Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (2 page)

Now that is really strange, that I said that. Normally I would have said "Sorry" in a mumble and moved the knapsack and left it at that. I think that I was so sick of myself, of being guilty about the car, and being angry, and being lonely, and wondering what good it was being seventeen when it was just as bad as or a little worse than being sixteen, and all the rest of it, that I drove myself out of myself. Anything to escape! Even being funny with some girl I didn't know. Or maybe there was something about her that made me speak, that made it possible for me to speak. Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it. I don't know.

She gave a laugh, a real laugh, surprised and tickled. So I went on, "It's either seven seconds or fifteen seconds, from the femoral artery, I can't remember which."

"What is?"

"Death by exsanguination. Ggggghhh." I slumped down in the bus seat and died quietly. Then I sat up and said, "Yechh, my collar's wet, it's like an ice pack."

"Your hair's all wet; it's dripping on your collar."

"I'm a drip," I said with real feeling. "Say," she said, "are you taking Mr. Senotti's history? Is he all right?"

"He's all right. Tough. Bad temper. Comes of being called Mr. Snotty, maybe; you can't blame him."

"I have one more requirement in social sciences, and I need a really easy teacher."

"Don't take Snotty then. Take Vrebek, all she does is show movies."

"I had her. That's why I quit. Oh, I don't know. Bah!" She really said "Bah!"—exactly as spelt—but savagely. "I hate gut courses, and I haven't got time to work hard for good teachers," she said. Talking to herself more than to me. But my ears were really standing up on end. In twelve years of school, counting kindergarten, I had never heard any human being say they hated gut courses.

"How come you got no time?" I said. "Femoral artery severed? Remember, don't panic, you may have all of fifteen seconds."

She laughed again, and she looked at me.

Just for a moment. But she looked, she saw. She wasn't looking at me to see what she looked like, she was looking at me to see what I looked like. That is unusual, in my experience.

I got the impression, even then, that people didn't often say funny things to this girl, that she wasn't used to clowning, but she liked it. The peculiar thing was that I wasn't much used to clowning, either. With people I didn't know well—which was the entire human species except for my parents and Mike Reinhard and Jason Thoer—I was either completely speechless, or said extremely serious things that instantly prevented any further conversation. But still, I am male, and it seems to me that at our age acting funny is almost an instinctive form of behavior in men. The girls laugh
at
things, but they seem basically serious. Whereas the fellows horse around and clown and make everything into a joke. My only real relationship with Mike and Jason, who were the nearest thing I had to friends, was a joking relationship. The point was never to be serious about anything. Except maybe sports scores. One of the main subjects to talk about was sex, but we kept unserious about sex, either by telling dirty jokes, or by being gross—using the special technical vocabulary of the sexual engineer, as if women were machines with interchangeable parts. I was pretty good at the dirty jokes, but my engineering vocabulary was unconvincing.

I might as well say here that at fifteen I still didn't know what "scoring with a girl" meant. I thought it meant you'd gone out and had a good time at a movie or a party or something. I knew the facts of life, all right, but I didn't connect that phrase with them. So that when Mike, who was way ahead of me physically, started telling us that he had finally scored with this girl, I said, "Yeah, what did you do?" And he gave me this look and said, "What do you think we did?" and I have never felt so stupid in my life. I am getting red talking about it into this tape recorder. Mike had to go tell a lot of other fellows about me asking, "What did you do?" It was good for lots of humor. However, they forgot about it eventually, and I kept a good string of dirty jokes worked up, so that I could talk with Mike and Jason. It beat eating lunch alone, I guess.

But one more thing about humor and seriousness: it doesn't necessarily go on like that. Older women sometimes say the funniest things, and older men often get deadly serious. My father has no sense of humor left at all. He is a kind man, but nothing ever strikes him as funny. And I've heard my mother and her friend Beverley laughing in the kitchen till they were bumping around like drunks and gasping. They were laughing about something dumb Beverley herself had done. Just listening to them whooping in there made me laugh, for nothing, for pleasure.

