Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  Robby was hospitalized for four months, spent five weeks in the county home, and was then returned to the custody of his mother. In accordance with further court orders, he was dutifully bussed to Chelton Day School for five hours of treatment a day, six days a week. He made the daily trip in darkness and silence.

  Robby’s future was as flat and featureless as a line extending nowhere, holding no hope of intersection.

  “Shit, Jer, you’re going to have to watch after the kid tomorrow.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because he won’t go into the goddamn pool, that’s why. You saw him today. Smitty just lowered his legs into the water, and the kid started swinging and screaming. Sounded like a bunch of cats had started up. Dr. Whilden says he stays back tomorrow. She says that the van is too hot for him to stay in. Just keep him company in the room till Jan McLellan’s regular aide gets back from vacation.”

  “Great,” said Bremen. He pulled his sweat-plastered shirt away from his skin. He had been hired to drive the school van, and now he was helping to feed, dress, and babysit the poor bastards. “Great. That’s just great, Bill. What am I supposed to do with him for an hour and a half while you guys are at the pool?”

  “Watch him. Try to get him to work on the zipper book. You ever see that page in there with the bra stuff—the eyes and hooks? Let him work on that. I useta practice on that with my eyes shut.”

  “Great,” said Bremen. He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun.

  Bremen sat on the front stoop and poured the last of the scotch into his glass. It was long past midnight, but the narrow street teemed with children playing. Two black teenagers were playing the dozens while their friends urged them on. A group of little girls jumped double dutch under the streetlamp. Insects milled in the light and seemed to dance to the girls’ singing. Adults sat on the steps of identical rowhouses and watched one another dully. No one moved much. It was very hot.

  It’s time to move on.

  Bremen knew that he had stayed too long. Seven weeks working at the day school had been too much. He was getting curious. And he was beginning to ask questions about the kids.

  Boston, perhaps. Farther north. Maine.

  Asking questions and getting answers Jan McLellan had told him about Robby. She had told him about the bruises on Robby’s body, about the broken arm two years before. She told him about the teddy bear that a candy striper had given the blind boy. It had been the first positive stimulus to evoke an emotion from Robby. He had kept the bear in his arms for weeks. Refused to go to X-ray without it. Then, a few days after his return home, Robby got into the van one morning, screaming and whining in his weird way. No teddy bear. Dr. Whilden called his mother only to be told that the God-damned toy was lost. “God-damned toy” were the mother’s words, according to Jan McLellan. No other teddy bear would do. Robby carried on for three weeks.

  So what? What can I do?

  Bremen knew what he could do. He had known for weeks. He shook his head and took another drink, adding to the already-thickened mindshield that separated him from the senseless, pain-giving world.

  Hell, it’d be better for Robby if I didn’t try it.

  A breeze came up. Bremen could hear the screams from a lot down the street where two allied gangs played a fierce game of pick-up ball. Curtains billowed out open windows. Somewhere a siren sounded, faded. The breeze lifted papers from the gutter and ruffled the dresses of the girls jumping rope.

  Bremen tried to imagine a lifetime with no sight, no sound.

  Fuck it! He picked up the empty bottle and went upstairs.

  The van pulled up the circular drive of the day school, and Bremen helped unload the children with a slow care born of practice, affection, and a throbbing headache.

  Scotty emerged, smiling, hands extended to the unseen adult he trusted to be waiting. Tommy Pierson lurched out with knees together and hands pulled up to his chest. Bremen had to catch him or the frail boy would have fallen face first into the pavement. Teresa jumped down with her usual gleeful cries, imparting inexact but slobberingly enthusiastic kisses on everyone who touched her.

  Robby remained seated after the others had exited. It took both Bremen and Smitty to get the boy out of the van. Robby did not resist; he was simply a mass of pliable but unresponsive fat. The boy’s head tilted back in a disturbing way. His tongue lolled first from one corner of the slack mouth and then from the other. The short, pigeon-toed steps had to be coaxed out of him one at a time. Only the familiarity of the short walk to the classroom kept Robby moving at all.

