American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

  He was upset, but he didn’t try to talk me out of it. I took my hat and coat and left.

  And now—Plato’s words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames:

  “. . . the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes. . . .”

  October 5—Sitting down to type these reports is difficult, and I can’t think with the tape recorder going. I keep putting it off for most of the day, but I know how important it is, and I’ve got to do it. I’ve told myself I won’t have dinner until I sit down and write something—anything.

  Professor Nemur sent for me again this morning. He wanted me at the lab for some tests, the kind I used to do. At first I figured it was only right, because they’re still paying me, and it’s important to have the record complete, but when I got down to Beekman and went through it all with Burt, I knew it would be too much for me.

  First it was the paper and pencil maze. I remembered how it was before when I learned to do it quickly, and when I raced against Algernon. I could tell it was taking me a lot longer to solve the maze now. Burt had his hand out to take the paper, but I tore it up instead and threw the pieces into the waste basket.

  “No more. I’m through running the maze. I’m in a blind alley now, and that’s all there is to it.”

  He was afraid I’d run out, so he calmed me down. “That’s all right, Charlie. Just take it easy.”

  “What do you mean ‘take it easy’? You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “No, but I can imagine. We all feel pretty sick about it.”

  “Keep your sympathy. Just leave me alone.”

  He was embarrassed, and then I realized it wasn’t his fault, and I was being lousy toward him. “Sorry I blew up,” I said. “How’s everything going? Got your thesis finished yet?”

  He nodded. “Having it retyped now. I’ll get my Ph.D. in February.”

  “Good boy.” I slapped him on the shoulder to show him I wasn’t angry with him. “Keep plugging. Nothing like an education. Look, forget what I said before. I’ll do anything else you want. Just no more mazes—that’s all.”

  “Well, Nemur wants a Rorschach check.”

  “To see what’s happening down deep? What does he expect to find?”

  I must have looked upset, because he started to back off. “We don’t have to. You’re here voluntarily. If you don’t want to—”

  “That’s all right. Go ahead. Deal out the cards. But don’t tell me what you find out.”

  He didn’t have to.

  I knew enough about the Rorschach to know that it wasn’t what you saw in the cards that counted, but how you reacted to them. As wholes, or parts, with movement or just motionless figures, with special attention to the color spots or ignoring them, with lots of ideas or just a few stereotyped responses.

  “It’s not valid,” I said. “I know what you’re looking for. I know the kind of responses I’m supposed to have, to create a certain picture of what my mind is like. All I’ve got to do is . . .”

  He looked up at me, waiting.

  “All I’ve got to do is . . .”

  But then it hit me like a fist against the side of my head that I didn’t remember what I had to do. It was as if I had been looking at the whole thing clearly on the blackboard of my mind, but when I turned to read it, part of it had been erased and the rest didn’t make sense.

  At first, I refused to believe it. I went through the cards in a panic, so fast that I was choking on my words. I wanted to tear the inkblots apart to make them reveal themselves. Somewhere in those inkblots there were answers I had known just a little while ago. Not really in the inkblots, but in the part of my mind that would give form and meaning to them and project my imprint on them.

  And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember what I had to say. All missing.

  “That’s a woman . . .” I said, “. . . on her knees washing the floors. I mean—no—it’s a man holding a knife.” And even as I said it, I knew what I was saying and I switched away and started off in another direction. “Two figures tugging at something . . . like a doll . . . and each one is pulling so it looks as if they’re going to tear it apart and—no!—I mean it’s two faces staring at each other through the window, and—”

  I swept the cards off the table and got up.

  “No more tests. I don’t want to take any more tests.”

  “All right, Charlie. We’ll stop for today.”

  “Not just for today. I’m not coming back here any more. Whatever there is left in me that you need, you can get from the progress reports. I’m through running the maze. I’m not a guinea pig any more. I’ve done enough. I want to be left alone now.”

  “All right, Charlie. I understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand because it isn’t happening to you, and no one can understand but me. I don’t blame you. You’ve got your job to do, and your Ph.D. to get, and—oh, yes, don’t tell me, I know you’re in this largely out of love of humanity, but still you’ve got your life to live and we don’t happen to belong on the same level. I passed your floor on the way up, and now I’m passing it on the way down, and I don’t think I’ll be taking this elevator again. So let’s just say good-bye here and now.”

