“It was always the mountain,” said Marianne, “like it was the only one in the world.” She took a sip of wine and let it roll around her tongue before swallowing. Night draped the bar in shadows. A few human silhouettes were hunched over the tables around her. “You couldn’t avoid it, living in the foothills. Loomed over you. And the town put in on everything. Official documents and shop windows and the Welcome to Villette sign on the main road.”
The bartender, a young woman with close-cropped hair and sleeve tattoo of climbing roses, smiled as she refilled a bowl of peanuts. “Get a lot of tourists?” She was drifting between polite curiosity and genuine interest. Marianne was grateful for either one.
“Oh sure. People came to climb it, hike it, whatever. Villette was just a way station. A place to get food and a room.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t wait to leave. And I never felt homesick after.”
The bartender nodded. “I grew up in a place like that.”
“Yeah. I didn’t hate it or anything. It was just there. Like the mountain.” She plucked a nut from the bowl beside her. “And the tourists, like an endless tide. People you’ve never seen before and never will again. Their faces blur and their voices get all muddled together. I really went off people when I was a kid.” The nut tasted fresh and salty. “But there was this one guy.”
“I thought,” said the bartender, “you might be building to something.”
“Maybe less than you think. It wasn’t a romantic thing. Or any kind of thing. I was in school and he was this ragged old guy who rode his bike all over the mountain. I mean, I think that’s literally all he did, day and night. It was a nice bike, of course. Bellringer 2C.”
“That is a nice bike.”
“Yeah, but he rode it like a scooter.” She mimed grabbing a pair of handlebars then leaned forward, hunching over them. “So that’s what we called him. We’d be on our way to school and he’d buzz on past and we’d wave and yell, Hey Scooter! And he’d wave back. We were just making fun of him, but then we realized he didn’t care that we were, and we started waving to him for real.”
“Scooter.” The bartender laughed and took a seat at her stool behind the bar. “Funny. I think there’s someone like that in every little town.”
“If there isn’t there should be.” Marianne picked another nut from the bowl beside her and rolled it between her fingers. “He stopped to talk once in a while. We’d ask him about his bike, what he saw up there on the mountain, what he thought about the tourists. I forget most of what he said. But one time someone asked him why he did it. Why he rode all over the mountain all day and night. And I never forgot what he said to that.
“He said, I’m looking for the Golden Door, kids! Then he laughed and rode off.” She finally slipped the nut into her mouth.
“The Golden Door,” said the bartender, looking thoughtful as she drew out the syllables.
“Sometimes,” said Marianne, after a sip of wine, “when I got so worked up late at night I couldn’t sleep, I’d go outside and look up at the mountain, and I swear I would hear him buzzing around up there. I’d strain to listen, imaging him tearing down the dirt roads with only a dim cone of light to guide him, searching for something I couldn’t understand.
“And then,” she said with a sigh, “I’d go back to bed and wait out the dawn.”
“Long sleepless nights.” The bartender was nodding in sympathy. “I’ve had a few of those.”
“Yeah. Couldn’t wait to get out, like I said. And eventually I did. Passed the civil exam and got out. But when I applied for my first job and they asked me what my goals in life were, I couldn’t think of a thing. Sat there um-ing for the longest moment of my life. But then I remembered Scooter, and blurted out: I’m looking for the Golden Door.”
The bartender mused over this. “Did it work?”
“It did, though I had to explain it. I think the novelty of it intrigued them more than anything else.” There was a weight pressing on her back and shoulders, a weight of time and expectations. “And I kept using it. And I kept going. And I never thought of coming home. But sometimes life pulls you back. And–”
And thirty years have passed, and there are only strangers here. But the mountain is still the mountain, and still no Golden Door.
One of the silhouettes detached from the gloom and approached the bar for a refill, and Marianne waited until the bartender had finished serving them. “I don’t want to bore you,” she said, when the bartender returned.
“You’re not.” The bartender resumed her seat. “I usually get shit-faced dullards explaining why the bitch shouldn’t have kicked them out. This is genteel conversation. A rarity in the trade.”
A grin. “Thanks. I’m Marianne, by the way.”
A nod. “Jen.”
“What’s your story, Jen?”
“I’m a sculptor. Or will be. Or should be.” Jen shrugged, but there was a wistful air about her. “Art, as far I can tell, is mostly a matter of timing.”
“I think that’s true,” said Marianne, “about a lot of things. What do you sculpt?”
“In terms of media, mostly found objects. Metal scraps, fallen wood, shiny rocks. Bone when I can get it. If I can attach it to something else, I’ll use it.”
“And in terms of subject?” Marianne reached for her wine.
“Movement. Like, how to depict it.” She waved a hand around for emphasis. “Not the runner but the act of running, if you get me.”
