The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  He had put his finger on the one thing that seemed really out of keeping with the rest of her. Her other actions and moods—if you could call them that—seemed to me wholly consistent with some rigorous private standard of her own. A standard that came from the mind. But I could not understand why she should be reading Hans Christian Andersen. And as she read, she had been crying, silently, to herself. Why? It was incredible.

  “Yes,” I admitted, “that was strange. I can’t explain that.”

  “I think I can,” he said, and his tone was gentle. “I am glad you told me about it. To me it proves that she was fond of him.” My look must have informed him that I didn’t understand what he meant, for he smiled and went on in the voice he reserved for his rare personal confidences. “You’ve never been married, so you may not understand. But to some women—Jerry’s mother was one of them—the thought of their husbands as children, as small boys, is extremely touching. I suppose very likely it’s the maternal part of their sex instinct dominating all the rest for the time being. That’s why Selena was crying when she read Jerry’s book, one that belonged to him when he was a boy.”

  Of course, it was possible. Neither Grace nor any other woman has ever yearned over me as a child or as a husband, so I didn’t know. But my immediate feeling was that Dr. Lister was wrong. If Selena was moved to tenderness and even tears by something, I felt sure it was not because she was thinking of Jerry as a boy. There had been an intensity and a bitterness in her face then, as I remembered it, which did not fit in with such a theory.

  It was hard to believe, indeed, that anything Selena read would stir her deeply, especially a fairy story. She was not the sort of little girl, I was willing to bet, who cared much for fairy stories, and to suppose that now, when she was so appallingly mature and with a mind like hers, she should deliberately invite tears . . . No, it didn’t fit. She read anything and everything that came under her hand, but none of it affected her. And if this story had moved her, it had done so by sheer chance.

  Anyway, what I’d seen on the page to which the book was open hadn’t seemed sad. What was it? Something about lanterns being lighted and sailors dancing. I couldn’t quite bring it back into my conscious memory.

  “I was trying to remember what story she was reading,” I told him finally, to explain my silence. “I only looked at the few words I told you about—sailors lighting lanterns on a boat or something.”

  He nodded. “Yes, that was a favorite of Jerry’s when he was eight or so. I used to read it aloud to him while he ate his supper. It’s the one called ‘The Little Mermaid.’ ”

  I didn’t remember it. “Oh,” I said vaguely. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “ ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ” he went on, “is the saddest and the best of all Andersen’s stories. You must have read it. Don’t you remember the little mermaid princess who lived at the bottom of the sea? One day she came up to the top of the water and saw a ship with a prince in it. She saved him from drowning and brought him to land. And she fell in love with him.”

  It came back to me with a rush. “Yes,” I said with a sense of inner excitement that I did not stop to analyze, “that’s it. And didn’t she go to some witch to be made into a human being?”

  “The witch transformed her fish’s tail into legs and feet, but whenever she walked she felt as if she were treading on sharp knives. She gave her tongue to the witch, so she could not speak. And she agreed that if she didn’t win the prince’s love, she had to die without an immortal, human soul.” He looked away. “Jerry always used to cry about that part of it.”

  The rest of the story was flashing through my mind as he spoke. How the little mermaid, after devoting herself to the prince, found that he was going to marry someone else, and how, on his wedding night, she slipped over the rail of the ship on which the wedding party was sailing, and dissolved into the sea foam. I remembered it all, now, and the hot feeling of tears in my eyes when I had first read it. Perhaps it had moved even Selena.

  Perhaps. But in the instant when the memory of the story completed itself in my mind, another explanation for Selena’s reaction to it occurred to me. She might have cried because the story was moving and beautiful—or because it was true.

  It was a fantastic, horrible notion, and I wanted immediately to stop thinking it. I remembered Jerry’s face as he looked at Selena there on the settle before the fire she had somehow managed to light. Certainly there had been horror and incredulity in his eyes. It was possible that he had been thinking, then, the same thought that was beginning to crystallize in my own mind. I felt an intense acceleration of every image, feeling, operation of my consciousness. My thoughts were not under my control; they flickered back over the whole of the story I had just told. And nowhere did they find positive proof that the thing which was growing, expanding into unwelcome life in my brain was impossible.

  The panic fear that swept over me as I realized that I might have discovered the answer was indescribable. I felt no sense of triumph at having found out the secret of Selena and her life with Jerry and the rest of us. Instead, I was sinking into icy, black water, being suffocated by its pressure, drowning in arctic night and winter. Layer after layer of cold and blackness was piling up above me and the fright of death itself was pounding in my pulse. Fear like that, real fear, is an invasion. A physical thing full of ice and death that enters into every fiber of the body and possesses the mind. The worst of it was that there was no tangible thing with which I could deal. There was nothing to run away from and nothing to confront. This terror sprung from a nebulous idea. A half-perceived theory . . .

  My face must have given Dr. Lister a suggestion of what was in my mind. He was staring at me with alarm. “What’s the matter, Bark? What’s happened to you?”

  His voice came from a distance. I tried to answer, but my lips were stiff. I licked them. “Something just occurred to me. Something that might explain her, or part of her.”

