Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  It was perfectly obvious what he had on his mind.

  That it wasn't what we had on our minds made no difference to him. You know these young people. All they're after is kicks.

  So, OK, I wasn't corrupted by Mr. Field's obsessions. I wouldn't even have thought about them, if I hadn't been corrupted already. That's a funny word, isn't it, corrupted? My dictionary says it means "To turn from a sound into an unsound condition...." That's all I mean by it. I just got to thinking unsoundly.

  The thing is, the way a lot of people talk, and the way a lot of movies and books and advertising and all the various sexual engineers, whether they're scientists or salesmen, tell you the way it is, is all the same. Man Plus Woman Equals Sex. Nothing else. No unknowns in the equation. Who needs unknowns?

  Especially when you haven't had any sex yet at all and so it is the unknown, and everybody seems to be telling you that it's the only thing that matters, nothing else counts; and if you don't have sex all the time, you're either impotent or frigid and you'll probably get cancer within the year, too.

  So I began thinking, what am I doing. I mean, I see this girl all the time and spend a whole day at the beach with her and somebody says, "Hey man, so what happened?" and I say: "She gave me a black rock and I gave her an agate." Hey, yeah? Wow!

  See, I began thinking what the others would think, not what I, myself, thought.

  Its hard to explain, because there was more to it than that. Of course there was. Being with a girl, a woman, and Natalie was a woman, was exciting. That sounds dumb, and you can make jokes about it if you want, but its the right word. Physically, and mentally, and spiritually exciting.

  But what I thought, because of what everybody, even Freud, says, was that it must be Love. They all say that sex is the real thing, and Love is what you call it when you are slightly more civilized than a gorilla. Sex isn't something you do when you're in love, love is what you call it when you want sex. Just ask the toothpaste commercials and the cigarette ads and the porno movies and the art movies and the pop songs, or Mr. Field. Man, there is one important thing. Just one.

  And so the next time we met, it was entirely different, I had decided that I was in love with Natalie. I hadn't fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn't say that; I had decided that I was in love with her.

  According to some of the people who write about the brain and the mind, and who are interested in the front-back differences rather than the left-right differences, this would be an example of the frontal lobes trying to run the whole show, and fouling up the poor old hind-brain. This is a foul-up intellectuals are liable to. At least, stupid mixed-up intellectuals like me.

  It was all right at first, because I was actually very cowardly. I spent the time when I wasn't with Natalie working on being in love with her. But when I was actually with her, I forgot about all that, and we talked like crazy, just like before.

  One thing we talked about was our plans, a fairly natural subject for high school seniors in the last semester. Hers were quite definite. She was going to Tanglewood this summer, mainly to meet people in the East, other musicians, professionals who might help her, and the other kids, the competition as she put it—she craved to meet the competition, to measure herself against them. Then she'd come back home in the fall, and for one year she'd work full time at the music school and giving lessons to save money, and practicing and composing, and taking a class at State in advanced theory and harmony; she said there was one man there who could teach her some things she needed to know; she'd already worked with him some, in summer school last year. Then she'd go to the Eastman School of Music in New York, with her savings and whatever scholarship they'd give her, and study with a couple of composers there "for as long as it's worthwhile," she said This was the same kind of reason why I wanted to go to MIT: there was a man there doing a kind of physiological psychology that was exactly what I was most interested in. We had some really strange conversations, with her explaining what these composers were trying to do and me trying to explain what consciousness was; but it was surprising how often the two completely different things came together and turned out to be related. The neat thing about ideas is the way they keep doing that.

  In April the Civic Orchestra was giving a concert at one of the big churches, and three of Natalies songs were to be on the program. It was no big deal, she said; it was because she knew the conductor, and when he needed an experienced player to hold his amateur violists together she did it for him; but still, it was a first public performance of her compositions. Composing, she said, is about the worst art of all, because its about nine-tenths string-pulling. You have to know people, or you never get played. She was realistic about that, and said she wasn't going in for the "Charles Ives game." Ives heard hardly any of his music played at the time he was writing it; he just sat and wrote it and stuck it into a box and worked as an insurance broker or something. She disapproved of that. She said getting it played was part of the job. But she wasn't very consistent, because her two idols were Schubert, who never heard most of his big works, and Emily Brontë, who never really forgave her sister Charlotte for publishing her poems, or even in fact for reading them. The three songs that were to be performed in April were settings of Emily Brontë poems.

  Wuthering Heights was Natalie's favorite book; and she knew a lot about the Brontë family, these four genius children living in a vicarage in a village on a moor in the middle of Nowhere, England, a hundred and fifty years ago. Talk about being isolated! I read a biography of them she gave me; and I realized that maybe I thought I had been lonely, but my life had been an orgy of sociability, compared to those four. But they did have each other. The kind of frightening thing was that it was the boy, the only son, who couldn't take it, and cracked up—went on drugs and alcohol, got hooked, and died of it. Because they'd all expected the most of him, because he was the boy. The girls, whom nothing was expected since they were only girls, went on and wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. It gives you to think. Maybe I was not so unlucky in having parents who expected less of me than I wanted to give, after all. Maybe also it is not an unmixed blessing to be born male.

