Bright Segment (47 page)

It may be that I was better equipped than the next guy to adjust to this, having lived for some eight years with the mild notoriety of being the boy who never scored less than 88 on the Rhine cards. But personally, constitutionally, I never was meant to be different from other people. What I mean is that my useless ability (I don’t regard it as a talent and I won’t call it a gift) didn’t have to make any difference to anyone. I could be just as good a short-order cook, just as bad a ticket-taker, as anyone else. But I was never given the chance of living like a human being.

I could stick around the parapsychology laboratories, earning a living like an ape in the zoo (and not much of a living at that; even in this enlightened era, there isn’t a rich parapsychologist), or I could
go out and get a job. And the way my dark past followed me, you’d think I was wearing a Flying Saucer for a halo. “Oh, yes—you’re the mind-reading fellow.” You know what that can do to your prospects?

Usually I didn’t get the job. Once I was hired though they knew. Twice I landed jobs and they found out later. Each time there was someone who went to the boss, seniority and all, and said, “Look, it’s him or me.” And guess who got the pink slip.

Would you work every day with somebody who could read your mind? Who hasn’t got secrets? Whose life really is an open book? I can tell you, I wouldn’t work next to someone like that, yet I’m about as inoffensive as they come. And what was driving me out of my head—and I was two-thirds out when I met Doris and then Frozen Face—was that everyone thought I could read minds and I
can’t!

But Doris, who had heard of me even before she met me, never mentioned it. First she was nice to be with, and then I had to be with her, and then I came to a big, fat, soul-searching decision and confessed All to her one night, and she kissed me on the end of the nose and said she’d known about it all along and it didn’t matter; and if I said I couldn’t read minds but was only good at guessing Rhine cards, why, she believed me; and if I ever did learn to read minds, she wished I’d hurry up and read hers, because she was getting awfully impatient. After that, I’d have married her if she looked like a gila monster. Actually she looked like the Tenniel Alice-in-Wonderland, only with curly hair.

When I came up for breath from that interchange, I liked people a hell of a lot more than I ever had before. I guess that’s another way of saying I liked myself some, at last.

Then along came the letter from Frozen Face, and Twink came up, and the accident happened.

And after the accident, the nightmare ability to dip down into the living silence that was Twink now, an unstirring something that couldn’t see or speak or hear, something that was dreadfully hurt and just hovering, barely alive. My kid. And after about seven weeks, a movement, a weak tensing. It was the faintest possible echo of fear, and always a retreat from it that shoved the little thing close to dying
again. Then there would be the silence again, and the stirring, and the fear and retreat.

Why I tried, how I thought to try, I don’t know, but I did what I could each time to reassure her. I would tense till I ached and say,
It’s all right, honey, don’t be afraid, it’s all over now
. And I hoped it helped her, and then I thought it did, and then one night I knew it did, because I saw the tension coming and stopped it, and there was a different kind of silence, like sleeping, not like coma.

After that, she got better fast, and I took hold of the slim hope that she might one day see and run and climb like other kids, hear music, go to school …

She had to, she
had
to, or I was a murderer. I was worse than that. Your out-and-out murderer knows what he’s doing. More likely than not, he does it to get something, for profit.

But me—want to know what I did?

We’d been out for a drive in our shiny new car—well, it was second-hand, but the newest one I’d ever owned—and I wanted to get a couple of cartons of cigarettes before we crossed the state line, to save—guess!—a few cents tax. It was a six-lane road, three each way. I was in my middle lane.

Doris pointed at a big neon sign. “There’s a place!”

I hauled the wheel over and shot straight across the right-hand lane. The truck just nipped the rear fender and over we went.

For six cents. Come to think of it, I never did buy the cigarettes, so I can’t even claim that.

There’s your superman, “wild talents” and all. A goddam highway boob.

Doris and Twink went to the hospital, bleeding and bleeding, then lying for days, waxy, doll-like, and came out, back to me, saying it wasn’t my fault it wasn’t my fault … God! And Twink as good as dead.

