“Nothing happens,” I said.
“Baby is three,” he repeated.
“Oh,” I said. “That.” I closed my eyes.
That might be it. Might, sight, night, light. I might have the sight of a light in the night. Maybe the baby. Maybe the sight of the baby at night because of the light …
There was night after night when I lay on that blanket, and a lot of nights I didn’t. Something was going on all the time in Lone’s house. Sometimes I slept in the daytime. I guess the only time everybody slept at once was when someone was sick, like me the first time I arrived there. It was always sort of dark in the room, the same night and day, the fire going, the two old bulbs hanging yellow by their wires from the battery. When they got too dim, Janie fixed the battery and they got bright again.
Janie did everything that needed doing, whatever no one else felt like doing. Everybody else did things, too. Lone was out a lot. Sometimes he used the twins to help him, but you never missed them, because they’d be here and gone and back again bing! like that. And Baby, he just stayed in his bassinet.
I did things myself. I cut wood for the fire and I put up more shelves, and then I’d go swimming with Janie and the twins sometimes. And I talked to Lone. I didn’t do a thing that the others couldn’t do, but they all did things I couldn’t do. I was mad, mad all the time about that. But I wouldn’t of known what to do with myself if I wasn’t mad all the time about something or other. It didn’t keep us from bleshing. Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.
Baby talked all the time. He was like a broadcasting station that runs twenty-four hours a day, and you can get what it’s sending any time you tune in, but it’ll keep sending whether you tune in or not. When I say he talked, I don’t mean exactly that. He semaphored mostly. You’d think those wandering vague movements of his hands and arms and legs and head were meaningless, but they weren’t. It was semaphore, only instead of a symbol for a sound, or such like, the movements were whole thoughts.
I mean spread the left hand and shake the right high up, and thump with the left heel, and it means, “Anyone who thinks a starling is a pest just don’t know anything about how a starling thinks” or something like that. Janie said she made Baby invent the semaphore business. She said she used to be able to hear the twins thinking—that’s what she said; hear them thinking—and they could hear Baby. So she would ask the twins whatever she wanted to know, and they’d ask Baby, and then tell her what he said. But then as they grew up they began to lose the knack of it. Every young kid does. So Baby learned to understand when someone talked, and he’d answer with this semaphore stuff.
Lone couldn’t read the stuff and neither could I. The twins didn’t give a damn. Janie used to watch him all the time. He always knew what you meant if you wanted to ask him something, and he’d tell Janie and she’d say what it was. Part of it, anyway. Nobody could get it all, not even Janie.
All I know is Janie would sit there and paint her pictures and watch Baby, and sometimes she’d bust out laughing.
Baby never grew any. Janie did, and the twins, and so did I, but not Baby. He just lay there. Janie kept his stomach full and cleaned him up every two or three days. He didn’t cry and he didn’t make any trouble. No one ever went near him.
Janie showed every picture she painted to Baby, before she cleaned the boards and painted new ones. She had to clean them because she only had three of them. It was a good thing, too, because I’d hate to think what that place would of been like if she’d kept them all; she did four or five a day. Lone and the twins were kept hopping getting turpentine for her. She could shift the paints back into the little pots on her easel without any trouble, just by looking at the picture one color at a time, but turps was something else again. She told me that Baby remembered all her pictures and that’s why she didn’t have to keep them. They were all pictures of machines and gear-trains and mechanical linkages and what looked like electric circuits and things like that. I never thought too much about them.
I went out with Lone to get some turpentine and a couple picnic hams one time. We went through the woods to the railroad track and down a couple of miles to where we could see the glow of a town. Then the woods again, and some alleys, and a back street.
Lone was like always, walking along, thinking, thinking.
We came to a hardware store and he went up and looked at the lock and came back to where I was waiting, shaking his head. Then we found a general store. Lone grunted and we went and stood in the shadows by the door. I looked in.
All of a sudden Beanie was in there, naked like she always was when she traveled like that. She came and opened the door from the inside. We went in and Lone closed it and locked it.
“Get along home, Beanie,” he said, “before you catch your death.”
She grinned at me and said, “Ho-ho,” and disappeared.
We found a pair of fine hams and a two-gallon can of turpentine. I took a bright yellow ballpoint pen and Lone cuffed me and made me put it back.
“We only take what we need,” he told me.
After we left, Beanie came back and locked the door and went home again. I only went with Lone a few times, when he had more to get than he could carry easily.
I was there about three years. That’s all I can remember about it. Lone was there or he was out, and you could hardly tell the difference. The twins were with each other most of the time. I got to like Janie a lot, but we never talked much. Baby talked all the time, only I don’t know what about.
We were all busy and we bleshed.
I sat up on the couch suddenly. Stern said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. This isn’t getting me any place.”
“You said that when you’d barely started. Do you think you’ve accomplished anything since then?”
