I sat there for a long time. The fire went out. I went and walked up the beach by the foam line, till I saw her sitting on a rock over the tide pools at the foot of the northern cliffs.
Her nose was all red, and her legs were covered with goose pimples and looked very white and thin against the barnacle-rough rock.
“There’s a crab,” she said, “under the big anemone.”
We looked into the tide pool a while. I said, “You must be starving, I am.” And we walked back along the foam line and built up the fire, and pulled on our jeans, and ate some lunch. Not very much, this time. We didn’t talk. Neither of us knew what to say any more. There were ten thousand things going on in my head, but I couldn’t say any of them.
We started home right after lunch.
About at the summit of the Coast Range, I found the one thing I thought needed saying, and said it. I said, “You know, it’s different for a man.”
“Is it?” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know. You have to decide.”
Then my anger came out and I said, “Decide what? You’ve already decided.”
She glanced at me. She had that remote look. She didn’t say anything.
The anger took over entirely, and I said, “I guess that’s always the woman’s privilege, isn’t it?” in this sneering, bitter voice.
“People make the real choices together,” she said. Her voice was much lower and smaller than usual. She started blinking and looked away, as if she was watching the scenery.
I went on driving, watching the road. We drove seventy miles without saying anything. At her house she said, “Good-bye, Owen,” in the same small voice, and got out, and went into the house.
I remember that. But nothing after that. Nothing until the following Tuesday.
It’s called specific amnesia, and is quite common following accidents, severe injuries, childbirth, etc. So I can’t tell you what I did. My guess is that, being extremely upset, and since it was only about four-thirty, I didn’t want to go home, but just went on driving around, probably so that I could be alone and think.
There’s a steep grade between two suburban towns west of the city. I don’t know why I was out there, I guess I was just taking whatever road turned up; but anyhow, apparently what I did was take a turn too fast on that grade.
A car behind me saw the car go off the edge and turn over, and they got help. Ambulance and all that, because I was out cold. Concussion, also dislocated a shoulder and had a whole lot of really weird bruises that came out green. I was lucky, as they say, since the car was totalled.
By the time I came to, they had moved me into a hospital in the city, and after another day I could go home.
I don’t remember anything about either hospital, except my mother sitting there and telling me that Jason had called twice, and that Natalie Field had come over. “What a nice girl,” my mother said. It all seemed perfectly natural but quite uninteresting to me. The fog had really and truly closed in. I was so alone in it, I didn’t know there was anything or anybody else out there. Nothing mattered. It was the concussion, of course. But not only that.
The whole thing was very hard on my father. First, of course, when some strange voice calls up and says, “We have your son here in the hospital with severe concussion and possibly brain damage,” that’s a really great thing to have happen in the middle of the Saturday afternoon TV ball game. Then there’s the relief and thankfulness when the kid’s going to be OK. Then he has to pay for having the wreck towed. And finds out the car is a total loss. And his wife says, “Who cares about the car so long as Owen is all right!” and bursts into tears. He does care about the car, but how can he admit it even to himself after that? And how can he admit that he’s terribly humiliated by the fact that his son can’t even drive around a corner without falling off? He has to be grateful to the son for not getting killed. And he is. Only there are moments when he’d like to kill the son himself. So he comes in and tells him not to worry, the car was fully insured, no problem. Not to worry. Only getting insurance for a while, after this, is going to be terribly expensive, so maybe the best thing is not to try to replace the car right away. And the son lies there and says, “Yeah, sure, that’s fine.”
I had to stick around home for a couple of weeks because our doctor said so long as there was some vision impairment it would be wiser. It was very dull because I couldn’t even read, because of seeing double, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to read.
Natalie came by once, on the Friday after the accident I think. Mother came upstairs, and I said I didn’t want to see anybody. Natalie didn’t come back. Jason and Mike came by on the weekend and sat around and told some jokes. They were disappointed because I couldn’t tell them anything about the accident.
When I went back to school, it was no trouble to avoid Natalie. It had never really been easy to meet her, since she had to run such a tight schedule. All I had to do was go in late for lunch and not be at the bus stop at two-thirty, and I never saw her at all.
I should be able to explain to you why I did that, why I didn’t want to see her, but I can’t. Parts of it are obvious, I guess. I was ashamed and embarrassed and so on. I was also resentful and frustrated and so on. But those are all reasons and feelings, and I wasn’t reasoning or feeling anything much at all. Things just didn’t seem to matter very much. The main thing seemed to be to avoid pain. There wasn’t any use trying to be in touch. I was alone. I’d always been alone. For a while with her I’d been able to pretend that I wasn’t, but I was, and finally I’d proved it even to her, forced her to turn her back on me like all the others. And it didn’t really matter. If I was alone, OK, it was better to accept it, not pretend. I was a kind of person that just does not fit into this kind of society. To expect anybody to like me was stupid. What should they like me for? My big brain? My big, smart brain with the concussion? Nobody likes brains. Brains are very ugly things. Some people like them fried in butter, but hardly any Americans do.
The only place for me, actually, was on Thorn. Thorn didn’t have much government in the usual sense, but they had some institutions people could join if they liked; one of them was called the Scholary. It was built part way up one of the highest mountains, out in the country. It had a huge library, and laboratories and basic science equipment and lots of rooms and studies. People could go there and take classes or teach classes, however it worked out best, and work on research alone or in teams, as they preferred. At night they all met, if they felt like it, in a big hall with several fireplaces, and talked about genetics and history and sleep research and polymers and the age of the Universe. If you didn’t like the conversation at one fireplace, you could go to another one. The nights are always cold, on Thorn. There’s no fog there up on the mountainside, but the wind always blows.
But Thorn was way behind me now. I’d never go back there. No way home. I was finally able to be realistic about myself. There was school to finish, and then next year at State, and the next year and the next and so on. I could hack it. I was actually much stronger than I’d thought. Too strong. Man of steel. Pulled practically undamaged from a totally wrecked car. I could see no particular reason for going on and finishing school and going to State and getting a job and living fifty more years, but that seemed to be the program. A man of steel does what he is programmed to do.
I’m not describing this well at all. What I keep leaving out, what I don’t know how to say, what I don’t even want to think about, is that it was horrible. The whole time, for weeks, every morning when I woke up, every night in bed, I wanted to cry, because I couldn’t stand it. Only I could stand it, and I couldn’t cry. There wasn’t anything to cry about.