Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

I keep on looking at her, thinking. Finally, “Miss Brandt, you said a thing yesterday—my God, was it only yesterday?—about my not being able to paint now because I don’t know why I painted before. Do you know what you were talking about?”

  “I—” and the lashes go down, the hands busy themselves, “—I only know sort of generally. I mean, if you can do a thing and know how you do it and—and especially why, and then something stops you, I think it’s easy to see the thing that stops you.”

  So I lean against the door and look at her in the way that makes her squirm (I’m sorry but that’s the way I look when I’m thinking) and I think:

  Does anyone ask a painter—even the painter himself—why he paints? Now me, I painted … used to … whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.

  But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I’ve always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I’m crossing it late.

  And the simple—child?—artist paints for himself … but when he grows up he sees through the eyes of the beholder, and feels through his fingertips, and helps him to see that which the artist is gifted to see. Those who had wept over my work up to now, I used to say, had stolen meaning out of it, against my will. When I grow up, perhaps they will accept what I willingly give them. And because Miss Brandt feels this is worth giving, she has tried to get more of it for people.

  So I had stopped painting because I had become too discerning, and could find nothing perfect enough to paint. But now it occurs to me that the girl with the silver in her hair can be painted for the beauty she has, regardless of her other ugliness. Atlantes had a magic, and in it one walked the battlements of a bastion—which was only, in truth, a byre. Miss Brandt can paint me, in her mind, as a man who turned back all the money in the world, and for her, this is a real nobility.

  The only key to the complexity of living is to understand that this world contains two-and-a-half-billion worlds, each built in a person’s eyes and all different, and all susceptible to beauty and hungry for it.

  I ran out of things to paint … and now, now, there’ll never be enough time to paint beauty! Rogero did a knightly thing on the black rock, because he was not a good knight. I did a manly thing about the money because I was a fool. All successes are accidents in someone’s world … so: “You tell her it worked, Miss Brandt. I’m going to paint, Miss Brandt; I’m going to paint you, Miss Brandt, because you’re beautiful.”

  And I paint, and she is, because I paint, because she is.

  When You’re Smiling

  Never tell the truth to humans.

  I can’t recall having formulated that precept; I do know I’ve lived under it all my life.

  But Henry?

  It couldn’t matter with Henry.

  You might say Henry didn’t count.

  And who would blame me? Being me, I’d found, was a lonely job. Doing better things than other people—and doing them better to boot—is its own reward, up to a point. But to find out about those murders, those dozens and dozens of beautiful scot-free murders, and then not to be able to tell anyone … well, I act like a human being in so many other ways—

  And besides, it’s only Henry.

  When I was a kid in school, I had three miles to go and used roller skates except when it was snowing. Sometimes it got pretty cold, occasionally too hot, and often wet; but rain or shine, Henry was there when I got to the building. That was twenty years ago, but all I have to do is close my eyes to bring it all back, him and his homely, doggy face, his odd flexible mouth atwist with laughter and welcome. He’d take my books and set them by the wall and rub one of my hands between his two if it was cold, or toss me a locker-room towel if it was wet or very hot.

  I never could figure out why he did it. It was more than just plain hero-worship, yet Lord knows he got little enough from me.

  That went on for years, until he graduated. I didn’t do so well and it took me longer to get out. I don’t think I really tried to graduate until after Henry did; the school suddenly seemed pretty bleak, so I did some work and got clear of it.

  After that, I kicked around a whole lot looking for a regular income without specializing in anything, and found it writing features for the Sunday supplement of one of those newspapers whose editorial policies are abhorrent to decent people, but it’s all right; no decent person reads them.

  I write about floods, convincingly describing America’s certain watery grave, and I write about drought and the vanishing water table, visualizing our grandchildren expiring on barren plains that are as dry as a potato-chip. Then there’s the perennial collision with a wandering planet, and features about nuts who predict the end of the world, and biographies of great patriots cut to size so they won’t conflict with the editorial page. It’s a living, and when you can compartment it away from what you think, none of it bothers you.

  So a lot of things happened and twenty years went by, and all of a sudden I ran into Henry.

  The first thing about him was that he hadn’t changed. I don’t think he had even grown much. He still had the coarse hair and the ugly wide mouth and the hot happy eyes. The second funny thing was the way he was dressed, like always, in hand-me-downs: a collar four sizes too large, a baggy suit, a raveled sweater that would have fought bitterly with his old herringbone if both weren’t so faded.

  He came wagging and panting up to me this early fall day when everyone in sight but Henry was already wearing a topcoat. I knew him right away and I couldn’t help myself; I just stood there and laughed at him. He laughed, too, glad to the groveling point, not caring why I was laughing, but simply welcoming laughter for its own sake. He said my name indistinctly, again and again; Henry almost always spoke indistinctly because of that grin he wore half around his head

  “Well, come on!” I bellowed at him, and then cussed at him. It always made him wince, and it did now. “I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll buy you nine drinks!”

  “No,” he said, smiling, backing away a little, bobbing his head in that funny way, as if he was about to duck. “I can’t right now.”

