—doctor bill & twinges in chest but must be all right maybe indigestion & dinner last night & wasn’t audrey giving me the glad eye & how the hell is a guy to know & maybe i can try and find out & what a fool i can look if she doesn’t—
—goddam idiot & they shouldn’t let some people drive & oh all right so the examiner was pretty lenient with me i haven’t had a bad accident yet & christ blood all over my blood let’s face it i’m scared to drive but the buses are no damn good & straight up three paces & man in a green hat & judas i ran that red light—
In fifteen years a man got used to it, more or less. He could walk down the street and hold his own thoughts to himself while the surf of unvoiced voices was a nearly ignored mumble in his brain. Now and then, of course, you got something very bad, it stood up in your skull and shrieked at you.
Norman Kane, who had come here because he was in love with a girl he had never seen, got to the corner of University and Shattuck just when the light turned against him. He paused, fetching out a cigarette with nicotine-yellowed fingers while traffic slithered in front of his eyes.
It was an unfavorable time, four-thirty in the afternoon, homeward rush of nervous systems jangled with weariness and hating everything else on feet or wheels. Maybe he should have stayed in the bar down on San Pablo. It had been pleasantly cool and dim, the bartender’s mind an amiable cud-chewing somnolence, and he could have suppressed awareness of the woman.
No, maybe not. When the city had scraped your nerves raw, they didn’t have much resistance to the slime in some heads.
Odd, he reflected how often the outwardly polite ones were the foully twisted inside. They wouldn’t dream of misbehaving in public, but just below the surface of consciousness…Better not think of it, better not remember. Berkeley was at least preferable to San Francisco or Oakland. The bigger the town, the more evil it seemed to hold, three centimeters under the frontal bone. New York was almost literally uninhabitable.
There was a young fellow waiting beside Kane. A girl came down the sidewalk, pretty, long yellow hair and a well-filled blouse. Kane focused idly on her: yes, she had an apartment of her own, which she had carefully picked for a tolerant superintendent. Lechery jumped in the young man’s nerves. His eyes followed the girl, Cobean-style, and she walked on…simple harmonic motion.
Too bad. They could have enjoyed each other. Kane chuckled to himself. He had nothing against honest lust, anyhow not in his liberated conscious mind; he couldn’t do much about a degree of subconscious puritanism. Lord, you can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, If they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.
—the trouble is, he thought, they hurt me. but i can’t tell them that. they’d rip me apart and dance on the pieces. the government / the military / wouldn’t like a man to be alive who could read secrets but their fear-inspired anger would be like a baby’s tantrum beside the red blind amok of the common man (thoughtful husband considerate father good honest worker earnest patriot) whose inward sins were known. you can talk to a priest or a psychiatrist because it is only talk & he does not live your failings with you—
The light changed and Kane started across. It was clear fall weather, not that this area had marked seasons, a cool sunny day with a small wind blowing up the street from the water. A few blocks ahead of him, the University campus was a splash of manicured green under brown hills.
—flayed & burningburningburning moldering rotted flesh & the bones the white hard clean bones coming out gwtjklfmx—
Kane stopped dead. Through the vertigo he felt how sweat was drenching into his shirt.
And it was such an ordinary-looking man!
“Hey, there, buster, wake up! Ya wanna get killed?”
Kane took a sharp hold on himself and finished the walk across the street. There was a bench at the bus stop and he sat down till the trembling was over.
Some thoughts were unendurable.
He had a trick of recovery. He went back to Father Schliemann. The priest’s mind had been like a well, a deep well under sun-speckled trees, its surface brightened with a few gold-colored autumn leaves…but there was nothing bland about the water, it had a sharp mineral tang, a smell of the living earth. He had often fled to Father Schliemann, in those days of puberty when the telepathic power had first wakened in him. He had found good minds since then, happy minds, but never one so serene, none with so much strength under the gentleness.
“I don’t want you hanging around that papist, boy, do you understand?” It was his father, the lean implacable man who always wore a black tie. “Next thing you know, you’ll be worshiping graven images just like him.”
