Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read online

  Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

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  Copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 2004

  First published by Atheneum Publishers in 1976

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929–

  Very far away from anywhere else/Ursula K. Le Guin.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Owen Griffiths, a seventeen-year-old outsider, learns to find

  his own way to a future in science through a friendship with a girl

  whose life is dedicated to music.

  [I. Friendship—Fiction. 2. College choice—Fiction.

  3. Self-actualization—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L52I5Ve 2004

  [Fic]—dc22 2004048298

  ISBN 0-15-205208-9 pb

  Text set in Centaur

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  DOM E G H F

  Printed in the United States of America

  IF YOU'D LIKE a story about how I won my basketball letter and achieved fame, love, and fortune, don't read this. I don't know what I achieved in the six months I'm going to tell about. I achieved something, all right, but I think it may take me the rest of my life to find out what.

  I never won any letters for anything. When I was a little kid, I really liked touch football, the strategy of it, but being short for my age I was always a bit slow even though I was good at evasive tactics. And then when we got into high school, it all got so organized. Going out for teams and wearing uniforms and all that stuff. And people talk about it all the time. Sports are neat to do, but dull to talk about Anyhow there wont be much about sports in this.

  I am talking into a tape recorder and then typing it. I tried to just write it, but it came out all stuffy and clotted-up with words, so lets see how it goes this way. My name is Owen Thomas Griffiths. I was seventeen in November. I am still fairly short for my age—5'7". I guess I will be short for my age when I'm forty-five, so what's the difference? It bothered me a lot when I was twelve or thirteen, but I was much shorter then compared to other kids, a genuine shrimp. At fifteen I grew six inches in eight months and felt really awful while I was doing it; my knees used to feel like the Bamboo Splinter Torture, but when it was over I was such a giant compared to what I had been that I never could really regret not going on any higher. I am average compact build and have dirty gray eyes and a lot of hair. The hair is curly, and whether I wear it short or long it sticks out all over my head. I fight it with a hairbrush every morning, and lose. I like my hair. It has a lot of willpower. However, this story is not about my hair, either.

  I am always the youngest person in my class. And the youngest person in my family, being the only child. They let me into school early because I was such a bright little jerk. I have always been bright for my age. Who knows, at forty-five I may still be bright for my age. That is partly what this thing I'm telling, this story, is about. About being a bright little jerk.

  It's OK, you know, up to about the sixth grade. Nobody really cares, least of all yourself. The teachers are mostly pretty nice to you, because you're easy to teach. Some of them love you for it, and give you neat books for extra reading. Some of them resent it, but they're too busy with the Behavior Problem types to have time to really make you feel lousy for being ahead of the others in math and reading. And there's always a few other kids, usually girls, who are as smart as you are, or smarter, and you and they write the class skits, and make lists for the teacher, and so on. And besides, for all the talk about how cruel little kids are, they haven't got a patch on older people for cruelty. Little kids are just dumb, the smart ones and the slow ones. They do dumb things. They say what they think. They haven't learned enough yet to say what they don't really think That comes later when kids begin to turn into people and find out that they are alone.

  I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups—clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. Its a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. You have to be with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friends' friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teen-ager. You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe.

  And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their blue jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe.

  I tried. I really did. I tried so hard it makes me sick to think about it. I did my jeans patches exactly like Bill Ebold who did everything right. I talked about baseball scores. I worked for the school paper for one term, because that was the one group that I could figure out how to get into. But none of it worked. I don't know why. Sometimes I wonder if introverts have a peculiar smell, which only extraverts are aware of.

  Some kids really don't have much Me at all. They truly are part of the group. But a lot of them just act—pretend—the way I tried to. Their heart isn't really in the groups, but still they get along, they get by. I wish I could. I honestly wish I could be a good hypocrite. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it sure makes life easier. But I never could fool anybody. They knew I wasn't interested in what interested them, and they despised me for it, and I despised them for despising me. But then I also despised the few kids who didn't try to go along. In ninth grade there was this tall kid who never brushed his teeth and wore a white sports coat to school, who wanted to make friends with me. I should have been delighted; I mean, nobody had ever wanted to make friends with me before. But he kept saying things like what a drip this person was and what a dolt that one was, and although I agreed with him I didn't want to talk about it all the time, and so I despised him for being a snob. And then I despised myself for despising everybody else. Oh, it's a really neat situation to be in. You know what I mean, if you've been there.

