PROGRESS REPORT 10

April 21—I figured out a new way to set up the mixing machines in the bakery to speed up production. Mr. Donner says he will save labor costs and increase profits. He gave me a fifty-dollar bonus and a ten-dollar-a-week raise.

I wanted to take Joe Carp and Frank Reilly out to lunch to celebrate, but Joe had to buy some things for his wife, and Frank was meeting his cousin for lunch. I guess it will take time for them to get used to the changes in me.

Everyone seems frightened of me. When I went over to Gimpy and tapped him on the shoulder to ask him something, he jumped up and dropped his cup of coffee all over himself. He stares at me when he thinks I’m not looking. Nobody at the place talks to me any more, or kids around the way they used to. It makes the job kind of lonely.

Thinking about it makes me remember the time I fell asleep standing up and Frank kicked my legs out from under me. The warm sweet smell, the white walls, the roar of the oven when Frank opens the door to shift the loaves.

Suddenly falling … twisting … everything out from under me and my head cracking against the wall.

It’s me, and yet it’s like someone else lying there—another Charlie. He’s confused … rubbing his head … staring up at Frank, tall and thin, and then at Gimpy nearby, massive, hairy, gray-faced Gimpy with bushy eyebrows that almost hide his blue eyes.

“Leave the kid alone,” says Gimp. “Jesus, Frank, why do you always gotta pick on him?”

“It don’t mean nothing,” laughs Frank. “It don’t hurt him. He don’t know any better. Do you, Charlie?”

Charlie rubs his head and cringes. He doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve this punishment, but there is always the chance that there will be more.

“But you know better,” says Gimpy, clumping over on his orthopedic boot, “so what the hell you always picking on him for?” The two men sit down at the long table, the tall Frank and the heavy Gimp shaping the dough for the rolls that have to be baked for the evening orders.

They work in silence for a while, and then Frank stops and tips his white cap back. “Hey, Gimp, think Charlie could learn to bake rolls?”

Gimp leans an elbow on the worktable. “Why don’t we just leave him alone?”

“No, I mean it, Gimp—seriously. I bet he could learn something simple like making rolls.”

The idea seems to appeal to Gimpy who turns to stare at Charlie. “Maybe you got something there. Hey, Charlie, come here a minute.”

As he usually does when people are talking about him, Charlie has been keeping his head down, staring at his shoelaces. He knows how to lace and tie them. He could make rolls. He could learn to pound, roll, twist and shape the dough into the small round forms.

Frank looks at him uncertainly. “Maybe we shouldn’t, Gimp. Maybe it’s wrong. If a moron can’t learn maybe we shouldn’t start anything with him.”

“You leave this to me,” says Gimpy who has now taken over Frank’s idea. “I think maybe he can learn. Now listen, Charlie. You want to learn something? You want me to teach you how to make rolls like me and Frank are doing?

Charlie stares at him, the smile melting from his face. He understands what Gimpy wants, and he feels cornered. He wants to please Gimpy, but there is something about the words learn and teach, something to remember about being punished severely, but he doesn’t recall what it is—only a thin white hand upraised, hitting him to make him learn something he couldn’t understand.

Charlie backs away but Gimpy grabs his arm. “Hey, kid, take it easy. We ain’t gonna hurt you. Look at him shaking like he’s gonna fall apart. Look, Charlie. I got a nice new shiny good-luck piece for you to play with.” He holds out his hand and reveals a brass chain with a shiny brass disc that says STA-BRITE METAL POLISH. He holds the chain by one end and the gleaming gold disc rotates slowly, catching the light of the fluorescent bulbs. The pendant is a brightness that Charlie remembers but he doesn’t know why or what.

He doesn’t reach for it. He knows you get punished if you reach out for other people’s things. If someone puts it into your hand that is all right. But otherwise it’s wrong. When he sees that Gimpy is offering it to him, he nods and smiles again.

“That he knows,” laughs Frank. “Give him something bright and shiny.” Frank, who has let Gimpy take over the experiment, leans forward excitedly. “Maybe if he wants that piece of junk bad enough and you tell him he’ll get it if he learns to shape the dough into rolls—maybe it’ll work.”

As the bakers set to the task of teaching Charlie, others from the shop gather around. Frank clears an area between them on the table, and Gimpy pulls off a medium sized piece of dough for Charlie to work with. There is talk of betting on whether or not Charlie can learn to make rolls.

“Watch us carefully,” says Gimpy, putting the pendant beside him on the table where Charlie can see it. “Watch and do everything we do. If you learn how to make rolls, you’ll get this shiny good-luck piece.”

Charlie hunches over on his stool, intently watching Gimpy pick up the knife and cut off a slab of dough. He studies each movement as Gimpy rolls out the dough into a long roll, breaks it off and twists it into a circle, pausing now and then to sprinkle it with flour.

“Now watch me,” says Frank, and he repeats Gimpy’s performance. Charlie is confused. There are differences. Gimpy holds his elbows out as he rolls the dough, like a bird’s wings, but Frank keeps his arms close to his sides. Gimpy keeps his thumbs together with the rest of his fingers as he kneads the dough, but Frank works with the flat of his palms, keeping thumbs apart from his other fingers and up in the air.

Worrying about these things makes it impossible for Charlie to move when Gimpy says, “Go ahead, try it.”

Charlie shakes his head.

“Look, Charlie, I’m gonna do it again slow. Now you watch everything I do, and do each part along with me. Okay? But try to remember everything so then you’ll be able to do the whole thing alone. Now come on

—like this.”

Charlie frowns as he watches Gimpy pull off a section of dough and roll it into a ball. He hesitates, but then he picks up the knife and slices off a piece of dough and sets it down in the center of the table. Slowly, keeping his elbows out exactly as Gimpy does, he rolls it into a ball.

He looks from his own hands to Gimpy’s, and he is careful to keep his fingers exactly the same way, thumbs together with the rest of his fingers— slightly cupped. He has to do it right, the way Gimpy wants him to do it. There are echoes inside him that say, do it right and they will like you. And he wants Gimpy and Frank to like him.

When Gimpy has finished working his dough into a ball, he stands back, and so does Charlie. “Hey, that’s great. Look, Frank, he made it into a ball.” Frank nods and smiles. Charlie sighs and his whole frame trembles as the tension builds. He is unaccustomed to this rare moment of success.

“All right now,” says Gimpy. “Now we make a roll.” Awkwardly, but carefully, Charlie follows Gimpy’s every move. Occasionally, a twitch of his hand or arm mars what he is doing, but in a little while he is able to twist off a section of the dough and fashion it into a roll. Working beside Gimpy he makes six rolls, and sprinkling them with flour he sets them carefully alongside Gimpy’s in the large flour-covered tray.

“All right, Charlie.” Gimpys face is serious. “Now, let’s see you do it by yourself. Remember all the things you did from the beginning. Now, go ahead.”

Charlie stares at the huge slab of dough and at the knife that Gimpy has pushed into his hand. And once again panic comes over him. What did he do first? How did he hold his hand? His fingers? Which way did he roll the ball?…A thousand confusing ideas burst into his mind at the same time and he stands there smiling. He wants to do it, to make Frank and Gimpy happy and have them like him, and to get the bright good-luck piece that Gimpy has promised him. He turns the smooth, heavy piece of dough around and around on the table, but he cannot bring himself to start. He cannot cut into it because he knows he will fail and he is afraid.

“He forgot already,” said Frank. “It don’t stick.”

He wants it to stick. He frowns and tries to remember: first you start to cut off a piece. Then you roll it out into a ball. But how does it get to be a roll like the ones in the tray? That’s something else. Give him time and he’ll remember. As soon as the fuzziness passes away he’ll remember. Just another few seconds and he’ll have it. He wants to hold on to what he’s learned—for a little while. He wants it so much.

“Okay, Charlie,” sighs Gimpy, taking the cutter out of his hand. “That’s all right. Don’t worry about it. It’s not your work anyway.”

Another minute and he’ll remember. If only they wouldn’t rush him.

Why does everything have to be in such a hurry?

“Go ahead, Charlie. Go sit down and look at your comic book. We got to get back to work.”

Charlie nods and smiles, and pulls the comic book out of his back pocket. He smooths it out, and puts it on his head as a make-believe hat. Frank laughs and Gimpy finally smiles.

“Go on, you big baby,” snorts Gimpy. “Go sit down there until Mr.

Donner wants you.”

Charlie smiles at him and goes back to the flour sacks in the corner near the mixing machines. He likes to lean back against them while he sits on the floor cross-legged and looks at the pictures in his comic book. As he starts to turn the pages, he feels like crying, but he doesn’t know why. What is there to feel sad about? The fuzzy cloud comes and goes, and now he looks forward to the pleasure of the brightly colored pictures in the comic book that he has gone through thirty, forty times. He knows all of the figures in the comic—he has asked their names over and over again (of almost everyone he meets)—and he understands that the strange forms of letters and words in the white balloons above the figures means that they are saying something. Would he ever learn to read what was in the balloons? If they gave him enough time—if they didn’t rush him or push him too fast—he would get it. But nobody has time.

Charlie pulls his legs up and opens the comic book to the first page where the Batman and Robin are swinging up a long rope to the side of a building. Someday, he decides, he is going to read. And then he will be able to read the story. He feels a hand on his shoulder and he looks up. It is Gimpy holding out the brass disc and chain, letting it swing and twirl around so that it catches the light.

“Here,” he says gruffly, tossing it into Charlie’s lap, and then he limps away….

I never thought about it before, but that was a nice thing for him to do. Why did he? Anyway, that is my memory of the time, clearer and more complete than anything I have ever experienced before. Like looking out of

the kitchen window early when the morning light is still gray. I’ve come a long way since then, and I owe it all to Dr. Strauss and Professor Nemur, and the other people here at Beekman. But what must Frank and Gimpy think and feel now, seeing how I’ve changed?

April 22—People at the bakery are changing. Not only ignoring me. I can feel the hostility. Donner is arranging for me to join the baker’s union, and I’ve gotten another raise. The rotten thing is that all of the pleasure is gone because the others resent me. In a way, I can’t blame them. They don’t understand what has happened to me, and I can’t tell them. People are not proud of me the way I expected—not at all.