There was a reception committee waiting for us—two big names in medicine, McClintock and Zein—and, of course, Champlain. Busy boy. He wouldn’t miss this for the world. But, thank heavens, no press.

“Come on, I want to talk to you,” said Champlain, big and breezy as ever, looking like the world’s least likely suspect as a parapsychologist. I never did like Champlain, but he was the only person in the world besides Doris I could really talk to. At the moment, I wished I hadn’t ever talked to him. Especially about Twink. But he knew and that was that.

He muscled me away from Doris and Twink.

“No!” cried Doris, and Twink was frightened.

“Now don’t you worry, little lady; he’ll be back with you before we do a thing,” he called heartily, and there I was going one way and Doris and Twink the other. What could I do?

He pushed me through a door and I had the choice of sitting in a big armchair or falling down, the way he rushed me. He kicked the door shut.

“Here’s some medicine.” He got a bottle out of the top desk drawer. “McClintock let me see where he put it, the fool.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Come on now.”

“Get away from me,” I said, and meant it. Inside myself, I turned to admire that tone, harsh and rough and completely decisive. I’d always thought only movie gangsters could make a speech like that sound so real. And while I was backing off from myself, admiring. I suddenly sobbed and swore and swore and sobbed. It was pretty disgusting.

“Wow,” said Champlain. He put the bottle down and got some pills. He filled a paper cup with ice-water and came over to me. “Take these.”

“I don’t want any.”

“You’ll take’m or I’ll hold your nose and ram ’em down your neck with a stick!”

I took them and the water. As I keep saying, I’m no superman. “What are they?”

“Dexamyl. Brighten you up, smooth you down all at once. Now tell me what’s the matter.”

I said it, said what I hadn’t put in words before. “Twink’s going to die. I want her to.”

“The two best specialists in the world say no.”

“Let her die! She’s going out of here as a basket case if you don’t! I know. I know better’n anybody. Blind. Deaf. Paralyzed. All she can do is sort of flop. Let her die!”

“Don’t be so goddam selfish.”

A kick in the face would have shocked me a good deal less. I just gawked at him.

“Sure, selfish,” he repeated. “You pulled a little bobble that anybody might have done and your wife won’t blame you for it. To you, it’s become a big, important bobble because you never were involved in anything important before. The only way you can prove it’s important is to suffer an important punishment. The worst thing you can think of is to have Twink dead. The next worse is to have her go through life the way she is now. You want one of those things.”

I called him something.

“Sure I am,” he agreed. “Absolutely. In the eyes of the guy who’s wrong, the guy who’s right is always just what you said.”

I used another one.

“That, too,” he said, and beamed.

I put up my hands and let them fall. “What do you want me to do? What are you picking on me for?”

He came over and sat sideways on the broad arm of the chair. “I want you to get in there and help us. Help Twink.”

“I’d be in the way.”

He hit me on the shoulderblade. It was done as a sort of friendly gesture, but it was done hard. “You can get through to her, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She’s been hurt. Badly. This is going to hurt her, too—a whole lot. She may not want to go through with it.”

“She has a choice?”

“Every patient has a choice. Other things being equal, they live or they don’t. If they’ve been hurt and they see more pain coming, they might not want to go through with it.”

“I still don’t see how I—”

“Would you like to keep wondering whether you could have
saved her life?”

“She’s going to die, anyway.”

He got up and stood in front of me with his big fists on his hips, glaring at me silently until I had to raise my face. He held me with his eyes until I couldn’t stand it and then he said, rough and gentle like a tiger purring, “You damn near killed her once and now you want to finish the job. That it?”

“All right, all
right!”
I shouted. “I’ll do
anything!”

“Good!” And suddenly he dropped on one knee and took both of my hands in both of his. It was a very surprising thing for him to do and strangely effective. I could feel currents of his immense vitality from those big hands; it was as if my ego, wrinkled like a prune, was swelling up sleek and healthy.

He said, softly and with deep earnestness, “All you’ve got to do is make her want to live. You’ve got to be with her and wait for her and help her along and keep her convinced that no matter what happens, no matter how it hurts, it’s worth it because she’s going to live.”

“All right,” I whispered.

