“You did a swell job,” I said.
“Louis,” Pris said, “take me out of here; take me somewhere and buy me a cup of coffee, or let’s just walk.” She started toward the door and after a moment of hesitation I followed.
Together, we strolled along the sidewalk, Pris staring down and kicking a pebble ahead of her.
“The first one was nothing,” she said, “compared to this. Stanton is just another person and yet even so it was almost too much for us. I have a book at home with every picture taken of Lincoln. I’ve studied them until I know his face better than my own.” She kicked her pebble into the gutter. “It’s amazing how good those old photographs were. They used glass plates and the subject had to sit without moving. They had special chairs they built, to prop the subject’s head so it wouldn’t wobble. Louis.” At the curb she halted. “Can he really come to life?”
“I dunno, Pris.”
“It’s all self-deception. We can’t really restore life to something that’s dead.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Is that how you think of it? If you put it like that I agree. Sounds like you’re too deep in it emotionally. You better back away and get perspective.”
“You mean we’re just making an imitation that walks and talks like the real thing. The spirit isn’t there, just the appearance.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you ever go to a Catholic mass, Louis?”
“Naw.”
“They believe the bread and wine actually are the body and blood. That’s a miracle. Maybe if we get the tapes perfect here, and the voice and the physical appearance and–”
“Pris,” I said, “I never thought I’d see you frightened.”
“I’m not frightened. It’s just too much for me. When I was a kid in junior high Lincoln was my hero; I gave a report on him in the eighth grade. You know how it is when you’re a kid, everything you read in books is real. Lincoln was real to me. But of course I really spun it out of my own mind. So what I mean is, my own fantasies were real to me. It took me years to shake them, fantasies about the Union cavalry and battles and Ulysses S. Grant . . . you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think someday somebody will make a simulacrum of you and me? And we’ll have to come back to life?”
“What a morbid thought.”
“There we’ll be, dead and oblivious to everything . . . and then we’ll feel something stirring. Maybe see a snatch of light. And then it’ll all come flooding in on us, reality once more. We’ll be helpless to stop the process, we’ll have to come back. Resurrected!” She shuddered.
“It’s not that, what you’re doing; get that idea out of your mind. You have to separate the actual Lincoln from this–”
“The real Lincoln exists in my mind,” Pris said.
I was astonished. “You don’t believe that. What do you mean by saying that? You mean you have the _idea_ in your mind.”
She cocked her head on one side and eyed me. “No, Louis. I really have Lincoln in my mind. And I’ve been working night after night to transfer him out of my mind, back into the outside world.”
I laughed.
“It’s a dreadful world to bring him into,” Pris said. “Listen Louis. I’ll tell you something. I know a way to get rid of those awful yellowjackets that sting everybody. You don’t take any risk . . . and it doesn’t cost anything; all you need is a bucket of sand.”
“Okay.”
“You wait until night. So the yellowjackets are all down below in their nest asleep. Then you show up at their hole and you pour the bucket of sand over it, so the sand forms a mound. Now listen. You think the sand suffocates them. But it’s not quite like that. Here’s what happens. The next morning the yellowjackets wake up and find their entrance blocked with this sand, so they start burrowing up into the sand to clear it away. They have no place to carry it except to other parts of their nest. So they start a bucket brigade; they carry the sand grain by grain to the back of their nest, but as they take sand from the entrance more falls in its place.”
“I see.”
“Isn’t it awful?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“What they do is they gradually fill their own nest with sand. They do it themselves. The harder they work to clear their entrance the faster it happens, and they suffocate. It’s like an Oriental torture, isn’t it? When I heard about this, Louis, I said to myself, I wish I was dead. I don’t want to live in a world where such things can be.”
“When did you learn about this sand technique?”
“Years ago; I was seven. Louis, I used to imagine what it was like down there in the nest. I’d be asleep.” Walking along beside me, she suddenly took hold of my arm and shut her eyes tight. “Absolutely dark. All around me, others like me. Then–thump. That’s the noise from above. Somebody dumping the sand. But it means nothing . . . we all sleep on.” She let me guide her along the sidewalk, pressing tightly against me. “Then we doze; we doze for the rest of the night, because it’s cold . . . but then daylight comes and the ground gets warm. But it’s still dark. We wake up. Why is there no light? We head for the entrance. All those particles, they block it. We’re frightened. What’s going on? We all pitch in; we try not to get panicked. We don’t use up all the oxygen; we’re organized into teams. We work silently. Efficiently.” I led her across the street; she still had her eyes shut. It was like leading a very tiny girl.
“We never see daylight, Louis. No matter how many grains of sand we haul away. We work and we wait, but it never comes. Never.” In a despairing, strangled voice she said, “We die, Louis, down there.”
I wound my fingers through hers. “What about the cup of coffee now?”
“No,” she said. “I just want to walk.” We went on for a distance.
“Louis,” Pris said, “those insects like wasps and ants . . . they do so much down in their nests; it’s very complicated.”
“Yes. Also spiders.”
“Spiders in particular. Like the trap-door spider. I wonder how a spider feels when someone breaks its web to pieces.”
“It probably says ‘drat,’ ” I said.
“No,” Pris said solemnly. “It gets furious, and then it abandons hope. First it’s sore–it would sting you to death if it could get hold of you. And then this slow, awful blind despair creeps over it. It knows that even if it rebuilds, the same thing is going to happen again.”
“But spiders get right out there and rebuild.”
“They have to. It’s inherited in them. That’s why their lives are worse than ours; they can’t give up and die–they have to go on.”
“You ought to look on the bright side once in a while. You do fine creative work, like those tiles, like your work on the simulacra; think about that. Doesn’t that cheer you? Don’t you feel inspired by the sight of your own creativity?”
“No,” Pris said. “Because what I do doesn’t matter. It isn’t enough.”
“What would be enough?”
Pris considered. She had opened her eyes, now, and all at once she disengaged her fingers from mine. It seemed automatic; she showed no awareness of doing it. A reflex, I thought. Such as spiders have.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know that no matter how hard I work or how long or what I achieve–_it won’t be enough_.”
“Who judges?”
“I do.”
“You don’t think that when you see the Lincoln come to life you’ll feel pride?”
“I know what I’ll feel. Greater despair than ever.”
I glanced at her. Why that? I wondered. Despair at success . . . it makes no sense. What would failure bring for you, then? Elation?
“I’ll tell you one, out of the world of nature,” I said. “See what you make of it.”
“Okay.” She listened intently.
“One day I was starting into a post office in some town down in California and there were birds’ nests up in the eaves of the building. And a young bird had flown or dropped out and was sitting on the pavement. And its parents were flying around anxiously. I walked up to it with the idea of picking it up and putting it back up in the nest, if I could reach the nest.” I paused. “Do you know what it did as I came near?”
“What?”
I said, “It opened its mouth. Expecting that I would feed it.”
Wrinkling her brow, Pris pondered.
“See,” I explained, “that shows that it had known only life forms which fed and protected it and when it saw me even though I didn’t look like any living thing it had ever known it assumed I would feed it.”