The police didn't find anything that interested them in the house, but when they looked around the garage they turned up a lock box hidden underneath a workshop table. My friend's mother gave them permission to open it, and inside they discovered, as my friend quoted them, “stacks of literature.” Then he wrote, “Both my mom and I were fairly certain that what they called literature wasn't pornography or anything of the kind. It was stuff about them.” That was the first reference to the small people I could recollect appearing in our correspondence to each other. Naturally, this was a subject that we didn't want to linger over. My friend continued regarding what was hidden in his dad's lock box that the police pried open: “Some of it was in envelopes with postmarks from all over the world.” The police rummaged through the material until my friend's mother told them there wasn't anything in there that would help them find her husband. “The cops didn't say a word after that,” my friend wrote. “I thought they might. It seemed to me they should have, the way they were looking at each other. But they just piled the envelopes and stuff back in the box and shoved the box back underneath my dad's workshop table. Then they left, and we haven't heard from them since, the bastards.”
For a few days, I didn't know what to write in response to my friend's letter. I considered phoning him, but I didn't think that was a prudent action to take. Finally, I composed a short letter of vague condolences and hopes that his dad had business he thought it best not to share with him and his mother. My letter was a mass of circumlocutions that I was sure my friend would understand. To my grief, I never received a response to that letter, and it was almost spring before I could admit to myself that I would never hear from him again.
I said that my friend avoided mentioning the smalls in our letters. However, as I later pored over our correspondence I saw that he had written something to me that I blocked from recall. The erasure of his words from my memory was understandable, for what he wrote was simply too strange to reflect upon for very long. If you'll remember, Doctor, I posed the following question: “How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things are in this world at its deepest level?” And the answer I gave to my own question was this: “Because we had done it before.” Well, that's exactly what I had done when I read what my friend wrote to me in one of his letters. Here is my recitation of it from memory: “My dad got drunk last night and told me things I had never heard from him before. I didn't understand most of it. What I do remember was his repeating what he called a spectral link between the smalls and some people in the real world. Then he went on about people who looked and acted like humans but were not human. Maybe he said they were not completely human. He did have a term for them. It was half-small people.”
You might be able to comprehend, Doctor, how disquieted I was to see written in my friend's hand certain words that, at least in concept, had occurred to me only in a dream. I hated to think that there was a spectral link between myself and the smalls, and though I have spoken of peculiar truths regarding how things really are in this world at its deepest level, truths that we keep ourselves from knowing, I concluded with stark lucidity that there was absolutely no spectral link between myself and the smalls—not as I understood my friend's father to have used these words. If anything, it was exactly the opposite. The small people were drastically alien to me. I was derided by my parents as a shameless little bigot because of my fear of them and my hatred of them, feelings that I had not known to exist in anyone else besides my friend, and vicariously through him with his father—and his mother, too, it seemed, whom I believe had also gone the way of the rest of my friend's family. But where they had gone I couldn't bring myself to ponder.
While continuing to be afraid of the smalls and to hate them, these emotions were now transferred with a rabid vehemence toward the half-smalls, whom my friend added sometimes devolved—or whatever the proper term might be—in both appearance and nature into small people through and through. Following this transformation, which they might not even know was possible or considered desirable—there was nothing for them to do except move into small country and live among their kind, that is, if they didn't regard this prospect as so repellent that they took other measures rather than losing the sense of who they were, or thought they were, and what they were, or thought they were. With its small people, this world just seemed a preposterous mess to me, and now it was revealed to be even worse than I knew. Why couldn't things be different? What would it take for our lives to make some kind of sense? Maybe that's just not possible, I thought. Maybe any world would be just as preposterous. Yet the existence of the half-smalls nevertheless still inspired in me a crawling fear, a new unseen horror, as I've mentioned having this sensation in dreams, along with a hatred of them for having what I thought was a weakness connecting them in some spectral manner with the small people. At least the latter were something of a phenomenally known quantity to my mind, however little I understood about them. But the halfers were something else— interlopers in a world where they didn't belong, the source of all questions about who or what human beings might be as a life form. For as tiresome as it has become, the question of what it means to be human continues to fervently preoccupy us— because without that definition we cannot positively know if our laborious self-perpetuation is worth the candle we keep lit in the blackness of the universe. We cannot decide whether we should continue or terminate the human race, if there is anything that might be called the human race, since we are as fragmented in the aggregate as we are as individuals—things of parts and not the integrated organisms we represent to ourselves. All the same, as naïve and arrogant as this may sound, I felt that my sensibility enabled my insight into this immemorial affair. I thought of this sensibility as a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.