  It seemed to me he was looking at my sharp-creased dacron suit, or maybe the pearl homburg. Or maybe he just caught my eye on his old set of threads. He waggled his hands aimlessly in front of him, like an old woman caught naked and not knowing what to cover up. “I don’t drink.”

  “You’ll drink,” I said.

  I took him by the wrist and marched him down to the corner and into Molson’s, while he tugged ineffectually at me and mumbled things from between his solid, crooked teeth. I wanted a drink and I needed a laugh, right now, and I wasn’t going to drag all the way down to Skid Row just to keep him from feeling conspicuous.

  Somebody was sitting in a back booth—someone I especially didn’t want to see. Be seen by. I don’t think I broke stride when I saw her, though. Hell, the day won’t come when I can’t handle the likes of her …

  “Siddown,” I said, and Henry had to; I pushed him and the edge of the seat hit the backs of his knees. I sat down, too, giving him the hip hard enough to slide those worn old tweeds of his back into the corner where he wouldn’t be able to get out unless I moved first. “Steve!” I roared, just as though I didn’t care if anyone in the place knew I was there. Steve was on his way, but I always yelled like that; it bothered him. Steve’s also sort of a funny guy.

  “Awright, awright,” he complained. “What’ll you have?”

  “What are you drinking, Henry?”

  “Oh, nothing—nothing for me.”

  I snorted at him and said to Steve, “Two sour-mash an’ soda on the side.”

  Steve grunted and went away.

  “
Really,” Henry said, with his maybe-I-better-duck wobble, “I don’t want any. I don’t drink.”

  “Yes, you do,” I told him. “Now what’s with you? Come on, right from the beginning. From school. I want the story of your life—trials and triumphs, toils ’n’ tragedies.”

  “My life?” he asked, and I think he was genuinely puzzled. “Oh, I haven’t done anything. I work in a store,” he added. When I just sat there shaking my head at him, he looked down at his hands and pulled them abruptly down into his lap as if he was ashamed of his nails. “I know, I know, it’s nothing much.” He looked at me with that peculiar hot gaze. “Not like you, with a piece in the paper every week and all.”

  “Steve came with the bourbon. I shut up until he’d gone. With Steve, I like to pretend I have big business and don’t trust him to listen in. I swear sometimes you can hear him grinding his teeth. He never says anything, though. A good customer’s got just a little more rights than just anybody else, so there’s nothing he can do about it. He just works there.

  When he’d gone, I said, “Here’s to the twist that don’t exist, and her claim there’s a game that can’t be played. Here’s to the wise old lies we use—”

  “Honest, I don’t want any,” said Henry.

  “If I’m going to be hospitable, you’re going to be housebroke,” I told him, and picked up his glass and shoved it at his face.

  He got his lips on it just in time to keep it from falling into that oversize collar. He didn’t take but a sip, and that great big mouth snapped down to button-size as if it had a drawstring on it. His eyes got round and filled with tears; he tried to hold the liquor on his tongue, but he sneezed through his nostrils and swallowed and started to cough.

  Laugh? I got my breath back just this side of hernia. Some day I’ll plant a sound camera and do that again and make an immortal out of old Henry.

  “Gosh!” he gasped when he could.

  He wiped his eyes with his frayed sleeves. I guess he didn’t have a handkerchief. “That hurt.” But he was grinning the old grin all the same. “You drink that all the time?” he half whispered.

  “All the time, like so,” I said, and drank the rest of his, “And like so,” and drank mine down. “Steve!” Steve already had the refills on a tray and I knew it, which is why I yelled at him. “Now, about what you started to say—” and I broke off while Steve got to the table and put down the drinks and picked up the empties and went away again—“the story of your life. You sit there and tell me ‘Oh, nothing,’ and you say you work in a store, period. Now I am going to tell you the story of your life. First of all, I’m going to tell you who you are. You’re Henry. Nobody else in God’s great gray-green Universe was ever this particular Henry. We start with that. No—”

  Henry said, “But I—”

  “No mountain,” I went on, “no supernova, no collapsing, alpha-spitting nucleus was ever more remarkable than the simple fact of you, Henry, just being Henry. Name me an earthquake, an oak tree, a racehorse or a Ph.D. thesis and I will, by God, name you one just like it that happened before. You,” I said, leaning forward and jamming my forefinger into his collarbone, “you, Henry, are unique and unprecedented on this planet in this galaxy.”

  “No, I’m not,” he laughed, backing off from the finger, which did him no good once I had him pinned to the wall behind him.

  “No supernova,” I said again, having just discovered that the phrase is a delightful way of sending the flavor of good bourbon through the nostrils. “That’s what we only begin with,” I went on. “Just being, you’re a miracle, aside from everything you’ve ever said or done or dreamed about.” I took away the finger and sat back to beam at him.

  “Ah,” he said; I swear he blushed. “Ah, there’s plenty more like me.”

  “Not a single one.” I tipped up my glass, found it was empty already, so I drank his because I had my mouth all set for it. “Steve!” I sat silently watching Henry aimlessly rubbing his collarbone while the drinks arrived and the empties left. “So we start with a miracle. Where do we go from there? How do you cap that?”

