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1Aramini
2# *THERE ARE DOORS*: IS LOVE THE SICKNESS OR THE CURE?
3
4>Then [Green] held the gun ... . He twisted it up and back. It fired - its flash half-blinded him, and the sound of the shot was deafening. ... He heard his own nose break, a terrible sound; something had invaded his head and was working destruction there. He gasped for breath, drew in blood and spat it out. More blood was streaming down his face. (Wolfe 297)
5
6Wolfe's *There Are Doors* opens with a question. "Do you believe in love?" The answer, from a woman who has come to embody ideal love for the novel's main character, is direct: "Yes. ... And I hate it. ... We use it, you see" (1). This introduces the reader to a world right next to the one in which the main character dwells, where sexual reproduction kills men, and a man's seed can engender many children long after he dies. After learning that his love interest Lara Morgan is the goddess of this other world, Green spends the rest of the book searching for her. Written at a time when *The Book of the New Sun* and the Latro novels had cemented Wolfe's legacy, this novel has more in common with contemporary books such as *Free Live Free* and *Castleview* than with his more highly regarded series. Despite its third-person narration, the reality of the events in this novel are constantly called into question by Mr. Green's mental health. He is a depressed, unexceptional man, and his wandering in and out of institutions gives just enough evidence of a damaged mind to doubt that his experiences are by and large real - though to Mr. Green himself, reality hardly matters, for his quest for a transcendent love is certainly symbolically true.
7
8Green has been wounded by the modern world and its mundane reality (called C-One by the "antagonist" of the novel), effectively hamstrung from lasting significance or social importance. However, the world next door to C-One features an even more severe form of emasculation, where men are not only rendered powerless by sex and love, they are completely destroyed by it. Even considering men’s sexual fragility and the widespread female resentment towards their efforts to maintain independence, the strange world in which Green finds himself allows something that his day to day life does not often feature: there, even an average man like Green will be desired as a prized resource by every woman, made valuable by virtue of an ephemeral mortality.
9
10At the heart of the novel, the quest for love sits side by side with the gender war that such a biological scheme would necessitate. The various men whom Green encounters there, though many are described as ethnic stereotypes, easily form alliances with him across the barriers of age and race (though there is another reason for this masculine alliance, which we will explore soon). The sacrifice men make so that humanity can continue echoes many of the ancient fertility rituals highlighted by Sir James Frazer in *The Golden Bough* quite literally, and the survival of those myths and patterns into the modern age, when so many other traditions have been robbed of their power, is a motif embedded into many of Wolfe's stories. At one point the goddess of "There," as Green calls it, was reputed to have had a lover called Attis, conflating her with Cybele, the Magna Mater (61). Alas, the mythical lover Attis is doomed to die under a pine tree, and given the inconclusive ending of the novel, Green, too, might be facing the same fate - possibly even at his own hands, as he tries to reach the distant home of the goddess, Overwood (certainly populated with pines).
11
12Wolfe's fantasies often run parallel to our waking world, but at times the main character in this particular novel seems more divorced from reality than Severian or Latro could ever be from theirs. Despite the third-person narration and the modern setting, *There Are Doors* maintains a distinct tone amongst Wolfe's contemporary novels, and much of this must come from the nature of its main character, Mr. Green. His love drives him in and out of institutions, and we are left questioning if he ever actually manages to escape them at all. *There Are Doors* shares features of what I call "urban allegory" with *Free Live Free* and the much later *Pirate Freedom* - it is not a directly realistic novel of mimesis because of the symbolic weight many of the characters and events seem to suggest. Indeed, after taking a look at the plot, we will discover that much of the story makes more sense from a figurative point of view; just as Green's psyche has personified love as Lara after the loss of his mother, blending all the women he seeks to love into one abstract goddess, his disturbed mind may have fractured his own personality into many distinct segments, with the other figures at United merely signifying the disparate aspects of his personality. Alas, if Green’s struggles “There” are internal and North is merely the violent side of his personality seeking to assert control, the opening quotation implies that as he twists the gun around and it fires, his quest for love has unknowingly led him to true and irrevocable self-destruction.
13
14## The Linear Story with Pertinent Allusions
15
16Even though Green has suppressed many of the problems in his day to day life, blocking out unpleasant feelings and avoiding the emptiness he feels, by the end of the novel we have a sense of how his story has progressed. Born in the Eisenhower administration (between 1953 and 1961, though probably close to 1957) and raised for most of his childhood by a single mother, Green grows up without a father (absent and possibly no longer living, though this is never made explicit; Green reveals that he hasn't seen his father in ten or twelve years at the end of the story). There are vague hints of the problems his single mother had, such as losing their house and attempting to teach Green about life without a masculine figure to guide him. When he gets a sales job at a department store, he moves from the YMCA into a more permanent apartment.
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18When his mother dies, Green's subsequent depression and increased drinking prompts his employers to send him to seek help at a doctor's office. He grows attached to Lora Masterman, a secretary there, and they begin to see each other, though through most of the novel Green appears to have repressed these memories, forgetting his many visits to the Downtown Mental Health Center. The novel opens after they have had a meal at Capini's Italian restaurant; Green believes that he has been living with Lara Morgan, the goddess of another world, who must leave him behind - for in her world, sex kills men. On March 14th, Lara disappears and the novel opens. Green finds a note warning him that if he passes through one of the doorways between their worlds, he must back up without turning around or the doorway will be gone, and he will be trapped. [Note that March 14th immediately precedes the Ides of March and the anniversary of Caesar's death, denoting a religious holiday sacred to the Father of the Gods, Jupiter, which featured sheep sacrifice and something like a scapegoat propitiatory ceremony. More importantly, this begins the holy week celebrating Cybele and her lover Attis, a week which takes him from his birth and exposure to his insanity, self-mutilation, and death, which we will discuss further below. The critic Paul Kincaid notes that the plot device of an ordinary, alcoholic man stepping through a door into a different world bears great similarity to the Thorne Smith novel *Rain in the Doorway*, save that in Smith's book, the protagonist steps into a department store with a shockingly sexually liberated atmosphere to escape his unfaithful wife, while Green escapes the banality of a store and a boring life in pursuit of a goddess. Even after reading Smith's book, I was uncertain if it was a direct influence, but one detail of Kincaid's analysis stands out: "It may well be, of course, that in this homage to Thorne Smith, Wolfe is recalling that Smith ended his life in a mental hospital" (Kincaid 315). (If this is true, it is thematically interesting - this will not be the only insane or self-destructive creator referenced directly or indirectly in *There Are Doors*.)] 
19
20As Green scrambles to find Lara again, he eventually comes to the Downtown Mental Health Center. There, the receptionist seems to recognize and even toy with him, speculating that Lara might have been a criminal or previously institutionalized if she feared the "doors" Green mentions. The receptionist concludes their talk by indicating how happy she is that Green has returned to the health center.
21
22The text jumps to Green leaving, observing the black wires overhead and finding himself before a doll hospital. [If we consider that many of Green's experiences could be a delusion he experiences while institutionalized, he might remain in the psychiatric institute at this point, and the guy wires he sees upon exiting the building, which are supposedly the first "door" he encounters, could even be symbolic of electro-shock treatment - yet his incarceration here would create further questions about the reality of events when he later *returns* to the Downtown Mental Health Center at the end of the book, unless we view his subsequent escape during a game of moopsball as "actual."]
23
24If we do not question the reality of Green's experiences at this point, he enters the shop and discovers that in this world, children are raised with these dolls. He sees one that he believes is Lara and buys it, writing a check. The doll supposedly walks and talks when activated by a saline solution. The shopkeeper indicates that even though the name *Tina* is embroidered to designate the doll, it is still a representation of the goddess, and that the previous owner has died of "Malicapita." [While some speculate that this is a castration gone wrong, with "capita" resembling the word capon, this seems closer to the latin *mala capita* - something bad in the head, which is echoed in the name of the restaurant which seems to be in both worlds: Capini's. Green, too, might eventually perish as a result of his mental illness.]
25
26Green also discovers that the goddess he seeks might be in Overwood, near Marea. [Later, the goddess will identify herself as the sea, with its obvious verbal resonance with Marea. Of course, the word also seems to bear a strong resemblance to the Latin name of a very prominent feminine ideal: *Maria*.] Green looks for a map to help him find Overwood at a nearby cartographer and, discovering that his money is no good in this world, flees with it. [Other maps on sale there include Disneyland, Slumberland, Heaven, Hell, and Limbo - very nebulous and idealized locales.] The saleswoman tries to stop him while a male spectator cheers him on. In an alley, he comes upon a Chinese man named Sheng who offers him escape, inviting him into his shop.
27
28At this point in the text, the trick matches of the shop owner and the smoke from his pipe introduce an important dragon motif which will reappear in the middle and at the finale of the novel. In addition, Sheng shows Green his own doll, Heng-O, and allows Green to purchase a sheaf of "fake" money (the currency of C-One) for a coin. [Heng-O and her mythical significance will be discussed below.]
29
30When Green leaves Sheng's shop, he comes upon a parade, probably celebrating the goddess. He is lured into the back of a camper by a blond skater, passing through "a door wreathed with roses" (22). [The rose motif will be associated with the different manifestations of the goddess soon.] The blond girl insists that she is "not one of those people who put a gun to your head" to get what she wants (sex), and he begins talking about Lara and his love for her. [This “gun to your head” remark might also foreshadow Green’s fate.] As she pulls at his coat, he realizes, "You're not her, and I really didn't know it was going to be like this" (23). Angered at his refusal to mate with her, she attacks him with a knife as he tries to escape, and he slips on the ice as he flees once again, knocked unconscious by the pavement.
31
32He awakens in the United Medical Center, being treated by Dr. Pille. A nurse gives him "aspenin," a scent based medicine which reminds Green of "the odor of spring, when new green growth duels with melting snow in the rain-washed air" (25). [Green's association with Attis and the fertility rituals predicate his movement between winter and spring throughout the novel, something made explicit at one point - there seem to be no other seasons for him.] The nurse also tells him his nose might not work for a while [which foreshadows the damage to Green's nose at the conclusion of the novel and also calls into question the objective functionality of his organs of perception]. He wonders if Lara, too, had been but a dream. "If that were so, he did not wish to wake" (26). He notes that it seems to be winter rather than spring, and looks out his window to see a street dominated by slush and snow. [Later we will learn that this must be January 18th or 19th.] A black attendant known as W.F. menacingly instructs him to return to his bed, and tells him, "You in for a sex change, huh?" (27) [Another nurse reveals that this is the common term for alcoholism, which lowers testosterone levels and also tends to circumvent balding, but it also resonates with the self-castration inherent in the Attis myth and in his priesthood, as well as hinting at Green's pervasive drinking problem, which is actually listed on his chart.]
33
34When Green turns on the TV:
35
36>Diagonal lines crossed the screen slowly, through a storm of snow. Lara's face fluttered behind them like an overexposed photograph, then vanished. ... He was sure it had been Lara, perhaps on another frequency. This was Channel One. He tried Two and Thirteen, and got nothing. When he returned to One, mixed teams were playing some complicated game that involved the kidnapping of opposing players. (27-8)
37
38[Here, he sees the game which he will soon play in the institution on the television. “Channel One” also resonates with the name Green will learn for the normal world: "C-One." See the discussion of snow and delusion below for further elaboration on this imagery.]
39
40He receives flowers from "the goddess of the silver screen," an actress known as Marcella, and somehow knows that she, too, is a manifestation of Lara (29). He then encounters the similarly institutionalized Eddie Walsh, who believes himself to be the manager of the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Eddie indicates that his fighter Joe could easily bust open the locker in Green's room and retrieve the mail "charm" from Sheng if he were there. Walsh offers Green an invisible business card and also tells Green that he is in the "good wing" of the United General Psychiatric Hospital (33). [It seems that Joe, Eddie, and perhaps even W.F. are patterned after *Joe Palooka*, a cartoon featuring the fighter and his balding manager, Knobby Walsh, as well as a black helper named Smokey. Joe Palooka represented to some degree the clean image masculine sports figures should have embodied according to mores of the time. Ham Edward Fisher, the creator of the comic, killed himself.]
41
42Green ponders that he might not be in the real world, and he is awoken by a man who instructs him to pass along some news: "That Gloria Brooks, she did it to Bailey tonight. Billy North went to Al's room to bum a smoke, and he caught her at it. Each one tells one" (35). Green tries to find his way to Eddie Walsh's room, and during his journey he considers that maybe Lara never lived in his apartment at all: "the truth was that he was afraid she would not be there, that there would be no one there ... . That there had never been anybody in the apartment but himself" (36).
