Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  But there was so much pain in it, and I couldn't handle it.

  After a couple of blocks my tears dried up, I walked on, but by the time I got to the edge of the park I was so tired I turned around and headed for home. It was about fifteen blocks, and as I walked I wasn't thinking or feeling anything that I can remember. I just walked in the night, and I could have been doing it forever and gone on doing it forever. Only the sense of strangeness was gone. Everything was familiar, the whole world, the stars even, I was at home. Now and then there was the smell of fresh earth or flowers from a dark garden. I remember that.

  I came to our street and turned down it. Just as I came towards the Fields' house, their car pulled up in front of it, and Mr. and Mrs. Field and Natalie and another young woman got out. They were all talking. I stopped short and just stood. I was between streetlights, and it's very strange that Natalie could see me off there in the dark. But she came straight towards me. I stood there.

  "Owen?"

  I said, "Yeah, hi."

  "I saw you at the concert."

  "Yeah. I heard you," I said, and gave a sort of laugh.

  She was carrying her viola case. She had on a long dress, her hair still looked very black and smooth, and her face was bright. Playing her music, and then I suppose a reception afterwards with people congratulating her, had got her keyed-up, tense; her eyes looked big.

  "You left after my songs."

  "Yeah. Is that when you saw me?"

  "I saw you earlier. At the back. I was looking for you."

  "You thought I'd be there?"

  "I hoped you would. No. I thought you would."

  Her father called her from the front steps; "Natalie!"

  "Is he proud of you?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "I have to go in," she said "My sister came for the concert. Do you want to come in?"

  "I can't,"

  I meant I couldn't, not that anybody was preventing me.

  "Will you come tomorrow night?" she said in a sudden voice, fiercely.

  I said, "All right."

  "I want to see you," she said in the same way. Then she turned around and went to the house and went in, and I walked on past and came home.

  My father was watching TV, and my mother was sitting with him doing crewelwork. She said, "Short movie?" and I said it was, and she said, "Did you enjoy it? What was it?" and I said, "Oh, I don't know," and went upstairs, because I'd walked right out of the night wind back into the fog. And I couldn't talk in the fog, I couldn't say anything true.

  It was not my parents' fault. If this seems to be one of those books about how everything is the older generation's fault, and even some psychologists have written books like that by the way, then I haven't said it right. It wasn't their fault. All right, so they lived partly in the fog all the time, and accepted a lot of lies without trying to get at the truth—so what? Who doesn't? It doesn't mean they liked it any better than I did. It doesn't mean they were strong. It means just the opposite.

  I WENT OVER to Natalie's the next night. It was like the first time: Mrs. Field let me in, and Natalie was practicing. I waited in the dark hall, and the music stopped, and she came down the stairs. She said, "Let's go for a walk."

  "Its raining some."

  "I don't care," she said. "I want to get out."

  She put on her coat and we started up the street towards the park.

  She still had that tense, high-flying look. It was going to take her a while to come back down.

  "What's been happening with you?" she said after we'd gone half a block.

  "Nothing much."

  "Have you heard from any of the colleges?"

  "Yeah, one."

  "Which one?"

  "MIT."

  "What did they say?"

  "Oh, they'll let me in."

  "No money?"

  "Yeah, tuition."

  "Full tuition?"

  "Yeah, right."

  "Wow. That's great! So what did you decide?"

  "Nothing."

  "You waiting to hear from the others?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Oh, I'm going to State, I guess."

  "State? What for?"

  "To get a college degree."

  "But why there? You wanted to work with that fellow at MIT"

  "Freshmen don't go and 'work with' Nobel Prize winners."

  "They don't stay freshmen either, do they?"

  "Yeah, well, I decided not to."

  "I thought you said you didn't decide anything."

  "There isn't anything to decide."

  She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and hunched her head over and strode along clumping her heels. She looked mad. But after about a block she said, "Owen."

  "Yeah."

  "I am really confused."

  "What about?"

  I don't know how she could go on, I was answering her in such a cold, dumb, uninterested tone. But she went on.

  "About Jade Beach and all that."

  "Oh, yeah. Well, that's all right."

  I didn't want to talk about it. It loomed up out of the fog much too big and solid and hard. I wanted to turn away and not look at it.

  "I've been thinking about it a lot," she said. "See, I thought I had all that figured out. At least for a while. For the next couple of years anyhow. The way I figured, I didn't want to get really involved with anybody. Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that. I'm pretty young, and there's all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it's the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don't think I can. I can't take anything lightly. Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. There's the kind of love that's lovers, and the kind of love that's friends. And I really thought it was that way. I thought we'd really made it, and everybody's wrong when they say men and women can't be friends. But I guess they're right. I was ... too theoretical...."

  "I don't know," I said. I didn't want to say anything more, but it got dragged up out of me. "I think you were right, actually. I was pushing the sex stuff in where it didn't belong."

