Part Two: Baby is Three

I finally got in to see this Stern. He wasn’t an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. ‘Sit over there, Sonny.’

I stood where I was until he looked up again. Then I said, ‘ Look, if a midget walks in here, what do you say—sit over there, Shorty?’

He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, ‘but how am I supposed to know you don’t want to be called Sonny?’

That was better, but I was still mad. ‘I’m fifteen and I don’t have to like it. Don’t rub my nose in it.’

He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Gerard.’

‘First or last?’

‘Both,’ I said.

‘Is that the truth?’

I said, ‘No. And don’t ask me where I live either.’

He put down his pencil. ‘We’re not going to get very far this way.’

‘That’s up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn’t be here. Are you going to let that stop you?’

‘Well, no, but—‘

‘So what else is bothering you? How you’re going to get paid?’ I took out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. ‘That’s so you won’t have to bill me. You keep track of it. Tell me when it’s used up and I’ll give you more. So you don’t need my address. Wait,’ I said, when he reached towards the money. ‘Let it lay there. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along.’

He folded his hands. ‘I don’t do business this way, Son—I mean, Gerard.’

‘Gerry,’ I told him. ‘You do, if you do business with me.’

‘You make things difficult, don’t you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?’

‘I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier underthings with Sudso.’ I leaned forward. ‘This time it’s the truth.’

‘All right,’ he said.

I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn’t say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead.

‘Before we start— if we start,’ I said, ‘I got to know something. The things I say to you—what comes out while you’re working on me—is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?’

‘Absolutely,’ he said.

‘No matter what?’

‘No matter what.’

I watched him when he said it. I believed him.

‘Pick up your money,’ I said. ‘You’re on.’

He didn’t do it. He said, ‘As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can’t buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can’t do that, it’s useless. You can’t walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it.’

I said tiredly, ‘I didn’t get you out of the phone book and I’m not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. ‘Winnowed, did you say? Just how?’

‘Things you hear, things you read. You know. I’m not saying, so just file that with my street address.’

He looked at me for a long time. It was the first time he’d used his eyes on me for anything but a flash glance. Then he picked up the bill.

‘What do I do first?’ I demanded.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do we start?’

‘We started when you walked in here.’

So then I had to laugh. ‘All right, you got me. All I had was an opening. I didn’t know where you would go from there, so I couldn’t be there ahead of you.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Stern said. ‘Do you usually figure everything out in advance?’

‘Always.’

‘How often are you right?’

‘All the time. Except—but I don’t have to tell you about no exceptions.’

He really grinned this time. ‘I see. One of my patients has been talking.’

‘One of your ex-patients. Your patients don’t talk.’

‘I ask them not to. That applies to you, too. What did you hear?’

‘That you know from what people say and do what they’re about to say and do, and that sometimes you let’m do it and sometimes you don’t. How did you learn to do that?’

He thought a minute. ‘I guess I was born with an eye for details, and then let myself make enough mistakes with enough people until I learned not to make too many more. How did you learn to do it?’

I said, ‘You answer that and I won’t have to come back here.’

‘You really don’t know?’

‘I wish I did. Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?’

He shrugged. ‘Depends on where you want to go.’ He paused, and I got the eyes full strength again. ‘Which thumbnail description of psychiatry do you believe at the moment?’

‘I don’t get you.’

Stern slid open a desk drawer and took out a blackened pipe. He smelled it, turned it over while looking at me. ‘Psychiatry attacks the onion of the self, removing layer after layer until it gets down to the little sliver of unsullied-ego. Or: psychiatry drills like an oil well, down and side-wise and down again, through all the muck and rock until it strikes a layer that yields. Or: psychiatry grabs a handful of sexual motivations and throws them on the pinball machine of your life, so they bounce on down against episodes. Want more? ’

I had to laugh. ‘That last one was pretty good.’

‘That last one was pretty bad. They are all bad. They all try to simplify something which is complex by its very nature. The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.’

‘What are you here for?’

‘To listen.’

‘I don’t have to pay somebody no day’s wage every hour just to listen.’

‘True. But you’re convinced that I listen selectively.’

‘Am I?’ I wondered about it. ‘I guess I am. Well, don’t you?’

‘No, but you’ll never believe that.’

I laughed. He asked me what that was for. I said, ‘You’re not calling me Sonny.’

‘Not you.’ He shook his head slowly. He was watching me while he did it, so his eyes slid in their sockets as his head moved. ‘What is it you want to know about yourself, that made you worried I might tell people?’

‘I want to find out why I killed somebody,’ I said right away.

It didn’t faze him a bit?. ‘Lie down over there.’

I got up. ‘On that couch?’

He nodded.

As I stretched out self-consciously, I said, ‘I feel like I’m in some damn cartoon.’

‘What cartoon?’

‘Guy’s built like a bunch of grapes,’ I said, looking at the ceiling. It was pale grey.

‘What’s the caption?’

‘ “I got trunks full of ‘em.” ’

‘Very good,’ he said quietly. I looked at him carefully. I knew then he was the kind of guy who laughs way down deep when he laughs at all.

He said,’ I’ll use that in a book of case histories some time. But it won’t include yours. What made you throw that in?” When I didn’t answer, he got up and moved to a chair behind me where I couldn’t see him. ‘You can quit testing, Sonny. I’m good enough for your purposes.’

I clenched my jaw so hard, my back teeth hurt. Then I relaxed; I relaxed all over. It was wonderful. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t say anything, but I had that feeling again that he was laughing. Not at me, though.

‘How old are you?’ he asked me suddenly.

‘Uh-fifteen.’

‘Uh—fifteen,’ he repeated. ‘What does the „uh” mean?’

‘Nothing. I’m fifteen.’

‘When I asked your age, you hesitated because some other number popped up. You discarded that and substituted „fifteen.”‘

‘The hell I did! I am fifteen!’

‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’ His voice came patiently.’ Now what was the other number?’

I got mad again. ‘There wasn’t any other number! What do you want to go pryin’ my grunts apart for, trying to plant this and that and make it mean what you think it ought to mean?’

He was silent.

‘I’m fifteen,’ I said defiantly, and then,’ I don’t like being only fifteen. You know that. I’m not trying to insist I’m fifteen.’

He just waited, still not saying anything.

I felt defeated. ‘The number was eight.’

‘So you’re eight. And your name?’

‘Gerry.’ I got up on one elbow, twisting my neck around so I could see him. He had his pipe apart and was sighting through the stem at the desk lamp. ‘Gerry, without no „uh!”‘

‘All right,’ he said mildly, making me feel real foolish.

I leaned back and closed my eyes.

Eight, I thought. Eight.

‘It’s cold in here,’ I complained.

Eight. Eight, plate, state, hate. I ate from the plate of the state and I hate. I didn’t like any of that and I snapped my eyes open. The ceiling was still grey. It was all right. Stern was somewhere behind me with his pipe, and he was all right. I took two deep breaths, three, and then let my eyes close. Eight. Eight years old. Eight, hate. Years, fears. Old, cold. Damn it! I twisted and twitched on the couch, trying to find a way to keep the cold out. I ate from the plate of the—

I grunted and with my mind I took all the eights and all the rhymes and everything they stood for, and made it all black. But it wouldn’t stay black. I had to put something there, so I made a great big luminous figure eight and just let it hang there. But it turned on its side and inside the loops it began to shimmer. It was like one of those movie shots through binoculars. I was going to have to look through whether I liked it or not.

Suddenly I quit fighting it and let it wash over me. The binoculars came close, closer, and then I was there.

Eight. Eight years old, cold. Cold as a bitch in the ditch. The ditch was by a railroad. Last year’s weeds were scratchy straw. The ground was red, and when it wasn’t slippery, clingy mud, it was frozen hard like a flowerpot. It was hard like that now, dusted with hoar-frost, cold as the winter light that pushed up over the hills. At night the lights were warm, and they were all in other people’s houses. In the daytime the sun was in somebody else’s house too, for all the good it did me.

I was dying in that ditch. Last night it was as good a place as any to sleep and this morning it was as good a place as any to die. Just as well. Eight years old, the sick-sweet taste of pork fat and wet bread from somebody’s garbage, the thrill of terror when you’re stealing a gunnysack and you hear a footstep.

And I heard a footstep.

I’d been curled up on my side. I whipped over on my stomach because sometimes they kick your belly. I covered my head with my arms and that was as far as I could get.

After a while I rolled my eyes up and looked without moving. There was a big shoe there. There was an ankle in the shoe, and another shoe close by. I lay there waiting to get tromped. Not that I cared much any more, but it was such a damn shame. All these months on my own, and they’d never caught up with me, never even come close, and now this. It was such a shame I started to cry.

The shoe took me under the armpit, but it was not a kick. It rolled me over. I was so stiff from the cold, I went over like a plank. I just kept my arms over my face and head and lay there with my eyes closed. For some reason I stopped crying. I think people only cry when there’s a chance of getting help from somewhere.

When nothing happened, I opened my eyes and shifted my forearms a little so I could see up. There was a man standing over me and he was a mile high. He had on faded dungarees and an old Eisenhower jacket with deep sweat-stains under the arms. His face was shaggy, like the guys who can’t grow what you could call a beard, but still don’t shave.

He said, ‘Get up.’

I looked down at his shoe, but he wasn’t going to kick me. I pushed up a little and almost fell down again, except he put his big hand where my back would hit it. I lay against it for a second because I had to, and then got up to where I had one knee on the ground.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

I swear I felt my bones creak, but I made it. I brought a round white stone up with me as I stood. I hefted the stone. I had to look at it to see if I was really holding it, my fingers were that cold. I told him, ‘Stay away from me or I’ll bust you in the teeth with this rock.’

His hand came out and down so fast I never saw the way he got one finger between my palm and the rock and flicked it out of my grasp. I started to cuss at him, but he just turned his back and walked up the embankment towards the tracks. He put his chin on his shoulder and said,’ Come on, will you?’

He didn’t chase me, so I didn’t run. He didn’t talk to me so I didn’t argue. He didn’t hit me, so I didn’t get mad. I went along after him. He waited for me. He put out his hand to me and I spit at it. So he went on, up to the tracks, out of my sight. I clawed my way up. The blood was beginning to move in my hands and feet and they felt like four point-down porcupines. When I got up to the road-bed, the man was standing there waiting for me.

The track was level just there, but as I turned my head to look along it, it seemed to be a hill that was steeper and steeper and turned over above me. The next thing you know, I was lying flat on my back looking up at the cold sky.

The man came over and sat down on the rail near me. He didn’t try to touch me. I gasped for breath a couple of times and suddenly felt I’d be all right if I could sleep for a minute—just a little minute. I closed my eyes. The man stuck his finger in my ribs, hard. It hurt.

‘Don’t sleep,’ he said.

I looked at him.

He said, ‘You’re frozen stiff and weak with hunger. I want to take you home and get you warmed up and fed. But it’s a long haul up that way, and you won’t make it by yourself. If I carry you, will that be the same to you as if you walked it?’

‘What are you going to do when you get me home?’

‘I told you.’

‘All right,’ I said.

He picked me up and carried me down the track. If he’d said anything else in the world, I’d of laid right down where I was until I froze to death. Anyway, what did he want to ask me for, one way or the other? I couldn’t of done anything.

I stopped thinking about it and dozed off.

I woke up once when he turned off the right of way. He dove into the woods. There was no path, but he seemed to know where he was going. The next time I woke from a crickling noise. He was carrying me over a frozen pond and the ice was giving under his feet. He didn’t hurry. I looked down and saw the white cracks raying out under his feet, and it didn’t seem to matter a bit. I bleared off again.

He put me down at last. We were there. ‘There’ was inside a room. It was very warm. He put me on my feet and I snapped out of it in a hurry. The first thing I looked for was the door. I saw it and jumped over there and put my back against the wall beside it, in case I wanted to leave. Then I looked around.

It was a big room. One wall was rough rock and the rest was logs with stuff shoved between them. There was a big fire going in the rock wall, not in a fireplace, exactly; it was a sort of hollow place. There was an old auto battery on a shelf opposite, with two yellowing electric light bulbs dangling by wires from it. There was a table, some boxes, and a couple of three-legged stools. The air had a haze of smoke and such a wonderful, heartbreaking, candy-and-crackling smell of food that a little hose squirted inside my mouth.

The man said, ‘What have I got here, Baby?’