43
44After following the uncertain instructions to Walsh's room, he comes across a sleeping man there. When he calls out Eddie's name, the occupant stirs and says, "*Yes, Mama*?" (37) [This is one of the key details in our thesis - as the text progresses, it is quite distinctly Green who is destroyed by the loss of his mother. North’s identical need has no other narrative existence.] The man awakens violently and grabs Green's wrist, revealing that he suffers from "Acute manic schizophrenia" and that Richard Nixon is president (38). He drills Green on his recent past and his relationship with Lara. When Green tries to pass on what "Billy North" saw, the man slaps him, saying that *he* is to be called William T. North. Green punches back, feeling the man's nose give (40). [The nose injury is an important thematic wound that North and Green trade.] Calming down, North reveals that he has an escape plan in mind, instructing Green how to open the locker in his room and avoid a shock. He also calls the world they came from, where Nixon was president, by the name C-One. [The act of breaking into the lockers is clearly symbolic, and will be discussed further below.] When Green returns to his room, he phones his apartment for Lara, and a man answers, asking, "Ist dis you, Kay? ... Dis ist Chief of Department Klamm, Herr Kay" (43). [Both of these characters appear in Franz Kafka's *The Castle*.]
45
46Amidst his attempts to open the locker in his room and remain undetected, Green encounters Eddie Walsh once again, with his fighter Joe Joseph. He learns that Joe is actually not yet the champion, despite Eddie's delusions, and that the fighter is married to a woman named Jennifer. Walsh fears that she will pressure the young man into sex, which would kill him. In a vital scene, Walsh tells Green that he secretly hopes something will happen to Jennifer, though if it did, Joe would retreat, perhaps suicidally, to the mountains near Manea. [See “Snow, Delusion, and the Difference between Marea and Manea” below - this does not seem to be a typo, as it will be repeated once more in the final scenes. During this scene, Joe drinks a "poisonous-looking scarlet" drink named Poxxie, and we should keep in mind that Joe Palooka's creator poisoned himself (51).] Here, Green verbalizes one of the most important concepts of the novel, moved by some spirit to tell Joe: "I think the best way to help [Walsh] might be for you to become champion. Then he'd be well" (51).
47
48Sleeping in his room, Green is awakened by a phone call from a pretentious older woman whom he believes to be Lara, who says that her attendant (or caretaker) Emma was reluctant to call Green, but did mix her a strong drink. She asks if he received her flowers, and Green realizes that Lara is also Marcella. "Yes, there's a real Marcella too - a real Marcella still, though sometimes I have ever so much trouble getting in touch with her. Besides, it's so much fun being a bitch, though one doesn't like oneself half so well afterward." She speculates that after she comes to see him, they might "find a door out for [Green] together" (54). [This scene involves the concept of love reaching the heart of an older, embittered woman once again.]
49
50He considers that Lara might call back, as Tina or as someone else. Soon he jerks awake again and picks the locker in his room, finding items fraught with significance: the "mail" charm of Sheng [which he considered might be a "male" charm when Sheng first mentioned it], the Tina doll in the pocket of his jacket, the map, and a book of matches which he lights (featuring a dragon on its label "floating upward, as it seemed, to kiss or perhaps to devour a Chinese character of astonishing complexity") (55). As he returns to his bed, he notices the different colors and scents of the roses, equating them with Lara, Marcella, and Tina.
51
52After this association, Lara appears, taking him by the hand. The locker springs open and he sees a garden filled with sun and flowers through it, with a stone arch at its center, whose sight fills him with "a cold terror, like the dread inspired by the sight of a scalpel in a man about to be operated upon" (56). Lara disappears through the arch, and then Tina emerges, looking childlike and approaching him. At his touch, she becomes Marcella, and, "He was so startled by the transformation that he jerked his head out of the locker and slammed the door" (57). [It is possible to map his mother, Lora Masterman, and the widowed Martha Foster to these three figures, though there is some overlap.]
53
54He springs awake and gets out of bed, only to be ushered back into it by W. F.. He tells Green how much Joe loves flowers. [Later it will be revealed that Klamm, too, grows roses as a hobby.] Green seems to fall asleep again and finds himself selling furniture to an angry woman, and he shows her a desk with green baize lining with "an unopened letter sealed in red wax imprinted with a heart" which he snaps open (58). [This desk is vital to the climax of the story, and we will discuss it further below. The angry woman is Martha Foster, as will be revealed at the end of the novel.] The woman disapproves, and when Green sits up back in the mental hospital, he sees Marcella in the hallway. He springs up to find her, but she is gone. When he returns to his room, North is there, and he claims to need a driver to aid in his escape. He asks North who the Goddess is. North claims:
55
56>"[S]he's not real. She's just like Christ or Buddha, you get me? She represents the God-damned feminine ideal or whatever. There's a big place out west that's sacred to her - ten thousand square miles, they say. Nobody can live out there. ... She's supposed to go around looking for her lost lover, some guy she ditched thousands of years back. ... If you ask me, she's Mary Magdalene, and she's looking for Jesus. Anyway, sometimes they see him too - the lost lover." (60)
57
58North then describes her lover, Attis: "He's got something to do with spring, and the harvest. Or he did" (61). [We should make note of the statement that "nobody can live" out near Overwood.] He also informs Green that they will escape during group recreation. They are interrupted when the light comes on. W.F. brings in food [and North seems to disappear quite effectively]. Green begins to consider his fate: "He had not thought of himself as a patient before, but as a wounded animal, a lost adventurer briefly exiled from the fields of life. Perhaps no one thought of himself as a patient until he was well" (63).
59
60The television repairman comes, and they discuss the technology which would be necessary to create color TV, which does not seem to exist in this world. [During their chitchat, they mention a woman who might be Amelia Earhart, who flew her plane into a hole in the cloud and arrived in a drastically changed world.] As they talk, Green tries to dial his apartment once again, reaching a man who seems to know Lara but refuses to identify himself until Green does the same. Green hangs up. After the repairman leaves, Green examines his money and soon sees his own apartment through the television, where a man is on the phone. "This man was older than he, big, tough looking, starting to run to fat" (68). A nurse comes in to take him to recreational activities fit for the snow: indoor moopsball. [Moopsball’s insane rules can be found at http://eblong.com/zarf/moopsball/. Wolfe names one of the characters in the upcoming scene after Cohn, the creator of moopsball.] The nurse also advises him to wait for William's signal, revealing that she is a conspirator.
61
62At the game, played with tricycles, garbage-can lids, and plastic bats, Walsh appoints Green as his wizard and instructs him to beat the spells of the opposing team. He hears North's voice during the melee, advising him to go to Door *C* after putting on street clothes. Green gets his belongings and dresses, thinking that "the last few days had been only a nightmare, that everything that had taken place since he had met Lara had been a dream, that he must soon wake up and go to work" (73). He and North escape, taking the nurse's car, and Green drives. North makes him stop to procure guns, and while Green waits in the car, he examines Tina and the root he received from Sheng. The people passing by look like people from "pictures set in the thirties and forties" (76). North tries to give him one of his guns, throwing it in Green's lap, and he refuses to take it. North hits him and issues a challenge: "Pick it up and try to kill me. I'll go for mine. One of us wins" (77). North demonstrates that indeed the weapon is loaded, and they proceed to the Grand Hotel (though they seem to get stuck in a traffic circle for some time.) [Much of Green’s childhood involved watching old movies on television.]
63
64When they finally reach the desolate Grand, it is situated on a winter sea, with waves of "black green that he had been told artist called *cannon*," with a terrace of evergreens in tubs (80). [The evergreens resonate with the character of Green, so trapped in all of his actions. The snow and ice which permeate this scene represent not only stasis but Green's mental state.] Green wonders if some drug has permanently distorted the way he sees the world, so that "in the city where he had been born they now saw him wandering, wide eyed, talking to phantoms" (81). Alone in the room, Green answers the phone. He has been checked into the hotel under the name Pine, while North has used the name Campbell. [Obviously the association with Attis and the pine tree is clear. Joseph Campbell wrote the influential *Hero with a Thousand Faces*, describing what he called the monomyth. The heroic figure of masculine power aspiring to be the champion, Joe Joseph, might draw his name from this source as well.] Green looks at his map at an area marked "Giants' Castle," thinking he has heard of it or something like it, perhaps Giants' Causeway. [Giants' Causeway comes from an Irish legend involving the giant Finn McCool, who, unable to swim, threw rocks into the sea to make a path to face a foe from whom he ultimately fled in fear - ironically, when the gigantic foe came to kill Finn, who had hidden himself in a cradle pretending to be a child, the larger giant fled, imagining how big the father of the child must be.] Green cannot recall the name of the city near Overwood [in almost every case, it is referred to as Marea. The close association of the goddess with the sea and Green's inability to remember the name also hint at conscious repression.]
65
66North returns with clothes and a newspaper detailing the escape of three unnamed lunatics. One was being treated with "electric shock and lithium" (84). North realizes that the third escaped man was Eddie Walsh. He also hands Green a strange driver's license, which resembles a theater ticket. When North says that Walsh took his chances just as they did, Green is reminded of his mother before they lost their house. Visions of her continue: 
67
68>[H]er face as it had perhaps been when she was much younger, on the television screen. Or Lara's. ... His mother had been Lara, he felt - Lara in a way that fluttered off when he tried to grasp it. Not quite the Lara who had lived with him, yet they were both ...
69
70>He shook his head. Was it possible to catch insanity like measles? What was it anyway? Was anyone who denied the facts insane, like poor Eddie Walsh? (86)
71
72He sees another article in the paper in which Walsh proclaims his fighter’s readiness to take on the boxing champion, Sailor Sawyer. Green decides to try to reach the disturbed trainer, and uses the phone book to call Walsh Promotions. Walsh's attorney Laura Nomos answers, and Green recognizes her as Lara. She hangs up on him when he calls her Lara Morgan.
73
74North and he leave to attend a meeting which will propose a takeover of the government of "There," and the violent madman directs Green to drive through ever narrowing streets. Accessing the meeting area through a private metal door, they are hustled into a room where makeup is applied. They then enter a room with several other men, one reclining in a bathrobe, another in uniform. They seem to be on a stage, with "watchers in the darkness beyond the light" (91). North begins to pontificate, claiming that the movement to fight injustice can be won with commitment and obedience. He also says they can triumph through strength:
75
76>"[The government's arms are] tied by religion and morality, and by the need to look moral and religious even when real religion and actual morality point in the other direction. ... Strength is God! What is God, but the thing that grants our prayers? It is Strength that grants all prayers, that makes it possible for a nation or a man to do what he wants. ...
77
78>"We are supernatural beings chained by beings merely natural, and we must not turn our back on the hand of God within us. We are a sacred band of brothers, and when every one of us knows that, we will be unconquerable." (92)
79
80A curtain falls and the men in the room line up to take a bow. They retreat to the audience to watch a woman with "a cross between an electric guitar and a balalaika" sing a song about pirates. Wounded figures missing various parts (an eye, a hand, and a leg) dance behind her, and, "When the pirate ship lay half a cable from its victim, the rolling of the broadsides filled the theater and the three dancers seemed to have become fifty" (93). [The theme of a sailor or pirate at sea will emerge in relation to an old lover of the goddess named Blazing Billy later, and the current boxing champion of There is "Sailor" Sawyer. More importantly, these wounded, partial dancers seeming to become fifty is an important metaphor for our wounded hero, who seems to be many disparate people.]
81
82An old scrub woman begins to play the rather chaotic and ephemeral tune of Debussy's "L'isle Joyeuse" on a piano, and the pirates become harlequins. Green recognizes the ship, thinking he has seen it "perhaps in a picture or on a painted screen in Furniture" (94). [The piano, too, will later be revealed to originate from an instrument at the Downtown Mental Health Center in C-One.] With his eyes closed, he knows that Lara seems to step from the piano, and he rushes to follow her. He encounters a man who tells him it was only a dream and insists that Green must go on stage, for the President's advisor Klamm is attending. Green says, "Even it if was just a dream, I've got to look. Even if there's only one chance in a million, because it's the only chance I've got" (95). He finds himself on the stage once again with North. "He felt that his first impression had been correct, that they were in a basement room, that it was the theater that was illusion, not the play. I've been an actor in a play all my life, he thought, and not known my lines. The only difference is that I know it now" (95-96). On stage, a sick and dying man, reclining on a cot, converses with a corpulent doctor named Applewood. He claims that he couldn't help himself, and his immune system is shutting down after engaging in intercourse.
83
84Green looks frantically for Lara, and sees Klamm in a box above, who seems "to be sleeping with open eyes" (96). Lara enters the box, placing a hand upon Klamm's shoulder and wearing a gown of rainbow colors. "Yet he thought her own glorious hair more beautiful, a part of her person that in transfiguring her transfigured itself" (97). Men with guns appear and fire at the stage, and "the first shot killed the man who had been dying on the cot" (98).
85
86North leads Green through a magician's cabinet, and they escape through it to the basement of the Chinese shop. Green challenges North to shoot him if he will not let him go, and strikes one of Sheng's matches. "A dragon of red and yellow fire appeared, emitting black smoke, illuminating their corner of the dusty basement. It appeared to wink at him, then vanished" (99). North is distracted by it and Green escapes upstairs, finding Sheng and his nephew, Dr. Pille, drinking tea. Sheng tells him, "We joke for gods. Relax, enjoy, laugh too. Do not do mean. Mean not belong joke. Die, drink wine with gods, laugh more" (100). [This ordering of events and Green's bold challenge to North might contextualize the final few pages of the novel, as well as the struggle between the dragon tattooed heavyweight champion Sailor Sawyer and Joe Joseph in a scene where North attempts to become Joe's "manager."]
