Miraculously, her need had been seen by Earth ones. Deborah found that her exceptional problem was common enough to be covered by a statute. If she could prove to the Board of Regents her conquest of high-school subjects, she could get a certificate of equivalency without having to undergo three years in the big stone school. If she could ride the two hours to and two hours back between the hospital and the city’s Remedial and Tutorial School, there might be a quicker and less perilous bridge between Never and Maybe. She fell into her work dizzily and full of doubt, found her balance, took the books, and dove into them. Buried in pages, she sounded to the bottom like a whale, rose, took breath, and plunged again. Despite the dangerously hypnotic effect of the double two-hour ride each day, pride in the stubborn battle gave her the strength she needed. She struggled to stay up to the demands of the study and travel. In time the teachers were able to open a tiny crack in the wall of her separation. During the month that she went to school from B ward the nurse woke her before full light. Each morning before she was ready to leave for school, she was allowed by doctor’s order (medicinal) one cup of coffee, and after a week of fidelity to the early hour, the night nurse added toast and a glass of juice on her own responsibility. Deborah was proud of the respect that the little extras showed. Except for the extraordinary ones, the hospital workers tended to give the flat requirement and no more, but lately, at the moment when she stood at the door with her morning schoolbooks—symbols of responsible sanity—and waited for it to be unlocked with the large “madhouse” key, the attendant would say, “Good-by, now,” or even, “Have a good day.”
With such extras, Deborah achieved a certain pride and status on the ward. When she moved back to the rooming house, and went to the hospital just for supper and therapy, the shadow that she cast along the walkways was lengthened by more than the coming of evening. She began to understand why Doris Rivera, who had been well enough to work and live with her own keys in her pocket, had spoken so sparingly to the hungry and terror-stricken audience of D ward. She, too, had seen her shadow lengthened by hard-won hairbreadths, and though she was still dwarfed on the flat-faced walls of the world, to the hope-stunted sick from among whom she had gone, she had had an outline larger than life. How it had swayed and faltered with her return.
One day, coming from an exhausting session with Furii, Deborah saw a knot of people in the hall, and coming closer she saw that they were writhing, slow motion, like creatures under water. At the center of the knot, all but hidden by it, was Miss Coral. Because Deborah’s loyalty had not shifted with her commitment to the world, she had to choke back a guffaw. The bed-flinging genius of fulcrum, weight, and thrust was at it again! Deborah wondered how she had gotten off the ward. She was standing almost still in the middle of the melee, taking on five attendants by drawing them into battle with each other. Her rant was a low mutter, like an engine, full of long sibilances and obscenity. Deborah passed by and tossed a “Hello, Miss Coral,” more for the attendants than for the lady herself. Miss Coral removed her concentration from her war and smiled to Deborah.
“Hello, Deborah. You’re not back, are you?”
“Oh, no; just a doctor’s hour.”
“I heard you were home for the Christmas holidays.”
“Yes. . . . It was easier this time—almost like real fun.”
Miss Coral’s lightning eyes softened; her rigid stance and the whole five-man writhe about her relaxed into a half-comic, yet strangely moving, truce, while Deborah and Miss Coral faced each other, socializing.
“How is Carla? Do you still see her?”
“Oh, yes, she got that job she wanted. . . . Hey, is it true that Dobshansky got married to a nurse on one of the male wards?”
“Yes, a student. It’s a secret marriage, though, because of her training. No one knows about it,” and they smiled at each other for all the cold-water pipes and all the ears on all the wards.
“How is everybody?” Deborah asked.
“Oh, the same, more or less. Lee Miller is leaving for another hospital. Sylvia looks rather better, but she still doesn’t talk. Helene’s back with us on ‘D,’ you know.”
“No—I didn’t. Say ‘Hello’ for me. Throw something at her and be rude so she’ll know it’s me.” Deborah looked hard at Miss Coral. It was difficult to confront the pain she saw so nakedly in the face of her modest and gentle teacher, the bed-thrower and bearer of Catullus. “Are you okay?” she asked, knowing that anything more would be an imposition.
Miss Coral looked apologetically at her retinue as if they were all one great, embarrassing social blunder with which she was not connected.
“Well . . .” she said, “it comes and goes.”
“Can I bring you anything?”
She knew that Miss Coral could not ask, but she was hoping for something in code. They had shared a thing rare for their sort of illness—a touching of minds, a touching of feelings. Horace, shouted through the two-inch-thick doors of a seclusion room and into the dark wastes of a private world, had been more than Latin, more than beauty.
“Oh, no . . . no.”
Deborah realized that the bus would be leaving. “I have to go—”
“Well, then, good-by, Deborah.”