  The morning seemed to last forever. It rained before lunch, and for a while it looked as if the swimming would be canceled. Then the sun came out and illuminated the flowerbeds on the front lawn. Bremen watched sunlight dance off the moistened petals of Turk’s prize roses and listened to the roar of the lawnmower. He realized that it was going to happen.

  After lunch he helped them prepare for departure. The boys needed help getting into their suits, and it saddened Bremen to see pubic hair and a man’s penis on the body of someone with a seven-year-old’s mind. Tommy would always start masturbating idly until Bremen touched his arm and helped him with the elastic of the suit.

  Then they were gone, and the hall, which had been filled with squealing children and laughing adults, was silent. Bremen watched the blue-and-white van disappear slowly down the drive. Then he turned back to the classroom.

  Robby showed no awareness that Bremen had entered the room. The boy looked absurd dressed in a striped, green top and orange shorts that were too tight to button. Bremen thought of a broken, bronze Buddha he had seen once near Osaka. What if this child harbored some deep wisdom born of his long seclusion from the world?

  Robby stirred, farted loudly, and resumed his slumped position.

  Bremen sighed and pulled up a chair. It was too small. His knees stuck into the air, and he felt ridiculous. He grinned to himself. He would leave that night. Take a bus north. Hitchhike. It would be cooler in the country.

  This would not take long. He need not even establish full contact. A one-way mindtouch. It was possible. A few minutes. He could look out the window for Robby, look at a picture book, perhaps put a record on and share the music. What would the boy make of these new impressions? A gift before leaving. Anonymous. Share nothing else. Better not to send any images of Robby, either. All right.

  Bremen lowered his mindshield. Immediately he flinched and raised it again. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself to be so vulnerable. The thick, woolly blanket of the mindshield, thickened even further by alcohol, had become natural to him. The sudden surge of background babble—he thought of it as white noise—was abrasive. It was like coming into a glaringly bright room after spending months in a cave. He directed his attention to Robby and lowered his barriers again. He tuned out the neurobabble and looked deeply into Robby’s mind.

  Nothing.

  For a confused second Bremen thought that he had lost the focus of his power. Then he concentrated and was able to pick out the dull, sexual broodings of Turk out in the garden and the preoccupied fragments of Dr. Whilden’s thoughts as she settled herself into her Mercedes and checked her stockings for runs. The receptionist was reading a novel—The Plague Dogs. Bremen read a few lines with her. It frustrated him that her eyes scanned so slowly. His mouth filled with the syrupy taste of her cherry coughdrop.

  Bremen stared intensely at Robby. The boy was breathing asthmatically. His tongue was visible and heavily coated. Stray bits of food remained on his lips and cheeks. Bremen narrowed his probe, strengthened it, focused it like a beam of coherent light.

  Nothing.

  No. Wait. There was—what?—an absence of something. There was a hole in the field of mindbabble where Robby’s thoughts should have been. Bremen realized that he was confronting the strongest mindshield he had ever encountered. Even Gail had not been able to concentrate a barrier of that incredible tightness. For a second Bremen was deeply impressed,
even shaken, and then he realized the cause of it. Robby’s mind was damaged. Entire segments were probably inactive. With so few senses to rely on and such limited awareness, it was little wonder that the boy’s consciousness—what there was of it—had turned inward. What at first seemed to Bremen to be a powerful mindshield was nothing more than a tight ball of introspection going beyond autism. Robby was truly alone.

  Bremen was still shaken enough to pause a minute and take a few deep breaths. When he resumed, it was with even more care, feeling along the negative boundaries of the mindshield like a man groping along a rough wall in the dark. Somewhere there had to be an opening.