“Mm.” Marianne swallowed and tried to nod with the wineglass still at her lips. It was an awkward motion, and she was suddenly conscious of it. “That sounds intriguing. Do people pick up on it?”
“Some do.” Jen folded her arms and smiled. “Tell me where you went after you got out.”
“Ah,” said Marianne, “well. As implied, I went into civil service. Settled in Tournet because it’s the seat for both Ardelle and Corwyn. Started in the interior office, running surveys, then made a move into the policy wing. Got rotated out after a few years and wound up in the industrial office. Found a new way to align a couple of manufacturing sectors and got kicked up to commitee level. At that point I could have jumped over, grabbed a seat from a retiring subcommittee chair, but decided I’d rather see what the maritime office had to offer. Please stop me if any of this starts making sense.”
Jen chuckled. “It doesn’t sound boring.”
“I’m leaving out those parts. A lot of late night reading and long days listening.” Marianne dropped her gaze to her wineglass. “I learned a lot. I had to. It’s easier when you’re young. Every once in a while a well-meaning head would take me aside and ask me what my career plans were. And I had to tell them about the Golden Door.”
Jen shifted forward in her stool. “What did it mean? Just a way of getting people off your back?”
“At first, sure. But it started to make sense to me as a way of life. Wandering, but with purpose. If I set a goal, I might fail, but the Golden Door could be anything. So I kept moving.” The wineglass was nearly empty. Marianne rolled her finger around its base. “Moving. I spent my life in motion.”
“Can I get you another one of those?”
Marianne glanced up at the bartender. “Yes, thanks. Sorry. I got a little lost there.”
“Not to worry.” Jen slipped a new glass from an overhead rack and set it on the bar. “It’s funny, but I’ve been thinking of your path in life and how I’d depict it in sculpture.” She reached under the bar for a bottle, uncorked it, and poured out a measure. “I mean, there’s upward progress, but also a lot of, well, motion. As you said.” Sliding a napkin into place in front of Marianna, she set the glass on top of it. “And of course, the points where you pause for a moment. I have to represent those too.”
The liquid in the glass rippled a little, then settled. “Dead ends,” said Marianne, and reached for it.
One of the toilets in the men’s room was overflowing, according to a shadow that sidled up to the bar, acting as apologetic as a person can be without taking responsibility for the action. Jen sighed and turned to Marianne. “The perks of the job. Back in a moment.”
She lifted a flap at the side of the bar and headed for a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. After a few seconds, a man in dirty coveralls came out with a plunger and an irritated look.
“Don’t forget to mop the floor, Ed,” said Jen from behind him.
“I won’t,” said Ed, leaving enough ambiguity behind him to drive through.
“There he goes,” said Jen, “to do battle with shit once more. Where did we leave it, Marianne?”
“Dead ends.” Marianne waited as Jen settled back into her stool. “It is awfully nice of you to listen to me gab my way through all this.”
Jen shrugged. “When you came in, you looked a little lost.”
“More than a little.” Another mouthful of wine went down. She was warming, loosening up. “I did a lot of traveling, as I said, and finally wound up back in the interior office. Back where I’d started.”
“Did you get your old desk back?”
A smile. “Different division. I’d started in land management. This time I was assigned to forestry.”
“Forestry?” Jen looked intruiged. “Does that mean what it sounds like?”
Marianne nodded. “The forest primordial. Yes, there’s a civil service office responsible for it. Not for it, of course. Just for dealing with it. Mostly I just dealt with paperwork. Filing field reports and requisitions. After a few years, I was ready to hit the road again. Then I saw a report from Villette.”
“Anything wrong?” said Jen, looking concerned.
“Nothing serious. Monitoring stations had been miscalibrated, and the town clerk hadn’t filled out a specific form. Procedural stuff. Someone from my office would have to travel out and verify the corrections.” Marianne took another nut from the dish. “I insisted on going.”
“Why?”
“I wanted,” said Marianne, “to stop moving.” She flicked the nut along the bar and watched it spin and roll around, coming to a halt near the edge.
“By going home?” Jen looked skeptical. “I mean, you could retire, I guess.”
“I could, but it wouldn’t have solved anything. Same motion. Different reasons.” She reached along the bar and grabbed the nut. “It was the report that convinced me. The monitoring stations. All over the mountain. They’d been there for years, long before I was born. I didn’t even know about them.”
“What were they monitoring?” said Jen, leaning forward and even glancing around the bar, as if to be certain they weren’t being overheard.
“Dead ends.” Marianne smiled at Jen’s expression. “No, really. They were monitoring the impasse potential of dead ends. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”
Footsteps shuffled behind her. “I’m getting the mop,” said Ed, sounding petulant. “I’m getting it.”
