The Ten Thousand Doors of January(70)

Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerized by the sight of our own broken hearts.

This is why I didn’t notice for so long: the doors are closing. Or, perhaps more accurately, the doors are being closed.

I should have seen it sooner, but I was even more obsessed in the earliest years, convinced that the very next door would open onto the cerulean seas of my homeland. I followed myths and stories and rumors, I looked for upheavals and revolutions, and at their twisted roots I often found doorways. None of them led me back to her, and so I abandoned them all as quickly as I could, taking time only to scavenge and plunder. Then I packed their stolen treasures in sawdust, scrawled 1611 CHAMPLAIN DRIVE, SHELBURNE, VERMONT on the crate, and departed for the next steamer, the next story, the next door.

I did not linger long enough to see what came next: unexplained forest fires, unscheduled demolitions of historic buildings, floods, property development, cave-ins, gas leaks, and explosions. Sourceless, blameless disasters that turned the doors to rubble and ash and broke the secret links between the worlds.

When I finally recognized the pattern—sitting on a hotel balcony reading an article in the Vancouver Sun about a mine-shaft collapse where I’d found a door only the week before—I did not at first blame human agency. I blamed time. I blamed the twentieth century, which seemed hell-bent on Ouroboran self-destruction. I thought doors might not belong in the modern world, that all doors were destined to close eventually.

I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.

Perhaps I knew the truth, even before I had proof. I felt myself growing suspicious, worrying that strangers were watching me in Bangalore restaurants, hearing footsteps behind me in the alleys of Rio. Around that time I began writing my missives back to Cornelius in a code of my own invention, convinced that some unknown entity was intercepting my reports. It made no difference; the doors kept closing.

I reasoned with myself: What did it matter that these particular doors were destroyed? They were all the wrong doors. None of them would take me back to Ade, to our stone house above the City of Nin, to that moment when I climbed the hillside and saw the two of you curled on the quilt: golden, whole, perfect.

But even in the depths of my self-pity, another thought occurred to me: What happens to a world without doors? Hadn’t I concluded that doors introduce change, back when I was a Scholar rather than a grave robber? I’d hypothesized that doors were vital avenues, allowing the mysterious and miraculous to flow freely between worlds.

Already I imagine I see the effects of their absence in this world: a subtle stagnation, a staleness, like a house that has been left shut up all summer. There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change.

I believe I already know what happens to a world without doors.

But to stop looking for doors would be to stop looking for your mother, and I cannot. I cannot.

I began retracing Ade’s decade-old footsteps, on the theory that the door to the Written might be hidden in some other world. It was not always easy, piecing together the stories she told me with stories overheard in busy streets or dingy bars, gin-soaked and garbled, but I was persistent. I found the St. Ours door, the Haitian door, the selkie door, a dozen others—all of them are gone now. Burnt, collapsed, destroyed, forgotten.

It wasn’t until 1907 that I caught a glimpse of my pursuers. I’d finally found the Greek door—a cold stone slab in an abandoned church—which led to a world Ade had once described as a “black pit of hell.” I had no interest in repeating her experiences (she was, by her testimony, nearly shanghaied by an ice-eyed chieftainess), and so did not linger long inside it. I wandered for less than a day, creeping fearfully through the snow, but found nothing alive and nothing worth stealing. There were only endless rows of black pines and a distant horizon the color of gunmetal, and the wracked remains of some sort of fort or village. If there were any other doors in that place, I did not linger to find them.

I crawled back through the stone door into the mold-splotched interior of St. Peter’s Church. It was only after I’d emerged—shivering in heaving spasms, inhaling the salt and lime smell of a Mediterranean evening—that I noticed something standing on the tile floor that hadn’t previously been there: a pair of black-booted feet.

They belonged to a tall, heavy-browed man wearing the brass-buttoned uniform and round cap of a Greek police officer. He did not look particularly surprised to see a snow-dusted foreigner crawling out of the wall, but merely a little inconvenienced.

I scrambled to my feet. “Who—what are you doing here?”

He shrugged and spread his hands. “Exactly as I please.” He spoke guttural, accented English. “Although I am I think a little early.” He sighed and made a show of brushing off a pew and sitting down to wait.

I swallowed. “I know what you’re here for. Don’t try to pretend. And I won’t let you, not this time—”