  There was. Not an opening so much as a soft spot—a resilience set amidst the stone. Bremen half-perceived the flutter of underlying thoughts, much as a pedestrian senses the movement of trains in a subway under the pavement. He concentrated on building the strength of the probe until he felt his shirt beginning to soak with sweat. His vision and hearing were beginning to dim in the singleminded exertion of his effort. No matter. Once initial contact was made, he would relax and slowly open the channels of sight and sound.

  He felt the shield give a bit, still elastic but sinking slightly under his unrelenting pressure. He concentrated until the veins stood out in his temples. Unknown to himself, he was grimacing, neck muscles knotting with the strain. The shield bent. Bremen’s probe was a solid ram battering a tight, gelatinous doorway. It bent further. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight.

  The shield continued to bend. Bremen leaned forward as into a strong wind. There was only the concentrated force of his will. Suddenly there was a ripping, a rush of warmth, a falling forward. Bremen lost his balance, flailed his arms, opened his mouth to yell.

  His mouth was gone.

  He was falling. Tumbling. He had a distant, confused glimpse of his own body writhing in the grip of an epileptic seizure. Then he was falling again. Falling into silence. Falling into nothing.

  Nothing.

  Bremen was inside. Beyond. Was diving through layers of slow thermals. Colorless pinwheels tumbled in three dimensions. Spheres of black collapsed outward. Blinded him. There were waterfalls of touch, rivulets of scent, a thin line of balance blowing in a silent wind.

  Supported by a thousand hands—touching, exploring, fingers in the mouth, palms along the chest, sliding along the belly, cupping the penis, moving on.

  He was buried. He was underwater. Rising in the blackness. But he could not breathe. His arms began to move. Palms flailed against the viscous current. Up. He was buried in sand. He flailed and kicked. He moved upwards, pulled on by a vacuum that gripped his head in a vise. The substance shifted. Compacted, pressed in by a thousand unseen hands, he was propelled through the constricting aperture. His head broke the surface. He opened his mouth to scream, and the air rushed into his chest like water filling a drowning man. The scream went on and on.

  ME!

  Bremen awoke on a broad plain. There was no sky. Pale, peach-colored light diffused everything. The ground was hard and scaled into separate orange segments which receded to infinity. There was no horizon. The land was cracked and serrated like a floodplain during a drought. Above him were levels of peachlit crystal. Bremen felt that it was like being in the basement of a clear plastic skyscraper. An empty one. He lay on his back and looked up through endless stories of crystallized emptiness.

  He sat up. His skin felt as if it had been toweled with sandpaper. He was naked. He rubbed his hand across his stomach, touched his pubic hair, found the scar on his knee from the motorcycle accident when he was seventeen. A wave of dizziness rolled through him when he stood upright.

  He walked. His bare feet found the smooth plates warm. He had no direction and no destination. Once he had walked a mile on the Bonneville Salt Flats just before sunset. It was like that. Bremen walked. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

  When he finally stopped, it was in a place no different from any other. His head hurt. He lay back and imagined himself as a bottom-dwelling sea creature looking up through layers of shifting currents. The peach-colored light bathed him in warmth. His body was radiant. He shut his eyes against the light and slept.

  He sat up suddenly, with nostrils flaring, ears actually twitching with the strain of trying to pinpoint a half-heard sound. Darkness was total.

  Something was moving in the night.

  Bremen crouched in the blackness and tried to filter out the sound of his own ragged breathing. His glandular system reverted to programming a million years old. His fists clenched, his eyes rolled uselessly in their sockets, and his heart raced.

  Something was moving in the night.

  He felt it nearby. He felt the power of it. It was huge, and it had no trouble finding its way in the darkness. The thing was near him, above him. Bremen felt the force of its blind gaze. He kneeled on the cold ground and hugged himself into a ball.

  Something touched him.

  Bremen fought down the impulse to scream. He was caught in a giant’s hand—something rough and huge and not a hand at all. It lifted him. Bremen felt the power of it through the pressure, the pain in his ribs. The thing could crush him easily. Again he felt the sense of being viewed, inspected, weighed on some unseen balance. He had the naked, helpless, but somehow reassuring feeling one has while lying on the X-ray table, knowing that invisible beams are passing through you, searching for any malignancy, probing.