87
88Green asks what kind of world has a doctor named Pille, and the physician claims that his family name was actually Di. [This name, too, has an ominous implication for his reappearance before the final chapter of the novel.] They discuss Green's treatment and diagnosis at United, and when North comes up, they are interrupted by two explosions from the basement. "A demon, an alien being, a thing of flame having nothing to do with the life of earth (that yet seemed to live), roared up the stair, crashed into a wall, and veered into the room where they were drinking tea" (103).
89
90Green awakens in the street, slightly burnt. A cop tells him Feds raided the theater, and that something started a fire. The officer offers to send him back to his hotel via taxi. During the ride, Green considers that North must be dead. "Striking the trick match had made North drop that cigar, and the sparks had set off the fireworks, so he had killed North. He felt no regret, guilt only about having none" (103). He also wonders if Nixon felt a twinge when North died. "Perhaps. For Nixon had been loyal, or at least so he understood. Loyalty had been that President's great, shining virtue, the thing that had made Nixon a threat" (104). [While much has been made of the connection between North and G. Gordon Liddy, one of Nixon's most controversial allies in the Watergate Scandal, the physical description we are given of William North, at 5'11'' and 170 pounds, with dark slightly balding hair and a mustache, as well as a tattoo reading RN on his right wrist, actually most closely resembles the 5'11'' and 175-pound president Richard Nixon, if he had grown a mustache. G. Gordon Liddy was somewhat shorter, and Vice President Spiro Agnew significantly taller. It could very well be that the RN tattoo North has and the size equivalence with Nixon are a hint that he is actually the "same" as his ideal leader (or, possibly, old boss). Green also thinks of his own birth during Eisenhower's administration: "Eisenhower had brought Nixon; Nixon had brought North" (105). The earliest president Green remembers might very well be Nixon, which could explain why North is patterned after him as an ideal: the disgraced and corrupt pattern of a strong leader.]
91
92During the ride, Green notices an evergreen "broken under its burden of snow" (105). He also ruminates about the rabbit's foot attached to the nurse's keys: "a rabbit would have gotten away even in that alley, run from the flames, bouncing over the trash cans and the broken, empty bottles, bottles emptied of cheap wine in which there was no Christ, wine grown in the California sun to be pissed away in a corner" (106).
93
94He also thinks about Marcella and her assistant Emma:
95
96>Emma stood at his elbow, and though he could not see her there, he knew her for a Nazi soldier, a transvestite of the S.S. He wanted to say, "*So, Colonel Hogan*," but the words would not come. The drawer was open, and in it lay the unopened letter, the letter shut with red wax. He was afraid of the woman, of the man behind him.
97
98> Why, I'm back in the dream again, he thought, and maybe when I wake up I'll be asleep beside Lara.
99
100> A single book lay upon the desk, pinned there with a nail so it could not be stolen. The title was stamped on the black morocco cover in German letters of tarnished gold: *Das Schloss*. (106)
101
102[The book is Kafka's *The Castle*, featuring Herr K. and Klamm. If we view the scenes "There" as an internal delusion, then Emma is simply another manifestation of a mentally ill male creator - a fragment of the male psyche in drag, as Green's strange thoughts run, influenced by his life experiences, from television to novels.] The driver lets Green out at the Grand, and he sees the dancing snow and the surf. He climbs giant slabs of ice until he feels himself a creature of the sea [these might resemble the "Giant's Causeway" discussed earlier]. He remembers his mother and her fairy tales and wonders if North is some kind of salamander of fire waiting for him. Insisting to himself that his mother is not dead, Green thinks it might be her letter in the "green-lined drawer of the dream" (109).
103
104When the snow clouds part and reveal the ocean, he "knew that in some previous life he had sailed there for decades; and that this previous life was returning to him" (109). [Whether or not this is a memory of amniotic fluid we shall leave to the reader to decide.] Green returns to the hotel and learns that the theater was called the Adrian. As he walks to his room, he wonders if he is dead, traveling through Purgatory or Hell unaware. Green also thinks of the hotel as some kind of living creature, with "empty veins and silent nerves. This was what a scalpel saw as it sliced flesh, this sectioned view that could not live" (111). He also recalls his childhood surgeries: "[Y]ou went to sleep in the daytime and woke sick. This had been the reality, this surgeon's elevator touring his body to learn how it was made; the wrought iron glared at him with the faces of jungle beasts, from the rolling eyes of a bull with the wings of a vulture and the bearded head of a man" (111). [This composite beast imagery will be continued in the symbols on the flags at the Grand: a double-headed eagle and a griffin.]
105
106In the morning, he tries to phone the hotel's doctor. When he does so, the doctor says he "[h]ad a bit of an accident" himself (114). Green descends to a desolate and windowless "cavern of boutiques" in his search for the doctor's office before finding him. There he meets Dr. Applewood, the physician in attendance at the Adrian Theater, who tells him that one of the men there, Daniel, is definitely dead, beyond saving, "once and for all" (115). The doctor asks to see Green's wounds, and the text jumps to Green in a coffee shop looking out at a low cliff. "Beyond that lay a broad expanse of beach ... [featuring] expressionless images ... among the shattered wrecks of others, some finished, some incomplete, some scarcely begun - all this executed in slabs of greenish sea-ice" (117). He considers than Klamm must be trying to account for everyone who was on the stage.
107
108The waitress there, latter revealed to be Fanny Land, looks "like the maid in some old movie starring Cary Grant" (118). As he watches the sea, remembering nights with Lara, he sees a large boat and remembers a line from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": "As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean" (119). [This line brings the reality of the scene into question, and once again the scenery seems to be heavily influenced by movies Green once watched.] In keeping with the winter and spring themes, Fanny tells him that "This is the worst time of year. Usually it's pretty good through Yule, and then it picks up again in March" (119). During a discussion about his name, he concludes that his assumed one of A.C. Pine must stand for "Adam something" (122).
109
110Green goes to see about cutting or coloring his hair at the hairdressers (where he sees an ad for shampoo featuring Lara). The waitress, Fanny, walks in behind him. The hairdresser and Fanny share an awkward exchange, and Green exits to eavesdrop on them. He hears Fanny say that the other woman knows her orders. He creeps away to talk to an older seamstress, who jokes that his jacket doesn't have room for a gun underneath it. They bargain for a suit of clothes, and she throws in a muffler for half off, of "pure virgin lamb' wool" (125). She offers to straighten out his doll's hair as well after he asks about the hairdresser, who is supposedly on vacation [The woman says, "She won't be open till the twenty-first" (125). Later, North's confession indicates that he stalked into Applewood's office right after Green left, on the morning of January 21st (294). These conflicting dates need not be a contradiction if we doubt the reality of "There" – note that according to the information we have so far, this could have been on any day *except* the 21st.]
111
112On his way back, Green wonders if the doctor has been arrested or gone home given the darkness in his offices. "He considered trying the door, entering the doctor's office if he could, and searching the desk; but decided against it" (126). He ascends a short stair outside to the parking lot, where the wind is persistent. "He felt that it was not a sea wind but a land wind; it lacked the flavor of the sea, seeming instead of have blown across lonely miles of featureless snow" (127). There are only four cars there, one of them a limousine. In the trunk, Green finds a file full of papers. They are blown by the wind, but he manages to grab one of them: a profile of William North, whose other names include Richard North and Ted West. He is described with burns on the palms of both hands and scars on his forearms. "(North is self-mutilator)" (128). [This information links up to both Attis and to the conclusion of the novel.] He is listed as extremely dangerous and a member of both Blue September and the chief of Iron Boot, arrested on June 6th of 1988. Another paper lists Daniel Paul Perlitz as deceased, and Green then attempts to reenter the door from which he came. It is locked. He cannot find a path clear of snow, which seems to limit his vision, and most of the structure of the hotel is "lost in the white erasure of the snow" (129).
113
114As he walks, he laments the lack of shoes and gloves. Leaving the parking lot, he finds one of the sheets which blew away, detailing Frances Land, also known as "Faith Lord" (130). She was born in Marea, AX and is described with six fingers on her right hand, and the dossier concludes, "Associates members Blue September, Immortals, Iron Boot. Believed sympathizer" (131). As he walks along a road, he considers that he might actually be dead and rotting at home. Soon a farmer named Grudy stops and gives him a ride back to the hotel, but he finds it "CLOSED FOR THE SEASON." The clerk visible behind the glass doors ignores him, so Green simply returns once again to the road. Cars pass him by until Fanny calls out from her vehicle: "You need a ride?" (136). The hotel claimed he had checked out, and she complains that her winter job is gone. He notices her hair has not been touched, and he tells her he is determined to go to Marea (138). He wants to talk to Klamm first, and she tells him he must go home with her. She reveals she was in the audience at the Adrian, and that though North had escaped, they let Dr. Applewood get away. When asked if he would turn against North, Green answers, "I've never been for him. I was a sort of prisoner - his slave, if you want to put it like that" (140). Green is hurt that she was merely playing a part in the coffee shop. She tells him that Laura Nomos (Eddie Walsh's attorney) from the theater is Klamm's step-daughter, and that she must look much as her mother did when she was young.
115
116Fanny takes him to her place, saying that she is twenty-two years old [though the dates on the files Green found indicate she was born in 1964, and that North was arrested as late as 1988. In C-One we can estimate that enough time has passed by the end of the novel to place it in 1988 or 1989, though time "There" runs differently.] One more important detail in their conversation comes up when he reveals Klamm called him Herr Kay. She says, "Sometimes Klamm himself is called Herr K. in the papers. ... But I don't see how it could be that if you were really on the phone with Klamm" (142). [All of the characters There are ultimately part of Green, so Herr K is in a real sense both Kay and Klamm.]
117
118In her room, he feels that the furniture is too small for him, as if it is scaled for a doll's house. They talk about Visitors who travel between other worlds, and how they are incarcerated or destroyed if they are dangerous. He tells a story about failing to recognize an old supervisor outside the workplace [another thematically important story for the larger implications of the novel.] "But after I thought for a while I saw he hadn't recognized me either until I said something. ... I'd looked different to Mr. Kolecke - so different he hadn't known me until he heard my voice, and I think maybe that's the way Lara is for me" (146). She reveals that Klamm is the President's security advisor and that he grows roses as a hobby. [The various manifestations of Lara are associated with roses; this is also Joe Joseph's hobby, mentioned when he was introduced. Green has been unable to recognize that Walsh and North are simply parts of his own personality.] Fanny concludes that Green was locked out of the hotel because it was simply a case of "men protecting a man" from their inquiry (149). She also warns that North is a special threat, who "could end civilization. He could start the whole human race on the downhill path" in his quest for power (150). After further talk, she suggests eating at Capini's.
119
120There, as Fanny notes his distraction, Green is recognized by Mama Capini, who says he has been gone for a month. She remembers Lara: "Nice girl, too good for you" (155). Mama also shares that Lara was there last night with a newly married couple who are later revealed to be Joe Joseph and his wife Jennifer. When Fanny expresses surprise that Mama notices so much, she says, "[Green] brought [Lara], then she brings this couple. It's my business, so I noticed" (156). [This echoes the language of Eisenhower bringing Nixon and Nixon bringing North.]
121
122When Green needs change, one of Mama's sons breaks his bill for him as he makes small talk: "They shouldn't have let those sons of bitches bust up the Bell System" (157). Green receives C-One currency, and hypothesizes that Capini's door is in both worlds, and that he will be able to return home, though Fanny gets change in the currency of "There." Green says, "If I go home, that's the life I had before I met Lara. She may visit my world, but this is where she comes from. This is where she lives, so this is where I'll find her, if I find her at all" (159). [We will discuss the metaphorical meaning of Capini's below, acknowledging that it is derived from *capo*, or "head."]
123
124As they eat at Capini's, Fanny asserts, "You really are crazy, that's what I think" (161). They continue to discuss the nature of the world, theorizing that "both worlds are only frequencies," like different channels on a television (164). [This resonates with calling Green's ordinary reality C-One.] He believes that when he leaves Capini's, he will be in his world again. As they depart, Green catches sight of Lara outside, "snow blowing past her" (167). Mama Capini calls out goodbye, and Fanny turns around to wave as they step through the door. Green finds himself alone in the street, with "snowflakes sparkl[ing]in the sun, blown from the rooftops by a spring wind." He chases Lara into a fur store and discovers that she just dropped off her coat. The clerk adds, "She picked it up last October. But it had been with us for twenty-six months, sir" (169).
