If she had explained, if she had answered, it would have been all right but she only watched him.
“All right,” he gritted. “I remembered one thing, I can remember another. Or I can go back there and ask again. I don’t need you.”
Her expression did not change but, watching it, he knew suddenly that she was holding it still and that it was a terrible effort to her.
He said gently, “I did need you. I’d’ve died without you. You’ve been …” He had no word for what she had been to him so he stopped searching for one and went on, “It’s just that I’ve got so I don’t need you that way any more. I have some things to find out but I have to do it myself.”
At last she spoke: “You have done it yourself, Hip. Every bit of it. All I’ve done is to put you where you could do it. I—want to go on with that.”
“You don’t need to,” he reassured her. “I’m a big boy now. I’ve come a long way; I’ve come alive. There can’t be much more to find out.”
“There’s a lot more,” she said sadly.
He shook his head positively. “I tell you, I know! Finding out about those children, about this Alicia Kew, and then the address where they’d moved—that was right at the end; that was the place where I got my fingertips on the—whatever it was I was trying to grab. Just that one more place, that address where the children are; that’s all I need. That’s where he’ll be.”
“He?”
“The one, you know, the one I’ve been looking for. His name is—” He leapt to his feet. “His name’s—”
He brought his fist into his palm, a murderous blow. “I forgot,” he whispered.
He put his stinging hand to the short hair at the back of his head, screwed up his eyes in concentration. Then he relaxed. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll find out, now.”
“Sit down,” she said. “Go on, Hip. Sit down and listen to me.”
Reluctantly he did; resentfully he looked at her. His head was full of almost-understood pictures and phrases. He thought, Can’t she let me alone? Can’t she let me think awhile? But because she … Because she was Janie, he waited.
“You’re right, you can do it,” she said. She spoke slowly and with extreme care. “You can go to the house tomorrow, if you like, and get the address and find what you’ve been looking for. And it will mean absolutely—nothing—to you. Hip, I know!”
He glared at her.
“Believe me, Hip; believe me!”
He charged across the room, grabbed her wrists, pulled her up, thrust his face to hers. “You know!” he shouted. “I bet you know. You know every damn thing, don’t you? You have all along. Here I am going half out of my head wanting to know and you sit there and watch me squirm!”
“Hip! Hip, my arms—”
He squeezed them tighter, shook her. “You do know, don’t you? All about me?”
“Let me go. Please let me go. Oh, Hip, you don’t know what you’re doing!”
He flung her back on the bed. She drew up her legs, turned on her side, propped up on one elbow and, through tears, incredible tears, tears which didn’t belong to any Janie he had yet seen, she looked up at him. She held her bruised forearm, flexed her free hand. “You don’t know,” she choked, “what you’re …” And then she was quiet, panting, sending, through those impossible tears, some great, tortured, thwarted message which he could not read.
Slowly he knelt beside the bed. “Ah, Janie. Janie.”
Her lips twitched. It could hardly have been a smile but it wanted to be. She touched his hair. “It’s all right,” she breathed.
She let her head fall to the pillow and closed her eyes. He curled his legs under him, sat on the floor, put his arms on the bed and rested his cheek on them.
She said, with her eyes closed, “I understand, Hip; I do understand. I want to help, I want to go on helping.”
“No you don’t,” he said, not bitterly, but from the depths of an emotion something like grief.
He could tell—perhaps it was her breath—that he had started the tears again. He said, “You know about me. You know everything I’m looking for.” It sounded like an accusation and he was sorry. He meant it only to express his reasoning. But there wasn’t any other way to say it. “Don’t you?”
Still keeping her eyes closed, she nodded.
“Well then.”
He got up heavily and went back to his chair. When she wants something out of me, he thought viciously, she just sits and waits for it. He slumped into the chair and looked at her. She had not moved. He made a conscious effort and wrung the bitterness from his thought, leaving only the content, the advice. He waited.
She sighed then and sat up. At sight of her rumpled hair and flushed cheeks, he felt a surge of tenderness. Sternly he put it down.
She said, “You have to take my word. You’ll have to trust me, Hip.”
Slowly he shook his head. She dropped her eyes, put her hands together. She raised one, touched her eye with the back of her wrist.
She said, “That piece of cable.”
The tubing lay on the floor where he had dropped it. He picked it up. “What about it?”
“When was the first time you remembered you had it—remembered it was yours?”
He thought. “The house. When I went to the house, asking.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t mean that. I mean, after you were sick.”
“Oh.” He closed his eyes briefly, frowned. “The window. The time I remembered the window, breaking it. I remembered that and then it … oh!” he said abruptly. “You put it in my hand.”
“That’s right. And for eight days I’d been putting it in your hand. I put it in your shoe, once. On your plate. In the soap dish. Once I stuck your toothbrush inside it. Every day, half a dozen times a day—eight days, Hip!”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t understand! Oh, I can’t blame you.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, I don’t believe you.”