And the room was full of kids. Well, three of them, but somehow they seemed to be more than three kids. There was a girl about my age—eight, I mean—with blue paint on the side of her face. She had an easel and a palette with lots of paints and a fistful of brushes, but she wasn’t using the brushes. She was smearing the paint on with her hands. Then there was a little Negro girl about five with great big eyes who stood gaping at me. And in a wooden crate, set up on two sawhorses to make a kind of bassinet, was a baby. I guess about three or four months old. It did what babies do, drooling some, making small bubbles, waving its hands around very aimless, and kicking.

When the man spoke, the girl at the easel looked at me and then at the baby. The baby just kicked and drooled.

The girl said, ‘His name’s Gerry. He’s mad.’

‘What’s he mad at?’ the man asked. He was looking at the baby.

‘Everything,’ said the girl. ‘Everything and everybody.’

‘Where’d he come from?’

I said, ‘Hey, what is this?’ but nobody paid any attention. The man kept asking questions at the baby and the girl kept answering. Craziest thing I ever saw.

‘He ran away from a state school,’ the girl said.’ They fed him enough, but no one bleshed with him.’

That’s what she said—‘bleshed’.

I opened the door then and cold air hooted in. ‘You louse,’ I said to the man, ‘you’re from the school.’

‘Close the door, Janie,’ said the man. The girl at the easel didn’t move, but the door banged shut behind me. I tried to open it and it wouldn’t move. I let out a howl, yanking at it.

‘I think you ought to stand in the corner,’ said the man. ‘Stand him in the corner, Janie.’

Janie looked at me. One of the three-legged stools sailed across to me. It hung in mid-air and turned on its side. It nudged me with its flat seat. I jumped back and it came after me. I dodged to the side, and that was the corner. The stool came on. I tried to bat it down and just hurt my hand. I ducked and it went lower than I did. I put one hand on it and tried to vault over it, but it just fell and so did I. I got up again and stood in the corner, trembling. The stool turned right side up and sank to the floor in front of me.

The man said, ‘Thank you, Janie.’ He turned to me. ‘Stand there and be quiet, you. I’ll get to you later. You shouldn’ta kicked up all that fuss.’ And then, to the baby, he said, ‘He got anything we need?’

And again it was the little girl who answered. She said, ‘Sure. He’s the one.’

‘Well,’ said the man. ‘What do you know!’ He came over. ‘Gerry, you can live here. I don’t come from no school. I’ll never turn you in.’

‘Yeah, huh?’

‘He hates you,’ said Janie.

‘What am I supposed to do about that?’ he wanted to know.

Janie turned her head to look into the bassinet. ‘Feed him.’ The man nodded and began fiddling around the fire.

Meanwhile, the little Negro girl had been standing in the one spot with her big eyes right out on her cheekbones, looking at me. Janie went back to her painting and the baby just lay there same as always, so I stared right back at the little Negro girl. I snapped, ‘What the hell are you gawking at?’

She grinned at me. ‘Gerry ho-ho,’ she said, and disappeared. I mean she really disappeared, went out like a light, leaving her clothes where she had been. Her little dress billowed in the air and fell in a heap where she had been, and that was that. She was gone.

‘Gerry hee-hee,’ I heard. I looked up, and there she was, stark naked, wedged in a space where a little outcropping on the rock wall stuck out just below the ceiling. The second I saw her she disappeared again.

‘Gerry ho-ho,’ she said. Now she was on top of the row of boxes they used as storage shelves, over on the other side of the room.

‘Gerry hee-hee!’ Now she was under the table. ‘Gerry ho-ho!’ This time she was right in the corner with me, crowding me.

I yelped and tried to get out of the way and bumped the stool. I was afraid of it, so I shrank back again and the little girl was gone.

The man glanced over his shoulder from where he was working at the fire. ‘Cut it out, you kids,’ he said.

There was a silence, and then the girl came slowly out from the bottom row of shelves. She walked across to her dress and put it on.

‘How did you do that?’ I wanted to know.

‘Ho-ho,’ she said.

Janie said, ‘It’s easy. She’s really twins.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Then another girl, exactly the same, came from somewhere in the shadows and stood beside the first. They were identical. They stood side by side and stared at me. This time I let them stare.

‘That’s Bonnie and Beanie,’ said the painter. ‘This is Baby and that—‘she indicated the man—‘that’s Lone. And I’m Janie.’

I couldn’t think of what to say, so I said, ‘Yeah.’

Lone said,’ Water, Janie.’ He held up a pot. I heard water trickling, but didn’t see anything. ‘That’s enough,’ he said, and hung the pot on a crane. He picked up a cracked china plate and brought it over to me. It was full of stew with great big lumps of meat in it and thick gravy and dumplings and carrots. ‘Here, Gerry. Sit down.’

I looked at the stool. ‘On that?’

‘Sure.’

‘Not me,’ I said. I took the plate and hunkered down against the wall.

‘Hey,’ he said after a time. ‘Take it easy. We’ve all had chow. No one’s going to snatch it away from you. Slow down!’

I ate even faster than before. I was almost finished when I threw it all up. Then for some reason my head hit the edge of the stool. I dropped the plate and spoon and slumped there. I felt real bad.

Lone came over and looked at me. ‘Sorry, kid,’ he said. ‘Clean up, will you, Janie?’

Right in front of my eyes, the mess on the floor disappeared. I didn’t care about that or anything else just then. I felt the man’s hand on the side of my neck. Then he tousled my hair.

‘Beanie, get him a blanket. Let’s all go to sleep. He ought to rest a while.’

I felt the blanket go around me, and I think I was asleep before he put me down.

I don’t know how much later it was when I woke up. I didn’t know where I was and that scared me. I raised my head and saw the dull glow of the embers in the fireplace. Lone was stretched out on it in his clothes. Janie’s easel stood in the reddish blackness like some great preying insect. I saw the baby’s head pop up out of the bassinet, but I couldn’t tell whether he was looking straight at me or away. Janie was lying on the floor near the door and the twins were on the old table. Nothing moved except the baby’s head, bobbing a little.

I got to my feet and looked around the room. Just a room, only the one door. I tiptoed towards it. When I passed Janie, she opened her eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered.

‘None of your business,’ I told her. I went to the door as if I didn’t care, but I watched her. She didn’t do anything. The door was as solid tight closed as when I’d tried it before.

I went back to Janie. She just looked up at me. She wasn’t scared. I told her, ‘I got to go to the john.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why’n’t you say so?’

Suddenly I grunted and grabbed my guts. The feeling I had I can’t begin to talk about. I acted as if it was a pain, but it wasn’t. It was like nothing else that ever happened to me before. Something went splop on the snow outside.

‘Okay,’ Janie said. ‘Go on back to bed.’

‘But I got to—’

‘You got to what?’

‘Nothing.’ It was true. I didn’t have to go no place.

‘Next tune tell me right away. I don’t mind.’

I didn’t say anything. I went back to my blanket.

‘That’s all?’ said Stern. I lay on the couch and looked up at the grey ceiling. He asked, ‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen,’ I said dreamily. He waited until, for me, the grey ceiling acquired walls on a floor, a rug and lamps and a desk and a chair with Stern in it. I sat up and held my head a second, and then I looked at him. He was fooling with his pipe and looking at me. ‘What did you do to me?’

‘I told you. I don’t do anything here. You do it.’

‘You hypnotized me.’

‘I did not.’ His voice was quiet, but he really meant it.

‘What was all that, then? It was… it was like it was happening for real all over again.’

‘Feel anything?’

‘Everything.’ I shuddered. ‘ Every damn thing. What was it?’

‘Anyone doing it feels better afterwards. You can go over it all again now any time you want to, and every time you do, the hurt in it will be less. You’ll see.’

It was the first thing to amaze me in years. I chewed on it and then asked, ‘If I did it by myself, how come it never happened before?’

‘It needs someone to listen.’

‘Listen? Was I talking?’

‘A blue streak.’

‘Everything that happened?’

‘How can I know? I wasn’t there. You were.’

‘You don’t believe it happened, do you? Those disappearing kids and the footstool and all?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not in the business of believing or not believing. Was it real to you?’

‘Oh, hell, yes!’

‘Well, then, that’s all that matters. Is that where you live, with those people?’

I bit off a fingernail that had been bothering me. ‘ Not for a long time. Not since Baby was three.’ I looked at him. ‘You remind me of Lone.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. No, you don’t.’ I added suddenly. ‘I don’t know what made me say that.’ I lay down abruptly.

The ceiling was grey and the lamps were dim. I heard the pipe-stem click against his teeth. I lay there for a long time.

‘Nothing happens,’ I told him.

‘What did you expect to happen?’

‘Like before.’

‘There’s something there that wants out. Just let it come.’

It was as if there was a revolving drum in my head, and on it were photographed the places and things and people I was after. And it was as if the drum was spinning very fast, so fast I couldn’t tell one picture from another. I made it stop, and it stopped at a blank segment. I spun it again, and stopped it again.

‘Nothing happens,’ I said.

‘Baby is three,’ he repeated.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That.’ I closed my eyes.

That might be it. Might, sight, night, light. I might have the sight of a light in the night. Maybe the baby. Maybe the sight of the baby at night because of the light…

There was night after night when I lay on that blanket, and a lot of nights I didn’t. Something was going on all the time in Lone’s house. Sometimes I slept in the daytime. I guess the only time everybody slept at once was when someone was sick, like me the first time I arrived there. It was always sort of dark in the room, the same night and day, the fire going, the two old bulbs hanging yellow by their wires from the battery. When they got too dim, Janie fixed the battery and they got bright again.

Janie did everything that needed doing, whatever no one else felt like doing. Everybody else did things, too. Lone was out a lot. Sometimes he used the twins to help him, but you never missed them, because they’d be here and gone and back again bing! like that. And Baby, he just stayed in his bassinet.

I did things myself. I cut wood for the fire and I put up more shelves, and then I’d go swimming with Janie and the twins sometimes. And I talked to Lone. I didn’t do a thing that the others couldn’t do, but they all did things I couldn’t do. I was mad, mad all the time about that. But I wouldn’t of known what to do with myself if I wasn’t mad all the time about something or other. It didn’t keep us from blesh-ing. Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing’, but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.

Baby talked all the tune. He was like a broadcasting station than runs twenty-four hours a day, and you can get what it’s sending any time you tune in, but it’ll keep sending whether you tune in or not. When I say he talked, I don’t mean exactly that. He semaphored mostly. You’d think those wandering vague movements of his hands and arms and legs and head were meaningless, but they weren’t. It was semaphore, only instead of a symbol for a sound, or such like, the movements were whole thoughts.

I mean spread the left hand and shake the right high up, and thump with the left heel, and it means, ‘Anyone who thinks a starling is a pest just don’t know anything about how a starling thinks’ or something like that. Janie said she made Baby invent the semaphore business. She said she used to be able to hear the twins thinking—that’s what she said; hear them thinking—and they could hear Baby. So she would ask the twins whatever she wanted to know, and they’d ask Baby, and then tell her what he said. But then as they grew up they began to lose the knack of it. Every young kid does. So Baby learned to understand when someone talked, and he’d answer with this semaphore stuff.

Lone couldn’t read the stuff and neither could I. The twins didn’t give a damn. Janie used to watch him all the time. He always knew what you meant if you wanted to ask him something, and he’d tell Janie and she’d say what it was. Part of it, anyway. Nobody could get it all, not even Janie.

All I know is Janie would sit there and paint her pictures and watch Baby, and sometimes she’d bu’st out laughing.

Baby never grew any. Janie did, and the twins, and so did I, but not Baby. He just lay there. Janie kept his stomach full and cleaned him up every two or three days. He didn’t cry and he didn’t make any trouble. No one ever went near him.

Janie showed every picture she painted to Baby, before she cleaned the boards and painted new ones. She had to clean them because she only had three of them. It was a good thing, too, because I’d hate to think what that place would of been like if she’d kept them all; she did four or five a day. Lone and the twins were kept hopping getting turpentine for her. She could shift the paints back into the little pots on her easel without any trouble, just by looking at the picture one colour at a time, but turps was something else again. She told me that Baby remembered all her pictures and that’s why she didn’t have to keep them. They were all pictures of machines and gear-trains and mechanical linkages and what looked like electric circuits and things like that. I never thought too much about them.

