A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Don listened, fairly humming with reaction. He had seen all the things she mentioned, good and bad. Some he had not understood, some he had not thought about, some he wouldn’t dream of discussing in mixed company. He knew vaguely that things were better than they had been twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago, but he had never before been face to face with one of those who integrate, correlate, extrapolate this progress, who dirty their hands on this person or that in order to work for people. Sometimes he bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from laughing at her bluntness and efficiency—he wished he could have seen that desk sergeant’s face!—or to keep from sniggering self-consciously at the way unmentionables rolled off her precise tongue. Sometimes he was puzzled and lost in the complexities of the organizations with which she was so familiar. And sometimes he was slack-jawed with fear for her, thinking of the retribution she must surely be in the way of, breaking up rackets like that. But then his own aching back would remind him that she had ways of taking care of herself, and a childlike awe would rise up in him until he forgot to breathe.

  There was no direct instruction in anything she said. It was purely description. And yet he began to feel that in this complex lay duties for him to perform. Exactly what they might be did not emerge. It was simply that he felt, as never before, a functioning part, rather than an excrescence, of his own environment.

  He was never to remember all the details of that extraordinary communion, nor the one which immediately followed; for somehow she had stopped speaking and there was a long quiet between them. His mind was so busy with itself that there seemed no break in this milling and chewing of masses of previously unregarded ideas. For a time she had been talking, for a time she did not talk, and in it all he was completely submerged.

  At length she said, “Donny, tell me something ugly.”

  “What do you mean ugly?” The question and its answer had flowed through him almost without contact; had she not insisted, he would have lapsed into his busy silence again.

  “Donny, something that you know about that you’ve done. Anything at all. Something you’ve seen.”

  It was easy to turn from introspection to deep recalls. “Went to one of those summer camps that there paper runs for kids. I’s about seven, I guess.”

  “Donny,” she said after what may have been a long time, “go on.”

  “Wasps,” he said, negotiating the divided sibilant with some difficulty. “The ones that make paper nests.” Suddenly he turned quite pale. “They stung me, it was on the big porch. The nurse, she came out an’ hugged me and went away and came back with a bottle, ammonia it was, and put it on where I’s stung.” He coughed. “Stuff stunk, but it felt fine. Then a counselor, a big kid from up the street, he came with a long stick. There was a ol’ rag tied on the end, it had kerosene on it. He lit it up with a match, it burned all yellow and smoky. He put it up high by them paper nests. The wasps, they come out howlin’, they flew right into the fire. When they stopped comin’ he pushed at the nest and down it come.

  “He gone on to the next one, and down the line, twelve, fifteen of them. Every time he come to a new one, the wasps they flew into the fire. You could see the wings go, not like burning, not like melting, sort of fzzz! they gone. They fall. They fall all over the floor, they wiggle around, some run like ants, some with they legs burned off they just go around in one place like a phonograph.

  “Kids come from all over, watching bug-eyed, runnin’ around the porch, stampin’ on them wasps with their wings gone, they can’t sting nobody. Stamp on ’em and squeal and run away an’ run back and stamp some more. I’m back near the door, I’m bawlin’. The nurse is squeezin’ me, watchin’ the wasps, wipin’ the ammonia on me any old place, she’s not watchin’ what she’s doin’. An’ all the time the fire goes an’ goes, the wasps fly at it, never once a dumb damn wasp goes to see who’s at the other end of the stick. An’ I’m there with the nurse, bawlin’. Why am I bawlin’?” It came out a deep, basic demand.

  “You must have been stung quite badly,” said Miss Phoebe. She was leaning forward, her strange unlovely eyes fixed on him. Her lower lip was wet.