At last she looked at him; when she did he realized how rare it was for him to be with her without her eyes on his face. “Truly,” she said intensely. “Truly, Hip. That’s the way it was.”
He nodded reluctantly. “All right. So that’s the way it was. What has that to do with—”
“Wait,” she begged. “You’ll see … now, every time you touched the bit of cable, you refused to admit it existed. You’d let it roll right out of your hand and you wouldn’t see it fall to the floor. You’d step on it with your bare feet and not even feel it. Once it was in your food, Hip; you picked it up with a forkful of lima beans, you put the end of it in your mouth, and then just let it slip away; you didn’t know it was there!”
“Oc—” he said with an effort, then, “occlusion. That’s what Bromfield called it.” Who was Bromfield? But it escaped him; Janie was talking.
“That’s right. Now listen carefully. When the time came for the occlusion to vanish, it did; and there you stood with the cable in your hand, knowing it was real. But nothing I could do beforehand could make that happen until it was ready to happen!”
He thought about it. “So—what made it ready to happen?”
“You went back.”
“To the store, the plate glass window?”
“Yes,” she said and immediately, “No. What I mean is this: You came alive in this room, and you—well, you said it yourself: the world got bigger for you, big enough to let there be a room, then big enough for a street, then a town. But the same thing was happening with your memory. Your memory got big enough to include yesterday, and last week, and then the jail, and then the thing that got you into jail. Now look: At that moment, the cable meant something to you, something terribly important. But when it happened, for all the time after it happened, the cable meant nothing. It didn’t mean anything until the second your memory could go back that far. Then it was real again.”
“Oh,” he said.
She dropped her eyes. “I knew about the cab
le. I could have explained it to you. I tried and tried to bring it to your attention but you couldn’t see it until you were ready. All right—I know a lot more about you. But don’t you see that if I told you, you wouldn’t be able to hear me?”
He shook his head, not in denial but dazedly. He said, “But I’m not—sick any more!”
He read the response in her expressive face. He said faintly, “Am I?” and then anger curled and kicked inside him. “Come on now,” he growled, “you don’t mean to tell me I’d suddenly get deaf if you told me where I went to high school.”
“Of course not,” she said impatiently. “It’s just that it wouldn’t mean anything to you. It wouldn’t relate.” She bit her lip in concentration. “Here’s one: You’ve mentioned Bromfield a half dozen times.”
“Who? Bromfield? I have not.”
She looked at him narrowly. “Hip—you have. You mentioned him not ten minutes ago.”
“Did I?” He thought. He thought hard. Then he opened his eyes wide. “By God, I did!”
“All right. Who is he? What was he to you?”
“Who?”
“Hip!” she said sharply.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m a little mixed up.” He thought again, hard, trying to recall the entire sequence, every word. At last, “B-Bromfield,” he said with difficulty.
“It will hardly stay with you. Well, it’s a flash from a long way back. It won’t mean anything to you until you go back that far and get it.”
“Go back? Go back how?”
“Haven’t you been going back and back—from being sick here to being in jail to getting arrested, and just before that, to your visit to that house? Think about that, Hip. Think about why you went to the house.”
He made an impatient gesture. “I don’t need to. Can’t you see? I went to that house because I was searching for something—what was it? Oh, children; some children who could tell me where the halfwit was.” He leapt up, laughed. “You see? The halfwit—I remembered. I’ll remember it all, you’ll see. The halfwit … I’d been looking for him for years, forever. I … forget why, but,” he said, his voice strengthening, “that doesn’t matter any more now. What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t have to go all the way back; I’ve done all I need to do. I’m back on the path. Tomorrow I’m going to that house and get that address and then I’ll go to wherever that is and finish what I started out to do in the first place when I lost the—”
He faltered, looked around bemusedly, spied the tubing lying on the chair arm, snatched it up. “This,” he said triumphantly. “It’s part of the—the—oh, damn it!”
She waited until he had calmed down enough to hear her. She said, “You see?”
“See what?” he asked brokenly, uncaring, miserable.
“If you go out there tomorrow, you’ll walk into a situation you don’t understand, for reasons you can’t remember, asking for someone you can’t place, in order to go find out something you can’t conceive of. But,” she admitted, “you are right, Hip—you can do it.”
“If I did,” he said, “it would all come back.”
She shook her head. He said harshly, “You know everything, don’t you?”
“Yes, Hip.”
“Well, I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.”
She took one deep breath. “You’ll be killed.”
“What?”
“If you go out there you will be killed,” she said distinctly. “Oh, Hip, haven’t I been right so far? Haven’t I? Haven’t you gotten back a lot already—really gotten it back, so it doesn’t slip away from you?”
Agonized, he said, “You tell me I can walk out of here tomorrow and find whatever it is I’ve been looking—Looking? Living for … and you tell me it’ll kill me if I do. What do you want from me? What are you trying to tell me to do?”
“Just keep on,” she pleaded. “Just keep on with what you’ve been doing.”
