Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
Succulent pizza and cold beer in a booth painted a too-bright, edge-worn green. A happy-weary walk through the darkening booths to the late bus which waited, breathing. A sense of membership because of the fitting of the spine to the calculated average of the bus seats. A shared doze, a shared smile, at sixty miles an hour through the flickering night, and at last the familiar depot on the familiar street, echoing and empty but
my
street in
my
town.
They woke a taxi driver and gave him their address. “Can I be more alive than this?” he murmured from his corner and then realized she had heard him. “I mean,” he amended, “it’s as if my whole world, everywhere I lived, was once in a little place inside my head, so deep I couldn’t see out. And then you made it as big as a room and then as big as a town and tonight as big as... well, a lot bigger,” he finished weakly.
A lonely passing streetlight passed her answering smile over to him. He said, “So I was wondering how much bigger it can get.”
“Much bigger,” she said.
He pressed back sleepily into the cushions. “I feel fine,” he murmured. “I feel... Janie,” he said in a strange voice, “I feel sick.”
“You know what that is,” she said calmly.
A tension came and went within him and he laughed softly. “Him again. He’s wrong. He’s wrong. He’ll never make me sick again.
Driver!
”
His voice was like soft wood tearing. Startled, the drive slammed on his brakes. Hip surged forward out of his seat and caught the back of the driver under his armpit. “Go back,” he said excitedly.
“Goddlemighty,” the driver muttered. He began to turn the cab around. Hip turned to Janie, an answer, some sort of answer, half formed, but she had no question. She sat quietly and waited. To the driver Hip said, “Just the next block. Yeah, here. Left. Turn left.”
He sank back then, his cheek to the window glass, his eyes raking the shadowed houses and black lawns. After a time he said, “There. The house with the driveway, there where the big hedge is.”
“Want I should drive in?”
“No,” Hip said. “Pull over. A little farther... there, where I can see in.”
When the cab stopped, the driver turned around and peered back. “Gettin’ out here? That’s a dollar ’n—”
“
Shh!
” The sound came so explosively that the driver sat stunned. Then he shook his head wearily and turned to face forward. He shrugged and waited.
Hip stared through the driveway’s gap in the hedge at the faintly gleaming white house, its stately porch and porte-cochère, its neat shutters and fanlit door.
“Take us home,” he said after a time.
Nothing was said until they got there. Hip sat with one hand pressing his temples, covering his eyes. Janie’s corner of the cab was dark and silent.
When the machine stopped Hip slid out and absently handed Janie to the walk. He gave the driver a bill, accepting the change, pawed out a tip and handed it back. The cab drove off.
Hip stood looking down at the money in his hand, sliding it around on his palm with his fingers. “Janie?”
“Yes, Hip.”
He looked at her. He could hardly see her in the darkness. “Let’s go inside.”
They went in. He switched on the lights. She took off her hat and hung her bag on the bedpost and sat down on the bed, her hands on her lap. Waiting.
He seemed blind, so deep was his introspection. He came awake slowly, his gaze fixed on the money in his hand. For a moment it seemed without meaning to him; then slowly, visibly, he recognized it and brought it into his thoughts, into his expression. He closed his hand on it, shook it, brought it to her and spread it out on the night table—three crumpled bills, some silver. “It isn’t mine,” he said.
“Of course it is!”
He shook his head tiredly. “No it isn’t. None of it’s been mine. Not the roller coaster money or the shopping money or coffee in the mornings or... I suppose there’s rent here.”
She was silent.
“That house,” he said detachedly. “The instant I saw it I knew I’d been there before. I was there just before I got arrested. I didn’t have any money then. I remember. I knocked on the door and I was dirty and crazy and they told me to go around the back if I wanted something to eat. I didn’t have any money; I remember that
so
well. All I had was...”
Out of his pocket came the woven metal tube. He caught lamplight on its side, flicked it off again, squeezed it, then pointed with it at the night table. “Now, ever since I came here, I have money. In my left jacket pocket every day. I never wondered about it. It’s your money, isn’t it, Janie?”
“It’s yours. Forget about it, Hip. It’s not important.”