“She’s only a little girl. She takes things just the way she finds them and she doesn’t make allowances. If something looks like fear to her, or anger, it is that. If something looks like love, or wisdom, or strength, that’s just how she’ll take it. Be strong and wise for her.”

“Me?”

He got up. “You.” He went to the desk and got the bottle and poured a paper cup full. He held it out to me.

I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands and stood up. “No thanks. I don’t need it,” I told him.

He twitched his eyebrows and drank the liquor himself and we went out.

They put me through the scrub room just as if I’d been a surgeon—gloves, mask and all—and then we went into the operating theater. Doris was already there, all fixed up, too. I went and kissed her right through the mask and she smiled.

I said, “You look lovely in white,” and wondered where that had come from; and “Hi-i, Twink.”

Somewhere in the blindness, in the confines of paralysis, there was a shadow of fear and, down inside that, a warm little response. And the fear evaporated. I looked up and met Champlain’s eyes. That unnatural feeling under my mask was, to my complete astonishment, a grin. I nodded and he winked back and said, “I guess you can go ahead, Mac.”

Now listen, Twink, I said with all my heart, I love you and I’m here, I’m right here with you no matter what happens. Something’s going to happen, something big, and it’s going to change everything for you. Some of it won’t be … won’t be nice. But they have to do it. For you, Twink. Even when it isn’t nice, it’s for you. You’ve got to let them. You’ve got to help them. They love you, but I love you most of all. You mustn’t go away. If it hurts you too much, you just tell me and I’ll make them stop.

Then something was the matter, very much the matter. Shaken, I crowded close and tried to see what McClintock was doing. “Back off a little,” he growled.

“Back off, my eyeball. What the hell are you winding around her head?”

Champlain barked at me, “Cut it out! The one thing you don’t get is angry!”

Doris made a little sound. I spun to her. She was smiling. No, she wasn’t. Her eyes were all screwed up. A tear came out.

“Doris!”

Her face relaxed instantly, as if the nerves had been cut. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “I’m all right,” she said.

There was a calling, a calling, a calling.

All right, Twink, I’m here. I didn’t go away. I’m right here, honey. If you want them to stop, you just say so.

A pause, then a tremulous questioning.

Yes, yes, I said, I’m here. Every single second. I’m not going away. Again the pause and then, like a flicker of light, a hot, glad little response.

Doris moaned, almost a whisper. I shot a glance at her, then at Champlain.

“You want that stopped?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I promised her she could.”

Doris’s hand moved. I took it. It was wet. She squeezed mine, hard.

Something from Twink, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Except the accident. Yes, it was like the accident—and
stop!
STOP!

“Stop!” I gasped. “Stop it!”

McClintock went right on working as if I hadn’t made a sound. The other specialist, Zein, said to Champlain as if I couldn’t hear, “Do we have to stand for this?”

“You’re damn right you do,” said Champlain.

Working, McClintock asked, “Stop? What do you mean, stop?”

Zein mumbled something to him. McClintock nodded and a nurse came flying across the room with a tray of hypodermics. McClintock used a number of them.

Twink went quiet. For a moment, I thought I would faint from relief.

All right, honey? All right? I made them stop. Twinkie. Is it all right?

Twink!

Twink!

I made some sort of noise, I don’t know what. Champlain’s hands were on my shoulders, grinding down like two oversized C-clamps. I shrugged off one, knocked off the other with my wrist. “Twink!” I shouted. Then Doris screamed shrilly and Twink vibrated like a gong.

“That won’t do,” I snapped, gesturing with my head.

“Want her out?”

“Don’t you dare,” said Doris.

“Yes. Now.”

McClintock began, “Who’s—” but Champlain said, “Shut up. Take her out.”

After that, it went very quickly.

Just a little more, Twink, and it’ll be all over and you’ll be warm and comfy and you can sleep. And I’ll be near while you sleep and with you when you wake up.

I tried to stop McClintock once more, when he took the little arm that had been immobilized across Twink’s chest for so long and twisted it brutally up and back. But this time Champlain was on McClintock’s side and he was right; the pain stopped almost instantly.