  What the Brontë kids did for years was write stories and poems about these countries they made up. Maps and wars and adventures and all. Charlotte and Branwell had "Angria," and Emily and Anne had "Gondal." Emily burned all her Gondal stories when she realized she was going to die of TB, but by then Charlotte had made her save the poems. They all learned how to write, they practiced at it by writing these long, involved romances about non-existent countries, for years. It came as a shock to me, because between twelve and sixteen I had done sort of the same thing, though I had no sister to show it to.

  I had this country called Thorn. I drew maps of it and stuff, but mostly I didn't write stories about it. Instead I described the flora and fauna, and the landscape and the cities, and figured out the economy and the way they lived, their government and history. It started out as a kingdom when I was twelve, but by the time I was fifteen or sixteen it had become a kind of free socialistic set-up, and so I had to work out all the history of how they got from autocracy to socialism, and also their relationships to other nations. They weren't at all friendly with Russia, China, or the United States. In fact they traded only with Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of San Marino. Thorn was a very small country, on an island in the South Atlantic, only about sixty miles across, and a very long way from anywhere else. The wind blew all the time in Thorn. The coasts were high and rocky. Sailing ships had very seldom been able to land there; the Greeks or Phoenicians had found it once, which gave rise to the myths of Atlantis, but it wasn't rediscovered until 1810. They had still, intentionally, not built a harbor for big ships, or any kind of landing field for planes. Fortunately it was small enough and poor enough that the Great Powers hadn't yet bothered to bring it into a sphere of influence and make it into a missile base. They let it alone. I had spent a lot of time on Thorn, for four years. But for over a ye
ar I hadn't been back; it all seemed long ago, kid stuff. Still, when I happened to think about it, I could see the steep cliffs over the and the wind blowing over the long sheep pastures, and the city of Barren on the south coast, my favorite city, built of granite and cedarwood, looking out over the windy cliffs to the Antarctic Ocean and the South Pole.

  I dug out some of the History of Thorn and showed it to Natalie. She really liked it. She said, "I could write their music. You never talk about their music."

  "Its all wind instruments," I said, clowning.

  "OK," she said. "A wind quintet. No clarinets. They're too sticky for Thorn. Flute, oboe, bassoon ... horn? English horn?Trombone? Yes, they'd have trombones...." She wasn't clowning. She did write a wind quintet for Thorn.

  Her definiteness about her plans infected me. It was catching. I began seriously thinking about what I would do if I could. Whether I wanted to go the medical route, or go into biology and work up to the place where bio and psychology interact, or go straight into psychology. They all fascinated me. They were all related, but you couldn't study them all at once, you'd just flounder. The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn't exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically.

  All that, talking about our plans, and music and science, and Thorn and Gondal, was great. Sometimes she played me a new bit of the Thorn Quintet. She had an old cornet trumpet she'd picked up for a dollar at a rummage sale, and she'd blow at it with her cheeks getting red and her eyes popping out, trying to let me hear a theme. I'd played cornet for one year in sixth grade in the school band, my entire musical career, but I could do about as well as she could. We fooled around with it and made it do all sorts of peeps and squeals and farts, and I performed "The Isle of Capri," sort of. Once I drove her out to her Saturday job at the music school and hung around while she put the kids through their Orff Method, which was also great. Everybody had a xylophone or a bell or wood blocks, and when they all got going, fourteen six-year-olds with all that equipment, it was move over, Mick Jagger. She insisted that they learned music theory from it. I suggested that what they mosdy got was a good time, and considerable hearing impairment if they kept it up long. Then we drove back and had a shake and French fries on the way and got to her house and her father was there.

  He didn't exactly say hello to me. He said hello to her, and looked at me.

  And I got red and the smile came onto my face, the smile I wish I could stamp on. And I remembered that I was in love with Natalie. And so I couldn't say anything to him, or to her. I got sticky and uptight, and pretty soon I went home, where it was a lot easier and more comfortable to be in love.

  I only saw Natalie three or four times in the couple of weeks after that. And when I did it was much less enjoyable. I kept wondering things like whether she had ever had another man friend, and what she planned to do about men in amongst her other plans, and what she thought about me in that particular way, and not daring to ask her any of it. The closest I got was once when we were walking the fat off Orville again in the park. I said, "Do you think people can combine love with a career?" It came out and sort of hung there like a corpse. It sounded exactly like a question out of some magazine for Homemakers. Natalie said, "Well of course they can," and gave me an extremely peculiar look. Then Orville met a Great Dane on the path and tried to kill and eat it. When that was over, we had gotten past the stupid question. But I kept on being sort of solemn and moody. As we were coming home, Natalie said in a sort of wistful voice, "How come you never do the ape act any more?"

