Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read online

  "Is it?" she said. "Maybe. I don't know. You have to decide."

  Then my anger came out and I said, "Decide what? You've already decided."

  She glanced at me. She had that remote look. She didn't say anything.

  The anger took over entirely, and I said, "I guess that's always the woman's privilege, isn't it?" in this sneering, bitter voice.

  "People make the real choices together," she said. Her voice was much lower and smaller than usual. She started blinking and looked away, as if she was watching the scenery.

  I went on driving, watching the road. We drove seventy miles without saying anything. At her house she said, "Good-bye, Owen," in the same small voice, and got out, and went into the house.

  I remember that. But nothing after that. Nothing until the following Tuesday.

  IT'S CALLED specific amnesia, and is quite common following accidents, severe injuries, childbirth, etc. So I can't tell you what I did. My guess is that, being extremely upset, and since it was only about four-thirty, I didn't want to go home, but just went on driving around, probably so that I could be alone and think.

  There's a steep grade between two suburban towns west of the city. I don't know why I was out there, I guess I was just taking whatever road turned up; but anyhow, apparently what I did was take a turn too fast on that grade.

  A car behind me saw the car go off the edge and turn over, and they got help. Ambulance and all that, because I was out cold. Concussion, also dislocated a shoulder and had a whole lot of really weird bruises that came out green. I was lucky, as they say, since the car was totalled.

  By the time I came to, they had moved me into a hospital in the city, and after another day I could go home.

  I don't remember anything about either hospital, except my mother sitting there and telling me that Jason had called twice, and that Natalie Field had come over. "What a nice girl," my mother said. It all seemed perfectly natural but quite uninteresting to me. The fog had really and truly closed in. I was so alone in it, I didn't know there was anything or anybody else out there. Nothing mattered. It was the concussion, of course. But not only that.

  The whole thing was very hard on my father. First, of course, when some strange voice calls up and says, "We have your son here in the hospital with severe concussion and possibly brain damage," that's a really great thing to have happen in the middle of the Saturday afternoon TV ball game. Then there's the relief and thankfulness when the kids going to be OK. Then he has to pay for having the wreck towed. And finds out the car is a total loss. And his wife says, "Who cares about the car so long as Owen is all right!" and bursts into tears. He does care about the car, but how can he admit it even to himself after that? And how can he admit that he's terribly humiliated by the fact that his son can't even drive around a corner without falling off? He has to be grateful to the son for not getting killed. And he is. Only there are moments when he'd like to kill the son himself. So he comes in and tells him not to worry, the car was fully insured, no problem. Not to worry. Only getting insurance for a while, after this, is going to be terribly expensive, so maybe the best thing is not to try to replace the car right away. And the son lies there and says, "Yeah, sure, that's fine."

  I had to stick around home for a couple of weeks because our doctor said so long as there was some vision impairment it would be wiser. It was very dull because I couldn't even read, because of seeing double, but I didn't care. I didn't want to read.

  Natalie came by once, on the Friday after the accident I think. Mother came upstairs, and I said I didn't want to see anybody. Natalie didn't come back. Jason and Mike came by on the weekend and sat around and told some jokes. They were disappointed because I couldn't tell them anything about the accident.

  When I went back to school, it was no trouble to avoid Natalie. It had never really been easy to meet her, since she had to run such a tight schedule. All I had to do was go in late for lunch and not be at the bus stop at two-thirty, and I never saw her at all.

  I should be able to explain to you why I did that, why I didn't want to see her, but I can't. Parts of it are obvious, I guess. I was ashamed and embarrassed and so on. I was also resentful and frustrated and so on. But those are all reasons and feelings, and I wasn't reasoning or feeling anything much at all. Things just didn't seem to matter very much. The main thing seemed to be to avoid pain. There wasn't any use trying to be in touch. I was alone. I'd always been alone. For a while with her I'd been able to pretend that I wasn't, but I was, and finally I'd proved it even to her, forced her to turn her back on me like all the others. And it didn't really matter. If I was alone, OK, it was better to accept it, not pretend. I was a kind of person that just does not fit into this kind of society. To expect anybody to like me was stupid. What should they like me for? My big brain? My big, smart brain with the concussion? Nobody likes brains. Brains are very ugly things. Some people like them fried in butter, but hardly any Americans do.

