Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

She saw it all, right up to yesterday’s viewing, with Newell in a thousand pieces from what appeared to be a separate jigsaw puzzle for each piece, and Anson a bright wonder, learning to read now, marveling at everything because everything was new—teaspoons and music and mountains, the Solar System and sandwiches and the smell of vanilla.

And as he watched, doors opened in the doctor’s mind. They did not open wide, but enough for him to know that they were there and in which walls. How to describe the indescribable feeling of expertness?

It is said that a good truck driver has nerve-endings which extend to the bumper and tail light, tire tread to overhead. The virtuoso pianist does not will each separate spread and crook of each finger; he wills the notes and they appear.

The doctor had steered this course of impossible choices by such willing and such orientation; and again he felt it, the urge that this way is right now and there is the thing to do next. The miracle to him was not the feeling, but that it had come back to him while he watched the films and heard the tapes with Miss Thomas, who had said nothing, given no evaluation or advice. They were the same films he had studied, run in the same sequence. The difference was only in not being alone any more.

“Where are you going?” Miss Thomas asked him.

From the coat closet, he said, “File that material and lock it up, will you, Miss Thomas? I’ll call you as soon as I return.” He went to the door and smiled back at her. It hurt his face. “Thanks.”

Miss Thomas opened her mouth to speak, but did not. She raised her right hand in a sort of salute and turned around to put the files away.

The doctor called from a booth near the Newell apartment. “Did I wake you, Osa? I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know how late it gets.”

“Who . . . Fred? Is that you, Fred?”

“Are you up to some painful conversation?”

Alarmed, she cried, “Is something the matter? Is Dick—”

He mentally kicked himself for his clumsiness. What other interpretation could she have put on such a remark? “He’s okay. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not good at the light banter. . . . Can I see you?”

She paused for a long moment. He could hear her breathing. “I’ll come out. Where are you?”

He told her.

She said, “There’s a cafe just around the corner, to your left. Give me ten minutes.”

He put up the phone and went to the corner. It was on a dingy street which seemed to be in hiding. On the street, the cafe hid. Inside the cafe, booths hid. In one of the booths, the doctor sat and was hidden. It was all he could do to keep himself from assuming a fetal posture.

A waiter came. He ordered Collinses, made with light rum. He slumped then, with his forearms on the table and his chin on them, and watched bubbles rise in the drinks and collect on the underside of the shaved ice, until the glasses frosted too much for him to see. Then he closed his eyes and attempted to suspend thought, but he heard her footsteps and sprang up.

“Here I am,” he said in a seal-like bark far louder than he had intended.

She sat opposite him. “Rum Collins,” she said, and only then did he remember that it had always been the drink they shared, when they had shared things. He demanded of himself, Now why did I have to do that? and answered, You know perfectly well why.

“Is he really all right?” she asked him.

“Yes, Osa. So far.”

“I’m sorry.” She turned her glass around, but did not lift it. “I mean maybe you don’t want to talk about Dick.”

“You’re very thoughtful,” he said, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to see her just for himself. “But you’re wrong. I did want you to talk about him.”

“Well... if you like, Fred. What, especially?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. Isn’t that silly?”

He sipped his drink. He was aware that she did the same. They never used to say “cheers” or “skoal” or anything else, but they always took that first sip together.

He said, “I need something that segmentation or hypnosis or narcosynthesis just won’t give me. I need to flesh out a skeleton. No, it’s more refined than that. I need tints for a charcoal portrait.” He lifted his hands and put them down again. “I don’t know what I need. I’ll tell you when I get it.”

“Well, of course I’ll help if I can,” she said uncertainly.

“All right. Just talk, then. Try to forget who I am.”

He met her eyes and the question there, and elaborated, “Forget I’m his therapist, Osa. I’m an interested stranger who has never seen him, and you’re telling me about him.”

“Engineering degree, and where he comes from, and how many sisters?”

“No,” he said, “but keep that up. You’re bound to stumble across what I want that way.”

“Well, he’s . . . he’s been sick. I think I’d tell a stranger that.”

“Good! What do you mean, sick?”

She glanced quickly at him and he could follow the thought behind it: Why don’t you tell me how sick he is? And then: But you really want to play this game of the interested stranger. All right.

She stopped looking at him and said, “Sick. He can’t be steered by anything but his own—pressures, and they-—they aren’t the pressures he should have. Not for this world.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“He just doesn’t seem to care. No,” she denied forcefully, “I don’t mean that, not at all. It’s more like—I think he would care if he—if he was allowed to, and he isn’t allowed to.” She got his eyes again. “This is very hard to do, Fred.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But do go on; you’re doing fine. What do you mean, he isn’t allowed to care about the world and the way it wags? Who won’t allow him?”

“It isn’t a who; it’s a—I don’t know. You’d have a term for it. I’d call it a monster on his back, something that drives him to do things, be something he really isn’t.”

“We strangers don’t have any terms for anything,” he reminded her gently.

“That’s a little refreshing,” she said with a wan half-smile. “I like...mystified ... people. They make me feel like one of the crowd. You know who’s lucky?” she asked, her voice suddenly wild and strained and, by its tone, changing the subject. “Psychotics are lucky. The nuts, the real buggy ones. (I talk like this to layman strangers.) The ones who see butterflies all the time, the ones who think the President is after them.”

“Lucky!” he exploded.

“Yes, lucky. They have a name for the beast that’s chewing on them. Sometimes they can see it themselves.”

“I don’t quite—”

“I mean this,” she said excitedly. “If I see grizzly bears under every lamp post, I’m seeing something. It has a name, a shape; I could draw a picture of it. If I do something irrational, the way some psychos do—run a nonexistent railroad or shoot invisible pheasants with an invisible gun, I’m doing something. I can describe it and say how it feels and write letters about it. See, these are all things plaguing the insane. Labels, handles. Things that you can hold up to reality to demonstrate that they don’t coincide with it.”

“And that’s lucky?”

She nodded miserably. “A mere neurotic—Dick, for example—hasn’t a thing he can name. He acts in ways we call irrational, and has a sense of values nobody can understand, and does things in a way that seems consistent to him but not to anyone else. It’s as if there were a grizzly bear, after all, but we’d never heard of grizzly bears—what they are, what they want, how they act. He’s driven by some monster without a name, something that no one can see and that even he is not aware of. That’s what I mean.”