“But they aren’t—”
His ears could still ring with the cuff. “Go up to your room! I don’t want to see you till tomorrow morning. And you’ll have two more chapters of Deuteronomy memorized by then. Maybe that’ll teach you the true Christian faith.”
Kane grinned wryly and lit another cigarette from the end of the previous one. He knew he smoked too much. And drank—but not heavily. Drunk, he was defenseless before the horrible tides of thinking.
He had had to run away from home at the age of fourteen. The only other possibility was conflict ending with reform school. It had meant running away from Father Schliemann too, but how in hell’s red fire could a sensitive adolescent dwell in the same house as his father’s brain? Were the psychologists now admitting the possibility of a sadistic masochist? Kane knew the type existed.
Give thanks for this much mercy, that the extreme telepathic range was only a few hundred yards. And a mind-reading boy was not altogether helpless; he could evade officialdom and the worst horrors of the underworld. He could find a decent elderly couple at the far end of the continent and talk himself into adoption.
Kane shook himself and got up again. He threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with his heel. A thousand examples told him what obscure sexual symbolism was involved in that act, but what the deuce…it was also a practical thing. Guns are phallic too, but at times you need a gun.
Weapons: he could not help wincing as he recalled dodging the draft in 1949. He’d traveled enough to know this country was worth defending. But it hadn’t been any trick at all to hoodwink a psychiatrist and get himself marked hopelessly psychoneurotic—which he would be after two years penned with frustrated men. There had been no choice, but he could not escape a sense of dishonor.
—haven’t we all sinned / everyone of us / is there a single human creature on earth without his burden of shame?—
A man was coming out of the drugstore beside him. Idly, Kane probed his mind. You could go quite deeply into anyone’s self if you cared to, in fact you couldn’t help doing so. It was impossible merely to scan verbalized thinking: the organism is too closely integrated. Memory is not a passive filing cabinet, but a continuous process beneath the level of consciousness; in a way, you are always reliving your entire past. And the more emotionally charged the recollection is, the more powerfully it radiates.
The stranger’s name was—no matter. His personality was as much an unchangeable signature as his fingerprints. Kane had gotten into the habit of thinking of people as such-and-such a multidimensional symbolic topography; the name was an arbitrary gabble.
The man was an assistant professor of English at the University. Age forty-two, married, three children, making payments on a house in Albany. Steady sober type, but convivial, popular with his colleagues, ready to help out most friends. He was thinking about tomorrow’s lectures, with overtones of a movie he wanted to see and an undercurrent of fear that he might have cancer after all, in spite of what the doctor said.
Below, the list of his hidden crimes. As a boy: tormenting a cat, well-buried Oedipean hungers, masturbation, petty theft…the usual. Later: cheating on a few exams, that ludicrous fumbling attempt with a girl which came to nothing because he was too nervous, the time he crashed a cafeteria line and had been shoved away with a cold remark (and praises be, Jim who had seen that was now living in Chicago)…still later: wincing memories of a stomach uncontrollably rumbling at a formal dinner, that woman in his hotel room the night he got drunk at the convention, standing by and letting old Carver be fired because he didn’t have the courage to protest to the dean…now: youngest child a nasty whining little snotnose, but you can’t show anyone what you really think, reading Rosamond Marshall when alone in his office, disturbing young breasts in tight sweaters, the petty spite of academic politics, giving Simonson an undeserved good grade because the boy was so beautiful, disgraceful sweating panic when at night he considered how death would annihilate his ego—
And what of it? This assistant professor was a good man, a kindly and honest man, his inwardness ought to be between him and the Recording Angel. Few of his thoughts had ever become deeds, or ever would. Let him bury them himself, let him be alone with them. Kane ceased focusing on him.
The telepath had grown tolerant. He expected little of anyone; nobody matched the mask except possibly Father Schliemann and a few others…and those were human too, with human failings; the difference was that they knew peace. It was the emotional overtones of guilt which made Kane wince. God knew he himself was no better. Worse maybe, but then his life had thrust him to it. If you had an ordinary human sex drive, for instance, but could not endure to cohabit with the thoughts of a woman, your life became one of fleeting encounters; there was no help for it, even if your austere boyhood training still protested.
