American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “That’s a common experience.”

  “I find myself wanting to impress you in a way I never thought about doing before, but being with you has undermined my self-confidence. I question my motives now, about everything I do.”

  I tried to get her off the subject, but she kept coming back to it. “Look, I didn’t come here to argue with you,” I finally said. “Will you let me take you home? I need someone to talk to.”

  “So do I. But these days I can’t talk to you. All I can do is listen and nod my head and pretend I understand all about cultural variants, and neo-Boulean mathematics, and post-symbolic logic, and I feel more and more stupid, and when you leave the apartment, I have to stare in the mirror and scream at myself: ‘No, you’re not growing duller every day! You’re not losing your intelligence! You’re not getting senile and dull-witted. It’s Charlie exploding forward so quickly that it makes it appear as if you’re slipping backwards.’ I say that to myself, Charlie, but whenever we meet and you tell me something and look at me in that impatient way, I know you’re laughing.

  “And when you explain things to me, and I can’t remember them, you think it’s because I’m not interested and don’t want to take the trouble. But you don’t know how I torture myself when you’re gone. You don’t know the books I’ve struggled over, the lectures I’ve sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish. I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to help you and share with you—and now you’ve shut me out of your life.”

  As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.

  She was crying silently as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become. She was terrified of me. The ice had broken between us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.

  She was right in refusing to torture herself by being with me. We no longer had anything in common. Simple conversation had become strained. And all there was between us now was the embarrassed silence and unsatisfied longing in a darkened room.

  “You’re very serious,” she said, breaking out of her own mood and looking up at me.

  “About us.”

  “It shouldn’t make you so serious. I don’t want to upset you. You’re going through a great trial.” She was trying to smile.

  “But you did. Only I don’t know what to do about it.”

  On the way from the bus stop to her apartment, she said, “I’m not going to the convention with you. I called Professor Nemur this morning and told him. There will be a lot for you to do there. Interesting people—the excitement of the spotlight for a while. I don’t want to be in the way—”

  “Alice—”

  “—and no matter what you say about it now, I know that’s how I’m going to feel, so if you don’t mind, I’ll hang on to my splintering ego—thank you.”

  “But you’re making more of this than it is. I’m sure if you’ll just—”

  “You know? You’re sure?” She turned and glared at me on the front steps of her apartment building. “Oh, how insufferable you’ve become. How do you know what I feel? You take liberties with other people’s minds. You can’t tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel.”

  She started inside and then she looked back at me, her voice shaky: “I’ll be here when you get back. I’m just upset, that’s all, and I want both of us to have a chance to think this out while we’re a good distance apart.”

  For the first time in many weeks she didn’t ask me inside. I stared at the closed door with the anger mounting inside me. I wanted to create a scene, to bang on the door, to break it down. I wanted my anger to consume the building.

  But as I walked away I felt a kind of simmering, then cooling, and finally a relief. I walked so fast I was drifting along the streets, and the feeling that hit my cheek was a cool breeze out of the summer night. Suddenly free.

  I realize now that my feeling for Alice had been moving backwards against the current of my learning, from worship, to love, to fondness, to a feeling of gratitude and responsibility. My confused feeling for her had been holding me back, and I had clung to her out of my fear of being forced out on my own, and cut adrift.

  But with the freedom came a sadness. I wanted to be in love with her. I wanted to overcome my emotional and sexual fears, to marry, have children, settle down.

  Now it’s impossible. I am just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70. And this time we both know it.

  June 8—What drives me out of the apartment to prowl through the city? I wander through the streets alone—not the relaxing stroll of a summer night, but the tense hurry to get—where? Down alleyways, looking into doorways, peering into half-shuttered windows, wanting someone to talk to and yet afraid to meet anyone. Up one street, and down another, through the endless labyrinth, hurling myself against the neon cage of the city. Searching . . . for what?

  I met a woman in Central Park. She was sitting on a bench near the lake, with a coat clutched around her despite the heat. She smiled and motioned for me to sit beside her. We looked at the bright skyline on Central Park South, the honeycomb of lighted cells against the blackness, and I wished I could absorb them all.

  Yes, I told her, I was from New York. No, I had never been to Newport News, Virginia. That’s where she was from, and where she had married this sailor who was at sea now, and she hadn’t seen him in two and a half years.

  She twisted and knotted a handkerchief, using it from time to time to wipe the beaded sweat from her forehead. Even in the dim light reflected from the lake, I could see that she wore a great deal of make-up, but she looked attractive with her straight dark hair loose to her shoulders—except that her face was puffy and swollen as if she had just gotten up from sleep. She wanted to talk about herself, and I wanted to listen.

