He tore the books out of me the way he would tear berries from a bush, all at once; he smelled of sweat and earth and the green juices his heavy body crushed when he moved through the wood.
If he learned anything from the books, it made no difference in him.
There came a day when he sat by me and puzzled something out.
He said, “What book has something like this?” Then he waited for a long time, thinking. “The way a termite can’t digest wood, you know, and microbes in the termite’s belly can, and what the termite eats is what the microbe leaves behind. What’s that?”
“Symbiosis,” I remembered. I remembered the words. Lone tore the content from the words and threw the words away. “Two kinds of life depending upon one another for existence.”
“Yeah. Well, is there a book about four-five kinds doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
Then he asked, “What about this? You got a radio station, you got four-five receivers, each receiver is fixed up to make something different happen, like one digs and one flies and one makes noise, but each one takes orders from the one place. And each one has its own power and its own thing to do, but they are all apart. Now: is there life like that, instead of radio?”
“Where each organism is a part of the whole, but separated? I don’t think so … unless you mean social organizations, like a team, or perhaps a gang of men working, all taking orders from the same boss.”
“No,” he said immediately, “not like that. Like one single animal.” He made a gesture with his cupped hand which I understood.
I asked, “You mean a gestalt life-form? It’s fantastic.”
“No book has about that, huh?”
“None I ever heard of.”
“I got to know about that,” he said heavily. “There is such a thing. I want to know if it ever happened before.”
“I can’t see how anything of the sort could exist.”
“It does. A part that fetches, a part that figures, a part that finds out, and a part that talks.”
“Talks? Only humans talk.”
“I know,” he said, and got up and went away.
I looked and looked for such a book, but found nothing remotely like it. I came back and told him so. He was still a very long time, looking off to the blue-on-blue line of the hilly horizon. Then he drove those about-to-spin irises at me and searched.
“You learn, but you don’t think,” he said, and looked again at the hills.
“This all happens with humans,” he said eventually. “It happens piece by piece right under folks’ noses, and they don’t see it. You got mind-readers. You got people can move things with their mind. You got people can move themselves with their mind. You got people can figure anything out if you just think to ask them. What you ain’t got is the one kind of person who can pull ’em all together, like a brain pulls together the parts that press and pull and feel heat and walk and think and all the other things.
“I’m one,” he finished suddenly. Then he sat still for so long, I thought he had forgotten me.
“Lone,” I said, “what do you do here in the woods?”
“I wait,” he said. “I ain’t finished yet.” He looked at my eyes and snorted in irritation. “I don’t mean ‘finished’ like you’re thinking. I mean I ain’t—completed yet. You know about a worm when it’s cut, growin’ whole again? Well, forget about the cut. Suppose it just grew that way, for the first time, see? I’m getting parts. I ain’t finished. I want a book about that kind of animal that is me when I’m finished.”
“I don’t know of such a book. Can you tell me more? Maybe if you could, I’d think of the right book or a place to find it.”
He broke a stick between his huge hands, put the two pieces side by side and broke them together with one strong twist.
“All I know is I got to do what I’m doing like a bird’s got to nest when it’s time. And I know that when I’m done I won’t be anything to brag about. I’ll be like a body stronger and faster than anything there ever was, without the right kind of head on it. But maybe that’s because I’m one of the first. That picture you had, the caveman …”
“Neanderthal.”
“Yeah. Come to think of it, he was no great shakes. An early try at something new. That’s what I’m going to be. But maybe the right kind of head’ll come along after I’m all organized. Then it’ll be something.”
He grunted with satisfaction and went away.
I tried, for days I tried, but I couldn’t find what he wanted. I found a magazine which stated that the next important evolutionary step in man would be a psychic rather than a physical direction, but it said nothing about a—shall I call it a gestalt organism? There was something about slime molds, but they seem to be more a hive activity of amoebae than even a symbiosis.
To my own unscientific, personally uninterested mind, there was nothing like what he wanted except possibly a band marching together, everyone playing different kinds of instruments with different techniques and different notes, to make a single thing move along together. But he hadn’t meant anything like that.
So I went back to him in the cool of an early fall evening, and he took what little I had in my eyes, and turned from me angrily with a gross word I shall not permit myself to remember.
“You can’t find it,” he told me. “Don’t come back.”
He got up and went to a tattered birch and leaned against it, looking out and down into the wind-tossed crackling shadows. I think he had forgotten me already. I know he leaped like a frightened animal when I spoke to him from so near. He must have been completely immersed in whatever strange thoughts he was having, for I’m sure he didn’t hear me coming.
I said, “Lone, don’t blame me for not finding it. I tried.”
He controlled his startlement and brought those eyes down to me. “Blame? Who’s blamin’ anybody?”
“I failed you,” I told him, “and you’re angry.”
He looked at me so long I became uncomfortable.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he said.
