A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Come closer,” she said. “No, not that way—facing me. That’s it. Your back to the window. Now, I’m going to cover my face. That’s because otherwise the light would be on it; I don’t want you to look at me or at anything but what you find inside yourself.” She took a dark silk scarf from the small drawer in the end of the gateleg table. “Put your hands out. Palms down. So.” She dropped the scarf over her face and hair, and felt for his hands. She slipped hers under his, palms upward, and leaned forward until she could grasp his wrists. “Hold mine that way too. Good.

  “Be absolutely quiet.”

  He was. She said, “There’s something the matter. You’re all tightened up. And you’re not close enough. Don’t move! I mean, in your mind … ah, I see. You’ll have your questions answered. Just trust me.” A moment later she said, “That’s much better. There’s something on your mind, though, a little something. Say it, whatever it is.”

  “I was thinkin’, this is a trapeze grip, like in the circus.”

  “So it is! Well, it’s a good contact. Now, don’t think of anything at all. If you want to speak, well, do; but nothing will be accomplished until you no longer feel like talking.

  “There is a school of discipline called Yoga,” she said quietly. “For years I have studied and practiced it. It’s a lifetime’s work in itself, and still it’s only the first part of what I’ve done. It has to do with the harmony of the body and the mind, and the complete control of both. My breathing will sound strange to you. Don’t be frightened; it’s perfectly all right.”

  His hands lay heavily in hers. He opened his eyes and looked at her but there was nothing to see, just the black mass of her silk-shrouded head and shoulders in the dim light. Her breathing deepened. As he became more and more aware of other silences, her breathing became more and more central in his attention. He began to wonder where she was putting it all; an inhalation couldn’t possibly continue for so long, like the distant hiss of escaping steam. And when it dwindled, the silence was almost too complete, for too long; no one could hold such a deep breath for as long as that! And when at last the breath began to come out again, it seemed as if the slow hiss went on longer even than the inhalation. If he had wondered where she was putting it, he now wondered where she was getting it.

  And at last he realized that the breathing was not deep at all, but shallow in the extreme; it was just that the silence was deeper and her control greater than he had imagined.

  His hands—

  “It tingles. Like electric,” he said aloud.

  His voice did not disturb her in the least. She made no answer in any area. The silence deepened, the darkness deepened, the tingling continued and grew … not grew; it spread. When he first felt it, it had lived in a spot on each wrist, where it contacted hers. Now it uncoiled, sending a thin line of sensation up into his forearms and down into his hands. He followed its growth, fascinated. Around the center of each palm the tingling drew a circle, and sent a fine twig of feeling growing into his fingers, and at the same time he could feel it negotiating the turn of his elbows.

  He thought it had stopped growing, and then realized that it had simply checked its twig-like creeping, and was broadening; the line in his arms and fingers was becoming a band, a bar of feeling. It crossed his mind that if this bothered him at all he could pull his hands away and break the contact, and that if he did that Miss Phoebe would not resent it in any way. And, since he knew he was free to do it, knew it without question, he was not tempted. He sat quietly, wonder-struck, tasting the experience.

  With a small silent explosion there were the tingling, hair-thin lines of sensation falling like distant fireworks through his chest and abdomen, infusing his loins and thighs and the calves of his legs. At the same time more of them crept upward through his neck and head, flared into and around his ears, settled and boiled and shimmered through his lobes and cheeks, curled and clasped the roots of his eyelids. And again there was the feeling of the lines broadening, fusing one with the other as they swelled. Distantly he recognized their ultimate; they would grow inward and outward until they were a complete thing, bounded exactly by everything he was, every hair, every contour, every thought and function.

  He opened his eyes, and the growth was not affected. The dark mass of Miss Phoebe’s head was where it had been, friendly and near and reassuring. He half-smiled, and the sparkling delicate little lines of feeling on his lips yielded to the smile, played in it like infinitesimal dolphins, gave happy news of it to all the other threads, and they all sang to his half-smile and gave him joy. He closed his eyes comfortably, and cheerful filaments reached for one another between his upper and lower lashes.

  An uncountable time passed. Time now was like no time he knew of, drilling as it always had through event after event, predictable and obedient to rust, springtime, and the scissoring hands of clocks. This was a new thing … not a suspension, for it was too alive for that. It was different, that’s all, different the way this feeling was, and now the lines and bands and bars were fused and grown, and he was filled, he was, himself, of a piece with what had once been the tingling of a spot on his wrist.

  It was a feeling, still a feeling, but it was a substance too, Don-sized, Don-shaped. A color … no, it wasn’t a color, but if it had been a color it was beginning to glow and change. It was glowing as steel glows in the soaking pits, a color impossible to call black because it is red inside; and now you can see the red; and now the red has orange in it, and now in the orange is yellow, and when white shows in the yellow you may no longer look, but still the radiation beats through you, intensifying … not a color, no; this thing had no color and no light, but if it had been a color, this would have been its spectral growth.