  Her father had given her a good home, an education, everything a wealthy shipbuilder could give his only daughter—but not forgiveness. He would never forgive her elopement with the sailor.

  She took my hand as she spoke, and rested her head on my shoulder. “The night Gary and I were married,” she whispered, “I was a terrified virgin. And he just went crazy. First, he had to slap me and beat me. And then he took me with no love-making. That was the last time we were ever together. I never let him touch me again.”

  She could probably tell by the trembling of my hand that I was startled. It was too violent and intimate for me. Feeling my hand stir, she gripped it tighter as if she had to finish her story before she could let me go. It was important to her, and I sat quietly as one sits before a bird that feeds from your palm.

  “Not that I don’t like men,” she assured me with wide-eyed openness. “I’ve been with other men. Not him, but lots of others. Most men are gentle and tender with a woman. They make love slowly, with caresses and kisses first.” She looked at me meaningfully, and let her open palm brush back and forth against mine.

  It was what I had heard about, read about, dreamed about. I didn’t know her name, and she didn’t ask mine. She just wanted me to take her someplace where we could be alone. I wondered what Alice would think.

  I caressed her awkwardly and kissed her still more hesitantly so that she looked up at me. “What’s the matter?” she whispered. “What are you thinking?”

  “About you.”

  “Do you have a place we can go?”

  Each step forward was caution. At what point would the ground give way and plunge me into anxiety? Something kept me moving ahead to test my footing.

  “If you don’t have a place, the Mansion Hotel on Fifty-third doesn’t cost too much. And they don’t bother you about luggage if you
pay in advance.”

  “I have a room—”

  She looked at me with new respect. “Well, that’s fine.”

  Still nothing. And that in itself was curious. How far could I go without being overwhelmed by symptoms of panic? When we were alone in the room? When she undressed? When I saw her body? When we were lying together?

  Suddenly, it was important to know if I could be like other men, if I could ever ask a woman to share a life with me. Having intelligence and knowledge wasn’t enough. I wanted this, too. The sense of release and looseness was strong now with the feeling that it was possible. The excitement that came over me when I kissed her again communicated itself, and I was sure I could be normal with her. She was different from Alice. She was the kind of woman who had been around.

  Then her voice changed, uncertain. “Before we go . . . Just one thing . . .” She stood up and took a step toward me in the spray of lamplight, opening her coat, and I could see the shape of her body as I had not imagined it all the time we were sitting next to each other in the shadows. “Only the fifth month,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Standing there with her coat open, she was superimposed as a double exposure on the picture of the middle-aged woman just out of the bathtub, holding open her bathrobe for Charlie to see. And I waited, as a blasphemer waits for lightning. I looked away. It was the last thing I had expected, but the coat wrapped tightly around her on such a hot night should have warned me that something was wrong.

  “It’s not my husband’s,” she assured me. “I wasn’t lying to you about what I said before. I haven’t seen him for years. It was a salesman I met about eight months ago. I was living with him. I’m not going to see him any more, but I’m going to keep the baby. We’ve just got to be careful—not rough or anything like that. But otherwise you don’t have to worry.”

  Her voice ran down when she saw my anger. “That’s filthy!” I shouted. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  She drew away, wrapping her coat quickly around her to protect what lay within.

  As she made that protective gesture, I saw the second double image: my mother, heavy with my sister, in the days when she was holding me less, warming me less with her voice and touch, protecting me less against anyone who dared to say I was subnormal.

  I think I grabbed her shoulder—I’m not sure, but then she was screaming, and I was sharply back to reality with the sense of danger. I wanted to tell her I had meant no harm—I would never hurt her or anyone. “Please, don’t scream!”

  But she was screaming, and I heard the running footsteps on the darkened path. This was something no one would understand. I ran into the darkness, to find an exit from the park, zig-zagging across one path and down another. I didn’t know the park, and suddenly I crashed into something that threw me backwards. A wire-mesh fence—a dead end. Then I saw the swings and slides and realized it was a children’s playground locked up for the night. I followed the fence, and kept going, half-running, stumbling over twisted roots. At the lake that curved around near the playground, I doubled back, found another path, went over the small footbridge and then around and under it. No exit.

  “What is it? What happened, lady?”

  “A maniac?”

  “You all right?”

  “Which way did he go?”

  I had circled back to where I had started from. I slipped behind the huge outcropping of a rock and a screen of bramble and dropped flat on my stomach.

  “Get a cop. There’s never a cop when you need one.”

  “What happened?”

  “A degenerate tried to rape her.”

  “Hey, some guy down there is chasing him. There he goes!”

  “Come on! Get the bastard before he gets outta the park!”

  “Careful. He’s got a knife and a gun. . . .”

