Flowers for Algernon

“You don’t, Charlie. If you did then I’d tell them I don’t care about their delegations and their petitions, and I’d stick up for you against all of them. But as it is now, they’re all scared to death of you. I got to think of my own family too.”

“What if they change their minds? Let me try to convince them.” I was making it harder for him than he expected. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t control myself. “I’ll snake them understand,” I pleaded. “All right,” he sighed finally. “Go ahead, try. But you’re only going to hurt yourself.” As I came out of his office, Frank Reilly and Joe Carp walked by me, and I knew what he had said was true. Having me around to look at was too much for them. I made them all uncomfortable. Frank had just picked up a tray of rolls and both he and Joe turned when I called. “Look, Charlie, I’m busy. Maybe later—”

“No,” I insisted. “Now-right now. Both of you have been avoiding me. Why?” Frank, the fast talker, the ladies’ man, the arranger, studied me for a moment and then set the tray down on the table. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because all of a sudden you’re a big shot, a know-it-all, a brainl Now you’re a regular whiz kid, an egghead. Always with a bookalways with all the answers. Well, I’ll tell you something. You think you’re better than the rest of us here? Okay, go someplace else.”

“But what did I do to you?”

“What did he do? Hear that, Joe? I’ll tell you what you did, Mister Gordon. You come pushing in here with your ideas and suggestions and make the rest of us all look like a bunch of dopes. But I’ll tell you something. To me you’re still a moron. Maybe I don’t understand some of them big words or the names of the books, but I’m as good as you are-better even.”

“Yeah.” Joe nodded, turning to emphasize the point to Gimpy who had just come up behind him.

“I’m not asking you to be my friends,” I said, “or have anything to do with me. Just let me keep my job. Mr. Donner says it’s up to you.” Gimpy glared at me and then shook his head in disgust. “You got a nerve,” he shouted. “You can go to hell!” Then he turned and limped off heavily. And so it went. Most of them felt the way Joe and Frank and Gimpy did. It had been all right as long as they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it. Fanny Birden was the only one who didn’t think I should be forced to leave, and despite their pressure and threats, she had been the only one not to sign the petition.

“Which don’t mean to say,” she remarked, “that I don’t think there’s something mighty strange about you, Charlie. The way you’ve changed! I don’t know. You used to be a good, dependable man — ordinary, not too bright maybe, but honest-and who knows what you done to yourself to get so smart all of a sudden. Like everybody’s been saying-it ain’t right.”

“But what’s wrong with a person wanting to be more intelligent, to acquire knowledge, and understand himself and the world?”

“If you’d read your Bible, Charlie, you’d know that it’s not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord in the first place. The fruit of that tree was forbidden to man. Charlie, if you done anything you wasn’t supposed to-you know, like with the devil or something-maybe it ain’t too late to get out of it. Maybe you could go back to being the good simple man you was before.”

“There’s no going back, Fanny. ’I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m like a man born blind who has been given a chance to see light. That can’t be sinful. Soon there’ll be millions like me all over the world. Science can do it, Fanny.”

She stared down at the bride and groom on the wedding cake she was decorating and I could see her lips barely move as she whispered: “It was evil when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It was evil when they saw they was naked, and learned about lust and shame. And they was driven out of Paradise and the gates was closed to them. If not for that none of us would have to grow old and be sick and die.”

There was nothing more to say, to her or to the rest of them. None of them would look into my eyes. I can still feel the hostility. Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God’s name did they want of me?

This intelligence has driven a wedge between me and all the people I knew and loved, driven me out of the bakery. Now, I’m more alone than ever before. I wonder what would happen if they put Algernon back in the big cage with some of the other mice. Would they turn against him?