  “Nah! Three times, four …” He struggled hard to fit rich sensation to a poverty of words. “It was me, see. I guess if I got stung every wasp done it should get killed. Maybe burned even. But them wasps in the nest-es, they din’t sting nobody, an’ here they are all … all brave, that’s what, brave, comin’ and fallin’ and comin’ and fallin’ and gettin’ squashed. Why? Fer me, thass why! Me, it was me, I hadda go an’ holler because I got stung an’ make all that happen.” He screwed his eyes tight shut and breathed as if he had been running. Abruptly his eyes opened very wide and he pressed himself upward in his chair, stretching his long bony neck as if he sat in rising water up to his chin. “What am I talkin’ about, wasps? We wasn’t talkin’ about no wasps. How’d we get talkin’ like this?”

  She said, “It’s all part of the same thing.”

  She waited for him to quiet down. He seemed to, at last. “I asked you to tell me something ugly, and you did. Did it make you feel better?”

  He looked at her strangely. Wasn’t there something—oh, yes. Yesterday, about the watch. She made him tell and then asked if he didn’t feel better. Was she getting back to that damn watch? I guess not, he thought, and for some reason felt very ashamed. “Yeah, I feel some better.” He looked into himself, found that what he had just said was true, and started in surprise. “Why should that be?” he asked, and it was the first time in his whole life he had asked such a question.

  “There’s two of us carrying it now,” she explained.

  He thought, and then protested, “There was twenty people there.”

  “Not one of them knew why you were crying.”

  Understanding flashed in him, bloomed almost to revelation. “God damn,” he said softly.

  This time she made no comment. Instead she said, “You learned something about bravery that day, didn’t you?”

  “Not until … now.”

  She shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. As long as you understand, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Now, if all that happened just to make you understand something about bravery, it isn’t an ugly thing at all, is it?”

  He did not answer, but his very silence was a response.

  “Perhaps one day you will fly into the fire and burn your wings and die, because it’s all you can do to save something dear to you,” she said softly. She let him think about that for a moment and then said, “Perhaps you will be a flame yourself, and see the brave ones fly at you and lose their wings and die. Either way, you’d know a little better what you were doing, because of the wasps, wouldn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “The playgrounds,” she said, “the medicines, the air-raid watching, the boys’ clubs, everything we were discussing … each single one of them kills something to do its work, and sometimes what is killed is very brave. It isn’t easy to know good from evil.”

  “You know,” he blurted.

  “Ah,” she said, “but there’s a reason for that. You’d better go now, Donny.”

  Everything she had said to him flew to him as she spoke it, rested lightly on him, soaked in while he waited, and in time found a response. This was no exception. When he understood what she had said he jumped up guiltily covering the thoughtful and receptive self with self-consciousness like a towel snatched up to cover nakedness.

  “Yeah I got to, what time is it?” he muttered. “Well,” he said, “yeah. I guess I should.” He looked about him as if he had forgotten some indefinable thing, turned and gave her a vacillating smile and went to the door. He opened it and turned. Silently and with great difficulty his mouth moved. He pressed the lips together.

  “Good-bye, Donny.”

  “Yeah. Take it easy,” he said.

  As he spoke he saw himself in the full-length mirror fixed to the closet door. His eyes widened. It was himself he saw there—there was no doubt of that. But there
was no sharp-cut seam-strained sports jacket, no dull and tattered shoes, no slicked-down hair smooth in front and down-pointing shag at the nape. In the reflection he was dressed in a dark suit. The coat matched the trousers. The tie was a solid color, maroon, and was held by a clasp so low down that it could barely be seen in the V of the jacket. The shoes gleamed, not like enamel but like the sheen of a new black-iron frying pan.

  He gasped and blinked, and in that second the reflection told him only that he was what he was, flashy and clumsy and very much out of place here. He turned one long scared glance on Miss Phoebe and bolted through the door.

  Don quit his job at the market. He quit jobs often, and usually needed no reason, but he had one this time. The idea of delivering another package to Miss Phoebe made him sweat, and the sweat was copious and cold. He did not know if it was fear or awe or shame, because he did not investigate the revulsion. He acknowledged it and acted upon it and otherwise locked the broad category labeled “Miss Phoebe” in the most guarded passages of his mind.

