More Than Human (16 page)

He awoke, and it was too dark. He did not know where he was. The face was there, wide-browed, sallow, with its thick lenses and its pointed chin. Wordlessly, he roared at it and it smiled at him. When he realized that the face was in his mind and not in the room, it disappeared... no; it was simply that he knew it was not there. He was filled with fury that it was not there; his brain was fairly melting with rage.
Yes, but who is he?
he asked, and answered, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know...” and his voice became a moan, softer and softer and softer until it was gone. He inhaled deeply and then something inside him slipped and fell apart and he began to cry. Someone took his hand, took his other hand, held them together; it was the girl; she’d heard him, she’d come. He was not alone.
       Not alone... it made him cry harder, bitterly. He held her wrists as she bent over him, looked up through darkness at her face and her hair and he wept.
       She stayed with him until he was finished and for as long afterwards as he held her hand. When he released it he was asleep, and she drew the blanket up to his chin and tiptoed out.

In the morning he sat on the edge of the bed, watching the steam from his coffee spread and fade in the sunlight, and when she put the eggs before him he looked up at her. His mouth quivered. She stood before him, waiting.
       At last he said, “Have you had your breakfast yet?”
       Something was kindled in her eyes. She shook her head.
       He looked down at the plate, puzzling something out. Finally he pushed it away from him a fraction of an inch and stood up. “You have this,” he said. “I’ll fix some more.”
       He had seen her smile but he had not noticed it before. Now, it was as if the warmth of all of them was put together for this one. She sat down and ate. He fried his eggs, not as well as she had done, and they were cooked before he thought of toast and the toast burned while he was eating the eggs. She did not attempt to help him in any way, even when he stared blankly at the little table, frowned and scratched his jaw. In his own time he found what he was looking for—the other cup on top of the dresser. He poured fresh coffee for her and took the other which she had not touched, for himself, and she smiled again.
       “What’s your name?” he asked her, for the very first time,
       “Janie Gerard.”
       “Oh.”
       She considered him carefully, then stretched down to the footpost of the bed where her handbag hung by its strap. She drew it towards her, opened it, and took out a short piece of metal. At first glance, it was a piece of aluminium tubing, perhaps eight inches long and oval in cross-section. But it was flexible—woven of tiny strands rather than extruded. She turned his right hand palm up, where it lay beside his coffee cup, and put the tubing into it.
       He must have seen it for he was staring down into the cup. He did not close his fingers on it. His expression did not change. At length he took a slice of toast. The piece of tubing fell, rolled over, hung on the edge of the table and dropped to the floor. He buttered his toast.

After that first shared meal there was a difference. There were many differences. Never again did he undress before her or ignore the fact that she was not eating. He began to pay for little things—bus fares, lunches, and, later, to let her precede him through doorways, to take her elbow when they crossed streets. He went to the market with her and carried the packages.
       He remembered his name; he even remembered that the “Hip” was for “Hippocrates”. He was, however, unable to remember how he came by the name, or where he had been born, or anything else about himself. She did not urge him, ask him. She simply spent her days with him, waiting. And she kept the piece of aluminium webbing in sight.
       It was beside his breakfast plate almost every morning. It would be in the bathroom, with the handle of his toothbrush thrust into it. Once he found it in his side jacket pocket where the small roll of bills appeared regularly; this one time the bills were tucked into the tubing. He pulled them out and absently let the tubing fall and Janie had to pick it up. She put it in his shoe once and when he tried to put the shoe on and could not, he tipped it out on to the floor and let it lie there. It was as if it were transparent or even invisible to him; when, as in the case of finding his money in it, he had to handle it, he did so clumsily, with inattention, rid himself of it and apparently forgot it. Janie never mentioned it. She just quietly put it in his path, time and time again, patient as a pendulum.
       His afternoons began to possess a morning and his days, a yesterday. He began to remember a bench they had used, a theatre they had attended, and he would lead the way back. She relinquished her guidance as fast as he would take it up until it was he who planned their days.
       Since he had no memory to draw on except his time with her, they were days of discovery. They had picnics and rode learningly on buses. They found another theatre and a place with swans as well as ducks.
       There was another kind of discovery too. One day he stood in the middle of the room and turned, looking at one wall after another, at the windows and the bed. “I was sick, wasn’t I?”