I went out with Lone to get some turpentine and a couple of picnic hams one time. We went through the woods to the railroad track and down a couple of miles to where we could see the glow of a town. Then the woods again, and some alleys, and a back street.

Lone was like always, walking along, thinking, thinking.

We came to a hardware store and he went up and looked at the lock and came back to where I was waiting, shaking his head. Then we found a general store. Lone grunted and we went and stood in the shadows by the door. I looked in.

All of a sudden Beanie was in there, naked like she always was when she travelled like that. She came and opened the door from the inside. We went in and Lone closed it and locked it.

‘Get along home, Beanie,’ he said,’ before you catch your death.’

She grinned at me and said, ‘Ho-ho,’ and disappeared.

We found a pair of fine hams and a two-gallon can of turpentine. I took a bright yellow ballpoint pen and Lone cuffed me and made me put it back.

‘We only take what we need,’ he told me.

After we left, Beanie came back and locked the door and went home again. I only went with Lone a few times, when he had more to get than he could carry easily.

I was there about three years. That’s all I can remember about it. Lone was there or he was out, and you could hardly tell the difference. The twins were with each other most of the time. I got to like Janie a lot, but we never talked much. Baby talked all the time, only I don’t know what about.

We were all busy and we bleshed.

I sat up on the couch suddenly.

Stern said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter. This isn’t getting me any place.’

‘You said that when you’d barely started. Do you think you’ve accomplished anything since then?’

‘Oh, yeah, but—‘

‘Then how can you be sure you’re right this time?’ When I didn’t say anything, he asked me, ‘Didn’t you like this last stretch?’

I said angrily, ‘I didn’t like or not like. It didn’t mean nothing. It was just—just talk.’

‘So what was the difference between this last session and what happened before?’

‘My gosh, plenty! The first one, I felt everything. It was all really happening to me. But this time—nothing.’

‘Why do you suppose that was?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

‘Suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that there was some episode so unpleasant to you that you wouldn’t dare relive it.’

‘Unpleasant? You think freezing to death isn’t unpleasant?’

‘There are all kinds of unpleasantness. Sometimes the very thing you’re looking for—the thing that’ll clear up your trouble—is so revolting to you that you won’t go near it. Or you try to hide it. Wait,’ he said suddenly, ‘maybe „revolting” and „unpleasant” are inaccurate words to use. It might be something very desirable to you. It’s just that you don’t want to get straightened out.’

‘I want to get straightened out.’

He waited as if he had to clear something up in his mind, and then said, ‘There’s something in that „Baby is three” phrase that bounces you away. Why is that?’

‘Damn if I know.’

‘Who said it?’

‘I dunno… uh…’

He grinned. ‘Uh?’

I grinned back at him. ‘I said it.’

‘Okay. When?’

I quit grinning. He leaned forward, then got up.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

He said, ‘I didn’t think anyone could be that mad.’ I didn’t say anything. He went over to his desk. ‘You don’t want to go on any more, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Suppose I told you you want to quit because you’re right on the very edge of finding out what you want to know?’

‘Why don’t you tell me and see what I do?’

He just shook his head. ‘I’m not telling you anything. Go on, leave if you want to. I’ll give you back your change.’

‘How many people quit just when they’re on top of the answer?’

‘Quite a few.’

‘Well, I ain’t going to.’ I lay down.

He didn’t laugh and he didn’t say, ‘Good,’ and he didn’t make any fuss about it. He just picked up his phone and said, ‘Cancel everything for this afternoon,’ and went back to his chair, up there out of my sight.

It was very quiet in there. He had the place soundproofed.

I said,’ Why do you suppose Lone let me live there so long when I couldn’t do any of the things that the other kids could?’

‘Maybe you could.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said positively. ‘I used to try. I was strong for a kid my age and I knew how to keep my mouth shut, but aside from those two things I don’t think I was any different from any kid. I don’t think I’m any different right now, except what difference there might be from living with Lone and his bunch.’

‘Has this anything to do with „Baby is three”?’

I looked up at the grey ceiling. ‘Baby is three. Baby is three. I went up to a big house with a winding drive that ran under a sort of theatre-marquee thing. Baby is three. Baby…’

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-three,’ I said, and the next thing you know I was up off that couch like it was hot and heading for the door.

Stern grabbed me. ‘Don’t be foolish. Want me to waste a whole afternoon?’

‘What’s that to me? I’m paying for it.’

‘All right, it’s up to you.’

I went back. ‘I don’t like any part of this,’ I said.

‘Good. We’re getting warm then.’

‘What made me say „Thirty-three”? I ain’t thirty-three. I’m fifteen. And another thing…’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s about that „Baby is three.” It’s me saying it, all right. But when I think about it—it’s not my voice.’

‘Like thirty-three’s not your age?’

‘Yeah,’ I whispered.

‘Gerry,’ he said warmly, ‘there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

I realized I was breathing too hard. I pulled myself together. I said, ‘I don’t like remembering saying things in somebody else’s voice.’

‘Look,’ he told me. ‘This head-shrinking business, as you called it a while back, isn’t what most people think. When I go with you into the world of your mind—or when you go yourself, for that matter—what we find isn’t so very different from the so-called real world. It seems so at first, because the patient comes out with all sorts of fantasies and irrationalities and weird experiences. But everyone lives in that kind of world. When one of the ancients coined the phrase „truth is stranger than fiction”, he was talking about that.

‘Everywhere we go, everything we do, we’re surrounded by symbols, by things so familiar we don’t ever look at them or don’t see them if we do look. If anyone ever could report to you exactly what he saw and thought while walking ten feet down the street, you’d get the most twisted, clouded, partial picture you ever ran across. And nobody ever looks at what’s around him with any kind of attention until he gets into a place like this. The fact that he’s looking at past events doesn’t matter; what counts is that he’s seeing clearer than he ever could before, just because, for once, he’s trying.

‘Now—about this „thirty-three” business. I don’t think a man could get a nastier shock than to find he has someone else’s memories. The ego is too important to let slide that way. But consider: all your thinking is done in code and you have the key to only about a tenth of it. So you run into a stretch of code which is abhorrent to you. Can’t you see that the only way you’ll find the key to it is to stop avoiding it?’

‘You mean I’d started to remember with… with somebody else’s mind?’

‘It looked like that to you for a while, which means something. Let’s try to find out what.’

‘All right.’ I felt sick. I felt tired. And I suddenly realized that being sick and being tired was a way of trying to get out of it.

‘Baby is three,’he said.

Baby is maybe. Me, three, thirty-three, me, you Kew you.

‘Kew!’ I yelled. Stern didn’t say anything. ‘Look, I don’t know why, but I think I know how to get to this, and this isn’t the way. Do you mind if I try something else?’

‘You’re the doctor,’ he said.

I had to laugh. Then I closed my eyes.

There, through the edges of the hedges, the ledges and wedges of windows were shouldering up to the sky. The lawns were sprayed-on green, neat, and clean, and all the flowers looked as if they were afraid to let their petals break and be untidy.

I walked up the drive in my shoes. I’d had to wear shoes and my feet couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to go to the house, but I had to.

I went up the steps between the big white columns and looked at the door. I wished I could see through it, but it was too white and thick. There was a window the shape of a fan over it, too high up though, and a window on each side of it, but they were all crudded up with coloured glass. I hit on the door with my hand and left dirt on it.

Nothing happened so I hit it again. It got snatched open and a tall, thin coloured woman stood there. ‘What you want?’

I said I had to see Miss Kew.

‘Well, Miss Kew don’t want to see the likes of you,’ she said. She talked too loud. ‘You got a dirty face.’

I started to get mad then. I was already pretty sore about having to come here, walking around near people in the daytime and all. I said, ‘My face ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Where’s Miss Kew? Go on, find her for me.’

She gasped. ‘You can’t speak to me like that!’

I said, ‘I didn’t want to speak to you like any way. Let me in.’ I started wishing for Janie. Janie could of moved her. But I had to handle it by myself. I wasn’t doing so hot, either. She slammed the door before I could so much as curse at her.

So I started kicking on the door. For that, shoes are great. After a while, she snatched the door open again so sudden I almost went on my can. She had a broom with her. She screamed at me, ‘You get away from here, you trash, or I’ll call the police!’ She pushed me and I fell.

I got up off the porch floor and went for her. She stepped back and whupped me one with the broom as I went past, but anyhow I was inside now. The woman was making little shrieking noises and coming for me. I took the broom away from her and then somebody said,’ Miriam!’ in a voice like a grown goose.

I froze and the woman went into hysterics. ‘Oh, Miss Alicia, look out! He’ll kill us all. Get the police. Get the—’

‘Miriam!’ came the honk, and Miriam dried up.

There at the top of the stairs was this prune-faced woman with a dress on that had lace on it. She looked a lot older than she was, maybe because she held her mouth so tight. I guess she was about thirty-three— thirty-three. She had mean eyes and a small nose.

I asked, ‘Are you Miss Kew?’

‘I am. What is the meaning of this invasion?’

‘I got to talk to you, Miss Kew.’

‘Don’t say „got to”. Stand up straight and speak out.’

The maid said, ‘I’ll get the police.’

Miss Kew turned on her. ‘There’s time enough for that, Miriam. Now, you dirty little boy, what do you want?’

‘I got to speak to you by yourself,’ I told her.

‘Don’t you let him do it, Miss Alicia,’ cried the maid.

‘Be quiet, Miriam. Little boy, I told you not to say „got to”. You may say whatever you have to say in front of Miriam.’

‘Like hell.’ They both gasped. I said, ‘Lone told me not to.’

‘Miss Alicia, are you goin’ to let him—‘

‘Be quiet, Miriam! Young man, you will keep a civil—‘ Then her eyes popped up real round. ‘ Who did you say…’

‘Lone said so.’

‘Lone.’ She stood there on the stairs looking at her hands. Then she said, ‘Miriam, that will be all.’ And you wouldn’t know it was the same woman, the way she said it.

The maid opened her mouth, but Miss Kew stuck out a finger that might as well of had a rifle-sight on the end of it. The maid beat it.

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘here’s your broom.’ I was just going to throw it, but Miss Kew got to me and took it out of my hand.

‘In there,’ she said.

She made me go ahead of her into a room as big as our swimming hole. It had books all over and leather on top of the tables, with gold flowers drawn into the corners.

She pointed to a chair. ‘Sit there. No, wait a moment.’ She went to the fireplace and got a newspaper out of a box and brought it over and unfolded it on the seat of the chair. ‘Now sit down.’

I sat on the paper and she dragged up another chair, but didn’t put no paper on it.

‘What is it? Where is Lone?’

‘He died,’ I said.

She pulled in her breath and went white. She stared at me until her eyes started to water.

‘You sick?’ I asked her. ‘Go ahead, throw up. It’ll make you feel better.’

‘Dead? Lone is dead?’

‘Yeah. There was a flash flood last week and when he went out the next night in that big wind, he walked under a old oak tree that got gullied under by the flood. The tree come down on him.’

‘ Came down on him,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, no… it’s not true.’

‘It’s true, all right. We planted him this morning. We couldn’t keep him around no more. He was beginning to st—‘

‘Stop!’ She covered her face with her hands.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ll be all right in a moment,’ she said in a low voice. She went and stood in front of the fireplace with her back to me. I took off one of my shoes while I was waiting for her to come back. But instead she talked from where she was. ‘Are you Lone’s little boy?’

‘Yeah. He told me to come to you.’

‘Oh, my dear child!’ She came running back and I thought for a second she was going to pick me up or something, but she stopped short and wrinkled up her nose a little bit. ‘Wh-what’s your name?’

‘Gerry,’ I told her.

‘Well, Gerry, how would you like to live with me in this nice big house and—and have new clean clothes—and everything?’

‘Well, that’s the whole idea. Lone told me to come to you. He said you got more dough than you know what to do with, and he said you owed him a favour.’

‘A favour?’ That seemed to bother her.

‘Well,’ I tried to tell her, ‘he said he done something for you once and you said some day you’d pay him back for it if you ever could. This is it.’

‘What did he tell you about that?’ She’d got her honk back by then.

‘Not a damn thing.’

‘Please don’t use that word,’ she said, with her eyes closed. Then she opened them and nodded her head. ‘I promised and I’ll do it. You can live here from now on. If-if you want to.’

‘That’s got nothin’ to do with it. Lone told me to.’

‘You’ll be happy here,’ she said. She gave me an up-and-down. ‘I’ll see to that.’

