More Than Human

He thought, An innocent is the most beautiful thing there can be. Immediately he demanded of himself, What’s so beautiful about an innocent? And the answer, for once almost as swift as Baby’s: It’s the waiting that’s beautiful.

Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.

Lone was suddenly deep-down glad. For if this was true, he had made something, rather than destroyed something… and when he had lost it, the pain of the loss was justified. When he had lost the Prodds the pain wasn’t worth it.

What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to… Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous, different?

‘Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are and what they belong to.’

‘He says, every kind.’

‘What kind,’ Lone whispered, ‘am I, then?’

A full minute later he yelled, ‘What kind?’

‘Shut up a while. He doesn’t have a way to say it… uh… Here. He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.’

‘I belong. I belong. Part of you, part of you and you too.’

‘The head, silly.’

Lone thought his heart was going to burst. He looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and – the head to direct it.

‘And we’ll grow, Baby. We just got born!’

‘He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically anything but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot.’

So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.

Part Two: Baby is Three

I finally got into see this Stern. He wasn’t an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. ‘Sit over there, Sonny.’

I stood where I was until he looked up again. Then I said, ‘ Look, if a midget walks in here, what do you say – sit over there, Shorty?’

He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, ‘but how am I supposed to know you don’t want to be called Sonny?’

That was better, but I was still mad. ‘I’m fifteen and I don’t have to like it. Don’t rub my nose in it.’

He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Gerard.’

‘First or last?’

‘Both,’ I said.

‘Is that the truth?’

I said, ‘No. And don’t ask me where I live either.’

He put down his pencil. ‘We’re not going to get very far this way.’

‘That’s up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn’t be here. Are you going to let that stop you?’

‘Well, no, but – ‘

‘So what else is bothering you? How you’re going to get paid?’ I took out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. ‘That’s so you won’t have to bill me. You keep track of it. Tell me when it’s used up and I’ll give you more. So you don’t need my address. Wait,’ I said, when he reached towards the money. ‘Let it lay there. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along.’

He folded his hands. ‘I don’t do business this way, Son – I mean, Gerard.’

‘Gerry,’ I told him. ‘You do, if you do business with me.’

‘You make things difficult, don’t you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?’

‘I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier underthings with Sudso.’ I leaned forward. ‘This time it’s the truth.’

‘All right,’ he said.

I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn’t say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead.

‘Before we start – if we start,’ I said, ‘I got to know something. The things I say to you – what comes out while you’re working on me – is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?’

‘Absolutely,’ he said.

‘No matter what?’

‘No matter what.’

I watched him when he said it. I believed him.

‘Pick up your money,’ I said. ‘You’re on.’

He didn’t do it. He said, ‘As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can’t buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can’t do that, it’s useless. You can’t walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it.’

I said tiredly, ‘I didn’t get you out of the phone book and I’m not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. ‘Winnowed, did you say? Just how?’

‘Things you hear, things you read. You know. I’m not saying, so just file that with my street address.’