  The only place for me, actually, was on Thorn. Thorn didn't have much government in the usual sense, but they had some institutions people could join if they liked; one of them was called the Scholary. It was built part way up one of the highest mountains, out in the country. It had a huge library, and laboratories and basic science equipment and lots of rooms and studies. People could go there and take classes or teach classes, however it worked out best, and work on research alone or in teams, as they preferred. At night they all met, if they felt like it, in a big hall with several fireplaces, and talked about genetics and history and sleep research and polymers and the age of the Universe. If you didn't like the conversation at one fireplace, you could go to another one. The nights are always cold, on Thorn. There's no fog there up on the mountainside, but the wind always blows.

  But Thorn was way behind me now. I'd never go back there. No way home. I was finally able to be realistic about myself. There was school to finish, and then next year at State, and the next year and the next and so on. I could hack it. I was actually much stronger than I'd thought. Too strong. Man of steel. Pulled practically undamaged from a totally wrecked car. I could see no particular reason for going on and finishing school and going to State and getting a job and living fifty more years, but that seemed to be the program. A man of steel does what he is programmed to do.

  I'm not describing this well at all. What I keep leaving out, what I don't know how to say, what I don't even want to think about, is that it was horrible. The whole time, for weeks, every morning when I woke up, every night in bed, I wanted to cry, because I couldn't stand it. Only I could stand it, and I couldn't cry. There wasn't anything to cry about.

  And there wasn't anything to do. I'd tried, twice. Once with Natalie. Once with the car. And neither try had worked. There was no way to change things. I wouldn't get bit again. If I couldn't make a friend, OK, I'd get along without. If I couldn't absentmindedly drive off a cliff and kill myself, OK, I'd stay alive. One attempt had been just as stupid as the other.

  I knew my mother was worried about me, but it didn't bother me much. What she wanted for me was to be (I) alive, (2) normal. I was alive, and I was doing pretty much everything she wanted me to do. If it didn't produce normality, it ought to at least produce a pretty good fifty-year imitation of it. She also wanted me to be (3) happy, but that rabbit I could not produce out of the hat for her. I didn't do any crazy things, or sulk, or quarrel, or go on drugs, or refuse to eat her cookies and pies, or join the American Communist Party, or anything. I just stayed in my own room a lot and kept to myself, and I'd always pretty much done that. So she figured I couldn't be too unhappy; it was just a mood. I know she knew it had something to do with Natalie Field. As I said, my mother is a highly intelligent person. But all that could be labelled, after all, as puppy love, growing pains, perfectly normal.

  My father, who didn't really know what he wanted for me, was more worried about me than she was, though I don't know if he knew it. I knew it from the way he talked to me. Sort of formal and uncertain
. He didn't know what to say to me anymore. And I didn't know what to say to him. And neither of us could do anything about it. But what did it really matter anyhow?

  One thing I did was take a lot of showers. You can be really alone in the shower with the water running loud and a lot of steam and fog. I also went to a lot of movies with Mike and Jason. Sometimes I borrowed dad's car for going to the movies. We had both figured it was important that I drive again as soon as possible, so that I wouldn't get uptight. It wasn't easy—for him or me—the first couple of times, but it worked out fine (maybe this is one purpose of selective amnesia), and it was a sort of ray of hope for him. Maybe Owen wasn't a total loss. After all, a lot of teen-age boys wreck cars. It's almost a virile kind of thing to have done.