  "Yeah, but it does belong," she said in this defeated, morose voice. And then in the fierce voice, "You can't just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I'm busy just now!"

  We went on another block. The rain was fine and misty so that you hardly felt it on your face, but it was beginning to drip down the back of my neck.

  "The first fellow I went out with," she said, "I was sixteen and he was eighteen; he was an oboeist, oboeists are all crazy. He had a car and he kept parking it in places with a nice view and then, you know, sort of launching himself onto me. And he started saying, 'This is bigger than either of us, Natalie!' And it made me mad, and I finally said, 'Well it may be bigger than you, but it isn't bigger than me!'That sort of finished that. He was a jerk anyhow. So was I. But anyhow. Now I know what he meant."

  After a while she went on, "But all the same..."

  "What?"

  "It doesn't belong. Does it?"

  "What?"

  "With you and me. It just doesn't work Does it?"

  "No," I said.

  She got mad then. She stopped walking and looked at me with that scowl. "You say yes, you say no, you say there isn't anything to decide—Well, there is! And did I decide right or didn't I? I don't know! Why do I have to make the decision? If we're friends—and that's the whole point of it, can we be friends?—then we make the decisions together—don't we?"

  "OK. We did."

  "Then why are you mad at me?"

  We were standing there under a big horse chestnut tree in a parking lot. It was dark under the branches, and they kept most of the rain off. Some of the flowers shone like candles in the streetlight, above us. Natalie's coat and hair were all like shadows, all I could see of her was her face and eyes.

  "I'm not," I said. It was like the ground was shifting under me, the world reorganizing itself, an eart
hquake, nothing to hold onto. "I'm really mixed-up. It's just that. I can't make sense out of anything. I can't handle it."

  "Why not, Owen? What's wrong?"

  "I don't know," I said, and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she came up close and held me around the ribs.

  "I get scared," I said.

  She said, "What of?" into my coat.

  "Being alive."

  She held onto me, and I held onto her.

  "I don't know what to do," I said. "See, I'm supposed to go on living all these years and I don't know how."

  "You mean you don't know why?"

  "I guess so."

  "But, for this," she said, holding on. "For this. For you, for the stuff you have to do, for time to think; for time to hear the music. You know how, Owen. Only you listen to the people who don't!"

  "Yeah, I guess so," I said. I was shaking. She said, "It's cold. Let's go home and make some weird tea. I've got some Chinese tea that's supposed to be very calming and aids longevity."

  "Longevity is just what I need right now."

  We started back. I don't think we said anything much going back or while we were standing around in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil. We took the teapot and cups up to the practice room and sat on the Oriental rug. The Chinese herb tea tasted really vile. It left your mouth feeling scoured out, but then it was kind of pleasant once you got used to it. I was still feeling shaken-up, but I was getting used to that, too.

  "Did you ever finish the Thorn Quintet?" I said.

  Actually it had only been eight weeks since I had seen her, but it seemed like eight years, and we were in a whole new place.

  "Not yet. The slow movement's done, and I have the idea for the last movement."

  "Listen, Nat. Your stuff last night, the songs, you know. It made me cry. The second one."

  "I know, That's why I had to talk to you again. I mean, because I knew we could. I mean, because..."

  "Because that's the way you really talk. The rest is just words."

  She looked at me straight on and she said, "Owen, you are the neatest person I ever knew. Nobody else understands that. I don't even know any other musicians who understand that. I can't really say anything. I can't even really be anything. Except in music. Maybe later. Maybe when I get good at music, maybe when I learn how to do that, then I'll be able to do some of the rest, too. Maybe I'll even become a human being. But you are one."

  "I'm an ape," I said. "Trying to do the human act."

  "You're good at it," she said, "the best I ever knew."

  I lay down on the rug on my stomach and looked down into my cup of tea. It was a sort of murky yellow brown, with bits of Chinese sediment floating around in it.

  "If this stuff is really calming," I said, "I wonder if it works on the central nervous system, or the cerebrum, or the cerebellum, or where."

  "It tastes like steel wool pads; I wonder if they're calming."

  "I don't know, I never ate one."

  "For breakfast, with milk and sugar."

  "Five thousand percent of the minimum daily adult iron requirement."

  She laughed and wiped her eyes. "I wish I could talk," she said. "I wish I was like you."

  "What did I ever say?"

  "I can't tell you, because I can't talk. I can play it, though."

  "I want to hear it."

  She got up and went to the piano and played some music I had never heard before.

  When it was done, I said, "Is it Thorn?" and she nodded.

  "See, if I could just live there," I said, everything would be duck soup."

  "You do live there. That's where you live."

  "Alone?"

  "Maybe."

  "I don't want to be alone. I'm tired of myself"

  "Well, you could let visitors come. In small boats."

  "I don't want to play king of the castle anymore. I want to live with other people, Nat. I used to think other people didn't matter, but they do. You can't hack it all by yourself"

  "Is that why you're going to State?"

