Why did imperfect people seek him out and need him?
He knew himself to be no wiser, no nobler, no kinder than most people were capable of being, if given the chance. But he seemed to be a focal point for those who were in need of kindness; gentle words, soft touches. It had always been so for him. Yet he had no needs of his own.
Was it possible never to be touched, to give endlessly, no matter how much was asked, and never to name one’s own desire? It was like living behind a pane of one-way glass; seeing out, while no one could see in. Polyphemus, the one-eyed, trapped in his cave, ready victim for all the storm-tossed Odysseus creatures who came to him unbidden. And like Polyphemus, denied half his sight; was he always to be a victim of the storm-tossed? Was there a limit to how much he could give? All he knew of need was what was demanded of him, blind in one eye to personal necessities.
The wind rose and shivered the tops of the trees.
It smelled very clean and fresh. As she had.
Out on the East River a dark shape slid smoothly across his line of sight and he thought of some lonely scow carrying the castoff remnants of life downtide to a nameless grave where blind fish and things with many legs sculled through the darkness, picking over the remains.
He rose from the bench and walked down through the park.
To his right, in the empty playground, the wind pushed the children’s swings. They squealed and creaked. The dark shape out there, skimming along obscuring Roosevelt Island, was heading south downriver. He decided to pace it. He might have gone straight ahead till Schurz Park ended, then crossed the John Finley Walkway over the East River Drive traffic, but the dark shape out there fascinated him. As far as he could tell, he had no connection with it, in any way, of any kind. Utterly uninvolved with the shape. It meant nothing to him; and for that reason, chiefly, it was something to follow.
At 79th Street, the park’s southern boundary behind him, East End Avenue came to a dead end facing the side of the East End Hotel. To his left, where 79th Street’s eastern extremity terminated against the edge of Manhattan Island, worlds-end, a low metal barrier blocked off the street from the Drive. He walked to the barrier. Out there the black shape had come to rest on the river.
Cars flashed past like accelerated particles, their lights blending one into another till chromatic bands of blue and red and silver and white formed a larger barrier beyond the low metal fence blocking his passage. Passage where? Across six lanes of thundering traffic and a median that provided no protection? Protection from what? He stepped off the curb and did not realize he had climbed over the metal fencing to do so. He stepped off into the seamless, light-banded traffic.
Like walking across water. He crossed the uptown-bound lanes, between the cars, walking between the raindrops, untouched. He reached the median and kept going. Through the downtown-bound bands of light to the far side.
He looked back at the traffic. It had never touched him; but that didn’t seem strange, somehow. He knew it should, but between the now-blistering headache and his feeling of being partially disembodied, it was inconsequential.
He climbed the low metal barrier and stood on the narrow ledge of concrete. The East River lay below him. He sat down on the concrete ledge and let his legs dangle. The black shape was directly across from him, in the middle of the river. He lowered himself down the face of the concrete wall till his feet touched the black skin of the East River.
He had met a woman at a library sale two years before. The New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue had been clearing out excess and damaged stock. They had set up the tables in tiny Bryant Park abutting the library on the 42nd Street side. He had reached for a copy of José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses in the 15th anniversary Norton edition, just as she had reached for it. They came up with the book together, and looked across the table at each other. He took her for coffee at the Swiss Chalet on East 48th.
They went to bed only once, though he continued to see her for several months while she tried to make up her mind whether she would return to her husband; he was in the restaurant linen supply business. For the most part, Brubaker sat and listened to her.
“The thing I most hate about Ed is that he’s so damned self sufficient,” she said. “I always feel if I were to vanish, he’d forget me in a week and get himself another woman and keep right on the way he is.”
Brubaker said, “People have confided in me, and they’ve been almost ashamed of saying it, though I don’t know why they should be, that the pain of losing someone only lasts about a week. At least with any intensity. And then it’s simply a dull ache for a while until someone else comes along.”
“I feel so guilty seeing you and not, uh, you know.”
“That’s all right,” he said, “I enjoy your company. And if I can be of any use, talking to me, so you get your thoughts straight, well, that’s better than being a factor that keeps you and Ed apart.”
“You’re so kind. Jesus, if Ed were only a fraction as kind as you, we’d have no problems. But he’s so selfish! Little things. He’ll squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, especially a new one, and he knows how that absolutely unhinges me, and he’ll spit the paste all over the fixtures so I have to go at them a hundred times a week —”
And he listened to her and listened to her and listened to her, but she was too nervous for sex, and that was all right; he really did like her and wanted to be of some help.
There were times when she cried in his arms, and said they should take an apartment together, and she’d do it in a minute if it weren’t for the children and half the business being in her name. There were times when she raged around his apartment, slamming cabinet doors and talking back to the television, cursing Ed for some cruelty he had visited on her. There were times when she would sit curled up staring out the window of Brubaker’s apartment, running the past through her mind like prayer beads of sorrow.
