I Get No Kick from Champagne

The Inimitable Dr Wang (2)

I’d just disconnected as I reached the top of the stairs, when the door buzzer went. Cursing under my breath, I ran back down three flights of stairs and opened the front door. A tall, skinny man was standing on the doorstep, holding a doctor’s Gladstone bag. He was in his fifties, with tightly curled shoulder length blond hair streaked with grey, tied back in a pony-tail, a ratty beard at least eight inches long, and intelligent blue eyes observing me with interest and disdain through bifocal glasses. He was wearing jeans and a tee-shirt and cowboy boots. Jeans? Cowboy boots? What kind of doctor makes house calls wearing cowboy boots? And he didn’t look remotely Chinese.

“I am Dr Ken Wang,” he said, in a slight North European accent. My face must have expressed my surprise, because he sighed, and said, “Wang is an old Norwegian surname.” He pronounced it ‘vang’ or ‘vung’. “It means ‘cheek’.”

“Quite so,” I replied politely, smothering a grin. “How did you get here so quickly? I’ve just this instant called you.”

He didn’t answer, instead looking at me with raised eyebrows, and saying in a very dry tone, “And you are . . . . . ?”

“I’m the person who called you. Steven.” Obviously – else how would I know that I’d just finished calling him? What a nong.

“There is much we need to talk about. But first, the patient.”

“This way,” I said, leading the way up the stairs to my room, wondering what on earth a complete stranger needed to talk to me about.

Tiltheus was lying on the blankets, staring up at the ceiling. When he looked at me, I could see that he was completely lost – he had no idea where he was, and rather looked as if he didn’t know who he was. I felt sorry for him. I’d read ‘Lord of The Rings’. I’d read the Liberal Party’s manifesto. They were fantasies – and therefore by definition untrue – but at least I had some frame of reference. This poor guy was probably shitting himself at the sound of the trams and the cars, and was wondering just how a log cabin in his world connected with an upper story room in mine.

“Ho de iatros estin,” I said, giving him a smile, explaining who Dr Wang was.

“Nai,” he replied, but he clearly doubted me. I wondered too – Dr Wang was quite different to my expectations. But it turned out that Dr Wang did actually know about healing.

He briskly asked Tiltheus to take off his shirt, in English. I translated, and when he saw the lacerations across Tiltheus’s chest and side, he sucked his teeth.

“Hmm. Interesting. And what did this?”

“Some kind of wild animal. A giant eagle? A harpy? Tiltheus didn’t explain very well.”

“You’ve been ‘across’, haven’t you?” he said as he cleaned the wounds, obviously unfazed by the honey-blood.

I nodded. ‘Across’. That was rich.

Dr Wang opened his Gladstone bag. It appeared to be much larger inside than it looked from the outside. Of course. A doctor specialising in aliens and elves and were-creatures wouldn’t be so dull as to have a normal doctor’s bag. No, he had to have a bag that defied Einstein’s and Newton’s laws. I wondered whether it weighed less than it should, too. He pulled out a packet of dried green leaves that looked suspiciously like something distinctly unmedical, making my mouth water. To my relief, he didn’t also haul out a pipe, but he did bring out a silver bowl. Then, he closed his eyes and prayed. At least, that’s what it looked like. As he finished the prayer, the green stuff in the silver bowl ignited, without matches or lighter, and the room was filled with the scent of high places, where the air is magical and healing, and great pine trees shed their needles into a foot-thick layer of mulch. I was taken right back to trips grandpa had taken me on, to the mountains around Melbourne.

Dr Wang placed his hands on Tiltheus’s wounds, and began to sing softly. As I watched, the flesh began to knit, and the orange-red inflammation to disappear. Tiltheus looked as surprised as I did. Would that regular doctors cured that easily. But then I suspected that the good Dr Wang was much more than an M.D., and that his qualifications, written or not, extended much further than the usual M B/Ch B. It appeared that I had not just a Greek-speaking elf, but also a wizard in my room. Oh, not to forget a doorway which defied all the known laws of physics to connect an otherwise perfectly ordinary Art Deco cupboard with another world, perhaps even another universe. And I’d even forgotten, with all the excitement, that I just been kicked out of a two-year relationship.

“You must rest,” he said to Tiltheus, which I dutifully translated.

“Rest!” snorted Tiltheus. “I’ve things to do.”

Dr Wang must have guessed what Tiltheus meant, and he was even more unimpressed when I explained what he had said. “They’ll have to wait,” he said firmly. I grinned at Tiltheus, who was looking grumpy as I translated.

“Will alcohol kill him?” I asked.

Dr Wang took Tiltheus’s arm in his, and pressed against Tiltheus’s upturned hand with his own. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then said, “No more than it will you. But keep him off the green stuff. It appears to be both profoundly addictive and toxic to this species.”

I felt myself blush with embarrassment. Damn clairvoyant doctors. “OK,” I grunted.

“Now I need to talk to you. Come here.”

And without my meaning it, I found myself standing in front of him. He took my chin in his hand and looked deep into my eyes. Suddenly he was no longer amusing or twee, but terrifying, alien, ruthless. In his eyes, there was the knowledge and cynicism of centuries. As quickly as he’d grabbed me, he let go.