  “Don’t you think you should talk to Dr.—”

  “Say good-bye to everyone for me, will you? I don’t feel like facing any of them again.”

  Before he could say any more or try to stop me, I was out of the lab, and I caught the elevator down and out of Beekman for the last time.

  October 7—Strauss tried to see me again this morning, but I wouldn’t open the door. I want to be left to myself now.

  It’s a strange sensation to pick up a book you read and enjoyed just a few months ago and discover you don’t remember it. I recall how wonderful I thought Milton was. When I picked up Paradise Lost I could only remember it was about Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge, but now I couldn’t make sense of it.

  I stood up and closed my eyes and saw Charlie—myself—six or seven years old, sitting at the dinner table with a schoolbook, learning to read, saying the words over and over with my mother sitting beside him, beside me . . .

  “Try it again.”

  “See Jack. See Jack run. See Jack see.”

  “No! Not See Jack see! It’s Run Jack run!” Pointing with her rough-scrubbed finger.

  “See Jack. See Jack run. Run Jack see.”

  “No! You’re not trying. Do it again!”

  Do it again . . . do it again . . . do it again . . .

  “Leave the boy alone. You’ve got him terrified.”

  “He’s got to learn. He’s too lazy to concentrate.”

  Run Jack run . . . run Jack run . . . run Jack run . . . run Jack run . . .

  “He’s slower than the other children. Give him time.”

  “He’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with him. Just lazy. I’ll beat it into him until he learns.”

  Run Jack run . . . run Jack run . . . run Jack run . . . run Jack run . . .

  And then looking up from the table, it seems to me I saw myself, through Charlie’s eyes, holding Paradise Lost, and I realized I was breaking the binding with the pressure of both hands as if I wanted to tear the book in half. I broke the back of it, ripped out a handful of pages, and flung them and the book across the room to the corner where the broken records were. I let it lay there and its torn white tongues were laughing because I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  I’ve got to try to hold onto some of the things I’ve learned. Please, God, don’t take it all away.

  October 10—Usually at night I go out for walks, wander around the city. I don’t know why. To see faces, I guess. Last night I couldn’t remember where I lived. A policeman took me home. I have the strange feeling that this has all happened to me before—a lo
ng time ago. I don’t want to write it down, but I keep reminding myself that I’m the only one in the world who can describe what happens when it goes this way.

  Instead of walking I was floating through space, not clear and sharp, but with a gray film over everything. I know what’s happening to me, but there is nothing I can do about it. I walk, or just stand on the sidewalk and watch people go by. Some of them look at me, and some of them don’t but nobody says anything to me—except one night a man came up and asked if I wanted a girl. He took me to a place. He wanted ten dollars first and I gave it to him, but he never came back.

  And then I remembered what a fool I was.

  October 11—When I came into my apartment this morning, I found Alice there, asleep on the couch. Everything was cleaned up, and at first I thought I was in the wrong apartment, but then I saw she hadn’t touched the smashed records or the torn books or the sheet music in the corner of the room. The floor creaked and she woke up and looked at me.

  “Hi,” she laughed. “Some night owl.”

  “Not an owl. More of a dodo. A dumb dodo. How’d you get in here?”

  “Through the fire escape. Fay’s place. I called her to find out about you and she said she was worried. She says you’ve been acting strangely—causing disturbances. So, I decided it was time for me to put in an appearance. I straightened up a bit. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “I do mind . . . very much. I don’t want anybody coming around feeling sorry for me.”

  She went to the mirror to comb her hair. “I’m not here because I feel sorry for you. It’s because I feel sorry for me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean,” she shrugged. “It just is—like a poem. I wanted to see you.”

  “What’s wrong with the zoo?”

  “Oh, come off it, Charlie. Don’t fence with me. I waited long enough for you to come and get me. I decided to come to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s still time. And I want to spend it with you.”

  “Is that a song?”

  “Charlie, don’t laugh at me.”

  “I’m not laughing. But I can’t afford to spend my time with anyone—there’s only enough left for myself.”

  “I can’t believe you want to be completely alone.”

  “I do.”