  And this was the structure, this the unnamable something which now found itself alive and joyous. It was from such a peak that the living thing rose as if from sleep, became conscious of its own balance and strength, and leapt heavenward with a single cry like all the satisfying, terminal resolving chords of all music, all uttered in a wingbeat of time.

  Then it was over not because it was finished, like music or a meal, but because it was perfect, like foam or a flower caught in the infrangible amber of memory. Don left the experience without surfeit, without tension, without exhaustion. He sat peacefully with his hands in Miss Phoebe’s, not dazzled, not numb, replenished in some luxurious volume within him which kept what it gained for all of life, and which had an infinite capacity. But for the cloth over her face and the odd fact that their hands were dripping with perspiration, they might just that second have begun. It may even have been that second.

  Miss Phoebe disengaged her hands and plucked away the cloth. She was smiling—really smiling, and Don understood why she so seldom smiled, if this were the expression she used for such experiences.

  He answered the smile, and said nothing, because about perfect things nothing can be said. He went and dried his hands and then pulled back the drapes and raised the blinds while she straightened the chairs.

  “The ancients,” said Miss Phoebe, “recognized four elements: earth, air, fire and water. This power can do anything those four elements can do.” She put down the clean cups, and went to get her crumb brush. “To start with,” she added.

  He placed the remark where it would soak in, and picked up a piece of icing from the cake plate. This time he ate it. “Why is a wet towel darker than a dry one?”

  “I—why, I hadn’t thought,” she said. “It is, now that you mention it. I’m sure I don’t know why, though.”

  “Well, maybe you know this,” he said. “Why I been worrying about it so much?”

  “Worrying?”

  “You know what I mean. That and why most motors that use heat for power got to have a cooling system, and why do paper towels tear where they ain’t perf’rated, and a zillion things like that. I never used to.”

  “Perhaps it’s … yes, I know. Of course!” she said happily. “You’re getting a—call it a kinship with
things. A sense of interrelationship.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I think it is. It means I was right in feeling that you have a natural talent for what I’m going to teach you.”

  “It takes up a lot of my time,” he grumbled.

  “It’s good to be alive all the time,” she said. She poured. “Don, do you know what a revelation is?”

  “I heard of it.”

  “It’s a sudden glimpse of the real truth. You had one about the wasps.”

  “I had it awful late.”

  That doesn’t matter. You had it, that’s the important thing. You had one with the rat, too.”

  “I did?”

  “With the wasps you had a revelation of sacrifice and courage. With the rat—well, you know yourself what effect it has had on you.”

  “I’m the only one I know has no girl,” he said.

  “That is exactly it.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s s’posed to be that way!”

  “For you, I—I’d say so.”

  “Miss Phoebe, I don’t think l know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  She looked at her teacup. “I’ve never been married.”

  “Me too,” he said somberly. “Wait, is that what you—”

  “Why do people get married?”

  “Kids.”

  “Oh, that isn’t all.”

  He said, with his mouth full, “They wanna be together, I guess. Team up, like. One pays the bills, the other runs the joint.”

  “That’s about it. Sharing. They want to share. You know the things they share.”

  “I heard,” he said shortly.

  She leaned forward. “Do you think they can share anything like what we’ve had this afternoon?”

  “That I never heard,” he said pensively.

  “I don’t wonder. Don, your revelation with the rat is as basic a picture of what is called ‘original sin’ as anything I have ever heard.”

  “Original sin,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s about Adam an’—no, wait. I remember. Everybody’s supposed to be sinful to start with because it takes a sin to get’m started.”

  “Once in a while,” she said, “it seems as if you know so few words because you don’t need them. That was beautifully put. Don, I think that awful thing that happened to you in the sewer was a blessing. I think it’s a good thing, not a bad one. It might be bad for someone else, but not for you. It’s kept you as you are so far. I don’t think you should try to forget it. It’s a warning and a defense. It’s a weapon against the ‘yin’ forces. You are a very special person, Don. You were made for better things than—than others.”

  “About the wasps,” he said. “As soon as you started to talk I begun to feel better. About this, I don’t feel better.” He looked up to the point where the wall met the ceiling and seemed to be listening to his own last phrase. He nodded definitely. “I don’t feel better. I feel worse.”

  She touched his arm. It was the only time she had made such a gesture. “You’re strong and growing and you’re just eighteen.” Her voice was very kind. “It would be a strange thing indeed if a young man your age didn’t have his problems and struggles and tempta—I mean, battles. I’m sorry I can’t resolve it for you, Don. I wish I could. But I know what’s right. Don’t I, Don, don’t I?”

  “Every time,” he said glumly. “But I …” His gaze became abstracted.

  She watched him anxiously. “Don’t think about her,” she whispered. “Don’t. You don’t have to. Don, do you know that what we did this afternoon was only the very beginning, like the first day of kindergarten?”

  His eyes came back to her, bright. “Yeah, huh. Hey, how about that.”

  “When would you like to do some more?”

  “Now?”

  “Bless you, no! We both have things to do. And besides, you have to think. You know it takes time to think.”

  “Yeah, okay. When?”

  “A week.”

  “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be here. Hey, I’m gonna be late for work.”