  One thing I couldn't do, though, was homework. It was just too pointless. I'd always been able to get by when I was bored with a course by just sort of throwing words around and dazzling the teachers; but now I was bored even with the math course I had, and you can't get by in math by throwing words around. I just stopped doing the assignments, and I cut the tests. Advanced math courses are small, and the teacher noticed right away and tried to say something about it to me; but I just said, "Yeah," and mumbled. There's nothing a teacher can do, really. In my other courses, they were so used to me being good that they didn't notice I wasn't being good anymore; so long as I showed up in class they assumed I was the same as always. And I didn't cut much. I would have, because school drove me crazy, not so much the classes as the halls full of people all talking to each other, and the way they watch you walk past and so on; but what else was there to do? If I stayed home, my mother was there, and I couldn't walk around the city all day.

  So March went by and most of April went by. All fog. Fog and movies.

  I was walking home from school one afternoon by one of my variant routes, and passed the First Congregational Church. A sign outside it announced that Friday night there would be the spring performance of the Civic Orchestra, Leila Bone, soprano, works by Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonio Vivaldi, and Natalie Field.

  IT'S A BEAUTIFUL name: Field. I see the curve of a field on a summer-colored hill, under the sky. Or the long furrows on a winter field, dark brown, throwing shadows in the long sunlight.

  It hurt a lot. It hurt incredibly much, and not a clean hurt either, because half of it was envy, the lowest kind of envy. But no matter how low I got, and it was unbelievable to me how low it was, still there were a couple of things I couldn't do. One of them was, I couldn't not go to hear the first public performance of compositions by Natalie Field.

  So as I walked on past the church, I already knew I had to go. But the idea of going, and going alone, of course, was part of the hurt. It seemed like the end of something. It was the last thing I had to do that meant anything, and it was just left over from the time before, when things used to mean something. After it, there wouldn't be anything left to do. Ever.

  I got home, and the mail had come. There was a letter for me from the admissions office of MIT. My mother had left it out on the chest in the hall, but she didn't say anything or ask about it. I took it up to my room and read it. It said I had been admitted, and they would give me a full tuition scholarship. I should at least have felt a little proud or, what's the word, vindicated, but I didn't. It made no difference whatever. The scholarship was still way short of what it would cost to get to Massachusetts and live there and pay all the costs, and anyhow I wasn't going there. I was supposed to answer within ten days, but I just stuck the letter into the drawer of the desk and forgot about it. I mean I really did forget about it. It just didn't mean anything.

  Jason wanted to go to a show Friday night, but I said I was doing something with my parents; and I told them that I was going to the show with Jason. I was doing a lot of lying like that. Just dumb lies that didn't hurt anybody or make any big difference; it was just easier to tell lies about things than to tell the truth. If I told Jason I didn't want to go to a show, he would have argued. If I told either him or my parents that I was going to hear this concert at a church, they would have thought it was a funny thing to do, and I was sick and tired of always being the only person who ever did funny things. They might even have noticed the sign then and seen Natalie's name, and that was none of their business. And Jason might have come with me, because he was so bored he'd do almost anything so long as there was somebody to do it with. So it was a lot easier to lie about it. If you lied about enough things, then everybody else got involved in the fog, too, and they couldn't see you, or touch you at all.

  I felt very peculiar going there, Friday night. It was late April and one of the first warm nights, warm and windy, all the flowers out in the gardens, and clouds blowing across the stars. Walking to the church I felt dizzy. You know that feeling where you seem to have done something before? Well, this was just the opposite. It was as if I'd never seen any of the streets before, though I walked them twice a day, five days a week. Everything was different. I felt like a stranger in the late evening in a strange city. It was frightening, but I liked it too, in a way. I thought, what if none of the people in the houses I passed and the cars passing me were speaking English, what if they were all speaking some language I didn't know, and this was really a foreign city I had never seen before, and I only thought I'd lived here all my life because I was going crazy.