“What do you mean it’s mine?” he barked. “Mine because you give it to me?” He probed her silence with a bright beam of anger and nodded. “Thought so.”
“Hip!”
He shook his head, suddenly, violently, the only expression he could find at the moment for the great tearing wind which swept through him. It was anger, it was humiliation, it was a deep futility and a raging attack on the curtains which shrouded his self-knowledge. He slumped down into the easychair and put his hands over his face.
He sensed her nearness, then her hand was on his shoulder. “Hip...” she whispered. He shrugged the shoulder and the hand was gone. He heard the faint sound of springs as she sat down again on the bed.
He brought his hands down slowly. His face was twisted, hurt. “You’ve got to understand, I’m not mad at you, I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done, it isn’t that,” he blurted. “I’m all mixed up again,” he said hoarsely. “Doing things, don’t know why. Things I
got
to do, I don’t know what. Like...” He stopped to think, to sort the thousand scraps that whirled and danced in the wind which blew through him. “Like knowing this is wrong, I shouldn’t be here, getting fed, spending money, but I don’t know who ever said I shouldn’t, where I learned it. And... and like what I told you, this thing about finding somebody and I don’t know who it is and I don’t know why. I said tonight...” He paused and for a long moment filled the room with the hiss of breath between his teeth, his tense-curled lips. “I said tonight, my world... the place I live, it’s getting bigger all the time. It just now got big enough to take in that house where we stopped. We passed that corner and I knew the house was there and I had to look at it. I knew I’d been there before, dirty and all excited... knocked... they told me to go around back... I yelled at them... somebody else came. I asked them, I wanted to know about some—”
The silence, again the hissing breath.
“—children who lived there, and no children lived there. And I shouted again, everybody was afraid, I straightened out a little. I told them just tell me what I wanted to know, I’d go away, I didn’t want to frighten anybody. I said all right, no children, then tell me where is Alicia Kew, just let me talk to Alicia Kew.”
He straightened up, his eyes alight, and pointed the piece of tubing at Janie. “You see? I remember, I remember her name, Alicia Kew!” He sank back. “And they said, ‘Alicia Kew is dead.’ And then they said, oh her children! And they told me where to go to find them. They wrote it down someplace, I’ve got it here somewhere....” He began to fumble through his pockets, stopped suddenly and glared at Janie. “It was the old clothes, you have it,
you’ve
hidden it!”
If she had explained, if she had answered, it would have been all right but she only watched him.
“All right,” he gritted. “I remembered one thing, I can remember another. Or I can go back there and ask again. I don’t need you.”
Her expression did not change but, watching it, he knew suddenly that she was holding it still and that it was a terrible effort for her.
He said gently, “I did need you. I’d’ve died without you. You’ve been...” He had no word for what she had been to him so he stopped searching for one and went on, “It’s just that I’ve got so I don’t need you that way any more. I have some things to find out but I have to do it myself.”
At last she spoke: “You have done it yourself, Hip. Every bit of it. All I’ve done is to put you where you could do it. I—want to go on with that.”
“You don’t need to,” he reassured her. “I’m a big boy now. I’ve come a long way; I’ve come alive. There can’t be much more to find out.”
“There’s a lot more,” she said sadly.
He shook his head positively. “I tell you, I
know!
Finding out about those children, about this Alicia Kew, and then the address where they’d moved—that was right at the end; that was the place where I got my fingertips on the—whatever it was I was trying to grab. Just that one more place, that address where the children are; that’s all I need. That’s where he’ll be.”
“He?”
“The one, you know, the one I’ve been looking for. His name is—” He leapt to his feet. “His name’s—”
He brought his fist into his palm, a murderous blow. “I forgot,” he whispered.
He put his stinging hand to the short hair at the back of his head, screwed up his eyes in concentration. Then he relaxed. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll find out, now.”
“Sit down,” she said. “Go on, Hip. Sit down and listen to me.”
Reluctantly he did; resentfully he looked at her. His head was full of almost-understood pictures and phrases. He thought,
Can’t she let me alone? Can’t she let me think a while?
But because she... Because she was Janie, he waited.
