Pilgrimage
The First Book of
the People
Zenna Henderson
1961
I
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.