  Since I was trying hard not to be different, I didn't want to be a straight-A type; but that problem was always solved for me by gym. I wasn't any worse at gym than a lot of fellows, but I got D's because I cut it all the time because I couldn't take Mr. Thorpe. "If you can take your minds off Keats and Shelley for a while, Griffiths, you might at least stand around and watch how basketball is played." It was always Keats and Shelley—I heard him use exactly the same line to at least two other fellows. He said it with real hatred, hissing: Keatsssnssshelhy, ssssss. It was stupid applied to me, since math and science is where I am good, but that hatred curious I went back and read Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in the freshman lit text. They didn't give us any Shelley, but I looked up his collected works at the c
ity library and later on I bought it secondhand So it was Mr Thorpe teaching basketball who put me on to "Prometheus Unbound." I should be grateful. But it still didn't make third period with Mr. Thorpe any easier.

  But—this is important—I never talked back. I never said anything. I could have said, "Look, Mr. Thorpe, I don't want to take my mind off Keats and Shelley, or sines and cosines, so you just go ahead and bounce your little bouncyball, OK?" Some of the kids could do that. Back in elementary school once I heard a little black seventh-grade girl tell off our math teacher, "You just get your hands off my paper, if you don't like it the way I done it, you can just stuff it!" It was pure fight—the teacher hadn't done anything to deserve it, he was just trying to teach the kid some math—but still, it was pure fight, it was courage, and I admired it. I still do. But I can't do it. I haven't got it. I don't get into fights.

  I stand there and take it, till I can run. And then I run.

  Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry.

  When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.

  IT WAS FIVE DAYS after my birthday. I was seventeen and five days. Tuesday, November 25th. Raining. I took the bus because it was raining so hard when I got out of school. There was only one seat left. I sat down and tried to get the back of my neck away from my collar, which had gotten wet while I waited at the bus stop and felt like the Icy Hand of Death. And I sat there and felt guilty. About taking the bus.

  Guilty about taking the bus. About taking the bus. Listen, the really terrible thing about being young is the triviality.

  The reason I felt guilty about taking the bus is this. It was five days since my birthday, right? For my birthday my father had given me a present. A really fantastic present. It was unbelievable. He must have planned it and saved for it for years, literally. He had it there waiting when I got home from school. It was parked in front of the house, but I didn't even notice it. He kept hinting, but I didn't get the hints. Finally he had to take me out and show it to me. When he gave me the keys, his face got all twisted up as if he felt like crying with pride and pleasure.

  It was a car, of course. I won't say the brand name because I think there's enough advertising around already. It was a new car. Clock, radio, all the extras. It took him an hour to show me all the extras.

  I had learned to drive, and got my license in October. It seemed useful, if there was an emergency; and I could do some errands for my mother and get off by myself that way. She had a car, my father had a car, now I had a car. Three people, three cars. Only the thing was, I didn't want a car.

  What did the thing cost? I didn't ask, but it was at least three thousand dollars. My father is a cpa, and we don't have that kind of money for unnecessary things. For that kind of money I could have lived for a year or more at MIT, if I got a tuition scholarship. That's what came into my head right away, before he'd even opened the shiny little door. He could have put the money into savings. Of course, I could sell the car and not take too bad a loss on it if I did it soon. That came into my head too, and that was when he put the keys in my hand and said, "She's all yours, son!" and his face twisted up that way.

  And I smiled. I guess.

  I don't know if I fooled him. If so, it was probably the first time I ever succeeded in fooling anybody; but I think so, because he wanted so badly to be fooled, to believe that I was struck dumb with joy and gratitude. That sounds as if I was scornful of him. I don't mean it that way.

  We took the car out for a ride right away, of course. I drove up into the park, and he drove it back—he was itching to get his hands on the wheel—and all that was fine. The trouble came when he found out on Monday that I hadn't driven my new car to school. Why not?

  I couldn't tell him why not. I only half understood it myself. If I drove the thing to school and parked it in the school lot, Id given in. I owned it. It owned me. I was the owner of a new car with all the extras. People at school would say, "Hey how about that. Hey wow. How about Fastback Griffiths!" Some of them would sneer, but some of them would honestly admire it, and maybe me for being lucky enough to own it. And that's what I couldn't take. I didn't know who I was, but I knew one thing: I wasn't the seat-fixture of an automobile. What I was was the type who walks to school (it's 2.7 miles by the shortest route) because walking is the kind of exercise I like, and I really like the streets of the city. The sidewalks, the buildings, the people you pass. Not the brake lights on the back of the car in front of yours.

