“I see,” he said. She knew that he didn’t.
“You can use it for the way the wind is blowing sometimes, or beautiful long dresses, or hair that is rippling, or … or leaving.”
“It also means leaving?”
“No …” Deborah said, “… there is another word that means leaving.”
“What word?” He demanded. “… It depends on whether one has the intention of coming back …” she said miserably.
“Very interesting,” he said.
“There is also a saying—” (She had made it up that minute to try to save herself and them.) “It is: Don’t cut bangs with a hatchet.”
“Cut bangs?” he said.
An Americanism, perhaps, so she tried again. “Don’t do brain surgery with a pickax.”
“And what does that signify to you?” he said, perhaps forgetting that if she could speak truly to the world, she would not be a mental patient.
“It suffered and died in translation,” she said.
There followed a long silence between them, and though she tried at the next hour and the next and the next, his humorless and automatic responses brought down the muteness like a night. He worked hard to convince her that Yri was a language formulated by herself and not sent with the gods as a gift. He had taken the first words she gave him and shown her the roots of them from scraps of Latin, French, and German that a nine- or ten-year-old could pick up if she tried. He analyzed the structure of the sentences and demanded that she see that they were, with very few exceptions, patterned on the English structure by which she, herself, was bound. His work was clever and detailed and sometimes almost brilliant, and she had many times to agree with him, but the more profound he was the more profound was the silence which enveloped her. She could never get beyond the austerity of his manner or the icy logic of what he had proven, to tell him that his scalpels were intrusions into her mind just as long-ago doctors had intruded into her body, and that furthermore, his proofs were utterly and singularly irrelevant. At the end she marshaled all of her strength, and with as good a clarity as she could give him, she said, “Please, Doctor, my difference is not my sickness.” It was a last cry and it went unheard.
Now, with Furii dead and the warmth of Earth’s summer contradicting Deborah’s own season, whose sun was a gray spot in an empty universe, there could be nothing else but muteness. She stopped reacting at all and her surface became as dead as the moon. As time went on, her motion ceased also and she sat like a fixed display on her bed. Occasionally, inside, Yr would present her with its alternatives and she would ride with Anterrabae in the hot wind of his fall or soar for a second with Lactamaeon on the rising columns of air over the Canyons of the Sorrow in Yr, but these times were all too rare and took incessant ceremonial tolls. Now even Yr seemed far and not to be apprehended.
She named the new doctor Snake-tooth, drawing the implication of the name from the hot summer-dry shaking of rattles, a senseless but evil sound, and she would think of it as she sat rigid and mute before him hour after hour. Slowly a volcano began to form beneath her still and masklike face, and as more days dragged by, voices and countervoices, hates, hungers, and long terrors began to seethe within its stony depths. The heat of them grew and mounted.
At a certain time Idat, the Dissembler, came to her in the shape of a woman. Idat was always veiled when she came so, but she was beautiful and never came without reminding her queen and victim of her beauty and saying also that she, Deborah, might someday aspire to being simply ugly. On this visit, the veil was lowered slightly, and Idat all in white.
Suffer, Idat. Why do you flow white?
Shroud and wedding gown, Idat said. Two gowns that are the same gown. Behold! Should you not dying, live; and living, die; surrender, fighting; and fighting, surrender? My road will give all opposites at the same time, and the same means for the opposite ends.
I know you from the veil outward, Idat, Deborah answered.
I mean that men set backfires, one to kindle yet quench the other.
Is it applicable also to stone?
With my help, Idat said.
Deborah perceived that by burning she could set a backfire that would assuage the burning kiln of the volcano, all the doors and vents of which were closed and barricaded. And by this same burning she could prove to herself finally whether or not she was truly made of human substance. Her senses offered no proof; vision was a gray blur; hearing merely muffled roars and groans, meaningless half the time; feeling was blunted, too. No one counted matches on B ward and what Yr wished her to obtain was always clear to her vision, freed from the blur. She soon had the matches and a supply of cigarettes picked up here and there. With five of them glowing, she began to burn her surface away. But the volcano only burned hotter behind the stone face and body. She lit the cigarettes again and put them out slowly and deliberately against the inner bend of her elbow. There was a faint sensation and the smell of burning but still no abatement of the volcano. Would it take a conflagration then, to create a backfire?
Sometime later a nurse came in to tell her something. Perhaps she smelled the burned flesh, for she forgot what her message was and left, and soon a doctor was there. Deborah saw through her mask, with relief, the picture of the face of Dr. Halle. That it was summertime somewhere else and that the picture was in fact a living being, she accepted on faith, like facts too remote to be worth debating—the number of miles in the earth’s circumference, or the statistical variations of waves of light.
“What do you mean by a backfire?” he was saying.
“It seems necessary,” answered a representative of the volcano.
“Where?”
“On the surface.”
“Show me.” The words were careful but not critical or hypocritical.
The sleeve was now stuck to the burned place, but she pulled it off before he could cry the civilized “Don’t!”, instinctively wincing a little and thrusting his hand out as if she were made of real flesh.
After he looked, he said, a little sadly she thought, “I think I’d better take you up to …D.’ ”
“Whatever.”