Still, I’ve got to have someone to talk to. I’m going to ask Miss Kinnian to go to a movie tomorrow night to celebrate my raise. If I can get up the nerve.

April 24—Professor Nemur finally agreed with Dr. Strauss and me that it will be impossible for me to write down everything if I know it’s immediately read by people at the lab. I’ve tried to be completely honest about everything, no matter who I was talking about, but there are things I can’t put down unless I can keep them private—at least for a while.

Now, I’m allowed to keep back some of these more personal reports, but before the final report to the Welberg Foundation, Professor Nemur will read through everything to decide what part of it should be published.

What happened today at the lab was very upsetting.

I dropped by the office earlier this evening to ask Dr. Strauss or Professor Nemur if they thought it would be all right for me to ask Alice Kinnian out to a movie, but before I could knock I heard them arguing with each other. I shouldn’t have stayed, but it’s hard to break the habit of listening because people have always spoken and acted as if I weren’t there, as if they never cared what I overheard.

I heard someone bang on the desk, and then Professor Nemur shouted: “I’ve already informed the convention committee that we will present the paper at Chicago.”

Then I heard Dr. Strauss’ voice: “But you’re wrong, Harold. Six weeks from now is still too soon. He’s still changing.”

And then Nemur: “We’ve predicted the pattern correctly so far. We’re justified in making an interim report. I tell you, Jay, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ve succeeded. It’s all positive. Nothing can go wrong now.”

Strauss: “This is too important to all of us to bring it out into the open prematurely. You’re taking the authority on yourself—”

Nemur: “You forget that I’m the senior member of this project.”

Strauss: “And you forget that you’re not the only one with a reputation to consider. If we claim too much now, our whole hypothesis will come under fire.”

Nemur: “I’m not afraid of regression any more. I’ve checked and rechecked everything. An interim report will do no harm. I feel sure nothing can go wrong now.”

The argument went on that way with Strauss saying that Nemur had his eye on the Chair of Psychology at Hallston, and Nemur saying that Strauss was riding on the coattails of his psychological research. Then Strauss said that the project had as much to do with his techniques in psychosurgery and enzyme-injection patterns, as with Nemur’s theories, and that someday thousands of neurosurgeons all over the world would be using his methods, but at this point Nemur reminded him that those new techniques would never have come about if not for his original theory.

They called each other names—opportunist, cynic, pessimist—and I found myself frightened. Suddenly, I realized I no longer had the right to stand there outside the office and listen to them without their knowing it. They might not have cared when I was too feeble-minded to know what was going on, but now that I could understand they wouldn’t want me to hear it. I left without waiting for the outcome.

It was dark, and I walked for a long time trying to figure out why I was so frightened. I was seeing them clearly for the first time—not gods or even heroes, but just two men worried about getting something out of their work. Yet, if Nemur is right and the experiment is a success, what does it matter? There’s so much to do, so many plans to make.

I’ll wait until tomorrow to ask them about taking Miss Kinnian to a movie to celebrate my raise.

April 26—I know I shouldn’t hang around the college when I’m through at

the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they’re learning in their

classes excites me. I wish I could sit and talk with them over coffee in the Campus Bowl Luncheonette when they get together to argue about books and politics and ideas. It’s exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy—about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other

names that echo like great church bells in my mind.

Sometimes I listen in on the conversations at the tables around me, and pretend I’m a college student, even though I’m a lot older than they are. I carry books around, and I’ve started to smoke a pipe. It’s silly, but since I belong at the lab I feel as if I’m a part of the university. I hate to go home to that lonely room.

April 27—I’ve made friends with some of the boys at the Campus Bowl. They were arguing about whether or not Shakespeare really wrote

Shakespeare’s plays. One of the boys—the fat one with the sweaty face— said that Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays. But Lenny, the short kid with the dark glasses, didn’t believe that business about Marlowe, and he said that everyone knew that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays because

Shakespeare had never been to college and never had the education that

shows up in those plays. That’s when the one with the freshman beanie said he had heard a couple of guys in the men’s room talking about how

Shakespeare’s plays were really written by a lady.

And they talked about politics and art and God. I never before heard anyone say that there might not be a God. That frightened me, because for the first time I began to think about what God means.

Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

All the time they talked and argued, I felt the excitement bubble up inside me. This was what I wanted to do—go to college and hear people talk about important things.

I spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I’m not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now—Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner—everything I can get my hands on—feeding a hunger that can’t be satisfied.

April 28—In a dream last night I heard Mom screaming at Dad and the teacher at the elementary school P.S. 13 (my first school before they transferred me to P.S. 222)….

“He’s normal! He’s normal! He’ll grow up like other people. Better than others.” She was trying to scratch the teacher, but Dad was holding her back. “He’ll go to college someday. He’ll be somebody.” She kept screaming it, clawing at Dad so he’d let go of her. “He’ll go to college someday and he’ll be somebody.”

We were in the principal’s office and there were a lot of people looking embarrassed, but the assistant principal was smiling and turning his head so no one would see it.

The principal in my dream had a long beard, and was floating around the room and pointing at me. “He’ll have to go to a special school. Put him into the Warren State Home and Training School. We can’t have him here.”

Dad was pulling Mom out of the principal’s office, and she was shouting and crying too. I didn’t see her face, but her big red teardrops kept splashing down on me….

This morning I could recall the dream, but now there’s more than that

—I can remember through the blur, back to when I was six years old and it all happened. Just before Norma was born. I see Mom, a thin, dark-haired woman who talks too fast and uses her hands too much. As always her face is blurred. Her hair is up in a bun, and her hand goes to touch it, pat it smooth, as if she has to make sure it’s still there. I remember that she was always fluttering like a big, white bird—around my father, and he too heavy and tired to escape her pecking.

I see Charlie, standing in the center of the kitchen, playing with his spinner, bright colored beads and rings threaded on a string. He holds the string up in one hand turns the rings so they wind and unwind in bright spinning flashes. He spends long hours watching his spinner. I don’t know who made it for him, or what became of it, but I see him standing there fascinated as the string untwists and sets the rings spinning….

She is screaming at him—no, she’s screaming at his father. “I’m not going to take him. There’s nothing wrong with him!”

“Rose, it won’t do any good pretending any longer that nothing is wrong. Just look at him, Rose. Six years old, and—”

“He’s not a dummy. He’s normal. He’ll be just like everyone else.”

He looks sadly at his son with the spinner and Charlie smiles and holds it up to show him how pretty it is when it goes around and around.

“Put that thing away!” Mom shrieks and suddenly she knocks the spinner from Charlie’s hand, and it crashes across the kitchen floor. “Go play with your alphabet blocks.”

He stands there, frightened by the sudden outburst. He cowers, not knowing what she will do. His body begins to shake. They’re arguing, and the voices back and forth make a squeezing pressure inside him and a sense of panic.

“Charlie, go to the bathroom. Don’t you dare do it in your pants.”

He wants to obey her, but his legs are too soft to move. His arms go up automatically to ward off blows.

“For God’s sake, Rose. Leave him alone. You’ve got him terrified. You always do this, and the poor kid—”

“Then why don’t you help me? I have to do it all by myself. Every day I try to teach him—to help him catch up to the others. He’s just slow, that’s all. But he can learn like everyone else.”

“You’re fooling yourself, Rose. It’s not fair to us or to him. Pretending he’s normal. Driving him as if he were an animal that could learn to do tricks. Why don’t you leave him alone?”

“Because I want him to be like everyone else.”

As they argue, the feeling that grips Charlie’s insides becomes greater. His bowels feel as if they will burst and he knows he should go to the bathroom as she has told him so often. But he can’t walk. He feels like sitting down right there in the kitchen, but it is wrong and she will slap him. He wants his spinner. If he has his spinner and he watches it going round and round, he will be able to control himself and not make in his pants. But the spinner is all apart with some of the rings under the table and

some under the sink, and the cord is near the stove.

It is very strange that although I can recall the voices clearly their faces are still blurred, and I can see only general outlines. Dad massive and slumped. Mom thin and quick. Hearing them now, arguing with each other across the years, I have the impulse to shout at them: “Look at him. There, down there! Look at Charlie. He has to go to the toilet!”

Charlie stands clutching and pulling at his red checkered shirt as they argue over him. The words are angry sparks between them—an anger and a guilt he can’t identify.

“Next September he’s going to go back to P.S. 13 and do the term’s work over again.”

“Why can’t you let yourself see the truth? The teacher says he’s not capable of doing the work in a regular class.”

“That bitch a teacher? Oh, I’ve got better names for her. Let her start with me again and I’ll do more than just write to the board of education. I’ll scratch that dirty slut’s eyes out. Charlie, why are you twisting like that? Go to the bathroom. Go by yourself. You know how to go.”

“Can’t you see he wants you to take him? He’s frightened.”

“Keep out of this. He’s perfectly capable of going to the bathroom himself. The book says it gives him confidence and a feeling of achievement.”

The terror that waits in that cold tile room overwhelms him. He is afraid to go there alone. He reaches up for her hand and sobs out: “Toi— toi…” and she slaps his hand away.

“No more,” she says sternly. “You’re a big boy now. You can go by yourself. Now march right into that bathroom and pull your pants down the way I taught you. I warn you if you make in your pants you’ll get spanked.”

I can almost feel it now, the stretching and knotting in his intestines as the two of them stand over him waiting to see what he will do. His whimper becomes a soft crying as suddenly he can control no longer, and he sobs and covers his face with his hands as he dirties himself.

It is soft and warm and he feels the confusion of relief and fear. It is his, but she will take it away from him as she always does. She will take it away and keep it for herself. And she will spank him. She comes toward him, screaming that he is a bad boy, and Charlie runs to his father for help.

Suddenly, I remember that her name is Rose and his name is Matt. It’s odd to have forgotten your parents’ names. And what about Norma? Strange I haven’t thought about them all for a long time. I wish I could see Matt’s face now, to know what he was thinking at that moment. All I remember is that as she began to spank me, Matt Gordon turned and walked out of the apartment.