  He was, unquestionably, haunted. Although he refused to acknowledge its source, he could not escape what can only be described as a sense of function. When he sharked around the pool halls to pick up some change—he carried ordinary seaman’s papers, so could get a forty-cent bed at the Seaman’s Institute—he was of the nonproductive froth on the brackish edges of a backwater, and he knew it acutely. When he worked as helper in a dockside shop, refurbishing outdated streetcars to be shipped to South America, his hand was unavoidably a link in a chain of vision and enterprise starting with an idea and ending with a peasant who, at this very moment, walked, but who would inevitably ride. Between that idea and that shambling peasant were months and miles and dollars, but the process passed through Don’s hands every time they lifted a wrench, and he would watch them with mingled wonder and resentment.

  He was a piece of nerve-tissue becoming aware of the proximity of a ganglion, and dimly conscious of the existence, somewhere, of a brain. His resentment stemmed from a nagging sense of loss. In ignorance he had possessed a kind of freedom—he’d have called it loneliness while he had it—which in retrospect filled him with nostalgia. He carried his inescapable sense of belonging like a bundle of thorns, light but most irritating. It was with him in drunkenness and the fights, the movies and the statistical shoutings of the baseball season. He never slept, but was among those who slept. He could not laugh without the realization that he was among the laughers. He no longer moved in a static universe, or rested while the world went by, for his every action had too obvious a reaction. Unbidden, his mind made analogies to remind him of this, inverting everything to illuminate this unwanted duality. The street, he found, pressed upward to his feet with a force equal to his weight. A new job and he approached one another with an equal magnetism, and he lost it or claimed it not by his effort or lack of it, but by an intricate resultant compounded of all the forces working with him matched against those opposed. On going to bed he would remove one shoe, and wake from a reverie ten minutes later to find with annoyance that he had sat motionless all that time to contemplate the weight of the shoe versus the upward force of the hand that held it. No birth is painless, and the stirrings of departure from a reactive existence are most troubling, since habit opposes it and there is no equipment to define the motivating ambition.

  His own perceptions began to plague him. There had been a time when he was capable of tuning out that which did not concern him. But whatever it was that was growing within him extended its implacable sense of kinship to more areas than those of human endeavor. Why, he would ask himself insistently, is the wet end of a towel darker than the dry end? What do spiders do with their silk when they climb up a single strand? What makes the brows of so many big executives tilt downward from the center?

  He was not a reader, and though he liked to talk, his wharf-rat survival instinct inhibited him from talking “different” talk, which is what his “different” questions would be, for one does not expose oneself to the sharp teeth of raillery.

  He found an all-night cafe where the talk was as different as the talkers could make it; where girls who were unsure of their difference walked about with cropped hair and made their voices boom, and seedy little polyglots surreptitiously ate catsup and sugar with their single interminable cup of coffee; where a lost man could exchange his broken compass for a broken oar. He went there night after night, sitting alone and listening, held by the fact that many of these minds were genuinely questing. Armed with his strange understanding of opposites, he readily recognized those on one side or the other of forces which most naturally oppose one another, but since he could admire neither phrasing nor intensity for their own sakes, he could only wonder at the misery of these children perched so lonesomely on their dialectical seesaws, mourning the fact that they did not get off the ground while refusing to let anyone get on the other end. Once he listened raptly to a man with a bleeding ear who seemed to understand the things he felt, but instead of believing many things, this man believed in nothing. Don went away, sad, wondering if there were anyone, anywhere who cared importantly that when you yawn, an Italian will ask you if you’re hungry while a Swede will think you need sleep; or that only six parallel cuts on a half-loaf of bread will always get you seven slices.

  So for many months he worked steadily so that his hands could drain off tensions and let him think. When he had worked through every combination and permutation of which he was capable, he could cast back and discover that all his thoughts had stemmed from Miss Phoebe. His awe and fear of her ceased to exist when he decided to go back, not to see her, but to get more material.