“Well”—and with a hint of a gentling—“you’ll be one of my patients there. I’ve just taken over the administration of that ward.”
She gave the Yri hand-gesture of compliance with the slightly upward tilt, meaning that whether or not there was darkness, at least she felt safer because Halle could be spoken to and never gave the Number Three with Smile. He took her, with his usual decent lack of fuss, back to the D ward. When they stood inside the double-locked doors, someone from Yr said, Look at him. See? He feels safer now.
Poor man, she answered.
“You’ve made pretty much of a mess there,” Dr. Halle said, studying the burned place. “It’ll have to be cleaned up and it’s going to hurt.”
A student, delighted to be “medical” again, was standing by with an impressive tray full of medical metal. Dr. Halle began to scrub and clean the burn. A faint sensation followed his instruments, but there was no pain. For his concern and the time he was taking, Deborah wanted to give him a present. She remembered Furii and the gift of the cyclamen.
She is dead, though, Anterrabae said.
But you can give him a flower, Lactamaeon whispered.
I have nothing tangible.
Furii gave you a memory of hers, Lactamaeon said. She thanked Lactamaeon with the Yri thanks: Go warm-shod and well lighted in the mind.
She tried to think of a truth to tell the doctor as a present. Perhaps it might be the one about seeing—that even when seeing every line and plane and color of a thing, if there was no meaning, the sight was irrelevant and one was just as well blind; that perhaps even the famous Third Dimension is only meaning, the gift which translates a bunch of planes into a box or a madonna or a Dr. Halle with antiseptic bottle.
“I’m being as gentle as I can,” he was saying.
She looked at him sharply to see if he was trying to burden her wi
th the responsibility of gratitude. No. She wondered if he was immune to her poisonous nganon.She decided that her gift would be a reassurance that he could touch her and not die.
“Don’t worry,” she said graciously, “the time of contact is so short that there is no chance of infection.”
“That’s why I’m using this,” he said, swabbing away. As he was bandaging, she realized that he had not understood, so she decided to tell him about the meaning of the third dimension of sight. It came out in a single blurted sentence.
“Vision isn’t everything!”
“No, I guess not,” he said, finishing up. Then, as if he had caught something, he said, “Do you have trouble with your eyes?”
“Well”—Deborah was embarrassed by the suddenness of the truth—“when I get upset … I usually have trouble seeing properly.”
Oh. really? How interesting, the Collect said sarcastically.
“Shut up! I can’t hear myself think!” Deborah shouted at them.
“What?” Dr. Halle turned. Deborah looked at him in horror. Her words to Yr had pierced the barriers of the Earth’s hearing. The clamor from the Collect built higher until it was an overwhelming roar and the gray vision went red. Without warning the full Punishment fell like an executioner’s hand and the testimony of light, space, time, gravity, and the five senses became meaningless. Heat froze and light hurled tactile stabbing rays. She had no sense of where her body was; there was no up or down, no location or distance, no chain of cause and effect….
She endured outside of time and beyond exhaustion, and then she came up in world’s daytime, a pack, a strange doctor.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I don’t know. How long …” But she realized that he could not know when she had started down. “How long since I have been up here?”
“Oh, three days or four.”
She became aware of aching in her hands and little aches along her arms and shoulders. She became terrified. “Did I hit anybody? Did I hurt anybody?”
“No.” He smiled a little. “You were having quite a go at the doors and windows, though.”
In revulsion and shame she tried to turn away, but a neck cramp caught her so that she began to cough and had to turn back toward him to work it away. “I don’t know you. How come you are here?”
“Oh, I’m on call today. I stopped in to see if you were okay.”
“Good God!” she said in awe. “I must have torn the place down. They never call a doctor unless somebody’s killed himself.”
He laughed a little. “That’s not true for me; I’m a new doctor. Can you come out? Do you feel ready?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, we’ll give you another half hour. Don’t worry about that aching. A lot of it is just tension. Well—so long.” She heard his key busy in the lock and the inexpertness was strangely moving.
When she returned to her bed on “D”—it was one which she had had before in the front dorm—she found it surrounded by woe. In the shuffle of comings and goings, the Wife of the Abdicated had been moved two beds down and Deborah was now between Fiorentini’s Mary and Sylvia, still mute and vacant about the face. The Punishment had exhausted Deborah and she lay on her bed watching the world’s shadows draw long, shading the world’s time toward evening.
Mary lay resting on the next bed. After a while she said gaily, “Kid, I never knew you had it in you. You can really fight!”
“I didn’t hit anyone …” Deborah said, feeling a little sick at the mention of it and wondering if she had, in spite of what the young “new” doctor had said.
“Oh, but the talent is there; the talent is definitely there!” Mary laughed her laugh like breaking glass, an imitation of mirth from one who had never understood it. “But, you are insane of course, out of your mind—didn’t know what you were doing.” Again she used a light voice, a parody of an actress in a sophisticated comedy.
“Yes,” Deborah said quietly, “but I can’t figure out why I came out of it … why it stopped. …”
“Well, really, every case like you ought to realize that that hell”—and she began to shake with shudders of high, shrill laughter—“can’t last any more than you can stand it. It’s like physical pain—tee-hee-hee—there’s just so much and then, no more!”
