Pilgrimage

The First Book of

the People

Zenna Henderson

THE Window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior. "Look,' the thought, "I still have a face." She tilted her head and watched the wan light slide along the clean soft line of her cheek. There was no color except darkness for the wide eyes, the crisp turn of short cuffs above her ears and the curve of her brows-all were an out-of-focus print against the outside darkness. "That's what I look like to people," she thought impersonally. "My outside is intact-an eggshell sucked of life."

The figure in the seat next to her stirred.

"Awake, deary?" The plump face beamed in the dusk. "Must have had a good nap, "You've been so quiet ever since I got on. Here, let me turn on the reading light." She fumbled above her. "I think these lights are cunning. How'd they get them to point just in the right place?" The light came on and Lea winced away from it. "Bright, isn't it?" The elderly face creased into mirth. "Reminds me of when I was a youngster and we came in out of the dark and lighted a coal-oil lamp. It always made me squint like that.

By the time I was your age, though, we had electricity. But I got my first two before we got electricity. I married at seventeen and the two of them came along about as quick as they could. You can't be much more than twenty-two or three. Lordee! I had four by then and buried another. Here, I've got pictures of my grandbabies. I'm just coming back from seeing the newest one. That's Jennie's latest. A little girl after three boys. You remind me of her a little, your eyes being dark and the color your hair is. She wears hers longer but it has that same kinda red tinge to it." She fumbled in her bag. Lea felt as though words were washing over her like a warm frothy flood. She automatically took the bulging billfold the woman tendered her and watched unseeingly as the glassine windows flipped. "... and this is Arthur and Jane.

Ah, there's Jennie. Here, take a good look and see if she doesn't look like you."

Lea took a deep breath and came back from a long painful distance. She stared down at the billfold.

"Well?" The face beamed at her expectantly.

"She's-" Lea's voice didn't work. She swallowed dryly

"She's pretty."

"Yes, she is," the woman smiled. "Don't you think she looks a little like you, though?"

"A little-" Her repetition of the sentence died, but the woman took it for an answer.

"Go on, look through the others and see which one of her kids you think's the cutest."

Lea mechanically flipped the other windows, then sat staring down into her lap.

"Well, which one did you pick?" The woman leaned over.

"Well!" She drew an indignant breath. "That's my driver's license! I didn't say snoop!" The billfold was snatched away! and the reading light snapped off. There was a good deal of flouncing and muttering from the adjoining seat before quiet descended.

The hum of the bus was hypnotic and Lea sank back into her apathy, except for a tiny point of discomfort that kept jabbing her consciousness. The next stop she'd have to do something. Her ticket went no farther. Then what? Another decision to make. And all she wanted was nothing-nothing. And all she had was nothing-nothing. Why did she have to do anything? Why couldn't she just not-? She leaned her forehead against the glass, dissolving the nebulous reflection of herself, and stared into the darkness.

Helpless against habit, she began to fit her aching thoughts hack into the old ruts, the old footprints leading to complete futility-leading into the dark nothingness. She caught her breath and fought against the horrifying-threatening . . .

All the lights in the bus flicked on and there was a sleepy stirring murmur. The scattered lights of the outskirts of town slid past the slowing bus.

It was a small town. Lea couldn't even remember the name of it. She didn't even know which way she turned when she went out the station door. She walked away from the bus depot, her feet swift and silent on the cracked sidewalk, her body appreciating the swinging rhythm of the walk after the long hours of inactivity. Her mind was still circling blindly, unnoticing, uncaring, unconcerned.

The business district died out thinly and Lea was walking up an incline. The walk leveled and after a while she wavered into a railing. She clutched at it, waiting for a faintness to go away. She looked out and down into darkness. "'It's a bridge!" she thought. "Over a river." Gladness flared up in her. "It's the answer," she exulted. "This is it. After this-nothing!" She leaned her elbows on the railing, framing her chin and cheeks with her hands, her eyes on the darkness below, a darkness so complete that not even a ripple caught a glow from the bridge lights.

The familiar, so reasonable voice was speaking again. Pain like this should be let go of. Just a momentary discomfort and it ends. No more breathing, no more thinking, no aching, no blind longing for anything. Lea moved along the walk, her hand brushing the railing. "I can stand it now," she thought,

"Now that I know there is an end. I can stand to live a minute or so longer-to say good-by." Her shoulders shook and she felt the choke of laughter in her throat. Good-by? To whom? Who'd even notice she was gone? One ripple stilled in all a stormy sea. Let the quiet water take her breathing. Let its impersonal kindness hide her-dissolve her-so no one would ever be able to sigh and say, That was Lea.

Oh, blessed water!

There was no reason not to. She found herself defending her action as though someone had questioned it. "Look," she thought. "I've told you so many times. There's no reason to go on. I could stand it when futility wrapped around me occasionally, but don't you remember? Remember the morning I sat there dressing, one shoe off and one shoe on, and couldn't think of one good valid reason why I should put the other shoe on? Not one reason! To finish dressing? Why? Because I had to work? Why? To earn a living? Why? To get something to eat? Why? To keep from starving to death? Why? because you have to live! Why? Why? Why!

"And there were no answers. And I sat there until the grayness dissolved from around me as it did on lesser occasions. But then-" Lea's hands clutched each other and twisted painfully.

"Remember what came then? The distorted sky wrenched open and gushed forth all the horror of a meaningless mindless universe-a reasonless existence that insisted on running on like a ! faceless clock-a menacing nothingness that snagged the little thread of reason I was hanging onto and unraveled it and unraveled it." Lea shuddered and her lips tightened with the effort to regain her composure. "That was only the beginning.

