Interlaced Pathways

Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium-3

“Well?” She giggled at me and stood up. “One of them is it. That’s a better chance than you gave anyone.”

I looked down at the containers. She had no more idea of what was in three of them than I did. “I have no intention of opening any of these,” I said.

She shrugged, still grinning. “Have it your way, brown eyes. I’m leaving.” She started strolling away.

“Wait.”

She turned and walked away backwards, facing me. “What?”

“Uh—” I couldn’t think of anything.

“Bye!”

“No—uh, hey, what did I give back to you, anyway?”

“Oh!” She laughed. “My sense of humor.” She was still backpedaling.

“I’ll do it! Wait a minute.”

She stopped and folded her arms. “You’ll really do it?”

“Come on. Come on back here while I do this.” I wasn’t sure why I wanted company, but I did.

She came back, grinning. “If you got the guts, brown eyes, you can open ‘em all.”

I smiled weakly. “They could all be good.”

She smirked. “Sure—it’s possible.”

I looked down at the four containers. The wooden box seemed more likely to hold a tangible object than a lost quality. Though this place had few reliable rules, I decided to leave the box alone. The brown bottle with the short neck had such a heavy layer of sand that its contents were hidden. I knelt down and looked over the two smoky jars.

“Come on, sweetie.” She started tapping her foot.

Quickly, before I could reconsider, I grabbed both jars, stood, and smashed them down on the floor. The glass shattered and two small billows of blue-gray smoke curled upward.

She stepped back.

I leaned forward, waited for the smoke to reach me, and inhaled. One strand smelled like charcoal-broiled Kansas City steak; the other, like the inside of a new car. I breathed both in, again and again, until the vapors were gone.

After a moment, I blinked and looked around. “I don’t feel any different.”

“Sure you do.” She smiled. “Just go on as normal, and it’ll come clear.”

“Okay.” I bent down and picked up the box and the bottle. “Where were these? I’ll put ‘em back. There’s a broom—”

“You?” She laughed gaily. “Well, that’s something. You mean you’re actually going to straighten up this place?”

“No, I—well, I’ve been in charge; I suppose I should do something…” I replaced the items where she pointed.

“Integrity.”

“What?”

“You’ve got your integrity back, for one.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” I looked at her for a moment and then gazed up the dark aisle toward the light from one of the main corridors. “I guess I did lose that, too… Otherwise, I couldn’t have been so cruel to people, even without compassion. They trusted me.” I started walking up the aisle.

She followed, watching me closely. “So what are you going to do?”

“I guess I’ll stay and run the shop.” It just came out naturally. I hadn’t even realized I was going to say it. “The…other thing I got back is kind of minor. For a long time, I used to try to remember the details of a fishing trip in the mountains my family went on, back when I was little. I knew I had a great time, but that was all. Now, all of a sudden, I can remember it completely.”

She c****d her head to one side. “Was it really wonderful?”

I considered my new memories a moment. “Yeah.”

“Aw…” She looked at me, smiling. “I can’t help it, brown eyes. I give in. It’s in that brown thing, with the sand all over it.”

Excitement surged in my chest. “Thanks!” I reached up with trembling fingers and snatched it off the shelf.

“Careful—”

I fumbled it away. It hit my shoulder, bounced to the floor, and cracked. It rolled, and before I could bend down to grab it, it was under a bottom shelf. I dropped to the floor and slid my face under the shelf. The cracked bottle was hissing in the darkness as the special vapors escaped. I couldn’t smell anything. It was too far from me.

I reached for it with one hand. It was wedged against something and stuck. I could touch it, but I couldn’t get enough of a hold to pull it back.

I remained on the floor, inhaling frantically, motionless until the hissing stopped. Then, suddenly feeling heavy all over, I managed to stand up.

“What happened?” She smiled hopefully.

“It’s gone,” I muttered. “It…sure was over quick.” I hesitated, then added, “Thanks anyhow.” Stunned, I eased past her and started walking. I could hear her follow me.

We came out into the main corridor. I picked up the little blue throw rug and hung it on a nearby hook. Then I turned, all the way around, surveying my shop. “Maybe it was no accident.”

“You were nervous, that’s all—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean my finding the door to this place when I most needed it, and staying until…someone came in to find my stuff.”

“You think your new integrity adds up to something, it sounds like.”

“My destiny.”

She laughed, then tapered off when I looked at her calmly. “You serious?”

I shrugged. “This place is mine. I knew that, somehow, when I put my signs up. And now I owe this shop my best attention.”

“With integrity.”

I shrugged again. Taking care of the shop and its customers was important; the reasons I felt that way were not.

“I…think I got news for you, brown eyes.”

“I don’t want any news.” I was still in shock from disappointment. It was justice of a sort, but it wasn’t pleasant.

“You have your compassion back. I’m sure of it. You can’t help it.”

“But you said it was in the bottle I broke—”

“It was, as a separate quality. Only, I think your integrity comes with a little compassion in a package deal. Forces it on you.”

I looked up at her, hopeful. “Really?”

“You could try it.” She pointed down the Florida corridor.

Whatsername, the peach-colored former artist lady, had never made it out the door. She was sitting near it, slumped on the floor, an incongruous position for a woman of her age and dignity. The skirt of her suit was smudged and rumpled under her, exposing more of her legs than it was supposed to.

“This is your shop now,” said my companion. She put a hand on my shoulder.

I didn’t say anything.

“You can’t just let a customer sit there, can you?”

“No—not anymore. A matter of—integrity.”

“In this case, it’s the same as compassion. I don’t see how you can help her, but if you try—”

“I know how.”

“Huh?”

“I lost one chance to help her.” I smiled, suddenly understanding the true potential of this place. “If you’ll go down the aisles and find it, we can fix up that customer after all.”

She winked. “You got it, brown eyes.”

*****

Author’s Afterword:

This story took me seven years to write. Well, not exactly; at the 1974 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Harlan Ellison assigned us to write a story about “where lost things go.” I wrote one at the time that everyone agreed wasn’t very good. The concept stayed with me, though, and one day seven years later, as I was trying to take a nap in Boca Raton, Florida, the idea and layout and rules of the emporium finally occurred to me. I got out of bed and started writing it. Two weeks later, the first version was finished.

I sold it to Amazing Stories magazine a year later, after revising it some. It was published a year after that, and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards in 1984, a mere decade after Harlan had first suggested the concept. During this time, Diana G. Gallagher wrote a song about it as a birthday present to me and recorded it on several of her commercial cassettes. A year after the story was published, Alan Brennert adapted it for the Twilight Zone TV show in a version that I like. You can still see it rerun occasionally.

This story was first published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, ed. George Scithers. 56:2 (April 1983).