by Jerry
Now, as we panted up to school, I stopped, afraid again. “You go on ahead,” I said.
The last bell tolled. The kids ran. I looked at the school with vines growing on it. I heard the voices inside, making a high, all-the-time noise. I heard little desk bells tinkle and sharp teacher voices reaching out.
Poison, I thought. The teachers, too! They want me sick! They teach you how to be sicker and sicker! And—and how to enjoy being sick!
“Good morning, Douglas.”
I heard high-heeled shoes on the cement walk. Miss Adams, the principal, with her pince-nez and wide, pale face and close-cropped dark hair, stood behind me.
“Come along in,” she said, holding my shoulder firmly. “You’re late. Come along.”
She guided me, one two, one two, one two, upstairs, up the stairs to my fate. . . .
Mr. Jordan was a plump man with thinning hair and serious green eyes and a way of rocking on his heels before his charts. Today he had a large illustration of a body with all its skin off. Exposed, were green, blue, pink and yellow veins, capillaries, muscles, tendons, organs, lungs, bones and fatty tissues.
Mr. Jordan nodded before the chart. “There’s a great similarity between cancer and normal cell reproduction. Cancer is simply a normal function gone wild. Overproduction of cellular material—”
I raised my hand. “How does food—I mean—what makes the body grow?”
“A good question, Douglas.” He tapped the chart. “Food, taken into the body, is broken down, assimilated, and—”
I listened and I knew what Mr. Jordan was trying to do to me. My childhood was in my mind like a fossil imprint on soft shale rock. Mr. Jordan was trying to polish and smooth it away. Eventually it would all be gone, all my beliefs and imaginings. My mother changed my body with food, Mr. Jordan worked on my mind with words.
So I began to draw pictures on paper, not listening. I hummed little songs, made up a language all my own. The rest of the day I heard nothing. I resisted the attack, I counteracted the poison.
But then after school I passed Mrs. Singer’s store and I bought candy. I couldn’t help it. And after I ate it I wrote on the back of the wrapper; “This is the last candy I’m going to eat. Even at the Saturday matinee, when Tom Mix comes on the screen with Tony. I won’t eat candy again.”
I looked at the candy bars stacked like a harvest on the shelves. Orange wrappers with sky blue words saying “Chocolate.” Yellow and violet wrappers with little blue words on them. I felt the candy in my body, making my cells grow. Mrs. Singer sold hundreds of candy bars each day. Was she in conspiracy? Did she know what she was doing to children with them? Was she jealous of them being so young? Did she want them to grow old? I wanted to kill her! “What you doing?”
Bill Arno had come up behind me while I was writing on the candy wrapper. Clarisse Mellin was with him. She looked at me with her blue eyes and said nothing.
I hid the paper. “Nothing,” I said.
We all walked along. We saw kids playing hopscotch and kick the can and playing mibs on the hard ground, and I turned to Bill and I said, “We won’t be allowed to do that next year, or maybe the year after.”
Bill only laughed and said, “Sure, we will. Who’ll stop us?”
“They will,” I said.
“Who’s they?” asked Bill.
“Never mind,” I said. “Just wait and see.”
“Aw,” said Bill. “You’re crazy.”
“You don’t understand!” I cried. “You play and run around and eat, and all the time they’re tricking you and making you think different and act different and walk different. And all of a sudden one day you’ll stop playing and have to worry!” My face was hot and my hands were clenched. I was blind with rage. Bill turned, laughing, and walked away. “Over Annie Over!” someone sang, tossing a ball over a housetop.
YOU might go all day without breakfast or lunch, but what about supper? My stomach shouted as I slid into my chair at the supper table. I held onto my knees, looking down at them. I won’t eat, I told myself. I’ll show them. I’ll fight them.
Dad pretended to be considerate. “Let him go without supper,” he said to my mother, when he saw me neglect my food. He winked at her. “He’ll eat later.”
All evening long I played on the warm brick streets of town, rattling the tin cans and climbing the trees in the growing dark.
Coming into the kitchen at ten o’clock, I realized it was no use. There was a note on top of the icebox which said, “Help yourself. Dad.”