“Oh, yeah, but—”
“Then how can you be sure you’re right this time?” When I didn’t say anything, he asked me, “Didn’t you like this last stretch?”
I said angrily, “I didn’t like or not like. It didn’t mean nothing. It was just—just talk.”
“So what was the difference between this last session and what happened before?”
“My gosh, plenty! The first one, I felt everything. It was all really happening to me. But this time—nothing.”
“Why do you suppose that was?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “that there was some episode so unpleasant to you that you wouldn’t dare relive it.”
“Unpleasant? You think freezing to death isn’t unpleasant?”
“There are all kinds of unpleasantness. Sometimes the very thing you’re looking for—the thing that’ll clear up your trouble—is so revolting to you that you won’t go near it. Or you try to hide it. Wait,” he said suddenly, “maybe ‘revolting’ and ‘unpleasant’ are inaccurate words to use. It might be something very desirable to you. It’s just that you don’t want to get straightened out.”
“I want to get straightened out.”
He waited as if he had to clear something up in his mind, and then said, “There’s something in that ‘Baby is three’ phrase that bounces you away. Why is that?”
“Damn if I know.”
“Who said it!”
“I dunno … uh …”
He grinned. “Uh?”
I grinned back at him. “I said it.”
“Okay. When?”
I quit grinning. He leaned forward, then got up.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He said, “I didn’t think anyone could be that mad.” I didn’t say anythin
g. He went over to his desk. “You don’t want to go on any more, do you?”
“No.”
“Suppose I told you you want to quit because you’re right on the very edge of finding out what you want to know?”
“Why don’t you tell me and see what I do?”
He just shook his head. “I’m not telling you anything. Go on, leave if you want to. I’ll give you back your change.”
“How many people quit just when they’re on top of the answer?”
“Quite a few.”
“Well, I ain’t going to.” I lay down.
He didn’t laugh and he didn’t say, “Good,” and he didn’t make any fuss about it. He just picked up his phone and said, “Cancel everything for this afternoon,” and went back to his chair, up there out of my sight.
It was very quiet in there. He had the place sound-proofed.
I said, “Why do you suppose Lone let me live there so long when I couldn’t do any of the things that the other kids could?”
“Maybe you could.”
“Oh, no,” I said positively. “I used to try. I was strong for a kid my age and I knew how to keep my mouth shut, but aside from those two things I don’t think I was any different from any kid. I don’t think I’m any different right now, except what difference there might be from living with Lone and his bunch.”
“Has this anything to do with ‘Baby is three’?”
I looked up at the gray ceiling. “Baby is three. Baby is three. I went up to a big house with a winding drive that ran under a sort of theater-marquee thing. Baby is three. Baby …”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-three,” I said, and the next thing you know I was up off that couch like it was hot and heading for the door.
Stern grabbed me. “Don’t be foolish. Want me to waste a whole afternoon?”
“What’s that to me? I’m paying for it.”
“All right, it’s up to you.”
I went back. “I don’t like any part of this,” I said.
“Good. We’re getting warm then.”
“What made me say ‘Thirty-three’? I ain’t thirty-three. I’m fifteen. And another thing …”
“Yes?”
“It’s about that ‘Baby is three.’ It’s me saying it, all right. But when I think about it—it’s not my voice.”
“Like thirty-three’s not your age?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“Gerry,” he said warmly, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I realized I was breathing too hard. I pulled myself together. I said, “I don’t like remembering saying things in somebody else’s voice.”
“Look,” he told me. “This head-shrinking business, as you called it a while back, isn’t what most people think. When I go with you into the world of your mind—or when you go yourself, for that matter—what we find isn’t so very different from the so-called real world. It seems so at first, because the patient comes out with all sorts of fantasies and irrationalities and weird experiences. But everyone lives in that kind of world. When one of the ancients coined the phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ he was talking about that.
“Everywhere we go, everything we do, we’re surrounded by symbols, by things so familiar we don’t ever look at them or don’t see them if we do look. If anyone ever could report to you exactly what we saw and thought while walking ten feet down the street, you’d get the most twisted, clouded, partial picture you ever ran across. And nobody ever looks at what’s around him with any kind of attention until he gets into a place like this. The fact that he’s looking at past events doesn’t matter; what counts is that he’s seeing clearer than he ever could before, just because, for once, he’s trying.
“Now—about this ‘thirty-three’ business. I don’t think a man could get a nastier shock than to find he has some one else’s memories. The ego is too important to let slide that way. But consider: all your thinking is done in code and you have the key to only about a tenth of it. So you run into a stretch of code which is abhorrent to you. Can’t you see that the only way you’ll find the key to it is to stop avoiding it?”
“You mean I’d started to remember with … with somebody else’s mind?”
“It looked like that to you for a while, which means something. Let’s try to find out what.”
“All right.” I felt sick. I felt tired. And I suddenly realized that being sick and being tired was a way of trying to get out of it.
“Baby is three,” he said.