  He made a sort of giggle. It meant, “I don’t know.”

  “You never heard anybody talk like this about you before, did you?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” I put out the forefinger again, but did not touch him with it because he expected I would.

  Over his shoulder, in the wall mirror, I could see that woman sitting alone in the back booth, crying. Always a great one for crying, she was.

  “I’ll tell you why I talk like this, Henry,” I said. “It’s for your own good, because you don’t know what you are. Here you walk around this place telling people ‘Oh, nothing’ when they ask for the story of your life, and you’re a walking miracle just to start with. Now what do we go on with?”

  He shrugged.

  “You feel better, now you know what you are?”

  “I don’t … I never thought about it.” He looked up at me swiftly, as if to find out what I wanted him to say. “I guess I do.”

  “All right then. That makes it better. That makes it easier on you, because I am now going to tell you what you are, Henry. Henry, what are you?”

  “Well, you said—” he swallowed—“a miracle.”

  I brought down my fist with a bang that made everybody jump, even her in the mirror, but especially Henry. “No! I’ll tell you what you are. You are a nowhere type, a nudnick type nothing!” I quickly bent forward. He shrank from the finger like a snail from salt. “And now you’re going to tell me that’s a paradox. You’re going to say I contradicted myself.”

  “I’m not.” His mouth trembled and then he was smiling again.

  “Well, all right, but it’s what you’re thinking. Drink up.” I raised my glass. “Here’s to the eyes, blue brown and brindle, and here’s to the fires that those eyes don’t kindle; I don’t mean the fires that burn down shanties, I mean the fires that pull down—”

  “Gee, no, thanks,” he said.

  I drank my drink. “But I mean,” I said aloud to myself, “really a nothing.” I took his drink and held it and glared at him. “You will, by God, stop stepping on my punchlines.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t even notice.” He pointed vaguely. “I didn’t know anyone could handle so much of that—that whiskey.”

  “I got news for you, boy,” I said, and winked at him. “Here it is past quitting time and this whiskey is all I had for lunch, and it’s what I had for a snack—high tea, wot?—and it’s what I’m having for dinner, and well should you envy this mighty capacity. Among other things. Now I will show you why I have uttered no paradox in describing you as a miracle and a simultaneous, coexistent, concurrent nothing.

  I smelled his drink and lowered it. “You started out being everything I described—unique, unprecedented. If you thought about it at all, which I doubt, you thought of yourself as having been born naked and defenseless, and having gained constantly since—the power of speech, the ability to read, an education of sorts (you can see by my calling it that I’m in a generous mood) and, lately, some sort of a job in some sort of a store, the right to vote, and that … well, unusual suit you’re wearing. No matter how modest you are about these achievements—are you are, you really are—they seem to add up to more than you started with.

  “Well, they don’t. Since the day you were born, you’ve lost. What the hell is it that you keep looking at?”

  “That girl. She’s crying. But I’m listening to what you’re saying.”

  “You better listen. I’m doing this for you, for your own good. Just let her cry. If she cries long enough, she’ll find out crying doesn’t help. Then she’ll quit.”

  “You know why she’s crying?”

  Did I! “Yes, and it’s a pretty useless procedure. Where was I?”

  “I’ve been losing since I was born,” Henry obediently reminded me.

  “Yeah, yeah. What you’ve lost is potential, Henry. You started out with the capability
of doing almost anything and you’ve come to a point where you can do almost nothing. On the other hand, I started out being able to do practically nothing and now I can do almost anything.”

  “That’s wonderful!” he said warmly.

  “You just don’t know,” I told him. “Now, mind you, we’re still talking about you. You’ll see the connection. I just want to illustrate a point … These days, everybody specializes or doesn’t make it, one or the other. If you’re lucky enough to have a talent and find work where you use it, you go far. If your work is outside your talent, you can still make out. If you have no talent, hard work in one single line makes for a pretty fair substitute. But in each case, how good you are depends on how closely you specialize and how hard you work inside a specialty. Me, now, I’m different. Steve!”

  “None for me,” Henry insisted plaintively.

  “Do it again, Steve. Henry, stop interrupting me when I’m doing you a favor. What I am, I’m what you might call a specializing non-specialist. We’re few and far between, Henry—guys like me, I mean. Far as work’s concerned, I got a big bright red light in here—” I tapped my forehead—“that lights up if I accidentally stay in one line too long. Any time that happens, I quick wind up what I’m doing and go do something else instead. And far as talents are concerned, talents I got, I guess. Only I don’t use ’em. I avoid ’em. They’re the only thing that could ever trap me into specializing and I just won’t be trapped, not by anybody or anything. Not me!”

  “You have a real talent for writing,” Henry said diffidently.

  “Well, thanks, Henry, but you’re wrong. Writing isn’t a talent. It’s a skill. Certain kinds of thinking, ways of thinking—you might call them based on talent; but writing’s just a verbalization, a knack of putting into an accepted code what’s already there in your head. Learning to write is like learning to type, a transformation of a sort of energy into a symbol. It’s what you write that counts, not how you do it. What’s the matter, did I lose you?”