“Good-by.” She moved past. The hardness came back into Miss Coral’s eyes; the muscles tensed. The writhing began again; the machine hum started. The truce was ended.
When Deborah sat in the bus, she thought of Miss Coral and trembled a little. How many of the dead could be raised? Of all the D-ward women, how many would be free someday? In her three years there many faces had come and gone, and many had stayed. Of those who had gone, maybe three-quarters had left for other hospitals. Some had improved enough to live a kind of half-life as outpatients. How many were really out, alive, and free? You could count them on your fingers! She shivered. She would have to force herself to her books tonight.
The months went on and the high-school subjects began to fill in the notebooks. If sanity was measured in feet and hours, learning was weighed in pounds of books carried to school and back again. The heavy textbooks gave her a kind of pride, as if she might someday weigh in the world what her schoolbooks weighed in her arms. The city remedial school was mainly for young children with reading problems or speech impediments, but apart from sitting at tiny deal tables, Deborah liked it. She liked not having to be uncomfortable with her teachers, working alone and hard and with no precocity, and not unbelonging in the middle of the Varsity Drag. After a while her teachers began to praise her for her tenacity. Steady and steadfast, they said, and she was greatly pleased. It was only when she was returning to her room in the afternoon that the world hurt. Young and rustling, loud with charm-bracelets and giggling, the high-school and young college girls would overwhelm the buses, and she would once again find herself peering into the world of the elaborately vain, mirror-mad, fearing and predatory young girls—a world where she had failed, a world that she knew looked much better than it really was, but to the eyes of its outcasts, a world that glowed with mysterious brilliance. She looked down at her own school skirt and sweater. She looked the way they did, but she was still a stranger, the imitation of a young schoolgirl.
And am I not as that world is? Idat asked from Yr. I am veiled and mysterious; I am rewarding and full of splendor. If you leave me and Lactamaeon, who loves you, and Anterrabae, who is your friend, with whom you laugh and are easy, will you ever have such light?
Then, strangely, the images of her tutors at the remedial school appeared in Yr to speak to Idat.
Are you joining the Collect? You too? Deborah called to them.
Certainly not! the English tutor said. We are against those creatures of yours!
Listen, you, the math tutor said to Idat, that girl works hard. She is here every day with sharp pencils and conventional dress. She is prompt and obedient and never insane in the classroom. She’s not overbright in math, but she works hard for what she gets and that’s the good, solid truth!
Hardly a shower of stars, Idat said dryly. Hardly a silver raven. (It was an Yri metaphor for flattery—because of the high polish.)
Suddenly, one by one, members of the Collect began to appear in the Midworld. One carried a trumpet, one a fiddle, one a drum, and one a tambourine. We are going to the Dance, they said to Deborah.
What dance?
The Grand Dance.
Who will be there?
You also.
Where will it be?
The Five Continents.
Sick or well, the English tutor said, sick or well you are one of the dancers—don’t you see that? Teachers and Collect began to trace the Yri words of separation on a piece of paper. In Yri and English they copied the old, old words, “You Are Not Of Them.” There it stands, the math teacher said. All your old reality.
Then they tore the paper into shreds and gave it away to the wind.
That evening at the church, Deborah invited her hymnbook mate out for a soda. The girl blanched and stammered so badly that Deborah became frightened that those who had seen might think she had said something indecent. She saw a momentary picture of the ancient fear, as Onward Christian Soldiers marched onward against the little girl of the past. Slipping back to invisibility she sang on through choir practice about Compassion.
“Adolescence again?” Furii said. “That at least you can grow out of, but do you really think you are poisoned still?”
“No, it’s just hard to get rid of the old things all at once. I was always so careful of my nganon, and so jealous of the clean things that other people had. It’s hard to think differently about everything all at once.”
“But you have friends—” Furii said, more as a question.
“In this town, though I sing beside them and take classes at night—they don’t see me. They will never see me.”
“Are you sure it isn’t your attitude?”
“Trust me,” Deborah said quietly. “It’s true. There are brightnesses, but they are small except for one or two friends from the hospital.”
“And the small brightness?”
“Well, my landlady was babysitting for her daughter. The little granddaughter is just two months old and the landlady had to go out. She came to my room and just said, ‘Deborah, will you mind the baby ’til I get back?’ Then she went out and that was all. I sat with that little baby for an hour and a half, hoping against hope that it would keep imitating itself—breathe in, breathe out, and not die while I was there.”
“Why should the baby die?”
“If I really was just a Semblance after all—only alive one-eighth-inch inward; alive to fire perhaps, but no deeper—”
“Tell me, do you love your parents?”