I wish I could see their faces more clearly.

 

PROGRESS REPORT 11

May 1—Why haven’t I ever noticed how beautiful Alice Kinnian is? She

has pigeon-soft brown eyes and feathery brown hair down to the hollow of her neck. When she smiles, her full lips look as if she’s pouting.

We went to a movie and then to dinner. I didn’t see much of the first picture because I was too conscious of her sitting next to me. Twice her bare arm touched mine on the armrest, and both times the fear that she would become annoyed made me pull back. All I could think about was her soft skin just inches away. Then I saw, two rows ahead of us, a young man with his arm around his girl, and I wanted to put my arm around Miss Kinnian. Terrifying. But if I did it slowly … first resting my arm on the back of her seat … moving up … inch by inch … to rest near her shoulders and the back of her neck … casually…

I didn’t dare.

The best I could do was rest my elbow on the back of her seat, but by the time I got there I had to shift position to wipe the perspiration off my face and neck.

Once, her leg accidentally brushed against mine.

It became such an ordeal—so painful—that I forced myself to take my mind off her. The first picture had been a war film, and all I caught was the ending where the G.I. goes back to Europe to marry the woman who saved his life. The second picture interested me. A psychological film about a man and woman apparently in love but actually destroying each other. Everything suggests that the man is going to kill his wife but at the last moment, something she screams out in a nightmare makes him recall something that happened to him during his childhood. The sudden memory shows him that his hatred is really directed at a depraved governess who had terrified him with frightening stories and left a flaw in his personality. Excited at discovering this, he cries out with joy so that his wife awakens. He takes her in his arms and the implication is that all his problems have been solved. It was pat and cheap, and I must have shown my anger because Alice wanted to know what was wrong. “It’s a lie,” I explained, as we walked out into the lobby. “Things just don’t happen that way.”

“Of course not.” She laughed. “It’s a world of make-believe.”

“Oh, no! That’s no answer.” I insisted. “Even in the world of make- believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together. This kind of picture is a lie. Things are forced to fit because the writer or the director or somebody wanted something in that didn’t belong. And it doesn’t feel right.”

She looked at me thoughtfully as we walked out into the bright dazzling night-lights of Times Square. “You’re coming along fast.”

“I’m confused. I don’t know what I know any more.”

“Never mind that,” she insisted. “You’re beginning to see and understand things.” She waved her hand to take in all of the neon and glitter around us as we crossed over to Seventh Avenue. “You’re beginning to see what’s behind the surface of things. What you say about the parts having to belong together—that was a pretty good insight.”

“Oh, come on now. I don’t feel as if I’m accomplishing anything. I don’t understand about myself or my past. I don’t even know where my parents are, or what they look like. Do you know that when I see them in a flash of memory or in a dream the faces are a blur? I want to see their expressions. I can’t understand what’s going on unless I can see their faces

—”

“Charlie, calm down.” People were turning to stare. She slipped her arm through mine and pulled me close to restrain me. “Be patient. Don’t forget you’re accomplishing in weeks what takes others a lifetime. You’re a giant sponge soaking in knowledge. Soon you’ll begin to connect things up, and you’ll see how all the different worlds of learning are related. All the levels, Charlie, like steps on a giant ladder. And you’ll climb higher and higher to see more and more of the world around you.”

As we entered the cafeteria on Forty-fifth Street and picked up our trays, she spoke animatedly. “Ordinary people,” she said, “can see only a little bit. They can’t change much or go any higher than they are, but you’re a genius. You’ll keep going up and up, and see more and more. And each step will reveal worlds you never even knew existed.”

People on the line who heard her turned to stare at me, and only when I nudged her to stop did she lower her voice. “I just hope to God,” she whispered, “that you don’t get hurt.”

For a little while after that I didn’t know what to say. We ordered our food at the counter and carried it to our table and ate without talking. The

silence made me nervous. I knew what she meant about her fear, so I joked about it.

“Why should I get hurt? I couldn’t be any worse off than I was before. Even Algernon is still smart, isn’t he? As long as he’s up there I’m in good shape.” She toyed with her knife making circular depressions in a pat of butter and the movement hypnotized me. “And besides,” I told her, “I overheard something—Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss were arguing, and Nemur said he’s positive that nothing can go wrong.”

“I hope so,” she said. “You have no idea how afraid I’ve been that something might go wrong. I feel partly responsible.” She saw me staring at the knife and she put it down carefully beside her plate.

“I never would have done it but for you,” I said.

She laughed and it made me tremble. That’s when I saw that her eyes were soft brown. She looked down at the tablecloth quickly and blushed.

“Thank you, Charlie,” she said, and took my hand.

It was the first time anyone had ever done that, and it made me bolder. I leaned forward, holding on to her hand, and the words came out. “I like you very much.” After I said it, I was afraid she’d laugh, but she nodded and smiled.

“I like you too, Charlie.”

“But it’s more than liking. What I mean is … oh hell! I don’t know what I mean.” I knew I was blushing and I didn’t know where to look or what to do with my hands. I dropped a fork, and when I tried to retrieve it, I knocked over a glass of water and it spilled on her dress. Suddenly, I had become clumsy and awkward again, and when I tried to apologize I found my tongue had become too large for my mouth.

“That’s all right, Charlie,” she tried to reassure me. “It’s only water.

Don’t let it upset you this way.”

In the taxi on the way home, we were silent for a long time, and then she put down her purse and straightened my tie and puffed up my breast pocket handkerchief. “You were very upset tonight, Charlie.”

“I feel ridiculous.”

“I upset you by talking about it. I made you self-conscious.”

“It’s not that. What bothers me is that I can’t put into words the way I feel.”

“These feelings are new to you. Not everything has to … be put into words.”

I moved closer to her and tried to take her hand again, but she pulled away. “No, Charlie. I don’t think this is good for you. I’ve upset you, and it might have a negative effect.”

When she put me off, I felt awkward and ridiculous at the same time. It made me angry with myself and I pulled back to my side of the seat and stared out the window. I hated her as I had never hated anyone before—with her easy answers and maternal fussing. I wanted to slap her face, to make her crawl, and then to hold her in my arms and kiss her.

“Charlie, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.” “Forget it.”

“But you’ve got to understand what’s happening.”

“I understand,” I said, “and I’d rather not talk about it.”

By the time the cab reached her apartment on Seventy-seventh Street, I was thoroughly miserable.

“Look,” she said, “this is my fault. I shouldn’t have gone out with you tonight.”

“Yes, I see that now.”

“What I mean is, we have no right to put this on a personal … emotional level. You have so much to do. I have no right to come into your life at this time.”

“That’s my worry, isn’t it?”

“Is it? This isn’t your private affair any more, Charlie. You’ve got obligations now—not only to Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss, but to the millions who may follow in your footsteps.”

The more she talked that way, the worse I felt. She highlighted my awkwardness, my lack of knowledge about the right things to say and do. I was a blundering adolescent in her eyes, and she was trying to let me down easy.

As we stood at the door to her apartment, she turned and smiled at me and for a moment I thought she was going to invite me in, but she just whispered: “Good night, Charlie. Thank you for a wonderful evening.”

I wanted to kiss her good night. I had worried about it earlier. Didn’t a woman expect you to kiss her? In the novels I’d read and the movies I’d

seen, the man makes the advances. I had decided last night that I would kiss her. But I kept thinking: what if she turns me down?

I moved closer and reached for her shoulders, but she was too quick for me. She stopped me and took my hand in hers. “We’d better just say good night this way, Charlie. We can’t let this get personal. Not yet.”

And before I could protest, or ask what she meant by not yet, she started inside. “Good night, Charlie, and thank you again for a lovely … lovely time.” And closed the door.

I was furious at her, myself, and the world, but by the time I got home, I realized she was right. Now, I don’t know whether she cares for me or if she was just being kind. What could she possibly see in me? What makes it so awkward is that I’ve never experienced anything like this before. How does a person go about learning how to act toward another person? How does a man learn how to behave toward a woman?

The books don’t help much.

But next time, I’m going to kiss her good night.

May 3—One of the things that confuses me is never really knowing when something comes up from my past, whether it really happened that way, or if that was the way it seemed to be at the time, or if I’m inventing it. I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up. Everything is strangely slow-motion and blurred.

I had a nightmare last night, and when I woke up I remembered something.

First the nightmare: I’m running down a long corridor, half blinded by the swirls of dust. At times I run forward and then I float around and run backwards, but I’m afraid because I’m hiding something in my pocket. I don’t know what it is or where I got it, but I know they want to take it away from me and that frightens me.

The wall breaks down and suddenly there is a red-haired girl with her arms outstretched to me—her face is a blank mask. She takes me into her arms, kisses and caresses me, and I want to hold her tightly but I’m afraid. The more she touches me, the more frightened I become because I know I must never touch a girl. Then, as her body rubs up against mine, I feel a

strange bubbling and throbbing inside me that makes me warm. But when I look up I see a bloody knife in her hands.

I try to scream as I run, but no sound comes out of my throat, and my pockets are empty. I search in my pockets but I don’t know what it is I’ve lost or why I was hiding it. I know only that it’s gone, and there is blood on my hands too.

When I woke up, I thought of Alice, and I had the same feeling of panic as in the dream. What am I afraid of? Something about the knife.

I made myself a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. I’d never had a dream like it before, and I knew it was connected with my evening with Alice. I have begun to think of her in a different way.

Free association is still difficult, because it’s hard not to control the direction of your thoughts … just to leave your mind open and let anything flow into it … ideas bubbling to the surface like a bubble bath … a woman bathing … a girl … Norma taking a bath … I am watching through the keyhole … and when she gets out of the tub to dry herself I see that her body is different from mine. Something is missing.

Running down the hallway … somebody chasing me … not a person … just a big flashing kitchen knife … and I’m scared and crying but no voice comes out because my neck is cut and I’m bleeding…

“Mama, Charlie is peeking at me through the keyhole…”

Why is she different? What happened to her?…blood … bleeding … a dark cubbyhole…

Three blind mice … three blind mice, See how they run! See how they run! They all run after the farmer’s wife,

She cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three … blind … mice?