  Well, anyhow, that was where I drew the line. I'd already tried very ingeniously to hide the line, by driving errands for Mother on Saturday, and volunteering to take both my parents for a drive in the country on Sunday in "my new car." But Monday evening he found the line. Didn't you take the car to school? Why not?

  So there I was on Tuesday riding the bus and feeling guilty. I wasn't even walking, after all my explanations of how I liked to walk and doctors say the exercise of walking is the best of all for the human body. I was riding the bus. For twenty-five cents. And three thousand dollars' worth of car was sitting on its white side-wall steel-belted radials in front of our house, right where I'd get off the bus.

  I looked out the window of the bus to make sure it really was raining hard enough to be an excuse for not walking. It was coming down so hard that the bus windows looked like pebble glass; but mere facts don't seem to help guilt much. I wondered how my father would say, "Didn't you take the car to school? Why not?" tonight. The thought made me twitch, and while twitching I noticed that the person in the window seat was somebody from school. I said, "Oh, hi," and she said, "Hi," and I wished it was somebody I didn't know so I could ignore her.

  The Fields had lived in a house two blocks up our street a couple of years, and Natalie had been in some classes with me in sophomore and junior years. She had long dark hair and was quiet and you never saw her around and she did something with music, and that was one hundred percent of what I knew about Natalie Field. She was good-looking, but I find almost all girls good-looking, so I am no judge. People wouldn't call her beautiful, because she was stocky and had a severe expression; but I think she was good-looking, only you didn't notice it, because she wasn't noticing you. However, this time I did notice it, because she was noticing me. She had to. My knapsack flap had gotten wet through and was dripping onto her knee. I moved it so it would soak into my thigh instead and said, "Sorry. It's only a severed artery, it'll stop soon."

  Now that is really strange, that I said that. Normally I would have said "Sorry" in a mumble and moved the knapsack and left it at that. I think that I was so sick of myself, of being guilty about the car, and being angry, and being lonely, and wondering what good it was being seventeen when it was just as bad as or a little worse than being sixteen, and all the rest of it, that I drove myself out of myself. Anything to escape! Even being funny with some girl I didn't know. Or maybe there was something about her that made me speak, that made it possible for me to speak. Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it. I don't know.

  She gave a laugh, a real laugh, surprised and tickled. So I went on, "It's either seven seconds or fifteen seconds, from the femoral artery, I can't remember which."

  "What is?"

  "Death by exsanguination. Ggggghhh." I slumped down in the bus seat and died quietly. Then I sat up and said, "Yechh, my collar's wet, it's like an ice pack."

  "Your hair's all wet; it's dripping on your collar."

  "I'm a drip," I said with real feeling. "Say," she said, "are you taking Mr. Senotti's history? Is he all right?"

  "He's all right. Tough. Bad temper. Comes of being called Mr. Snotty, maybe; you can't blame him."

  "I have one more requirement in social sciences, and I need a really easy teacher."

  "Don't take Snotty then. Take Vrebek, all she does is show movies."

  "I had her. That's why I quit. Oh, I don't know. Bah!" She really said "Bah
!"—exactly as spelt—but savagely. "I hate gut courses, and I haven't got time to work hard for good teachers," she said. Talking to herself more than to me. But my ears were really standing up on end. In twelve years of school, counting kindergarten, I had never heard any human being say they hated gut courses.

  "How come you got no time?" I said. "Femoral artery severed? Remember, don't panic, you may have all of fifteen seconds."

  She laughed again, and she looked at me.

  Just for a moment. But she looked, she saw. She wasn't looking at me to see what she looked like, she was looking at me to see what I looked like. That is unusual, in my experience.

  I got the impression, even then, that people didn't often say funny things to this girl, that she wasn't used to clowning, but she liked it. The peculiar thing was that I wasn't much used to clowning, either. With people I didn't know well—which was the entire human species except for my parents and Mike Reinhard and Jason Thoer—I was either completely speechless, or said extremely serious things that instantly prevented any further conversation. But still, I am male, and it seems to me that at our age acting funny is almost an instinctive form of behavior in men. The girls laugh at things, but they seem basically serious. Whereas the fellows horse around and clown and make everything into a joke. My only real relationship with Mike and Jason, who were the nearest thing I had to friends, was a joking relationship. The point was never to be serious about anything. Except maybe sports scores. One of the main subjects to talk about was sex, but we kept unserious about sex, either by telling dirty jokes, or by being gross—using the special technical vocabulary of the sexual engineer, as if women were machines with interchangeable parts. I was pretty good at the dirty jokes, but my engineering vocabulary was unconvincing.