125
126Green finally returns to his apartment, discovering that it is April 15th and that thirty-three days have passed since Lara left him, though to him it seems only four nights. He does his taxes and resists the urge to pull out the Tina doll. He cleans up and finds no trace of Lara, attaining some new clothes as well. When Green returns to Capini's to eat, the waitress does not recall him eating there for lunch, assuming another waitress named Gina served him. Green asks her to find Gina and looks through his pockets, finding a checkbook. [The last check was written on March 11th; he recalls writing one for the doll even though he cannot recall the amount: "[H]e was not sure a check could be presented for collection by a shop in another world, a shop in a dream" (176).] He finds no trace of Guido, the Capini son who talked with him about Joe's fight, and wonders if he was drawn into the other world. Green returns to his apartment to watch television. "After an hour or so, he realized he had no idea what the show was or why he was watching it" (178).
127
128The next day he goes to work, wondering if he should talk to Mr. Capper, the man in charge of his department, or Personnel. [Notice the similarity in name between Capper and Capini - Capper as a name denotes a wearer or maker of caps or headgear.] He opts for Personnel, and Ella, the secretary there, tells him she carried him on sick leave for a while. [To Green she looks like Fanny, "though perhaps he was just forgetting what Fanny looked like" (181). Most of the people There are based somehow on Green’s real life.]
129
130Mr. Drummond, the manager of personnel, comes in and speaks with Ella, and Green waits outside, perusing *Time*. He wonders if he saw any papers there, and remembers, "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" (183). [This association between seeing Walsh in the paper and thinking about comics no doubt reinforces that Walsh is based on a character from the comic *Joe Palooka*, which Green might have read in syndication or come across as a child.]
131
132Drummond calls him in and accepts responsibility for failing to keep an eye on Green. He instructs Green to go visit his doctor immediately and get a note before returning to work. On the way out, Ella asks if he is okay. Green says he is fine, "suppressing the fact that he had to go see some doctor he could not remember" (184). Green tries to figure out which doctor he might have been seeing, and winds up calling Dr. Nilson's office, introducing himself as Adam Pine.
133
134>"Dr. Nilson -" Faintly someone called "*Lara! Lara!*" He could not tell whether the voice was male or female; it sounded far off and scratchy.
135
136>"Would you mind if I put you on hold, Mr. Green?" (186)
137
138[Later, Green realizes that the voice calling out at Lora Masterman over the phone belonged to Klamm. She instantly recognizes Green despite his false name - based on our thesis, Green himself is calling out for her in need.] Dr. Nilson picks up, and Green asks to speak to Lara. "To Lora? She just left" (187). The doctor asks Green to come in to her office.
139
140On his way, he contemplates the antiquated feel of There and remembers a time when he had gone to singles bars "one or two nights a week, a time that had ended when he realized the women were looking for husbands and not for love. (No, never for love)" (189).
141
142When he arrives at the clinic, he finds himself crying in the street when he sees working men taking down wires from overhead [representing the loss of his initial entrance into There, when he found himself before the doll shop.] In Dr. Nilson's office, he takes a pen from the empty receptionist's drawer which reads "DOWNTOWN MENTAL/HEALTH CENTER/LORA MASTERMAN" (191). Dr. Nilson tells him she has seen him eight times, though he can only remember coming on March 14th. She tells him he was looking for Lara Morgan, and at first refuses to show him a picture of Lora Masterman, who has quit suddenly. Dr. Nilson says, "the description [of Lara] doesn't fit Lora at all" (193). She asks for proof of Lara's existence, and finally offers to show him a picture of her secretary.
143
144"'Don't! ... There isn't any picture there. ... Or if there is, it won't show Lara. Lora.' He did not know how he knew, yet he did" (195). When he sees the brown-haired girl, he recognizes her as Tina. "I think when she looks like that, she calls herself Tina" (195). [His knowledge of Lara as an abstract concept seems to become more conscious at this point.]
145
146He asks if Dr. Nilson has ever looked at the impossibly distant stars, and wondered why God put them so far away. He starts to tell her about the world next door, and mentions "a goddess ... who wanted to make love to a man from our world ... Because in her world men die after they make love" (197). He tells the doctor that this world was much like the one they are in. Soon, "two husky black men in the trousered white uniforms of male nurses [enter]" (198-199). He tries to fight them, but they force him into a straitjacket. Dr. Nilson calls Mr. Drummond to inform him that Green is being hospitalized, and may be able to return to work when he is released.
147
148As Green is taken away, he can't help himself from spurting out, "*This will keep me from finding Lara.*" Dr. Nilson responds that it would be pointless to look, "just as it would be pointless to look for Cinderella" (200). As he is being taken away, Dr. Nilson answers a call from Lora. Green asks one of the aids about her, but the man says he didn't pay any attention to Lora because she was a "white girl." [This male attendant might be a character double for W.F..] As they continue to discuss her, the attendant describes her as a woman with "big blues and one of those china-doll faces," but the driver of the car says, "That Lora woman has green eyes, fool" (202).
149
150He is transferred to an institution in the suburbs. During his interview with the doctor there, we are reminded that it is April 16th. [While there are multiple connotations, the most likely significance to this date is its position within the spring festivals which often featured the burning of an effigy after the equinox.] The interview ends when Green claims he was at work a week beforehand. During his institutionalization, he plays chess with another patient whom Green recognizes as the man who sent him to spread the news about Al Bailey at United Hospital, which led to his meeting with North. There are several pieces missing from the board, and they substitute "a red king for the missing white queen" (206). [Possibly also symbolic of the masculine coping figures Green has met (such as North, identified as a fiery salamander) after the loss of his mother and Lara.] At this point, his opponent also brings up electroshock therapy and even notes that Green has been undergoing it, as the burns from the theater match up very well with the wounds suffered during treatment. "[S]ometimes he felt sure he was back in United. Once he told a smooth Korean about United and Dr. Pille, and the smooth Korean, Dr. Kim, giggled" (207). [There are close cognates for almost everything Green experienced There, including a piano which he will recall after being released.]
151
152After a previously kind attendant wants him "to do something he did not want to do" behind the boiler, "It came to him that he was there for a memory that was, after all, no more than a dream" (207). When Green claims during an interview that the entire time he was missing from work was a blank, it seems that the doctor is satisfied, and the text jumps to Mr. Green set up in a new apartment, getting his clothes and furniture out of storage. He is transferred to Furniture and Major Appliances and soon resumes his sales career quite successfully. He delves into his occupation: "He learned to tell red oak form white, white oak from maple, maple from walnut, walnut from pecan, pecan from teak, and at last false rosewood from real Brazilian rosewood" (209). [Because of the manifestations of the Goddess being associated with roses, as well as the fate of Attis, who dies under a pine tree, this ability to distinguish both the types and the veracity of woods is thematically important.]
153
154As he resumes his life, it seems that there were only two seasons "- spring, during which the department carried lawn and patio furniture, and of course Christmas" (210). Three Christmases come and go, and an experience with the owner, H. Harris Henry, sees him transferred to antiques. There, he becomes interested in "a small desk of unimpeachable pedigree that had begun its career nearly two hundred years ago in the service of a British sea captain" (211). It features green-baize lining, and Green would often smell it: "The old captain had kept his tobacco in the upper left drawer, he thought; the other odors were fleeting and deceptive - so much so that he was never certain he was not imagining them" (211). [This desk represents the key scene in C-One, and it is certainly no coincidence that Green's imagination is invoked as one of the main components in regard to the desk and its features. He first had a vision of it when examining the locker at United, and it clearly holds significance for his mental well-being.]
155
156One night he dreams that he is sitting at the desk at sea:
157
158>The floor moved beneath him, gently rocking, rising and falling with a motion he saw echoed ever so faintly in the well of black ink into which he dipped a feather pen. "My Dearest Heart," he wrote. "My good friend Captain Clough, of the *China Doll*, has promised to post this in England. She is a clipper, and so ..." There was a hail, and hurrying feet drumming the deck over his head. He sat up, and in a second or two he was laughing at himself, though there was something within him - some part that was still the old captain - that was not laughing. (212)
159
160[The name Klamm can mean a "gorge, ravine, or pass," and the name Clough also denotes a "ravine," probably equating their roles. However, the word clough can also signify "to wither, pine, or cling," which has many connotations for Mr. Green, aka Adam Pine - adding a new, sorrowful level to the name as well.] The next day he encounters Martha Foster, "an ugly middle-aged woman [who] made him show her the desk" (212). He is surprised at how dark the day becomes after she buys the desk. "People had been talking for weeks about what a beautiful fall they were having, about Indian Summer. It seemed to him ... that winter had arrived at last, and that it was likely to be a hard winter. He had a heavier coat, a long wool coat of a gray so deep it was almost black, put away somewhere. He reminded himself to get it out" (213). [Clearly his failure to attain the desk has stained his entire world view.]
161
162This prompts him to retrieve his heavy coat (as well as the doll in its pocket) from storage. Getting out the coat makes him realize that he is living in a different apartment: "His fireplace was gone - he could not understand how that could have happened. He recalled lying there in front of the fire, drinking brandy with somebody, with some girl, a woman. ... Had she taken it with her when she left?" (216)
163
164He thinks of taking a girl from Better Dresses out:
165
166>It had been a mistake; she had been like all the rest, a single woman looking frantically for the kind of man who would never consider her if she found him, a handsome wealthy, athletic college man who was sensitive, intelligent, cultured, and completely blind to what she was. ... And yet was he better? Yes, he thought. Yes, I am. ... But what am I? Surely not god, and it was God who said, "*I am*." (217)
167
168[This solipsistic consideration of apotheosis does not preclude Green as a kind of unconscious demiurge, as we will discuss below.] He begins to drink again and puts on Christmas music, "moved by a dim recollection of opening boxes beneath the tree as a child" (218). He starts looking through his clothes and soon finds the map. When he regards it, he sees, "Its highest elevation was Mt. Hieros; judging from its white center, Mt. Hieros was capped with snow" (219). [Hieros is a term for the holy or the sanctified, and the motif of snow is once again prominent in these most dubious of scenes.] As he considers this, "the neighborhood of his old apartment had returned to his mind vividly now" (220). He finds the doll, and thinks, "He must have dated a divorcée. He had gotten the doll ... to give to her little girl; no doubt Christmas had been coming then, as it was coming now. Then he and this woman had broken off, and he had put away the coat without emptying its pockets" (221). [Clearly, losing the desk has brought depression and despair back into his life.]
169
170Failing to concentrate on the Midnight Movie, he cradles the doll "as though it were a child, haunted by the feeling that he too was on TV, that he owed his whole existence to some set playing to an empty room, that he and the doll were lost, were the lost children in the woods in the story his mother had let him watch when he was very small so long ago." He begins to cry, and "a tear dotted the green smock, another fell upon the graceful little legs, and a third plashed full in the doll's piquant face. And the doll moved like a living girl in his hand" (222). [His sadness brings Tina to life again, at least for him.]
171
172She begins to talk to Green, and mentions a tea party. He says, "Seeing you reminded me of somebody else, of somebody I'd forgotten ... . Or at least that I'd put out of my mind" (224). Green eventually resolves not to tell Dr. Nilson about Tina, and "the memory of a disheveled man in hospital pajamas playing an out-of-tune piano returned with such force that he seemed to see and hear it, seemed to feel the unyielding wood of the bench upon which he had once sat" (227). [This memory mirrors his spectral experience at the Adrian.]
173
174Eventually, he and Tina discuss his father. Green claims that his father never loved him. She asks what he wants for his birthday, and he indicates the desk. "I think you should get that for your next birthday. I'll tell Daddy" (229). Their discussion eventually turns to Lara: "You remind me of her. I used to be in love with Lara - ... But I lost her, somehow" (230).
175
176He attempts to call Martha Foster at the end of his work shift to purchase the desk, and she is suspicious of his motives. Finally, she understands that he didn't realize how much he valued it until it was gone, but still refuses to sell him the desk. As he leaves, he sees a paper which reads "SUICIDE RATE CLIMBS." He thinks, "If I'd made the world ... Christmas would be a good time for everybody" (234).
177
178He finds himself in the arcade below the Grand Hotel of There again as he walks, and the woman at the haberdashery insists that he pick up his pants, which have been waiting four months for him. She tells him that Dr. Applewood is dead. Green tries to take the elevator to the ground floor, and as he walks, "he discovered to his surprise that he was happy. It took him half a block to find the source of his happiness in the knowledge that Lara was real even if Tina was not" (238). Wondering if she would reject him as a servant, he resolves to become her slave. "What was the talk of anyone else ... but an animal's imitation of Lara's voice, of the laughter of the goddess?" (238) He finds himself back in the world of C-One, and is bothered by the knowledge that Tina will be waiting for him in the apartment. "He would have to admit to her then that he had not been able to buy the desk. Already the taste of failure was bitter in his mouth" (239). [Failing to attain the desk has set him once again on the path to delusional depression - first it caused the appearance of Tina, and now it results in a further break with reality.]