I wouldn’t let him turn away from me. He would have. He would have left me forever with not another thought; he didn’t care! It wasn’t cruelty or thoughtlessness as I have been taught to know those things. He was as uncaring as a cat is of the bursting of a tulip bud.
I took him by the upper arms and shook him, it was like trying to shake the front of my house. “You can know!” I screamed at him. “You know what I read. You must know what I think.”
He shook his head.
“I’m a person, a woman,” I raved at him. “You’ve used me and used me and you’ve given me nothing. You’ve made me break a lifetime of habits—reading until all hours, coming to you in the rain and on Sunday—you don’t talk to me, you don’t look at me, you don’t know anything about me and you don’t care. You put some sort of a spell on me that I couldn’t break. And when you’re finished, you say, ‘Don’t come back.’ ”
“Do I have to give something back because I took something?”
“People do.”
He gave that short, interested hum. “What do you want me to give you? I ain’t got anything.”
I moved away from him. I felt … I don’t know what I felt. After a time I said, “I don’t know.”
He shrugged and turned. I fairly leaped at him, dragging him back. “I want you to—”
“Well, damn it, what?”
I couldn’t look at him; I could hardly speak. “I don’t know. There’s something, but I don’t know what it is. It’s something that—I couldn’t say if I knew it.” When he began to shake his head, I took his arms again. “You’ve read the books out of me; can’t you read the … the me out of me?”
“I ain’t never tried.” He held my face up, and stepped close. “Here,” he said.
His eyes projected their strange probe at me and I screamed. I tried to twist away. I hadn’t wanted this, I was sure I hadn’t. I struggled terribly.
I think he lifted me right off the ground with his big hands. He held me until he was finished, and then let me drop. I huddled to the ground, sobbing. He sat down beside me. He didn’t try to touch me. He didn’t try to go away. I quieted at last and crouched there, waiting.
He said, “I ain’t going to do much of that no more.”
I sat up and tucked my skirt close around me and laid my cheek on my updrawn knees so I could see his face. “What happened?”
He cursed. “Damn mishmash inside you. Thirty-three years old—what you want to live like that for?”
“I live very comfortably,” I said with some pique.
“Yeah,” he said. “All by yourself for ten years now ’cept for someone to do your work. Nobody else.”
“Men are animals, and women …”
“You really hate women. They all know something you don’t.”
“I don’t want to know. I’m quite happy the way I am.”
“Hell you are.”
I said nothing to that. I despise that kind of language.
“Two things you want from me. Neither makes no sense.” He looked at me with the first real expression I have ever seen in his face: a profound wonderment. “You want to know all about me, where I came from, how I got to be what I am.”
“Yes, I do want that. What’s the other thing I want that you know and I don’t?”
“I was born some place and growed like a weed somehow,” he said, ignoring me. “Folks who didn’t give even enough of a damn to try the orphanage routine. I lived with some other folks for a while, tried school, didn’t like it. Too small a town for them special schools for my kind, retarded, y’know. So I just ran loose, sort of in training to be the village idiot. I’da made it if I’d stayed there, but I took to the woods instead.”
“Why?”
He wondered why, and finally said, “I guess because the way people lived didn’t make no sense to me. I saw enough up and down, back and forth, to know that they live a lot of different ways, but none of ’em was for me. Out here I can grow like I want.”
“How is that?” I asked over one of those vast differences that built and receded between him and me so constantly.
“What I wanted to get from your books.”
“You never told me.”
For the second time he said, “You learn, but you don’t think. There’s a kind of—well, person. It’s all made of separate parts, but it’s all one person. It has like hands, it has like legs, it has like a talking mouth, and it has like a brain. That’s me, a brain for that person. Damn feeble, too, but the best I know of.”
“You’re mad.”
“No, I ain’t,” he said, unoffended and completely certain. “I already got the part that’s like hands. I can move ’em anywhere and they do what I want, though they’re too young yet to do much good. I got the part that talks. That one’s real good.”
“I don’t think you talk very well at all,” I said. I cannot stand incorrect English.
He was surprised. “I’m not talking about me! She’s back yonder with the others.”
“She?”
“The one that talks. Now I need one that thinks, one that can take anything and add it to anything else and come up with a right answer. And once they’re all together, and all the parts get used together often enough, I’ll be that new kind of thing I told you about. See? Only—I wish it had a better head on it than me.”
My own head was swimming. “What made you start doing this?”
He considered me gravely. “What made you start growing hair in your armpits?” he asked me. “You don’t figure a thing like that. It just happens.”
“What is that … that thing you do when you look in my eyes?”
“You want a name for it? I ain’t got one. I don’t know how I do it. I know I can get anyone I want to do anything. Like you’re going to forget about me.”
I said in a choked voice, “I don’t want to forget about you.”