       And one day he stopped on the street, stared at the grim building on the other side. “I was in there.”
       And it was several days after that when he slowed, frowned, and stood gazing into a men’s furnishing shop. No—not into it. At it. At the window.
       Beside him Janie waited, watching his face.
       He raised his left hand slowly, flexed it, looked down at the curled scar on the back of his hand, the two straight ones, one long, one short, on his wrist.
       “Here,” she said. She pressed the piece of tubing into his hand.
       Without looking at it he closed his fingers, made a fist. Surprise flickered across his features and then a flash of sheer terror and something like anger. He swayed on his feet.
       “It’s all right,” said Janie softly.
       He grunted questioningly, looked at her as if she were a stranger and seemed slowly to recognize her. He opened his hand and looked carefully at the piece of metal. He tossed it, caught it. “That’s mine,” he said.
       She nodded.
       He said, “I broke that window.” He looked at it, tossed the piece of metal again, and put it in his pocket and began to walk again. He was quiet for a long time and just as they mounted the steps of their house he said, “I broke the window and they put me in that jail. And you got me out and I was sick and you brought me here till I was well again.”
       He took out his keys and opened the door, stood back to let her pass in. “What did you want to do that for?”
       “Just wanted to,” she said.

He was restless. He went to the closet and turned out the pockets of his two suit jackets and his sport coat. He crossed the room and pawed aimlessly at the dresser scarf and opened and shut drawers.
       “What is it?”
       “That thing,” he said vaguely. He wandered into and out of the bathroom. “You know, that piece of pipe, like.”
       “Oh,” she said.
       “I had it,” he muttered unhappily. He took another turn around the room and then shouldered past Janie where she sat on the bed, and reached to the night table. “Here it is!”
       He looked at it, flexed it, and sat down in the easychair. “Hate to lose that,” he said relievedly. “Had it a long time.”
       “It was in the envelope they were holding for you while you were in jail,” Janie told him.
       “Yuh. Yuh.” He twisted it between his hands, then raised it and shook it at her like some bright, thick, admonishing forefinger. “This thing—”
       She waited.
       He shook his head. “Had it a long time,” he said again. He rose, paced, sat down again. “I was looking for a guy who...
Ah!
” he growled, “I can’t remember.”
       “It’s all right,” she said gently.
       He put his head in his hands. “Damn near almost found him too,” he said in a muffled voice. “Been looking for him a long time. I’ve
always
been looking for him.”
       “Always?”
       “Well, ever since... Janie, I can’t remember again.”
       “All right.”
       “All right, all right, it isn’t all right!” He straightened and looked at her. “I’m sorry, Janie. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
       She smiled at him. He said, “Where was that cave?”
       “Cave?” she echoed.
       He waved his arms up, around. “Sort of a cave. Half cave, half log house. In the woods. Where was it?”
       “Was I there with you?”
       “No,” he said immediately. “That was before, I guess. I don’t remember.”
       “Don’t worry about it.”
       “I
do
worry about it!” he said excitedly. “I can worry about it, can’t I?” As soon as the words were out, he looked to her for forgiveness and found it. “You got to understand,” he said more quietly, “this is something I—I got to— Look,” he said, returning to exasperation, “can something be more important than anything else in the world, and you can’t even remember what it is?”
       “It happens.”
       “It’s happened to me,” he said glumly. “I don’t like it either.”
       “You’re getting yourself all worked up,” said Janie.
       “Well, sure!” he exploded. He looked around him, shook his head violently. “What is this? What am I doing here? Who are you, anyway, Janie? What are you getting out of this?”
       “I like seeing you get well.”
       “Yeah, get well,” he growled. “I should get well! I ought to be sick. Be sick and get sicker.”
       “Who told you that?” she rapped.
       “Thompson,” he barked and then slumped back, looking at her with stupid amazement on his face. In the high, cracking voice of an adolescent he whimpered, “Thompson? Who’s Thompson?”
       She shrugged and said, matter-of-factly, “The one who told you you ought to be sick, I suppose.”