Well, anyhow, it was really neat to have this girl laugh like that at my feeble jokes, so I went on. "Sounds to me as if what you need is two aspirin tablets and a tourniquet. Bring the leg in to me tomorrow. We have a three-legged centaur that needs a transplant." And so on. I mean feeble. But she laughed at me till I ran out; and then I said, "But how come no time? You got a job?"

"I give some lessons."

I couldn't remember what instrument she played. It would be uncool to ask. "You like it?"

She shrugged and made a face. "Oh, well, it's music," she said. Like people say, "Oh, well, it's a living." But the implication is different.

"That's what you want to be, a music teacher?"

"No," she said, the way she'd said "Bah."

"No teacher. Just music."

She was so fierce she sounded like Tarzan, but it wasn't directed at me, exactly. She had a nice voice, clear and soft, with that fierceness in it. I went into an ape act. "No teacher. Urgh, urgh, kill teacher. Good teacher, yum yum. No teacher. Good tummy, fat, full of teacher." Natalie said, "Teacher lousy, all bones!" The man across the aisle was giving us Send to Siberian Prison Camp Look No. 12. That kind of look can create a bond between you. "What are you going in for?" Natalie asked.

"Urgh, urgh, professional gorilla. Taking Advanced Grooming now, in Home Ec," and I showed her how to groom my knapsack and eat the fleas neatly. Then I said, "I'm going to be a teacher." That seemed funnier for some reason than the ape act, and we both laughed.

"Honest?"

"No, I don't know. Maybe. Something. Depends on where I go to college, I guess."

"Where do you want to go?"

"MIT"

"Mental Institute of ... Texas..."

"Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or else Cal Tech. Science. Laboratories, acres of laboratories. White rats. Dedicated men in white coats laboriously sneaking up sideways on the secrets of the Universe. Frankenstein's monster. All that."

"Yeah," Natalie said. She didn't say it questioningly, or agreeing-without-understanding, or mocking, or meaning nothing. She said it firmly. That's it. Yeah. "That's neat," she said.

"It's also expensive."

"Oh, well," she said, "you can always handle that."

"How?"

"Scholarships—working—That's why I'm giving lessons. So I can get to Tanglewood this summer."

"Tanglewood, New South Wales?"

She gave a laugh-snort and said, "It's a music school thing."

"Near the Mental Institute of Texas. Yes."

"Right."

It was my stop. I got up and said, "So long," and she said, "So long," and I got off in the rain. Only after I got off I thought I could have ridden on two more blocks with her, to her stop, and we could have sort of finished the conversation. It had ended so fast. I jumped up and down in the rain doing the ape act as the bus started up again, but she was on the other side of the bus; nobody saw me but the Director of Siberian Prison Camps, and he looked away quickly and winced.

T
HE REASON I HAVE
reported that conversation on the bus with Natalie Field so exactly is that it was an unimportant conversation that was extremely important to me. And that's important, that something unimportant can be so important.

I guess I tend to think that important events should be solemn, and very grand, with muted violins playing in the background. It's hard to realize that the really important things are just normal little happenings and decisions, and when they turn on the background music and the spotlights and the uniforms, nothing important is going to happen at all.

What stuck in my head after that conversation was just one word, the most commonplace, meaningless word. It wasn't the way she looked, or the way she looked at me, or my acting like a clown and making her laugh, or it was all that, but all sort of compressed into one word, "Yeah," the way she said it. Firmly, certainly. Yeah, that's what you're going to do. It was like a rock. Whenever I looked into my head, there was this rock.

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

It was really getting bad. It had been coming for a while, for a long while I guess, but it was the car that really brought it on.