  "I guess so."

  "But you said last winter that your problem at school was the way things are set up there, to level everybody down so that nobody's anybody. Won't State be just like that only bigger?"

  "The entire world is like school, only bigger."

  "No it isn't." She looked stubborn and played some very ugly chords very softly on the piano. "School is where you can't decide anything yet. The rest of the world is where you have to. You aren't going to, you know, decide never to decide anything, be a groupie, are you?"

  "But see, I'm so sick of going against the others, being different. It gets you nowhere. If I do like the others do—"

  She went BRWHANNGGG! on the piano keys.

  "The others are all doing like the other others, so that they can all get along together and not be alone," I said. "Man is a social species. So why the hell can't I?"

  "Because you aren't any good at it," she said.

  "So what do I do? Go back to Thorn and be a crazy hermit the rest of my life writing dumb stuff nobody reads?"

  "No. You go to MIT and show them how good you are."

  "It costs too much."

  BRRWWWHAANNNGGG!

  "They give him three thousand dollars, and he complains," she said.

  "Its going to cost like sixteen or twenty thousand to go there just the first four years."

  "Borrow it. Steal it. Sell your stupid car!"

  "I already wrecked it," I said, and I began to laugh.

  "Wrecked it? The car? In the accident?"

  "Totalled," I said, laughing like crazy. She began laughing, too. I have no idea why we were laughing. It was all of a sudden funny. The whole thing. Everything had been so out of proportion, and all of a sudden it was like I was in proportion and could see it.

  "My father got practically the whole value of it in insurance," I said. "Cash."

  "Well then!"

  "Well then?"

  "There's your first year. You worry about the next year next year."

  "Gorillas build new nests every night," I said. "They sleep in nests, up in trees. They build really lousy ones, very sloppy. They have to build new ones every night because they keep moving on, and besides they foul up the old ones with banana peels and other effluvia. The rule for primates, maybe, is to keep moving on and building nests, one at a time, until they learn to do it right. Or to throw out the banana peels at least."

  Natalie was still sitting at the piano, and she played about six seconds of a thing by Chopin that she had been studying back in December, the Revolutionary Étude. She said, "I wish I understood...."

  I got up off the floor and sat down by her on the piano bench and played some nothing with both hands. "See, I don't understand how to play the piano. But when you play it, I hear the music."

  She looked at me and I looked at her, and we kissed each other on the mouth. But modestly: six seconds at the maximum.

  THERE IS MORE, of course, but that seems to be all of this thing I wanted to tell. The "more" is just what happened next and keeps on happening—each days new gorilla nest.

  I got the scholarship thing out of my desk drawer next day and showed it to my parents, and said that with the car insurance money I could get started at MIT. My mother began to get very upset, really angry, as if I was pulling a dirty trick on her. I don't know if I could have handled that, but my father came in on my side. This is what you always forget, you think you know what to expect, but you don't; what you expect is what doesn't happen, and what you don't expect is what does. My father said that if I worked summers and kept getting tuition scholarships, he would pay the rest. My mother felt really betrayed and refused to go along with the plan gracefully. But she had to go along ungracefully, because despite the fact that she runs our household, she has always played this game that the man is the one who makes the decisions, and so she has cut herself out from decision-making, unless the decisions are not made but just happen, which is how she
prefers it to be. She left herself no option but resentment. That would have been awfully hard to take, if I hadn't had my father backing me up. As it was, it was painful, but endurable. My mother is actually too good-natured to keep on resenting week after week. She began forgetting to resent by about the middle of May. A couple of weeks after that she bought me some ties, very tasteful dark stripes, because she has this conviction that Eastern College Men wear ties to class.

  I got back to work at school and finished up with all A's for the first time. If you are going to be an egghead, you might as well be a hardboiled one. I have a job this summer as a starting lab technician at Bico Industries.

  Natalie and I saw each other several times a week in May and June. It was difficult sometimes, because we did not always manage to stick to the six-second maximum. As she said, neither of us are good at taking things lightly. We had several sort of quarrels, because we would both be somewhat frustrated and take it out on the other. But they lasted only about five minutes, because we both were basically certain that we couldn't make any commitment yet, and that sex was no good to us without a commitment, but that we were no good without love. So the best we could do was just go on as we were, together. It was a very good best.

  She left for Tanglewood the last week in June. She went on Amtrak. I saw her off, which was embarrassing since her parents were seeing her off, too. But I felt I had the right, despite the fact that Mr. Field still made me feel about as welcome as a tarantula. I just sort of stood around, there on the railway platform. Now and then Mrs. Field stood back slightly, so that I was partially included and could see Natalie. She had her viola case in one hand and her violin case in the other and a backpack, so she wasn't very mobile. At the steps up to her train car, she kissed her mother and father. She didn't kiss me. She looked at me. She said, "See you in the East, a year from September, Owen."