       “Yeah,” he whispered, and again, in a soft-focused flood of enlightenment, “yeah-h-h-h...” He wagged the piece of mesh tubing at her. “I saw him. Thompson.” The tubing caught his eye then and he held it still, staring at it. He shook his head, closed his eyes. “I was looking for...” His voice trailed off.
       “Thompson?”
       “Nah!” he grunted. “I never wanted to see him! Yes I did,” he amended. “I wanted to beat his brains out.”
       “You did?”
       “Yeah. You see, he—he was—aw, what’s the matter with my
head?
” he cried.
       “Sh-h-h,” she soothed.
       “I can’t remember, I can’t,” he said brokenly. “It’s like... you see something rising up off the ground, you got to grab it, you jump so hard you can feel your knee-bones crack, you stretch up and get your fingers on it, just the tips of your fingers...” His chest swelled and sank. “Hang there, like forever, your fingers on it, knowing you’ll never make it, never get a grip. And then you fall, and you watch it going up and up away from you, getting smaller and smaller, and you’ll never—” He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was panting. He breathed, barely audible, “And you’ll never...”
       He clenched his fists. One of them still held the tubing and again he went through the discovery, the wonder, the puzzlement. “Had this a long time,” he said, looking at it. “Crazy. This must sound crazy to you, Janie.”
       “Oh, no.”
       “You think I’m crazy?”
       “
No
.”
       “I’m sick,” he whimpered.
       Startlingly, she laughed. She came to him and pulled him to his feet. She drew him to the bathroom and reached in and switched on the light. She pushed him inside, against the washbasin, and rapped the mirror with her knuckles. “Who’s sick?”
       He looked at the firm-fleshed, well-boned face that stared out at him, at its glossy hair and clear eyes. He turned to Janie, genuinely astonished. “I haven’t looked this good in years! Not since I was in the... Janie, was I in the Army?”
       “Were you?”
       He looked into the mirror again. “Sure don’t
look
sick,” he said, as if to himself. He touched his cheek. “Who keeps telling me I’m sick?”
       He heard Janie’s footsteps receding. He switched off the light and joined her. “I’d like to break that Thompson’s back,” he said. “Throw him right through a—”
       “What is it?”
       “Funny thing,” he said, “was going to say, through a brick wall. I was thinking it so hard I could see it, me throwing him.”
       “Perhaps you did.”
       He shook his head. “It wasn’t a wall. It was a plate glass window. I know!” he shouted. “I saw him and I was going to hit him. I saw him standing right there on the street looking at me and I yelled and jumped him and... and...” He looked down at his scarred hand. He said, amazed, “I turned right around and hauled off and hit the window instead. God.”
       He sat down weakly. “That’s what the jail was for and it was all over. Just lie there in that rotten jail, sick. Don’t eat don’t move, get sick and sicker and it’s all over.”
       “Well, it isn’t all over, is it?”
       He looked at her. “No. No, it isn’t. Thanks to you.” He looked at her eyes, her mouth. “What about you, Janie? What are you after, anyway?”
       She dropped her eyes.
       “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That must’ve sounded...” He put out a hand to her, dropped it without touching her. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me today. It’s just that... I don’t figure you, Janie. What did I ever do for you?”
       She smiled quickly. “Got better.”
       “It’s not enough,” he said devoutly. “Where do you live?”
       She pointed. “Right across the hall.”
       “Oh,” he said. He remembered the night he had cried, and pushed the picture away in embarrassment. He turned away, hunting for a change of subject, any change. “Let’s go out.”
       “All right.” Was that relief he detected in her voice?

They rode on a roller coaster and ate cotton candy and danced in an outdoor pavilion. He wondered aloud where he had ever learned to dance, but that was the only mention he made of the things which were troubling him until late in the evening. It was the first time he had consciously enjoyed being with Janie; it was an Occasion, rather than a way of life. He had never known her to laugh so easily, to be so eager to ride this and taste that and go yonder to see what was there. At dusk they stood side by side, leaning on a railing which overlooked the lake, watching the bathers. There were lovers on the beach, here and there. Hip smiled at the sight, turned to speak to Janie about it and was arrested by the strange wistfulness which softened her taut features. A surge of emotion, indefinable and delicate, made him turn away quickly. It was in part a recognition of the rarity of her introspection and an unwillingness to interrupt it for her; and partly a flash of understanding that her complete preoccupation with him was not necessarily all she wanted of life. Life had begun for him, to all intents and purposes, on the day she came to his cell. It had never occurred to him before that her quarter of a century without him was not the clean slate that his was.
