“An accident,” he said, squashing her against the floor, breathing into her face.
Eyes appeared beyond the edge of the stove; something peeped in at them as they lay together in the darkness– something watched. It had put away its paste and scissors and magazines, dropped all that to watch this and gloat and savor each thump they made.
“Go away,” she gasped at it. But it did not go away. “More,” she said, then, and it laughed at her. It laughed and laughed, as she and the weight squashing her kept on. They could not stop.
Gubble me more, she said. Gubble gubble gubble me, put your gubbish into me, into my gubbish, you Gubbler. Gubble gubble, I like gubble! Don’t stop. Gubble, gubble gubble gubble, _gubble!_
As Jack Bohlen lowered the Yee Company ‘copter toward the landing field of the Public School directly below, he glanced at Manfred and wondered what the boy was thinking. Wrapped up in his thoughts, Manfred Steiner stared sightlessly out, his features twisted into a grimace that repelled Jack and made him instantly look away.
Why did he have anything to do with this boy? Jack wondered. Doreen was right; he was in over his head, and the unstable, schizophrenic aspects of his own personality were being stirred into life by the presence beside him. And yet he did not know how to get out; somehow it was too late, as if time had collapsed and left him here, for eternity, caught in a symbiosis with this unfortunate, mute creature who did nothing but rake over and inspect his own private world, again and again.
He had imbibed, on some level, Manfred’s world-view, and it was obviously bringing about the stealthy disintegration of his own.
Tonight, he thought. I have to keep going until tonight: somehow I must hold out until I can see Arnie Kott. Then I can jettison all this and return to my own space, my own world; I will never have to look at Manfred Steiner again.
Arnie, for Christ’s sake, save me, he thought.
“We’re here,” he said as the ‘copter bumped to a halt on the roof field. He switched off the motor.
At once Manfred moved to the door, eager to get out.
So you want to see this place, Jack thought. I wonder why. He got to his feet and went to unlock the door of the ‘copter; at once Manfred hopped out onto the roof and scampered toward the descent ramp, almost as if he knew the way by heart.
As Jack stepped from the ship the boy disappeared from sight. On his own he had hurried down the ramp and plunged into the school.
Doreen Anderton and Arnie Kott, Jack said to himself. The two people who mean the most to me, the friends with whom my contacts, my intimacy with life itself, is the strongest. And yet it’s right there that the boy has managed to infiltrate; he has unfastened me from my relationships where they are the strongest.
What’s left? he asked himself. Once I have been isolated there, the rest–my son, my wife, my father, Mr. Yee–all follow almost automatically, without a fight.
I can see what lies ahead for me if I continue to lose, step by step, to this completely psychotic boy. Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with–the endless ebb and flow of one’s own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.
It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.
And, he realized, I stand on the threshold of that. Perhaps I always did; it was implicit in me from the start. But this boy has led me a long way. Or, rather, because of him I have gone a long way.
A coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field. Then the most minute change is examined with the greatest attention. That is Manfred’s state now; has been, from the beginning. The ultimate stage of the schizophrenic process.
“Manfred, wait,” he called, and followed slowly after the boy, down the ramp and into the Public School building.
Seated in June Henessy’s kitchen, sipping coffee, Silvia Bohlen discoursed on her problems of late.
“What’s so awful about them,” she said, meaning Erna Steiner and the Steiner children, “is that, let’s face it, they’re vulgar. We’re not supposed to talk in terms like that, but I’ve been forced to see so much of them that I can’t ignore it; my face has been rubbed in it every day.”
June Henessy, wearing white shorts and a skimpy halter, padded barefoot here and there in the house, watering from a glass pitcher her various indoor plants. “That’s really a weird boy. He’s the worst of all, isn’t he?”
Shuddering, Silvia said, “And he’s over all day long. Jack is working with him, you know, trying to make him part of the human race. I think myself they ought to just wipe out freaks and sports like that; it’s terribly destructive in the long run to let them live; it’s a false mercy to them and to us. That boy will have to be cared for for the rest of his life; he’ll never be out of an institution.”
Returning to the kitchen with the empty pitcher, June said, “I want to tell you what Tony did the other day.” Tony was her current lover; she had been having an affair with him for six months now, and she kept the other ladies, especially Silvia, up to date. “We had lunch together over at Geneva II, at a French restaurant he knows; we had escargots–you know, snails. They serve them to you in the shells and you get them out with a horrible-looking fork that has tines a foot long. Of course, that’s all black-market food; did you know that? That there’re restaurants serving exclusively black-market delicacies? I didn’t until Tony took me there. I can’t tell you the name of it, of course.”
“Snails,” Silvia said with aversion, thinking of all the wonderful dishes she herself would have ordered, if she had a lover and he had taken her out.
How would it be to have an affair? Difficult, but surely worth it, if she could keep it from her husband. The problem, of course, was David. And now Jack worked a good deal of the time at home, and her father-in-law was visiting as well. And she could never have him, her lover, at the house, because of Erna Steiner next door; the big baggy hausfrau would see, comprehend, and probably at once, out of a Prussian sense of duty, inform Jack. But then, wasn’t the risk part of it? Didn’t it help add that–flavor?
“What would your husband do if he found out?” she asked June. “Cut you to bits? Jack would.”
June said, “Mike has had several affairs of his own since we’ve been married. He’d be sore and possibly he’d give me a black eye and go off for a week or so with one of his girl friends, leaving me stuck with the kids, of course. But he’d get over it.”
To herself, Silvia wondered if Jack had ever had an affair. It did not seem probable. She wondered how she would feel if he had and she found out–would it end the marriage? Yes, she thought. I’d get a lawyer right away. Or would I? There’s no way to tell in advance . . . .
“How are you and your father-in-law getting along?” June asked.
“Oh, not badly. He and Jack and the Steiner boy are off somewhere today, taking a business trip. I don’t see much of Leo, actually; he came mainly on business–June, how many affairs have you had?”
“Six,” June Henessy said.
“Gee,” Silvia said. “And I haven’t had any.”
“Some women aren’t built for it.”
That sounded to Silvia like a rather personal, if not outright anatomical, insult. “What do you mean?”
“Aren’t constituted psychologically,” June explained glibly. “It takes a certain type of woman who can create and sustain a complex fiction, day after day. I enjoy it, what I make up to tell Mike. You’re different. You have a simple, direct sort of mind; deception isn’t your cup of tea. Anyhow, you have a nice husband.” She emphasized the authority of her judgment by a lifting of her eyebrows.
“Jack used to be gone all week long,” Silvia said. “I should have had one then. Now it would be so much harder.” She wished, fervently, that she had something creative or useful or exciting to do that would fill up the long empty afternoons; she was bored to death with sitting in some other woman’s kitchen drinking coffee hour after hour. No wonder so many women had affairs. It was that or madness.