Finally, one last night, she came into his bed and made ferocious love to him, then told Brubaker she was going back to Ed. For all the right reasons, she said. And a part of Brubaker had gone away, never to return. He had experienced the headache.
Now he simply walked across the soaked-black water to the dark shape. Like walking through traffic. Untouched. The tiniest ripples circled out from beneath his feet, silvered and delicate for just a moment before vanishing to either side of him.
He walked out across the East River and stepped into the dark shape. It was all mist and soft cottony fog. He stepped inside and the only light was that which he produced himself, through the tiniest pinpoint that had opened between and above his eyes. The darkness smoothed around him and he was well within the shifting shape now.
It was not his sort of gathering. Everyone seemed much too intense. And the odor of their need was more pervasive than anything he had ever known before.
They lounged around in the fog, dim in the darkness, illuminated only when Brubaker’s light struck them, washed them for a moment with soft pink-white luminescence and then they became dim moving shapes in the fog. He moved among them, and once a hand touched his arm. He drew back. For the first time in his life he drew back.
He realized what he had done, and felt sorry about it.
He swept his light around through the darkness and caught the stare of a woman who had clearly been watching him. Had she been the person who had touched him? He looked at her and she smiled. It seemed a very familiar smile. The woman with the limp? The virgin? Ed’s wife? One of the many other people he had known?
People moved in the darkness, rearranging themselves. He could not tell if they were carrying on conversations in the darkness, he could hear no voices, only the faint sound of fog whispering around the shadowed shapes. Were they coupling, was this some bizarre orgy? No, there was no frenetic energy being expended, no special writhing that one knew as sexual activity, even in darkness.
But they were all watching him now. He felt utterly alone among them. He was not one o
f them, they had not been waiting for him, their eyes did not shine.
She was still watching him, still smiling.
“Did you touch me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “No one touched you.”
“I’m sure someone—”
“No one touched you.” She watched him, the smile more than an answer, considerably less than a question. “No one here touched you. No one here wants anything from you.”
A man spoke from behind him, saying something Brubaker could not make out. He turned away from the woman with the serious smile, trying to locate the man in the darkness. His light fell on a man lying in the fog, resting back on his elbows. There was something familiar about him, but Brubaker could not place it; something from the past, like a specific word for a specific thing that just fitted perfectly and could be recalled if he thought of nothing else.
“Did you say something?”
The man looked at him with what seemed to be concern. “I said: you deserve better.”
“If you say so.”
“No, if you say so. That’s one of the three things you most need to understand.”
“Three things?”
“You deserve better. Everyone deserves better.”
Brubaker did not understand. He was here in a place that seemed without substance or attachment to real time, speaking plainly to people who were—he now realized—naked—and why had he not realized it before?—and he did not wonder about it; neither did he understand what they were saying to him.
“What are the other two things I need to know?” he asked the man.
But it was a woman in the darkness who answered. Yet another woman than the one with the smile. “No one should live in fear,” she said, from the fog, and he skimmed his light around to find her. She had a harelip.
“Do you mean me? That I live in fear?”
“No one should live like that,” she said. “It isn’t necessary. It can be overcome. Courage is as easy to replicate as cowardice. You need only practice. Do it once, then twice, and the third time it’s easier, and the fourth time a matter of course, and after that it’s done without even consideration. Fear washes away and everything is possible.”
He wanted to settle down among them. He felt one with them now. But they made no move to invite him in. He was something they did not want among them.
“Who are you all?”
“We thought you knew,” said the woman with the smile. He recognized her voice. It came and went in rises and falls of tone, as though speaking over a bad telephone connection, incomplete, partial. He felt he might be missing parts of the conversation.
“No, I have no idea,” he said.
“You’ll be leaving now,” she said. He shone the light on her. Her eyes were milky with cataracts.
His light swept across them. They were all malformed in some way or other. Hairless, blind, atrophied, ruined. But he did not know who they were.
His light went out.
The dark shape seemed to be withdrawing from around him. The fog and mist swarmed and swirled away, and he was left standing in darkness on the East River. A vagrant whisper of one of their voices came to him as the dark shape moved off downriver: “You’d better hurry.”
He felt water lapping at his ankles, and he hurried back toward the concrete breakwall. By the time he reached it, he was swimming. The wind had died away, but he shivered with the chill of the water that soaked his clothes.
He pulled himself up the face of the wall and lay on the ledge gasping for breath.
“May I help you?” he heard someone say.
A hand touched his shoulder. He looked up and saw a woman in a long beige duster coat. She was kneeling down, deeply concerned.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, “ he heard himself say.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I just thought you might need a hand up out of the water.”
“Yes,” he said, “I could use a hand.”