       Why had she rescued him? Why him, if she must rescue someone? And—why?
       What could she want from him? Was there something in his lost life that he might give her? If there was, he vowed silently, it was hers, whatever it might be; it was inconceivable that anything, anything at all she might gain from him would be of greater value than his own discovery of the life which produced it.
       But what could it be?
       He found his gaze on the beach and its small galaxy of lovers, each couple its own world, self-contained but in harmony with all the others adrift in the luminous dusk. Lovers... he had felt the tuggings of love... back somewhere in the mists, he couldn’t quite remember where, with whom... but it was there, and with it his old, old reflex,
not until I’ve hunted him down and
— But again he lost the thought. Whatever it was, it had been more important to him than love or marriage or a job or a colonelcy. (Colonelcy? Had he ever wanted to be a colonel?)
       Well, then maybe it was a conquest. Janie loved him. She’d seen him and the lightning had struck and she wanted him, so she was going about it in her own way. Well, then! If that’s what she wanted...
       He closed his eyes, seeing her face, the tilt of her head in that waiting, attentive silence; her slim strong arms and lithe body, her magic hungry mouth. He saw a quick sequence of pictures taken by the camera of his good male mind, but filed under “inactive” in his troubled, partial one: Janie’s legs silhouetted against the window, seen through the polychrome cloud of her liberty silk skirt. Janie in a peasant blouse, with a straight spear of morning sunlight bent and moulded to her bare shoulder and the soft upper curve of her breast. Janie dancing, bending away and cleaving to him as if he and she were the gold leaves of an electroscope. (W
here had he seen... worked with... an electroscope? Oh, of course! In the
... But it was gone.) Janie barely visible in the deep churning dark, palely glowing through a mist of nylon and the flickering acid of his tears, strongly holding his hands until he quieted.
       But this was no seduction, this close intimacy of meals and walks and long shared silences, with never a touch, never a wooing word. Love-making, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing. Janie demanded nothing. She only... she only waited. If her interest lay in his obscured history she was taking a completely passive attitude, merely placing herself to receive what he might unearth. If something he had been, something he had done, was what she was after, wouldn’t she question and goad, probe and pry the way Thompson and Bromfield had done? (
Bromfield? Who’s he?
) But she never had, never.
       No, it must be this other, this thing which made her look at lovers with such contained sadness, with an expression on her face like that of an armless man spellbound by violin music...
       Picture of Janie’s mouth, bright, still, waiting. Picture of Janie’s clever hands. Picture of Janie’s body, surely as smooth as her shoulder, as firm as her forearm, warm and wild and willing—
       They turned to each other, he the driving, she the driven gear. Their breath left them, hung as a symbol and a promise between them, alive and merged. For two heavy heartbeats they had their single planet in the lovers’ spangled cosmos; and then Janie’s face twisted in a spasm of concentration bent not towards a ponderous control, but rather to some exquisite accuracy of adjustment.
       A thing happened to him, as if a small sphere of the hardest vacuum had appeared deep within him. He breathed again and the magic about them gathered itself and whipped in with the breath to fill the vacuum which swallowed and killed it, all of it, in a tick of time. Except for the brief spastic change in her face, neither had moved; they still stood in the sunset, close together, her face turned up to his, here gloried, here tinted, there self-shining in its own shadow. But the magic was gone, the melding; they were two, not one, and this was Janie quiet, Janie patient, Janie not damped, but unkindled. But no—the real difference was in him. His hands were lifted to go round her and no longer cared to and his lips lost their grip on the unborn kiss and let it fall away and be lost. He stepped back. “Shall we go?”
       A swift ripple of regret came and went across Janie’s face. It was a thing like many other things coming now to plague him: smooth and textured things forever presenting themselves to his fingertips and never to his grasp. He almost understood her regret, it was there for him, it was there—and gone, altogether gone, dwindling high away from him.
