Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human

‘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. (Where 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 greyhounds race up a slope; the darts they threw at balloons—with these they buried something now so negligible it left no mound.