Charlie, alone in the kitchen early in the morning. Everyone else asleep, and he amuses himself playing with his spinner. One of the buttons pops off his shirt as he bends over, and it rolls across the intricate line- pattern of the kitchen linoleum. It rolls towards the bathroom and he

follows, but then he loses it. Where is the button? He goes into the bathroom to find it. There is a closet in the bathroom where the clothes hamper is, and he likes to take out all the clothes and look at them. His father’s things and his mother’s … and Norma’s dresses. He would like to try them on and make believe he is Norma, but once when he did that his mother spanked him for it. There in the clothes hamper he finds Norma’s underwear with dried blood. What had she done wrong? He was terrified. Whoever had done it might come looking for him….

Why does a memory like that from childhood remain with me so strongly, and why does it frighten me now? Is it because of my feelings for Alice?

Thinking about it now, I can understand why I was taught to keep away from women. It was wrong for me to express my feelings to Alice. I have no right to think of a woman that way—not yet.

But even as I write these words, something inside shouts that there is more. I’m a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon’s knife. And I have to love someone.

May 8—Even now that I have learned what has been going on behind Mr. Donner’s back, I find it hard to believe. I first noticed something was wrong during the rush hour two days ago. Gimpy was behind the counter wrapping a birthday cake for one of our regular customers—a cake that sells for

$3.95. But when Gimpy rang up the sale the register showed only $2.95. I started to tell him he had made a mistake, but in the mirror behind the counter I saw a wink and smile that passed from the customer to Gimpy and the answering smile on Gimpy’s face. And when the man took his change, I saw the flash of a large silver coin left behind in Gimpy’s hand, before his

fingers closed on it, and the quick movement with which he slipped the half-dollar into his pocket.

“Charlie,” said a woman behind me, “are there any more of those cream-filled éclairs?”

“I’ll go back and find out.”

I was glad of the interruption because it gave me time to think about what I had seen. Certainly, Gimpy had not made a mistake. He had deliberately undercharged the customer, and there had been an understanding between them.

I leaned limply against the wall not knowing what to do. Gimpy had worked for Mr. Donner for over fifteen years. Donner—who always treated his workers like close friends, like relatives—had invited Gimpy’s family to his house for dinner more than once. He often put Gimpy in charge of the shop when he had to go out, and I had heard stories of the times Donner gave Gimpy money to pay his wife’s hospital bills.

It was incredible that anyone would steal from such a man. There had to be some other explanation. Gimpy had really made a mistake in ringing up the sale, and the half-dollar was a tip. Or perhaps Mr. Donner had made some special arrangement for this one customer who regularly bought cream cakes. Anything rather than believe that Gimpy was stealing. Gimpy had always been so nice to me.

I no longer wanted to know. I kept my eyes averted from the register as I brought out the tray of éclairs and sorted out the cookies, buns, and cakes.

But when the little red-haired woman came in—the one who always pinched my cheek and joked about finding a girl friend for me—I recalled that she came in most often when Donner was out to lunch and Gimpy was behind the counter. Gimpy had often sent me out to deliver orders to her house.

Involuntarily, my mind totaled her purchases to $4.53. But I turned away so that I would not see what Gimpy rang up on the cash register. I wanted to know the truth, and yet I was afraid of what I might learn.

“Two forty-five, Mrs. Wheeler,” he said.

The ring of the sale. The counting of change. The slam of the drawer. “Thank you, Mrs. Wheeler.” I turned just in time to see him putting his hand into his pocket, and I heard the faint clink of coins.

How many times had he used me as a go-between to deliver packages to her, undercharging her so that later they could split the difference? Had he used me all these years to help him steal?

I couldn’t take my eyes off Gimpy as he clomped around behind the counter, perspiration streaming down from under his paper cap. He seemed animated and good-natured, but looking up he caught my eye, frowned and turned away.

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to go behind the counter and smash his face in. I don’t remember ever hating anyone before—but this morning I hated Gimpy with all my heart.

Pouring this all out on paper in the quiet of my room has not helped. Every time I think of Gimpy stealing from Mr. Donner I want to smash something. Fortunately, I don’t think I’m capable of violence. I don’t think I ever hit anyone in my life.

But I still have to decide what to do. Tell Donner that his trusted employee has been stealing from him all these years? Gimpy would deny it, and I could never prove it was true. And what would it do to Mr. Donner? I don’t know what to do.

May 9—I can’t sleep. This has gotten to me. I owe Mr. Donner too much to stand by and see him robbed this way. I’d be as guilty as Gimpy by my silence. And yet, is it my place to inform on him? The thing that bothers me most is that when he sent me on deliveries he used me to help him steal from Donner. Not knowing about it, I was outside it—not to blame. But

now that I know, by my silence I am as guilty as he is.

Yet, Gimpy is a co-worker. Three children. What will he do if Donner fires him? He might not be able to get another job—especially with his club foot.

Is that my worry?

What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like this.

May 10—I asked Professor Nemur about it, and he insists that I’m an innocent bystander and there’s no reason for me to become involved in what

would be an unpleasant situation. The fact that I’ve been used as a go- between doesn’t seem to bother him at all. If I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, he says, then it doesn’t matter. I’m no more to blame than the knife is to blame in a stabbing, or the car in a collision.

“But I’m not an inanimate object,” I argued. “I’m a person.”

He looked confused for a moment and then laughed. “Of course, Charlie. But I wasn’t referring to now. I meant before the operation.”

Smug, pompous—I felt like hitting him too. “I was a person before the operation. In case you forgot—”

“Yes, of course, Charlie. Don’t misunderstand. But it was different…” And then he remembered that he had to check some charts in the lab.

Dr. Strauss doesn’t talk much during our psychotherapy sessions, but today when I brought it up, he said that I was morally obligated to tell Mr. Donner. But the more I thought about it the less simple it became. I had to have someone else to break the tie, and the only one I could think of was Alice. Finally, at ten thirty I couldn’t hold out any longer. I dialed three times, broke off in the middle each time, but on the fourth try, I managed to hold on until her voice.

At first she didn’t think she should see me, but I begged her to meet me at the cafeteria where we had dinner together. “I respect you—you’ve always given me good advice.” And when she still wavered, I insisted. “You have to help me. You’re partly responsible. You said so yourself. If not for you I would never have gone into this in the first place. You just can’t shrug me off now.”

She must have sensed the urgency because she agreed to meet me. I hung up and stared at the phone. Why was it so important for me to know what she thought, how she felt? For more than a year at the Adult Center the only thing that mattered was pleasing her. Was that why I had agreed to the operation in the first place?

I paced up and back in front of the cafeteria until the policeman began to eye me suspiciously. Then I went in and bought coffee. Fortunately, the table we had used last time was empty. She would think of looking for me back there.

She saw me and waved to me, but stopped at the counter for coffee before she came over to the table. She smiled and I knew it was because I had chosen the same table. A foolish, romantic gesture.

“I know it’s late,” I apologized, “but I swear I was going out of my mind. I had to talk to you.”

She sipped her coffee and listened quietly as I explained how I had found out about Gimpy’s cheating, my own reaction, and the conflicting advice I’d gotten at the lab. When I finished, she sat back and shook her head.

“Charlie, you amaze me. In some ways you’re so advanced, and yet when it comes to making a decision, you’re still a child. I can’t decide for you, Charlie. The answer can’t be found in books—or be solved by bringing it to other people. Not unless you want to remain a child all your life. You’ve got to find the answer inside you—feel the right thing to do. Charlie, you’ve got to learn to trust yourself.”

At first, I was annoyed at her lecture, but then suddenly—it began to make sense. “You mean, I’ve got to decide?”

She nodded.

“In fact,” I said, “now that I think of it, I believe I’ve already decided some of it! I think Nemur and Strauss are both wrong!”

She was watching me closely, excitedly. “Something is happening to you, Charlie. If you could only see your face.”

“You’re damned right, something is happening! A cloud of smoke was hanging in front of my eyes, and with one breath you blew it away. A simple idea. Trust myself. And it never occurred to me before.”

“Charlie, you’re wonderful.”

I caught her hand and held it. “No, it’s you. You touch my eyes and make me see.”

She blushed and pulled her hand back.

“The last time we were here,” I said, “I told you I liked you. I should have trusted myself to say I love you.”

“Don’t, Charlie. Not yet.”

“Not yet?” I shouted. “That’s what you said last time. Why not yet?” “Shhhh … Wait a while, Charlie. Finish your studies. See where they

lead you. You’re changing too fast.”

“What does that have to do with it? My feeling for you won’t change because I’m becoming intelligent. I’ll only love you more.”

“But you’re changing emotionally too. In a peculiar sense I’m the first woman you’ve ever been really aware of—in this way. Up to now I’ve been

your teacher—someone you turn to for help and advice. You’re bound to think you’re in love with me. See other women. Give yourself more time.”

“What you’re saying is that young boys are always falling in love with their teachers, and that emotionally I’m still just a boy.”

“You’re twisting my words around. No, I don’t think of you as a boy.” “Emotionally retarded then.”

“No.”

“Then, why?”

“Charlie, don’t push me. I don’t know. Already, you’ve gone beyond my intellectual reach. In a few months or even weeks, you’ll be a different person. When you mature intellectually, we may not be able to communicate. When you mature emotionally, you may not even want me. I’ve got to think of myself too, Charlie. Let’s wait and see. Be patient.”

She was making sense, but I wasn’t letting myself listen. “The other night—” I choked out, “You don’t know how much I looked forward to that date. I was out of my mind wondering how to behave, what to say, wanting to make the best impression, and terrified I might say something to make you angry.”

“You didn’t make me angry. I was flattered.” “Then, when can I see you again?”

“I have no right to let you get involved.”

“But I am involved!” I shouted, and then seeing people turn to look, I lowered my voice until it trembled with anger. “I’m a person—a man—and I can’t live with just books and tapes and electronic mazes. You say, ‘see other women.’ How can I when I don’t know any other women? Something inside is burning me up, and all I know is it makes me think of you. I’m in the middle of a page and I see your face on it—not blurred like those in my past, but clear and alive. I touch the page and your face is gone and I want to tear the book apart and throw it away.”