179
180At home, Tina searches around the house for the currency of There. She condemns TV as "just talk to use up the time" (241). He reads Tina a story of Joseph and his blind brother Jacob as she looks. The brothers fall upon hard times: "Because so much snow falls in the Black Forest during the winter, making it a white forest for whole months at a time, the brothers had to buy enough food in autumn to last until spring. And after several years had gone by, there came an autumn when it could be seen that they could not" (242). For money to survive, they decide to try their hand at writing. Jacob asks his brother to look outside and tell him what he sees, so that he can write it down, selling it to the *Schwarzwald Gazette*. [The Scharzwald (Black Forest) in Germany is actually known for its influence on the Grimm Brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, famous for their fairy tales. Here, the brothers are not direct representations. The use of the name Joseph for Wilhelm is important, given William North's pseudonym Campbell and the fighter Joe Joseph as an avatar of positive masculinity. We should also note that Wilhelm is a form of William that has been substituted with Joseph in Wolfe’s novel, almost as a mathematical equivalence. Wilhelm is also Klamm's middle name. All of these characters are related through Green’s mind.] To beat Jacob's writer's block, Joseph begins to look for images in the forest outside. When he sees trees waving in the wind, he says that the blue shadows creeping across the hoarfrost are a black wolf, and his brother begins to write. The next time, he sees a bright bird above and says, "I see an enchanted princess picking blackberries. ... An enchanted princess with wings" (244).
181
182Their poverty increases as they send off the tales, and Joseph resolves that the food will be saved for Jacob. (During Green's reading, Tina has continued her search for the strange money, mostly finding dirt and junk. At this point, she pulls up a root, which Green identifies as "a magic charm" (246). He wonders if it will bring mail, and she insists that it will, proving its efficacy. "He was not often subject to sudden insights, but he had one then; it was that he was arguing with a doll about a magic root" (247).) As Green continues to read, he describes how Joseph looks outside and sees a sleigh bringing a woman in white furs. Joseph realizes she is a princess, looking for the writer of the stories she has read. He says his brother writes the stories, but when they come to the door, Jacob says, "What my brother has told you is not wholly true. It is indeed he who writes my stories - I, as you see, am blind. I merely write them down" (248). [This tale is of course a framing metaphor for the third person narrative: Green as Joseph looks into the world and his mind creates fancies, which the third person narrator (Wolfe as Jacob) writes down. In the final look out the window, when all hope is lost, Joseph's perceptions at last match reality.]
183
184A knock at the door brings a huge package for "Seven C" (249). The delivery man brings it in, and as he is leaving, Tina advises him to say thank you for finding the charm. She reveals that she was born on Christmas, and calls him "a jealous god, like the one they talk about" (251). [Attis and Christ are both typically said to have a birthdate of December 25th.] Tina says she used to belong to a goddess, a young girl who made paper crowns for both of them. "And then something happened. I don't know what - something bad. Then you were holding me and crying" (252). As they talk, he gets a call from Lora, who tells him not to go to his appointment with Dr. Nilson's next Tuesday, as she has a consulting job to do that day. He might be able to go in the next day instead, and Green takes the opportunity to ask her to lunch. "He found he was looking at Tina while thinking of Lara. That was why he had bought Tina, of course - because she reminded him of Lara; but she was not Lara. Lora was Lara" (253). Lora says she has been married and divorced, and has a child now. Green hints that he might make Tina a present for her daughter Missy. He tells Tina, "I don't think this little girl really exists. If she has a doll, it probably isn't real either" (255). [The simultaneous arrival of the desk and the call from Lora are definitely a point in the narrative set in C-One where there is reason to question reality, as Green's mental despair increases, but it also complements the powerful desperation he displays during the climactic lunch with Lora.]
185
186Green strains to open the crate, finally ripping off a board. While he is doing that, Tina has found the money in a pocket of his coat. She explains, "It's a double pocket ... Only the middle thing had gotten pushed up underneath the flap. When I got in, I could feel the money on the other side" (256). He sends her into the crate to explore, missing her "as soon as she was out of sight" (257).
187
188She does not answer his calls, and he manages to crack open the rest of the package, pulling out the "yellow mats of shredded wood [which] had been pushed down around it to give extra protection" (261). The package holds the desk, "his desk" (261). He untapes the drawers and continues to search for Tina, finding an envelope. The letter from Martha Foster reads:
189
190>Dear Mr. Green:
191
192>Mother gave me an antique doll when I was twelve, and I have been a collector ever since. That's more than fifty years now. Do you know Kipling's poem?
193
194>*There was no worth in the fashion -
195>there was no wit in the plan -
196>Hither and thither, aimless,
197>the ruined footings ran -
198>Masonry, brute, mishandled,
199>but carven on every stone:
200>"After me cometh a Builder.
201>Tell him, I too have known."*
202
203>It was a favorite of my late husband's.
204
205>Merry Christmas. You will pardon an old woman her sentimentalities. (262-3)
206 
207[The poem is "The Palace," and will be discussed further below.]
208
209Continuing to search for Tina, he manages to open a hidden panel on the desk.
210
211The text jumps to "Lunch with Lora," where Green has displayed his doll to Lora Masterman. He says that he has come to understand antiques since they lived together. She emphasizes it was only for a few days. She insists she left not because of his qualities, but because she wasn't good for him: "You started blocking. You forgot - I mean on the conscious level - that you were a patient, and that was very bad. You even forgot that we'd met in Dr. Nilson's office. ... I'm afraid you're going to start it again. You're constructing a delusional system, with me inside" (267).
212
213He insists that the place he visited was real. Mama Capini comes by and says, "You two, you're back together? That's good" (268). Lora is surprised, saying, "It's been years" (268). Green insists he acquired Tina to own a piece of her. "Anyway, a lady I thought was a bitch sent me the desk, because she knew how much I wanted it. It turns out she's a saint, really, underneath" (269).
214
215Lora says sometimes that it goes the other way, and Green says that if she is a devil or fallen angel he will follow her back to Hell. He realizes that Keats's "Le Belle Dame sans Merci" must also have been patterned after her. [In that poem, a knight comes across a beautiful woman and travels with her as she sings her "faery's song." She takes him to her grotto, where he is lulled asleep and dreams of deathly kings and warriors who warn him that now he is in her thrall. "And I awoke and found me here, on the cold hill's side," alone in destitution, where no birds sing. This association bodes ill for Green's fate.]
216
217Green claims he found Tina inside the secret compartment of the desk, and that she has run down because he had failed to give her tea. He starts to prepare an electrolyte solution to reawaken her, and she sits up and says, "I belong to you ... I'm *your* doll, and I can talk" to Lora (272). Green displays the note left to him by Lara, but Lora does not understand what he is talking about concerning doors. He threatens to call Channel Nine, using Tina and the note as evidence. Lora goes to leave, but Tina begs her not to, telling her how pretty she is.
218
219"This is crazy ... I should have known it would be, so it's my fault. Thanks for lunch" (273). Green says that things sort themselves out, and asks, "What happens when something belongs to both places?"
220
221Lara says, "Let's call my world the sea ... And yours the land" (273-4). The alteration in her voice was "minute yet vastly significant - she had given up a hopeless game that no longer entertained her. ... There were freckles beneath her makeup, and her eyes blazed green" (274). [This represents Green's final break with the reality of C-One. One can imagine that Lora stormed out, though from Green's point of view she casts aside the illusion and becomes Lara, love personified.]
222
223Lara tells him that the sea will draw heavy things, which will sink. She says that things with both light and heavy qualities will "not lie heavily upon the floor of the sea ... it is possible the timber will be washed ashore" when a storm comes. She says, "I am the storm" (276).
224
225Green takes out a locket containing an old miniature of her face in profile. He says that her name is inside the lid: Leucothea Fitzhugh Hurst, and that it was in the secret compartment with Tina. Lara says that she is also Tina: "You wouldn't have been happy if I had been Lora Masterman, because Lora Masterman was your psychiatrist's receptionist; so I was Lara Morgan for you" (277). She reveals that he was depressed.
226
227>"There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having. You were one of those lonely men, whether you would admit it to Dr. Nilson or not. ... You were an only child, and your parents separated while you were still very young. Your mother was your best friend - in fact, your only friend. After your mother died, you managed to cope for a year or so. But you wouldn't talk to customers, sometimes, and you were drinking too much." (277-8)
228
229She says that she loved Captain Hurst, whose name was William, and that he was often called "Blaze-Away Billy Hurst." She tells him the story of their shipboard romance, and how she fell ill and had to be left behind; Green assumes she was gone by the time he returned. She asks him, "What is it you want of me? That I love you? I do already, as much as I'm capable of love; if I hadn't loved you, I would have stayed with you far longer" (279). He says that another Billy told him about her lover Attis, and he learned how Attis "cut himself for you ... because he thought that was what you wanted" (280).
230
231She says she loves him, "as much as the old woman at the next table loves some little dog, possibly" (280). Green wants only to follow her, and she proposes a test by taking a small piece of bread to be dropped into the wine. If it sinks, he will be free to follow her. "If it floats ... I will die." She says, "You will anyway" (281).
232
233"Red as blood, wine raced up the snowy sides of the bread, and it sank like a stone" (281). She hisses "So be it," and rushes out, with Green running after her. [This reiteration of the snowy bread stained with blood, and her promise that he will die anyway, are quite portentous. The imagery is appropriately Eucharistic, given the connections between Attis and Christ.]
234
235Outside, Green passes by a church and is assaulted by North, and their conflict ends with Green on the ground retching. Tina asks if he is sick, and he answers in the affirmative, smiling. North pushes him to a wide metal door painted dark green, displaying the name Joe Joseph. They burst upon Joe Joseph preparing for his bout with the champion, with Walsh, W.F., and Jennifer. North proclaims that he is the fighter's new handler, and threatens them all if they do not go along with his desires and allow him in the corner. There is a knock at the door, and Lara comes in. Walsh introduces her as his attorney, Laura Nomos. [Nomos means "law" and also refers to customs and habits of social behavior which are constructed by society. Laura Nomos bears a strong resemblance to her mother, Klamm's wife (141). This is no doubt a set up for much of the allegorical significance of the championship fight, for North espouses a philosophy of might and strength making right, regardless of the law and society's customs.]
236
237North says, "Tonight I want to be out front where everybody can see me. I want to be associated with a popular male figure - a truly masculine man. I want the best seat in the house for the title fight" (287). He says he will expose Walsh's insanity, telling Laura, "they'll sure as hell connect Walsh with you, and you with Klamm. With a little help, they might even connect Walsh with Green here, and he's as crazy as a blue crab" (288). [This chain of connections should be taken literally.] North also provides her a signed confession of the murder of Dr. Applewood to ensure that he won't use the threat again.
238
239As the fight looms closer, North concedes that perhaps he will allow Walsh to take his place in Joe's corner after he is seen sufficiently. Jennifer waits in the dressing room, and Laura instructs Green to come along with her as the others head to the fight. She intends to join her stepfather. He asks how long it has been for everyone, since only four months seems to have passed here, while for him it has been years. He asks if she lives forever, and Lara says, "There are many forevers" (292). She introduces him to Klamm, who again calls Green Herr Kay. They discuss the champion, Sailor Sawyer, whose tattoos cover his body and prompt Tina to say, "That dragon's alive!" (293)
240
241As the fight is about to begin, Lara shows him North's confession, in which he claims to have slain Dr. Applewood after his confederate left the doctor's office, then to wait in their hotel room "intending to kill him when he returned, but [Green] did not return" (294).
242
243The fight ensues, and at times the dragon seems to wrap "Joe in golden scales" (296). A few rounds progress, and at first it seems to go badly for Joe, who then comes on strongly. When the bell rings, Walsh rushes to Joe's corner as W.F. screams for water, and North produces a gun in each hand and turns them towards Green. Green catapults over the ropes and somehow, in the struggle, gets his hands on the gun, twisting it around and leaving North's jaw "a red horror" as North continues to strike him (297). Joe assaults North and the violent man falls dead near the center of the ring. When Joe speaks to Green, his "words [are] muffled, slurred by Joe's mouthpiece" (298). Walsh says that he only got one shot off at North. [This is of course the conclusion of North's gambit to take control of Green and dominate his behavior. As the quote at the start of this essay shows, something seems to have invaded Green's brain here, and he has also lost teeth and suffered severe facial damage. Even Joe's speech is affected during this altercation, hinting at a close relationship to the wounds of Green, Joe, and North, whose jaw was left a bloody mess. North, Green, and Walsh all fire a gun in this scene.]
244
245The fight resumes, and Klamm instructs the referee to make it a long round. Insisting that Green must be taken to a hospital, Klamm indicates that Lara is gone. Outside, word spreads of North's death. "A man of about his own age wept without shame, sallow cheeks flooded with tears" (299). Three black cars, "one an enormous limousine," wait for them. Klamm offers to reward Green. Tina implores, "He needs your help, Papa" (300).