  I looked at things, the trees, the houses, the way a tourist would, and it really seemed to be true, I'd never seen them before. The wind kept blowing in my face.

  When I got to the church and other people were going in, I felt very nervous and irritable. I sort of crept in. I would have gone on all fours if I could have, so as to be less visible. It was a big old church, mostly wood, hollow and dark and high inside. Since I'd never been in it, it was easy to keep up the feeling of being a total stranger, a foreigner. There were quite a lot of people there and more coming in, but I didn't know any of them. I didn't know where Natalie would sit, probably down in front; so I took a seat at the end of a pew in the last row, clear across the church from where the people came in, behind a pillar, as inconspicuous a place as I could find. I didn't want to see or be seen. I wanted to be alone. The only people I saw that I knew even by sight were two girls from school, maybe friends of Natalie's. The church got quite full, but being in a church nobody talked loud, and the sound of them talking was like water on the beach, a big soft noise, not English, not anything. I sat there reading the mimeographed program and feeling dizzy and unearthly—detached, completely detached.

  The songs were the next to last thing on the program. The orchestra was pretty good, I guess; I didn't listen hard, I kept floating; but I sort of vaguely enjoyed the music, because it let me float. There was an intermission, but I stayed in my seat. Then finally the singer stood up, down in front. The accompaniment was a string quartet, and Natalie was playing the viola part. I hadn't expected that. I saw her sitting there next to a big middle-aged man cellist; he hid most of her, I could just see her hair looking sleek and jet black in the lights. Then I ducked down again. The conductor, who was the chatty type, went on for a while about Music in Our City and about this promising young musician and composer of eighteen, and finally shut up and the music began.

  The singer was good. She was just somebody who sang at the church, I guess, but she had a strong voice, and she understood the words and the music. The first song was "Love and Friendship," a simple poem about how love is like the wild rose but friendship is the holly tree. It had a good tune, and you could tell the audience thought it was very pretty. They applauded hard at the end Natalie sat there and scowled and didn't look up. They weren't supposed to applaud until all three songs were sung. The singer looked embarrassed and half bowed, and the audience finally got the idea and shut up. Then she sang the second one. Emily Brontë wrote the words when she was twenty-two.

  Riches I kid in light esteem

  And Love I laugh to scorn

  And lust of Fame was hut a dream
>
  That vanished with the morn—

  And if I pray, the only prayer

  That moves my lips for me

  Is— "Leave the heart that now I bear

  And give me liberty"

  Yes, as my swift days near their goal

  'Tis all that I implore—

  Through life and death, a chainless soul

  With courage to endure!

  The violins and the cello played long notes softly in a kind of shivering drone, and there was a double tune, the singer and the viola, singing with and against each other. A hard, reaching, grieving tune. And it broke through, on those last four words and stopped.

  The audience didn't applaud. Maybe they didn't know it was over, maybe they didn't like it, maybe it scared them. The whole place was perfectly silent. Then they did the third song, "Mild the mist upon the hill," very softly. I began crying, and I couldn't stop when it was over and they were clapping and Natalie had to stand up and take bows. I got up and blundered around the back of the pews, by feel mostly because I couldn't see for crying, and got out of the church into the night.

  I started to walk up towards the park. The street lamps were big blobs of light with rainbow haloes, and the wind was cold on the tears on my face. My head was hot and light and ringing with the singer's voice. I didn't feel the pavement under my feet, and if I passed anyone I didn't see them. And I didn't care if they saw me walking on the street crying.

  There was a glory in it. It was too much for me to take, everything coming together at once, but there was a glory in it. And that was partly love. I mean real love. In the song I had seen Natalie whole, the way she really was, and I loved her. It was not an emotion or a desire, it was a confirmation, it was a glory, like seeing the stars. To know that she could do that, that she could make a song that made people be still and listen, and made me cry, to know that that was Natalie, it really was, it was her, herself, the truth.