“Thank you, Ed.” Jen bowed slightly, then returned her attention to Marianne. “All right. Back we go. You’re home. What’s it like?”
“Exactly as I remember it, and that was the worst part. Like sitting down to dinner with the corpse of a best friend. All the old familiar hangouts, bustling with strangers.” Marianne shuddered at the memory. Any thoughts she’d had of getting to know the place again had been dashed. “I went right to the town offices and got to work.”
“Looking for misreported miscalibrations.” Jen mimed spinning a dial.
“Yeah. So someone had to go up the mountain and check the calibration logs from the stations themselves. Normally the agent on the scene would send a local inspector, but I had other ideas.”
Jen’s eyes widened. “Tell me you got yourself a Bellringer 2C.”
“A Montclair K. Same engine. Suspension’s better. You can even ride it like a scooter if you want.”
“You spent the day buzzing around the mountain.”
“That I did,” said Marianne, grinning. “All those narrow little dirt roads I’d never explored before. It felt more like home than home did. Of course, I had a job to do, and I did it. Found the stations. Each one at the terminus of a dead end road.”
Ed walked by with a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other. “Got the mop.”
“I can see that,” said Jen, nodding with infinite patience.
“Just making sure.”
Marianne took advantage of the interlude to take an extended gulp of her wine, then resumed her story once Ed trudged away.
“It was a pretty simple task once I found the station. Open the panel, review the logged calibrations on the sticker and check them against the paper trail. First one, someone had transposed digits in a measurement. No problem. Second one, incorrect date on the second-to-last calibration. Easy.”
“Little more visual detail, please.” Jen was frowning. “What’s it like up there?”
“Sunny and breezy. Quiet. I’d hear a bird, then another, then another, like they were taking turns. A typical road resembled a dry river bed, with a shallow bank on either side of you. Trees all over the place, of course. I didn’t see another person the whole time. I could believe I was the only one ever to know this place.
“When I opened the panel on the third station, a piece of paper fluttered out. I thought the log had come loose, but no, it was an old note to someone named Boone. Something about the road being a private road and whether it mattered. I didn’t understand at first.” Marianne smiled. “Then I saw it. The last line. Still looking for that Door! I mean, I didn’t need to ask who wrote that, did I?”
A handful of regulars drifted up to pay their tab. Jen greeted each of them by name and nodded her thanks for the tips. “Have a good night,” she said, hitting the register. When they were gone, she let out a sigh. “Dead ends,” she said. “So Scooter was leaving notes in mysterious machines?”
“He was,” said Marianne. The second glass of wine was warming her, bringing a flush to her skin. “When I went back to the town office to do the paperwork, I asked the clerk who Boone was. She had no idea, but looked back through the records and sure enough, he was an town inspector. Long retired, of course. I made up a little story about the need for historical context in the interpretation of calibration errors, and got his address with a promise that I wouldn’t annoy him too much.”
“Some old people like getting visitors,” said Jen, shrugging.
“Some do. Boone didn’t. I found him in his front yard, drinking a beer and glaring at children. Had no interest in talking to a civil servant.” Marianne put on an exaggerated old man voice. “I don’t do that goddamn job anymore. I don’t have to tell you a goddamn thing.”
“My hero. No offense, but I can’t wait to be old enough to act like that.”
Marianne giggled. “It was entertaining, in a way. I showed him the note, and he seemed to go away for a moment. You know, in his eyes, in his face. And when he came back he was a little different.”
“He knew Scooter, of course,” said Jen, nodding.
“Yeah. Not by that name, of course. That was just what we called him. His name was Michio.” The wineglass was calling. Marianne reached for it, then pulled her hand back. Not yet. She wanted to get this right. “Of course, just because I’d found a note didn’t mean he was any more willing to talk to me. I told him I’d grown up in Villette and that I’d known Scooter. Michio. Whatever. And I just wanted to know who he really was, what happened to him. Anything.”
“Did he tell you?”
“In a roundabout way.” Marianne gathered herself for the final leg of her story. “It went like this.”
All of the stations are on dead end roads. That’s important, see? But none of those dead end roads were built for the stations. That’s more important. All of those roads were originally supposed to go somewhere. But they didn’t.
I don’t know where all of them was supposed to go but Buckman was the access road for Restful Breezes Resort and that was planned, architected, and funded. Just about to break ground on it and one of the investors got into a jam that no one wanted to talk about and it all just stopped. Nothing came of it. They left the road. No reason not to.
There were others. A home that was never built, don’t know the reason but I heard it was a sad one. Another was supposed to be a scenic view, past where some asshole proposed to her girlfriend, and the committee decided to fix a bridge instead.
All of them were like that. The stations had to be built on those roads to work. They had to be built at the end of roads that had been made for some other purpose. A purpose that never came to be.