‘Okay. Shall I go get the other kids?’

‘ Other kids—children?’

‘Yeah. This ain’t for just me. For all of us—the whole gang.’

‘Don’t say „ain’t”.’ She leaned back in her chair, took out a silly little handkerchief and dabbed her lips with it, looking at me the whole time. ‘Now tell me about these—these other children.’

‘Well, there’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.’

I screamed. Stern was kneeling beside the couch in a flash, holding his palms against my cheeks to hold my head still; I’d been whipping it back and forth.

‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘You found it. You haven’t found out what it is, but now you know where it is.’

‘But for sure,” I said hoarsely. ‘Got water?’

He poured me some water out of a thermos flask. It was so cold it hurt. I lay back and rested, like I’d climbed a cliff. I said, ‘I can’t take anything like that again.’

‘You want to call it quits for today?’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll go on as long as you want me to.’

I thought about it.’ I’d like to go on, but I don’t want no thumping around. Not for a while yet.”

‘If you want another of those inaccurate analogies,’ Stern said, ‘psychiatry is like a road map. There are always a lot of different ways to get from one place to another place.’

I’ll go around by the long way,’ I told him. ‘The eight-lane highway. Not that track over the hill. My clutch is slipping. Where do I turn off?’

He chuckled. I liked the sound of it. ‘Just past that gravel driveway.’

‘I been there. There’s a bridge washed out.’

‘You’ve been on this whole road before,’ he told me. ‘Start at the other side of the bridge.’

‘I never thought of that. I figured I had to do the whole thing, every inch.’

‘Maybe you won’t have to, maybe you will, but the bridge will be easy to cross when you’ve covered everything else. Maybe there’s nothing of value on the bridge and maybe there is, but you can’t get near it till you’ve looked everywhere else.’

‘Let’s go.’ I was real eager, somehow.

‘Mind a suggestion?’

‘No.’

‘Just talk,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to get too far into what you’re saying. That first stretch, when you were eight—you really lived it. The second one, all about the kids, you just talked about. Then, the visit when you were eleven, you felt that. Now just talk again.’

‘All right.’

He waited, then said quietly, ‘In the library. You told her about the other kids.’

I told her about… and then she said… and something happened, and I screamed. She comforted me and I cussed at her.

But we’re not thinking about that now. We’re going on.

In the library. The leather, the table, and whether I’m able to do with Miss Kew what Lone said.

What Lone said was, ‘There’s a woman lives up on the top of the hill in the Heights section, name of Kew. She’ll have to take care of you. You got to get her to do that. Do everything she tells you, only stay together. Don’t you ever let any one of you get away from the others, hear? Aside from that, just you keep Miss Kew happy and she’ll keep you happy. Now you do what I say.’ That’s what Lone said. Between every word there was a link like steel cable, and the whole thing made something that couldn’t be broken. Not by me it couldn’t.

Miss Kew said, ‘Where are your sisters and the baby?’

I’ll bring ‘em.’

‘Is it near here?’

‘Near enough.’ She didn’t say anything to that, so I got up. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I—really, I haven’t had time to think. I mean—I’ve got to get things ready, you know.’

I said, ‘You don’t need to think and you are ready. So long.’

From the door I heard her saying, louder and louder as I walked away, ‘Young man, if you’re to live in this house, you’ll learn to be a good deal better-mannered—‘and a lot more of the same.

I yelled back at her, ‘Okay, okay! ’ and went out.

The sun was warm and the sky was good, and pretty soon I got back to Lone’s house. The fire was out and Baby stunk. Janie had knocked over her easel and was sitting on the floor by the door with her head in her hands. Bonnie and Beanie were on a stool with their arms around each other, pulled up together as close as they could get, as if it was cold in there, although it wasn’t.

I hit Janie in the arm to snap her out of it. She raised her head. She had grey eyes—or maybe it was more a kind of green—but now they had a funny look about them, like water in a glass that had some milk left in the bottom of it.

I said, ‘What’s the matter around here?’

‘What’s the matter with what?’ she wanted to know.

‘All of yez,’ I said.

She said, ‘We don’t give a damn, that’s all.’

‘Well, all right,’ I said, ‘but we got to do what Lone said. Gome on.’

‘No.’ I looked at the twins. They turned their backs on me. Janie said, ‘They’re hungry.’

‘Well, why not give ‘em something?’

She just shrugged. I sat down. What did Lone have to go get himself squashed for?

‘We can’t blesh no more,’ said Janie. It seemed to explain everything.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to be Lone now.’

Janie thought about that and Baby kicked his feet. Janie looked at him. ‘You can’t,’ she said.

‘I know where to get the heavy food and the turpentine,’ I said. ‘I can find that springy moss to stuff in the logs, and cut wood, and all.’

But I couldn’t call Bonnie and Beanie from miles away to unlock doors. I couldn’t just say a word to Janie and make her get water and blow up the fire and fix the battery. I couldn’t make us blesh.

We all stayed like that for a long time. Then I heard the bassinet creak. I looked up. Janie was staring into it.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Baby.’

‘Who’s running things now?’ I said, mad. ‘Me or Baby?’

‘Baby,’ Janie said.

I got up and went over to bust her one in the mouth, and then I stopped. If Baby could make them do what Lone wanted, then it would get done. If I started pushing them all around, it wouldn’t. So I didn’t say anything. Janie got up and walked out the door. The twins watched her go. Then Bonnie disappeared. Beanie picked up Bonnie’s clothes and walked out. I got Baby out of the bassinet and draped him over my shoulders.

It was better when we were all outside. It was getting late in the day and the air was warm. The twins flitted in and out of the trees like a couple of flying squirrels, and Janie and I walked along like we were going swimming or something. Baby started to kick, and Janie looked at him a while and got him fed, and he was quiet again.

When we came close to town, I wanted to get everybody close together, but I was afraid to say anything. Baby must of said it instead. The twins came back to us and Janie gave them their clothes and they walked ahead of us, good as you please. I don’t know how Baby did it. They sure hated to travel that way.

We didn’t have no trouble except one guy we met on the street near Miss Kew’s place. He stopped in his tracks and gaped at us, and Janie looked at him and made his hat go so far down over his eyes that he like to pull his neck apart getting it back up again.

What do you know, when we got to the house somebody had washed off all the dirt I’d put on the door. I had one hand on Baby’s arm and one on his ankle and him draped over my neck, so I kicked the door and left some more dirt.

‘There’s a woman here name of Miriam,’ I told Janie. ‘She says anything, tell her to go to hell.’

The door opened and there was Miriam. She took one look and jumped back six feet. We all trailed inside. Miriam got her wind and screamed, ‘Miss Kew! Miss Kew!’

‘Go to hell,’ said Janie, and looked at me. I didn’t know what to do. It was the first time Janie ever did anything I told her to.

Miss Kew came down the stairs. She was wearing a different dress, but it was just as stupid and had just as much lace. She opened her mouth and nothing came out, so she just left it open until something happened. Finally she said, ‘Dear gentle Lord preserve us!’

The twins lined up and gawked at her. Miriam sidled over to the wall and sort of slid along it, keeping away from us, until she could get to the door and close it. She said, ‘Miss Kew, if those are the children you said were going to live here, I quit.’

Janie said, ‘Go to hell.’

Just then Bonnie squatted down on the rug. Miriam squawked and jumped at her. She grabbed hold of Bonnie’s arm and went to snatch her up. Bonnie disappeared, leaving Miriam with one small dress and the damnedest expression on her face. Beanie grinned enough to split her head in two and started to wave like mad. I looked where she was waving, and there was Bonnie, naked as a jaybird, up on the banister at the top of the stairs.

Miss Kew turned around and saw her and sat down plump on the steps. Miriam went down, too, like she’d been slugged. Beanie picked up Bonnie’s dress and walked up the steps past Miss Kew and handed it over. Bonnie put it on. Miss Kew sort of lolled around and looked up. Bonnie and Beanie came back down the stairs hand in hand to where I was. Then they lined up and gaped at Miss Kew.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ Janie asked me.

‘She gets sick every once in a while.’

‘Let’s go back home.’

‘No,’ I told her.

Miss Kew grabbed the banister and pulled herself up. She stood there hanging on to it for a while with her eyes closed. All of a sudden she stiffened herself. She looked about four inches taller. She came marching over to us.

‘Gerard,’ she honked.

I think she was going to say something different. But she sort of checked herself and pointed. ‘What in heaven’s name is that? ’ And she aimed her finger at me.

I didn’t get it right away, so I turned around to look behind me. ‘What?’

‘That! That!’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘That’s Baby.’

I slung him down off my back and held him up for her to look at. She made a sort of moaning noise and jumped over and took him away from me. She held him out in front of her and moaned again and called him a poor little thing, and ran and put him down on a long bench, with cushions under the coloured-glass window. She bent over him and put her knuckle in her mouth and bit on it and moaned some more. Then she turned to me.

‘How long has he been like this?’

I looked at Janie and she looked at me. I said, ‘He’s always been like he is.’

She made a sort of cough and ran to where Miriam was lying flaked out on the floor. She slapped Miriam’s face a couple of times back and forth. Miriam sat up and looked us over. She closed her eyes and shivered and sort of climbed up Miss Kew hand over hand until she was on her feet.

‘Pull yourself together,’ said Miss Kew between her teeth. ‘Get a basin with some hot water and soap. Washcloth. Towels. Hurry!’ She gave Miriam a big push. Miriam staggered and grabbed at the wall, and then ran out.

Miss Kew went back to Baby and hung over him, titch-titching with her lips all tight.

‘Don’t mess with him,’ I said. ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with him. We’re hungry.’

She gave me a look like I’d punched her. ‘Don’t speak to me!’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘we don’t like this any more’n you do. If Lone hadn’t told us to, we wouldn’t never have come. We were doing all right where we were.’

‘Don’t say „wouldn’t never”,’ said Miss Kew. She looked at all of us, one by one. Then she took that silly little hunk of handkerchief and pushed it against her mouth.

‘See?’ I said to Janie. ‘All the time gettin’ sick.’

‘Ho-ho,’ said Bonnie.

Miss Kew gave her a long look. ‘Gerard,’ she said in a choked sort of voice, ‘I understood you to say that these children were your sisters.’

‘Well?’

She looked at me as if I was real stupid. ‘We don’t have little coloured girls for sisters, Gerard.’

Janie said, ‘ We do.’

Miss Kew walked up and back, real fast. ‘We have a great deal to do,’ she said, talking to herself.

Miriam came in with a big oval pan and towels and stuff on her arm. She put it down on the bench thing and Miss Kew stuck the back of her hand in the water, then picked up Baby and dunked him right in it. Baby started to kick.

I stepped forward and said, ‘Wait a minute. Hold on now. What do you think you’re doing?’

Janie said, ‘Shut up, Gerry. He says it’s all right.’

‘All right? She’ll drown him.’

‘ No, she won’t. Just shut up.’

Working up a froth with the soap, Miss Kew smeared it on Baby and turned him over a couple of times and scrubbed at his head and like to smothered him in a big white towel. Miriam stood gawking while Miss Kew lashed up a dishcloth around him so it come out pants. When she was done, you wouldn’t of known it was the same baby. And by the time Miss Kew finished with the job, she seemed to have a better hold on herself. She was breathing hard and her mouth was even tighter. She held out the baby to Miriam.

‘Take this poor thing,’ she said, ‘and put him—‘

But Miriam backed away. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Kew, but I am leaving here and I don’t care.’

Miss Kew got her honk out. ‘You can’t leave me in a predicament like this! These children need help. Can’t you see that for yourself?’

Miriam looked me and Janie over. She was trembling. ‘You ain’t safe, Miss Alicia. They ain’t just dirty. They’re crazy!’

‘They’re victims of neglect, and probably no worse than you or I would be if we’d been neglected. And don’t say „ain’t”. Gerard!’

‘What?’

‘Don’t say—oh, dear, we have so much to do. Gerard, if you and your—these other children are going to live here, you shall have to make a great many changes. You cannot live under this roof and behave as you have so far. Do you understand that?’

‘Oh, sure. Lone said we was to do whatever you say and keep you happy.’

‘Will you do whatever I say?’

‘That’s what I just said, isn’t it?’

‘Gerard, you shall have to learn not to speak to me in that tone. Now, young man, if I told you to do what Miriam says, too, would you do it?’