"So after that the depths of futility became a refuge instead of something to run from, its negativeness almost comfortable in contrast to the positive horror of what living has become. But I can't take either one any more." She sagged against the railing. "And I don't have to." She pushed herself upright and swallowed a sudden dry nausea. "The middle will be deeper," she thought. "Deep, swift, quiet, carrying me out of this intolerable-"

And as she walked she heard a small cry somewhere in the lostness inside her. "But I could have loved living so much! Why have I come to this pass?"

Shhh! the darkness said to the little voice. Shhh! Don't bother to think. It hurts. Haven't you found it hurts? You need never think again or speak again or breathe again past this next inhalation ....

Lea's lungs filled slowly. The last breath! She started to slide across the concrete bridge railing into the darkness-into finishedness-into The End.

"You don't really want to." The laughing voice caught her like a splash of water across her face.

"Besides, even if you did, you couldn't here. Maybe break a leg, but that's all.

"Break a leg?" Lea's voice was dazed and, inside, something broke and cried in disappointment, "I've spoken again!"

"Sure." Strong hands pulled her away from the railing and nudged her to a seat in a little concrete kiosk sort of thing.

"You must be very new here, like on the nine-thirty bus tonight."

"Nine-thirty bus tonight," Lea echoed flatly.

" 'Cause if you'd been here by daylight you'd know this bridge is a snare and a delusion as far as water goes. You couldn't drown a gnat in the river here. It's dammed up above. Sand and tamarisks here, that's all. Besides you don't want to die, especially with a lovely coat like that-almost new!"

"'Want to die," Lea echoed distantly. Then suddenly she jerked away from the gentle hands and twisted away from the encircling arm.

"I do want to die! Go away!" Her voice sharpened as she spoke and she almost spat the last word.

"But I told you!" The dim glow from the nearest light of the necklace of lights that pearled the bridge shone on a smiling girl-face, not much older than Lea's own. "You'd goof it up good if you tried to commit suicide here. Probably lie down there in the sand all night, maybe with a sharp stub of a tamarisk stuck through your shoulder and your broken leg hurting like mad. And tomorrow the ants would find you, and the flies-the big blowfly kind. Blood attracts them, you know. Your blood, spilling onto the sand."

Lea hid her face, her fingernails cutting into her hairline with the violence of the gesture. This-this creature had no business peeling the oozing bleeding scab off, she thought. It's so easy to think of lumping into darkness-into nothingness, but not to think of blowflies and blood-your own blood.

"Besides-" the arm was around her again, gently leading her back to the bench, "you can't want to die and miss out on everything."

"Everything is nothing," Lea gasped, grabbing for the comfort of a well-worn groove. "It's nothing but gray chalk writing gray words on a gray sky in a high wind. There's nothing! There's nothing !"

"You must have used that carefully rounded sentence often and often to have driven yourself such a long way into darkness," the voice said, unsmiling now. "But you must come back, " you know, back to wanting to live."

"No, no!" Lea moaned, twisting. "Let me go!'"

"I can't." The voice was soft, the hands firm. "The Power sent me by on purpose. You can't return to the Presence with your life all unspent. But you're not hearing me, are you? Let me tell you.

"Your name is Lea Holmes. Mine, by the way, is Karen. You left your home in Clivedale two days ago.

You bought a ticket for as far as your money would reach. You haven't eaten in two days. You're not even quite sure what state you're in, except the state of utter despair and exhaustion-right?"

"How-how did you know?" Lea felt a long-dead something stir inside her, but it died again under the flat monotone of her voice. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. You don't know anything about it!" A sick anger fluttered in her empty stomach. "'You don't know what it's like to have your nose pressed to a blank wall and still have to walk and walk, day after day, with no way to get off the treadmill-no way to break through the wall-nothing, nothing, nothing! Not even an echo! Nothing!"

She snatched herself away from Karen's hands and, in a mad flurry of motion, scraped her way across the concrete railing and flung herself over into the darkness.

Endlessly tumbling-endlessly turning-slowly, slowly. Did it take so long to die? Softly the sand received her.

"You see," Karen said, shifting in the sand to cradle Lea's head on her lap. "I can't let you do it."

"But-I-I-jumped!" Lea's hands spatted sideways into the sand, and she looked up to where the lights of the passing cars ran like sticks along a picket fence.

"Yes, you did." Karen laughed a warm little laugh. "See, Lea, there is some wonder left in the world.

Not everything is bogged down in hopelessness. What's that other quote you've been using for an anesthesia?"

Lea turned her head fretfully and sat up. "Leave me alone."

"What was that other quote?" Karen's voice was demanding now.

" 'There is for me no wonder more,' " Lea whispered into her hands, " 'Except to wonder where my wonder went, And why my wonder all is spent-' " Hot tears stung her eyes but could not fall. " '-no wonder more-' " The big emptiness that was always waiting, stretched and stretched, distorting-"No wonder?" Karen broke the bubble with her tender laughter. "Oh, Lea, if only I had the time! No wonder, indeed! But I've got to go. The most incredibly wonderful-" There was a brief silence and the cars shh-ed by overhead, busily, busily. "Look!" Karen took Lea's hands. "You don't care what happens to you any more, do you?"

"No!" Lea said dully, but a faint voice murmured protest somewhere behind the dullness.

"You feel that life is unlivable, don't you?" Karen persisted.

"That nothing could be worse?"

"Nothing," Lea said dully, squelching the murmur.

"Then listen." Karen hunched closer to her in the dark. "I'll take you with me. I really shouldn't, especially right now, but they'll understand. I'll take you along and then-then-if when it's all over you still feel there's no wonder left in the world, I'll take you to a much more efficient suicide-type place and push you over!"