More Than Human

He flung her back on the bed. She drew up her legs, turned on her side, propped up on one elbow and, through tears, incredible tears, tears which didn’t belong to any Janie he had yet seen, she looked up at him. She held her bruised forearm, flexed her free hand. ‘You don’t know,’ she choked, ‘what you’re…’ And then she was quiet, panting, sending, through those impossible tears, some great, tortured, thwarted message which he could not read.

Slowly he knelt beside the bed. ‘Ah, Janie. Janie.’

Her lips twitched. It could hardly have been a smile but it wanted to be. She touched his hair. ‘It’s all right,’ she breathed.

She let her head fall to the pillow and closed her eyes. He curled his legs under him, sat on the floor, put his arms on the bed and rested his cheek on them.

She said, with her eyes closed, ‘I understand, Hip; I do understand. I want to help, I want to go on helping.’

‘No you don’t,’ he said, not bitterly, but from the depths of an emotion something like grief.

He could tell – perhaps it was her breath – that he had started the tears again. He said, ‘ You know about me. You know everything I’m looking for.’ It sounded like an accusation and he was sorry. He meant it only to express his reasoning. But there wasn’t any other way to say it. ‘Don’t you?’

Still keeping her eyes closed, she nodded.

‘Well then.’

He got up heavily and went back to his chair. When she wants something out of me, he thought viciously, she just sits and waits for it. He slumped into the chair and looked at her. She had not moved. He made a conscious effort and wrung the bitterness from his thought, leaving only the content, the advice. He waited.

She sighed then and sat up. At sight of her rumpled hair and flushed cheeks, he felt a surge of tenderness. Sternly he put it down.

She said, ‘You have to take my word. You’ll have to trust me, Hip.’

Slowly he shook his head. She dropped her eyes, put her hands together. She raised one, touched her eye with the back of her wrist.

She said, ‘That piece of cable.’

The tubing lay on the floor where he had dropped it. He picked it up. ‘What about it?’

‘When was the first time you remembered you had it -remembered it was yours?’

He thought, ‘The house. When I went to the house, asking.’

‘No,’ she said,’ I don’t mean that. I mean, after you were sick.’

‘Oh.’ He closed his eyes briefly, frowned. ‘The window. The time I remembered the window, breaking it. I remembered that and then it… oh!’ he said abruptly. ‘You put it in my hand.’

‘That’s right. And for eight days I’d been putting it in your hand. I put it in your shoe, once. On your plate. In the soap dish. Once I stuck your toothbrush inside it. Every day, half a dozen times a day – eight days, Hip!’

‘I don’t – ’

‘You don’t understand! Oh, I can’t blame you.’

‘I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, I don’t believe you.’

At last she looked at him; when she did he realized how rare it was for him to be with her without her eyes on his face. ‘Truly,’ she said intensely. ‘Truly, Hip. That’s the way it was.’

He nodded reluctantly. ‘All right. So that’s the way it was. What has that to do with – ‘

‘Wait,’ she begged. ‘You’ll see… now, every time you touched the bit of cable, you refused to admit it existed. You’d let it roll right out of your hand and you wouldn’t see it fall to the floor. You’d step on it with your bare feet and not even feel it. Once it was in your food, Hip; you picked it up with a forkful of lima beans, you put the end of it in your mouth, and then just let it slip away; you didn’t know it was there!’

‘Oc – ‘ he said with an effort, then, ‘occlusion. That’s what Bromfield called it.’ Who was Bromfield? But it escaped him; Janie was talking.

‘That’s right. Now listen carefully. When the time came for the occlusion to vanish, it did; and there you stood with the cable in your hand, knowing it was real. But nothing I could do beforehand could make that happen until it was ready to happen!’

He thought about it.’ So – what made it ready to happen?’

‘You went back.’

‘To the store, the plate glass window?’

‘Yes,’ she said and immediately, ‘No. What I mean is this: You came alive in this room, and you – well, you said it yourself: the world got bigger for you, big enough to let there be a room, then big enough for a street, then a town. But the same thing was happening with your memory. Your memory got big enough to include yesterday, and last week, and then the jail, and then the thing that got you into jail. Now look: At that moment, the cable meant something to you, something terribly important. But when it happened, for all the time after it happened, the cable meant nothing. It didn’t mean anything until the second your memory could go back that far. Then it was real again.’

‘Oh,’ he said.