A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He stepped inside, and though he thought he had forgotten about the strange mirror, he found himself looking for it even before he saw Miss Phoebe’s face. It was still there, and in it he saw himself as before, with the dark suit, the quiet tie, the dull, clean-buffed shoes. He saw it with an odd sense of disappointment, for it had given him such a wondrous shock before, but now reflected only what a normal mirror would, since he was wearing such a suit and tie and shoes—but wait; the figure in the reflection carried something and he did not. A paper parcel … a wrapped bunch of flowers; not a florist’s elaboration, but tissue-wrapped jonquils from a subway peddler. He blinked, and the reflection was now quite accurate again.

  All this took place in something over three seconds. He now became aware of a change in the room, it’s—oh, the light. It had been almost glary with its jewel-clean windows and scrubbed white woodwork, but now it was filled with mellow orange light. Part of this was sunlight struggling through the inexpensive blinds, which were drawn all the way down. Part was something else he did not see until he stepped fully into the room and into the range of light from the near corner. He gasped and stared, and, furiously, he felt tears rush into his eyes so that the light wavered and ran.

  “Happy birthday, Don,” said Miss Phoebe severely.

  Don said, “Aw.” He blinked hard and looked at the little round cake with its eighteen five-and-dime candles. “Aw.”

  “Blow them out quickly,” she said. “They run.”

  He bent over the cake.

  “Every one, mind,” she said. “In one breath.”

  He blew. All the candles went out but one. He had no air left in his lungs, and he looked at the candle in purple panic. In a childlike way, he could not bring himself to break the rules she had set up. His mouth yawped open and closed like that of a beached fish. He puffed his cheeks out by pushing his tongue up and forward, leaned very close to the candle, and released the air in his mouth with a tiny explosive pop. The candle went out.

  “Splendid. Open the blinds for me like a good boy.”

  He did as he was asked without resentment. As she plucked the little sugar candleholders out of the cake, he said, “How’d you know it was my birthday?”

  “Here’s the knife. You must cut it first, you know.”

  He came forward. “It’s real pretty. I never had no birthday cake before.”

  “I’m glad you like it. Hurry now. The tea’s just right.”

  He busied himself, serving and handing and receiving and setting down, moving chairs, taking sugar. He was too happy to speak.

  “Now then,” she said when they were settled. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  He assumed she knew, but if she wanted him to say, why, he would. “I’m a typewriter mechanic now,” he said. “I like it fine. I work nights in big offices and nobody bothers me none. How’ve you been?”

  She did not answer him directly, but her serene expression said that nothing bad could ever happen to her. “And is that all? Just work and sleep?”

  “I been thinkin’,” he said. He looked at her curiously. “I thought a lot about what you said.” She did not respond. “I mean about everything working on everything else, an’ the wasps and all.” Again she was silent, but now there was response in it.

  He said, “I was all mixed up for a long time. Part of the time I was mad. I mean, like you’re working for a boss who won’t let up on you, thinks he owns you just because you work there. Used to be I thought about whatever I wanted to, I could stop thinkin’ like turnin’ a light off.”

  “Very apt,” she remarked. “It was exactly that.”

  He waited while this was absorbed. “After I was here I couldn’t turn off the light; the switch was busted. The more I worked on things, the more mixed-up they got.” In a moment he added, “For a while.”

  “What things?” she asked.

  “Hard to say,” he answered honestly. “I never had nobody to tell me much, but I had some things pretty straight. It’s wrong to swipe stuff. It’s right to do what they tell you. It’s wrong to play with yourself. It’s right to go to church.”

  “It’s right to worship,” she interjected. “If you can worship in a church, that’s the best place to do it. If you can worship better in another place, then that’s where you should go instead.”