“Pardon me, got a match?”
—lynn is dead / i still can’t understand it that i will never see her again & eventually you learn how to go on in a chopped-off fashion but what do you do in the meantime how do you get through the nights alone—
“Sure.” —maybe that is the worst: sharing sorrow and unable to help & only able to give him a light for his cigarette—
Kane put the matches back in his pocket and went on up University, pausing again at Oxford. A pair of large campus buildings jutted up to the left; others were visible ahead and to the right, through a screen of eucalyptus trees. Sunlight and shadow damascened the grass. From a passing student’s mind he discovered where the library was. A good big library—perhaps it held a clue, buried somewhere in the periodical files. He had already arranged for permission to use the facilities: prominent young author doing research for his next novel.
Crossing wistfully named Oxford Street, Kane smiled to himself. Writing was really the only possible occupation: he could live in the country and be remote from the jammed urgency of his fellow men. And with such an understanding of the soul as was his, with any five minutes on a corner giving him a dozen stories, he made good money at it. The only drawback was the trouble of avoiding publicity, editorial summonses to New York, autographing parties, literary teas…he didn’t like those. But you could remain faceless if you insisted.
They said nobody but his agent knew who B. Traven was. It had occurred, wildly, to Kane that Traven might be another like himself. He had gone on a long journey to find out…No. He was alone on earth, a singular and solitary mutant, except for—
It shivered in him, again he sat on the train. It had been three years ago, he was in the club car having a nightcap while the streamliner ran eastward through the Wyoming darkness. They passed a westbound train, not so elegant a one. His drink leaped from his hand to the floor and he sat for a moment in stinging blindness. That flicker of thought, brushing his mind and coming aflame with recognition and then borne away again…Damn it, damn it, he should have pulled the emergency cord and so should she. There should have halted both trains and stumbled through cinders and sagebrush and found each other’s arms.
Too late. Three years yielded only a further emptiness. Somewhere in the land there was, or there had been, a young woman, and she was a telepath and the startled touch of her mind had been gentle. There had not been time to learn anything else. Since then he had given up on private detectives. (How could you tell them: “I’m looking for a girl who was on such-and-such a train the night of—”?) Personal ads in all the major papers had brought him nothing but a few crank letters. Probably she didn’t read the personals; he’d never done so till his search began, there was too much unhappiness to be found in them if you understood humankind as well as he did.
Maybe this library here, some unnoticed item…but if there are two points in a finite space and one moves about so as to pass through every infinitesimal volume dV, it will encounter the other one in finite time provided that the other point is not moving too.
Kane shrugged and went along the curving way to the gatehouse. It was slightly uphill. There was a bored cop in the shelter, to make sure that only authorized cars were parked on campus. The progress paradox: a ton or so of steel, burning irreplaceable petroleum to shift one or two human bodies around, and doing the job so well that it becomes universal and chokes the cities which spawned it. A telepathic society would be more rational. When every little wound in the child’s soul could be felt and healed…when the thick burden of guilt was laid down, because everyone knew that everyone else had done the same…when men could not kill because soldier and murderer felt the victim die…
—adam & eve? you can’t breed a healthy race out of two people. but if we had telepathic children / & we would be bound to do so i think because the mutation is obviously recessive / then we could study the heredity of it & the gift would be passed on to other blood-lines in logical distribution & every generation there would be more of our kind until we could come out openly & even the mindmates could be helped by our psychiatrists & priests & earth would be fair and clean and sane—
There were students sitting on the grass, walking under the Portland Cement Romanesque of the buildings, calling and laughing and talking. The day was near an end. Now there would be dinner, a date, a show, maybe some beer at Robbie’s or a drive up into the hills to neck and watch the lights below like trapped stars and the mighty constellation of the Bay Bridge…or perhaps, with a face-saving grumble about mid-terms, an evening of books, a world suddenly opened. It must be good to be young and mindmute. A dog trotted down the walk and Kane relaxed into the simple wordless pleasure of being a healthy and admired collie.
