Lone made Janie read him the letter four times in a three-week period, and each reading seemed to add a fresh element to the yeasty seething inside him. Much of this happened silently; for some of it he asked help.
He had believed that Prodd was his only contact with anything outside himself and that the children were merely fellow occupants of a slag dump at the edge of mankind. The loss of Prodd—and he knew with unshakeable certainty that he would never see the old man again—was the loss of life itself. At the very least, it was the loss of everything conscious, directed, cooperative; everything above and beyond what a vegetable could do by way of living.
‘Ask Baby what is a friend.’
‘He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.’
But then, Prodd and his wife had shucked him off when he was in the way, after all those years, and that meant they were ready to do it the first year and the second and the fifth—all the time, any time. You can’t say you’re a part of anything, anybody, that feels free to do that to you. But friends… maybe they just didn’t like him for a while, maybe they loved him all the way through.
‘Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love.’
‘He says only if you love yourself.’
His bench-mark, his goal-point, had for years been that thing which happened to him on the bank of the pool. He had to understand that. If he could understand that, he was sure he could understand everything. Because for a second there was this other, and himself, and a flow between them without guards or screens or barriers—no language to stumble over, no ideas to misunderstand, nothing at all but a merging.
What had he been then? What was it Janie had said?
Idiot. An idiot.
An idiot, she had said, was a grown person who could hear only babies’ silent speech. Then—what was the creature with whom he had merged on that terrible day?
‘Ask Baby what is a grown person who can talk like the babies.’
‘He says, an innocent.’
He had been an idiot who could hear the soundless murmur. She had been an innocent who, as an adult, could speak it.
‘Ask Baby what if an idiot and an innocent are close together.’
‘He says when they so much as touched, the innocent would stop being an innocent and the idiot would stop being an idiot.’
He thought, An innocent is the most beautiful thing there can be. Immediately he demanded of himself, What’s so beautiful about an innocent? And the answer, for once almost as swift as Baby’s: It’s the waiting that’s beautiful.
Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.
Lone was suddenly deep-down glad. For if this was true, he had made something, rather than destroyed something… and when he had lost it, the pain of the loss was justified. When he had lost the Prodds the pain wasn’t worth it.
What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to… Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous, different?
‘Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are and what they belong to.’
‘He says, every kind.’
‘What kind,’ Lone whispered, ‘am I, then?’
A full minute later he yelled, ‘What kind?’
‘Shut up a while. He doesn’t have a way to say it… uh… Here. He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.’
‘I belong. I belong. Part of you, part of you and you too.’
‘The head, silly.’
Lone thought his heart was going to burst. He looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and—the head to direct it.
‘And we’ll grow, Baby. We just got born!’
‘He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically anything but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot.’
So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.
Part Two: Baby is Three
I finally got in to see this Stern. He wasn’t an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. ‘Sit over there, Sonny.’
I stood where I was until he looked up again. Then I said, ‘ Look, if a midget walks in here, what do you say—sit over there, Shorty?’
He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, ‘but how am I supposed to know you don’t want to be called Sonny?’
That was better, but I was still mad. ‘I’m fifteen and I don’t have to like it. Don’t rub my nose in it.’
He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Gerard.’
‘First or last?’
‘Both,’ I said.
‘Is that the truth?’
I said, ‘No. And don’t ask me where I live either.’
He put down his pencil. ‘We’re not going to get very far this way.’
‘That’s up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn’t be here. Are you going to let that stop you?’
‘Well, no, but—‘
‘So what else is bothering you? How you’re going to get paid?’ I took out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. ‘That’s so you won’t have to bill me. You keep track of it. Tell me when it’s used up and I’ll give you more. So you don’t need my address. Wait,’ I said, when he reached towards the money. ‘Let it lay there. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along.’
He folded his hands. ‘I don’t do business this way, Son—I mean, Gerard.’
‘Gerry,’ I told him. ‘You do, if you do business with me.’
‘You make things difficult, don’t you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?’
‘I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier underthings with Sudso.’ I leaned forward. ‘This time it’s the truth.’
‘All right,’ he said.
I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn’t say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead.
‘Before we start—if we start,’ I said, ‘I got to know something. The things I say to you—what comes out while you’re working on me—is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said.
‘No matter what?’
‘No matter what.’
I watched him when he said it. I believed him.
‘Pick up your money,’ I said. ‘You’re on.’
He didn’t do it. He said, ‘As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can’t buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can’t do that, it’s useless. You can’t walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it.’
I said tiredly, ‘I didn’t get you out of the phone book and I’m not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. ‘Winnowed, did you say? Just how?’