I said to Janie, ‘What about that?’

‘I’ll ask Baby.’ Janie looked at Baby and Baby wobbled his hands and drooled some. She said, ‘It’s okay.’

Miss Kew said, ‘Gerard, I asked you a question.’

‘Keep your pants on,’ I said. ‘ I got to find out, don’t I? Yes, if that’s what you want, we’ll listen to Miriam too.’

Miss Kew turned to Miriam. ‘You hear that, Miriam?’

Miriam looked at Miss Kew and at us and shook her head. Then she held out her hands a bit to Bonnie and Beanie.

They went right to her. Each one took hold of a hand. They looked up at her and grinned. They were probably planning some sort of hellishness, but I guess they looked sort of cute. Miriam’s mouth twitched and I thought for a second she was going to look human. She said, ‘All right, Miss Alicia.’

Miss Kew walked over and handed her the baby and she started upstairs with him. Miss Kew herded us along after Miriam. We all went upstairs.

They went to work on us then and for three years they never stopped.

‘That was hell,’ I said to Stern.

‘They had their work cut out.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose they did. So did we. Look, we were going to do exactly what Lone said. Nothing on earth could of stopped us from doing it. We were tied and bound to doing every last little thing Miss Kew said to do. But she and Miriam never seemed to understand that. I guess they felt they had to push every inch of the way. All they had to do was make us understand what they wanted, and we’d of done it. That’s okay when it’s something like telling me not to climb into bed with Janie. Miss Kew raised holy hell over that. You’d of thought I’d robbed the Crown Jewels, the way she acted.

‘But when it’s something like, „You must behave like little ladies and gentlemen,” it just doesn’t mean a thing. And two out of three orders she gave us were like that. „Ah-ah!” she’d say. „Language, language!” For the longest time I didn’t dig that at all. I finally asked her what the hell she meant, and then she finally came out with it. But you see what I mean.’

‘I certainly do,’ Stern said. ‘Did it get easier as time went on?’

‘We only had real trouble twice, once about the twins and once about Baby. That one was real bad.’

‘What happened?’

‘About the twins? Well, when we’d been there about a week or so we began to notice something that sort of stunk. Janie and me, I mean. We began to notice that we almost never got to see Bonnie and Beanie. It was like that house was two houses, one part for Miss Kew and Janie and me, and the other part for Miriam and the twins. I guess we’d have noticed it sooner if things hadn’t been such a hassel at first, getting us into new clothes and making us sleep all the time at night, and all that. But here was the thing: We’d all get turned out in the side yard to play, and then along comes lunch, and the twins got herded off to eat with Miriam while we ate with Miss Kew. So Janie said, „Why don’t the twins eat with us?”

‘ “Miriam’s taking care of them, dear,” Miss Kew says.

‘Janie looked at her with those eyes. „I know that. Let ‘em eat here and I’ll take care of ‘em.”

‘Miss Kew’s mouth got all tight again and she said, „They’re little coloured girls, Jane. Now eat your lunch.”

‘But that didn’t explain anything to Janie or me, either. I said, “I want ‘em to eat with us. Lone said we should stay together.”

‘ “But you are together,” she says. “We all live in the same house. We all eat the same food. Now let us not discuss the matter.”

‘I looked at Janie and she looked at me and she said, „So why can’t we all do this livin’ and eatin’ right here?”

‘Miss Kew put down her fork and looked hard. „I have explained it to you and I have said that there will be no further discussion.”

‘Well, I thought that was real nowhere. So I just rocked back my head and bellowed, „Bonnie! Beanie!” And bing, there they were.

‘So all hell broke loose. Miss Kew ordered them out and they wouldn’t go, and Miriam come steaming in with their clothes, and she couldn’t catch them, and Miss Kew got to honking at them and finally at me. She said this was too much. Well, maybe she’d had a hard week, but so had we. So Miss Kew ordered us to leave.

‘I went and got Baby and started out, and along came Janie and the twins. Miss Kew waited till we were all out the door and next thing you know she ran out after us. She passed us and got in front of me and made me stop. So we all stopped.

‘ “Is this how you follow Lone’s wishes?” she asked.

‘I told her yes. She said she understood Lone wanted us to stay with her. And I said, “Yeah, but he wanted us to stay together more.”

‘She said come back in, we’d have a talk. Janie asked Baby and Baby said okay, so we went back. We had a compromise. We didn’t eat in the dining room no more. There was a side porch, a sort of verandah thing with glass windows, with a door to the dining room and a door to the kitchen, and we all ate out there after that. Miss Kew ate by herself.

‘But something funny happened because of that whole cockeyed hassel.’

‘What was that?’ Stern asked me.

I laughed. ‘Miriam. She looked and sounded like always but she started slipping us cookies between meals. You know, it took me years to figure out what all that was about. I mean it. From what I’ve learned about people, there seems to be two armies fightin’ about race. One’s fightin’ to keep ‘em apart, and one’s fightin’ to get ‘em together. But I don’t see why both sides are so worried about it! Why don’t they just forget it?’

‘They can’t. You see, Gerry, it’s necessary for people to believe they are superior in some fashion. You and Lone and the kids—you were a pretty tight unit. Didn’t you feel you were a little better than all of the rest of the world?’

‘Better? How could we be better?’

‘Different, then.’

‘Well, I suppose so, but we didn’t think about it. Different, yes. Better, no.’

‘You’re a unique case,’ Stern said. ‘Now go on and tell me about the other trouble you had. About Baby.’

‘Baby. Yeah. Well, that was a couple of months after we moved to Miss Kew’s. Things were already getting real smooth, even then. We’d learned all the „yes, ma’am, no, ma’am” routines by then and she’d got us catching up with school—regular periods morning and afternoon, five days a week. Janie had long ago quit taking care of Baby, and the twins walked to wherever they went. That was funny. They could pop from one place to another right in front of Miss Kew’s eyes and she wouldn’t believe what she saw. She was too upset about them suddenly showing up bare. They quit doing it and she was happy about it. She was happy about a lot of things. It had been years since she’d seen anybody—years. She’d even had the meters put outside the house so no one would ever have to come in. But with us there, she began to liven up. She quit wearing those old-lady dresses and began to look halfway human. She ate with us sometimes, even.

‘But one fine day I woke up feeling real weird. It was like somebody had stolen something from me when I was asleep, only I didn’t know what. I crawled out of my window and along the ledge into Janie’s room, which I wasn’t supposed to do. She was in bed. I went and woke her up. I can still see her eyes, the way they opened a little slit, still asleep, and then popped up wide. I didn’t have to tell her something was wrong. She knew, and she knew what it was.

‘ “Baby’s gone!” she said.

‘We didn’t care then who woke up. We pounded out of her room and down the hall and into the little room at the end where Baby slept. You wouldn’t believe it. The fancy crib he had and the white chest of drawers and all that mess of rattles and so on, they were gone, and there was just a writing desk there. I mean it was as if Baby had never been there at all.

‘We didn’t say anything. We just spun around and busted into Miss Kew’s bedroom. I’d never been in there but once and Janie only a few times. But forbidden or not, this was different. Miss Kew was in bed, with her hair braided. She was wide awake before we could get across the room. She pushed herself back and up until she was sitting against the headboard. She gave the two of us the cold eye.

‘ “What is the meaning of this?” she wanted to know.

‘ “Where’s Baby?” I yelled at her.

‘ “Gerard,” she says, „there is no need to shout.”

‘Janie was a real quiet kid, but she said, „You better tell us where he is, Miss Kew,” and it would of scared you to look at her when she said it.

‘So all of a sudden Miss Kew took off the stone face and held out her hands to us. “Children,” she said, „I’m sorry. I really am sorry. But I’ve just done what is best. I’ve sent Baby away. He’s gone to live with some children like him. We could never make him really happy here. You know that.”

‘Janie said, „He never told us he wasn’t happy.”

‘Miss Kew brought out a hollow kind of laugh. „As if he could talk, the poor little thing!”

‘ “You better get him back here,” I said. „You don’t know what you’re fooling with. I told you we wasn’t ever to break up.”

‘She was getting mad, but she held on to herself. „I’ll try to explain it to you, dear,” she said. „You and Jane here and even the twins are all normal, healthy children and you’ll grow up to be fine men and women. But poor Baby’s—different. He’s not going to grow very much more, and he’ll never walk and play like other children.”

‘ “That doesn’t matter,” Janie said. „You had no call to send him away.”

‘And I said, „Yeah. You better bring him back, but quick.”

‘Then she started to jump salty. „Among the many things I have taught you is, I am sure, not to dictate to your elders. Now then, you run along and get dressed for breakfast, and we’ll say no more about this.”

‘I told her, nice as I could, „Miss Kew, you’re going to wish you brought him back right now. But you’re going to bring him back soon. Or else.”

‘So then she got up out of her bed and ran us out of the room.’

I was quiet a while, and Stern asked, ‘What happened?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘she brought him back.’ I laughed suddenly. ‘I guess it’s funny now, when you come to think of it. Nearly three months of us getting bossed around, and her ruling the roost, and then all of a sudden we lay down the law. We’d tried our best to be good according to her ideas, but, by God, that time she went too far. She got the treatment from the second she slammed her door on us. She had a big china pot under her bed, and it rose up in the air and smashed through her dresser mirror. Then one of the drawers in the dresser slid open and a glove come out of it and smacked her face.

‘She went to jump back on the bed and a whole section of plaster fell off the ceiling on to the bed. The water turned on in her little bathroom and the plug went in, and just about the time it began to overflow, all her clothes fell off their hooks. She went to run out of the room, but the door was stuck, and when she yanked on the handle it opened real quick and she spread out on the floor. The door slammed shut again and more plaster come down on her. Then we went back in and stood looking at her. She was crying. I hadn’t known till then that she could.

‘ “You going to get Baby back here?” I asked her.

‘She just lay there and cried. After a while she looked up at us. It was real pathetic. We helped her up and got her to a chair. She just looked at us for a while, and at the mirror, and at the busted ceiling, and then she whispered, „What happened? What happened?”

‘ “You took Baby away,” I said. „That’s what.”

‘So she jumped up and said real low, real scared, but real strong: „Something struck the house. An aeroplane. Perhaps there was an earthquake. We’ll talk about Baby after breakfast.”

‘I said, „Give her more, Janie.”

‘A big gob of water hit her on the face and chest and made her nightgown stick to her, which was the kind of thing that upset her most. Her braids stood straight up in the air, more and more, till they dragged her standing straight up. She opened her mouth to yell and the powder puff off the dresser rammed into it. She clawed it out.

‘ “What are you doing? What are you doing?” she says, crying again.

‘Janie just looked at her and put her hands behind her, real smug. „We haven’t done anything,” she said.

‘And I said, “Not yet we haven’t. You going to get Baby back?”

‘And she screamed at us, „Stop it! Stop it! Stop talking about that mongoloid idiot! It’s no good to anyone, not even itself! How could I ever make believe it’s mine?”

‘I said, „Get rats, Janie.”

‘There was a scuttling sound along the baseboard. Miss Kew covered her face with her hands and sank down on the chair. „Not rats,” she said. „There are no rats here.” Then something squeaked and she went all to pieces. Did you ever see anyone really go to pieces?’

‘Yes,’ Stern said.

‘I was about as mad as I could get,’ I said, ‘but that was almost too much for me. Still, she shouldn’t have sent Baby away. It took a couple of hours for her to get straightened out enough so she could use the phone, but we had Baby back before lunch time.’ I laughed.

‘What’s funny?’

‘She never seemed able to rightly remember what had happened to her. About three weeks later I heard her talking to Miriam about it. She said it was the house settling suddenly. She said it was a good thing she’d sent Baby out for that medical check-up—the poor little thing might have been hurt. She really believed it, I think.’

‘She probably did. That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.’

‘How much of this do you believe?’ I asked him suddenly.

‘I told you before—it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to believe or disbelieve it.’

‘You haven’t asked me how much of it I believe.’

‘I don’t have to. You’ll make up your own mind about that.’

‘Are you a good psychotherapist?’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Whom did you kill?’

The question caught me absolutely off guard. ‘Miss Kew,’ I said. Then I started to cuss and swear. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you that.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.’ What did you do it for?’

‘That’s what I came here to find out.’

‘You must have really hated her.’

I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that!

