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 that 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 defense,” he said tersely. “We’ve got it now. Just one more try.”
“Now hold on. The last-ditch defense 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 toward 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 color 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 dothes 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 laughed at me. 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…