You see, in giving me that car my father was saying, "This is what I want you to be. A normal car-loving American teen-ager." And by giving it to me he had made it impossible for me to say what I wanted to say, which was that I had finally realized that that's what I wasn't, and was never going to be, and I needed help finding out what I was instead. But to say that, now, I had to say, "Take your present back, I don't want it!" And I couldn't. He'd put his heart into that gift. It was the best he could possibly give me. And I was supposed to say, "Take yourself back, dad, I don't want you"?

I think my mother understood all that, but in a way that wasn't any use to me. My mother was and is a good wife. Being a good wife and mother is the important thing in her life. And she is a good wife and mother. She never lets my father down. She rides him about some things, of course, but she never sneers at him or cuts him down, the way I've heard women do to their husbands; in all the big things she backs him up—what he does is right. And she keeps the house clean and cooks really well and makes extra stuff like cookies and granola, and when you want a clean shirt there is one, and when Muscular Dystrophy or March of Dimes wants a coordinator or a door-to-door collector she does it. And if you think all that, running even a small family and house so that things are decent and peaceful, is a small job, maybe you ought to try it for a year or two. She works hard and uses her head at it. But the trouble is, she's afraid of doing anything else, of being anything else. Not afraid for herself, I think, but afraid that if she did anything except look after us, she'd be letting us down—letting the side down, not being a good wife and mother. She feels she's got to be always there. She can't even take off the time it takes to read a novel. I think she doesn't read novels because if she got really interested in one, absorbed, then she'd be somewhere else, by herself: she wouldn't be with us. And that's wrong, to her. So all she ever reads are some magazines about food and interior decorating and one about extremely expensive holiday travel to places she doesn't want to go to. My father watches a lot of TV, but she never pays much attention to it; she may be sitting there with him in the living room, but she's sewing or doing crewelwork or figuring out household stuff or working on March of Dimes lists. Ready to get up and do what needs doing.

She didn't spoil me, more than an only kid always gets spoiled by being the center of attention. She used to try to keep me from reading so much, but she sort of gave up when I was twelve or thirteen. As far back as I can remember, I had to keep my room straight and do garden jobs. I do the lawn and carry out trash and so on. Male jobs only, of course. I never learned how to work the washer and dryer till the time she had to have an operation and couldn't climb stairs for two weeks. I don't think my father knows how to work them yet. That's woman's work. It's funny, really, because he's nuts about machines. All our appliances have to have about twelve different cycles and all possible attachments. If he ever bought the plain ordinary model of anything he'd feel he wasn't treating her right. But if they're household work machines, she runs them. And when they break down, she calls the repairman. My father doesn't like to hear about things breaking down.

That's why I couldn't say anything about the car. Because it had really broken me down. It just was the end, the last stop. I had to get off. But there wasn't anything outside the bus but rain and fog and me jumping up and down doing an ape act and nobody looking or hearing.

I came in from the bus stop that day. My mother was in the kitchen blending something in the blender. She yelled something over the scream of the machine but I couldn't hear what. I went up to my room and dropped my knapsack and took off my coat with the wet collar and stood there. The rain was whacking on the roof. I said, "I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. And the rest of you can go to hell!"

I heard my voice and it sounded unbelievably feeble. Big deal! So I was an intellectual, and what else is new? That's when the fog closed in completely. And that's when I found the rock. It was actually like that, as if my hand closed around a solid, round rock. The girl on the bus saying, "Yeah," in that solid, round voice. Yeah: good. So go ahead and be what you are.

So when I had rubbed some of the rain out of my hair with a towel, I sat down at my desk and started to reread Ornstein's
The Psychology of Consciousness.
Because something like that, thinking about how we actually think, how our heads work, is what I would like to do.

But it didn't last. I dropped the rock. At dinner my father got going about how you break in a new car. You should drive it at moderate speeds every day, and going to and from school would be perfect for it. "If you want me to take it to work for a week or so, of course I'll be glad to," he said. "It's not good for a new car just to sit there."

"OK," I said, "you do that."

That blew it. His face got tight. "If you didn't want the car, you might have told me."