246
247Klamm admits that Laura is the goddess and that they still hold hands. "Perhaps we kiss when nobody sees. ... Do you envy an old man so much, Herr Kay?" (301) Klamm tries to explain the manner in which Green's calls reached his desk. "We arranged that such calls should ring at my desk. ... She told me of you and that I was to assist you, should you ask my assistance. You did not. ... When I am gone, another must answer my calls. Sometimes we must act at once; then he acts for me, in my name" (302). [This resembles praying to God with the intercession of some intermediary such as a saint or an angel, and the allegorical association of Klamm with a Heavenly Father who remains unasked for help works, but seeing Klamm as an internal manifestation of Green's absent father or super-ego also makes sense.]
248
249When Green asks about seeing the assistant on TV, Klamm says, "Perhaps another would have seen what you saw, Herr Kay. ... More often, not. She was near you then, and she brings such dreams; I cannot explain why" (302). Green feels as if the limousine should be pulling up to a hospital at this point. They arrive at St. Anchises's. [In Greek myth, Anchises was the mortal lover of Aphrodite. He boasted of the affair and was struck by a thunderbolt, in various versions blinded or killed. Certainly, this also sheds light on Green's situation.] Klamm bids good-bye to Green, saying, "I only call you Herr Kay because I remember an old friend, that was myself also" (303).
250
251Green is soon surprised to be treated by Dr. Pille: "I thought you were at that other place" (303). Dr. Pille says he is there when he is needed, and begins filling a hypodermic.
252
253When he awakens in the morning, Green finds his overcoat in an unlocked locker, recalling that he had not had it in the limousine with Klamm. Tina is inside it. He gets tea for her from the nurse, and says that someone is coming to take him somewhere. "I'm not sure I'll even go" (307). Green is taken to a dentist, and comes across a magazine showing Lara, labelled, "Marcella Masters relaxes at home before beginning work on *Atlantis*" (308). Fanny is waiting for him in his room, and he is released to her custody. She says, "I'm responsible for you now, and I'll catch hell if I lose you" (309). He gets Tina out, and Fanny says soon enough he will throw Tina away after staying with Fanny for a week or two. "You don't die, do you? ... We can do it over and over, as often as we want to" (309). As Green prepares, Tina tells him that she does not like Fanny. He says, "I do, ... But not enough" (310). [Fanny's nickname, "Faith Lord," would certainly be apt as an agent of Klamm in this scene, where Green has the choice of putting aside his almost idolatrous deification of love as Lara or in continuing his pursuit to its ultimate end.] He hangs Sheng's charm around his neck and ties his blood smeared tie before being pushed outside in a wheelchair.
254
255It is spring, and Green notices a store nearby selling music, with the song "Find Your True Love" displayed in the window. They hail a taxi, and Green locks Fanny out, telling the driver he is going to the railway station without her. Green also whispers that they are headed to Manea to Tina. [This is the second time Manea has been used rather than Marea in the text: the first time occurred when Joe Joseph brought up traveling there in despair, possibly to kill himself, if he lost his love.] The driver hears him regardless, and they pass a fountain: "[I]ts splashing recalled Klamm - the tears in Klamm's eyes. Klamm had followed the letter of the law, but suddenly he knew that no one would question the driver or pursue them" (312).
256
257The whistle of a locomotive blows, "singing of lovers' meetings in distant places," and Tina whistles along: "*Whooee! ... a-whooee!*" (313).
258
259## Uniting the Madness: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
260
261In Wolfe's contemporary settings, it seems that representational and symbolic associations actually make more sense of the plot than surface actions. When Green is incarcerated in United, the name of that institution indicates that all of the men there are actually just aspects of his personality, united together in his delusions under one roof. As the triple goddess or the feminine principle in the story is represented by Lara (or Laura/his mother), Tina (or Lora), and Marcella (or Martha), Green's own personality may have conversely fractured into different aspects. Thus, William North is the self-destructive will to power in Green; Eddie Walsh the damaged and vulnerable older man holding on to a dream, and Joe Joseph the idealistic and capable champion who will engage the destructive dragon which might be yet another aspect of Green's most repressed tendencies. Thus, when Green notes that Adalwolf Wilhelm Klamm answers the phone call he makes to his own apartment, even Klamm might represent something like the most elevated fatherly figure that Green can conceptualize, both benevolent paternal figure (forever absent from his real life) and the ideal of the super-ego. Seeking to gain control of everything, North is willing to do anything, and his profile indicates that includes self-destruction: "North is self-mutilator" (128). This will tie in to the myth of Attis as well, whose madness and self-mutilation lead to his death under a pine tree.
262
263Klamm insists on calling Green Herr Kay, and says at one point, after revealing that he, too, was Lara's lover, "I only call you Herr Kay because I remember an old friend, that was myself also" (303). Of course, these figures are all ultimately (Wilhelm/William) Klamm, for he is but a manifestation of Green. Lara (as Laura Nomos) indicates her affection for these men as she notes that all of them, including Sailor Sawyer, will be dead in a few years: "Let them all engage with Death, an opponent worthy of any strength. ... I do [like Joe]. He's like a big, solemn child, so eager to please and to do what is right. And Eddie, because he'll reshape the world to fit his dream or die. And W.F., because he loves them both" (292).
264
265Green, too, is attempting to reshape the world to fit his dreams just as Laura said Walsh was, and many of the most important scenes in the institution make more sense if they are internal metaphors and the characters there represent aspects of his own internal struggle for dominance and control (or reflections of real life experiences that have doubles in the waking world of C-One). North teaches Green how to unlock his sealed memories and desires. The mail charm sealed inside the locker might also be a charm of masculinity and power, one which brings with it the innate worthiness of deserving love, while obviously the Tina doll represents his search to duplicate the love he lost when his mother died. In many ways, that mail root might serve as a kind of stand in for the ideal masculine figure - in this case, probably Joe Joseph, given that both Walsh and North are trying to "handle" or guide him. Green also sees the key to his problems sealed in that locker when he witnesses the disappearance of Lara through the dreadful arch (his mother's death), the approach of Tina (his courtship of Lora Masterman), and the touch of Marcella (signifying the loss of the desk, and perhaps its return, at the hands of Martha Foster, whose last name might imply a kind of surrogate or foster mother for him).
266
267When Green returns at last to his apartment and escapes his delusional system, he finds a crossword puzzle which demands "seven letters meaning *bear*" (173). While produce, deliver, or support might all work to solve this puzzle, the burden placed upon Green by the waking world soon proves too heavy for him to bear, and he loses himself in delusion once again. The final action scene, with North brandishing two guns, has a disturbingly suicidal connotation, as the opening quote to this essay reveals taken out of context. Not only does North's gun appear in Green's hand, his turning of the gun and the sudden malevolent and destructive presence in his brain at that point could very well be a suicidal action (though it might not be entirely successful, given the ambulance or police-like noises made by Tina on the final page). Even more strangely, Walsh ends up with one of the guns in his hand during this scene and claims to have fired it. In other words, when we look at them as a group, North, Green, and Walsh escape the institution together, and in the climax, somehow they all wind up with North's gun in their hand and fire a shot: "'I only got one shot at 'im,' Walsh confesses. 'Somebody was always in the way'" (298).
268
269When Green first escapes United with North, Eddie Walsh sneaks out as well - and Green comes upon North by following the instructions to reach Eddie's room. In the final confrontation, North muscles in to take control of Joe Joseph as manager, trying to circumvent Eddie Walsh. Even though it seems that Green is fighting North in this climax (as Joe was just fighting the dragon tattooed Sailor Sawyer), the metaphor for management and control over the innocent and brave child-like fighter is brought to life in this destructive power struggle. Green considers during his break out that "even United had not thought him crazy, only an alcoholic. He was - supposedly - a drunk, and North was what? A schizophrenic maniac" (76). Green, too, is suffering from something terrible, threatening to tear him apart from the inside. North was undergoing electric shock and lithium treatment, and later Green shows evidence of those burns on his own face in the world of "C-One," because he himself has been undergoing it.
270
271The pattern of abuse from North starts at their very first meeting, where, fittingly, Green fails to apprehend North's identity when he first leaves "the good wing" of United (33). Indeed, Green follows the instructions to get to Eddie Walsh's room, and somehow winds up in North's, who is calling in his sleep, "*Yes, Mama?*" (37) When Green finally remembers the news he is supposed to spread, he tells North in ignorance: "Billy North went into Al's room to borrow a cigarette, and he caught her at it" (40). In typical North fashion, he reacts violently by slapping Green; Green punches North in the nose in retaliation. The mirrored nose injuries at the start and the end of the novel, the calling out for mother, and the presence of North in what should have been Walsh's room all make a chilling kind of sense if North, Walsh, and Green are fractured aspects of the same person. In a scene with the seamstress, Green is warned that his nose will run terribly without sufficient protection from the wind. The metaphor for Green's mental state is given life when he is first incarcerated at United: 
272
273>As from a great height, he looked down upon an endless plain of snow. It was nearly featureless, yet lit by a slanting sun so that such features it possessed cast long shadows to eastward, their shadows more distinct and more visible than they. Night came quickly from the north, devouring the shadows, transforming the plain into a featureless darkness lit only by the memory of light. (24)
274
275Here, the shadows cast by real objects are more distinct than the objects themselves, just as Green's delusions are more real than his everyday waking world. From the north (or North), the threat of darkness erasing everything manifests itself. When he meets North, Green's failure to recognize him actually continues throughout the novel, for Green lacks self-awareness. When North teaches Green how to get into his locker without getting shocked, this is a clear metaphor for Green's retrieval of his repressed and blocked memories, but they must be unlocked in such a way that he is not subjected to more electroshock therapy, or they will be locked away again. Many of the other symbols or motifs help to cement the internal consistency of this overarching narrative unity. For example, both William North and Fanny are members of Blue September (128) and her nickname as "Faith Lord" is even more allegorically suggestive of her role in Green's psyche (130). Blue September might hint at the depression Green faces as the winter months come ever nearer.
276
277When he is in Fanny's house:
278
279>He sat, feeling the chair was too small for him, that it had been scaled for a child, that it had once been part of the furnishings of a doll's house - furnishings dispersed long ago, scattered through smoldering dumps, through Salvation Army stores until only this chair and the doll remained. (145)
280
281Unquestioning faith is a remnant of lost childhood that once fit him, and in the mature world he believes he has outgrown it (though he still prefers to play with Tina and selects her over Fanny at the end.) Even with these allegorical associations, Fanny is still a combination of ordinary women from Green's waking life: "Fanny put her fingertips together, reminding him suddenly of the buck-toothed woman in the Downtown Mental Health Center" (145). When Green goes back to his work place, he also notices how much the secretary Ella "looked like Fanny, though perhaps he was just forgetting what Fanny looked like" (181).
282
283Just as Fanny seems to become associated with a faith in something besides the goddess, the goddess is a personification of every type of love:
284
285>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. (182)
286
287Even though Klamm and his agent seem to operate like God and his saints or angels, they too might be further manifestations of a part of Green's personality. When a temp secretary tried to call Green's house, Green's manager claims, "She was never able to reach you, but on one occasion she got someone who said his name was Perlman, or some such" (184). She might have reached the love-injured and moribund persona of Daniel Paul Perlitz, listed as deceased at one point after the Adrian explosion, though this is not a clear association.
288
289Both Joe Joseph and Klamm grow roses, and Green associates the three women who could very well be aspects of the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother, and Crone) with roses:
290
291>One seemed darkly amber, languid, sultry and freighted with spice. Another, light yet evocative of ripe pears and apples, suggested a pink flower. Between these two, sometimes subtle, sometimes wanton, danced a third, insinuative of no color, but daring, seductive, and ravishing. By one of those insights that come when we are near sleep, he knew that this was Lara herself, the first Marcella, the second Tina. (56)
292
293These vibrant symbols in the text do not merely extend to the feminine. When North and Green go to the Grand Hotel, Green sees flags bearing a two-headed eagle and a griffin (115). These composite beasts also resonate with the fragmentation of Green's will - the many characters There make up one man. At this point, Green wonders "If he was not in fact dead," considering his disbelief in Purgatory as a child:
294
295>[B]ut perhaps he had been wrong, as he had been wrong about things so many times since, wrong about a whole series of wrong choices that had seemed likely never to end - until at last Lara had chosen him. Did they have fires in Purgatory? No, they had fires in Hell. (111)
296
297As the elevator moves at the Grand Hotel, it seems to excavate the hotel like a living thing: "[I]ts veins and nerves laid bare by this cage of wrought iron, which displayed to him water lilies and pyramids at one level, golden cattle and sheaves of wheat at the next. ... This was what a scalpel saw as it sliced flesh, this sectioned view that could not live" (111). As Green descends the elevator, "He felt that he himself was only a ghost, riding a ghostly elevator in a phantom hotel, that this building had fallen to the wrecking ball long ago" (114). The Grand Hotel is in some ways Green himself, who has lost his sense of greatness and nobility as he aged, and has considered the failure of his senses since the start of the novel. Besides these unifying images, many of the homages throughout the novel involve madness and suicide, such as the references to Attis and Leucothea and the creator of *Joe Palooka*.