“Please, Charlie…”

“Let me see you again.” “Tomorrow at the lab.”

“You know that’s not what I mean. Away from the lab. Away from the

university. Alone.”

I could tell she wanted to say yes. She was surprised by my insistence. I was surprised at myself. I only knew that I couldn’t stop pressing her. And

yet there was a terror in my throat as I begged her. My palms were damp. Was I afraid she’d say no, or afraid she’d say yes? If she hadn’t broken the tension by answering me, I think I would have fainted.

“All right, Charlie. Away from the lab and the university, but not alone.

I don’t think we should be alone together.”

“Anywhere you say,” I gasped. “Just so I can be with you and not think of tests … statistics … questions … answers…”

She frowned for a moment. “All right. They have free spring concerts in Central Park. Next week you can take me to one of the concerts.”

When we got to her doorway, she turned quickly and kissed my cheek. “Good night, Charlie. I’m glad you called me. I’ll see you at the lab.” She closed the door and I stood outside the building and looked at the light in her apartment window until it went out.

There is no question about it now. I’m in love.

May 11—After all this thinking and worrying, I realized Alice was right. I had to trust my intuition. At the bakery, I watched Gimpy more closely.

Three times today, I saw him undercharging customers and pocketing his portion of the difference as the customers passed money back to him. It was only with certain regular customers that he did it, and it occurred to me that these people were as guilty as he. Without their agreement this could never take place. Why should Gimpy be the scapegoat?

That’s when I decided on the compromise. It might not be the perfect decision, but it was my decision, and it seemed to be the best answer under the circumstances. I would tell Gimpy what I knew and warn him to stop.

I got him alone back by the washroom, and when I came up to him he started away. “I’ve got something important to talk to you about,” I said. “I want your advice for a friend who has a problem. He’s discovered that one of his fellow employees is cheating his boss, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He doesn’t like the idea of informing and getting the guy into trouble, but he won’t stand by and let his boss—who has been good to both of them—be cheated.”

Gimpy looked at me hard. “What does this friend of yours plan to do about it?”

“That’s the trouble. He doesn’t want to do anything. He feels if the stealing stops there would be nothing gained by doing anything at all. He would forget about it.”

“Your friend ought to keep his nose in his own business,” said Gimpy, shifting off his club foot. “He ought to keep his eyes closed to things like that and know who his friends are. A boss is a boss, and working people got to stick together.”

“My friend doesn’t feel that way.” “It’s none of his business.”

“He feels that if he knows about it he’s partly responsible. So he’s decided that if the thing stops, he’s got nothing more to say. Otherwise, he’ll tell the whole story. I wanted to ask your opinion. Do you think that under the circumstances the stealing will stop?”

It was a strain for him to conceal his anger. I could see that he wanted to hit me, but he just kept squeezing his fist.

“Tell your friend the guy doesn’t seem to have any choice.” “That’s fine,” I said. “That will make my friend very happy.”

Gimpy started away, and then he paused and looked back. “Your friend

—could it be maybe he’s interested in a cut? Is that his reason?” “No, he just wants the whole thing to stop.”

He glared at me. “I can tell you, you’ll be sorry you stuck your nose in. I always stood up for you. I should of had my head examined.” And then he limped off.

Perhaps I ought to have told Donner the whole story and had Gimpy fired—I don’t know. Doing it this way has something to be said for it. It’s over and done with. But how many people are there like Gimpy who use other people that way?

May 15—My studies are going well. The university library is my second

home now. They’ve had to get me a private room because it takes me only a second to absorb the printed page, and curious students invariably gather around me as I flip through my books.

My most absorbing interests at the present time are etymologies of ancient languages, the newer works on the calculus of variations, and Hindu

history. It’s amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together. I’ve moved up to another plateau, and now the streams of the various disciplines seem to be closer to each other as if they flow from a single source.

Strange how when I’m in the college cafeteria and hear the students arguing about history or politics or religion, it all seems so childish.

I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level. People resent being shown that they don’t approach the complexities of the problem—they don’t know what exists beyond the surface ripples. It’s just as bad on a higher level, and I’ve given up any attempt to discuss these things with the professors at Beekman.

Burt introduced me to an economics professor at the faculty cafeteria, one well known for his work on the economic factors affecting interest rates. I had long wanted to talk to an economist about some of the ideas I had come across in my reading. The moral aspects of the military blockade as a weapon in times of peace had been bothering me. I asked him what he thought of the suggestion by some senators that we begin using such tactics as “blacklisting” and reinforcement of the navicert controls that had been used in World Wars I and II, against some of the smaller nations which now oppose us.

He listened quietly, staring off into space, and I assumed he was collecting his thoughts for an answer, but a few minutes later he cleared his throat and shook his head. That, he explained apologetically, was outside his area of specialization. His interest was in interest rates, and he hadn’t given military economics much thought. He suggested I see Dr. Wessey, who once did a paper on War Trade Agreements during World War II. He might be able to help me.

Before I could say anything else, he grabbed my hand and shook it. He had been glad to meet me, but there were some notes he had to assemble for a lecture. And then he was gone.

The same thing happened when I tried to discuss Chaucer with an American literature specialist, questioned an Orientalist about the Trobriand Islanders, and tried to focus on the problems of automation-caused unemployment with a social psychologist who specialized in public opinion polls on adolescent behavior. They would always find excuses to slip away, afraid to reveal the narrowness of their knowledge.

How different they seem to be now. And how foolish I was ever to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They’re people—and afraid the rest of the world will find out. And Alice is a person too—a woman, not a goddess—and I’m taking her to the concert tomorrow night.

May 17—Almost morning and I can’t fall asleep. I’ve got to understand what happened to me last night at the concert.

The evening started out well enough. The Mall at Central Park had filled up early, and Alice and I had to pick our way among the couples stretched out on the grass. Finally, far back from the path, we found an unused tree where—out of the range of lamplight—the only evidence of other couples was the protesting female laughter and the glow of lit cigarettes.

“This will be fine,” she said. “No reason to be right on top of the orchestra.”

“What’s that they’re playing now?” I asked. “Debussy’s La Mer. Do you like it?”

I settled down beside her. “I don’t know much about this kind of music.

I have to think about it.”

“Don’t think about it,” she whispered. “Feel it. Let it sweep over you like the sea without trying to understand.” She lay back on the grass and turned her face in the direction of the music.

I had no way of knowing what she expected of me. This was far from the clear lines of problem-solving and the systematic acquisition of knowledge. I kept telling myself that the sweating palms, the tightness in my chest, the desire to put my arms around her were merely biochemical reactions. I even traced the pattern of stimulus-and-reaction that caused my nervousness and excitement. Yet everything was fuzzy and uncertain. Should I put my arm around her or not? Was she waiting for me to do it? Would she get angry? I could tell I was still behaving like an adolescent and it angered me.

“Here,” I choked, “why don’t you make yourself more comfortable? Rest on my shoulder.” She let me put my arm around her, but she didn’t look at me. She seemed to be too absorbed in the music to realize what I

was doing. Did she want me to hold her that way, or was she merely tolerating it? As I slipped my arm down to her waist, I felt her tremble, but still she kept staring in the direction of the orchestra. She was pretending to be concentrating on the music so that she wouldn’t have to respond to me. She didn’t want to know what was happening. As long as she looked away, and listened, she could pretend that my closeness, my arms around her, were without her knowledge or consent. She wanted me to make love to her body while she kept her mind on higher things. I reached over roughly and turned her chin. “Why don’t you look at me? Are you pretending I don’t exist?”

“No, Charlie,” she whispered. “I’m pretending I don’t exist.”

When I touched her shoulder she stiffened and trembled, but I pulled her toward me. Then it happened. It started as a hollow buzzing in my ears

… an electric saw … far away. Then the cold: arms and legs prickly, and finger numbing. Suddenly, I had the feeling I was being watched.

A sharp switch in perception. I saw, from some point in the darkness behind a tree, the two of us lying in each other’s arms.

I looked up to see a boy of fifteen or sixteen, crouching nearby. “Hey!” I shouted. As he stood up, I saw his trousers were open and he was exposed.

“What’s the matter?” she gasped.

I jumped up, and he vanished into the darkness. “Did you see him?” “No,” she said, smoothing her skirt nervously. “I didn’t see anyone.” “Standing right here. Watching us. Close enough to touch you.” “Charlie, where are you going?”

“He couldn’t have gotten very far.”

“Leave him alone, Charlie. It doesn’t matter.”

But it mattered to me. I ran into the darkness, stumbling over startled couples, but there was no way to tell where he had gone.

The more I thought about him, the worse became the queasy feeling that comes before fainting. Lost and alone in a great wilderness. And then I caught hold of myself and found my way back to where Alice was sitting.

“Did you find him?”

“No, but he was there. I saw him.”

She looked at me strangely. “Are you all right?”

“I will be … in a minute … Just that damned buzzing in my ears.” “Maybe we’d better go.”

All the way back to her apartment, it was on my mind that the boy had been crouching there in the darkness, and for one second I had caught a glimpse of what he was seeing—the two of us lying in each other’s arms.

“Would you like to come in? I could make some coffee.”

I wanted to, but something warned me against it. “Better not. I’ve got a lot of work to do tonight.”

“Charlie, is it anything I said or did?”

“Of course not. Just that kid watching us upset me.”

She was standing close to me, waiting for me to kiss her. I put my arm around her, but it happened again. If I didn’t get away quickly, I would pass out.

“Charlie, you look sick.”

“Did you see him, Alice? The truth…”

She shook her head. “No. It was too dark. But I’m sure—”

“I’ve got to go. I’ll call you.” And before she could stop me, I pulled away. I had to get out of that building before everything caved in.

Thinking about it now, I’m certain it was a hallucination. Dr. Strauss feels that emotionally I’m still in that adolescent state where being close to a woman, or thinking of sex, sets off anxiety, panic, even hallucinations. He feels that my rapid intellectual development has deceived me into thinking I could live a normal emotional life. But I’ve got to accept the fact that the fears and blocks triggered in these sexual situations reveal that emotionally I’m still an adolescent—sexually retarded. I guess he means I’m not ready for a relationship with a woman like Alice Kinnian. Not yet.

