“But we don’t have time! Charles Wallace—“
“I said he takes longer than we do, and that’s true. But sometimes adults can go deeper than we can, if we’re patient.”
“We don’t have time to be patient!”
“Meg, trust Blajeny. Mr. Jenkins must be with us for a reason. Help him. Do what Progo says.”
Proginoskes kythed urgently, “We may need Mr. Jenkins to get Sporos to Deepen. Blajeny wouldn’t have sent him unless—oh, Meg, a Teacher never does anything without reason. Try to reach Mr. Jenkins, Meg.”
She pushed her terror aside and opened herself to kything
and she was with Charles Wallace,
not within him,
not without him,
but with him,
part of his exhaustion,
his terrifying energy loss,
his struggle to breathe.
Oh, fight, Charles,
don’t stop struggling, ,
breathe,
breathe,
I’ll try to help,
I’ll do anything Lean to help, even
then
She was with the twins. Charles Wallace, she thought, had sent her.
The twins were in the garden, digging, grimly spading up and turning under the old tomato plants, the frost-blackened zinnias, the lettuce gone to seed, turning them under to enrich the earth for the next spring, the next planting, with set faces working silently, taking out their anxiety over Charles Wallace in physical labor. – Sandy broke the silence. “Where’s Meg?”
Dennys paused, his foot on his pitchfork as he pressed it into the earth. “She should be getting home from school soon.”
“Charles Wallace said she isn’t in school. He said that Meg is in him. I heard him.”
“Charles Wallace is delirious.”
“Have you ever seen anyone die?”
“Only animals.”
“I wish Meg would come home.”
“So do I.”
They went on with their preparation of the garden for the winter cold and snow.
If the twins’ job is simply to take care of their garden —Meg told herself, —your job is to reach Mr. Jenkins. Where? Nowhere. Just Mr. Jenkins.
“Mr. Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins. You are you and nobody else and I Named you. I’m kything, Mr. Jenkins. Here I am. Me. Meg. You know me and I know you.”
She thought she heard a sniff, a Mr. Jenkins sniff. Then he seemed to recede again. This minuscule undersea world was totally beyond his comprehension. She tried to kythe to him once more all the images in earth equivalents which she had received, but he responded with nothing beyond anxious blankness.
“Name him,” Proginoskes urged. “He is afraid to be. When you Named him in the schoolyard, that was kything, that was how you knew him from the two Echthroi-Mr. Jenkinses, how you must know him this tune.”
Mr. Jenkins. Unique, as every star in the sky is unique, every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every farandola, every cherubim, unique: Named.
He gave Calvin shoes. And he didn’t have to come with us to this danger and horribleness, but he did. He chose to throw in his lot with us when he could have gone back to school and his safe life as a failure.
Yes, but for an unimaginative man to come with them into the unimaginably infinitesimal unknown isn’t the kind of thing a failure does.
Nevertheless, Mr. Jenkins had done it, was doing it.
“Mr. Jenkins, I love you!”
She did.
Without stopping to think she put her imagined hand into his. His fingers were slightly damp and chill, just as clammy as she had always thought Mr. Jenkins’s hand would be.
And real.
10 Yadah.
Of course Mr. Jenkins’s hand would be damp. He’d be scared out of his wits. He was years away from games of Make Believe and Let’s Pretend.
“Mr. Jenkins, are you all right?”
She felt a fumbling kything, a frightened inability to -accept that they were actually in a mitochondrion, a mitochondrion within one of Charles Wallace’s cells. “How long have we been here?”
“I’m not sure. So much has happened. Progo—you’re sure we’re in farandola time, not earth tune?”
“Farandola time.”
“Whew!” she told Mr. Jenkins in relief. “That means that time on earth is passing much more slowly than time is for us—aeons more slowly. Charles Wallace’s heart beats only once every decade or so.”
“Even so,” Proginoskes warned, “there’s no time to waste.”
Another flash of Charles Wallace’s face, ashen, eyes closed, breathing labored; of her mother’s face, tight with pain; of Dr. Louise, watchful, waiting. She stood with her small hand lightly against Charles Wallace’s wrist.