“You’re right, you can do it,” she said. She spoke slowly and with extreme care. “You can go to the house tomorrow, if you like, and get the address and find what you’ve been looking for. And it will mean absolutely—
nothing
—to you. Hip, I
know!
”
He glared at her.
“Believe me, Hip; believe me!”
He charged across the room, grabbed her wrists, pulled her up, thrust his face to hers. “You know!” he shouted. “I
bet
you know. You know every damn thing, don’t you? You have all along. Here I am going half out of my head wanting to know and you sit there and watch me squirm!”
“Hip! Hip, my arms—”
He squeezed them tighter, shook her. “You
do
know, don’t you? All about me?”
“Let me go. Please let me go. Oh, Hip, you don’t know what you’re doing!”
He flung her back on the bed. She drew up her legs, turned on her side, propped up on one elbow and, through tears, incredible tears, tears which didn’t belong to any Janie he had yet seen, she looked up at him. She held her bruised forearm, flexed her free hand. “You don’t know,” she choked, “what you’re...” And then she was quiet, panting, sending, through those impossible tears, some great, tortured, thwarted message which he could not read.
Slowly he knelt beside the bed. “Ah, Janie. Janie.”
Her lips twitched. It could hardly have been a smile but it wanted to be. She touched his hair. “It’s all right,” she breathed.
She let her head fall to the pillow and closed her eyes. He curled his legs under him, sat on the floor, put his arms on the bed and rested his cheek on them.
She said, with her eyes closed, “I understand, Hip; I do understand. I want to help, I want to go on helping.”
“No you don’t,” he said, not bitterly, but from the depths of an emotion something like grief.
He could tell—perhaps it was her breath—that he had started the tears again. He said, “You know about me. You know everything I’m looking for.” It sounded like accusation and he was sorry. He meant it only to express his reasoning. But there wasn’t any other way to say it. “Don’t you?’
Still keeping her eyes closed, she nodded.
“Well then.”
He got up heavily and went back to his chair.
When she wants something out of me
, he thought viciously,
she just sits and waits for it
. He slumped into the chair and looked at her. She had not moved. He made a conscious effort and wrung the bitterness from his thought, leaving only the content, the advice. He waited.
She sighed then and sat up. At sight of her rumpled hair and flushed cheeks, he felt a surge of tenderness. Sternly he put it down.
She said, “You have to take my word. You’ll have to trust me, Hip.”
Slowly he shook his head. She dropped her eyes, put he hands together. She raised one, touched her eye with the back of her wrist.
She said, “That piece of cable.”
The tubing lay on the floor where he had dropped it. He picked it up. “What about it?”
“When was the first time you remembered you had it—remembered it was yours?”
He thought. “The house. When I went to the house, asking.”
“No, “she said,” I don’t mean that. I mean, after you were sick.”
“Oh.” He closed his eyes briefly, frowned. “The window. The time I remembered the window, breaking it. I remembered that and then it... oh!” he said abruptly. “You put it in my hand.”
“That’s right. And for eight days I’d been putting it in your hand. I put it in your shoe, once. On your plate. In the soap dish. Once I stuck your toothbrush inside it. Every day, half a dozen times a day—eight days, Hip!”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t understand! Oh, I can’t blame you.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, I don’t believe you.”
At last she looked at him; when she did he realized how rare it was for him to be with her without her eyes on his face. “Truly,” she said intensely. “Truly, Hip. That’s the way it was.”
He nodded reluctantly. “All right. So that’s the way it was. What has that to do with—”
“Wait,” she begged. “You’ll see... now, every time you touched the bit of cable, you refused to admit it existed. You’d let it roll right out of your hand and you wouldn’t see it fall to the floor. You’d step on it with your bare feet and not even feel it. Once it was in your food, Hip; you picked it up with a forkful of lima beans, you put the end of it in your mouth, and then just let it slip away; you didn’t know it was there!”
“Oc—” he said with an effort, then, “occlusion. That’s what Bromfield called it.”
Who was Bromfield?
But it escaped him; Janie was talking.
“That’s right. Now listen carefully. When the time came for the occlusion to vanish, it did; and there you stood with the cable in your hand, knowing it was real. But nothing I could do beforehand could make that happen until it was ready to happen!”