I can’t tell you how it works. I don’t understand all that metaphysical shit. The stations measure the impasse potential, and I have no idea what that is. I just knew which terminals to test the reference voltages from. Michio, he knew a little more. Told me that dead ends were special, because of the intent behind them. Everything we intend to build exists somewhere. Every road that was meant to go somewhere is a bridge to some forgotten clearing in the Forest. Something like that.
I liked the guy, though he was a boozer and a gambler. And a nut, but I think that came later. Came into a little money and decided he wanted to build a bar up on the mountain. I think he just wanted an excuse to drink, really. Not like he’d get much traffic up there. But he had the whole thing lined up. Contracts, permits, all of it, and then one night he puts his entire stake on a horse.
You can guess how that turned out.
Anyway, I guess his mind started to go after that. We’d see him out on the mountain roads now and then. I don’t know how he found out about the stations but he became obsessed with them. We had to warn him about breaking into them. I last saw him, wow, fifteen years ago? No idea where how it ended for him. Don’t suppose it was pretty.
Things happen to people, and sometimes they recover and sometimes they don’t. Michio didn’t. I mean, I’ve known people who lost children, who were able to move on. But not him. He never got over that one.
Yeah, the Golden Door. What? Oh, that’s what he was going to call it. The bar. The Golden Door.
It was a while before Jen broke the silence that had settled between them. “How did you get here, Marianne?” she said, in a soft voice
“I left Boone to his memories,” said Marianne, “and I rode. All over the mountain. No idea where I was going. Night fell and I kept going, up one road and down another. Somewhere back there I ran out of road, or thought I did. But I kept going. And I found this place.” She felt used up, run down. It was difficult to keep her voice from fading out.
“Yeah.” Jen was nodding slightly, staring at something under the bar, or nothing in particular. “That was kind of how I got here too. I wasn’t running away, but I wasn’t running toward either. Running, or wandering. I wandered off the edge of a dead end road.”
“What’s it like out there?”
“Not bad. Strange, but not bad. I stay with a couple of aunties down the road. Kind of fun, really.” The bartender snorted and shook her head. “Funny. I don’t think about it much. You get used to it, I guess.”
“That’s great.” Marianne smiled, then downed the wineglass in one gulp. She picked her satchel off the floor, rifled through its pockets, and came up with a handful of coins. “I’m not sure if this will cover the tab,” she said, spreading the coins across the bar, “but I’ll make amends however I can.”
Jen got off the stool and flicked through the coins, scooping up two silver ones. “You’re good.”
“Thanks.” Marianne stood, wobbled a little. “Thanks for listening.”
“My pleasure. Leaving already?”
“I don’t know. Just need some air, maybe.”
She walked through the gloom, weaving slightly, and found the door. The night air, cool and gentle on her skin, dried the faint sheen of sweat on her forehead. She left the shadow of the building and stepped out into the parking lot. The Montclair was where she’d left it, leaning on its kickstand at the far end of the lot.
Around her was the summit of the mountain. The mountain, as she had been taught from birth, but not the only one in the world. Beyond it was the rest of the world, a confusion of light and space, a kalidoscope of possiblities she had never imagined.
Something creaked behind her, and a door closed softly. “You okay?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, taking in the strangeness that seemed to stretch out forever below. “I wonder if Scooter ever made it here.”
Jen walked up to stand beside her. “I don’t know. Honestly, I’d never heard of him until you walked in. The owner’s some guy named Tim. He’s not here now but he’ll be around tomorrow morning.”
“That’s okay.”
They lapsed into silence again.
“I never wanted anything, Jen.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not like that. Not like someone who wants to build a resort, or a new house, or a family. Or a bar, for that matter.” She glanced behind her, as if assuring herself of the reality of the place. “I used the Golden Door to avoid having a dream of my own.”
Jen thought about that for a moment. “I think that’s how most people are. Don’t feel bad.”
“Have you ever met anyone who thought of themselves as most people?”
“Mm, well. You got me there.”
They lapsed into silence again.
“Everything that was supposed to lie at the end of every dead end road, ends up in this place,” said Jen. “I knew that, though I kind of forgot. It’s just the background noise. But every once in a while someone new wanders in, and you remember. And I’m glad you wandered in here tonight.”
“So am I. But I just don’t know where go to from here. I’ve finally reached the end of the road.”
“Did you? Seems to me there was something beyond it. Out there,” said Jen, gesturing at the grand expanse around them, “are a million broken dreams. Take your pick. Maybe Scooter didn’t make it here. But you did. And this is a nice place to wait while you’re thinking it over.”
She paused to let this sink in, then turned to go. Marianne stood for a moment, transfixed, then let herself be led back into the Golden Door.