American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “Knowing it intellectually doesn’t help. I can’t sit alone in my room any more. I wander into the streets at all hours of the day or night, not knowing what I’m looking for . . . walking until I’m lost . . . finding myself outside the bakery. Last night I walked all the way from Washington Square to Central Park, and I slept in the park. What the hell am I searching for?”

  The more I talked, the more upset she became. “What can I do to help you, Charlie?”

  “I don’t know. I’m like an animal who’s been locked out of his nice, safe cage.”

  She sat beside me on the couch. “They’re pushing you too fast. You’re confused. You want to be an adult, but there’s still a little boy inside you. Alone and frightened.” She put my head on her shoulder, trying to comfort me, and as she stroked my hair I knew that she needed me the way I needed her.

  “Charlie,” she whispered after a while, “whatever you want . . . don’t be afraid of me. . . .”

  I wanted to tell her I was waiting for the panic.

  Once—during a bakery delivery—Charlie had nearly fainted when a middle-aged woman, just out of the bath, amused herself by opening her bathrobe and exposing herself. Had he ever seen a woman without clothes on? Did he know how to make love? His terror—his whining—must have frightened her because she clutched her robe together and gave him a quarter to forget what had happened. She was only testing him, she warned, to see if he was a good boy.

  He tried to be good, he told her, and not look at women, because his mother used to beat him whenever that happened in his pants. . . .

  Now he had the clear picture of Charlie’s mother, screaming at him, holding a leather belt in her hand, and his father trying to hold her back. “Enough, Rose! You’ll kill him! Leave him alone!” His mother straining forward to lash at him, just out of reach now so that the belt swishes past his shoulder as he writhes and twists away from it on the floor.

  “Look at him!” Rose screams. “He can’t learn to read and write, but he knows enough to look at a girl that way. I’ll beat that filth out of his mind.”

  “He can’t help it if he gets an erection. It’s normal. He didn’t do anything.”

  “He’s got no business to think that way about girls. A friend of his sister’s comes to the house and he starts thinking like that! I’ll teach him so he never forgets. Do you hear? If you ever touch a girl, I’ll put you away in a cage, like an animal, for the rest of your life. Do you hear me? . . .”

  I still hear her. But perhaps I had been released. Maybe the fear and nausea was no longer a sea to drown in, but only a pool of water reflecting the past alongside the now. Was I free?

  If I could reach Alice in time—without thinking about it, before it overwhelmed me—maybe the panic wouldn’t happen. If only I could make my mind a blank. I managed to choke out: “You . . . you do it! Hold me!” And before I knew what she was doing, she was kissing me, holding me closer than anyone had ever held me before. But at the moment I should have come closest of all, it started: the buzzing, the chill, and the nausea. I turned away from her.

  She tried to soothe me, to tell me it didn’t matter, that there was no reason to blame myself. But ashamed, and no longer able to control my anguish, I began to sob. There in her arms I cried myself to sleep, and I dreamed of the courtier and the pink-cheeked maiden. But in my dream it was the maiden who held the sword.

  PROGRESS REPORT 12

  June 5—Nemur is upset because I haven’t turned in any progress reports in almost two weeks (and he’s justified because the Welberg Foundation has begun paying me a salary out of the grant so that I won’t have to look for a job). The International Psychological Convention at Chicago is only a week away. He wants his preliminary report to be as full as possible, since Algernon and I are the prime exhibits for his presentation.

  Our relationship is becoming increasingly strained. I resent Nemur’s constant references to me as a laboratory specimen. He makes me feel that before the experiment I was not really a human being.

  I told Strauss that I was too involved in thinking, reading, and digging into myself, trying to understand who and what I am, and that writing was such a slow process it made me impatient to get my ideas down. I followed his suggestion that I learn to type, and now that I can type nearly seventy-five words a minute, it’s easier to get it all down on paper.

  Strauss again brought up my need to speak and write simply and directly so that people will understand me. He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway. Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence.

  I see Alice occasionally, but we don’t discuss what happened. Our relationship remains platonic. But for three nights after I left the bakery there were the nightmares. Hard to believe it was two weeks ago.

  I am pursued down the empty streets at night by ghostly figures. Though I always run to the bakery, the door is locked, and the people inside never turn to look at me. Through the window, the bride and groom on the wedding cake point at me and laugh—the air becomes charged with laughter until I can’t stand it—and the two cupids wave their flaming arrows. I scream. I pound on the door, but there is no sound. I see Charlie staring back at me from inside. Is it only a reflection? Things clutch at my legs and drag me away from the bakery down into the shadows of the alleyway, and just as they begin to ooze over me I wake up.

  Other times the window of the bakery opens into the past and looking through it I see other things and other people.

  It’s astonishing how my power of recall is developing. I cannot control it completely yet, but sometimes when I’m busy reading or working on a problem, I get a feeling of intense clarity.

  I know it’s some kind of subconscious warning signal, and now instead of waiting for the memory to come to me, I close my eyes and reach out for it. Eventually, I’ll be able to bring this recall completely under control, to explore not only the sum of my past experiences, but also all of the untapped faculties of the mind.