  He went to the door. “Take it easy,” he said.

  He went out and closed the door but before the latch clicked he pushed it open again. He crossed the room to her.

  He said, “Hey, thanks for the birthday cake. It was …” His mouth moved as he searched. “It was a good birthday cake.” He took her hand and shook it heartily. Then he was gone.

  Miss Phoebe was just as pink as the birthday cake. To the closed door she murmured, “Take it easy.”

  Don was in a subway station two nights later, waiting for an express. The dirty concrete shaft is atypical and mysterious at half-past four in the morning. The platforms are unlittered and deserted, and there is a complete absence of the shattering roar and babble and bustle for which these urban entrails are built. An approaching train can be heard starting and running and stopping sometimes ten or twelve minutes before it pulls in, and a single set of footfalls on the mezzanine above will outlast it. The few passengers waiting seem always to huddle together near one of the wooden benches, and there seems to be a kind of inverse square law in operation, for the closer they approach one another the greater the casual unnoticing manners they affect, though they will all turn to watch someone walking toward them from two hundred feet away. And when angry voices bark out, the effect is more shattering than it would be in a cathedral.

  A tattered man slept uneasily on the bench. Two women buzz-buzzed ceaselessly at the other end. A black-browed man in gray tweed strode the platform, glowering, looking as if he were expected to decide on the recall of the Ambassador to the Court of St. James by morning.

  Don happened to be looking at the tattered man, and the way the old brown hat was pulled down over the face (it could have been a headless corpse, and no one would have been the wiser), when the body shuddered and stirred. A strip of stubbled skin emerged between the hat and the collar, and developed a mouth into which was stuffed a soggy collection of leaf-mold which may have been a cigar butt yesterday. The man’s hand came up and fumbled around, coming away with most of the soggy thing. The jaws worked, the lips smacked distastefully. The hand pushed the hat brim up only enough to expose a red eye, which glared at the butt. The hat fell again, and the hand pitched the butt away.

  At this point the black-browed man hove to, straddle-legged in front of the bench. He opened his coat and hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. He tilted his head back, half-closed his eyes, and sighted through the cleft on his chin at the huddled creature on the bench. “You!” he grated, and everyone swung around to stare at him. He thumped the sleeping man’s ankle with the side of his foot. “You!” Everyone looked at the bench.

  The tattered man said “Whuh-wuh-wuh-wuh,” and smacked his lips. Suddenly he was bolt upright, staring.

  “You!” barked the black-browed man. He pointed to the butt. “Pick that up!”

  The tattered man looked at him and down at the butt. His hand strayed to his mouth, felt blindly on and around it. He looked down again at the butt and dull recognition began to filter into his face. “Oh sure boss, sure,” he whined. He cringed low, beginning to stoop down off the bench but afraid to stop talking, afraid to turn his gaze away from the danger point. “I don’t make no trouble for anybody, mister, not me, honest I don’t,” he wheedled. “A feller gets down on his luck, you know how it is, but I never make trouble, mister …”

  “Pick it up!”

  “Oh sure, sure, right away, boss.”

  At this point Don, to his own intense amazement, felt himself approaching the black-browed man. He tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Mister,” he said. He prayed that his tight voice would not break. “Mister, make me pick it up, huh?”

  “What?”

  Don waved at the tattered man. “A two-year-old kid could push him around. So what are you proving, you’re a big man or something? Make me pick up the butt, you’re such a big man.”

  “Get away from me,” said the black-brow
ed man. He took two quick paces backwards. “I know what you are, you’re one of those subway hoodlums.”

  Don caught a movement from the corner of his eye. The tattered man had one knee on the platform, and was leaning forward to pick up the butt. “Get away from that,” he snapped, and kicked the butt onto the local tracks.

  “Sure, boss, sure, I don’t want no …”

  “Get away from me, both of you,” said the black-browed man. He was preparing for flight. Don suddenly realized that he was afraid—afraid that he and the tattered man might join forces, or perhaps even that they had set the whole thing up in advance. He laughed. The black-browed man backed into a pillar. And just then a train roared in, settling the matter.

  Something touched Don between the shoulder blades and he leaped as if it had been an ice pick. But it was one of the women. “I just had to tell you, that was very brave. You’re a fine young man,” she said. She sniffed in the direction of the distant tweed-clad figure and marched to the train. It was a local. Don watched it go, and smiled. He felt good.

  “Mister, you like to save my life, you did. I don’t want no trouble, you unnerstan’, I never do. Feller gets down on his luck once in a wh—”

  “Shaddup!” said Don. He turned away and froze. Then he went back to the man and snatched off the old hat. The man cringed.

  “I know who you are. You just got back from the can. You got sent up for attackin’ a girl.”

  “I ain’t done a thing,” whispered the man. “Gimme back my hat, please, mister?”

  Don looked down at him. He should walk away, he ought to leave this hulk to rot, but his questing mind was against him. He threw the hat on the man’s lap and wiped his fingers on the side of his jacket. “I saw you stayin’ out of trouble three nights ago on Mulberry Street. Followin’ a girl into a house there.”