“For what?” he raged. “Go back and back, go farther away from the thing I want? What good will—”
“Stop it!” she said sharply. To his own astonishment he stopped. “You’ll be biting holes in the rug in a minute,” she said gently and with a gleam of amusement. “That won’t help.”
He fought against her amusement but it was irresistible. He let it touch him and thrust it away; but it had touched him. He spoke more quietly: “You’re telling me I mustn’t ever find the—the halfwit and the … whatever it is?”
“Oh,” she said, her whole heart in her reflection, “oh, no! Hip, you’ll find it, truly you will. But you have to know what it is; you have to know why.”
“How long will it take?”
She shook her head soberly. “I don’t know.”
“I can’t wait. Tomorrow—” He jabbed a finger at the window. The dark was silvering, the sun was near, pressing it away. “Today, you see? Today I could go there … I’ve got to; you understand how much it means, how long I’ve been …” His voice trailed off; then he whirled on her. “You say I’ll be killed; I’d rather be killed, there with it in my hands; it’s what I’ve been living for anyway!”
She looked up at him tragically. “Hip—”
“No!” he snapped. “You can’t talk me out of it.”
She started to speak, stopped, bent her head. Down she bent, to hide her face on the bed.
He strode furiously up and down the room, then stood over her. His face softened. “Janie,” he said, “help me….”
She lay very still. He knew she was listening. He said, “If there’s danger … if something is going to try to kill me … tell me what. At least let me know what to look for.”
She turned her head, faced the wall, so he could hear her but not see her. In a labored voice she said, “I didn’t say anything will try to kill you. I said you would be killed.”
He stood over her for a long time. Then he growled, “All right. I will. Thanks for everything, Janie. You better go home.”
She crawled off the bed slowly, weakly, as if she had been flogged. She turned to him with such a look of pity and sorrow in her face that his heart was squeezed. But he set his jaw, looked toward the door, moved his head toward it.
She went, not looking back, dragging her feet. It was more than he could bear. But he let her go.
The bedspread was lightly rumpled. He crossed the room slowly and looked down at it. He put out his hand, then fell forward and plunged his face into it. It was still warm from her body and for an instant so brief as to be indefinable, he felt a thing about mingled breaths, two spellbound souls turning one to the other and about to be one. But then it was gone, everything was gone and he lay exhausted.
Go on, get sick. Curl up and die. “All right,” he whispered.
Might as well. What’s the difference anyway? Die or get killed, who cares?
Not Janie.
He closed his eyes and saw a mouth. He thought it was Janie’s, but the chin was too pointed. The mouth said, “Just lie down and die, that’s all,” and smiled. The smile made light glance off the thick glasses which must mean he was seeing the whole face. And then there was a pain so sharp and swift that he threw up his head and grunted. His hand, his hand was cut. He looked down at it, saw the scars which had made the sudden, restimulative pain. “Thompson, I’m gonna kill that Thompson.”
Who was Thompson who was Bromfield who was the halfwit in the cave … cave, where is the cave where the children … children … no, it was children’s … where the children’s … clothes, that’s it! Clothes, old, torn, rags; but that’s how he …
Janie … You will be killed. Just lie down and die.
His eyeballs rolled up, his tensions left him in a creeping lethargy. It was not a good thing but it was more welcome than feeling. Someone said, “Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.” Who said that?
He, Hip Barrows. He said it.
Who’d he say it to?
Janie with her clev
er hand on the ack-ack prototype.
He snorted faintly. Janie wasn’t a corporal. “Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”
Who said that? Oh—Bromfield. The jerk! He should know better than to try to talk engineering to an engineer. “Cap’n Bromfield” (tiredly, the twenty damn thousandth time), “if I wasn’t an engineer I wouldn’t’ve found it, I wouldn’t’ve recognized it and I wouldn’t give a damn now.” Ah, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter. Just curl up and as long as Thompson don’t show his face. Just curl up and … “No, by God,” roared Hip Barrows. He sprang off the bed, stood quaking in the middle of the room. He clapped his hands over his eyes and rocked like a storm-blown sapling. He might be all mixed up, Bromfield’s voice, Thompson’s face, a cave full of children’s clothes, Janie who wanted him killed; but there was one thing he was sure of, one thing he knew: Thompson wasn’t going to make him curl up and die. Janie had rid him of that one!
He whimpered as he rocked, “Janie …?”
Janie didn’t want him to die.
Janie didn’t want him killed; what’s the matter here? Janie just wants … go back. Take time.
He looked at the brightening window.
Take time? Why, maybe today he could get that address and see those children and find the halfwit and … well, find him anyway; that’s what he wanted, wasn’t it? Today. Then by God he’d show Bromfield who had an obsession!
If he lived, he’d show Bromfield.
But no; what Janie wanted was to go the other way, go back. For how long? More hungry years, nobody believes you, no one helps, you hunt and hunt, starve and freeze, for a little clue and another to fit it: the address that came from the house with the porte-cochère which came from the piece of paper in the children’s clothes which were … in the …
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