He gave me time to get it all out. The first part of it came out in noises, grunts, and squeaks that hurt my throat. Much more than you’d think came out when my nose started to run. And finally—words.

‘Do you know where I came from? The earliest thing I can remember is a punch in the mouth. I can still see it coming, a fist as big as my head. Because I was crying. I been afraid to cry ever since. I was crying because I was hungry. Cold, maybe. Both. After that, big dormitories, and whoever could steal the most got the most. Get the hell kicked out of you if you’re bad, get a big reward if you’re good. Big reward: they let you alone. Try to live like that. Try to live so the biggest, most wonderful thing in the whole damn world is just to have ‘em let you alone!

‘So a spell with Lone and the kids. Something wonderful: you belong. It never happened before. Two yellow bulbs and a fireplace and they light up the world. It’s all there is and all there ever has to be.

‘Then the big change: clean clothes, cooked food, five hours a day school; Columbus and King Arthur and a 1925 book on Civics that explains about septic tanks. Over it all a great big square-cut lump of ice, and you watch it melting and the corners curve, and you know it’s because of you, Miss Kew… hell, she had too much control over herself ever to slobber over us, but it was there, that feeling. Lone took care of us because it was part of the way he lived. Miss Kew took care of us and none of it was the way she lived. It was something she wanted to do.

‘She had a weird idea of „right” and a wrong idea of „wrong”, but she stuck to them, tried to make her ideas do us good. When she couldn’t understand, she figured it was her own failure… and there was an almighty lot she didn’t understand and never could. What went right was our success. What went wrong was her mistake. That last year, that was… oh, good.’

‘So?’

‘So I killed her. Listen,’ I said. I felt I had to talk fast. I wasn’t short of time, but I had to get rid of it. ‘I’ll tell you all I know about it. The one day before I killed her. I woke up in the morning and the sheets crackly clean under me, the sunlight coming in through white curtains and bright red-and-blue drapes. There’s a closet full of my clothes—mine, you see; I never had anything that was really mine before—and downstairs Miriam clinking around with breakfast and the twins laughing. Laughing with her, mind you, not just with each other like they always did before.

‘In the next room, Janie moving around, singing, and when I see her, I know her face will shine inside and out. I get up. There’s hot hot water and the toothpaste bites my tongue. The clothes fit me and I go downstairs and they’re all there and I’m glad to see them and they’re glad to see me, and we no sooner get set around the table when Miss Kew comes down and everyone calls out to her at once.

‘And the morning goes by like that, school with a recess, there in the big long living room. The twins with the ends of their tongues stuck out, drawing the alphabet instead of writing it, and then Janie, when it’s time, painting a picture, a real picture of a cow with trees and a yellow fence that goes off into the distance. Here I am lost between the two parts of a quadratic equation, and Miss Kew bending close to help me, and I smell the sachet she has on her clothes. I hold up my head to smell it better, and far away I hear the shuffle and klunk of filled pots going on the stove back in the kitchen.

‘And the afternoon goes by like that, more school and some study and boiling out into the yard, laughing. The twins chasing each other, running on their two feet to get where they want to go; Janie dappling the leaves in her picture, trying to get it just the way Miss Kew says it ought to be. And Baby, he’s got a big play-pen. He don’t move around much any more, he just watches and dribbles some, and gets packed full of food and kept as clean as a new sheet of tinfoil.

‘And supper, and the evening, and Miss Kew reading to us, changing her voice every time someone else talks in the story, reading fast and whispery when it embarrasses her, but reading every word all the same.

‘And I had to go and kill her. And that’s all.’

‘You haven’t said why,’ Stern said.

‘What are you—stupid?’ I yelled.

Stern didn’t say anything. I turned on my belly on the couch and propped up my chin in my hands and looked at him. You never could tell what was going on with him, but I got the idea that he was puzzled.

‘I said why,’ I told him.

‘Not to me.’

I suddenly understood that I was asking too much of him. I said slowly, ‘We all woke up at the same time. We all did what somebody else wanted. We lived through a day someone else’s way, thinking someone else’s thoughts, saying other people’s words. Janie painted someone else’s pictures, Baby didn’t talk to anyone, and we were all happy with it. Now do you see?’

‘Not yet.’

‘God!’ I said. I thought for a while. ‘We didn’t blesh.’

‘Blesh? Oh. But you didn’t after Lone died, either.’

‘That was different. That was like a car running out of gas, but the car’s there—there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just waiting. But after Miss Kew got done with us, the car was taken all to pieces, see?’

It was his turn to think a while. Finally he said, ‘The mind makes us do funny things. Some of them seem completely reasonless, wrong, insane. But the cornerstone of the work we’re doing is this: there’s a chain of solid, unassailable logic in the things we do. Dig deep enough and you find cause and effect as clearly in this field as you do in any other. I said logic, mind; I didn’t say „correctness” or „rightness” or „justice” or anything of the sort. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.

‘When that mind is submerged, working at cross-purposes with the surface mind, then you’re all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you’re pointing at—that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don’t see the logic. I don’t see that regaining that „bleshing” was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable.’

I said desperately, ‘Maybe it wasn’t worth destroying it.’

Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. ‘ It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you’d had before. I don’t see why and neither do you.’

‘How are we going to find out?’

‘Well, let’s get to the most unpleasant part, if you’re up to it.’

I lay down. ‘I’m ready.’

‘All right. Tell me everything that happened just before you killed her.’

I fumbled through that last day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again: it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead.

I said, ‘What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people’s way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet. I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew’s bedroom and killed her.’

‘How?’

‘That’s all there is!’ I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. ‘It was awful dark… it still is. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her.’

‘All right, all right,’ Stern said, ‘I guess there’s no need to get too gruesome about this. You’re—‘

‘What?’

‘You’re quite strong for your age, aren’t you, Gerard?’

‘I guess so. Strong enough, anyway.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I still don’t see that logic you were talking about.’ I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, hard, once for each word: ‘Why—did—I—have—to—go—and—do—that?’

‘Cut that out,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

‘I ought to get hurt,’ I said.

‘Ah?’ said Stern.

I got up and went to the desk and got some water. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here.’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘It was only last night. I took her cheque-book. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the bank when it opened. Cashed a cheque for eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That’s all.’

‘Didn’t you have any trouble cashing the cheque?’

‘I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do.’

He gave a surprised grunt.

‘I know what you’re thinking—I couldn’t make Miss Kew do what I wanted.’

‘That’s part of it,’ he admitted.

‘If I had of done that,’ I told him, ‘she wouldn’t of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker—all I made him do was be a banker.’

I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.

‘You killed her,’ he said—and I knew he was changing the subject—‘and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must have been less valuable to you than the chance to rebuild this thing you used to have with the other kids. And you’re not sure of the value of that.’ He looked up. ‘Does that describe your main trouble?’

‘Just about.’

‘You know the single thing that makes people kill?’ When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘Survival. To save the self or something which identifies with the self. And in this case that doesn’t apply, because your setup with Miss Kew had far more survival value for you, singly and as a group, than the other.’

‘So maybe I just didn’t have a good enough reason to kill her.’

‘You had, because you did it. We just haven’t located it yet. I mean we have the reason, but we don’t know why it was important enough. The answer is somewhere in you.’

‘Where?’

He got up and walked some. ‘We have a pretty consecutive life-story here. There’s fantasy mixed with the fact, of course, and there are areas in which we have no detailed information, but we have a beginning and a middle and an end. Now I can’t say for sure, but the answer may be in that bridge you refused to cross a while back. Remember?’

I remembered all right. I said, ‘Why that? Why can’t we try something else?’

He quietly pointed out, ‘Because you just said it. Why are you shying away from it?’

‘Don’t go making big ones out of little ones,’ I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. ‘That bothers me. I don’t know why, but it does.’

‘Something’s lying hidden in there and you’re bothering it so it’s fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we’re after. Your trouble is concealed, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said, and I felt that sickness and faintness again, and again I pushed it away. Suddenly I wasn’t going to be stopped any more. ‘Let’s go get it.’ I lay down.

He let me watch the ceiling and listen to silence for a while, and then he said, ‘You’re in the library. You’ve just met Miss Kew. She’s talking to you; you’re telling her about the children.’

I lay very still. Nothing happened. Yes, it did; I got tense inside all over, from the bones out, more and more. When it got as bad as it could, still nothing happened.

I heard him get up and cross the room to the desk. He fumbled there for a while; things clicked and hummed. Suddenly I heard my own voice:

‘ Well, there ’ s Janie, she ’ s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they ’ re twins, and Baby. Baby is three. ’

And the sound of my own scream—

And nothingness.

Sputtering out of the darkness, I came up flailing with my fists. Strong hands caught my wrists. They didn’t check my arms; they just grabbed and rode. I opened my eyes. I was soaking wet. The thermos lay on its side on the rug. Stern was crouched beside me, holding my wrists. I quit struggling.

‘What happened?’

He let me go and stood back watchfully. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘what a charge!’

I held my head and moaned. He threw me a hand-towel and I used it. ‘What hit me?’

‘I’ve had you on tape the whole time,’ he explained. ‘When you wouldn’t get into the recollection, I tried to nudge you into it by using your own voice as you recounted it before. It works wonders sometimes.’

‘It worked wonders this time,’ I growled. ‘I think I blew a fuse.’

‘In effect, you did. You were on the trembling verge of going into the thing you don’t want to remember, and you let yourself go unconscious rather than do it.’

‘What are you so pleased about?’

‘Last-ditch defence,’ he said tersely. ‘We’ve got it now. Just one more try.’

‘Now hold on. The last-ditch defence is that I drop dead.’

‘You won’t. You’ve contained this episode in your subconscious mind for a long time and it hasn’t hurt you.’

‘Hasn’t it?’

‘Not in terms of killing you.’

‘How do you know it won’t when we drag it out?’

‘You’ll see.’

I looked up at him sideways. Somehow he struck me as knowing what he was doing.

‘You know a lot more about yourself now than you did at the time,’ he explained softly. ‘You can apply insight. You can evaluate it as it comes up. Maybe not completely, but enough to protect yourself. Don’t worry. Trust me. I can stop it if it gets too bad. Now just relax. Look at the ceiling. Be aware of your toes. Don’t look at your toes. Look straight up. Your toes, your big toes. Don’t move your toes, but feel them. Count outward from your big toes, one count for each toe. One, two, three. Feel that third toe. Feel the toe, feel it, feel it go limp, go limp, go limp. The toe next to it on both sides gets limp. So limp because your toes are limp, all of your toes are limp—‘

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him.

He said in the same silky voice, ‘You trust me and so do your toes trust me. They’re all limp because you trust me. You—‘

‘You’re trying to hypnotize me. I’m not going to let you do that.’

‘You’re going to hypnotize yourself. You do everything yourself. I just point the way. I point your toes to the path. Just point your toes. No one can make you go anywhere you don’t want to go, but you want to go where your toes are pointed where your toes are limp where your…’

On and on and on. And where was the dangling gold ornament, the light in the eyes, the mystic passes? He wasn’t even sitting where I could see him. Where was the talk about how sleepy I was supposed to be? Well, he knew I wasn’t sleepy and didn’t want to be sleepy. I just wanted to be toes. I just wanted to be limp, just a limp toe. No brains in a toe, a toe to go, go, go eleven times, eleven, I’m eleven…

I split in two, and it was all right, the part that watched the part that went back to the library, and Miss Kew leaning towards me, but not too near, me with the newspaper crackling under me on the library chair, me with one shoe off and my limp toes dangling… and I felt a mild surprise at this. For this was hypnosis, but I was quite conscious, quite altogether there on the couch with Stern droning away at me, quite able to roll over and sit up and talk to him and walk out if I wanted to, but I just didn’t want to. Oh, if this was what hypnosis was like, I was all for it. I’d work at this. This was all right.

There on the table I’m able to see that the gold will unfold on the leather, and whether I’m able to stay by the table with you, with Miss Kew, with Miss Kew…

‘… and Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.’

‘Baby is three,’ she said.

There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a… a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.

And this is what was inside. All in one flash, but all this.

Baby is three? My baby would be three if there were a baby, which there never was…

Lone, I’m open to you. Open, is this open enough?

His irises like wheels. I’m sure they spin, but I never catch them at it. The probe that passes invisibly from his brain, through his eyes, into mine. Does he know what it means to me? Does he care? He doesn’t care, he doesn’t know; he empties me and I fill as he directs me to; he drinks and waits and drinks again and never looks at the cup.

