Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  The place seemed quiet and empty. Then she heard voices and her heart leaped. Through an open door she could see Grace and Doydoy sitting in armchairs, talking to each other. She watched them for a moment with no desire to interrupt their private current of love and joy; she was satisfied that they had it.

  Marczinek’s door was closed. That was a different matter. Jason might express a hope by digging a flowerbed, but nothing so simple would relieve her feelings.

  She had opened the strongbox of her emotions and delivered them into the hands of others—Marczinek was one of those others. If he died now when she had only just learned to love, and loved him so—She did not even want to see him.

  * * * *

  Jason was exercising his muscles with obvious pleasure, and singing as he mixed loam with topsoil:

  Sew on that button, baby, patch up them shoes,

  Sew on that button, put a patch on them old shoes;

  Might as well be singing jailbird blues…

  He paused to mop his brow. “Go on, ask me why I’m not using psi for this.” He spread a piece of sacking on the grass and she sat on it.

  “Mesomorphs are active types.”

  “Tsk. Thought I’d get a rise out of you.”

  “You will,” she said darkly. She sat there full of gloom, wishing she could take pleasure in the sunshine and the fresh new dress blowing about her legs. “You never did ask me what Margaret Mead would have done.”

  He leaned on the shovel. “Didn’t have to. You were doing it all the time.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Observing,” he said simply. “Remember? New insight—”

  “Don’t!”

  He shrugged. “All right—but one last question. Why are you trying to pick a fight? I saw it on your face the minute you looked out of the window.”

  “I’m not. I—I’m upset about—Marczinek, and—and—” And myself.

  “Then go and give Urquhart an earful!”

  “I can’t. He’s getting married and I can’t spoil things for him. And you—”

  His eyes blazed. “I don’t have any day to spoil? I don’t have any feelings to hurt? I’m not sensitive, I sing because I’m an animal!”

  “I didn’t mean that, I—” She began to cry.

  “Bawling again! God, I wish I could read you! No. No, I don’t. You’d be just like all the rest, and I thought you were different.”

  “I am different. I’m too different.” She burst into a new freshet. “I thought I’d be with everybody again—after all these years—and—and now I’ve just been kicked upstairs and pushed out!”

  “Pushed out! Jeez, you take my breath away.” He squatted on his heels beside her. “Is that all that’s bugging you?”

  “I don’t want Marsh to die.”

  “Shandy, he’s an old man, and he’s hurt and tired. He feels he’s had a good life, and he doesn’t owe it to you to hang on just because you love him. You’ll have to learn to depend on yourself all over again—but in a different way. It doesn’t mean we’re pushing you out. Don’t disappoint us. Marsh said you wouldn’t turn down a good thing.” He produced a handkerchief out of the air and she used it gratefully. “Urquhart said all this was bothering you and I told him you were too smart to get upset over it.”

  “You were wrong,” she sniffled.

  “I’m not wrong now. You better listen to me, because you weren’t listening to yourself very well when you were explaining everything to Urquhart so lucidly and sensibly. Now you’ve gotten all slewed round again. You think being a supernormal means fighting crime from your secret mountain fortress, emerging only to stop a runaway roller coaster—like somebody in a comic-book? Afraid you’ll be kept in a glass case on a wad of cotton batting, or”—his tone became gentle—“scared you’ll die an old maid from waiting around to find another supernormal to marry?”

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice.

  “Gee whiz, Shandy, you said yourself what your kind of person is for—to transfuse interesting and valuable new genes into humanity—and in the meantime you can’t be sure the strain’s transmissible, or even know for certain how to recognize another supernormal! So stop worrying. Look, suppose in seven or eight years some honest and earnest-looking kook came along and said”—he placed a hand on his breast and proffered an imaginary bunch of flowers—

  “‘Shandy, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?’—would you say”—he struck an even more ridiculous pose—“‘Nay, sir, I cannot, for a higher destiny beckons, and I must follow where it leads’?”

  She giggled. “No. I’d only want to know—”

  “What his IQ was!”

  “That’d be nice to know, but I’d—”

  “Ask to see his bankbook!”

  “I’d just want to be sure he loved me, you goof!” He stopped and looked at her. As though he were a precog reaching there for the future, toward the matured Shandy, she hoped: for wisdom and compassion, sexual attractiveness, perhaps even a modest kind of beauty. He said, “I think he’ll manage that without too much trouble,” and tweaked her nose. “Now please: wash the tears off your face, say hello to Marsh, and get some more rest, or Grace will give me hell…and on the way back, take a look in the library. There’s something worth seeing there, and I’m not sure how long it’s gonna be around.”

  She left, and he turned back to his garden and his song:

  Sorrel Park fence, barb’wire go roun’ an’ roun’,

  Damn ol’ fence, barb’wire go roun’ an’ roun‘;

  Plane passin’ over got a lonesome soun’…

  The Dump was a closed and fortified place, but all doors were open where it was administered. She stood in the doorway of the library and confronted Curtis Quimper. He was bandaged around the ribs. One arm jutted at a strange angle because it was encased up to and around the shoulder in heavy plaster, and he had a shirt buttoned loosely about him.

  He had helped and been rewarded; someone had kept her promise. The reward was perhaps disproportionate to the act, but then he had never done anything worth rewarding in his life, and the act was immensely significant. He looked up at her.

  He had not been reading, or doing anything except sit and stare. There was no sense of reward on his face. They stared at each other, black hair, sallow skin, pointed faces, blue eyes, from opposite poles of humanity.

  “How are you, Curtis?”

  His eyes flashed, his mouth twisted as though he were about to flare up, but after a second the impulse died. Perhaps because he was being watched—or perhaps he was even trying to live up to freedom. His one thoughtless good deed would cost him many an indulgence.

  But he only shrugged and said, “Lonely.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Brother, you aren’t the only one?”