       They walked silently back to the midway and the lights, their pitiable thousands of candlepower; and to the amusement rides, their balky pretence at motion. Behind them in the growing dark they left all real radiance, all significant movement. All of it; there was not enough left for any particular reaction. With the compressed air guns which fired tennis balls at wooden battleships; the cranks they turned to make the toy grayhounds race up a slope; the darts they threw at balloons—with these they buried something now so negligible it left no mound.
       At an elaborate stand were a couple of war surplus servo-mechanisms rigged to simulate radar gun directors. There was a miniature anti-aircraft gun to be aimed by hand, its slightest movement followed briskly by the huge servo-powered gun at the back. Aircraft silhouettes were flashed across the domed half ceiling. All in all, it was a fine conglomeration of gadgetry and dazzle, a truly high-level catchpenny.
       Hip went first, amused, then intrigued, then enthralled as his small movements were so obediently duplicated by the whip and weave of the massive gun twenty feet away. He missed the first “plane” and the second; after that he had the fixed error of the gun calculated precisely and he banged away at every target as fast as they could throw them and knocked out every one. Janie clapped her hands like a child and the attendant awarded them a blurred and glittering clay statue of a police dog worth all of a fifth of the admission price. Hip took it proudly, and waved Janie up to the trigger. She worked the aiming mechanism diffidently and laughed as the big gun nodded and shook itself. His cheeks flushed, his eyes expertly anticipating the appearance-point of each target, Hip said out of the corner of his mouth, “Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.”
       Janie’s eyes narrowed a trifle and perhaps that was to help her aiming. She did not answer him. She knocked out the first target that appeared before it showed fully over the artificial horizon, and the second, and the third. Hip swatted his hands together and called her name joyfully. She seemed for a moment to be pulling herself together, the odd, effortful gesture of a preoccupied man forcing himself back into a conversation. She then let one go by and missed four in a row. She hit two, one low, one high, and missed the last by half a mile. “Not very good,” she said tremulously.
       “Good enough,” he said gallantly. “You don’t have to hit ’em these days, you know.”
       “You don’t?”
       “Nah, Just get near. Your fuses take over from there. This is the world’s most diabetic dog.”
       She looked down from his face to the statuette and giggled. “I’ll keep it always,” she said. “Hip, you’re getting that nasty sparkle stuff all over your jacket. Let’s give it away.”
       They marched up and across and down and around the tinsel stands in search of a suitable beneficiary, and found him at last—a solemn urchin of seven or so, who methodically sucked the memory of butter and juice from a well-worn corncob. “This is for
you
,” carolled Janie. The child ignored the extended gift and kept his frighteningly adult eyes on her face.
       Hip laughed. “No sale!” He squatted beside the boy. “I’ll make a deal with you. Will you haul it away for a dollar?”
       No response. The boy sucked his corncob and kept watching Janie.
       “Tough customer,” grinned Hip.
       Suddenly Janie shuddered. “Oh, let’s leave him alone,” she said, her merriment gone.
       “He can’t outbid
me
,” said Hip cheerfully. He set the statue down by the boy’s scuffed shoes and pushed a dollar bill into the rip which looked most like a pocket. “Pleasure to do business with you, sir,” he said and followed Janie, who had already moved off.
       “Regular chatterbox,” laughed Hip as he caught up with her. He looked back. Half a block away, the child still stared at Janie. “Looks like you’ve made a lifelong impress—
Janie!
”
       Janie had stopped dead, eyes wide and straight ahead, mouth a triangle of shocked astonishment. “The little
devil!
” she breathed. “At his age!” She whirled and looked back.
       Hip’s eyes obviously deceived him for he saw the corncob leave the grubby little hands, turn ninety degrees and thump the urchin smartly on the cheekbone. It dropped to the ground; the child backed away four paces, shrilled an unchivalrous presumption and an unprintable suggestion at them and disappeared into an alley.
       “Whew!” said Hip, awed. “You’re so right!” He looked at her admiringly. ”What clever ears you have, grandma,” he said, not very successfully covering an almost prissy embarrassment with badinage. “I didn’t hear a thing until the second broadside he threw.”
       “Didn’t you?” she said. For the first time he detected annoyance in her voice. And the same time he sensed that he was not the subject of it. He took her arm. “Don’t let it bother you. Come on, let’s eat some food.”
       She smiled and everything was all right again.