When I saw him first, I was dancing in the wind, in the wood, in the wild, and I spun about and he stood there in the leafy shadows, watching me. I hated him for it. It was not my wood, not my gold-spangled fern-tangled glen. But it was my dancing that he took, freezing it forever by being there. I hated him for it, hated the way he looked, the way he stood, ankle-deep in the kind wet ferns, looking like a tree with roots for feet and clothes the colour of earth. As I stopped he moved, and then he was just a man, a great ape-shouldered, dirty animal of a man, and all my hate was fear suddenly and I was just as frozen.

He knew what he had done and he didn’t care. Dancing… never to dance again, because never would I know the woods were free of eyes, free of tall, uncaring, dirty animal-men. Summer days with the clothes choking me, winter nights with the precious decencies round and about me like a shroud, and never to dance again, never to remember dancing without remembering the shock of knowing he had seen me. How I hated him! Oh, how I hated him!

To dance alone where no one knew, that was the single thing I hid to myself when I was known as Miss Kew, that Victorian, older than her years, later than her time; correct and starched, lace and linen and lonely. Now indeed I would be all they said, through and through, forever and ever, because he had robbed me of the one thing I dared to keep secret.

He came out into the sun and walked to me, holding his great head a little on one side. I stood where I was, frozen inwardly and outwardly and altogether by the core of anger and the layer of fear. My arm was still out, my waist still bent from my dance, and when he stopped, I breathed again because by then I had to.

He said, ‘You read books?’

I couldn’t bear to have him near me, but I couldn’t move. He put out his hard hand and touched my jaw, turned my head up until I had to look into his face. I cringed away from him, but my face would not leave his hand, though he was not holding it, just lifting it. ‘You got to read some books for me. I got no time to find them.’

I asked him, ‘Who are you?’

‘Lone,’ he said. ‘You going to read books for me?’

‘No. Let me go, let me go!’ He wasn’t holding me.

‘What books?’ I cried.

He thumped my face, not very hard. It made me look up a bit more. He dropped his hand away. His eyes, the irises were going to spin…

‘Open up in there,’ he said. ‘Open way up and let me see.’

There were books in my head, and he was looking at the titles… he was not looking at the titles, for he couldn’t read. He was looking at what I knew of the books. I suddenly felt terribly useless, because I had only a fraction of what he wanted.

‘What’s that?’ he barked.

I knew what he meant. He’d gotten it from inside my head. I didn’t know it was in there, even, but he found it.

‘Telekinesis,’ I said.

‘How is it done?’

‘Nobody knows if it can be done. Moving physical objects with the mind!’

‘It can be done,’ he said. ‘This one?’

‘Teleportation. That’s the same thing—well, almost. Moving your own body with mind power.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I see it,’ he said gruffly.

‘Molecular interpenetration. Telepathy and clairvoyance. I don’t know anything about them. I think they’re silly.’

‘Read about ‘em. It don’t matter if you understand or not. What’s this?’

It was there in my brain, on my lips. ‘ Gestalt. ’

‘What’s that?’

‘Group. Like a cure for a lot of diseases with one kind of treatment. Like a lot of thoughts expressed in one phrase. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’

‘Read about that, too. Read a whole lot about that. That’s the most you got to read about. That’s important.’

He turned away, and when his eyes came away from mine it was like something breaking, so that I staggered and fell to one knee. He went off into the woods without looking back. I got my things and ran home. There was anger, and it struck me like a storm. There was fear, and it struck me like a wind. I knew I would read the books, I knew I would come back, I knew I would never dance again.

So I read the books and I came back. Sometimes it was every day for three or four days, and sometimes, because I couldn’t find a certain book, I might not come back for ten. He was always there in the little glen, waiting, standing in the shadows, and he took what he wanted of the books and nothing of me. He never mentioned the next meeting. If he came there every day to wait for me, or if he only came when I did, I have no way of knowing.

He made me read books that contained nothing for me, books on evolution, on social and cultural organization, on mythology, and ever so much on symbiosis. What I had with him were not conversations; sometimes nothing audible would pass between us but his grunt of surprise or small, short hum of interest.

He tore the books out of me the way he would tear berries from a bush, all at once; he smelled of sweat and earth and the green juices his heavy body crushed when he moved through the wood.

If he learned anything from the books, it made no difference in him.

There came a day when he sat by me and puzzled something out.

He said, ‘What book has something like this?’ Then he waited for a long time, thinking. ‘The way a termite can’t digest wood, you know, and microbes in the termite’s belly can, and what the termite eats is what the microbe leaves behind. What’s that?’

‘Symbiosis,’ I remembered. I remembered the words. Lone tore the content from words and threw the words away. ‘Two kinds of life depending upon one another for existence.’

‘Yeah. Well, is there a book about four-five kinds doing that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then he asked, ‘What about this? You got a radio station, you got four-five receivers, each receiver is fixed up to make something different happen, like one digs and one flies and one makes noise, but each one takes orders from the one place. And each one has its own power and its own thing to do, but they are all apart. Now: is there life like that, instead of radio?’

‘Where each organism is a part of the whole, but separated? I don’t think so… unless you mean social organizations, like a team, or perhaps a gang of men working, all taking orders from the same boss.’

‘No,’ he said immediately, ‘not like that. Like one single animal.’ He made a gesture with his cupped hand which I understood.

I asked, ‘You mean a gestalt life-form? It’s fantastic.’

‘No book has about that, huh?’

‘None I ever heard of.’

‘I got to know about that,’ he said heavily.’ There is such a thing. I want to know if it ever happened before.’

‘I can’t see how anything of the sort could exist.’

‘It does. A part that fetches, a part that figures, a part that finds out, and a part that talks.’

‘Talks? Only humans talk.’

‘I know,’ he said, and got up and went away.

I looked and looked for such a book but found nothing remotely like it. I came back and told him so. He was still a very long time, looking off to the blue-on-blue line of the hilly horizon. Then he drove those about-to-spin irises at me and searched.

‘You learn, but you don’t think,’ he said, and looked again at the hills.

‘This all happens with humans,’ he said eventually. ‘It happens piece by piece right under folks’ noses, and they don’t see it. You got mind-readers. You got people can move things with their mind. You got people can move themselves with their mind. You got people can figure anything out if you just think to ask them. What you ain’t got is the one kind of person who can pull ‘em all together, like a brain pulls together the parts that press and pull and feel heat and walk and think and all the other things.

‘I’m one,’ he finished suddenly. Then he sat still for so long I thought he had forgotten me.

‘Lone,’ I said, ‘what do you do here in the woods?’

‘I wait,’ he said. ‘I ain’t finished yet.’ He looked at my eyes and snorted in irritation. ‘I don’t mean „finished” like you’re thinking. I mean I ain’t—completed yet. You know about a worm when it’s cut, growin’ whole again? Well, forget about the cut. Suppose it just grew that way, for the first time, see? I’m getting parts. I ain’t finished. I want a book about that kind of animal that is me when I’m finished.’

‘I don’t know of such a book. Can you tell me more? Maybe if you could, I’d think of the right book or a place to find it.’

He broke a stick between his huge hands, put the two pieces side by side and broke them together with one strong twist.

‘All I know is I got to do what I’m doing like a bird’s got to nest when it’s time. And I know that when I’m done I won’t be anything to brag about. I’ll be like a body stronger and faster than anything there ever was, without the right kind of head on it. But maybe that’s because I’m one of the first. That picture you had, the caveman…’

‘Neanderthal.’

‘Yeah. Come to think of it, he was no great shakes. An early try at something new. That’s what I’m going to be. But maybe the right kind of head’ll come along after I’m all organized. Then it’ll be something.’

He grunted with satisfaction and went away.

I tried, for days I tried, but I couldn’t find what he wanted. I found a magazine which stated that the next important evolutionary step in man would be in a psychic rather than a physical direction, but it said nothing about a—shall I call it a gestalt organism? There was something about slime moulds, but they seem to be more a hive activity of amoebae than even a symbiosis.

To my own unscientific, personally uninterested mind, there was nothing like what he wanted except possibly a band marching together, everyone playing different instruments with different techniques and different notes, to make a single thing move along together. But he hadn’t meant anything like that.

So I went back to him in the cool of an early fall evening, and he took what little I had in my eyes, and turned from me angrily with a gross word I shall not permit myself to remember.

‘You can’t find it,’ he told me. ‘Don’t come back.’

He got up and went to a tattered birch and leaned against it, looking out and down into the wind-tossed crackling shadows. I think he had forgotten me already. I know he leaped like a frightened animal when I spoke to him from so near. He must have been completely immersed in whatever strange thoughts he was having, for I’m sure he didn’t hear me coming.

I said, ‘Lone, don’t blame me for not finding it. I tried.’

He controlled his startlement and brought those eyes down to me. ‘Blame? Who’s blamin’ anybody?’

‘I failed you,’ I told him, ‘and you’re angry.’

He looked at me so long I became uncomfortable.

‘I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,’ he said.

I wouldn’t let him turn away from me. He would have. He would have left me forever with not another thought; he didn’t care! It wasn’t cruelty or thoughtlessness as I have been taught to know those things. He was as uncaring as a cat is of the bursting of a tulip bud.

I took him by the upper arms and shook him, it was like trying to shake the front of my house. ‘You can know!’ I screamed at him. ‘You know what I read. You must know what I think!’

He shook his head.

‘I’m a person, a woman,’ I raved at him. ‘You’ve used me and used me and you’ve given me nothing. You’ve made me break a lifetime of habits—reading until all hours, coming to you in the rain and on Sunday—you don’t talk to me, you don’t look at me, you don’t know anything about me and you don’t care. You put some sort of a spell on me that I couldn’t break. And when you’re finished, you say, „Don’t come back.”‘

‘Do I have to give something back because I took something?’

‘People do.’

He gave that short, interested hum. ‘What do you want me to give you? I ain’t got anything.’

I moved away from him. I felt… I don’t know what I felt. After a time I said, ‘I don’t know.’

He shrugged and turned. I fairly leaped at him, dragging him back. ‘I want you to—’

‘Well, damn it, what?’

I couldn’t look at him; I could hardly speak. ‘I don’t know. There’s something, but I don’t know what it is. It’s something that—I couldn’t say if I knew it.’ When he began to shake his head, I took his arms again. ‘You’ve read the books out of me; can’t you read the… the me out of me?’

‘I ain’t never tried.’ He held my face up and stepped close. ‘Here,’ he said.

His eyes projected their strange probe at me and I screamed. I tried to twist away. I hadn’t wanted this, I was sure I hadn’t. I struggled terribly. I think he lifted me right off the ground with his big hands. He held me until he was finished, and then let me drop. I huddled to the ground, sobbing. He sat down beside me. He didn’t try to touch me. He didn’t try to go away. I quieted at last and crouched there, waiting.

He said, ‘I ain’t going to do much of that no more.’

I sat up and tucked my skirt close around me and laid my cheek on my updrawn knees so I could see his face. ‘What happened?’

He cursed. ‘Damn mishmash inside you. Thirty-three years old—what you want to live like that for?’

‘I live very comfortably,’ I said with some pique.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘All by yourself for ten years now ‘cept for someone to do your work. Nobody else.’

‘Men are animals, and women…’

‘You really hate women. They all know something you don’t.’

‘I don’t want to know. I’m quite happy the way I am.’

‘Hell you are.’

I said nothing to that. I despise that kind of language.

‘Two things you want from me. Neither makes no sense.’ He looked at me with the first real expression I have ever seen in his face: a profound wonderment.’ You want to know all about me, where I came from, how I got to be what I am.’

‘Yes, I do want that. What’s the other thing I want that you know and I don’t?’

‘I was born some place and growed like a weed somehow,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Folks who didn’t give even enough of a damn to try the orphanage routine. So I just ran loose, sort of in training to be the village idiot. I’da made it, but I took to the woods instead.’

‘Why?’

He wondered why, and finally said, ‘I guess because the way people lived didn’t make no sense to me. Out here I can grow like I want.’

‘How is that?’ I asked over one of those vast distances that built and receded between him and me so constantly.

‘What I wanted to get from your books.’

‘You never told me.’