  “That’s what I mean!” he barked, pointing a bony finger like a revolver. “You say something like that, so sure and easy, an’ all the—the fences go down. Everything’s all in the right box, see, an’ you come along and shake everything together. You don’t back off from nothing. You say what you want about anything, an’ you let me say anything I want to you. Everything I ever thought was right or wrong could be wrong or right. Like those wasps dyin’ because of me, and you say they maybe died for me, so’s I could learn something. Like you sayin’ I could be a wasp or a fire, an’ still know what was what … I’ll get mixed up again if I go on talkin’ about it.”

  “I think not,” she said, and he felt very pleased. She said, “It’s in the nature of things to be ‘shaken all together,’ as you put it. A bird brings death to a worm and a wildcat brings death to the bird. Can we say that what struck the worm and the bird was evil, when the wildcat’s kittens took so much good from it? Or if the murder of the worm is good, can we call the wildcat evil?”

  “There isn’t no … no altogether good or bad, huh.”

  “Now, that is a very wrong thing to say,” she said with soft-voiced asperity.

  “You gone an’ done it again!” he exclaimed.

  She did not smile with him. “There is an absolute good and an absolute evil. They cannot be confused with right and wrong, or building and destroying as we know them, because, like the cat and the worm, those things depend on whose side you take. Don, I’m going to show you something very strange and wonderful.”

  She went to her little desk and got pencil and paper. She drew a circle, and within it she sketched in an S-shaped line. One side of this line she filled in with quick short strokes of her pencil:

  “This,” she said, as Don pored over it, “is the most ancient symbol known to man. It’s called ‘yin and Yang.’ ‘Yin’ is the Chinese term for darkness and earth. ‘Yang’ means light and sky. Together they form the complete circle—the universe, the cosmos—everything. Nothing under heaven can be altogether one of these things or the other. The symbol means light and dark. It means birth and death. It is everything which holds together and draws down, with everything that pours out and disperses. It is male and female, hope and history, love and hate. It’s—everything there is or could be. It’s why you can’t say the murder of a worm by a bird is good or evil.”

  “This here yin an’ Yang’s in everything we do, huh.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s God an’ the Devil then.”

  “Good and the devil.” She placed her hand over the entire symbol. “God is all of it.”

  “Well, all right!” he exclaimed. “So it’s like I said. There ain’t a ‘altogether good’ and a ‘altogether bad’. Miss Phoebe, how you know you’re right when you bust up some pusher’s business or close a house?”

  “There’s a very good way of knowing, Don. I’m very glad you asked me that question.” She all but beamed at him—she, who hardly ever even smiled. “Now listen carefully. I am going to tell you something which it took me many years to find out. I am going to tell you because I do not see why the young shouldn’t use it.

  “Good and evil are active forces—almost like living things. I said that nothing under heaven can be completely one of these things or the other, and it’s true. But, Don—good and evil come to us from somewhere. They reach this cosmos as living forces, constantly replenished—from somewhere. It follows that there is a Source of good and a Source of evil … or call them light and dark, or birth and death if you like.”

  She put her finger on the symbol. “Human beings, at least with their conscious wills, try to live here, in the Yang part. Many f
ind themselves on the dark side; some cross and recross the borderline. Some set a course for themselves and drive it straight and true, and never understand that the border itself turns and twists and will have them on one side and then the other.

  “In any case, these forces are in balance, and they must remain so. But as they are living, vital forces, there must be those who willingly and purposefully work with them.”

  With his thumbnail he flicked the paper. “From this, everything’s so even-steven you’d never know who you’re working for.”

  “Not true, Don. There are ways of knowing.”

  He opened his lips and closed them, turned away, shaking his head.

  “You may ask me, Don,” she said.

  “Well, okay. You’re one of ’em. Right?”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “Perhaps nothing. You knocked me flat on my noggin twice in a row an’ never touched me. You’re—you’re somethin’ special, that’s for sure. You even knew about my birthday. You know who’s callin’ when the phone rings.”

  “There are advantages.”

  “All right then, here’s what I’m gettin’ to, and I don’t want you to get mad at me. What I want to know is, why ain’t you rich?”

  “What do you mean by rich?”