  Even now, as I think about it, I feel the sharp stillness. I see the bakery window . . . reach out and touch it . . . cold and vibrating, and then the glass becomes warm . . . hotter . . . fingers burning. The window reflecting my image becomes bright, and as the glass turns into a mirror, I see little Charlie Gordon—fourteen or fifteen—looking out at me through the window of his house, and it’s doubly strange to realize how different he was. . . .

  He has been waiting for his sister to come from school, and when he sees her turn the corner onto Marks Street, he waves and calls her name and runs out onto the porch to meet her.

  Norma waves a paper. “I got an A in my history test. I knew all the answers. Mrs. Baffin said it was the best paper in the whole class.”

  She is a pretty girl with light brown hair carefully braided and coiled about her head in a crown, and as she looks up at her big brother the smile turns to a frown and she skips away, leaving him behind as she darts up the steps into the house.

  Smiling, he follows her.

  His mother and father are in the kitchen, and Charlie, bursting with the excitement of Norma’s good news, blurts it out before she has a chance.

  “She got an A! She got an A!”

  “No!” shrieks Norma. “Not you. You don’t tell. It’s my mark, and I’m going to tell.”

  “Now wait a minute, young lady.” Matt puts his newspaper down and addresses her sternly. “That’s no way to talk to your brother.”

  “He had no right to tell!”

  “Never mind.” Matt glares at her over his warning finger. “He meant no harm by it, and you mustn’t shout at him that way.”

  She turns to her mother for support. “I got an A—the best mark in class. Now I can have a dog? You promised. You said if I got a good mark in my test. And I got an A. A brown dog with white spots. And I’m going to call him Napoleon because that was the question I answered best
on the test. Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo.”

  Rose nods. “Go out on the porch and play with Charlie. He’s been waiting over an hour for you to come home from school.”

  “I don’t want to play with him.”

  “Go out on the porch,” says Matt.

  Norma looks at her father and then at Charlie. “I don’t have to. Mother said I don’t have to play with him if I don’t want to.”

  “Now, young lady”—Matt rises out of his chair and comes toward her—“you just apologize to your brother.”

  “I don’t have to,” she screeches, rushing behind her mother’s chair. “He’s like a baby. He can’t play Monopoly or checkers or anything . . . he gets everything all mixed up. I won’t play with him any more.”

  “Then go to your room!”

  “Can I have a dog now, Mama?”

  Matt hits the table with his fist. “There’ll be no dog in this house as long as you take this attitude, young lady.”

  “I promised her a dog if she did well in school—”

  “A brown one with white spots!” adds Norma.

  Matt points to Charlie standing near the wall. “Did you forget you told your son he couldn’t have one because we didn’t have the room, and no one to take care of it. Remember? When he asked for a dog? Are you going back on what you said to him?”

  “But I can take care of my own dog,” insists Norma. “I’ll feed him, and wash him, and take him out . . .”

  Charlie, who has been standing near the table, playing with his large red button at the end of a string, suddenly speaks out.

  “I’ll help her take care of the dog! I’ll help her feed it and brush it and I won’t let the other dogs bite it!”

  But before either Matt or Rose can answer, Norma shrieks: “No! It’s going to be my dog. Only my dog!”

  Matt nods. “You see?”

  Rose sits beside her and strokes her braids to calm her. “But we have to share things, dear. Charlie can help you take care of it.”

  “No! Only mine! . . . I’m the one who got the A in history—not him! He never gets good marks like me. Why should he help with the dog? And then the dog will like him more than me, and it’ll be his dog instead of mine. No! If I can’t have it for myself I don’t want it.”

  “That settles it,” says Matt picking up his newspaper and settling down in his chair again. “No dog.”

  Suddenly, Norma jumps off the couch and grabs the history test she had brought home so eagerly just a few minutes earlier. She tears it and throws the pieces into Charlie’s startled face. “I hate you! I hate you!”

  “Norma, stop that at once!” Rose grabs her but she twists away.

  “And I hate school! I hate it! I’ll stop studying, and I’ll be a dummy like him. I’ll forget everything I learned and then I’ll be just like him.” She runs out of the room, shrieking: “It’s happening to me already. I’m forgetting everything . . . I’m forgetting . . . I don’t remember anything I learned any more!”

  Rose, terrified, runs after her. Matt sits there staring at the newspaper in his lap. Charlie, frightened by the hysteria and the screaming, shrinks into a chair whimpering softly. What has he done wrong? And feeling the wetness in his trousers and the trickling down his leg, he sits there waiting for the slap he knows will come when his mother returns.

  The scene fades, but from that time Norma spent all her free moments with her friends, or playing alone in her room. She kept the door to her room closed, and I was forbidden to enter without her permission.

  I recall once overhearing Norma and one of her girl friends playing in her room, and Norma shouting: “He is not my real brother! He’s just a boy we took in because we felt sorry for him. My mamma told me, and she said I can tell everyone now that he’s not really my brother at all.”