For the second time he said, ‘You learn, but you don’t think. There’s a kind of—well, person. It’s all made of separate parts, but it’s all one person. It has like hands, it has like legs, it has like a talking mouth, and it has like a brain. That’s me, a brain for that person. Damn feeble, too, but the best I know of.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘No, I ain’t,’ he said, unoffended and completely certain. ‘I already got the part that’s like hands. I can move ‘em anywhere and they do what I want, though they’re too young yet to do much good. I got the part that talks. That one’s real good.’

‘I don’t think you talk very well at all,’ I said. I cannot stand incorrect English.

He was surprised. ‘I’m not talking about me! She’s back yonder with the others.’

‘She?’

‘The one that talks. Now I need one that thinks, one that can take anything and add it to anything else and come up with a right answer. And once they’re all together, and all the parts get used together often enough, I’ll be that new kind of thing I told you about. See? Only—I wish it had a better head on it than me.’

My own head was swimming. ‘What made you start doing this?’

He considered me gravely. ‘What made you start growing hair in your armpits?’ he asked me. ‘You don’t figure a thing like that. It just happens.’

‘What is that… that thing you do when you look in my eyes?’

‘You want a name for it? I ain’t got one. I don’t know how I do it. I know I can get anyone I want to do anything. Like you’re going to forget about me.’

I said in a choked voice, ‘I don’t want to forget about you.’

‘You will.’ I didn’t know then whether he meant I’d forget, or I’d want to forget. ‘You’ll hate me, and then after a long time you’ll be grateful. Maybe you’ll be able to do something for me some time. You’ll be that grateful that you’ll be glad to do it. But you’ll forget, all right, everything but a sort of… feeling. And my name, maybe.’

I don’t know what moved me to ask him, but I did, forlornly. ‘And no one will ever know about you and me?’

‘Can’t,’ he said.’ Unless… well, unless it was the head of the animal, like me, or a better one.’ He heaved himself up.

‘Oh, wait, wait!’ I cried. He mustn’t go yet, he mustn’t. He was a tall, dirty beast of a man, yet he had enthralled me in some dreadful way. ‘You haven’t given me the other… whatever it was.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah, that.’

He moved like a flash. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a… a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.

I came up out of it, through two distinct levels:

I am eleven, breathless from shock from a transferred agony of that incredible entrance into the ego of another. And:

I am fifteen, lying on the couch while Stern drones on, ‘… quietly, quietly limp, your ankles and legs as limp as your toes, your belly goes soft, the back of your neck is as limp as your belly, it’s quiet and easy and all gone soft and limper than limp…’

I sat up and swung my legs to the floor. ‘Okay,’ I said.

Stern looked a little annoyed. ‘This is going to work,’ he said, ‘but it can only work if you cooperate. Just lie—‘

‘It did work,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The whole thing. A to Z.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Like that.’

He looked at me piercingly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was right there, where you said. In the library. When I was eleven. When she said, „Baby is three.” It knocked loose something that had been boiling around in her for three years, and it all came blasting out. I got it, full force; just a kid, no warning, no defences. It had such a—a pain in it, like I never knew could be.’

‘Go on,’ said Stern.

‘That’s really all. I mean that’s not what was in it; it’s what it did to me. What it was, a sort of hunk of her own self. A whole lot of things that happened over about four months, every bit of it. She knew Lone.’

‘You mean a whole series of episodes?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You got a series all at once? In a split second?’

‘That’s right. Look, for that split second I was her, don’t you see? I was her, everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever thought and heard and felt. Everything, everything, all in the right order if I wanted to bring it out like that. Any part of it if I wanted it by itself. If I’m going to tell you about what I had for lunch, do I have to tell you everything else I’ve ever done since I was born? No. I tell you I was her, and then and forever after I can remember anything she could remember up to that point. In just that one flash.’

‘A gestalt, ’ he murmured.

‘Aha!’ I said, and thought about that. I thought about a whole lot of things. I put them aside for a moment and said, ‘Why didn’t I know all this before?’

‘You had a powerful block against recalling it.’

I got up excitedly.’ I don’t see why. I don’t see that at all.’

‘Just natural revulsion,’ he guessed. ‘How about this? You had a distaste for assuming a female ego, even for a second.’

‘You told me yourself, right at the beginning, that I didn’t have that kind of a problem.’

‘Well, how does this sound to you? You say you felt pain in that episode. So—you wouldn’t go back into it for fear of re-experiencing the pain.’

‘Let me think, let me think. Yeah, yeah, that’s part of it—that thing of going into someone’s mind. She opened up to me because I reminded her of Lone. I went in. I wasn’t ready; I’d never done it before, except maybe a little, against resistance. I went all the way in and it was too much; it frightened me away from trying it for years. And there it lay, wrapped up, locked away. But as I grew older, the power to do that with my mind got stronger and stronger, and still I was afraid to use it. And the more I grew, the more I felt, down deep, that Miss Kew had to be killed before she killed the… what I am. My God!’ I shouted. ‘Do you know what I am?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Like to tell me about it?’

‘I’d like to,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, I’d like that.’

He had that professional open-minded expression on his face, not believing or disbelieving, just taking it all in. I had to tell him, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have enough words. I knew the things, but not the names for them.

Lone took the meanings and threw the words away.

Further back: ‘ You read books. Read books for me. ’

The look of his eyes. That—‘opening up’ thing.

I went over to Stern. He looked up at me, I bent close. First he was startled, then he controlled it, then he came even closer to me.

‘My God,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t look at those eyes before. I could have sworn those irises spun like wheels…’

Stern read books. He’d read more books than I ever imagined had been written. I slipped in there, looking for what I wanted.

I can’t say exactly what it was like. It was like walking in a tunnel, and in this tunnel, all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you, like the thing at the carnival, the merry-go-round, the thing you snatch the brass rings from. There’s a brass ring on the end of each of these arms, and you can take anyone of them you want to.

Now imagine you make up your mind which rings you want, and the arms hold only those. Now picture yourself with a thousand hands to grab the rings off with. Now just suppose the tunnel is a zillion miles long, and you can go from one end of it to the other, grabbing rings, in just the time it takes you to blink once. Well, it was like that, only easier.

It was easier for me to do than it had been for Lone.

Straightening up, I got away from Stern. He looked sick and frightened.

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘What did you do to me?’

‘I needed some words. Come on, come on. Get professional.’

I had to admire him. He put his pipe in his pocket and gouged the tips of his fingers hard against his forehead and cheeks. Then he sat up and he was okay again.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s how Miss Kew felt when Lone did it to her.’

‘What are you?’

‘I’ll tell you. I’m the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Janie, telekineticist; and myself, tele-path and central control. There isn’t a single thing about any of us that hasn’t been documented: the teleportation of the Yogi, the telekinetics of some gamblers, the idiot savant mathematicians, and most of all, the so-called poltergeist, the moving about of household goods through the instrumentation of a young girl. Only in this case every one of my parts delivers at peak performance.

‘Lone organized it, or it formed around him; it doesn’t matter which. I replaced Lone, but I was too underdeveloped when he died, and on top of that I got an occlusion from that blast from Miss Kew. To that extent you were right when you said the blast made me subconsciously afraid to discover what was in it. But there was another good reason for my not being able to get in under that „Baby is three” barrier.

‘We ran into the problem of what it was I valued more than the security Miss Kew gave us. Can’t you see now what it was? My gestalt organism was at the point of death from that security. I figured she had to be killed or it— I —would be. Oh, the parts would live on: two little coloured girls with a speech impediment, one introspective girl with an artistic bent, one mongoloid idiot, and me—ninety per cent short-circuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent.’ I laughed. ‘Sure,’ she had to be killed. It was self-preservation for the gestalt. ’

Stern bobbled around with his mouth and finally got out: ‘I don’t—’

‘You don’t need to,’ I laughed. ‘This is wonderful. You’re good—real good. Now I want to tell you this, because you can appreciate a fine point in your speciality. You talk about occlusions! I couldn’t get past the „Baby is three” thing because in it lay the clues to what I really am. I couldn’t find that out because I was afraid to remember that I was two things—Miss Kew’s little boy, and something a hell of a lot bigger. I couldn’t be both, and I wouldn’t release either one.’

He said, with his eyes on his pipe, ‘Now you can?’

‘I have.’

‘And what now?’

‘What do you mean?’

Stern leaned back against the corner of his desk. ‘Did it occur to you that maybe this— gestalt organism of yours is already dead?’

‘It isn’t.’

‘How do you know?”

‘How does your head know your arm works?’

He touched his face. ‘So… now what?’

I shrugged. ‘Did the Pekin man look at Homo Sap walking erect and say, „Now what?” We’ll live, that’s all, like a man, like a tree, like anything else that lives. We’ll feed and grow and experiment and breed. We’ll defend ourselves.’ I spread my hands. ‘We’ll just do what comes naturally.’

‘But what can you do?’

‘What can an electric motor do? It depends on where we apply ourselves.’

Stern was very pale. ‘Just what do you— want to do?’

I thought about that. He waited until I was quite finished thinking and didn’t say anything. ‘Know what?’ I said at last.’ Ever since I was born, people been kicking me around, right up until Miss Kew took over. And what happened with her? She damn near killed me.’

I thought some more, and said, ‘Everybody’s had fun but me. The kind of fun everybody has is kicking someone around, someone small who can’t fight back. Or they do you favours until they own you, or kill you.’ I looked at him and grinned. ‘I’m just going to have fun, that’s all.’

He turned his back. I think he was going to pace the floor, but right away he turned again. I knew then he would keep an eye on me. He said, ‘You’ve come a long way since you walked in here.’

I nodded. ‘You’re a good head-shrinker.’

‘Thanks,’ he said bitterly. ‘And you figure you’re all cured now, all adjusted and ready to roll.’

‘Well sure. Don’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘All you’ve found out is what you are. You have a lot more to learn.’

I was willing to be patient. ‘Like?’

‘Like finding out what happens to people who have to live with guilt like yours. You’re different, Gerry, but you’re not that different.’

‘I should feel guilty about saving my life?’

He ignored that. ‘One other thing: You said a while back that you’d been mad at everybody all your life—that’s the way you lived. Have you ever wondered why?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

‘One reason is that you were so alone. That’s why being with the other kids, and then with Miss Kew, came to mean so much.’

‘So? I’ve still got the kids.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘You and the kids are a single creature. Unique. Unprecedented.’ He pointed the pipe-stem at me. ‘ Alone. ’

The blood started to pound in my ears.

‘Shut up,’ I said.

‘Just think about it,’ he said softly. ‘You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone.’

‘Shut up, shut up… Everybody’s alone.’

He nodded. ‘But some people learn how to live with it.’

‘How?’

He said, after a time, ‘Because of something’you don’t know anything about. It wouldn’t mean anything to you if I told you.’

‘Tell me and see.’

He gave me the strangest look ‘It’s sometimes called morality.’

‘I guess you’re right. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I pulled myself together. I didn’t have to listen to this. ‘You’re afraid,’ I said. ‘You’re afraid of Homo Gestalt. ’

He made a wonderful effort and smiled. ‘That’s bastard terminology.’

‘We’re a bastard breed,’ I said. I pointed. ‘Sit down over there.’

He crossed the quiet room and sat at the desk. I leaned close to him and he went to sleep with his eyes open. I straightened up and looked around the room. Then I got the thermos flask and filled it and put it on the desk. I fixed the corner of the rug and put a clean towel at the head of the couch. I went to the side of the desk and opened it and looked at the tape recorder.

Like reaching out a hand, I got Beanie. She stood by the desk, wide-eyed.

‘Look here,’ I told her. ‘Look good, now. What I want to do is erase all this tape. Go ask Baby how.’

She blinked at me and sort of shook herself, and then leaned over the recorder. She was there—and gone—and back, just like that. She pushed past me and turned two knobs, moved a pointer until it clicked twice. The tape raced backward past the head swiftly, whining.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘beat it.’

She vanished.

I got my jacket and went to the door. Stern was still sitting at the desk, staring.

‘A good head-shrinker,’ I murmured. I felt fine.

Outside I waited, then turned and went back in again.

Stern looked up at me. ‘Sit over there, Sonny.’

‘Gee,’ I said. ‘Sorry, sir. I got in the wrong office.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

I went out and closed the door. All the way down to the police station I grinned. They’d take my report on Miss Kew and like it. And sometimes I laughed, thinking about this Stern, how he’d figure the loss of an afternoon and the gain of a thousand bucks. Much funnier than thinking about him being dead.

What the hell is morality, anyway?