  “We had a little time together before we got out of touch. We had things to talk about, and things to do together. It didn’t last very long but it was something. Look, we’ve known this might happen. It was no secret. I didn’t go away, Charlie, I’ve just been waiting. You’re about at my level again, aren’t you?”

  I stormed around the apartment. “But that’s crazy. There’s nothing to look forward to. I don’t dare let myself think ahead—only back. In a few months, weeks, days—who the hell knows?—I’ll go back to Warren. You can’t follow me there.”

  “No,” she admitted, “and I probably won’t even visit you there. Once you’re in Warren I’ll do my best to forget you. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But until you go, there’s no reason for either of us to be alone.”

  Before I could say anything, she kissed me. I waited, as she sat beside me on the couch, resting her head against my chest, but the panic didn’t come. Alice was a woman, but perhaps now Charlie would understand that she wasn’t his mother or his sister.

  With the relief of knowing I had passed through a crisis, I sighed because there was nothing to hold me back. It was no time for fear or pretense, because it could never be this way with anyone else. All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting. I loved her with more than my body.

  I don’t pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman’s body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else—just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe—beyond the universe—because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being—of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night—and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.

  This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other’s arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other—child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.

  But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.

  And in the moment before I fell off into sleep, I remembered the way it had been between Fay and myself, and I smiled. No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery.

  I leaned over and kissed her eyes.

  Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It’s painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.

  October 14—I wake up in the morning and don’t know where I am or what I’m doing here, and then I see her beside me and I remember. She senses when something is happening to me, and she moves quietly around the apartment, making breakfast, cleaning up the place, or going out and leaving me to myself, without any questions.

  We went to a concert this evening, but I got bored and we left in the middle. Can’t seem to pay much attention any more. I went because I know I used to like Stravinsky but somehow I no longer have the patience for it.

  The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing. I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her.

  October 17—Why can’t I remember? I’ve got to try to resist this slackness. Alice tells me I lie in bed for days and don’t seem to know who or where I am. Then it all comes back and I recognize her and remember what’s happening. Fugues of amnesia. Symptoms of second childhood—what do they call it?—senility? I can watch it coming on.

  All so cruelly logical, the result of speeding up all the processes of the mind. I learned so much so fast, and now my mind is deteriorating rapidly. What if I won’t let it happen? What if I fight it? Think of those people at Warren, the empty smiles, the blank expressions, everyone laughing at them.

  Little Charlie Gordon staring at me through the window—waiting. Please, not that again.

  October 18—I’m forgetting things I learned recently. It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again.

  Reread my paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was written by someone else. Most of it I don’t even understand.

  But why am I so irritable? Especially when Alice is so good to me? She keeps the place neat and clean, always putting my things away and washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I shouldn’t have shouted at her the way I di
d this morning because it made her cry, and I didn’t want that to happen. But she shouldn’t have picked up the broken records and the music and the book and put them all neatly into a box. That made me furious. I don’t want anyone to touch any of those things. I want to see them pile up. I want them to remind me of what I’m leaving behind. I kicked the box and scattered the stuff all over the floor and told her to leave them just where they were.

  Foolish. No reason for it. I guess I got sore because I knew she thought it was silly to keep those things, and she didn’t tell me she thought it was silly. She just pretended it was perfectly normal. She’s humoring me. And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pretending he had done something wonderful when he hadn’t.

  That was what she was doing to me, and I couldn’t stand it.

  When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault. I don’t deserve someone as good as her. Why can’t I control myself just enough to keep on loving her? Just enough.

  October 19—Motor activity impaired. I keep tripping and dropping things. At first I didn’t think it was me. I thought she was changing things around. The wastebasket was in my way, and so were the chairs, and I thought she had moved them.

  Now I realize my coordination is bad. I have to move slowly to get things right. And it’s increasingly difficult to type. Why do I keep blaming Alice? And why doesn’t she argue? That irritates me even more because I see the pity in her face.

  My only pleasure now is the TV set. I spend most of the day watching the quiz programs, the old movies, the soap operas, and even the kiddie shows and cartoons. And then I can’t bring myself to turn it off. Late at night there are the old movies, the horror pictures, the late show, and the late-late show, and even the little sermon before the channel signs off for the night, and the “Star-Spangled Banner” with the flag waving in the background, and finally the channel test pattern that stares back at me through the little square window with its unclosing eye. . . .