced with limestone, and the company had them sandblasted every other year. The curving show windows had bright brass frames. Maintenance washed all those windows every morning and polished the frames until they sparkled like gold.
“It’s not open,” a fat woman told him. She was standing in front of one of the windows eyeing a sundress.
“I work here,” he said, and hoped he still did. The store would open at nine-thirty sharp, but main-shift hourly employees were supposed to clock in by eight-thirty. It was three minutes after eight. He went around back and climbed the concrete steps to the employees’ entrance, where Whitey watched to make sure no one punched in for someone else.
“Hi,” Whitey said. “Have a nice vacation?”
He nodded. “Seems like I’ve only been gone for a couple of days.”
It did, and yet it did not. Nothing had changed except for himself.
He resisted the temptation to have a look at his department and took the elevator to the administrative floor. Lie, or tell the truth? Tell them the truth, he decided; he was a bad liar, and he could not think of a story that would explain such a long absence anyway.
The next question was: Mr. Capper or Personnel? Capper was (or he had been) in charge of the department; with Capper on his side, Personnel would not be too rough with him. On the other hand, if Cap was mad—and there was a good chance of that—the personnel manager would resent his not having gone there first, and would probably kill any chance of transferring.
Besides, Personnel was easy to find. Cap might be in the office doing paperwork, but might just as easily be out in the department helping stock. Cap might not even be in yet.
Ella was at her desk doing her nails. She said, “Well … hello!”
There were folding steel chairs for job applicants. He sat in the one nearest her desk. “I’m back,” he said.
“I see.” Ella hesitated. “Mr. Drummond’s not in yet.”
“I’ll wait.”
“I carried you sick for a week.” Although they were alone, Ella lowered her voice. “Then he made me start phoning. Once he even went to your apartment at night and rang your bell, but he said nobody answered.”
“I was away. I got back to my apartment yesterday, and I could see I hadn’t been there. Everything was dusty, you know?”
“You blacked out?”
“I don’t think so. I can remember two nights, one when I was in a hospital and one—no, two—when I was in a hotel room.” Not knowing what else to say, he added, “It was the same room.”
Ella leaned toward him and held out her hand for his. He noticed then how much she looked like Fanny, though perhaps he was just forgetting what Fanny looked like. Ella said, “You’ve been gone over a month.”
He nodded. “I think so.”
Unconsciously he had extended his own hand, and when Ella touched it she felt his bandage. “What in the world happened to you? Your face too—you’ve got a burn on your cheek and one on your forehead.”
“They’ve gone away, pretty much,” he said. “They weren’t very bad.”
“Were you in an accident? What happened?”
He nodded again. “I was in this Chinese shop—Mr. Sheng’s. He had fireworks stored in his basement, and something set them off. I think it was a guy named Bill North. Anyway, North was down there, and he’s a cigar smoker.” Though he felt it might be against his best interests, he grinned. “I was drinking tea with Mr. Sheng and his nephew, and a skyrocket came right up the stairs. It hit the wall at the top and came into the room where we were. It scared hell out of us. Then I guess some more must have gone off, because the next thing I knew I was in the street with my ears ringing and a cop and a paramedic bending over me. They said another ambulance had taken Mr. Sheng to the hospital, but—”
Drummond came in, nodded to Ella, raised an eyebrow at him, then smiled.
Ella said, “Good morning, sir.”
Drummond went into the little private office behind Ella’s reception room and shut the door.
Ella whispered, “I want to go in and talk to Dixie just for a minute. You wait here, okay?”
He nodded, studying her as she went into Drummond’s office. She was a little bit heavier than Fanny, he decided. That was an improvement, if anything. And her hair was brown. He felt sure Fanny’s had been black. Of course, no one was or could be like Lara, and he could never mistake any other woman for her. He had known right away that Marcella was really Lara, although Marcella had been a blonde, or at least had appeared to be. You could never tell, he thought, in black-and-white or in pictures drawn by a second-rate artist.
He glanced at his watch. It was eight twenty-eight, but he did not know just when he had come into the Personnel Office; it seemed to him Ella had been in the private office with Drummond a long time.
There was a drinking fountain in the hall outside. He got a drink, filling his mouth with icy water several times and each time making himself swallow it. He had the feeling that he did not always drink enough water, and ought to make himself drink more whenever he got the chance.
When he went back in, Ella was still in the private office with Drummond. He found Time in a pile of magazines on the end table and leafed through it. The President had reaffirmed his commitment to “ordinary Americans” and endorsed a reduction in Social Security benefits; the Near East seemed ready to explode. He wondered if it would help to send the President to the Near East, then tried to remember whether he had ever seen Time or a newspaper There. “There” was, he discovered, his private name for the other world, for the place where Lara was. He could not remember having seen one, although he could not be sure he had not—
Yes, of course, he had seen Walsh’s picture in the paper. This was Here and that was There. He could not remember if the comics had been the same, or whether that paper had carried any comics at all.
The door of the inner office swung open, and Ella came out. She said, “Mr. Drummond will see you now.” He put down Time and went in.