  It was obvious that the shouting had flushed out the night crawlers because the cry of “there he goes!” was echoed from behind me, and looking out from behind the rock I could see a lone runner being chased down the lamplit path into the darkness. Seconds later, another one passed in front of the rock and disappeared into the shadows. I pictured myself being caught by this eager mob and beaten and torn by them. I deserved it. I almost wanted it.

  I stood up, brushed the leaves and dirt from my clothing and walked slowly down the path in the direction from which I had come. I expected every second to be grabbed from behind and pulled down into the dirt and darkness, but soon I saw the bright lights of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, and I came out of the park.

  Thinking about it now, in the security of my room, I am shaken with the rawness that touched me. Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

  PROGRESS REPORT 13

  June 10—We’re on a Strato-jet about to take off for Chicago. I owe this progress report to Burt who had the bright idea that I could dictate this on a transistor tape recorder and have a public stenographer in Chicago type it up. Nemur likes the idea. In fact, he wants me to use the recorder up to the last minute. He feels it will add to the report if they play the most recent tape at the end of the session.

  So here I am, sitting off by myself in our private section of a jet on the way to Chicago, trying to get used to thinking aloud, and to the sound of my own voice. I suppose the typist can get rid of all the uhm’s, er’s and ah’s, and make it all seem natural on paper (I can’t help the paralysis that comes over me when I think hundreds of people are going to listen to the words I’m saying now).

  My mind is a blank. At this point my feelings are more important than anything else.

  The idea of going up in the air terrifies me.

  As far as I can tell, in the days before the operation, I never really understood what planes were. I never connected the movies and TV close-ups of planes with the things that I saw zooming overhead. Now that we’re about to take off I can think only of what might happen if we crash. A cold feeling, and the thought that I don’t want to die. Brings to mind those discussions about God.

  I’ve thought about death often in recent weeks, but not really about God. My mother took me to church occasionally—but I don’t recall ever connecting that up with the thought of God. She mentioned Him quite often, and I had to pray to Him at night, but I never thought much about it. I remember Him as a distant uncle with a long beard on a throne (like Santa Claus in the department store on his big chair, who picks you up on his knee and asks you if you’ve been good, and what would you like him to give you?). She was afraid of Him, but asked favors anyway. My father never mentioned Him—it was as if God was one of Rose’s relatives he’d rather not get involved with.

  * * *

  “We’re ready to take off, sir. May I help you fasten your seat belt?”

  “Do I have to? I don’t like to be strapped down.”

  “Until we’re airborne.”

  “I’d rather not, unless it’s necessary. I’ve got this fear of being strapped in. It’ll probably make me sick.”

  “It’s regulations, sir. Here, let me help you.”

  “No! I’ll do it myself.”

  “No . . . that one goes through here.”

  “Wait, uh. . . . Okay.”

  * * *

  Ridiculous. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Seat belt isn’t too tight—doesn’t hurt. Why should putting on the damned seat belt be so terrifying? That, and the vibrations of the plane taking off. Anxiety all out of proportion to the situation . . . so it must be something . . . what? . . . flying up into and through dark clouds . . . fasten
your seat belts . . . strapped down . . . straining forward . . . odor of sweaty leather . . . vibrations and a roaring sound in my ears.

  Through the window—in the clouds—I see Charlie. Age is difficult to tell, about five years old. Before Norma . . .

  “Are you two ready yet?” His father comes to the doorway, heavy, especially in the sagging fleshiness of his face and neck. He has a tired look. “I said, are you ready?”

  “Just a minute,” answers Rose. “I’m getting my hat on. See if his shirt is buttoned, and tie his shoelaces.”

  “Come on, let’s get this thing over with.”

  “Where?” asks Charlie. “Where . . . Charlie . . . go?”

  His father looks at him and frowns. Matt Gordon never knows how to react to his son’s questions.

  Rose appears in the doorway of her bedroom, adjusting the half-veil of her hat. She is a birdlike woman, and her arms—up to her head, elbows out—look like wings. “We’re going to the doctor who is going to help you get smart.”

  The veil makes it look as if she were peering down at him through a wire screen. He is always frightened when they dress up to go out this way, because he knows he will have to meet other people and his mother will become upset and angry.

  He wants to run, but there is no place for him to go.

  “Why do you have to tell him that?” says Matt.

  “Because it’s the truth. Dr. Guarino can help him.”

  Matt paces the floor like a man who has given up hope but will make one last attempt to reason. “How do you know? What do you know about this man? If there was anything that could be done, the doctors would have told us long ago.”

  “Don’t say that,” she screeches. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing they can do.” She grabs Charlie and presses his head against her bosom. “He’s going to be normal, whatever we have to do, whatever it costs.”