I looked up at the gray ceiling. “Baby is three. Baby is three. I went up to a big house with a winding drive that ran under a sort of theater-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.
“Don’t be foolish,” Stern said. “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 colored 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 colored 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 Kew, 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.