  That burned me. That really burned me. When I got home, I was in a foul mood. What I want to do is take this girl suddenly in my arms and kiss her and say "I love you!" and what she wants is for me to jump around with a banana peel looking for fleas in it.

  I worked myself up good and proper. I resented her for being so friendly and matter of fact, and I deliberately thought about the way her hair looked when she'd just washed it and it was all sleek and soft, and the texture of her skin, which was white and very fine. And pretty soon I had managed to develop her into the real thing, the mysterious female, the cruel beauty, the untouchable desirable goddess, you name it. So that instead of being my first and best and only real friend, she was something that I wanted and hated. Hated because I wanted it, wanted because I hated it.

  In February we drove over to the coast again.

  There's always a week around Washington's Birthday that is fantastic. It stops raining. The sun gets warm. The leaf buds start showing on the trees, and some first flowers come out. It's the first week of spring, and in some ways the best, because it's the first, and because it's so short.

  You can count on that week, and I'd planned ahead. I got her to get a substitute at the music school and postpone her lessons, so that we could drive over to Jade Beach on Saturday. If her father made any static about it, I didn't care. She had to handle him. We were adults, and she had to learn to do without his approval for everything. I was all ready to tell her exactly that, if she mentioned her father; but she didn't. She didn't seem very enthusiastic about this trip, but I guess she knew I wanted it, so she did what I wanted, like a friend.

  When we got to the beach about eleven in the morning, it was low tide, and there were some people clamming. We'd worn shorts under our jeans this time, and we played in the surf again, but it was different. There was a low fog over the sand, not thick and cold, just a kind of dimming as if the air was made of mother-of-pearl, and the waves were quiet and broke slowly, curving over themselves in long blue-green lines, dreamy and regular and hypnotic. We didn't stay together, but drifted apart, wading in the breakers. When I looked, Natalie was way up the beach, walking slowly in the foam, kicking up spray. She walked a litde hunched with her hands in her pockets and looked very small and frail there between the misty beach and the misty sea.

  The clammers left when the tide began to come back in. After about an hour Natalie came wandering back. Her hair was all tangled in strings and she kept sniffing. The sea air made her nose run, and we hadn't brought any tissues. She looked serene and distant, the way her mother always looked. She'd picked up some rocks, but most of them were the kind that are beautiful when wet, but nothing much when they dry. "Let's eat," she said. "I'm starving."

  I'd built a fire with driftwood in the same place as last time, in the hollow sheltered by the big log. She sat down right by the fire. I sat down next to her. I put my arm on her shoulders. Then my heart started hammering in this terrifying way, and I felt really crazy and dizzy, and I took hold of her really hard and kissed her. We kissed, and I couldn't get my breath. I hadn't meant to grab her like that; I meant to kiss her and tell her, "I love you" and talk about it, about love, and that was all. I hadn't thought any farther. I didn't know what would happen to me, that it would be like when you're in deep and a big breaker hits you and pulls you over and down and you can't swim and you can't breathe, and there is nothing you can do, nothing.

  She knew when the breaker hit me. And I guess it scared her too, but she wasn't caught in it. Because she pulled free after a bit and drew back, away from me. But she kept hold of my hand, because she saw that I was drowning.

  "Owen," she said, "hey, Owen sweetheart, Owen, don't."

  Because I was sobbing. I don't know whether it was crying, or because I couldn't breathe.

  I came out of it gradually. I was still too shaken up to be embarrassed or ashamed yet, and I reached for her other hand, so we were kneeling in the sand face-to-face, and I said, "Natalie, why can't—we're not kids—don't you—"

  She said, "No, I don't. I don't, Owen. I love you. It isn't right."

  She didn't mean morally right. She meant right the way the music or the thought comes right, comes clear, is true. Maybe that's the same thing as moral rightness. I don't know.

  It was she who said, "I love y
ou." Not me. I never did say it to her.

  I said what I'd said before, stammering—I couldn't stop—and pulling her towards me. All of a sudden her eyes got very bright, and she scowled and pulled away and stood right up. "No!" she said. "I won't get into this bind with you! I thought we could manage it, but if we can't, we can't, and that's it. That's all. If what we have isn't enough, then forget it. Because it's all we do have. And you know it! And it's a lot! But if it's not enough, then let it be. Forget it!" And she turned and walked off, down the beach to the sea, in tears.

  I sat there for a long time. The fire went out. I went and walked up the beach by the foam line, till I saw her sitting on a rock over the tide pools at the foot of the northern cliffs.

  Her nose was all red, and her legs were covered with goose pimples and looked very white and thin against the barnacle-rough rock.

  "There's a crab," she said, "under the big anemone."

  We looked into the tide pool a while. I said, "You must be starving, I am." And we walked back along the foam line and built up the fire, and pulled on our jeans, and ate some lunch. Not very much, this time. We didn't talk. Neither of us knew what to say anymore. There were ten thousand things going on in my head, but I couldn't say any of them.

  We started home right after lunch.

  About at the summit of the Coast Range, I found the one thing I thought needed saying, and said it. I said, "You know, it's different for a man."