  He kicked the table leg gently. “Junk,” he said. He waved at the windows. “Everybody’s got venetian blinds now. Look there, cracks in the ceiling ‘n you’ll get a rent rise if you complain, long as it ain’t leakin’. You know, if I could do the things you do, I’d have me a big house an’ a car. I’d have flunkies to wash dishes an’ all like that.”

  “I wouldn’t be rich if I had all those things, Don.”

  He looked at her guardedly. He knew she was capable of a preachment, though he had been lucky so far. “Miss Phoebe,” he said respectfully, “You ain’t goin’ to tell me the—uh—inner riches is better’n a fishtail Cadillac.”

  “I’ll ask you,” she said patiently. “Would you want a big house and servants and all those things?”

  “Well, sure!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, because, because—well, that’s the way to live, that’s all.”

  “Why is it the way to live?”

  “Well, anyone can see why.”

  “Don, answer the question. Why is that the way to live?”

  “Well,” he said. He made a circular gesture and put his hand down limply. He wet his lips. “Well, because you’d have what you wanted.” He looked at her hopefully and realized he’d have to try again. “You could make anyone do what you wanted.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “So you wouldn’t have to do your own work.”

  “Aside from personal comfort—why would you want to be able to tell other people what to do?”

  “You tell me,” he said with some warmth.

  “The answers are in you if you’ll only look, Don. Tell me: Why?”

  He considered. “I guess it’d make me feel good.”

  “Feel good?”

  “The boss. The Man. You know. I say jump, they jump.”

  “Power?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, power.”

  “Then you want riches so you’ll have a sense of power.”

  “You’re in.”

  “And you wonder why I don’t want riches. Don, I’ve got power. Moreover, it was given me and it’s mine. I needn’t buy it for the rest of my life.”

  “Well, now …” he breathed.

  “You can’t imagine power in any other terms than cars and swimming pools, can you?”

  “Yes I can,” he said instantly. Then he grinned and added, “But not yet.”

  “I think that’s more true than you know,” she said, giving him her sparse smile. “You’ll come to understand it.”

  They sat in companionable silence. He picked up a crumb of cake icing and looked at it. “Real good cake,” he murmured, and ate it. Almost without change of inflection, he said, “I got a real ugly one to tell you.”

  She waited, in the responsive silence he was coming to know so well.

  “Met a girl last night.”

  He was not looking at her and so did not see her eyes click open, round and moist. He hooked his heel in the chair rung and put his fist on the raised knee, thumb up. He lowered his head until the thumb fitted into the hollow at the bridge of his nose. Resting his head precariously there, rolling it slightly from time to time as if he perversely enjoyed the pressure and the ache, he began to speak. And if Miss Phoebe found surprising the leaps from power to birthday cake to a girl to what happened in the sewer, she said nothing.

  “Big sewer outlet down under the docks at Twenny-Seventh,” he said. “Was about nine or ten, playing there. Kid called Renzo. We were inside the pipe, it was about five feet high, and knee-deep in storm water. Saw somethin’ bobbin’ in the water, got close enough to look. It was the hind feet off a dead rat, a great big one, and real dead. Renzo, he was over by the outlet tryin’ to see if he could get up on a towboat out there, and I thought it might be fine if I could throw the rat on his back on account he didn’t have no shirt on. I took hold of the rat’s feet and pulled but that rat, he had his head stuck in a side-pipe somehow, an’ I guess he swole some too. I guess I said something and Renzo he come over, so there was nothin’ for it then but haul the rat out anyway. I got a good hold and yanked, an’ something popped an’ up he came. I pulled ’im right out of his skin. There he was wet an’ red an’ bare an’ smellin’ a good deal. Renzo, he lets out a big holler, laughin’, I can still hear it in that echoey pipe. I’m standin’ there like a goofball, starin’ at this rat. Renzo says, ‘Hit’m quick, Doc, or he’ll never start breathin’!’ I just barely got the idea when the legs come off the rat an’ it fell in the water with me still holdin’ the feet.”