Baby is maybe. Me, three, thirty-three, me, you Kew you.
“Kew!” I yelled. Stern didn’t say anything. “Look, I don’t know why, but I think I know how to get to this, and this isn’t the way. Do you mind if I try something else?”
“You’re the doctor,” he said.
I had to laugh. Then I closed my eyes.
There, through the edges of the hedges, the ledges and wedges of windows were shouldering up to the sky. The lawns were sprayed-on green, neat and clean, and all the flowers looked as if they were afraid to let their petals break and be untidy.
I walked up the drive in my shoes. I’d had to wear shoes and my feet couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to go to the house, but I had to.
I went up the steps between the big white columns and looked at the door. I wished I could see through it, but it was too white and thick. There was a window the shape of a fan over it, too high up though, and a window on each side of it, but they were all crudded up with colored glass. I hit on the door with my hand and left dirt on it.
Nothing happened so I hit it again. It got snatched open and a tall, thin colored woman stood there. “What you want?”
I said I had to see Miss Kew.
“Well, Miss Kew don’t want to see the likes of you,” she said. She talked too loud. “You got a dirty face.”
I started to get mad then. I was already pretty sore about having to come here, walking around near people in the daytime and all. I said, “My face ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Where’s Miss Kew? Go on, find her for me.”
She gasped. “You can’t speak to me like that!”
I said, “I didn’t want to speak to you like any way. Let me in.” I started wishing for Janie. Janie could of moved her. But I had to handle it by myself. I wasn’t doing so hot, either. She slammed the door before I could so much as curse at her.
So I started kicking on the door. For that, shoes are great. After a while, she snatched the door open again so sudden I almost went on my can. She had a broom with her. She screamed at me, “You get away from here, you trash, or I’ll call the police!” She pushed me and I fell.
I got up off the porch floor and went for her. She stepped back and whupped me one with the broom as I went past, but anyhow I was inside now. The woman was making little shrieking noises and coming for me. I took the broom away from her and then somebody said “Miriam!” in a voice like a grown goose.
I froze and the woman went into hysterics. “Oh, Miss Alicia, look out! He’ll kill us all. Get the police. Get the—”
“Miriam!” came the honk, and Miriam dried up.
There at the top of the stairs was this prune-faced woman with a dress on that had lace on it. She looked a lot older than she was, maybe because she held her mouth so tight. I guess she was about thirty-three—thirty-three. She had mean eyes and a small nose.
I asked, “Are you Miss Kew?”
“I am. What is the meaning of this invasion?”
“I got to talk to you, Miss Kew?”
“Don’t say ‘got to.’ Stand up straight and speak out.”
The maid said, “I’ll get the police.”
Miss Kew turned on her. “There’s time enough for that, Miriam. Now, you dirty little boy, what do you want?”
“I got to speak to you by yourself,” I told her.
“Don’t you let him do it, Miss Alicia,” cried the maid.
“Be quiet, Miriam. Little boy, I told you not to say ‘got to.�
� You may say whatever you have to say in front of Miriam.”
“Like hell.” They both gasped. I said, “Lone told me not to.”
“Miss Alicia, are you goin’ to let him—”
“Be quiet, Miriam! Young man, you will keep a civil—” Then her eyes popped up real round. “Who did you say …”
“Lone said so.”
“Lone.” She stood there on the stairs looking at her hands. Then she said, “Miriam, that will be all.” And you wouldn’t know it was the same woman, the way she said it.
The maid opened her mouth, but Miss Kew stuck out a finger that might as well of had a rifle-sight on the end of it. The maid beat it.
“Hey,” I said, “here’s your broom.” I was just going to throw it, but Miss Kew got to me and took it out of my hand.
“In there,” she said.
She made me go ahead of her into a room as big as our swimming hole. It had books all over and leather on top of the tables, with gold flowers drawn into the corners.
She pointed to a chair. “Sit there. No, wait a moment.” She went to the fireplace and got a newspaper out of a box and brought it over and unfolded it on the seat of the chair. “Now sit down.”
I sat on the paper and she dragged up another chair, but didn’t put no paper on it.
“What is it? Where is Lone?”
“He died,” I said.
She pulled in her breath and went white. She stared at me until her eyes started to water.
“You sick?” I asked her. “Go ahead, throw up. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Dead? Lone is dead?”
“Yeah. There was a flash flood last week and when he went out the next night in that big wind, he walked under a old oak tree that got gullied under by the flood. The tree come down on him.”
“Came down on him,” she whispered. “Oh, no … it’s not true.”
“It’s true, all right. We planted him this morning. We couldn’t keep him around no more. He was beginning to st—”
“Stop!” She covered her face with her hands.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ll be all right in a moment,” she said in a low voice. She went and stood in front of the fireplace with her back to me. I took off one of my shoes while I was waiting for her to come back. But instead she talked from where she was. “Are you Lone’s little boy?”
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