  I wish this memory were a photograph so that I could tear it up and throw it back into her face. I want to call back across the years and tell her I never meant to stop her from getting her dog. She could have had it all to herself, and I wouldn’t have fed it, or brushed it, or played with it—and I would never have made it like me more than it liked her. I only wanted her to play games with me the way we used to. I never meant to do anything that would hurt her at all.

  June 6—My first real quarrel with Alice today. My fault. I wanted to see her. Often, after a disturbing memory or dream, talking to her—just being with her—makes me feel better. But it was a mistake to go down to the Center to pick her up.

  I had not been back to the Center for Retarded Adults since the operation, and the thought of seeing the place was exciting. It’s on Twenty-third Street, east of Fifth Avenue, in an old schoolhouse that has been used by the Beekman University Clinic for the last five years as a center for experimental education—special classes for the handicapped. The sign outside on the doorway, framed by the old spiked gateway, is just a gleaming brass plate that says C. R. A. Beekman Extension.

  Her class ended at eight, but I wanted to see the room where—not so long ago—I had struggled over simple reading and writing and learned to count change of a dollar.

  I went inside, slipped up to the door, and, keeping out of sight, I looked through the window. Alice was at her desk, and in a chair beside her was a thin-faced woman I didn’t recognize. She was frowning that open frown of unconcealed puzzlement, and I wondered what Alice was trying to explain.

  Near the blackboard was Mike Dorni in his wheelchair, and there in his usual first-row first-seat was Lester Braun, who, Alice said, was the smartest in the group. Lester had learned easily what I had struggled over, but he came when he felt like it, or he stayed away to earn money waxing floors. I guess if he had cared at all—if it had been important to him as it was to me—they would have used him for this experiment. There were new faces, too, people I didn’t know.

  Finally, I got up the nerve to go in.

  “It’s Charlie!” said Mike, whirling his wheelchair around.

  I waved to him.

  Bernice, the pretty blonde with empty eyes, looked up and smiled dully. “Where ya been, Charlie? That’s a nice suit.”

  The others who remembered me waved to me and I waved back. Suddenly, I could see by Alice’s expression that she was annoyed.

  “It’s almost eight o’clock,” she announced. “Time to put things away.”

  Each person had an assigned task, the putting away of chalk, erasers, papers, books, pencils, note paper, paints, and demonstration material. Each one knew his job and took pride in doing it well. They all started on their tasks except Bernice. She was staring at me.

  “Why ain’t Charlie been coming to school?” asked Bernice. “What’s the matter, Charlie? Are you coming back?”

  The others looked up at me. I looked to Alice, waiting for her to answer for me, but there was a long silence. What could I tell them that would not hurt them?

  “This is just a visit,” I said.

  One of the girls started to giggle—Francine, whom Alice was always worried about. She had given birth to three children by the time she was eighteen, before her parents arranged for a hysterectomy. She wasn’t pretty—not nearly as attractive as Bernice—but she had been an easy mark for dozens of men who bought her something pretty, or paid her way to the movies. She lived at a boarding house approved for outside work trainees by the Warren State Home, and was permitted out in the evenings to come to the Center. Twice she hadn’t shown up—picked up by men on the way to school—and now she was allowed out only with an escort.

  “He talks like a big shot now,” she giggled.

  “All right,” said Alice, breaking in sharply. “Class dismissed. I’ll see you all tomorrow night at six.”

  When they were gone, I could see by the way she was slamming her own things into her closet, that she was angry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was going to wait for y
ou downstairs, and then I got curious about the old classroom. My alma mater. I just wanted to look through the window. And before I knew what I was doing I came in. What’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing—nothing’s bothering me.”

  “Come on. Your anger is all out of proportion to what’s happened. Something’s on your mind.”

  She slammed down a book she was holding. “All right. You want to know? You’re different. You’ve changed. And I’m not talking about your I.Q. It’s your attitude toward people—you’re not the same kind of human being—”

  “Oh, come on now! Don’t—”

  “Don’t interrupt me!” The real anger in her voice pushed me back. “I mean it. There was something in you before. I don’t know . . . a warmth, an openness, a kindness that made everyone like you and like to have you around. Now, with all your intelligence and knowledge, there are differences that—”

  I couldn’t let myself listen. “What did you expect? Did you think I’d remain a docile pup, wagging my tail and licking the foot that kicks me? Sure, all this has changed me and the way I think about myself. I no longer have to take the kind of crap that people have been handing me all my life.”

  “People have not been bad to you.”

  “What do you know about it? Listen, the best of them have been smug and patronizing—using me to make themselves superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron.”

  After I said it, I knew she was going to take it the wrong way.

  “You put me in that category too, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be absurd. You know damned well I—”

  “Of course, in a sense, I guess you’re right. Next to you I am rather dull-witted. Nowadays every time we see each other, after I leave you I go home with the miserable feeling that I’m slow and dense about everything. I review things I’ve said, and come up with all the bright and witty things I should have said, and I feel like kicking myself because I didn’t mention them when we were together.”