May 20—I’ve been fired from my job at the bakery. I know it was foolish of me to hang on to the past, but there was something about the place with its white brick walls browned by oven heat … It was home to me.

What did I do to make them hate me so?

I can’t blame Donner. He’s got to think of his business, and the other employees. And yet, he’s been closer to me than a father.

He called me into his office, cleared the statements and bills off the solitary chair beside his roll-top desk, and without looking up at me, he said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you. Now is as good a time as any.”

It seems foolish now, but as I sat there staring at him—short, chubby, with the ragged light-brown moustache comically drooping over his upper lip—it was as if both of me, the old Charlie and the new, were sitting on that chair, frightened at what Old Mr. Donner was going to say.

“Charlie, your Uncle Herman was a good friend of mine. I kept my promise to him to keep you on the job, good times and bad, so that you didn’t ever want for a dollar in your pocket and a place to lay your head without being put away in that home.”

“The bakery is my home—”

“And I treated you like my own son who gave up his life for his country. And when Herman died—how old were you? seventeen? more like a six-year-old boy—I swore to myself … I said, Arthur Donner, as long as you got a bakery and a business over your head, you’re going to look after Charlie. He is going to have a place to work, a bed to sleep in, and bread in his mouth. When they committed you to that Warren place, I told them how you would work for me, and I would take care of you. You didn’t spend even one night in that place. I got you a room and I looked after you. Now, have I kept that solemn promise?”

I nodded, but I could see by the way he was folding and unfolding his bills that he was having trouble. And as much as I didn’t want to know—I knew. “I’ve tried my best to do a good job. I’ve worked hard. ”

“I know, Charlie. Nothing’s wrong with your work. But something happened to you, and I don’t understand what it means. Not only me. Everyone has been talking about it. I’ve had them in here a dozen times in the last few weeks. They’re all upset. Charlie, I got to let you go.”

I tried to stop him but he shook his head.

“There was a delegation in to see me last night. Charlie, I got my business to hold together.”

He was staring at his hands, turning the paper over and over as if he hoped to find something on it that was not there before. “I’m sorry, Charlie.”

“But where will I go?”

He peered up at me for the first time since we’d walked into his cubbyhole office. “You know as well as I do that you don’t need to work here any more.”

“Mr. Donner, I’ve never worked anywhere else.”

“Let’s face it. You’re not the Charlie who came in here seventeen years ago—not even the same Charlie of four months ago. You haven’t talked about it. It’s your own affair. Maybe a miracle of some kind—who knows? But you’ve changed into a very smart young man. And operating the dough mixer and delivering packages is no work for a smart young man.”

He was right, of course, but something inside me wanted to make him change his mind.

“You’ve got to let me stay, Mr. Donner. Give me another chance. You said yourself that you promised Uncle Herman I would have a job here for as long as I needed it. Well, I still need it, Mr. Donner.”

“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 make 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 brain! Now you’re a regular whiz kid, an egghead. Always with a book—always 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 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?

May 25—So this is how a person can come to despise himself—knowing he’s doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop. Against my will I found myself drawn to Alice’s apartment. She was surprised but she let me in.

“You’re soaked. The water is streaming down your face.” “It’s raining. Good for the flowers.”

“Come on in. Let me get you a towel. You’ll catch pneumonia.” “You’re the only one I can talk to,” I said. “Let me stay.”

“I’ve got a pot of fresh coffee on the stove. Go ahead and dry yourself and then we can talk.”

I looked around while she went to get the coffee. It was the first time I had ever been inside her apartment. I felt a sense of pleasure, but there was something disturbing about the room.

Everything was neat. The porcelain figurines were in a straight line on the window-ledge, all facing the same way. And the throw-pillows on the sofa hadn’t been thrown at all, but were regularly spaced on the clear plastic covers that protected the upholstery. Two of the end tables had magazines, neatly stacked so that the titles were clearly visible. On one table: The

Reporter, The Saturday Review, The New Yorker; on the other:

Mademoiselle, House Beautiful, and Reader’s Digest.

On the far wall, across from the sofa, hung an ornately framed reproduction of Picasso’s “Mother and Child,” and directly opposite, above the sofa, was a painting of a dashing Renaissance courtier, masked, sword in hand, protecting a frightened, pink-cheeked maiden. Taken all together, it was wrong. As if Alice couldn’t make up her mind who she was and which world she wanted to live in.

“You haven’t been to the lab for a few days,” she called from the kitchen. “Professor Nemur is worried about you.”

“I couldn’t face them,” I said. “I know there’s no reason for me to be ashamed, but it’s an empty feeling not going in to work every day—not seeing the shop, the ovens, the people. It’s too much. Last night and the night before, I had nightmares of drowning.”

She set the tray in the center of the coffee table—the napkins folded into triangles, and the cookies laid out in a circular display pattern. “You mustn’t take it so hard, Charlie. It has nothing to do with you.”

“It doesn’t help to tell myself that. Those people—for all these years— were my family. It was like being thrown out of my own home.”

“That’s just it,” she said. “This has become a symbolic repetition of experiences you had as a child. Being rejected by your parents … being sent away…”

“Oh, Christ! Never mind giving it a nice neat label. What matters is that before I got involved in this experiment I had friends, people who cared for me. Now I’m afraid—”

“You’ve still got friends.” “It’s not the same.”

“Fear is a normal reaction.”

“It’s more than that. I’ve been afraid before. Afraid of being strapped for not giving in to Norma, afraid of passing Howells Street where the gang used to tease me and push me around. And I was afraid of the schoolteacher, Mrs. Libby, who tied my hands so I wouldn’t fidget with things on my desk. But those things were real—something I was justified in being afraid of. This terror at being kicked out of the bakery is vague, a fear I don’t understand.”

“Get hold of yourself.”

“You don’t feel the panic.”

“But, Charlie, it’s to be expected. You’re a new swimmer forced off a diving raft and terrified of losing the solid wood under your feet. Mr. Donner was good to you, and you were sheltered all these years. Being driven out of the bakery this way is an even greater shock than you expected.”

“Knowing it intellectually doesn’t help. I can’t sit alone in my room any more. I wander into the streets at all hours of the day or night, not knowing what I’m looking for … walking until I’m lost … finding myself outside the bakery. Last night I walked all the way from Washington Square to Central Park, and I slept in the park. What the hell am I searching for?”

The more I talked, the more upset she became. “What can I do to help you, Charlie?”

“I don’t know. I’m like an animal who’s been locked out of his nice, safe cage.”

She sat beside me on the couch. “They’re pushing you too fast. You’re confused. You want to be an adult, but there’s still a little boy inside you. Alone and frightened.” She put my head on her shoulder, trying to comfort me, and as she stroked my hair I knew that she needed me the way I needed her.

“Charlie,” she whispered after a while, “whatever you want … don’t be afraid of me. ”

I wanted to tell her I was waiting for the panic.

Once—during a bakery delivery—Charlie had nearly fainted when a middle-aged woman, just out of the bath, amused herself by opening her bathrobe and exposing herself. Had he ever seen a woman without clothes on? Did he know how to make love? His terror—his whining—must have frightened her because she clutched her robe together and gave him a

quarter to forget what had happened. She was only testing him, she warned, to see if he was a good boy.

He tried to be good, he told her, and not look at women, because his mother used to beat him whenever that happened in his pants….

Now he had the clear picture of Charlie’s mother, screaming at him, holding a leather belt in her hand, and his father trying to hold her back. “Enough, Rose! You’ll kill him! Leave him alone!” His mother straining forward to lash at him, just out of reach now so that the belt swishes past his shoulder as he writhes and twists away from it on the floor.

“Look at him!” Rose screams. “He can’t learn to read and write, but he knows enough to look at a girl that way. I’ll beat that filth out of his mind.”

“He can’t help it if he gets an erection. It’s normal. He didn’t do anything.”

“He’s got no business to think that way about girls. A friend of his sister’s comes to the house and he starts thinking like that! I’ll teach him so he never forgets. Do you hear? If you ever touch a girl, I’ll put you away in a cage, like an animal, for the rest of your life. Do you hear me?…”

I still hear her. But perhaps I had been released. Maybe the fear and nausea was no longer a sea to drown in, but only a pool of water reflecting the past alongside the now. Was I free?

If I could reach Alice in time—without thinking about it, before it overwhelmed me—maybe the panic wouldn’t happen. If only I could make my mind a blank. I managed to choke out: “You … you do it! Hold me!” And before I knew what she was doing, she was kissing me, holding me closer than anyone had ever held me before. But at the moment I should have come closest of all, it started: the buzzing, the chill, and the nausea. I turned away from her.

She tried to soothe me, to tell me it didn’t matter, that there was no reason to blame myself. But ashamed, and no longer able to control my anguish, I began to sob. There in her arms I cried myself to sleep, and I dreamed of the courtier and the pink-cheeked maiden. But in my dream it was the maiden who held the sword.

PROGRESS REPORT 12

June 5—Nemur is upset because I haven’t turned in any progress reports in almost two weeks (and he’s justified because the Welberg Foundation has begun paying me a salary out of the grant so that I won’t have to look for a job). The International Psychological Convention at Chicago is only a week away. He wants his preliminary report to be as full as possible, since Algernon and I are the prime exhibits for his presentation.

Our relationship is becoming increasingly strained. I resent Nemur’s constant references to me as a laboratory specimen. He makes me feel that before the experiment I was not really a human being.

I told Strauss that I was too involved in thinking, reading, and digging into myself, trying to understand who and what I am, and that writing was such a slow process it made me impatient to get my ideas down. I followed his suggestion that I learn to type, and now that I can type nearly seventy- five words a minute, it’s easier to get it all down on paper.

Strauss again brought up my need to speak and write simply and directly so that people will understand me. He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway. Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence.

I see Alice occasionally, but we don’t discuss what happened. Our relationship remains platonic. But for three nights after I left the bakery there were the nightmares. Hard to believe it was two weeks ago.