—so perhaps it is better to be a dog than a man? no / surely not / for if a man knows more grief he also knows more joy & so it is to be a telepath: more easily hurt yes but / god / think of the mindmutes always locked away in aloneness and think of sharing not only a kiss but a soul with your beloved—
The uphill trend grew steeper as he approached the library, but Kane was in fair shape and rather enjoyed the extra effort. At the foot of the stairs he paused for a quick cigarette before entering. A passing woman flicked eyes across him and he learned that he could also smoke in the lobby. Mind reading had its everyday uses. But it was good to stand here in the sunlight. He stretched, reaching out physically and mentally.
—let’s see now the integral of log x dx well make a substitution suppose we call y equal to log x then this is interesting i wonder who wrote that line about euclid has looked on beauty bare—
Kane’s cigarette fell from his mouth.
It seemed that the wild hammering of his heart must drown out the double thought that rivered in his brain, the thought of a physics student, a very ordinary young man save that he was quite wrapped up in the primitive satisfaction of hounding down a problem, and the other thought, the one that was listening in.
—she—
He stood with closed eyes, away on his feet, breathing as if he ran up a mountain. —are You there? are You there?
—not daring to believe: what do i feel?—
—i was the man on the train—
—& i was the woman—
A shuddering togetherness.
“Hey! Hey, mister, is anything wrong?”
Almost Kane snarled. Her thought was so remote, on the very rim of indetectability, he could get nothing but subvocalized words, nothing of the self, and this busybody— “No, thank, I’m OK, just a, a little winded.” —where are You, where can i find You o my darling?—
—image of a large white building / right over here & they call it dwinelle hall & i am sitting on the bench outside & please come quickly please be here i never thought this could become real—
Kane broke into a run. For the first time in fifteen years, he was unaware of his human surroundings. There were startled looks, he didn’t see them, he was running to her and she was running too.
—my name is norman kane & i was not born to that name but took it from people who adopted me because i fled my father (horrible how mother died in darkness & he would not let her have drugs though it was cancer & he said drugs were sinful and pain was good for the soul & he really honestly believed that) & when the power first appeared i made slips and he beat me and said it was witchcraft & i have searched all my life since & i am a writer but only because i must live but it was not aliveness until this moment—
—o my poor kicked beloved / i had it better / in me the power grew more slowly and i learned to cover it & i am twenty years old & came here to study but what are books at this moment—
He could see her now. She was not conventionally beautiful, but neither was she ugly, and there was kindness in her eyes and on her mouth.
—what shall i call you? to me you will always be You but there must be a name for the mindmutes & i have a place in the country among old trees & such few people as live nearby are good folk / as good as life will allow them to be—
—then let me come there with you & never leave again—
They reached each other and stood a foot apart. There was no need for a kiss or even a handclasp…not yet. It was the minds which leaped out and enfolded and became one.
—i remember that at the age of three i drank out of the toilet bowl / there was a peculiar fascination to it & i used to steal loose change from my mother though she had little enough to call her own so i could sneak down to the drugstore for ice cream & i squirmed out of the draft & these are the dirty episodes involving women—
—as a child i was not fond of my grandmother though she loved me and once i played the following fiendish trick on her & at the age of sixteen i made an utter fool of myself in the following manner & i have been physically chaste chiefly because of fear but my vicarious experiences are numbered in the thousands—
Eyes watched eyes with horror.
—it is not that you have sinned for i know everyone has done the same or similar things or would if they had our gift & i know too that it is nothing serious or abnormal & of course you have decent instincts & are ashamed—
—just so / it is that you know what i have done & you know every last little wish & thought & buried uncleanness & in the top of my head i know it doesn’t mean anything but down underneath is all which was drilled into me when i was just a baby & i will not admit to anyone else that such things exist in me—
A car whispered by, homeward bound. The trees talked in the light sunny wind.
A boy and girl went hand in hand.
The thought hung cold under the sky, a single thought in two minds.
—get out. i hate your bloody guts.—