“You admit, you concede, that Richard Milhous Nixon is our President?”
He hesitated, fearful of some trap. “Well, they still call him President Nixon on the news.”
There was a long silence, a stillness that throbbed with the blood in his ears.
“He isn’t President any more?” the occupant of the room whispered. “But he was?”
“He was, sure. He resigned.”
“For the good of the nation, right? That would be just like him—give it up if he had to for the good of the nation. He was a patriot. A real patriot.”
He said diplomatically, “I suppose he still is. He’s still alive, I think.”
There was another long silence while the occupant digested this fact. He heard someone walk past, shuffling down the hall, passing the doorless doorway; he wondered if he should yell for help, but he did not even turn his head to look.
At last the occupant said, “Why didn’t you give it to that skater?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me!” The grip on his wrist tightened again.
“It just didn’t seem right. I’ve got a—” he groped for a word. “Somebody I care a lot about.”
“Girlfriend or boyfriend?”
“My girlfriend; I’m not gay. Lara. I’m looking for her.” Unable to help himself, he added, “She was gone this morning when I woke up.”
The occupant grunted. “And you know about the President. Tell me something—how about yesterday morning? Was she there when you woke up then?”
“Sure,” he said. “We had breakfast together, then I went to work and Lara went to look for a job.”
“You were shacking up.”
That was an old term, and it struck him that the occupant was older than he had thought, ten years older than he was at least. He said carefully, “We’ve been living together for the past few days. With no job, Lara couldn’t pay her rent.” The memory of his message, which had been driven from his mind by the occupant’s grip on his wrist and all the talk about Nixon, returned. He said, “I was supposed to tell somebody that Gloria Brooks did it to Al Bailey tonight. Billy North went into Al’s room to borrow a cigarette, and he caught her at it.”
The palm of the occupant’s hand slapped his right cheek with a forehand, twisting his head so far that the returning backhand struck him across the lips.
“My name’s William T. North,” the occupant told him softly. “You refer to me as Mr. William T. North or Mr. North. Get it?”
He jabbed for North’s face with his free hand, and though he could not get much weight behind the punch, he felt North’s nose give under his knuckles in a satisfactory way.
“Say, that was all right.” North’s voice was so calm they might have been discussing the weather. “I’d break your neck for you, but they’d put me in the violent ward. I’ve been there, and it’s no fun. Besides, I’ve got a little thing cooking. You want out of here?”
“Not without my clothes.”
“Right. Absolutely right. In hospital rags they’d spot us in half a minute, just in time to keep us from freezing to death. But if you could take your clothes?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Can you drive?”
“Sure,” he said. It had been a long time—he was not sure just how long—since he had driven.
“Now I’m going to let go of your wrist. If you don’t want to get out, all you’ve got to do is duck through that door. But if you want to come—well, you’ve got some guts and you’re from C-One. That counts with me.”
There was a delay, almost as if the hand that grasped his wrist were arguing with its owner. Then it loosened, released its grip entirely, and drew away.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Step One: you must learn how to open these lockers. You can practice on mine, using my equipment; but you’re going to have to get your own and open your locker yourself, understand? I’m not going to do it for you.”
“You said I came from C-One,” he said. “What did you mean by that?”
“C-One’s the place we’re trying to get back to—President Nixon, and all that. Now listen. Here’s my pick.”
A small, stiff piece of metal was put into his hand. It had a small bend at one end, a much larger one at the other.
“These lockers have very simple locks. Have you seen one of the keys?”
“No.” He shook his head.
“They’re flat pieces of steel with one jagged side. The notches along that side are just to go around the wards of the lock, get it? When you use a pick, you bypass all the wards. The thing that does the business is the tip of the pick. All you have to do is get the tip of the pick where the tip of the key would be and work it around. Try it.”
It was remarkably easy. He seemed to become the bent wire, encountering the unyielding wards, and then, at the very back of the lock, something like a ward that gave to his pressure.
“That’s copper wire from a wall plug,” North told him. “Find one that’s got nothing plugged into it. There’s a wall plate held by a little screw; you can unscrew it with any piece of thin, flat metal. Pull the plate off. The plug’s held by two long screws. Take them out and pull the plug out. Don’t touch anything metal while you’re doing it, and work with your right hand only. Keep your left stuck in the shirt of your PJs, so you won’t forget and use it—that way a shock can’t go across your heart.”
He nodded, fairly sure he knew what would happen if one did.
“There’ll be two wires on the plug—a red one and a black one. The red one should be live; don’t touch it. The black one should be return. It’ll be insulated, and you touch it only by the insulation. That’s what’s black; the inside’s copper. Pull it out as far back as you can and bend it back and forth until it breaks. Then bend the part next to the plug back and forth the same way. When you’ve got your wire, put the plug back like it was and screw on the wall plate again. Then wipe the floor—there’ll be plaster dust on the floor. Meet me in the rec room after lunch and I’ll tell you the rest.”
“All right,” he said.
When he returned to his own room, he was exhausted and very sleepy. His cheek still hurt where North had slapped him. He rubbed it and discovered that his lower lip had split. A thin trickle of blood had run to his chin without his being aware of it. He groped for the light switch so that he could examine his face in the mirror, but there was no light switch.
He considered opening the wall plug, but he had no piece of metal to turn the screw, and he would not be able to distinguish the red wire from the black one in any case.
Determined at last, he picked up the telephone. Slowly, counting holes in the old-fashioned spinning dial, he entered the number of his apartment.
For a long time the earpiece buzzed and clicked. There was a twitter of bird-like voices, the voices of Japanese children, or of music boxes tuned to speak. At last a man’s deep voice asked, “Kay? Ist dis you, Kay?”
“I’m calling for Lara,” he said. He gave the address. “I think I must have the wrong number.”
The man announced, “Dis ist Chief of Department Klamm, Herr Kay,” and he slammed down the receiver.
The Club Fighter
He woke up wondering where he was. For a brief moment, the bed was almost his bed, the room nearly his apartment. Groping for the control of his electric blanket, he found a telephone.
It did not come rushing back to him. Rather it arrived in bits and pieces, like the guests at a masked ball, like dancers all dressed as dreams. It worried him that he could recall the dreams so very clearly, and the waking world not at all; he sat up in bed and saw the dim hallway outside.
Vaguely, he wondered what time it was. Down the hallway, very far down it, he could see a brightly lit nurses’ station. He discovered slippers beneath the bed.
“Can’t sleep?” the nurse on duty asked. She seemed neither friendly nor unfriendly.