From this point on, as I walked the streets of the town where I lived, I could see only how contrary everything was to the picture of it I was psychologically strong-armed into having. Now the place where I grew up was no more than another preposterous mess. The town's motto on the sign as you entered Main Street was: “A Good Place to Live”—not exactly a boastful statement. In actuality, though, it was pretty crummy. Not crummy in itself, I should say, because I had never lived in any other towns. They might be as crummy as my native town. The whole planet might be crummy for all I knew then. When I looked closely at the city hall, for instance, I could see it was wobbly. Maybe at one time I would have thought nothing of walking through the wide front doors of the place. Now that my eyes could see that they tilted quite visibly, I wouldn't have entered its space on a dare. Or take the post office. If my mother had ordered me in her most calmly intimidating voice to go buy her some stamps, I wouldn't do it. Not one foot would I set inside, because its bricks were set together all wrong. One of them could slide a little, I gauged, and the walls might come crashing down in a flash and bury me alive as I was standing in line to buy some rotten stamps which had images on them that were so faded and cock-eyed I couldn't tell anymore what they were supposed to represent. Once they were printed with images of monuments in one place or another where my family went on vacation, as I remembered in my mind's eye, but from then on they appeared all bent up and sagging. And they were all supposed to be so grand. Taken in total, the whole world was supposed to be so grand. But it wasn't, not from my perspective, which was no longer so muddled I couldn't see things for what they were and not how I was supposed to see them. In my view, all the earth and anything that stood upon it was just like the town where I lived—not a good place but a crummy place. Even new places that people were always rushing around to build were crummy from the start—wobbly and tilted, bent and sagging. All the energy and hustling that went into building a car wash or a row of stores that seemed shoot up overnight like mushrooms—it was just so useless. Everything was supposed to amount to something, as testified by the ubiquitous Grand Openings of some
place wherever you looked. But nothing amounted to anything. It was all just trying to be what it wasn't—real, that is, authentic in every sense of the word, and not fatally bogus.
I could see the same thing in people that I did in the flimsy material world, this junkyard of cast-off ectoplasm. They didn't meet expectations either, though, as I said, no one yet has been able to say definitely who or what we are. And I don't think anyone will ever be able to do so. I don't think they want to. What I do think they want is to say that humans, real humans, are this and that and the other thing—that there are millions of qualities humans have that nothing else has, and they say all this to keep us confused, to keep themselves confused, about what humans really are, except that they're not small people. But now I was fixated on the half-smalls. Now my sensibility, my special instinct, had become sufficiently honed to discern who was what. Not that I expected any consolation from such knowledge—it was simply something to do while I decided what to do with myself.
At first, as I walked around town during the summer after I stopped receiving letters from my friend, I wasn't sure exactly how my sensibility was functioning. I would get a feeling, like a tingling inside me, when I saw certain people strolling down the sidewalk or sitting at picnic tables outside the frozen custard stand that did land-office business throughout the summer months. I'm sure you get the picture, Doc. It was show time and nothing but. No doubt some clickety-clack version of it was being enacted by the smalls, as I was now with some confidence able to imagine after beholding one of their own towns in its construction stage, a poor excuse for even the crummiest human town, if one wants to get into degrees of crumminess, that is.
All things considered, my wits were in relatively fair working order, and my sensibility was becoming more and more sharply attuned. Occasionally, the tingling sensation I felt in the proximity of certain persons caught me off guard and pierced my spine with anxiety, but for the most part I was in control. Within the span of about a week, I not only felt something about those people but also began to see little things about them, things you wouldn't notice without an exacting gaze. After my confrontation with the small people and detecting the smoothness of their faces, which were bereft of the character bestowed by time, unwrinkled and unworn, I saw a family resemblance in the same people who set off that tingling inside me. I wished my friend could have been there, because I was sure he would have seen the same thing about them—that they were halfers.
Some days I'd walk from one end of town to the other, and I'd pick out the real people from the half-small people. As I passed by each person I would check off their identities in my mind— halfer, real, halfer, real, and so on. Mr. So-and-so—halfer. The old woman who walks her dog in the park every day—real. Schoolteachers—halfers every one. Cops, too, all halfers, which made me think of my friend's family and the investigating officers who found the literature under his father's workshop table. The girl who sat next to me in math class—real. I was glad about that. The middle-aged lady in the window at the beauty shop— everyone thought she had a facelift done, but she was a halfer. With children it was more of a challenge sorting out the real ones from the halfers. Most of them I let pass as real. There was one group of kids, though, all spindly specimens with empty stares. They had to be half-smalls.
All told, I judged about half the people in town as real and half as halfers. I had gotten to be quite proficient at spotting our citizens as one or the other—too good, in the end. I really should have shut off my thoughts sometimes, but I couldn't do that.