“You mean that there is a limit to the thing?”
“Well, more would be obscene, my dear, simply obscene!” And the high, young-girl giggle broke again into a sharp, back-bristling laughter.
Deborah wondered if Mary were right and if, in the nightmare of no laws, there were at least boundaries. The light faded and the dormitory grew dim. Perhaps there was mercy even in Hell. Her vision cleared a little and the softened lines of the beds and the walls and the bodies of the breathing dead around her took on the faint glow of the summer dusk. The overhead lights went on and with them came the knowledge that Mary, agony and all and with her awful laughter, had reached out with what little help she could summon, if only to say that there was, indeed, a limit. Even poisonous persons could, if they threw all their courage and energy into it, help one another. Carla had done it, Helene had done it, Sylvia in her death as furniture had done it, and now Mary had offered from herself a fragment of hard wisdom.
Deborah remembered her first meeting with Mary and laughed. She had said, “I’m Deborah,” and pointed to her bed, “over there.” Mary, with her omnipresent mirthless grin, had replied, “I’m bedlam as seen by Walt Disney.”
In the evening Deborah felt a need and got up to scout the ward for fuel for another backfire.
chapter twenty
For Deborah, the backfires became the only way of easing the pressure of the stifled volcano inside her. She continued to burn the same places over and over, setting layers of burns on top of one another. Cigarette butts and matches were easy to obtain, although they were supposedly guarded with great care; even D ward’s precautions were no match for the intensity of her need. Because the effects of the burnings lasted only an hour or so and because she could only bear the building up of pressure for three or four hours, she had to have a large supply of used cigarettes and the matches to relight them.
For a few days the wounds remained secret, even though she had to change the site of the burning when they began to infect and drain. She was amused but not surprised at how oblivious the nurses and attendants were. The wounds drained and stank and no one noticed. She thought: It’s because they don’t really want to look at us.
At the end of the week, the new doctor came up to the ward again. “You look a lot better,” he said, stopping by Deborah in the dayroom.
“I ought to,” she said a little acidly. “I’ve had to work like hell to keep it up.”
“Well, with such an improvement, you should be ready to go back to B ward very soon.”
When she heard this, she realized that B ward, with its unprotected time and free matches, was a perfect chance for the death she thought she wanted. Then she noticed that she was terrified, and wondered why. If he was letting her die as she wished, why was she angry?
“I have some more burns,” she said simply.
He looked shocked, recovered quickly, and said, “I’m glad you told me.”
She began to pull on her sweater, twisting it like wet laundry in her hands. If I want to die, what am I saving myself for? she demanded, still angry at the mental image of him permitting her to burn herself to death on B ward.
You told him because you are a coward! the Collect said. They began the old jibes again.
“How is the old sore?” the doctor said, loosening the bandaged place. She did not answer him because he was seeing for himself. The burn was stubbornly refusing to heal. “You haven’t done any more to this?” he asked, a little bit accusingly and afraid to make it stronger.
“No,” she said.
“We’ll try another kind of bandage. Let me see the new burn.” He looked at the other arm.
“How many times did you burn this?”
“About eight.”
He bandaged both places and left, no doubt to scold the nurses about the carelessness of leaving dangerous, firemaking materials on the ward. The burning cigarette he left behind him in the dayroom was long enough for two series of burnings.
When the lawgivers of D ward discovered that its patients were not so safe as they had thought, they swept the ward up and down with reforms to widen still further the distance between themselves and the patients. The fork that had been introduced on “D” a year before was now rescinded. The Age of Metal gave way to the Age of Wood and fire prevailed only within the precincts of the nursing station, the modern era. In the Pleistocene beyond, Pithecanthropus erectus shambled and muttered gibberish, ate with its fingers, and wet on the floor.
“Thanks a lot, kid,” Lee Miller said sarcastically as she walked past Deborah into the lighted place where Modern Man supplied the patients with his status-symbols—cigarette and match.
“Go to Hell,” Deborah answered, but her tone lacked conviction. Later the Wife of the Abdicated accused her of being a spy and in league with the Secretary of the Interior, and as Deborah already knew, the Secretary of the Interior was one of the worst Enemies.
Getting matches and butts now became difficult, but by no means impossible. Modern Man was careless with the fire-tipped cylinders he burned and breathed, and waiting beside him was a fire-hungry primitive whose gray and flat world magically included the cigarette in sharp focus, color, smell, and three dimensions of form.
But firing back at the volcano did not change its surface, its granite garment, as Anterrabae called it. And gods and Collect and Censor were wildly and inexplicably free with the Punishment. Even the logic of Yr seemed to have been erased and the laws overturned. Deborah began to believe that the volcano would erupt and explode. She remembered that the Last Deception had not yet come.
The days had long since become an Earth-form that was only a grammatical nicety. She woke up in one of them and found herself in pack, as so often before. A key turned in the lock of the door and a nurse entered. Behind the nurse, looking unbelievably different because she had not changed at all, stood Furii.
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Page 17