I opened the refrigerator, and a little cool breath breathed out against me, cold, with the smell of rimed foods on it. Inside was the wondrous half-ruin of a chicken. Members of celery were piled like cords of wood. Strawberries grew in a thicket of parsley.
My hands blurred. They made motions that caused an illusion of a dozen hands. Like those pictures of Eastern goddesses they worship in temples. One hand with a tomato in it. One hand grasping a banana. A third hand seizing strawberries!. A fourth, fifth, sixth hand caught in mid-motion, each with a bit of cheese, olive or radish!
Half an hour later I knelt by the toilet bowl and swiftly raised the seat. Then, rapidly, I opened my mouth, and shoved a spoon back, back along my tongue, down, down along my gagging throat. . . .
Lying in bed, I shuddered and tasted the acrid memory in my mouth, glad to be rid of the food I had so eagerly ingested. I hated myself for my weakness. I lay trembling, empty, hungry again, but too sick, now, to eat. . . .
I was very weak in the morning, and noticeably pale, for my mother made a comment on it. “If you’re not better by Monday,” she said, “to the doctor’s with you!”
IT WAS Saturday. The day of shouting, and no tiny little silver bells for teachers to silence it; the day when the colorless giants moved on the pale screen at the Elite movie house in the long theater dark, and children were only children, and not things growing.
I saw no one. In the morning when I should have been hiking out along the North Shore Rail Line, where the hot sun simmered up from the long parallels of metal, I lolled about in terrific indecision. And by the time I got to the ravine it was already mid-afternoon and it was deserted; all of the kids had run downtown to see the matinee and suck lemon drops.
The ravine was very alone, it looked so undisturbed and old and green, I was a little afraid of it. I had never seen it so quiet. The vines hung quietly upon the trees and the water went over the rocks and the birds sang high up.
I went down the secret trail, hiding behind bushes, pausing, going on.
Clarisse Mellin was crossing the bridge as I reached it. She was coming home from town with some little packages under her arm. We said hello, self-consciously.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Oh, walking around,” I said.
“All alone?”
“Yeah. All the other guys are downtown.”
She hesitated, then said, “Can I walk with you?”
“I guess so,” I said. “Come on.”
We walked down through the ravine. It was humming like a big dynamo. Nothing seemed to want to move, everything was very quiet. Pink darning needles flew and bumped on air pockets, and hovered over the sparkling creek water.
Clarisse’s hand bumped mine as we walked along the trail. I smelled the moist dank smell of the ravine and the soft new smell of Clarisse beside me.
We came to a place where there was a cross trail.
“We built a tree hut up there last year,” I said, pointing.
“Where?” Clarisse stepped close to me to see where my finger was pointing. “I don’t see.”
“There,” I said, my voice breaking, and pointed again.
Very quietly, she put her arm around me. I was so surprised and bewildered I almost cried out. Then, trembling, her lips kissed me, and my own hands were moving to hold her and I was shaking and shouting inside myself.
The silence was like a green explosion. The water bubbled on in the creek bed. I couldn
’t breathe.
I knew it was all over. I was lost. From this moment on, it would be a touching, an eating of foods, a learning of language and algebra and logic, a movement and an emotion, a kissing and a holding, a whirl of feeling that caught and sucked me drowning under. I knew I was lost forever now, and I didn’t care. But I did care, and I was laughing and crying all in one, and there was nothing to do about it, but hold her and love her with all my decided and rioting body and mind.
I could have gone on fighting my war against Mother and Dad and school and food and things in books, but I couldn’t fight this sweetness on my lips and this warmness in my hands, and the new odor in my nostrils.
“Clarisse, Clarisse,” I cried, holding her. looking over her shoulder blindly, whispering to her. “Clarisse!”
THE END
THE CURE
Henry Kuttner
The simplest way to drive a sane man mad is to face him, with an absolutely insoluble dilemma. There are more complex ways, of course—but the cure gets complicated, too, and sometimes fails—
When Dawson got back from his vacation in Florida, he was feeling no better. He hadn’t expected a miraculous cure. In fact, he hadn’t expected anything. Now he sat morosely at his desk, staring out at the tower of the Empire State and vaguely hoping it would topple.