“Of course I love them.”
“And your sister, whom you never murdered?”
“I love her—I always did.”
“And your friend Carla?”
“I love her, too.” She started to cry. “I love you, too, but I haven’t forgotten your power, you old mental garbage-collector!”
“How does it feel to go about without all that old, stinking garbage?”
Deborah felt Anterrabae begin to rumble. Were he, Lactamaeon, Idat, and all the beauties of her many places in Yr to be lumped together with the Pit, the Punishment, the Collect, the Censor, and all the plagues of past reality?
“Does it all have to go? Do we pile it up and throw it all out?”
“It cannot be a decent bargain now—don’t you see?” Furii said. “You have to take the world first, to take it on faith as a complete commitment . . . on my word, if no one else’s. Then, on what you yourself build of this commitment you can decide whether it’s a decent bargain or not.”
“How about the shining things? Must I never think about Lactamaeon, so black on his black horse, or Anterrabae, or Idat, now that she keeps her form and is so beautiful? Am I never to think of them again or of the words in Yr that are better than English for certain things?”
“The world is big and has much room for wisdom. Why have you never drawn pictures of Anterrabae or the other ones?”
“Well, they were secret—you know the laws against mingling the worlds.”
“Perhaps the time has come to share the good parts, the lovely and wise parts of Yr, with the world. Contributing is building the commitment.”
Deborah saw Anterrabae falling faster in his own spark-lightened darkness, and while Idat’s tears had been diamonds, his were flame-bits; Lactamaeon was weeping blood like Oedipus. The blood made her remember something and she spoke absently.
“I once went to a lady’s house and saw blood coming out of her kitchen faucets. There used to be blood clotted in the streets and people were bug-swarms. At least I don’t have that anymore.”
“Oh, Deborah! Health is not simply the absence of sickness. We never worked this hard just so that you might be unsick!”
Again Dr. Fried yearned silently as if before a blind patient to whom she was trying to prove the color of light. If only Deborah could know what a life of reality and experience means!
“If I gave you a picture of Lactamaeon in his hawk aspect or as a rider, would you look at it as my old nuttiness, or as a ‘contribution’?”
“I would have to see it first,” Furii said.
“All right then,” Deborah said, “perhaps I might begin to open Yr.”
STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
High-School Equivalency Examination
The high-school equivalency examinations will be given on May 10th at the County Courthouse.
As a registrant for these examinations you will be required to fill out and send in the appended forms and be present at the County Courthouse on Tuesday, May 10th at 9:00 a.m. Failure to comply with both of these requirements will disqualify you for certification.
Deborah put the notice on one side of the table and on the other, the sketches for a picture of Anterrabae. She had taken the notice from its envelope quickly, surprised that the time for it had come so soon. She had filled out the enclosure immediately, had looked twice to see that the address was right, and had gone out to mail it right away, lest it be forgotten or misplaced. When the letter was in the gullet of the mailbox, she had felt the first fear.
Now she sat before the table and tried to laugh it back, knowing with what eagerness and excitement part of her mind was functioning. The real feeling was hope, not fear. It was too late to pretend that she might not cast with the world this time.
Expectation bore her along for the two weeks until the test, and then she went forth in the clothes of reason on the specified day, to the musty, wainscoted room in the old courthouse building. There she found others taking their high-school educations at one gulp—a group of hard-handed day laborers who sweated and grunted over their papers as if they were blocks of granite. She was surprised and then humbled that they, too, though not prisoners or insane, had somehow missed beats in the rhythm of the world, and now were sharers with her in this necessary thing. McPherson’s wisdom was at her elbow: you have no corner on suffering. When the time was up and the papers had to be given in, Deborah put hers with the others and left, unable to measure what she had done.
An arrangement had been made at the school for her to go on with the tutoring until the results came in, as much to keep her from worry and idleness as out of fear that she might fail and have to apply again. It was a time of innocence before decision. She pursued her studies, but not breathlessly; followed the season of budding fruit trees in front of the Methodist Church; looked at the changes of the sky; fell in love with poplar trees; went to the movies every time the picture changed, which meant that she knew Tarzan at least as well as Hamlet; and had a month of singular, idle happiness. She called it “childhood.”
At the end of the month the Regents of the State called her out of the springtime to open their letter. She had passed well—well enough to be certified by the state as having an education equivalent to that of students who had attended high school—and there were enough points over to make her an acceptable applicant to any college. She phoned home especially proud to give her parents that second bit of news, and glad that their time of pride, while hedged-about and deferred, was still possible.
“Wonderful! It’s wonderful! Oh, wait until I call all the family! They are all going to be so proud!” Esther said.
