“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 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 molds, 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 kinds of 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.”