  “What is it?”

  I wanted to tell him, but I knew that he would think I was out of my mind. There was no way of expressing it that would not sound incredible. “I can’t put it into words, yet,” I said. “But it’s about Selena. I don’t think she’s—well—normal.”

  Incomprehension was stamped on his face. “I don’t see what you mean. Do you think she’s insane?”

  “No,” I said, “not insane. There’s nothing wrong with her mind at all.”

  “What is abnormal about her, then?”

  “Her self,” I told him, separating the two words deliberately. “There’s something entirely different about her. She isn’t like most people. She has a better mind and a better body, but the quality I mean hasn’t anything to do with comparatives.”

  “You think she’s unique, in some way. Nobody else in the world is like her?”

  “Well,” I answered, “I don’t know about that. Maybe there are others of her kind. If there are, they’re cleverer. They don’t show it.” The thought that I might be right about that made me pause. Even the possibility of encountering again someone like Selena, or of living in a world where another like her existed, was appalling to me. I went on quickly. “Anyway, I hope she’s the only one. Can’t you see how utterly different Selena is from you and me and Grace and everyone else we know? It’s a difference that’s much worse than if she’d lost an arm or a leg, or had her face smashed in an accident. Those things are just on the outside. This is something that goes clear through her.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t the remotest notion what you are trying to say.”

  “Well,” I replied, “I’ll have to phrase it differently. Don’t you feel that there’s a lack in her? Don’t you see that she is incomplete, somehow?”

  “No. No, I don’t believe I do.”

  “You said yourself that she was cold. I’d put it another way. She hasn’t any soul.”

  He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s stick to f
acts.”

  “Facts!” My voice sounded harsh in my ears. “There are all kinds of facts. Do you admit it’s a fact that Selena is different from every other person you’ve ever known?”

  “Yes, I’ll admit that.”

  “And what sort of difference is it?”

  “No two human personalities are ever identical.”

  “You’re evading the question.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not evading anything. Selena is not like you or me or anyone else. But the same could be said for you, or for me, or for anybody.”

  “Good God,” I said in desperation, “can’t you see that she is more different than anyone you’ve ever known? Can’t you understand that the reason for it isn’t the normal variation between one person and the next? She’s never been a part of the rest of us. She’s been a visitor in every thing and every place I’ve ever observed her.”

  “A visitor?”

  “Yes,” I said, shivering with a cold that did not come from the air around us. “She’s never been anything else.”

  He looked thoughtful. “That is a good description of her attitude . . . I never thought of it in just that way. There is something alien about her, perhaps.”

  “And another thing. Her mind. You admit that she’s intelligent. She’s more than that. She’s so intelligent that she’s either a genius or else—” I did not dare complete the sentence.

  He caught me up on it at once. “Or else what, Bark?”

  “Or else,” I went on, with every word sticking in my throat, “she isn’t human at all.” He stared at me. “Her mind, I mean. Not her body.”

  “I don’t know that I understand you.”

  “I don’t understand it myself. I don’t know what it means, either. But I think that Selena’s intelligence isn’t human. It isn’t akin to anything in the rest of us. Her mind wasn’t part of a baby and then of a child and then of a girl. It didn’t grow up and go through the experiences that are common to every human life. It wasn’t given to her by heredity, the ways yours and mine were given to us, with traits of our parents and maybe our ancestors blended into it. And I don’t believe it was shaped by environment, either. According to your own science, Dad, every living minute of every person is recorded on their brains. Each thing that ever happened to you or to me is a part of us, written into some page of our minds. I don’t believe the writing on the pages of Selena’s mind is in any language you or I know. At least, not till recently. The first entry we could read, I think, would be dated August seventh, two years ago.”

  “That was when Luella Jamison disappeared in Collegeville?”

  “Yes.”

  He was looking at me as if he couldn’t believe that he had understood me at all. “Then your idea is that Selena’s mind suddenly began to function on that day?”

  “No,” I told him. “My idea is that her mind appeared on that date.”

  His voice was incredulous. “Appeared? Appeared from where?” The question was one that I had known he would ask. If I knew the answer—and I was afraid to think whether I did or not—I did not want to speak it. There would be finality about uttering it, and I did not want anything final. “I don’t know from where. From some other place. That’s as near as I can come to it.”

  “You can’t believe that. There’s no conceivable . . . Unless you think she’s possessed?”

  I nodded. “Yes, something like that.”

  “Impossible. I’m not even sure there is such a thing as possession. Split personality, perhaps. But Selena isn’t a split personality.”

  There was no argument about that, of course. “No,” I assented, “she’s all of a piece throughout.”

  “Well, then,” he said, and I could see that he was impatient, “I don’t see how you can say—”

  I cut into his sentence. “Her mind is all of a piece. It doesn’t belong with her body. It’s just living in it, if you like to put it that way.”

  “This is a terrible idea,” he said slowly, and shook himself as if to get rid of it. “I don’t believe you’re right about it. It’s not scientific.”

  I shrugged. What difference did it make whether every truth was a scientific truth?