She helped him up. The headache seemed to be leaving him. He heard someone speak, far out on the river, and he looked at her. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes,” she said, “someone spoke. It must be one of those tricks of echo.”
“I’m sure that’s what it was,” he said.
“Do you need something to warm you up?” she asked. “I live right over there in that building. Some coffee?”
“Yes,” he said, allowing her to help him up the slope. “I need something to warm me up.”
Whatever you need in life you must go and get, had been the words from out there on the river where the lost bits of himself were doomed to sail forever. Damaged, forlorn; but no longer bound to him. He seemed to be able to see more clearly now.
And he went with her, for a while, for a long while or a short while; but he went to get something to warm him; he went to get what he needed.
The Executioner of the Malformed Children
Introduction
I have nothing to say about this story.
D-12 IN BIN 39.
M-1 in Bin 85.
00-87 in Bin 506.
We stand here tonight paying our last respects to him. One of those who committed their bodies at birth to our defense. One of those who had no hope for the future, no hope for real or lasting joy; one of those who said, with every breath he ever drew, “I’ll stand between.” Of what use are words from me? Words, mere words, mean nothing. He served. Again: he served. And died for it. So we meet to pay last respects, to conduct a funeral for someone who denied himself all his life that we might live. What is there to say in behalf of someone like Alan Pryor that hasn’t been said of his like since the brave first died? What is there to say about an Alan Pryor that won’t sound stupid and mawkish and ridiculously melodramatic? He knew what lay ahead of him and not once, at no point of decision when he might have freely chosen to live like everyone else, did he turn away and give up the task of being paladin to us all. There aren’t enough thanks in the world for Alan Pryor. But still we meet here for this polite ceremony, and hope it will suffice. It won’t, of course, but we still hope.
L-4 in Bin 55.
He was seven years old when it really began for him. When he was born the hospital ran the tests required by the government security agency, and his dossier fiche had been flagged potential sensitive. But his mother and father had been horrified at the suggestion he be sold to the training school, and refused to release him. So the government had politely thanked them for their time, apologized for having inconvenienced them in any smallest way, and put Alan’s name in the wait file.
And when Alan reached age seven, things changed radically. His parents had come on hard times. What had been a promising career for Alan’s father had somehow, inexplicably, gone sour at every little juncture where it might have led to better things. There was no reason for it; not even Alan’s mother’s frequent paranoid delusions that the government was behind it made any sense. Things just went sour. And they were constantly pressed.
And he was seven years old when he had the accident.
On the school playground, positioned as far left seeker in a sandlot game of kinneys-and-trespass, he had not seen the great birdlike shadow that had swiftly fallen over him, and even as his friends had screamed look out, Al, one of those senseless freak accidents had occurred. The pak on a jitney had failed, the craft had fallen out of the sky, and crushed the child beneath its rotors at impact.
What a jitney was doing that far off the regular transit routes, at that odd hour, was never explained. But the passengers—a man and his wife from Topeka, Kansas—had been killed instantly, and Alan had been rushed to the hospital.
Lying cocooned in spinex preservative, Alan had never regained consciousness, His body was broken and irreparable. His parents came and stared through the spinex, seeing the lusterless bruise their child had become.
“Mrs. Pryor… Mr. Pryor…”
They turned at the soft voice behind them.
“Doctor,
” Alan’s mother pleaded, “save him… isn’t there something you can do…” Then she looked back and added, very softly, “He’s so small…”
The doctor was a large man. Had he been rigged out in heavy wool, with a lumberjack waldo attached to his right arm, he would have seemed quite right in a logging camp. He put one great, thick arm around the woman’s shoulders and said (in the gentlest voice for such a huge man), “I’m sorry. I’ve done all I can.”
Alan’s father began to cry. Tight, dusty little sobs that failed to stir the air.
“There is one thing…”
Alan’s father was beyond hearing him, but she turned—still under his touch—and looked into his face for an answer from faraway.
“The people from the training school. They registered a call for him. If he lives. If you’ll grant permission.”
She stood without speaking for a moment, then lay her hand on her husband’s chest. His head came up and he stared at her. “Dennis, please.” He had not heard, so she had to tell him. And when he heard, he started to shake his head, but she grabbed his coat and her voice was desperate. “Dennis, I’m going to do it… the only way. They can save him. They have the skill to do it. I will!”
So the collection men came and took Alan Pryor away in aircars with shutters that had been opaqued. They took him to the Island, where the paladins were trained, and they saved his life. They did things to his body the Pryors’ doctor never knew could be done. They saved Alan Pryor’s life, and they saved that bright yellow spark in his mind that was the mark of the sensitive.
Alan’s parents never saw him again. But they had known it would turn out that way when they signed the release. It was better that he should live, even as a paladin, even if they never saw him again.
Alan’s mother waited for their life to improve quickly after the school received their boy. But it never did.
A-32 in Bin 11.