Jacob, by comparison, was almost still. “. . . Very proud,” he said. “It’s fine, just fine.” His voice seemed on the verge of breaking.
The high-school graduate hung up the phone, ashamed of her father’s pitiful pride. The sunlight still pulsed through the room, the air still bore the odors of spring—sap and greenness, flowering bushes, and moist, warmed earth. She walked slowly outside and down the road and around the old Catholic graveyard and past the auto wreckers’, intending to go to the high school and stare its windows down. It was a ritual she has promised herself if she passed the exam. There was no joy in going now; she was going simply to keep an old promise. She walked onto the school grounds and skirted the huge ball field, on which four boys were still practicing. Suddenly she felt very tired, and sat down against the fence that bounded the back of the field.
Why had he been so pitifully proud? She had given all her strength, all her struggle, all her will to succeed at her study. Now it was over and what had it been, after all, but what everyone else did without half trying, and it was two years late. She was nineteen and a high-school graduate, with parents who were calling the good news all over Chicago by now. But I wanted it! she whispered to herself in Yri, turning toward the fence in sudden helplessness.
On the field the boys were running with the late-afternoon magic of their ten-foot shadows. They seemed so young and strong and golden in the late sun. It had taken all of her capacities, every drop of her will, to come as far as they had come laughing and easy. The wall between them was still there and it would always be there. She could see through it now, to where the world offered its immense beauty, but she would burn away all her strength, just staying alive.
Across the field, gleaming in the sun, two other figures walked. A slender young girl, all grace and innocence, held the hand of the boy who walked with her. His jacket hung loosely on her slim shoulders. Slowly they walked around the field past her. A few times they stopped, playing or saying something that ended in laughter; he would lean over nuzzling her gathered-up hair or her cheek.
Deborah talked to herself out loud, the way crazy people do. “I will never have that,” she said. “Not by fighting or study or work or withstanding will I be able to walk with one of them or be warmed by their hands.”
Carla told you that long ago, Lactamaeon said from the fence. Your studies, your job—it’s all the same: “good morning” and “good night.”
Quentin will give you water, Anterrabae said, from the feeding tube. He will never move over your face with his hand. No one . . . no one . . .”
It was almost dark. She got up slowly and walked back toward town. The faces of the church choir seemed to challenge her from the yard of the auto wreckers. Good evening. Good night. They never spoke her name.
I spent my hope singing and sewing with you, and when I stand next to you, you don’t remember who I am. They were at the graveyard, Anterrabae scattering his flames in the darkness. Lactamaeon moaning in a dog-howl, the Collect building again—Work hard, lazy girl; fight hard, clumsy girl . . . never . . . never . . . never . . .”
I won it hard! she cried to them. I showed up even when I was sick. I showed up neat and on time and sane every day. I have some certain pride—But they had drowned her out in a great wave of laughter. She called Anterrabae, watching into Yr for his fiery passing, but there was only his laughter, a savage hollow laughter of terrible scorn. He flashed by, shrieking with laughter, joined suddenly by another figure, a figure which she recognized from a distant book, one of the forgotten books in Grandfather’s study, a book with engravings, a book out of fashion now, but which had once been de rigueur in cultured homes. It was Milton’s Paradise Lost; her original brilliant vision of a god falling perpetually in fire was none other than Milton’s Satan. She had gone over the pictures a thousand times in visits to Grandfather’s house. The nine-year-old had caught some of the ponderous thunder of the lines she did not know she had read, and while the artist in her had studied the etched angels and fine engraved lines that had blessed them with dimension, the secret-kingdom-seeker had subtly stolen the proud archangel for the first inhabitant of her world. Even Anterrabae was not hers!
In back of the vision the tumult mounted. You will create . . . the Collect roared. Nothing! You will lie down in the fields . . . nothing! Study and work . . . nothing!
They screamed her down the road into town and through the streets; she went vacant-eyed, listening into Yr. Past the church, where she sang on Wednesdays and Sundays, the gods mocked her father’s breaking voice. Past all the familiar streets the Collect hooted over Quentin’s smile and the golden people on the ball field. Male and female created He them. She was nearly at the hospital now—she could make out the two lights where the cars turned in. She went as if by habit, blindly. The Pit was waiting. Soon. She was terrified. Sight go soon. Voice . . . nothing. Up the steps to the door. Now, open it. Someone there, please! Inside: “Hello, Miss Blau.” And then, “Are you all right, Miss Blau?” One thing left: make a sign. Though a god screamed she could still hear the other sound—three buzzes: emergency. The Pit.