Carruthers, his partner in the law firm, came in and requested a cigarette. “You look lousy, Fred,” he said critically. “Why not go out and have a drink?”
“I don’t want a drink,” Dawson said. “Besides, it’s too early. I had enough liquor in Florida.”
“Maybe too much.”
“No. What griped me was . . . I dunno.”
“Great psychoses from little acorns, grow,” Carruthers said, his plump, pale face almost too casual.
“So now I’m nuts?”
“You could be. You could be. Give yourself time. Why this abnormal fear of psychiatrists, anyway? I got psychoanalyzed once.”
“What happened?”
“I’m going to marry a tall, dark woman,” Carruthers said. “Just the same, psychiatry isn’t in the same class with astrology. Maybe you bit your grandmother when you were a child. Drag it out in the open. As long as you keep thinking, ‘What big teeth you have,’ you’ll dwell in a morass of mental misery.”
“I’m not in a morass,” Dawson said. “It’s just—”
“Yeah. Just—Listen, didn’t you go to college with a guy named Hendricks?”
“I did.”
“I met him in the elevator last week. He’s moved here from Chicago. Got offices upstairs, on the twenty-fifth floor. He’s supposed to be one of the best psychiatrists in this country. Why not go see him?”
“What could I say?” Dawson asked. “I’m not followed by little green men.”
“Lucky man,” Carruthers said. “I am. Day and night. They drink my liquor, too. Just tell Hendricks you smell dead flies. You probably pulled the wings off an anopheles when you were a tot. It’s as simple as that, see?” He rose from his chair, put his hand on Dawson’s shoulder, and added quietly, “Do it, Fred. As a favor to me.”
“Um. Well O.K.”
“Good,” Carruthers said, brightening. He looked at his wrist-watch. “You’re due at his office in five minutes. I made the appointment yesterday.” He fled, ignoring the curse Dawson flung at his head. “Room twenty-five-forty,” he called, and slammed the door.
Scowling, Dawson located his hat, left word with the receptionist as to his whereabouts, and rode the elevator up. He met a short, fat, cherubic man in tweeds emerging from twenty-five-forty. Mild blue eyes considered him through glistening contact lenses.
“Hello, Fred,” the man said, “Don’t know me now, eh?”
“Raoul?” Dawson’s voice was doubtful.
“Right. Raoul Hendricks, somewhat fatter after twenty-five years, I’m afraid. You look the same, though. Look, I was just going down to your office. I didn’t have a chance to eat breakfast this morning. What about a bite downstairs?”
“Didn’t Carruthers tell you—”
“We can kick that around better over food.” Hendricks steered Dawson back to the elevator. “There’s a lot I want to ask you about. The college chaps. I didn’t keep in touch. I was in Europe most of the time.”
“I kept in touch,” Dawson said. “Remember Willard? He’s just been indicted in an oil mix-up—”
They talked over onion soup and through the entree. Hendricks listened, mostly. Sometimes he watched Dawson, though not pointedly. They were in an isolated booth, and, after coffee had been served, Hendricks lighted a cigarette and blew a smoke ring. “You want a snap diagnosis?” he asked.
“O.K.”
“You’re worried about something? Do you know what it is?”
“Certainly I know,” Dawson said. “It’s a sort of daydream. But Carruthers told you that.”
“He said you smelled dead flies.”
Dawson laughed. “On a windowpane. A dusty windowpane. Probably it isn’t that at all. I just got the impression, no more than that. I never see anything. It’s a sort of extension of sensory consciousness.”
“It never occurs in your sleeping dreams?”
“If it does, I don’t remember. It’s always a flash. The worst part is that I know at the time that it’s the windowpane that’s real. Usually it happens when I’m doing some routine stuff. Suddenly I get this flash. It’s instantaneous. I feel, very certainly, that whatever I happen to be doing at the time is a dream. And that really I’m somewhere smelling dead flies on a dusty windowpane.”
“Like the Red King? You think somebody’s dreaming you?”