“Show me the doorway,” he said softly. I opened the cupboard door, pushed my clothes to one side, and gestured. Be my guest, I thought.

There was nothing there, just the back of a nineteen-twenties cupboard. The gateway between the worlds had gone. My astonishment must have been comical, because the doctor chuckled.

“It will be back when it’s needed. Now that he’s here, there is a permanent connection. And if you go over there, the same thing will apply on that side,” he said.

This was not reassuring. I had a reffo¹ in my room, with nowhere to live, who had no income and no way of earning an income, probably terrified by modern technology, and unlikely to be easy to explain away to my friends. Friend. Thank God tomorrow was Saturday, and I didn’t need to work. Maybe the gateway would decide to come back before Monday.

“What,” I said with some acerbity, “am I supposed to do with him?”

“Show him the sights. Try not to frighten him too much. Don’t let the authorities get their hands on him. And if you need help, ring me.”

I started to enter his number into the mobile’s memory.

“I’ve already put it in,” he said, casually.

How had he done that? Really, I would have to smoke less of that green stuff. Really and truly. Because I was obviously going mental.

“You have some special connection to the other side,” he continued, changing the subject. “I suppose the cupboard appeared quite normal when you bought it?”

I nodded. “I checked it at the op-shop.” Not anywhere near thoroughly enough, I thought, irritably.

“I’m not sure whether it’s the combination of you and the cupboard, or the house and the cupboard that created the gateway, or even you and the house. You could find out if you were prepared to move out – but why bother? It takes a lot of nexuses coming together to force open a gateway, so it could even be that all three had to be present simultaneously.”

How did he know all this stuff? I wondered. “I can believe it about the cupboard, and even the house. But me?” I was frankly incredulous. I was just an ordinary bloke, doing an average job, with a dull, uneventful life.

“You have no idea, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but overrode anything I was about to say. “You are the One. You have been chosen for a task.”

“Don’t believe it,” I said. Me, Steven Witherspoon, serial failure – the One! But there was a certain louche attractiveness about it. I’d always wanted to be rich and famous. I was prepared to settle for one of the two. Preferably rich.

“Why do you think that the idea – the ideal – of a saviour, rising from nowhere, coming to save the world is so potent, so universal? ‘Star Wars’, ‘The Matrix’, ‘Lord of The Rings’ – all those stories?”

“Because Hollywood knows it can sell more stories that way? You know – pathetic, hopeless loser makes good. And the pathetic, hopeless losers go in droves to the cinemas, to triumph vicariously over adversity and beat the crap out of mythical bad guys and aliens.”

He just raised his eyebrows at me. I blushed. Yeah, right – there I was: loser, failure, dickhead, the perfect candidate to save the world. At that moment, Tiltheus asked what we were talking about. Poor bloke was obviously bored stiff. I explained, necessarily abbreviated, because I was still struggling with my Greek vocabulary. “Go on!” I said to Dr Wang.

“Have you thought that perhaps a loser, even a twenty-three year-old loser, might actually get a grip, and take control of his life, and make a difference to a world? Especially one with your musical talents.” He was looking at me intently, and once again, I was afraid – no, awed – by him. He knew altogether too much about me. I also noted that he didn’t say “the world”, but “a world”. And how had he known about my ‘musical talents’? I played the clarinet, and I’m reputed to have a good voice, but he shouldn’t have known that.

“Why me?” I asked stupidly. Like pleading with a bully. What have I done? Nothing – you just happened to be there when I needed to be cruel.

“Why not?” His face was uncompromising.

“Well, then, what is it I have to do?”

Dr Wang shrugged. “How should I know? This young man will tell you. Or you’ll find out when you go ‘across’ again. The details are different every time. But the general principles are always the same – a hero, often a bard, with his, um, best friend, saves the world through his bravery and skill and tenacity. ‘How’ is different. ‘What’ is always the same.”

‘Best friend’? Maybe, I thought. ‘Um, best friend’ – not bloody likely, Greek or not. Aloud, I said, “What do you mean by always? How many times have you been involved in this sort of thing?

“Many, many times.”

“And how many of the heroes came back?”

The look on his face was answer enough. Then he said, apologetically, “Sometimes, they liked it better where they were, and they chose to stay. Sometimes, they failed. They don’t put those stories in books. They don’t sell well. It’s a sort of Bardic Darwinism.”

“Thank you,” I said, with maximum dryness. “And what, may I ask, is to stop me refusing to get involved?”

He shrugged his shoulders eloquently, and cast his eyes sideways at the elf. Yeah, right, I thought.

Just then, the subject of our conversation decided to get stroppy. “I must go back,” he said, grinding his teeth.

“Dioti?” I asked. Why? Maybe I could get him to go back home, alone, and I could go back to being a doped-up, drunken loser, wasting his life.

“I was on an important mission. I am a servant of the light. I can’t afford any delay. It’s imperative that I complete the mission.”

