Wake Up With a Stranger (15 page)

“Are you afraid of God now?”

“No.”

“How did you get over being afraid of Him?”

“I quit believing in Him.”

“Are you afraid of society or disease?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid of anything in particular now?”

“No. Nothing in particular. I just feel that something is wrong with me, with my life, and I don’t know what it is except that it is something terrible that I won’t ever be able to get rid of. It’s something I was born with, I guess.”

“Is that why you did what you did to your wrist?”

“Yes, that’s why.”

“It’s really unnecessary and unreasonable to let yourself become so depressed over the things you mentioned, God and society and things like that. Don’t you understand that?”

“I understand that it’s unreasonable, but I can’t help it.”

“Of course you can’t. I see that, all right. But perhaps we can help you to help it. As you said, these are merely things or ideas to which your depression attaches. Since you understand that, we are already a long way on the road to understanding the rest of it. Well, now, you see? We have made some progress in just this little while, and I believe we have talked enough for the present, don’t you?”

The doctor stood up and looked around the room. His eyes discovered and rested upon a book.

“I see you are reading the
Grand Testament,”
he said. “It isn’t often you see someone reading Villon. Do you like him?”

“Yes, I like him. He is a fine poet.”

“Is that the only reason you like him? Because he is a fine poet?”

“No. I like him because he was an evil man who created a kind of beauty that few good men have been able to create.”

“Why does this idea appeal to you? Because you find it reassuring in respect to yourself?”

“I guess so. I’m evil, too. It’s something I’ve felt to be true for as long as I can remember, and I wouldn’t have felt it was true for so long if it weren’t.”

“And it makes you feel a little better to believe that evil people are capable of great good?”

“Great beauty, I said.”

“Beauty is good, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. I guess you’re right about that.”

“Can’t you see that if you were truly evil you would not be concerned about your potential for good?”

“I don’t know. It’s all part of the same thing. Just twisting words around won’t change it.”

“Have you ever done an evil thing?”

“That doesn’t matter. Doing evil and being evil are different things. God knows the difference.”

“I thought you had quit believing in God.”

“Oh, well, that’s just a manner of speaking. I can see that you are only trying to catch me up, and that’s no help to anyone.”

The doctor smiled again and placed a hand lightly for a second on Enos Simon’s shoulder.

“I said we had talked enough for the present, and here I have started all over again. It’s a weakness of mine. Whenever you’ve had enough of me, you mustn’t hesitate to say so. Goodby, now. Perhaps we can talk again soon.”

He went away quietly, and Enos Simon looked down at the slope and the pines.

As he now looked up at them. In this different place, at this different time, quite a long while later. His depression was increasing, the deep dark swing of the cycle, inexplicable and inexorable, that never swerved to the antithetical elation, the mania, but hovered only between depression and release from depression. He knew quite well that he should not be standing here in idle submission looking up the slope among the trees, that it was in fact the worst thing he could possibly do. But it was a part of the dark process to want most to do nothing when it was most imperative to do simply anything. It was a mistake also to remember the past, the effects of depressions that had become confused with causes, and he knew quite clearly what a mistake it was. It was one he had made before, and often, but he continued to make it, in spite of his knowledge.

There was, for instance, the time he had gone with a group to a home for incurables; it had been a day depressing in itself, a gray day of cold rain in which the sun had never shone. He had seen these patients, these men and women in all stages of degeneration, some in that terrible corruption of body and mind, and looking at them, he had wondered where their souls had gone. It was easy to believe that a normal person possessed a soul, but where was the soul of an idiot? And what happened to the soul of a person who had once not been an idiot but had become one slowly through degeneration over a period of time? And how could one seriously believe in something that was supposed to be the very essence and immortal part of life and yet was subject to physical corruption, or at least had no discernible existence apart from it in the way that the mind might survive cleanly and discernibly in a body otherwise mutilated? And most terrifying of all, if the soul survived, did it survive an idiot as an idiot soul?

This kind of speculation was very bad for Enos. Afterward he was unable to forget what he had seen or to quit thinking about it in the way he had begun. The depression he felt was far more enduring and intense than the brief and normal depression that would have come to any sensitive person from the visit. It was a morbid malignancy that grew and grew; he became obsessed with the idea that this visit had been a kind of warning of his own destiny, and at the same time he was driven to irrational efforts to avoid the destiny that was preordained. Everything was contaminated, a personal trap. He had only the vaguest ideas of how such debilitating diseases were contracted, but he knew there was no innocence left in the world, that everything had become an agent of contagion, and it required the most stringent effort to eat or drink, or touch so much as the knob of a door. This went on and on, but at last the fear passed. Or, rather, it was exchanged for a different fear which he dwelled on until it also was exchanged for still another. And in between, once in a while, there were interims of uneasy peace.

The chronology was confused in his mind, but of the interims of uneasy peace, one was a period encompassing a spring and a summer, remembered afterward as the time of Donna. Sustained by her, he experienced in those few months the brightest period of his life since the days of his early childhood, and the day after the climax of their relationship, he felt a sense of worth and confidence and a security that their love would survive and sustain him from that time forward. For a while it did sustain him, but then he began to slip from the level of brightness, caught again in another of the dark cycles; and he was certain that she did not love him, as actually she did not, that no one on earth, because he did not merit it, could love him with permanence or any depth. When his parents moved during his first college term, he had already given her up as lost, and himself also, and he did not return to her to suffer the rejection and humiliation which he anticipated with irrational certainty.