“You will.” I didn’t know then whether he meant I’d forget, or I’d want to forget. “You’ll hate me, and then after a long time you’ll be grateful. Maybe you’ll be able to do something for me some time. You’ll be that grateful that you’ll be glad to do it. But you’ll forget, all right, everything but a sort of … feeling. And my name, maybe.”
I don’t know what moved me to ask him, but I did, forlornly. “And no one will ever know about you and me?”
“Can’t,” he said. “Unless … well, unless it was the head of the animal, like me, or a better one.” He heaved himself up.
“Oh, wait, wait!” I cried. He mustn’t go yet, he mustn’t. He was a tall, dirty beast of a man, yet he had enthralled me in some dreadful way. “You haven’t given me the other … whatever it was.”
“Oh,” he said, “Yeah, that.”
He moved like a flash. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a … a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.
I came up out of it, through two distinct levels:
I am eleven, breathless from shock from a transferred agony of that incredible entrance into the ego of another. And:
I am fifteen, lying on the couch while Stern drones on, “… quietly, quietly limp, your ankles and legs as limp as your toes, your belly goes soft, the back of your neck is as limp as your belly, it’s quiet and easy and all gone soft and limper than limp …”
I sat up and swung my legs to the floor. “Okay,” I said.
Stern looked a little annoyed. “This is going to work,” he said, “but it can only work if you cooperate. Just lie—”
“It did work,” I said.
“What?”
“The whole thing. A to Z.” I snapped my fingers. “Like that.”
He looked at me piercingly. “What do you mean?”
“It was right there, where you said. In the library. When I was eleven. When she said, ‘Baby is three.’ It knocked loose something that had been boiling around in her for three years, and it all came blasting out. I got it, full force; just a kid, no warning, no defenses. It had such a—a pain in it, like I never knew could be.”
“Go on,” said Stern.
“That’s really all. I mean that’s not what was in it; it’s what it did to me. What it was, a sort of hunk of her own self. A whole lot of things that happened over about four months, every bit of it. She knew Lone.”
“You mean a whole series of episodes?”
“That’s it.”
“You got a series all at once? In a split second?”
“That’s right. Look, for that split second I was her, don’t you see? I was her, everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever thought and heard and felt. Everything, everything, all in the right order if I wanted to bring it out like that. Any part of it if I wanted it by itself. If I’m going to tell you about what I had for lunch, to I have to tell you everything else I’ve ever done since I was born? No. I tell you I was her, and then and forever after I can remember anything she could remember up to that point. In just that one flash.”
“A gestalt,” he murmured.
“Aha!” I said, and thought about that. I thought about a whole lot of things. I put them aside for a moment and said, “Why didn’t I know all this before?”
“You had a powerful block against recalling it.”
I got up excitedly. “I don’t see why. I don’t see that at all.”
“Just natural revulsion,” he guessed. “How about this? You had a distaste for assuming a female ego, even for a second.”
“You told me yourself, right at the beginning, that I didn’t have that kind of a problem.”
“Well, how does this sound to you? You say you felt pain in that episode. So—you wouldn’t go back into it for fear of re-experiencing the pain.”
“Let me think, let me think. Yeah, yeah, that’s part of it—that thing of going into someone’s mind. She opened up to me because I reminded her of Lone. I went in. I wasn’t read
y; I’d never done it before, except maybe a little, against resistance. I went all the way in and it was too much; it frightened me away from trying it for years. And there it lay, wrapped up, locked away. But as I grew older, the power to do that with my mind got stronger and stronger, and still I was afraid to use it. And the more I grew, the more I felt, down deep, that Miss Kew had to killed before she killed the … what I am. My God!” I shouted. “Do you know what I am?”
“No,” he said. “Like to tell me about it?”
“I’d like to,” I said. “Oh, yes, I’d like that.”
He had that professional open-minded expression on his face, not believing or disbelieving, just taking it all in. I had to tell him, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have enough words. I knew the things, but not the names for them.
Lone took the meanings and threw the words away.
Further back: “You read books. Read books for me.”
The look of his eyes. That—“opening up” thing.
I went over to Stern. He looked up at me. I bent close. First he was startled, then he controlled it, then he came even closer to me.
“My God,” he murmured. “I didn’t look at those eyes before. I could have sworn those irises spun like wheels …”
Stern read books. He’d read more books than I ever imagined had been written. I slipped in there, looking for what I wanted.
I can’t say exactly what it was like. It was like walking in a tunnel, and in this tunnel, all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you, like the thing at the carnival, the merry-go-round, the thing you snatch brass rings from. There’s a brass ring on the end of each of these arms, and you can take any one of them you want to.
Now imagine you make up your mind which rings you want, and the arms hold only those. Now picture yourself with a thousand hands to grab the rings off with. Now just suppose the tunnel is a zillion miles long, and you can go from one end of it to the other, grabbing rings, in just the time it takes you to blink once. Well, it was like that, only easier.
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