John Brunner: The Whole Man

Sarah Howson thought it over. And finally shook her head. She said, listen! You’re pretty much of a kid yourself still. I’m not. Anything could happen to me. My man isn’t going to want to be responsible for Gerry, is he? Not his kid! No, Gerry has to learn to look after himself. It’s a hard world, for God’s sake! If he’s as bright as you say, he’ll make out To my mind, he’s got to. Sooner or later.”

For a while thereafter, she did take more interest in him, though; she had vague visions that he wasn’t going to be useless after all — support in old age, earn a decent living at some desk job… But the habit wasn’t there, and the interest declined.

There was trouble sometimes. There was taunting and sometimes cruelty, and once he was made to climb a tree under goading from a kids” gang and fell from a ten-foot branch, a fall which luckily did no more than bruise him, but the bruise was huge and remained tender for more than three weeks. Seeing it, Sarah Howson had a sudden appalling recollection of her meeting with the Israeli woman, and firmly slapped down the memory.

There was also the time when he wouldn’t go to school because of the torment he underwent. When he was escorted there to stop him playing hookey, he refused to co-operate; he drew faces on his books, or sat gazing at the ceiling and pretended not to hear when he was spoken to.

He got over that eventually. The mood of the city, and the country, was changing. The trauma of “the crisis” was receding, a little joy was no longer suspect, frills and fun were coming back into style. Relaxing, people were more tolerant. He made his first friends when he was about thirteen, at about the same time that local storekeepers and housewives found that he was willing to limp on errands or feed the cat when the family was away — and could be trusted to complete the job, unlike other boys who might equally well decide to go to a movie with the gang instead.

He was considering a career when the widower died. He had vague thoughts of some job where his deformity and other, newly discovered, peculiarities were irrelevant. But the widower died, and he was legally of age to quit school.

And his mother was ill. It was some months before it was known to be from inoperable cancer, but he had suspected it might be ever since the first symptoms. Before she was ill enough to be hospitalized, he was having to support her by what odd jobs he could find: making up accounts for people, washing-up in a nearby bar and grill on Saturdays, and suchlike. He had had little acquaintance with hope in his life so far. By the time of his mother’s death, which left him alone at seventeen, ugly, awkward, a year lost on the schooling which he had figured would continue to college if he could get a public scholarship, he was embittered.

He found a room a couple of blocks from the old apartment, which had been reclaimed by the municipal housing authority for a family with children. And kept going as he had been: with odd jobs for subsistence, with books and magazines, with TV when he could beg entrance to someone’s home and a movie occasionally When he had spare cash for escapism.

At twenty, Gerald Howson was convinced that the world which had been uncaring when he was born was uncaring now, and he spent as much time as possible withdrawing from it into a private universe where there was nobody to stare at him, nobody to shout at him for clumsiness, nobody to resent his existence because his form blasphemed the shape of humanity.

The girl at the pay-desk of the neighbourhood movie theatre knew him by sight. When he limped to join the waiting line she made a kind of mental check-mark, and his ticket was already clicking from the machine before he could ask for it; one for the cheapest seats, as always. He appreciated that He was given to speaking rather little now, being so aware of the piping immature quality of his voice.

Some few things about himself he had been able to disguise. His height, naturally, wasn’t one of them. He had stopped growing at twelve, when he was barely five feet tall. But an old woman had taken pity on him a year back; she had formerly been a trained seamstress and worked in high-class tailor shops, and she got out her old needles and re-made a jacket he had bought, setting shoulder-pads into it and cunningly adjusting the hang of the back so that from the waist up he could pass a casual inspection. Also he had a high heel on the shoe of his shorter leg. It couldn’t stop him limping, because the leg still dragged slightly, but it gave him a better posture and seemed to lessen the endless ache from the muscles in the small of his back.

The jacket had been worn almost every day for a year, and was fraying, and the old woman was dead. He tried not to think about it. He went across the lobby to the kind darkness of the auditorium, with occasional snatched glances at the advertisements on the wall. Next week’s show, the same as this, held over by public demand.

Consequently, with the house lights up and minutes still to go before the start of the programme, there were many people to stare at him over popcorn-full mouths as he went down towards the base of the gigantic screen. He tried not to be aware of that, either.

The centre front rows were all full of teenage kids. He turned down a side aisle and went to an unoccupied end seat; the view of the screen would be badly angled, but it was that, or a tedious business of stumbling over other people’s feet, maybe treading on toes with his dragging shorter leg. He sat down and looked at the blank screen, his mind filling as always with fantasy images. The mere environment of the theatre seemed to take him out of himself, even before the movie started — snatches of conversation, pictures, moods of elation and depression, all flickered past his attention, and brought a sense of taut excitement. Some of the material in this mental variety-show could startle him with its unfamiliarity, but he had always assumed it was due to his surroundings provoking a recurrence of otherwise forgotten memory. He had seen hundreds of movies here; they must be the source of the ideas crowding his mind.

And yet… that wasn’t too satisfying as an explanation, somehow.

A man in brown came striding down the main aisle, all the way to the front, turned sharply towards the side where How-son sat, took the seat diagonally in front of him, and threw an overcoat across the seat adjacent. He shrugged aside his sleeve and stared at his watch before leaning back and turning his head towards the screen.

That — or the fact that he was well dressed, and should by appearances have been in the expensive seats — or something not available to consciousness, attracted Howson’s attention to him. For no definable reason, he was sure the man in brown hadn’t consulted his watch simply to know how long remained before show-time. The man was — not exactly nervous, but on edge about something, and it wasn’t the prospect of a good movie.

His puzzlement was cut short by the darkening of the auditorium, and he forgot everything except the huge colored images parading across the screen. By night and day his dreams were populated from movies, TV and magazines; he preferred movies because his fellow watchers didn’t care about his presence, and although people were willing enough to let him sit and see their TV there was always that tense awkwardness.

Besides, with every breath he seemed to draw in the enjoyment of the rest of the audience, adding it to his own.

First: a travelogue, Playgrounds of the Planet. The crashing music of surf at Bondi Beach, the humming roar of turbine cars as they streaked down the Sahara Highway, the whish and whir of skis on an Alpine slope and then the yammer of pulse-jet skimmers on blue Pacific water. Howson shut his ears to the syrupy wisecracking commentator. He made his own commentary, as though he could shift personalities like shifting gears, choosing a hardboiled masculine frame of mind for the admiring next-to-nude girls at Bondi, a worried near-feminine attitude for the ski-jumpers — thoughts of pain on failure, bruises, broken bones… He shied away from the recollection of a tree he had fallen out of.