  Something set him down.

  Bremen heard no sound but sensed great footsteps receding. A weight lifted from him. He sobbed. Eventually he uncurled and stood up. He called into the blackness, but the sound of his voice was tiny and lost and he was not even sure whether he had heard it at all.

  The sun rose. Bremen’s eyes fluttered open, stared into the distant brilliance, and then closed again before the fact registered fully in his mind. The sun rose.

  He was sitting on grass. A prairie of soft, knee-high grass went off to the horizon in all directions. Bremen pulled a strand, stripped it, and sucked on the sweet marrow. It reminded him of childhood afternoons. He began walking.

  The breeze was warm. It stirred the grass and set up a soft sighing, which helped to ease the headache that still throbbed behind his eyes. The walking pleased him. He contented himself with the feel of grass bending under his bare feet and the play of sunlight and wind on his body.

  By early afternoon he realized that he was walking toward a smudge on the horizon. By late afternoon the smudge had resolved itself into a line of trees. Shortly before sunset he entered the edge of the forest. The trees were the stately elms and oaks of his Pennsylvania boyhood. Bremen’s long shadow moved ahead of him as he moved deeper into the forest.

  For the first time he felt fatigue and thirst begin to work on him. His tongue was heavy, swollen with dryness. He moved leadenly through the lengthening shadows, occasionally checking the visible patches of sky for any sign of clouds. It was while he was looking up that he almost stumbled into the pond. Inside a protective ring of weeds and reeds lay the circle of water. A heavily laden cherry tree sent roots down the bank. Bremen took the last few steps forward, expecting the water to disappear as he threw himself into it.

  It was waist-deep and cold as ice.

  It was just after sunrise that she came. He spotted the movement immediately upon awakening. Not believing, he stood still, just another shadow in the shade of the trees. She moved hesitantly with the tentative step of the meek or the barefoot. The tasseled sawgrass brushed at her thighs. Bremen watched with a clarity amplified by the rich, horizontal sweeps of morning light. Her body seemed to glow. Her breasts, the left ever so slightly fuller than the right, bobbed gently with each high step. Her black hair was cut short.

  She paused in the light. Moved forward again. Bremen’s eyes dropped to her strong thighs, and he watched as her legs parted and closed with the heart-stopping intimacy of the unobserved. She was much closer now, and Bremen co
uld make out the delicate shadows along her fine ribcage, the pale, pink circles of areolae, and the spreading bruise along the inside of one arm.

  Bremen stepped out into the light. She stopped, arms rising across her upper body in a second’s instinctive movement, then moved toward him quickly. She opened her arms to him. He was filled with the clean scent of her hair. Skin slid across skin. Their hands moved across muscle, skin, the familiar terrain of vertebrae. Both were sobbing, speaking incoherently. Bremen dropped to one knee and buried his face between her breasts. She bent slightly and cradled his head with her fingers. Not for a second did they relax the pressure binding them together.

  “Why did you leave me?” he muttered against her skin. “Why did you go away?”

  Gail said nothing. Her tears fell into his hair and her hands tightened against his back. Wordlessly she kneeled with him in the high grass.

  Together they passed out of the forest just as the morning mists were burning away. In the early light the grass-covered hills gave the impression of being part of a tanned, velvety human torso, which they could reach out and touch.

  They spoke softly, occasionally intertwining fingers. Each had discovered that to attempt telepathic contact meant inviting the blinding headaches that had plagued both of them at first. So they talked. And they touched. And twice before the day was over, they made love in the high, soft grass with only the golden eye of the sun looking down on them.

  Late in the afternoon they crossed a rise and looked past a small orchard at a vertical glare of white.

  “It’s the farm!” cried Gail, with wonder in her voice. “How can that be?”