She emerged again back at the eternal beginning, with her heart just slowing from the terror. Because she was still alive, still bearing the insolent pumping muscle in her chest, she began to fight and struggle in her bonds, hoping to become exhausted and die. Exhaustion came, but death was adamant against her. After a while Dobshansky came again. This time his face had been carefully strained to remove all but the bland hospital expression. The books had won.
“You feel okay now?”
She was very tired. “I guess so.”
“We had to call your landlady and tell her you weren’t coming back there tonight and that you were here. She got worried about your school and came over with your books and some clothes. She was concerned about you.”
“She’s a good person,” Deborah said, meaning it, yet wishing that she did not have to wear everyone’s virtues as a weight that somehow counted against her own. She congratulated Quentin on his “secret” marriage and watched his face struggle with astonishment.
When he and little Cleary had gotten her free, she put on the ratty hospital robe and went slowly out on the ward. The faces there were empty or hostile, the same as ever; the first shock of a return was always brutal. It was early evening; she had lost all of the previous afternoon and most of the morning. The trays were just being given out. In the corner, Dowben’s Mary was muttering rites over her dinner. Miss Coral was in seclusion again, probably; Helene was hiding from her in bitterness and envy . . . and friendship. Deborah sat down, heartsick, and looked at the meal.
She heaved a sigh over the lukewarm substance on the plate, and suddenly Dowben’s Mary stood up and flung her coffee cup and saucer, and it hit Deborah a sharp, glancing blow on the head. She turned to face Mary and saw her unchanged, as if she were unaware of what she had done. The attendant came, slightly menacing them both because he didn’t know what had happened even though he had been sitting there and he felt guilty at having missed it all. Deborah felt in her hair for the wetness and remembered, as if it were medieval history, another gesture like that—her gesture years ago after Helene’s attack with the tray.
She looked again at the faces on the ward. Her presence was making them struggle with Maybes. Suddenly she realized that she was a Doris Rivera, a living symbol of hope and failure and the terror they all felt of their own resiliency and hers, reeling punch-drunk from beating after beating, yet, at the secret bell, up again for more. She saw why she could never explain the nature of her failures to these people who so needed to understand it, and why she could never justify scraping together her face and strength to go out again . . . and again. In some ways reality was as private a kingdom as Yr. The dimension of meaning could never be made plain to people whose survival depended on its abridgment or eradication. Mary’s cup and saucer glancing hard off Deborah’s head, and the unshielded fear and anger that Mary turned at her, made Deborah understand why the anguish had begun to come as her hand had hung up the telephone after delivering a triumphant piece of news. Yr was forcing her to choose at last. With her acceptance as a member in the world, a person with a present and a possible future, a Newtonian, a believer in cause and effect, the final lines of choice were drawn. It had come in agony and violence, in the familiar terror of the Pit, only because she was still very inexperienced in her knowledge of the difference between problems and symptoms, and so the sickness, which was also a source of her only defense and strength, had placed her where it was safe to make a choice. It was time for true allegiance.
When the trays were cleared away, she asked for her schoolbooks. The attendant brought them out and handed them to her with something of a respect for what they symbolized. She opened the first one.
“an equilateral triangle is one in which the angle opposite ac is equal to the angle opposite ab and is also equal to the angle opposite bc.”
“You rotten whore! Let me go!” sounded from the dormitory.
You are not of them, Anterrabae said quietly.
I am of them. Furii says that you will be a contribution, but I don’t yet know how, Deborah said to him. I will have to learn how. Then, maybe . . .
“a line bisecting an 80-degree angle forms two angles whose sum is 80 degrees.”
Mary: “I wonder if insanity is catching. Maybe the hospital could sell us for antibodies.”
Will you not save us as a shield against your hard rind, Bird-one?
I can’t do that anymore. I am going to hang with the world.
But the world is lawless and wild. . . .
Nevertheless.
Remember your own childhood—remember Hitler and the Bomb.
In spite of it.
Remember the blank-wall faces and the “sanity papers—” and hungering after ones that go hand in hand.
No matter. No matter what.
We could wait until you called us. . . .
I will not call. I am going to hang with the world. Full weight.
Good-by, Bird-one.
Good-by then, Anterrabae. Good-by, Yr.
“technological advances affected western expansion in many specific ways.”
Constantia: “Can’t you see that I’m suffering, you goddamn pigs!”
“the invention of t.n.t. made possible the joining of the coasts by railroad.”
“I am the secret first wife of Edward VIII, Abdicated King of England!”
“Jenna’s going again. Call Ellis; we’d better get a pack ready.”
“and both railroad and the morse telegraph maintained contact indispensable to modern industrial society.”
“Full weight,” Deborah said.