“He’s a servant of the light,” I said sarcastically to Dr Wang. “Come!” I said to Tiltheus, first in Greek and then in English. He might as well start learning. “Look!” I said, again in both languages. With a sadistic brutality I didn’t know I had in me, I opened the cupboard door with a flourish and showed him the impermeable wooden back. His face fell and he looked so downcast that I regretted the impulse. “The doctor says the gateway will come back,” I said, trying to make up for my cruelty.

“When?” he asked, his face bleak.

I shrugged. “He also says that I’m to help you, that your world needs me.” I shrugged again. “Tell me what was happening.”

Dr Wang interrupted. “I must go, now,” he said. “I’ll come back to see how Tiltheus is tomorrow.”

“Thank you for coming to see him, Dr Wang.” I was polite because I’d been well brought up, but also because I thought it a bad idea to cross him. I was still shaking from that deeeep look he’d given me.

“Any time,” he replied, with perfect sincerity. For a wizard, he was a nice guy. Then he simply vanished. I’d half expected something show-offish like that, but poor Tiltheus was shaken. I had to look up the translation for wizard and shaman in the Greek-English dictionary, and there wasn’t anything exactly comparable, though magos came close, so I explained that he was sort of a seer and doctor and scholar and priest all wrapped up into a single package.

Then I said that I needed a drink, and would he like one, and when he agreed I told him that I had to go and buy it. He insisted on coming too. Perhaps he was afraid that I would disappear and he would be totally alone in a strange, hostile world. For someone who’d been nearly killed and eaten by a giant winged something, he was remarkably chirpy. I lent him one of my shirts, because his was so stained (and I noticed that as the honey-blood dried, it grew darker, more like our blood) and then we set off for the bottle-shop. He appeared entranced by everything, amazed by the cars, the bicycles, the people, the shops, glass shop windows, the trams, the street lights (which were just coming on). At first he thought it was all magic, until I called it knowledge (That’s what ‘science’ means, after all). He loved the bottle shop, was fascinated by the different coloured glass bottles, the labels, the variety of drinks available.

We bought a cask of cheap red, and set off for home. Many of the passing pedestrians stopped and stared. Any one of the things about him might have been ignorable, but the totality definitely wasn’t. Put together out-of-the-ordinary clothing, long hair, pointed ears with many rings, eyes which changed colour all the time, and unique boots, and he was different. Most of the women who passed obviously fancied him, and so did some of the men. I felt rather pissed off with them. He’s mine, I thought. I found him. Keep your filthy hands off him. I could see only too well why they were looking. And the truth was, now that he was mostly healed, he looked stunning. I’ve never seen such a handsome guy, except for models and actors, and everybody knows that’s all make-up and camera angles. This was just somebody strolling back from the bottle-shop on an autumn evening. Luckily, I was straight, so I could admire his beauty the same way one admires a fine horse or a well-bred dog. But just to keep the oglers away, I chatted all the time to him in Greek, ostentatiously.

Back at the house I found two wine glasses in a kitchen dresser and we went upstairs. Cask-wine isn’t very potent, but we got thoroughly pissed, and I told him about Jane and he told me about his lost love, Danethon, who was recently killed by a thingy like the one that nearly got him, and who was clearly male (Greek nouns and adjectives and participles and pronouns have three genders). Hmm. I’d heard a bit about Greek bisexuality – Grandpa had discussed it with me when we read Plato and Sappho and other poets. He’d been a little uncomfortable with it, and he’d transmitted his discomfort to me. I loved Greek despite their, um, tastes. But I was too embarrassed to say anything, and Tiltheus seemed not to care, and certainly wasn’t making sheep’s eyes at me, so I decided that if anything happened I would very gently explain how things were in our world.

There was only the one bed, and the too-short sofa, so we ended up in the bed together, me keeping on my boxers, though I usually slept naked, and him keeping on his undies (I suppose because he saw I did), which were drawers – there’s no better word to describe them, strange, baggy off-white passion-killers just like grandpa used to wear. Before we went to bed I showed him how to use the toilet (that was another attraction of the room, a toilet on the same floor, and therefore more or less mine, because there weren’t any other rooms in the attic), and he was intrigued by the flush and the idea of toilet paper. Then we went to bed, my head, and probably also his, spinning. Somehow, over the course of the evening, we’d become friends.

“Steve, thank you for helping me. I owe you my life.” And he burst into tears and hugged me. Damn Greeks, I thought. Just can’t hold their liquor. Embarrassed as all hell, if you must know, and also touched and a bit tearful myself, I patted him on the back and said “It’s OK, Til,” and the storm subsided. He’d liked the idea of Greek words in English, and I told him that some people thought ‘OK’² was Greek in origin. So he used it all the time with relish. And though we went to sleep each of us on either side of the bed, I somehow wasn’t surprised to find him snuggled up against me in the morning. I told myself it was for comfort, because he was lonely, and used to it in his own world, and also, because it was pretty cold.

There were two things that surprised me. The first was that I rather liked waking up with a male elf’s arms around me. As long as he didn’t try anything. The other was that we hadn’t discussed the danger on his world, but it was obvious to both of us that I would be helping. And I wasn’t at all sure how that had happened.

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