“No. I’m dreaming this.” Dawson looked around the restaurant.
“Well,” Hendricks said, “possibly you are.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “We get into metaphysics at that point, and I’m lost. It doesn’t matter which is the dream. The main thing is to believe in the dream while you’re having it. Unless it’s a nightmare.”
“It isn’t,” Dawson said. “I’ve had a pretty good life so far.”
“Then where are we? You don’t know what’s worrying you. The dream’s merely a symbol. Once you realize what the symbol represents, the whole structure collapses, and any neuroses you may have are gone. As a general rule, anyway.”
“Ghosts can’t stand light, is that it?”
“That’s it, exactly. Don’t misunderstand me. Neuroses can build up eventually to true psychoses. You’ve got something like an olfactory hallucination. But there’s no accompanying delusion. You know the windowpane isn’t there.”
“Yeah,” Dawson said, “but there’s something under my hand.”
“Tactile hallucination? What does it feel like?”
“Cold and hard. I don’t know what it is. If I move it, something will happen.”
“Do you move it?”
After a long moment Dawson said “No,” very softly.
“Then move it,” Hendricks advised. He took out pencil and paper and adjusted his watch. “Let’s have a jury-rigged word-association test. O.K.?”
“Well why?”
“To find out the causation of your windowpane. If there’s a mental block, if the censor’s working, it’ll show up. Spring cleaning. If you clean a house regularly, you save a lot of work later. No chance for cobwebs to accumulate. Whereas if you let the stuff pile up, you’re apt to get a real psychosis, with all the trimmings. As I just said, it’s a question of finding the cause. Once you locate that, you know it’s a straw dummy, and it doesn’t bother you any more.”
“What if it isn’t a straw dummy?”
“Then, at least, you’ve recognized it, and can take steps to get rid of the incubus.”
“I see,” Dawson said slowly. “If I’d been responsible for a man’s death years ago, I could buy peace of mind by taking care of his orphaned children.”
“Read Dickens,” Hendricks said. “Scrooge is a beautiful case history. Hallucinations, persecution complex, guilt complex
and atonement.” He glanced at his watch.“Ready?”
“Ready.”
When they had finished, Hendricks blinked at the results. “Normal,” he said. “Too normal. A few odd quirks but it takes more than one test to get any definite result. We don’t want to be empirical though it’s sometimes necessary. Next time you have that daydream, move the gadget under your hand.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Dawson said.
But Hendricks only laughed. “Neural paralysis of the astral,” he suggested. “I’m relieved, Fred. I’d rather gathered you were slightly off your rocker. But the layman always overestimates mental quirks. Your friend Carruthers has probably got you a bit worried.”
“Maybe.”
“So you’ve got a hallucinatory daydream. That isn’t uncommon. Once we find the cause, you’ll have nothing left to worry about. Come in tomorrow, any time give me a call firsthand we’ll give you a physical checkup. More coffee?”
“No,” Dawson said, and presently left Hendricks at the elevator. He was feeling irrationally relieved. Though he discounted a good deal of the psychiatrist’s professional optimism, he felt that the man’s argument held water. There was logic in it. And certainly it was illogical to let a daydream influence his moods so strongly.
Back in his office, Dawson stood at the window, staring out over the serrated skyline. The low, hushed roar of traffic mounted from the canyons below. In forty-two years he had come a long way, partner in a law firm, member of a dozen clubs, taking an active interest in a variety of matters a long way, for a boy who had begun his career in an orphan asylum. He had married once, but there had been a divorce, amicable on both sides. Now it was more convenient to maintain a bachelor apartment near Central Park. He had money, prestige, power none of which would help him if the hallucination developed.
On impulse he left the office and visited a medical library. What he found only confirmed Hendricks’ remarks. Apparently, as long as he didn’t believe in the real existence of the dusty windowpane, he was fairly safe. When he did, dissociation stepped in, and all but subjective, false logic would fall. Men have a vital need to believe they are acting rationally and, since so many basic motives are too hidden and complicated to unscramble, they assign arbitrary meanings to their actions. But why a dusty windowpane?