“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. I lived with some other folks for a while, tried school, didn’t like it. Too small a town for them special schools for my kind, retarded, y’know. So I just ran loose, sort of in training to be the village idiot. I’da made it if I’d stayed there, 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. I saw enough up and down, back and forth, to know that they live a lot of different ways, but none of ’em was for 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 defenses. 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.”