  It was very quiet for a while. Don rocked his head, digging his thumb into the bridge of his nose. “Renzo and me we had a big fight after. He tol’ everybody I had a baby in the sewer. He tol’ ’em I’s a first-class stork. They all started to call me Stork. I hadda fight five of ’em in two days before they cut it out.

  “Kid stuff,” he said suddenly, too loudly, and sat upright, wide-eyed, startled at the sound. “I know it was kid stuff, I can forget it. But it won’t … it won’t forget.”

  Miss Phoebe stirred, but said nothing. Don said, “Girls. I never had nothing much to do with girls, kidded ’em some if there was somebody with me started it, and like that. Never by myself. I tell you how it is, it’s—” He was quiet for a long moment. His lips moved as if he were speaking silently, words after words until he found the words he wanted. He went on in precisely the same tone, like an interrupted tape recorder. “—like this, I get so I like a girl a whole lot, I want to get close to her, I think about her like any fellow does. So before I can think much about it, let alone do anything, zing! I’m standin’ in that stinkin’ sewer, Renzo’s yellin’ ‘Hit’m quick, Doc,’ an’ all the rest of it.” He blew sharply from his nostrils. “The better a girl smells,” he said hoarsely, “the worse it is. So I think about girls, I think about babies; I think about babies, it’s Renzo and me and that echo. Laughin’,” he mumbled, “him laughin’.

  “I met a girl last night,” he said clearly, “I don’t want ever to think about like that. I walked away. I don’t know what her name is. I want to see her some more. I’m afraid. So that’s why.”

  After a while he said, “That’s why I told you.”

  And later, “You were a big help before, the wasps.” As he spoke he realized that there was no point in hurrying her; she had heard him the first time and would wait until she was ready. He picked up another piece of icing, crushed it, tossed the pieces back on the plate.

  “You never asked me,” said Miss Phoebe, “about the power I have, and how it came to me.”

  “Din’t think you’d say. I wouldn’t, if I had it. This girl was—”

  “Study,” said Miss Phoebe. “
More of it than you realize. Training and discipline and, I suppose, a certain natural talent which,” she said, fixing him sternly with her eyes as he was about to interrupt, “I am sure you also have. To a rather amazing degree. I have come a long way, a long hard way, and it isn’t so many years ago that I first began to feel this power … I like to think of you with it, young and strong and … and good, growing greater year by year. Don, would you like the power? Would you work hard and patiently for it?”

  He was very quiet. Suddenly he looked up at her. “What?”

  She said—and for once the control showed—“I thought you might want to answer a question like that.”

  He scratched his head and grinned. “Gee, I’m sorry, Miss Phoebe, but for that one second I was thinkin’ about … something else, I guess. Now,” he said brightly, “what was it you wanted to know?”

  “What was this matter you found so captivating?” she asked heavily. “I must say I’m not used to talking to myself, Don.”

  “Ah, don’t jump salty, Miss Phoebe,” he said contritely. “I’ll pay attention, honest. It’s just that I—you din’t say word one about what I told you. I guess I was tryin’ to figure it out by myself if you wasn’t goin’ to help.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t wait long enough.”

  “Oh.” He looked at her and his eyes widened. “Oh! I never thought of that. Hey, go ahead, will you?” He drew his knees together and clasped them, turned to face her fully.

  She nodded with a slightly injured satisfaction. “I asked you, Don, if you’d like the kind of power I have, for yourself.”

  “Me?” he demanded, incredulously.

  “You. And I also asked you if you would work hard and patiently to get it.”

  “Would I! Look, you don’t really think, I mean, I’m just a—”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  She glanced out the window. Dusk was not far away. The curtains hung limp and straight in the still air. She rose and went to the windows, drew the blinds down. The severe velour drapes were on cranes. She swung them over the windows. They were not cut full enough to cover completely; each window admitted a four-inch slit of light. But that side of the building was in shadow, and she turned back to find Don blinking in deep obscurity. She went back to her chair.