I am pursued down the empty streets at night by ghostly figures. Though I always run to the bakery, the door is locked, and the people inside never turn to look at me. Through the window, the bride and groom on the wedding cake point at me and laugh—the air becomes charged with laughter until I can’t stand it—and the two cupids wave their flaming arrows. I scream. I pound on the door, but there is no sound. I see Charlie staring back at me from inside. Is it only a reflection? Things clutch at my legs and drag me away from the bakery down into the shadows of the alleyway, and just as they begin to ooze all over me I wake up.

Other times the window of the bakery opens into the past and looking through it I see other things and other people.

It’s astonishing how my power of recall is developing. I cannot control it completely yet, but sometimes when I’m busy reading or working on a

problem, I get a feeling of intense clarity.

I know it’s some kind of subconscious warning signal, and now instead of waiting for the memory to come to me, I close my eyes and reach out for it. Eventually, I’ll be able to bring this recall completely under control, to explore not only the sum of my past experiences, but also all of the untapped faculties of the mind.

Even now, as I think about it, I feel the sharp stillness. I see the bakery window … reach out and touch it … cold and vibrating, and then the glass becomes warm … hotter … fingers burning. The window reflecting my image becomes bright, and as the glass turns into a mirror, I see little Charlie Gordon—fourteen or fifteen—looking out at me through the window of his house, and it’s doubly strange to realize how different he was….

He has been waiting for his sister to come from school, and when he sees her turn the corner onto Marks Street, he waves and calls her name and runs out onto the porch to meet her.

Norma waves a paper. “I got an A in my history test. I knew all the answers. Mrs. Baffin said it was the best paper in the whole class.”

She is a pretty girl with light brown hair carefully braided and coiled about her head in a crown, and as she looks up at her big brother the smile turns to a frown and she skips away, leaving him behind as she darts up the steps into the house.

Smiling, he follows her.

His mother and father are in the kitchen, and Charlie, bursting with the excitement of Norma’s good news, blurts it out before she has a chance.

“She got an A! She got an A!”

“No!” shrieks Norma. “Not you. You don’t tell. It’s my mark, and I’m going to tell.”

“Now wait a minute, young lady.” Matt puts his newspaper down and addresses her sternly. “That’s no way to talk to your brother.”

“He had no right to tell!”

“Never mind.” Matt glares at her over his warning finger. “He meant no harm by it, and you musn’t shout at him that way.”

She turns to her mother for support. “I got an A—the best mark in class. Now I can have a dog? You promised. You said if I got a good mark in my test. And I got an A. A brown dog with white spots. And I’m going to call him Napoleon because that was the question I answered best on the test. Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo.”

Rose nods. “Go out on the porch and play with Charlie. He’s been waiting over an hour for you to come home from school.”

“I don’t want to play with him.” “Go out on the porch,” says Matt.

Norma looks at her father and then at Charlie. “I don’t have to. Mother said I don’t have to play with him if I don’t want to.”

“Now, young lady”—Matt rises out of his chair and comes toward her

—”you just apologize to your brother.”

“I don’t have to,” she screeches, rushing behind her mother’s chair. “He’s like a baby. He can’t play Monopoly or checkers or anything … he gets everything all mixed up. I won’t play with him any more.”

“Then go to your room!”

“Can I have a dog now, Mama?”

Matt hits the table with his fist. “There’ll be no dog in this house as long as you take this attitude, young lady.”

“I promised her a dog if she did well in school—” “A brown one with white spots!” adds Norma.

Matt points to Charlie standing near the wall. “Did you forget you told

your son he couldn’t have one because we didn’t have the room, and no one to take care of it. Remember? When he asked for a dog? Are you going back on what you said to him?”

“But I can take care of my own dog,” insists Norma. “I’ll feed him, and wash him, and take him out…”

Charlie, who has been standing near the table, playing with his large red button at the end of a string, suddenly speaks out.

“I’ll help her take care of the dog! I’ll help her feed it and brush it and I won’t let the other dogs bite it!”

But before either Matt or Rose can answer, Norma shrieks: “No! It’s going to be my dog. Only my dog!”

Matt nods. “You see?”

Rose sits beside her and strokes her braids to calm her. “But we have to share things, dear. Charlie can help you take care of it.”

“No! Only mine!…I’m the one who got the A in history—not him! He never gets good marks like me. Why should he help with the dog? And then the dog will like him more than me, and it’ll be his dog instead of mine. No! If I can’t have it for myself I don’t want it.”

“That settles it,” says Matt picking up his newspaper and settling down in his chair again. “No dog.”

Suddenly, Norma jumps off the couch and grabs the history test she had brought home so eagerly just a few minutes earlier. She tears it and throws the pieces into Charlie’s startled face. “I hate you! I hate you!”

“Norma, stop that at once!” Rose grabs her but she twists away.

“And I hate school! I hate it! I’ll stop studying, and I’ll be a dummy like him. I’ll forget everything I learned and then I’ll be just like him.” She runs out of the room, shrieking: “It’s happening to me already. I’m forgetting everything … I’m forgetting … I don’t remember anything I learned any more!”

Rose, terrified, runs after her. Matt sits there staring at the newspaper in his lap. Charlie, frightened by the hysteria and the screaming, shrinks into a chair whimpering softly. What has he done wrong? And feeling the wetness in his trousers and the trickling down his leg, he sits there waiting for the slap he knows will come when his mother returns.

The scene fades, but from that time Norma spent all her free moments with her friends, or playing alone in her room. She kept the door to her room closed, and I was forbidden to enter without her permission.

I recall once overhearing Norma and one of her girl friends playing in her room, and Norma shouting: “He is not my real brother! He’s just a boy we took in because we felt sorry for him. My mamma told me, and she said I can tell everyone now that he’s not really my brother at all.”

I wish this memory were a photograph so that I could tear it up and throw it back into her face. I want to call back across the years and tell her I never meant to stop her from getting her dog. She could have had it all to herself, and I wouldn’t have fed it, or brushed it, or played with it—and I

would never have made it like me more than it liked her. I only wanted her to play games with me the way we used to. I never meant to do anything that would hurt her at all.

June 6—My first real quarrel with Alice today. My fault. I wanted to see her. Often, after a disturbing memory or dream, talking to her—just being with her—makes me feel better. But it was a mistake to go down to the Center to pick her up.

I had not been back to the Center for Retarded Adults since the operation, and the thought of seeing the place was exciting. It’s on Twenty- third Street, east of Fifth Avenue, in an old schoolhouse that has been used by the Beekman University Clinic for the last five years as a center for experimental education—special classes for the handicapped. The sign outside on the doorway, framed by the old spiked gateway, is just a gleaming brass plate that says C. R. A. Beekman Extension.

Her class ended at eight, but I wanted to see the room where—not so long ago—I had struggled over simple reading and writing and learned to count change of a dollar.

I went inside, slipped up to the door, and, keeping out of sight, I looked through the window. Alice was at her desk, and in a chair beside her was a thin-faced woman I didn’t recognize. She was frowning that open frown of unconcealed puzzlement, and I wondered what Alice was trying to explain.

Near the blackboard was Mike Dorni in his wheelchair, and there in his usual first-row first-seat was Lester Braun, who, Alice said, was the smartest in the group. Lester had learned easily what I had struggled over, but he came when he felt like it, or he stayed away to earn money waxing floors. I guess if he had cared at all—if it had been important to him as it was to me—they would have used him for this experiment. There were new faces, too, people I didn’t know.

Finally, I got up the nerve to go in.

“It’s Charlie!” said Mike, whirling his wheelchair around. I waved to him.

Bernice, the pretty blonde with empty eyes, looked up and smiled dully. “Where ya been, Charlie? That’s a nice suit.”

The others who remembered me waved to me and I waved back.

Suddenly, I could see by Alice’s expression that she was annoyed.

“It’s almost eight o’clock,” she announced. “Time to put things away.” Each person had an assigned task, the putting away of chalk, erasers,

papers, books, pencils, note paper, paints, and demonstration material. Each one knew his job and took pride in doing it well. They all started on their tasks except Bernice. She was staring at me.

“Why ain’t Charlie been coming to school?” asked Bernice. “What’s the matter, Charlie? Are you coming back?”

The others looked up at me. I looked to Alice, waiting for her to answer for me, and there was a long silence. What could I tell them that would not hurt them?

“This is just a visit,” I said.

One of the girls started to giggle—Francine, whom Alice was always worried about. She had given birth to three children by the time she was eighteen, before her parents arranged for a hysterectomy. She wasn’t pretty

—not nearly as attractive as Bernice—but she had been an easy mark for dozens of men who bought her something pretty, or paid her way to the movies. She lived at a boarding house approved for outside work trainees by the Warren State Home, and was permitted out in the evenings to come to the Center. Twice she hadn’t shown up—picked up by men on the way to school—and now she was allowed out only with an escort.

“He talks like a big shot now,” she giggled.

“All right,” said Alice, breaking in sharply. “Class dismissed. I’ll see you all tomorrow night at six.”

When they were gone, I could see by the way she was slamming her own things into her closet, that she was angry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was going to wait for you downstairs, and then I got curious about the old classroom. My alma mater. I just wanted to look through the window. And before I knew what I was doing I came in. What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing—nothing’s bothering me.”

“Come on. Your anger is all out of proportion to what’s happened.

Something’s on your mind.”

She slammed down a book she was holding. “All right. You want to know? You’re different. You’ve changed. And I’m not talking about your

I.Q. It’s your attitude toward people—you’re not the same kind of human being—”

“Oh, come on now! Don’t—”

“Don’t interrupt me!” The real anger in her voice pushed me back. “I mean it. There was something in you before. I don’t know … a warmth, an openness, a kindness that made everyone like you and like to have you around. Now, with all your intelligence and knowledge, there are differences that—”

I couldn’t let myself listen. “What did you expect? Did you think I’d remain a docile pup, wagging my tail and licking the foot that kicks me? Sure, all this has changed me and the way I think about myself. I no longer have to take the kind of crap that people have been handing me all my life.”

“People have not been bad to you.”

“What do you know about it? Listen, the best of them have been smug and patronizing—using me to make themselves superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron.”