298
299### All the Myths of Madness: Leucothea; Cybele and Attis; Blazing Billy and Sailor Sawyer; The Importance of Broadcast Frequency; Memories of Mother
300
301When Green finally gets his desk, he believes that a locket inside the hidden desk depicts Lara. The name she gives to describe that identity is Leucothea Fitzhugh Hurst. In the most common version of the myth of Leucothea, Ino the sister of Semele is driven insane after providing care for Dionysus. She commits suicide by jumping into the sea with her child, where they are transformed into sea-gods, with Ino becoming Leucothea and her son becoming Palaemon. There are other variations of the myth, but they all involve madness and attempted suicide. Green, too, constantly wonders if he is mad and continually doubts the reality of his surroundings, as when he considers the black fluid surrounding the unclear figures outside his room at United:
302
303>It came to him that this viscous ichor was perhaps the reality, that the faces and figures to which he was accustomed might be as false in essence as the photomicrographs printed in the newspapers on slow news days, pictures that showed human skin as a rocky desert, an ant or a fly as a bewhiskered monster. This was how God saw men and women; who could blame him then, if he damned them all or forgot them all? (31)
304
305Given the heavy use of fertility myth in this novel, involving associations between Lara and the mysterious mother goddess Cybele, Frazer's *The Golden Bough* is probably one of the better places to examine the rituals and myths associated with her lover (and possibly son) Attis, with its obsessive attention to fertility and sacrificial rituals. The holy celebration of Attis which begins on March 15th celebrates his abandonment, insanity, self-mutilation, and death under a pine tree. [Additionally, Attis, Tina, and Christ seem to share a birthday, at least according to some traditions.]
306
307>[Attis] appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring. The legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike that the ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was said to have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of fertility, who had her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis was her son. His birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to have been miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived by putting a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in the Phrygian cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all things, perhaps because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the first heralds of the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before the leaves have opened. ... Two different accounts of the death of Attis were current. According to the one he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he unmanned himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. ... The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service of the goddess. The story of his death by the boar may have been told to explain why his worshippers, especially the people of Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In like manner the worshippers of Adonis abstained from pork, because a boar had killed their god. After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree. ...
308
309>On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was entrusted to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a corpse with woolen bands and decked with wreaths of violets, for violets were said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as roses and anemones from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young man, doubtless Attis himself, was tied to the middle of the stem. On the second day of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth of March, was known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering. Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood. The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and may have been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. (Frazer)
310
311The self-mutilation of North (and possibly Klamm) is certainly within this tradition. The resonance between the sailor Blazing Billy Hurst, William North (once referred to as a fiery Salamander), and even Sailor Sawyer is no doubt intentional. We should also note again that Klamm's middle name is Wilhelm. The all-consuming dragon of fire is an ominous figure which struggles for possession of Green's life and soul, and it is obvious that there is a thematic relationship between the dragon tattooed boxing champion, the flames that threaten to consume Green at the theater, and the nickname of the sea-faring Billy Hurst. If Green is unconsciously suicidal, one of his cogent realizations involves the speculation that there are fires in hell.
312
313The surface explanation for the relationship between the two worlds involves broadcast frequencies, in which similar objects would resonate with each other and create a kind of conduit between the worlds. However, Green wonders how realistic television and its shows, revealed through broadcast frequency, could actually be. As he listens in on Fanny talking to the hairdresser under the Grand Hotel, he thinks, "He had seen people - actors - do it on television and in pictures hundreds of times, and felt somehow that it could not possibly work in real life. The women would hear him, or they would be talking about nothing. But was this real life?" (Wolfe 123)
314
315During his walk outside the Grand, he finds himself "in a world of black and white, and it seemed to him after a time that he was no more than a bit player in an old movie, an old black-and-white movie" (131). He considers older actors like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell:
316
317>Shone so brightly even in black and gray when they should have been dead. How happy they were to be still alive, there in the flickering celluloid, there on the cramped screens that had been tacked to the radios they had known, how joyful! Just like him. He might be dead now at home, dead and rotting as he sat before the television in the chair he had bought so cheaply; but he was alive here, his crimson blood proved it, even if this was the last reel. (133)
318
319Given the denouement of our story, he very well could be dead and rotting soon. When he eats with Fanny at Capini's, she says, "[B]oth worlds are only frequencies, and nothing's solid at all. ... You tune to a certain channel and get two signals, one for picture, one for sound. ... When you change the frequency in your set a lot, it picks up a new channel, and the show you've been watching is gone, there's a new show, with different people" (164). Fanny asks him to think about watching television all his life, and asks what would happen if someone "changed the show" on his retinas, "that little screen at the back of your eyes" (165). At this point we might as well discuss the significance of Capini's being in both worlds. In addition to Italy's key position in both the pagan and the Christian worlds, prompting the emphasis on an Italian restaurant as a gateway between two different realities, Capini is a word derived from *capo*, or head. It can imply "from the head" or even be a diminutive of head. During this discussion at Capini's, Green also remembers the show *Brigadoon*: "He had seen *Brigadoon on HBO, and he tried to recall how it had ended so he could tell her. Nothing remained in his memory but the name and swirl of plaid skirts, the skirling of bagpipes" (166). *Brigadoon* featured two tourists from New York visiting Scotland. The mysterious town of Brigadoon had been sealed away, appearing only one day every hundred years, effectively locked in the past (unless a citizen ever left the city, which would cause it to disappear forever). When the main characters arrive there, one of the tourists falls in love with a girl from the city, and, amidst other turmoil, eventually the tourists leave and return to their old lives. One is haunted by the memories, and returns, expecting to find only emptiness. His love overcomes the spell, and he is able to enter Brigadoon once again, disappearing into the mist with the lost town. Green might similarly vanish into his delusions, and this informs our understanding of the Italian restaurant. Green's head is in both worlds, and Fanny as Faith cannot leave Capini's because of this symbolic layer to the text: faith is an intangible quality of the mind and soul.
320
321Speaking of souls, Green realizes almost at the start of the novel that "[I]n the depths of his soul he believed the last few days had been only a nightmare that everything that had taken place since he had met Lara had been a dream, that he must soon wake up and go to work; and if he went to work without his tie, he would have to buy one in Men's Wear" (73). When he dons his tie at the end of the novel, it is stained with blood. In our reading, all of that blood is actually his.
322
323### Snow, Delusion, and the Difference between Marea and Manea
324
325When Green flees from the parade and is knocked unconscious:
326
327>As from a great height, he looked down upon an endless plain of snow. It was nearly featureless, yet lit by a slanting sun so that such features as it possessed cast long shadows to eastward, their shadows more distinct and more visible than they. Night came quickly from the north, devouring the shadows, transforming the plain into a featureless darkness lit only by the memory of light. (24)
328
329Obviously, this depicts the threat of North, and establishes the indistinct winter outlines of snow and shadow which are indicative of delusion. Wolfe will use this relationship between snow and reality again in his third-person short story, "The Ziggurat." The Grand Hotel and the paths which lead to it are frozen in ice and snow. "Snow still danced across the broad flagstones; it was a dance of ghosts, of whirling white shapes that advanced and retreated in profound silence" (107).
330
331This frigid imagery is intimately tied to the water nearby: "The snow clouds parted for an instant, and the moon touched the ocean. He, seeing that fragment of it tossing in the silver light, knew it and knew that in some previous life he had sailed there for decades; and that this previous life was returning to him" (109). At one point he tells Tina, "I used to be in love with Lara - that's why I bought you. Lara was the woman in front of the fireplace. ... But I lost her somehow. I lost her walking through the snow" (230). While normally fire and snow are mutually exclusive, in this novel they both represent dangers to Green. While Lara once languished before a tame fire, the fire which eviscerates the Adrian blossoms into violent life when she is gone. Afterwards, a cab driver takes Green back to the Grand. During his ride, he sees an evergreen "broken under its burden of snow," another clear portent of A.C. Pine's fate (105).
332
333All of these symbols come together in the maternal image of the water: "The ocean spoke to him as an angry mother berates her child" (135). His memories of his mother push him onwards, for Lara is first and foremost created from her, though no doubt Lora Masterman's implied rejection at Capini's actually pushes him over the brink.
334
335>It seemed to him that he was himself a creature of the sea, a seal, a dolphin, or a sea lion made human by some heartless magic, magic like that which had given the mermaid legs in the story that had made him cry long ago ... . 
336
337>And it came to him that in those days before television had wholly claimed him, he had received from the mouth of his mother all the instruction he would need to navigate this queer country in which he found himself; but that he had paid no heed, or at least not enough heed, so that he could not recognize as once he might have recognized all its ogres and its elves, the shambling trolls and the dancing peris. North had been a monster, surely; yet what if North had been a salamander, and the master of the flames? ...
338
339>Surely his mother had taught him a spell for salamanders? Nor was she dead, as he had once foolishly imagined. (109)
340
341When he and North see the notice of their escape, along with Eddie Walsh, in the newspaper, he thinks of his mother's words "When they were about to lose the house: *'I took my chances*'" (85). His mother constitutes his earliest image of love: "His mother had been Lara, he felt - Lara in a way that fluttered off when he tried to grasp it. Not quite the Lara who had lived with him, yet they were both ..." (85). He remembers her walking him to school every day as a child, warning him, "There were bad men, she had said, in the city who would steal little boys if they could. Perhaps they had" (105).
342
343Regret over the death of the mother is expressed even at Capini's, though Mama Capini seems to be a stand in for her, trying to guide and encourage Green in his prospective relationships. One of her sons (in the real world of C-One) says, "[T]hey shouldn't have let those sons of bitches bust up the Bell System" (157). This monopoly was also known as Ma Bell for its representative female voice, and was broken up in 1983. The death of the mother and Green's subsequent inability to maintain masculine composure suffuses the text even in small details such as this.
344
345One final distinction that is probably not a typo involves the difference between Marea and Manea. Fanny is from Marea, and it is listed several times as a city close to the goddess, evoking both the name Maria and the sea. When Joe Joseph's hypothetical despair at the loss of Jennifer is considered, the text indicates that he might go to Manea. At the end, Green tells Tina they are headed for Manea. Previously, Asperin became Aspenin There, with a hint of spring in its application. In following the course of Man, which can be self-destructive, Green is actually turning away from Marea, into the delusions, purgatory, or hell which might follow an attempted suicide.
346 
347### The Brotherhood of Man, the Dragon, the Mail Root, and the Female Principle
348
349There are several important images which are introduced when Green encounters Sheng. One of them is the dragon imagery which will recur in both the explosion at the movie theater and in the finale, in which the boxer Joe seems to fight a tattooed incarnation of that dragon as William North tries to assert his control over the professional fighter, harnessing the ideal symbol of masculinity to his purposes. Another gift from Sheng is the "mail root," which Green for an instant believes might be a "male root" or some kind of fertility (or potency) charm. It is also locked away in United, and Green learns to open that door from North. As his more assertive and power-crazed persona, North is helping Green to find some of his basic masculine character, embodied by the root. Unfortunately, North's worship of power un-tempered by love, seeking to be free of containment, is dangerous not only to others but also to himself. 
350
351Sheng tells Green that it is the law of heaven there be "one paradise each man" (18). When Tina moves in his pocket, Green indicates that he is in fact in Paradise rather than Hell in Sheng's shop, though Sheng gave him the choice to decide where he was. "For a moment their eyes met, and he knew that the Chinese was his brother, despite the differences of half a world - and that the Chinese had known it even in the alley" (19).
352
353In this scene, a white smoke dragon from Sheng's pipe fights a savage steam dragon, illustrating the struggle between two subtly different but indistinct forces in the interplay of paradise and hell. Sheng plays another vital part in the progression of the story, for he also introduces his own doll, Heng-O. Heng-O is the Chinese Goddess of the moon, the symbol of yin, the dark and cold female principle. She was married to the archer Shen Yi. Shen Yi was known for a drink which granted immortality in some versions of the story. In her desire to live forever, Heng-O stole the drink, but was unable to completely consume it, and was thus stuck at the moon, betwixt the heaven of the other gods and the earth. (Her festival is held near the fall equinox.) While the name Sheng bears some resemblance to the heavenly archer Shen Yi, it is also a word used to denote the main role in Peking opera. One of its subtypes, when an older male is employed, involves the role of Guan Gong, the Chinese god of brotherhood. When Green looks at the old man, this brotherhood, a positive manly love, is invoked, crossing barriers of language, race, and age. That brotherhood is universal. The semi-immortal nature of Heng-O resonates nicely with an ideal personified, certainly less than God but very much more than mortal, as Love becomes in Green's mind.
354
355Green has never felt himself truly worthy of love, according to Lara. The mail root Sheng gives Green seems to be an envelope in his hands, but it also gradually starts to accrue into a "male charm" as well - the quality of manliness which makes someone worthy of being loved as well as bringing attention and correspondence. It prompts the arrival of both the desk which Green so coveted and a call from Lora, whom Green insists on calling Lara. The attainment of the desk is Green's primary concern in the waking world. In one of his dreams, experienced while approaching the Grand Hotel, that desk had a copy of Franz Kafka's *The Castle* nailed to it.
