Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Why do they think they can float like others when the surface tension of their nganons was broken by the first drowning? Deborah cried to Lactamaeon.

Idat only knows, he said. For some, nothing is impossible. Deborah’s inner muscles tightened with fear. Then you think that her nganon is not intrinsically evil, but is … is circumstantial?

Yes.

But I am a friend of hers. If she is not of my substance, I will poison her!

Exactly so.

Can a thing go so against the Laws? Even the Law says, “ nganon calls forth itself.” Did I call forth a different essence, and if so, why?

Perhaps as a punishment, Lactamaeon said. Occasionally others are damned by you to punish you.

Deborah looked from the god and saw Carla still crying. It was part of the Deceit, it seemed, to believe that one knew the code, that after years of suffering to find a way to outguess it, the final step gave way and there was the old chaos, anarchy, and laughter.

She was my friend! she cried to the departing gods. She seemed not to be hurt….

You are not of the same substance; the nganons are not the same. You will be her murderer, they said.

When Carla finished crying, Deborah’s body was still at the other side of the bed, but her self was not with her body.

For some unfathomable reason, one of the students attached herself to Deborah. Busily and with the gratuitous, meddling cheeriness of her dedication, the student followed her, a white blur and a blurred voice in the gray background, whenever Deborah poked her face out on the “public” part of the ward.

You must be sicker than you think, Deborah said to herself in Yri. These people usually take the worst ones to throw to God. God is their dog and Deborahs are so many bones. Therefore shall my name be Bone.

It seemed very funny indeed in Yri, and she laughed aloud and then she made the symbolic Yri gesture with her hands and the mimicry of laughter, mutely, as it was in Yr.

Who laughs there? Anterrabae joked with her.

It is I, the God-Bone-Thing! she answered, and they laughed until she felt the torment of the Earth easing inside her. What will happen to that one’s dear glory when God smells what her offering is! and they laughed again.

And the surprise on the face of the sweat-borne student storming Heaven? And there was more laughter, but it ended in sorrow because Deborah knew that she was not strong enough to ask the student not to track her and bother her with solicitous noises.

The spring went on and although Deborah gave and gave to Furii the secrets and fears and passwords of the passages between her worlds, she was surrendering them only to hasten her own capitulation to a total deceit that was as sure as the Juggernaut or the falling of Anterrabae. She did not lose the chill feeling of detachment before the doom and for a while she even posed a little in drama of that doom, making a high art of dying beautifully.

Furii threw up her hands. “Not only sick, God help us, but adolescent, too!”

“Well?”

“Well, there is no help for it—you must do what you have to, parodies and all. Only please help me to see which is the sickness against which we pit our whole strength, and which is the adolescence that is only another sure sign that you are one hundred percent Earth-one and woman-to-be.” She looked at Deborah keenly for a while and then smiled. “Sometimes the work gets so intense—all the secrets and the symptoms and the ghosts of the past to be met—one forgets how arid and meaningless this therapy can all seem before the world comes to be real to the patient.”

Deborah looked at the doctor’s littered desk. Looking away to it had often been a relief; on it lay a paperweight, whose odd shape resisted definition and eased the eyes and the mind from the tension of those hours. She was going to it now because, though it was familiar, it could not hurt. Furii saw her looking at it.

“Do you know what that is?”

“Agate?”

“No, not agate. It is a rare kind of petrified wood,” Furii said. “My father took me on a trip to Carlsbad when I graduated from what you call the high school. There the strangest sorts of rocks and formations are made, and he bought this for me as a souvenir of the trip.”

Furii had never once said a personal thing about her own past or self. Early in their time together, when the first trust was coming and Deborah had wrestled with her understanding and had forced herself to stay tankutu (unhidden) while Furii’s questions probed, Furii had risen at the end of the hour and had broken off a large and beautiful blossom from a cluster of cyclamen in her flowerpot. She had said, “I don’t ordinarily break flowers, but this you have earned. I don’t often give presents either, so take it.”

It had been worth the cost of the two terrible punishments from Yr that Deborah had received for accepting flowers from the Earth, although when she had come clear from the second, it was days later and the beautiful flower had long since wilted and dried. Now Furii was giving a second gift, a little piece of herself. Its delicacy meant more than a small respite from the probing or an unsaid message to “take heart”; it said, “I will trust you with one of my memories as you have trusted me with yours.” Once again, adolescence or no, it made of Deborah an equal.

“Did you like the trip?” she said.

“Oh, it was not exciting or …fun’ such as young people have now, but I felt so grown-up, and it was an honor to be with my father, just the two of us in the adult world.” Her face had the memory-shine of the old happiness. “Well!” She put her hands on her knees with finality. “Back into the salt mines. All right?”

“All right,” Deborah said, getting ready to bear inward again.

“Oh, no, wait. There is something else. I want to tell you now so that you can get used to the idea. I am leaving for my vacation early this summer because of a conference in Zurich. Then comes my vacation and then I go to join in a symposium for some writing which has been long put off.”

“How long will it be?”

“I plan to leave on June twenty-sixth and be back on September eighteenth. I have arranged for you to have someone to talk to while I am gone.”

In the sessions that followed Furii talked about the colleague’s qualifications, the possibility of resentment at what might seem a rejection, and the fact that this new doctor was not going to go deeply into the work, but would be there to stand for the world in the battles between Deborah and her censors, collects, and the forces of Yr. It was all deft and sure, but Deborah sensed the fait accompli, the oiling of the ancient wheels on which one was broken.

“I know lots of doctors here,” Deborah said wistfully. “Craig; and Sylvia’s doctor, Adams—I’ve seen her at work and I like her. I talked to Fiorentini once when he was on call at night, and then, the best one is Halle. He says he was the one who saw my parents when I was admitted. I’ve talked to him and I trust him….”

“Their schedules are all full,” Furii said. “Dr. Royson will see you.” The gears were oiled, the wheel ready; her acceptance would merely be form.

“My third rail,” Deborah said.

“What is that?”

“A free translation of an Yri word. It means: I will comply.”

Deborah worked against time, wishing to resolve everything before Furii left. She asked for and got a transfer to B ward—still locked, but not “disturbed.” Paper and pencil and books and privacy were possible there, but it was like a tomb compared to the rampant craziness of “D.” Because she had been a “D” patient, the others on “B” were afraid of her, but she knew a few of them and there were some good nurses who reminded her of McPherson by mentioning him. The therapeutic hours were infused with the desperate urgency created by Furii’s leaving, and if the insights were not brilliantly lit, they were at least hard-worked and honest.