  “What,” he went on carefully, “is your theory of the cause or purpose of this . . . this mind visitation in Selena?”

  “I’m not sure. But there’s the Hans Andersen story to go back to. The little mermaid wanted a soul. I think that’s what Selena wants too.”

  He struck his hand down on the table. “Let’s be sensible. I don’t like these vague words. Exactly what do you mean by ‘soul’?”

  “Everybody means the same thing by it,” I retorted. “Soul is the part of you that isn’t your body and isn’t your mind either. It’s what ties you together inside. It’s the essence of what you are.”

  He shook his head. “Emotions—which appear to be about what you mean by ‘soul’—are effects of certain glandular imbalances arising from sensory stimuli.”

  “Stop being a doctor, Dad. You know better than that.”

  “Sorry.” He looked at me gently, excusing me because of my fatigue and what I had been through.

  “No,” I said sharply. “I don’t want you making allowances for me. Do you honestly believe that all that scientific rigmarole you just recited really means anything? Does it explain anything to you? What about art and religion and love? What about sorrow, Dad? Are all those things nothing but the product of some glandular imbalances as you put it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and his voice was so low I could scarcely hear it.

  “Yes, you do. They aren’t. They can’t be. Ask Selena. She’ll tell you they can’t.”

  He answered quietly. “You’re not very coherent. Perhaps if you explained this whole idea of yours in simple words, I’d be able to understand it.”

  I was ashamed of my outburst. “I wasn’t attacking you, Dad. But I know I’m right. Let’s put it this way: Selena cried when she read the story of the little mermaid. She cried because she saw in it the elements of some experience of her own. She is an alien too. And so that story moved her deeply.”

  “Naturally,” he said thoughtfully, “if you are right, it would do so.” He was silent for some time, staring at the tabletop. “I cannot accept your assumption. It is too full of mystery. I have a scientific mind, perhaps. I can’t believe that Selena is anything but an extraordinary woman—an adventuress perhaps and possibly a foreigner.”

  I had expected he would say that. “I hope you’re right,” I answered. “My theory is—Well, I wish to God I’d never thought of it. But it does explain a lot of things that you can’t.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “It will be better for you to get this off your chest.”

  “It all begins,” I said, “on the evening when Luella Jamison was standing outside the rest room of the Sunoco station in Collegeville with her hands on the lattice. Think of her there. A body with no mind, no intelligence at all. Probably the brain cells were inside her skull all the time, but they weren’t connected to anything. Within three or four minutes Luella Jamison vanishes. It took intelligence to do that one thing and do it as fast and efficiently as Luella did it. Ten times more intelligence than Luella ever displayed before. You’ll grant that.”

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly, “I’ll admit that, I suppose.”

  “Luella’s body suddenly acquired a mind. I don’t know yet where it came from, though I have a guess. But anyway, it went straight to one certain place in all Collegeville, like steel to a magnet. It went straight to Walter LeNormand. He must have been in the observatory at the time, getting ready for his night’s work. Luella Jamison walked in on him. What happened between them I don’t know, but in two days he married her. And Luella Jamison, who did not know her own name, probably, became Selena LeNormand.”

  “You’re theorizing,” he interrupted. “How do you know she went to LeNormand?”

  “Because there is no other place she could have gone, and no other
likely place Selena could have come from. Because Selena has to have an intelligence near her powerful enough, like LeNormand’s, to give her some point of contact with human existence. When we met her first, after his death, she was dull and stupid, almost in a trance, till she met Jerry. His mind was the same kind as hers. It made her come to life again. Jerry and LeNormand had the same sort of intelligence. They were mathematicians. For that matter,” I added, “there were mathematicians in Luella’s own ancestry, if you’ll recall.”

  “Yes. Parsons said that.”

  All the time I was talking to him, the certainty that I was right kept growing and expanding inside me. With every word I spoke, the truth came to life in my brain like a winter-torpid snake in the spring sun. I no longer fought against the fear of it, because there was no room left in which to fight. Revulsion and terror were in every corner inch of my consciousness. My face must have reflected some of it, for Dr. Lister watched me with concern and a professional suspicion. But I was indifferent to that. All I wanted was to complete the story, as if, by communicating it to him I could siphon off some of the cold dread I was experiencing.

  When Luella Jamison walked into Eldridge Observatory, she went there because she knew that LeNormand was there. At least, she knew his intelligence was there. With the force that was in her mind that was a part of her, it would be easy to get him to marry her. Hadn’t she made me offer her a cigarette when I knew she never smoked? That was a small thing, but she could have done anything with me, and even with a man like LeNormand. So she lived with him, learning the ways of people, adapting herself to an unfamiliar life, just as the little mermaid lived among mortals when she first came up out of the sea.

  “Surely you don’t think Selena’s mind came out of the ocean?” he asked me when I reached this point in my exposition.

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t the sea.”

  So things had gone for several months. And then LeNormand, who must have been living by that time in a strange world of surmise and perhaps of fear, went back to his work, his great paper on space and time, and began to go over his equations. He must have made his final discovery the afternoon of the State football game.