Let's Go Play at the Adams'

that she could feel the curdly water resisting as she kicked, could smell the chlorine and

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hear the echoes around the pool building. She was in her room at home, and it was last

week again; her mother had put flowers on the dresser, and they were pretty. She was

at the Refugee Bar, and Ted was buying her a beer and talking long and seriously about

trying to get a job abroad. In detail, in color, feel, smell, and taste, the pictures of her

normal life crowded in and, being more interesting than her present immobility, claimed

equal reality with the actual world. Moreover, they cascaded, toppled, spilled -across

her mind out of sequence, out of context, even simultaneously until her head hurt with

the many attentions required of it. The mind, deprived of normal stimulus, was be-

ginning to create its own out of itself.

If they keep me here long enough, they'll have a real tripper on their hands, she

thought. Wild imaginings of a female Rip Van Winkle emerging back into the world, out

of time, out of place, invaded her imagination. Aloud-within the mind-she said, No, stop

that! And like startled birds, her fantasies scattered into air only to perch again nearby,

in the safe, dim periphery of active thought.

Mingled with this totally mental struggle, · was a second-the physical.

The mind, of course, received messages from the body-- Teacher bad studied that well

enough. In the case of being prisoner, however, she found these messages to be of a

new and unknown kind. Held fast, unmoving, suddenly stopped after twenty years of

waking and even sleeping action-willful, selfish, unhindered movement-the body

became capable of panic of its own. Yesterday, last night, she had been seized with

spasms of irrational, physical, non-thought terror in which her arms and legs wrenched

at ropes that her mind knew would not give. It produced needless pain, tightened loops

which would remain tight until they were untied hours later, and yet as well as she

recognized this, she still could not stop her body's fearing movements.

This afternoon, this evening, she seemed to have

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gained some control over these struggles. Occasionally, she was still overwhelmed by the

desire to break ropes, push down walls, demolish houses, sweep away all physical

restraints with the irresistible swing of gloriously free arms, free legs. With effort and

attention, however, she was able to restrain herself. Biting down on the rag between her

teeth, she willed herself to lie quietly. In this enforced motionlessness, however, came

another sensation.

Emanating from the body, inarticulate, thoughtless and blind, it nonetheless arose within

her. Mankind's grip on life, on nature, is secured only by unceasing alertness, thought and

action. Stopped, held fast, we watch helplessly as the weeds and jungle creep back in over

the land, as the home untended falls to rot, as the garden unwatered withers to straw.

Made prisoner, isolated, held immobile, we lose our claim on, our place in life and begin to

sink.

Barbara, of course, thought little enough about mankind, gardens and a11 that

Nonetheless she understood it all. In willing herself to stillness, she felt the bed beneath

her back grow cold, as if she were lying on a black, tidal flat whose slowly rising tides

would climb until they drowned her and took her back into nothingness again.

This thought, more frightening than the loss of mental control, brought her close to tears

she could not cry with a gag in her mouth. I can't, she said, not caring which of the terrors

she defied. I just can't let go.

Against this and from another side of her mind came the interrupting thought, I'm free

when I’m asleep. And she prayed for sleep which was many hours away in exhaustion.

As the evening grew darker, it became more sullen. The trees drooped; an early dew

developed; and it became still enough to hear the wing whir of swifts and bats hunting in

the deepening dusk. At full dark, nervous spasms of heat lightning flared back and forth

above the trees, the silent river, and the fields beyond.

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Briefly illuminated by these glows, heavy black clouds stood down the distant bay

toward the ocean to the east. The giants were walking again.

Sitting alone on the back steps, barefoot, ragamuffin, knees and elbows together, chin

on palms, Cindy watched the growing fullness of night with ancient unease. Now that

she was ten, Cindy was no longer afraid of lightning and thunder as such, yet they still

reminded her of the time when she was little and when, in the second's flash of

lightning, she always thought she saw the dim forms of nameless, terrible gods stalking

across the sky. In the next moment their eyes might fall on her, their great strides crush

her into the earth. She had cried and demanded much comforting.