Flowers for Algernon

“I care,” I whispered, kissing her throat. But as I did it, I saw the two of us, as if I were a third person standing in the doorway. I was watching a man and woman in each other’s arms. But seeing myself that way, from a distance, left me unresponsive. There was no panic, it was true, but there was also no excitement-no desire. “Your place or mine?” she asked. “Wait a minute.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Maybe we’d better not. I don’t feel well this evening.” She looked at me wonderingly. “Is there anything else?… Anything you want me to do?… I don’t mind..”

“No, that’s not it,” I said sharply. “I just don’t feel well tonight.” I was curious about the ways she had of getting a man excited, but this was no time to start experimenting. The solution to my problem lay elsewhere. I didn’t know what else to say to her. I wished she’d go away, but I didn’t want to tell her to go. She was studying me, and then finally she said, “Look, do you mind if I spend the night here?” Why?

She shrugged. “I like you. I don’t know. Leroy might come back. Lots of reasons. If you don’t want me to…”

She caught me off guard again. I might have found a dozen excuses to get rid of her, but I gave in. “Got any gin?” she asked. “No, I don’t drink much.”

“I’ve got some in my place. I’ll bring it over.” Before I could stop her she was out the window and a few minutes later she returned with a bottle about two-thirds full, and a lemon. She took two glasses from my kitchen and poured some gin into each. “Here,” she said, “this’ll 134 make you feel better. It’ll take the starch out of those straight lines. That’s what’s bugging you. Everything is too neat and straight and you’re all boxed in. Like Algernon in his sculpture there.” I wasn’t going to at first, but I felt so lousy that I figured why not. It couldn’t make things any worse, and it might possibly dull the feeling that I was watching myself through eyes that didn’t understand what I was doing. She got me drunk.

I remember the first drink, and getting into bed, and her slipping in beside me with the bottle in her hand. And that was all until this afternoon when I got up with a hangover.

She was still asleep, face to the wall, her pillow bunched up under her neck. On the night table beside the ash tray overflowing with crushed butts stood the empty bottle, but the last thing I remembered before the curtain came down was watching myself take the second drink. She stretched and rolled toward me-nude. I moved back and fell out of bed. I grabbed a blanket to wrap around myself.

“Hi,” she yawned. “You know what I want to do one of these days?”

“What?”

“Paint you in the nude. Like Michelangelo’s `David.’ You’d be beautiful. You okay?”

I nodded. “Except for a headache. Did I-uh-drink too much last night?” She laughed and propped herself up on one elbow. “You were loaded. And boy did you act queer-I don’t mean fairyish or anything like that but strange.”

“What”-I said, struggling to work the blanket around so that I could walk-“is that supposed to mean? What did I do?”

“I’ve seen guys get happy, or sad, or sleepy, or sexy, but I never saw anyone act the way you did. It’s a good thing you don’t drink often. Oh, my God, I only wish I had a camera. What a short subject you’d have made.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, what’d I do?”

“Not what I expected. No sex, or anything like that. But you were phenomenal. What an act! The weirdest. You’d be great on the stage. You’d wow them at the Palace. You went all confused and silly. You know, as if a grown man starts acting like a kid. Talking about how you wanted to go to school and learn to read and write so you could be smart like everyone else. Crazy stuff like that. You were a different person-like they do with method-acting-and you kept saying you couldn’t play with me because your mother would take away your peanuts and put you in a cage.”

“Peanuts?”

“Yeah! So help me!” she laughed, scratching her head. “And you kept saying I couldn’t have your peanuts. The weirdest. But I tell you, the way you talked! Like those dimwits on street corners, who work themselves up by just looking at a girl. A different guy completely. At first I thought you were just kidding around, but now I think you’re compulsive or something. All this neatness and worrying about everything.”

It didn’t upset me, although I would have expected it to. Somehow, getting drunk had momentarily broken down the conscious barriers that kept the old Charlie Gordon hidden deep in my mind. As I suspected all along, he was not really gone. Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there-watching and waiting. What was he waiting for? “You okay now?” I told her I was fine.