  A measure of awe returned, however, when he phoned. He heard her lift the receiver, but she did not say, “Hello.” She said, “Why, Don! How are you?”

  He swallowed hard and said, “Good, Miss Phoebe.”

  “Four o’clock tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.

  He put the receiver back carefully and stood looking at the telephone. He worked the tip of the finger-stop under his thumbnail and stood for a long time in the booth, carefully cleaning away the thin parenthesis of oily grime which had defied his brush that morning. When it was gone, so was his fright, but it took a long time. I’ve forgotten it all right, he thought, but oh, my aching back!

  Belatedly he thought, Why, she called me Don, not Donny.

  He went back to the cafe that night, feeling a fine new sense of insulation. He had so much to look forward to that searches could wait. And like many a searcher before him, he found what he was looking for as soon as he stopped looking. It was a face that could not have drawn him more if it had been luminous, or leaf-green. It was a face with strong and definite lines, with good pads of laughter-muscles under the cheekbones, and eye-sockets shaped to catch and hold laughter early and long. Her hair was long and seemed black, but its highlights were not blue but red. She sat with six other people around a large table, her eyes open and sleeping, her good mouth lax and miserable.

  He made no attempt to attract her attention, or to join the group. He simply watched her until she left, which was some three or four hours later. He followed her and so did another man. When she turned up the steps of a brownstone a few blocks away the man followed her, and was halfway up the steps when she was at the top, fumbling for a key. When Don stopped, looking up, the man saw him and whirled. He blocked Don’s view of the girl. To Don he was not a person at all, but something in the way. Don made an impatient, get-out-of-the-way gesture with his head, and only then realized that the man was at bay, terrified, caught red-handed. His eyes were round and he drooled. Don stood looking upward, quite astonished, as the man sidled down, glaring, panting, and suddenly leapt past him and pelted off down the street.

  Don looked from the shadowed, dwindling figure to the lighted doorway. The girl had both hands on the side of the outer, open doorway and was staring down at him with bright unbelief in her face. “Oh, dear God,” she said.

  Don saw that she
was frightened, so he said, “It’s all right.” He stayed where he was.

  She glanced down the street where the man had gone and found it empty. Slowly she came toward Don and stopped on the third step above him. “Are you an angel?” she asked. In her voice was a childlike eagerness and the shadow of the laughter that her face was made for.

  Don made a small, abashed sound. “Me? Not me.”

  She looked down the street and shuddered. “I thought I didn’t care any more what happened,” she said, as if she were not speaking to him at all. Then she looked at him. “Anyway, thanks. Thanks. I don’t know what he might’ve … if you …”

  Don writhed under her clear, sincere eyes. “I didn’t do nothing.” He backed off a pace. “What do you mean, am I a angel?”

  “Didn’t you ever hear about a guardian angel?”

  He had, but he couldn’t find it in himself to pursue such a line of talk. He had never met anyone who talked like this. “Who was that guy?”

  “He’s crazy. They had him locked up for a long time, he hurt a little girl once. He gets like that once in a while.”

  “Well, you want to watch out,” he said.

  She nodded gravely. “I guess I care after all,” she said. “I’ll watch out.”

  “Well, take it easy;” he said.

  She looked quickly at his face. His words had far more dismissal in them than he had intended, and he suddenly felt miserable. She turned and slowly climbed the steps. He began to move away because he could think of nothing else to do. He looked back over his shoulder and saw her in the doorway, facing him. He thought she was going to call out, and stopped. She went inside without speaking again, and he suddenly felt very foolish. He went home and thought about her all night and all the next day. He wondered what her name was.

  When he pressed the buzzer, Miss Phoebe did not come to the door immediately. He stood there wondering if he should buzz again or go away or what. Then the door opened. “Come in, Don.”