356
357### The Castle, The Palace, and the Relapse
358
359When Green escapes the burning Adrian Theater after his first glimpse of Klamm, he has a vision involving the desk which will come to symbolize the attainment of a mature version of his dream. Nailed to the desk is a copy of Kafka's *Das Schloss*, or *The Castle*, a book which features K. as its protagonist and Klamm as a kind of high official who represents the ubiquitous but frustratingly impenetrable castle of the title. Whether the castle represents a secular or divine authority, it remains perennially beyond K.'s grasp as he lives in its shadow, forming relationships and trying to survive in an ill-defined feudal system still burdened with bureaucracy. It seems that affairs with officials from the castle are desirable affirmations of status and worth, but readers get the sense that K. will never understand the world in which he has come to live. It is never clear if the castle is completely divorced from a spiritual, worthwhile goal or not, but it is still mired in pettiness and carnality, for all its resemblance to a divine, untouchable order remote from day to day life.
360
361Similarly, as Green escapes with North from United, he considers that the broken bottles on the street are "emptied of cheap wine in which there was no Christ, wine grown in the California sun to be pissed away in a corner" (106). He wonders if there was even a California in the world next door, and considers Marcella with her servant Emma, knowing her "for a Nazi soldier, a transvestite of the S.S." before thinking once again of the drawer with its letter and the copy of Kafka's book. This confusion, coupled with the strange mixture of negative images preceding the unveiling of the book, is innately tied with Green's desire for the desk which will come into the hands of Martha Foster.
362
363The desk appears at Green's first incarceration in United in the other world, after Marcella has sent her flowers. He has a vision of working:
364
365>The aisles of Furniture had become deserted highways lit by the level radiance of a setting sun and stretching for hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles, lined with brass beds, bookcase beds, and big waterbeds, all of which he showed the woman; ... When they had seen innumerable beige sofas and cozy wingback chairs, they came at last to a Chippendale writing desk. He pulled out a drawer to show her its green baize lining and found that it contained an unopened letter sealed in red wax imprinted with a heart.
366
367>Aware that the woman strongly disapproved of what he was about to do, he nevertheless took out the letter and broke the wax, which snapped like glass.
368
369>The snap was also the flicking of a switch. The infinite furniture aisles and the finite world were plunged alike into night. A woman stood in the dim doorway; from the gesture she made of thrusting her purse beneath her arm, he knew that the snap he had heard had been the sound of its clasp.
370
371>He sat up, but the woman had already turned away. For an instant her face was lit by the hall light, and he saw that she was Marcella, the woman whose picture (but it was Lara's) was on the card that had come with the roses, the woman he had seen in the garden. (58-59)
372
373When he finally gets the desk (which seems to be a triumph in the real world just as his final lunch with Lora is probably a failure), Martha Foster includes a stanza from Rudyard Kipling's "The Palace" in her letter. In that poem, a great architect attempts to erect a wonderful palace on the site of a previous builder. He disdains the nonsensical foundations and tears them to pieces. Alas, soon this builder abandons his work for future generations to the same disorganized outline, becoming a part of a tradition which can never encompass everything. The lost love of Martha Foster hopes to inspire something positive in a younger man, in a letter which perhaps reminds its reader that though things are lost and broken, the foundations remain, for the palace can neither be completed nor completely destroyed - it is forever under construction, like ideal love.
374
375If we view There as a delusion, then there are a few mysteries that may or may not have a ready explanation. One of them involves the money which Green seems to have purchased from Sheng for a pittance. At one point, he speculates that perhaps Lara provided it for him after all. Another involves his need for the desk. While there is no clear indication that this desk was ever a part of his mother's estate (or an accessory in the house they lost), it becomes clear that Green does not value the desk until it is beyond his reach and sees it as a symbol of Lara and her love for a worthy, adventurous man who braved the sea. It is conceivable that once upon a time, that desk was in his mother's possession, but that Green has once again blocked out a painful memory. Perhaps he even sold it himself for the cash which appears so mysteriously. Certainly, he associates it with a vital and immortal message from his mother, one from beyond the grave:
376
377>His mother had never been the waxen thing they had buried. He wondered where she was and why she had not called or written, why she had not advised him in some way, though perhaps she had, perhaps it was her letter that lay in the green-lined drawer of the dream. (109)
378
379### The Relationship of the Goddess and Klamm
380
381While readers have certainly picked up on the relationship between Green and Attis, the self-mutilating consort of Cybele, the implications of Klamm's closing statements do not seem to have been fully explored. The complex tangling of sexual desire, the continuation of life, chivalry, the personification of love in all its forms, and the conception of God as a being of perfect Love all come together in a metaphor where lesser, perhaps even false representations actually become sincere. Unfortunately for Green, he may be entering a purely delusory or spiritual world, with Klamm's "greatness" forever muted by unseeing eyes:
382
383>Klamm was there, the only occupant of a box, a crag-faced old man with long, pointed mustaches dyed jet black and cheeks pulled flaccidly downward by the weight of years. The great man ... seemed to be sleeping with open eyes, staring straight ahead as if content to wait, cigar in hand, for taller actors or more lofty themes, though they might be never so long in coming. (96)
384
385When Lara approaches him in a gown of shimmering material with the color of a double rainbow, Green thinks "her own glorious hair more beautiful, a part of her person that in transfiguring her transfigured itself" (97). This idea of transcendence as a two-way street is one of the most interesting themes in Wolfe's novels, for in following an unworthy goal the seeker still manages some form of sincere transfiguration.
386
387### Women and Men
388
389On a slightly more general note, this novel definitely confronts archetypes of femininity and masculinity. On the Urth Mailing List, James Jordan emphasizes the innate differences between men and women in Wolfe's writing:
390
391>That's Wolfe's view, and it definitely informs everything he writes. Theologically, the difference between men and women ultimately reflects the difference between the Son and the Spirit, between the Creator and His creation, and between Christ and the Church-Bride. Wolfe has clearly put a great deal of thought into this, and it is in the background, occasionally the foreground, of his work.
392
393>While there are various Doors between our world and "There" in [*There Are Doors*], the most significant is the Italian Restaurant, which is of course the Roman Catholic Church. The Mama figure is the Church Herself, and her black-dressed sober sons are priests. Wolfe's perspective is that Christianity is the fulfillment not only of the Hebrew revelation, but of all the best aspirations of all pre-Christian belief, and that the Church draws all of that into herself. Thus, Mama encourages Mr. Green to pursue Lara, an encouragement grounded in redemptive intent for both of them.
394
395>I strongly suspect that the reason men die after intercourse in "There" has something to do with Christ's death to bring life to His Bride. Wolfe brings out many societal implications of this feature of "There," of course, but I suspect many have more symbolic meanings than a first reading would disclose.
396
397>In Christianity, masculinity is protological and [femininity] is eschatological. Adam came first, but Eve comes last. Men initiate; women glorify and culminate. Christ comes to initiate the New Creation, which develops into a glorified Bride-Cosmos. Thus, as Paul insists in Ephesians, the man must lay down his life for his bride. Men die; women inherit.
398
399>These kinds of distinctions are REALLY offensive to modern sensibilities, of course, but you aren't going to understand Wolfe very well without them.
400
401>Since men and women are radically different - different all the way down to the depth of the psyche, just as the Son and the Spirit are wholly different yet one in God - so the sins of men and women tend to be different. Thus, in Wolfe there are bad men, and bad women, but they tend to be bad in different ways. Similarly with good men and good women. (Jordan)
402
403While some of our current understanding of *There Are Doors* is more rooted in the madness of Attis and the mythology behind the Mother Goddess (as well as understanding Mama's interests in Green's love as the natural concern of a surrogate mother in the head of a depressed man), Wolfe directly address these differences between the sexes in his novel:
404
405>Women and men thought different things important; it was something he had understood half his life, because of his job. Now it seemed to him that it might be important in itself: women would not care as much about cars; women would care far more about children's loneliness, and their education. Women in power might even see to it that there were dolls like Tina. (Wolfe 241)
406
407While Jordan has touched upon differing roles of men and women, there remains the all-consuming fire of North: undeniably masculine yet so utterly destructive that nothing lasts long before its fury.
408
409### The Sexual Metaphor and Capini as "The Little Head"
410
411While Freudian analyses of Wolfe might prove particularly unsatisfying, it seems that one of the major plot devices has no truly adequate explanation unless we turn the door of the title into the significant doorway of death (and the turned, possibly self-directed gun). The necessity of passing through the door backwards without turning around is supposed to be *significant* in both worlds, and perhaps this makes more sense if that imagery can be applied either psychologically or metaphorically to the sex act itself and the separation of male and female even after their union. If Green enters a delusion, he should attempt to back out of it with his previous perspective in mind rather than turning to embrace the new, all-consuming point of view. Similarly, in a more highly physical sense, turning around and seeing the world from a purely female point of view would be to lose the masculine features that the boxing match at the end of the story seems to emphasize. North wants to control that masculinity, but Lara, the avatar of love, has already taken Joe and his wife to Capini's. Joe Joseph knows what true love is.
412
413As we have already discussed, the *capo* is the head of the family, and the suffix -*ini* usually indicates a diminutive or affectionate connotation, thus making Capini "the little head." It is also part of a group of names in Italian which can denote block-headedness or stubbornness ... or in this case, it could very well indicate that the "little head" of a man does a lot of his thinking for him. Green can either turn around and embrace his delusion or take a step backwards and try to recognize reality. Turning North's gun around might also represent a significant shortcut to another world.
414
415## Conclusion
416
417Of course, it is left to us to decide if Green's quest for love represents a quite ordinary trap for an exceedingly ordinary character, or if he actually achieves the power to escape the banality and emptiness of his existence and reach for something truly divine. There is no easy way to dismiss the traces of Green's very real depression and separation from reality, given all of the struggles "There" which otherwise make little sense. The burns on his face which match the electro-shock scars of another patient and his perennial return to an institution or hospital where he is medicated may have a slightly cynical implication: to seek perfect love in the fallen and flawed world is insane - but perhaps it is a worthy goal. That love, which both emasculates and prompts one to heights of manly accomplishment, is both a terrible sickness and a transcendent cure. Even if Green is trapped in an institution, he is seeking a love that is more important than his empty and lonely life. The illness of Eddie Walsh is quite the same as Green's, on perhaps both a figurative and literal level. He has been institutionalized because he believes his fighter is the champion. The cure is quite simple: "I think the best way to help him might be for you to become champion. Then he'd be well" (51). The climax of the novel shows just such an effort as Joe actually fights the dragon-decorated champion, in a fight which would restore his manager to sanity, though the violent and reactionary masculinity of North seizes the opportunity to attempt to destroy Klamm (with pistols aimed squarely at Green), trying to sow chaos and catapult his own concept of self-destructive masculinity into the goddess's world. We should never forget the central conceit of "There": the need for love and sex is ultimately self-annihilating, and it seems that Green is no different. Yet the story of the brothers Jacob and Joseph offers one small hope: when Joseph looks out the window the final time, his perceptions match the reality of the Black Forest, for a princess has arrived at last. Even if Green's quest has taken him beyond the life of his physical body, there is a transcendent spiritual reality waiting for him, where he can continue the pursuit of love.
418
419For Walsh to be cured, his delusion must become reality. For Green to escape the insanity of his search for an ideal love, it, too, must become real, transfiguring the world around him to one of magic and mystery, the Overwood of the Goddess, just as, in one telling description, Lara is transfigured by her hair, which in exalting her transfigures itself. This then, is how Green can overcome his own emasculated weakness and grant himself value as a man: he must believe in love, no matter what the degenerate world of reality and his senses tells him - even if it takes him to Purgatory or Hell. Some things are more real than the material world, even if they can never be touched with mortal hands.
420
421# Resources
422
423- Cohn, Gary. "The Rules of Moopsball." 10 Jun 2005. Web. 23 May 2016. http://eblong.com/zarf/moopsball/
424
425- Frazer, Sir James George. "The Myth and Ritual of Attis." *The Golden Bough*. 2015. Web. 1 Jun 2016. http://www.bartleby.com/196/81.html
426
427- Jordan, James. "Wolfe's Women (There Are Doors)." *Urth Mailing List*. 30 Jun 1998. Web. 1 Jun 2016. http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0015/0045.shtml 
428
429- Kafka, Franz. *The Castle*. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2009. Print.
430
431- Keats, John. "Le Belle Dame sans Merci." *Poetry Foundation*. 2016. Web. 1 Jun 2016. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44475
432
433- Kincaid, Paul. *What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction.* Essex: Beccon Press, 2008. Print.
434
435- Kipling, Rudyard. "The Palace." *Poetry Lovers Page.* 2016. Web. 1 Jun 2016. http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/palace.html
436 
437- Wolfe, Gene. *There Are Doors.* New York: Tor Books, 1989. Print.