It was Saturday, and my dad was off work for the weekend. My family always barbequed hamburgers and hot dogs on those days and ate them together around a plastic table in the backyard. We don't tend to see our parents the way we do others. We're too close to them. Even if they make you miserable and call you a shameful little bigot, they're still your parents—special circumstances notwithstanding. But after all the time I spent around town separating the real people from the half-smalls, I scrutinized everyone the same. More to the point, I felt that tingling inside me. Being with both my mother and father for an extended period of time on a Saturday afternoon, and sitting with them around a plastic table in the backyard, I was tingling like mad. My father was smiling slightly and staring with concentration as he always did. But I never noticed that he was really staring at nothing in particular - that he was more or less gawking with bottomless eyes. And though the sun was shining on my mother's smooth face, her big eyes weren't squinting. Furthermore, they didn't look right or left, up or down. They were just big eyes like a big doll would have. The longer I sat with my parents eating hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad with no egg whites, because from the first time I ate potato salad with egg whites I refused to eat it again that way, the more I tingled inside. My parents did what they had to do in order to be real parents to me. But we weren't biologically related, as I'm sure it says in your file on me. I was adopted as an infant, and now I knew that I was only a prop, something to aid them in not being found out for what they were.
Before they told me, I already knew somehow that I was adopted. And I was never happy about that. But on that Saturday as I sat eating dinner with my parents around a plastic table, I praised whatever there was to praise that I was adopted, or else I would have been a halfer, too, if in fact that's the way it works. Nevertheless, I was pleased not to be their real offspring. I couldn't be sure, of course, if reals could give birth to halfers or the other way around, since I didn't know how the spectral link between the small people and the real people worked. My friend was taken from me before I could learn more about that, and maybe about other things. I hated that—I hated it with all my being. And what happened, as I mentioned, was that all my hate for the small people transferred to the half-smalls. Now I wondered if the reason for that transference wasn't due to my subliminal recognition of having parents who belonged to that weird species.
Retrospectively, it made all the sense in this clockwork world that my father and mother were halfers—the way they reproached me so often about being a shameful little bigot when in truth I was not a bigot but a real person who was afraid of the small people and couldn't accept the arrangement the big world had with them. Maybe real parents would have understood that, I don't know. I wanted to think so. I wanted to think that there was something sensible, or at least something of marginal value about the tick-tock world I had been born into. But the two halfers sitting with me at that plastic table only berated me as a shameless little bigot, certainly because they wanted to stifle my sensitivity to how things were in the world at its deepest level and to muddle my brain as I came of age, going through all the adjustments in the process so that that I could be presented in company— that is, so that I would be a sightless moron like everyone else, everyone except people like the only friend I ever had in my life. In a split-second, as I sat munching my hamburger or hot dog and watching my mother and father that day, I was hopelessly possessed by hatred for them.
That night I lay awake in my bed for a long time, earnestly trying to arrive at some way to live with the household status quo, just as real humans had arranged at some time in the past to live with the small people, though no book I could find would pinpoint when that was or how it was done. But there was no way I could do that—no way at all. It must have been around the middle of the night—I didn't plan a specific time—that I entered mother and father's bedroom. They were lying on their backs in bed, the moonlight glowing on my father's slightly smiling face and concentrating stare as well as on my mother's smooth face and big eyes, which were open. Both their eyes were open. I don't know why. Maybe they didn't sleep. It wasn't as if I was the sort of person to peek into his parents’ bedroom to see what they were doing.
“Dad, Mom,” I said, just to get their attention. They didn't even sit up in bed, though. Maybe they were sleeping, in their own way. “Listen,” I continued. “I want to tell you something. What I want to tell you is…” Then, with all the lung power I cou
ld summon, I screamed: “I'm a shameful little bigot. I hate the small people. I hate them for all I'm worth. But more than I hate the small people, I hate you.”
Then I jumped on the bed and was all over them with the knives I'd gotten from the kitchen. Push, push, push. Chop, chop, chop. They didn't make a sound the whole time. I can tell you one thing—halfers aren't soft like the smalls. I really had to work on those things that called themselves my parents.
I wasn't exactly amazed that I never saw the inside of a courtroom, knowing as I did what I knew. I didn't know, however, what would ensue in the aftermath of my deed—that I would be locked up in this place. Whatever it is, it isn't a prison, not with the superlative educational facilities you've provided, allowing my mind and sensibility to flourish. If our positions were reversed, that would be my scheme—cultivate me like a plant, breed me into something that could express its view of the world at its deepest level. You were ready for me from the very first, so I have to assume I'm not the only one to do what I did, and for the reason I did it. That's right, isn't it, Doctor? But I've been here so long. How many more doctors must I see who want to hear my story? Are you in training or something? I'm as sane as your shoes, we both know that, even though I should have gone mad long ago from my dreams alone. Why can't we make a deal, come to an arrangement? I'm practically an old man. My coming of age came and went. I'd kill myself if I thought you'd let me. That's not what you want, though, is it? Could you please give me an answer just once?
There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man Page 10