He struggled on through college and reached his third year, which was the worst period of all, the worst of his life — and just why it was worst he could never tell. There was no unusual precipitating incident, nothing at all that he could isolate and define. In the depths of unremitting depression, he felt devaluated and impotent and unfit to live; one afternoon, he returned to his room and tried to quit doing what he was plainly unfit to do. In the bathroom, which was shared by other students, he ran the tub about half full of water and held his left arm below the surface and slashed his wrist with a razor blade. He was afraid of the pain in the last moments of living, but there was only an insignificant sensation in the instant of action, and hardly any at all afterward as his blood mixed pinkly with the water.

It was a fine definitive action of which he was proud in the instant of its execution, but it turned out to be, after all, only another failure and humiliation — a climactic rejection of all rejections, no less than the scorn of death itself — for neglecting to lock the bathroom door, he was found, saved and sent away. Then had come the episode of the hill and the pines and the doctor who came to talk; and after that, after a sustained period on the top of the cycle, his release to the business of living for which he was somehow unfit. Because there seemed to be nothing else to do, he returned to the university and finished his course. Eventually, through the good offices of a friend of his father, after a couple of beginnings and failures in other places, he had come to this second hill of pines. Now here he was, looking out the window and up the slope, wondering how he could possibly go on with the intolerable task of survival.

Looking and wondering, he began to think of Donna, who had returned to his life like a kind of incidental miracle, and he felt the lift in darkness thinking of her always brought. He knew he must go to her again at once, with her permission if possible and without it if necessary, as he had gone three times since their first meeting. Stirred out of his perilous lethargy by the thought of her, he turned away from the window, went to the telephone and dialed her number.

In her own place at that moment, with a need far less profound than his, Donna was wanting him.

She was awakened suddenly by a sound at midnight. She did not actually know that it was a sound that awakened her, the assumption and acceptance of it simply being in her mind upon awakening, but she knew that it was midnight, because she could see, by turning her head slightly on her pillow, the luminous face of the bedside clock. Her left arm was pinned and numb, but she did not attempt to release it, lying very quietly, instead, and waiting for the repetition of the assumed sound, which very shortly came. It was no wonder that the sound had awakened her, for it was strangely penetrating, in spite of being very soft, and it was, she thought, a kind of whimper, a sound of dumb suffering.

Her arm still pinned, she raised her body from the hips as far as she could and leaned over Enos Simon to look down at his face. On his face was the visible expression of the sound, and as she watched the expression, the oral expression was repeated again, but this time with added shrillness and intensity, and it did not diminish and die away as it had before, but ascended precipitately to a high, thin cry. As if lifted by the force of the cry itself, his body jerked up to a sitting position, her own falling aside to avoid a collision, and the cry ended in his throat with a strangled sound.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, what’s the matter?”

He remained in a rigid posture of sitting and did not answer. His body was trembling, but the trembling slowly stopped. At first she could plainly hear him breathing, but then, quite soon, she could hear him only by listening intently.

“You cried out in your sleep,” she said. “Did you have a dream?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.” Reaching up, she touched his shoulder, drawing her fingers down his side.

“Lie down,” she said. “Lie down.”

He lay back slowly, turning to put his arms around her and press his face against her breasts.

“Did you have a dream?” she said again.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember any dream.”

“You sounded as if something were hurting you. Not physically. As if you were suffering.”

“Nothing was hurting. I don’t know what it was.”

“Does it make you happy to be here with me?”

“Yes. It’s the only thing. Nothing else makes me happy.”

“Did it make you happier earlier? What we did?”

“Yes. Of course. It always makes me happy.”

“When it happens, I get the feeling that you are not happy afterward. That maybe you feel it is something you should not do. Do you love me afterward, or do you despise me for a little while?”

“No, no. I never despise you. You only imagine it if you think I do.”

“All right. Do you want to go back to sleep?”

“No. I’m wide awake. I couldn’t possibly sleep.”

“Neither could I. Would you like a drink or some coffee or anything like that?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Or a cigarette? Would you like a cigarette?”

“No. A cigarette is not what I want.”

“What is it? What is it that you want?”

“You know. You know.”

“All right. All right, darling. All right.”

And then, as before, in the achievement of ecstasy and even in the ecstatic accomplishment, she was aware in her bones that it was all a mistake, not in itself alone, but in this way and with this man, and that it might very well be in the end, for him or for her or for both, the worst mistake of all. Afterward, however, lying in the lethargy succeeding excitement, in a warm and delicious indifference to trials and trouble and all consequences whatever, she listened again to his regular breathing, the slow and even pumping of his lungs, and wondered what it was about him that incited her compassion and generosity and almost her love, and she understood suddenly that it was because he was like a child.

He is like a child,
she thought,
with a terrible problem, whatever the problem may be.

“Are you going to sleep now?” she said.

“Maybe now. In a little while.”

“Do you feel good?”

“Yes, good. Very good.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“You.”

“What about me?”

“That you are lovely. That I love you. That I can almost believe in myself when you are with me, and that I cannot believe in myself, and consequently nothing at all, when you are not with me.”

“You shouldn’t say that. You must not be dependent on me or anyone else. It isn’t necessary.”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Of course not. Just consider a minute. It was only three weeks ago that we met again, and before that we knew each other for only a few months. You see? Out of all your life, you have known me less than half a year, and all the rest of the time you got along perfectly well without me.”

“I did not get along perfectly well.”

“Nonsense, darling. Certainly you did.”

“No. Perhaps sometime I’ll tell you just how I did not.”

“I’d like that. I’d like you to tell me about yourself.”

“Perhaps I’ll tell you.”