After I said it, I knew she was going to take it the wrong way. “You put me in that category too, I suppose.”

“Don’t be absurd. You know damned well I—”

“Of course, in a sense, I guess you’re right. Next to you I am rather dull-witted. Nowadays every time we see each other, after I leave you I go home with the miserable feeling that I’m slow and dense about everything. I review things I’ve said, and come up with all the bright and witty things I should have said, and I feel like kicking myself because I didn’t mention them when we were together.”

“That’s a common experience.”

“I find myself wanting to impress you in a way I never thought about doing before, but being with you has undermined my self-confidence. I question my motives now, about everything I do.”

I tried to get her off the subject, but she kept coming back to it. “Look, I didn’t come here to argue with you,” I finally said. “Will you let me take you home? I need someone to talk to.”

“So do I. But these days I can’t talk to you. All I can do is listen and nod my head and pretend I understand all about cultural variants, and neo-

Boulean mathematics, and post-symbolic logic, and I feel more and more stupid, and when you leave the apartment, I have to stare in the mirror and scream at myself: ‘No, you’re not growing duller every day! You’re not losing your intelligence! You’re not getting senile and dull-witted. It’s Charlie exploding forward so quickly that it makes it appear as if you’re slipping backwards.’ I say that to myself, Charlie, but whenever we meet and you tell me something and look at me in that impatient way, I know you’re laughing.

“And when you explain things to me, and I can’t remember them, you think it’s because I’m not interested and don’t want to take the trouble. But you don’t know how I torture myself when you’re gone. You don’t know the books I’ve struggled over, the lectures I’ve sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish. I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to help you and share with you—and now you’ve shut me out of your life.”

As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.

She was crying silently as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become. She was terrified of me. The ice had broken between us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.

She was right in refusing to torture herself by being with me. We no longer had anything in common. Simple conversation had become strained. And all there was between us now was the embarrassed silence and unsatisfied longing in a darkened room.

“You’re very serious,” she said, breaking out of her own mood and looking up at me.

“About us.”

“It shouldn’t make you so serious. I don’t want to upset you. You’re going through a great trial.” She was trying to smile.

“But you did. Only I don’t know what to do about it.”

On the way from the bus stop to her apartment, she said, “I’m not going to the convention with you. I called Professor Nemur this morning and told him. There will be a lot for you to do there. Interesting people—the excitement of the spotlight for a while. I don’t want to be in the way—”

“Alice—”

“—and no matter what you say about it now, I know that’s how I’m going to feel, so if you don’t mind, I’ll hang on to my splintering ego—thank you.”

“But you’re making more of this than it is. I’m sure if you’ll just—”

“You know? You’re sure?” She turned and glared at me on the front steps of her apartment building. “Oh, how insufferable you’ve become. How do you know what I feel? You take liberties with other people’s minds. You can’t tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel.”

She started inside and then she looked back at me, her voice shaky: “I’ll be here when you get back. I’m just upset, that’s all, and I want both of us to have a chance to think this out while we’re a good distance apart.”

For the first time in many weeks she didn’t ask me inside. I stared at the closed door with the anger mounting inside me. I wanted to create a scene, to bang on the door, to break it down. I wanted my anger to consume the building.

But as I walked away I felt a kind of simmering, then cooling, and finally a relief. I walked so fast I was drifting along the streets, and the feeling that hit my cheek was a cool breeze out of the summer night. Suddenly free.

I realize now that my feeling for Alice had been moving backward against the current of my learning, from worship, to love, to fondness, to a feeling of gratitude and responsibility. My confused feeling for her had been holding me back, and I had clung to her out of my fear of being forced out on my own, and cut adrift.

But with the freedom came a sadness. I wanted to be in love with her. I wanted to overcome my emotional and sexual fears, to marry, have children, settle down.

Now it’s impossible. I am just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70. And this time we both know it.

June 8—What drives me out of the apartment to prowl through the city? I wander through the streets alone—not the relaxing stroll of a summer night, but the tense hurry to get—where? Down alleyways, looking into

doorways, peering into half-shuttered windows, wanting someone to talk to and yet afraid to meet anyone. Up one street, and down another, through the endless labyrinth, hurling myself against the neon cage of the city.

Searching … for what?

I met a woman in Central Park. She was sitting on a bench near the lake, with a coat clutched around her despite the heat. She smiled and motioned for me to sit beside her. We looked at the bright skyline on Central Park South, the honeycomb of lighted cells against the blackness, and I wished I could absorb them all.

Yes, I told her, I was from New York. No, I had never been to Newport News, Virginia. That’s where she was from, and where she had married this sailor who was at sea now, and she hadn’t seen him in two and a half years.

She twisted and knotted a handkerchief, using it from time to time to wipe the beaded sweat from her forehead. Even in the dim light reflected from the lake, I could see that she wore a great deal of make-up, but she looked attractive with her straight dark hair loose to her shoulders—except that her face was puffy and swollen as if she had just gotten up from sleep. She wanted to talk about herself, and I wanted to listen.

Her father had given her a good home, an education, everything a wealthy shipbuilder could give his only daughter—but not forgiveness. He would never forgive her elopement with the sailor.

She took my hand as she spoke, and rested her head on my shoulder. “The night Gary and I were married,” she whispered, “I was a terrified virgin. And he just went crazy. First, he had to slap me and beat me. And then he took me with no love-making. That was the last time we were ever together. I never let him touch me again.”

She could probably tell by the trembling of my hand that I was startled. It was too violent and intimate for me. Feeling my hand stir, she gripped it tighter as if she had to finish her story before she could let me go. It was important to her, and I sat quietly as one sits before a bird that feeds from your palm.

“Not that I don’t like men,” she assured me with wide-eyed openness. “I’ve been with other men. Not him, but lots of others. Most men are gentle and tender with a woman. They make love slowly, with caresses and kisses first.” She looked at me meaningfully, and let her open palm brush back and forth against mine.

It was what I had heard about, read about, dreamed about. I didn’t know her name, and she didn’t ask mine. She just wanted me to take her someplace where we could be alone. I wondered what Alice would think.

I caressed her awkwardly and kissed her still more hesitantly so that she looked up at me. “What’s the matter?” she whispered. “What are you thinking?”

“About you.”

“Do you have a place we can go?”

Each step forward was caution. At what point would the ground give way and plunge me into anxiety? Something kept me moving ahead to test my footing.

“If you don’t have a place, the Mansion Hotel on Fifty-third doesn’t cost too much. And they don’t bother you about luggage if you pay in advance.”

“I have a room—”

She looked at me with new respect. “Well, that’s fine.”

Still nothing. And that in itself was curious. How far could I go without being overwhelmed by symptoms of panic? When we were alone in the room? When she undressed? When I saw her body? When we were lying together?

Suddenly, it was important to know if I could be like other men, if I could ever ask a woman to share a life with me. Having intelligence and knowledge wasn’t enough. I wanted this, too. The sense of release and looseness was strong now with the feeling that it was possible. The excitement that came over me when I kissed her again communicated itself, and I was sure I could be normal with her. She was different from Alice. She was the kind of woman who had been around.

Then her voice changed, uncertain. “Before we go … Just one thing…” She stood up and took a step toward me in the spray of lamplight, opening her coat, and I could see the shape of her body as I had not imagined it all the time we were sitting next to each other in the shadows. “Only the fifth month,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference. You don’t mind, do you?”

Standing there with her coat open, she was superimposed as a double exposure on the picture of the middle-aged woman just out of the bathtub, holding open her bathrobe for Charlie to see. And I waited, as a blasphemer waits for lightning. I looked away. It was the last thing I had expected, but

the coat wrapped tightly around her on such a hot night should have warned me that something was wrong.

“It’s not my husband’s,” she assured me. “I wasn’t lying to you about what I said before. I haven’t seen him for years. It was a salesman I met about eight months ago. I was living with him. I’m not going to see him any more, but I’m going to keep the baby. We’ve just got to be careful—not rough or anything like that. But otherwise you don’t have to worry.”

Her voice ran down when she saw my anger. “That’s filthy!” I shouted. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

She drew away, wrapping her coat quickly around her to protect what lay within.

As she made that protective gesture, I saw the second double image: my mother, heavy with my sister, in the days when she was holding me less, warming me less with her voice and touch, protecting me less against anyone who dared to say I was subnormal.

I think I grabbed her shoulder—I’m not sure, but then she was screaming, and I was sharply back to reality with the sense of danger. I wanted to tell her I had meant no harm—I would never hurt her or anyone. “Please, don’t scream!”

But she was screaming, and I heard the running footsteps on the darkened path. This was something no one would understand. I ran into the darkness, to find an exit from the park, zig-zagging across one path and down another. I didn’t know the park, and suddenly I crashed into something that threw me backwards. A wire-mesh fence—a dead end. Then I saw the swings and slides and realized it was a children’s playground locked up for the night. I followed the fence, and kept going, half-running, stumbling over twisted roots. At the lake that curved around near the playground, I doubled back, found another path, went over the small footbridge and then around and under it. No exit.

“What is it? What happened, lady?” “A maniac?”

“You all right?”

“Which way did he go?”

I had circled back to where I had started from. I slipped behind the huge outcropping of a rock and a screen of bramble and dropped flat on my stomach.

“Get a cop. There’s never a cop when you need one.” “What happened?”

“A degenerate tried to rape her.”

“Hey, some guy down there is chasing him. There he goes!” “Come on! Get the bastard before he gets outta the park!” “Careful. He’s got a knife and a gun. ”

It was obvious that the shouting had flushed out the night crawlers because the cry of “there he goes!” was echoed from behind me, and looking out from behind the rock I could see a lone runner being chased down the lamplit path into the darkness. Seconds later, another one passed in front of the rock and disappeared into the shadows. I pictured myself being caught by this eager mob and beaten and torn by them. I deserved it. I almost wanted it.

I stood up, brushed the leaves and dirt from my clothing and walked slowly down the path in the direction from which I had come. I expected every second to be grabbed from behind and pulled down into the dirt and darkness, but soon I saw the bright lights of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, and I came out of the park.

Thinking about it now, in the security of my room, I am shaken with the rawness that touched me. Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.