“I know,” Meg answered the cherubim. A cold wind seemed to blow through the interstices of her ribs. She must be strong for Charles Wallace now, so that he could draw on that strength. She held her mind quiet and steady until it calmed.
Then she opened herself again to Mr. Jenkins. Muddied thoughts which could hardly qualify as kything moved about her like sluggish water, and yet she understood that Mr. Jenkins was being more open with her than he had ever been before, or than he ever was able to be with most people. His mind shuddered into Meg’s as he tried to grasp the extraordinary fact that he was still himself, still Mr. Jenkins, at the same time that he was a minuscule part of the child who had been one of his most baffling and irritating problems at school.
Meg tried to let him know, in as unalarming a way as possible, that at least one of the Echthroid-Mr. Jenkinses was with them on Yadah. She did not want to recall her terror during her encounter with one of them, but she had to help Mr. Jenkins understand.
He sent her a response, first of bafflement, then fear, then a strange tenderness towards her. “You should not be asked to endure such things, Margaret.”
“There’s more,” she told him. This more was hardest of all, to make him understand that some of the little farandolae, some of the playful, dancing creatures, had saved her from the Echthros-Mr. Jenkins, and had sacrificed themselves in doing so.
Mr. Jenkins groaned.
From Proginoskes Meg relayed to the principal, “It was better than letting the Echthroi X them. They’re still— they’re still part of Creation this way.” She turned her kything to Proginoskes. “If the Echthroi X something, or if something Xs itself, is it forever?”
The cherubim surrounded her with the darkness of his unknowing. “But we don’t need to know, Meg,” he told her firmly, and the darkness began to blow away. “I am a cherubim. All I need to know is that all the galaxies, all the stars, all creatures, cherubic, human, farandolan, all, all, are known by Name.” He seemed almost to be crooning to himself.
Meg kythed at him sharply. “You’re Progo. I’m Meg. He’s Mr. Jenkins. Now what are we supposed to do?”
Proginoskes came back into focus. “Mr. Jenkins does not want to understand what a farandola is.”
“Evil is evil,” Mr. Jenkins sent fumblingly Megwards. She felt his mind balking at the idea of communication where distance was no barrier. “Mice talk by squeaking, and shrimp by—I don’t know much marine biology but they must make some sound. But trees!” he expostulated. “Mice who put down roots and turn into trees—you did say trees?”
“No.” Meg was impatient, not so much at Mr. Jenkins as at her own ineptitude in communicating with him. ‘The farae—well, they aren’t unlike trees, sort of primordial ones, and they aren’t unlike coral and underwater things like that.”
“Trees cannot talk with each other.”
“Farae can. And as for trees—don’t they?”
“Nonsense.”
“Mr. Jenkins, when you walk through the woods at home, and the wind moves in the trees, don’t you ever have the feeling that if you knew how, you’d be able to understand what they were saying?”
“Never.” It had been a long time since he had walked in the woods. He moved from his lodgings to the school, from the school to his lodgings, driving himself both ways. He did not have time to go for walks in the woods . . ..
She felt a dim regret in his kything, so she tried to make him hear the sound of wind in the pine woods. “If you close your eyes it sounds like ocean waves, even though we’re not anywhere near the ocean.”
All she felt from Mr. Jenkins was another cold wash of incomprehension.
So she envisioned a small grove of aspens for him, each leaf shivering and shaking separately, whispering softly in the still summer air.
“I’m too old,” was Mr. Jenkins’s response. “I’m much too old. I’m just holding you back. You ought to return me to Earth.”
Meg forgot that she had recently made exactly that suggestion. “Anyhow, Yadah is on Earth, or in Earth, sort of, since it’s in Charles Wallace . . .”
“No, no,” Mr. Jenkins said, “it’s too much. I’m no help. I don’t know why I thought I might be—“ His kything trailed off.
Through his discouragement she became aware of Calvin. “Hey, Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn’t.” He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together, their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed towards the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs and gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.