More Than Human

It was the first thing to amaze me in years. I chewed on it and then asked, ‘If I did it by myself, how come it never happened before?’

‘It needs someone to listen.’

‘Listen? Was I talking?’

‘A blue streak.’

‘Everything that happened?’

‘How can I know? I wasn’t there. You were.’

‘You don’t believe it happened, do you? Those disappearing kids and the footstool and all?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not in the business of believing or not believing. Was it real to you?’

‘Oh, hell, yes!’

‘Well, then, that’s all that matters. Is that where you live, with those people?’

I bit off a fingernail that had been bothering me. ‘ Not for a long time. Not since Baby was three.’ I looked at him. ‘You remind me of Lone.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. No, you don’t.’ I added suddenly. ‘I don’t know what made me say that.’ I lay down abruptly.

The ceiling was grey and the lamps were dim. I heard the pipe-stem click against his teeth. I lay there for a long time.

‘Nothing happens,’ I told him.

‘What did you expect to happen?’

‘Like before.’

‘There’s something there that wants out. Just let it come.’

It was as if there was a revolving drum in my head, and on it were photographed the places and things and people I was after. And it was as if the drum was spi

‘Nothing happens,’ I said.

‘Baby is three,’ he repeated.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That.’ I closed my eyes.

That might be it. Might, sight, night, light. I might have the sight of a light in the night. Maybe the baby. Maybe the sight of the baby at night because of the light…

There was night after night when I lay on that blanket, and a lot of nights I didn’t. Something was going on all the time in Lone’s house. Sometimes I slept in the daytime. I guess the only time everybody slept at once was when someone was sick, like me the first time I arrived there. It was always sort of dark in the room, the same night and day, the fire going, the two old bulbs hanging yellow by their wires from the battery. When they got too dim, Janie fixed the battery and they got bright again.

Janie did everything that needed doing, whatever no one else felt like doing. Everybody else did things, too. Lone was out a lot. Sometimes he used the twins to help him, but you never missed them, because they’d be here and gone and back again bing! like that. And Baby, he just stayed in his bassinet.

I did things myself. I cut wood for the fire and I put up more shelves, and then I’d go swimming with Janie and the twins sometimes. And I talked to Lone. I didn’t do a thing that the others couldn’t do, but they all did things I couldn’t do. I was mad, mad all the time about that. But I wouldn’t of known what to do with myself if I wasn’t mad all the time about something or other. It didn’t keep us from blesh-ing. Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing’, but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.

Baby talked all the tune. He was like a broadcasting station than runs twenty-four hours a day, and you can get what it’s sending any time you tune in, but it’ll keep sending whether you tune in or not. When I say he talked, I don’t mean exactly that. He semaphored mostly. You’d think those wandering vague movements of his hands and arms and legs and head were meaningless, but they weren’t. It was semaphore, only instead of a symbol for a sound, or such like, the movements were whole thoughts.

I mean spread the left hand and shake the right high up, and thump with the left heel, and it means, ‘Anyone who thinks a starling is a pest just don’t know anything about how a starling thinks’ or something like that. Janie said she made Baby invent the semaphore business. She said she used to be able to hear the twins thinking – that’s what she said; hear them thinking – and they could hear Baby. So she would ask the twins whatever she wanted to know, and they’d ask Baby, and then tell her what he said. But then as they grew up they began to lose the knack of it. Every young kid does. So Baby learned to understand when someone talked, and he’d answer with this semaphore stuff.

Lone couldn’t read the stuff and neither could I. The twins didn’t give a damn. Janie used to watch him all the time. He always knew what you meant if you wanted to ask him something, and he’d tell Janie and she’d say what it was. Part of it, anyway. Nobody could get it all, not even Janie.

All I know is Janie would sit there and paint her pictures and watch Baby, and sometimes she’d bu’st out laughing.

Baby never grew any. Janie did, and the twins, and so did I, but not Baby. He just lay there. Janie kept his stomach full and cleaned him up every two or three days. He didn’t cry and he didn’t make any trouble. No one ever went near him.

Janie showed every picture she painted to Baby, before she cleaned the boards and painted new ones. She had to clean them because she only had three of them. It was a good thing, too, because I’d hate to think what that place would of been like if she’d kept them all; she did four or five a day. Lone and the twins were kept hopping getting turpentine for her. She could shift the paints back into the little pots on her easel without any trouble, just by looking at the picture one colour at a time, but turps was something else again. She told me that Baby remembered all her pictures and that’s why she didn’t have to keep them. They were all pictures of machines and gear-trains and mechanical linkages and what looked like electric circuits and things like that. I never thought too much about them.

I went out with Lone to get some turpentine and a couple of picnic hams one time. We went through the woods to the railroad track and down a couple of miles to where we could see the glow of a town. Then the woods again, and some alleys, and a back street.

Lone was like always, walking along, thinking, thinking.

We came to a hardware store and he went up and looked at the lock and came back to where I was waiting, shaking his head. Then we found a general store. Lone grunted and we went and stood in the shadows by the door. I looked in.

All of a sudden Beanie was in there, naked like she always was when she travelled like that. She came and opened the door from the inside. We went in and Lone closed it and locked it.

‘Get along home, Beanie,’ he said,’ before you catch your death.’

She gri

We found a pair of fine hams and a two-gallon can of turpentine. I took a bright yellow ballpoint pen and Lone cuffed me and made me put it back.

‘We only take what we need,’ he told me.

After we left, Beanie came back and locked the door and went home again. I only went with Lone a few times, when he had more to get than he could carry easily.

I was there about three years. That’s all I can remember about it. Lone was there or he was out, and you could hardly tell the difference. The twins were with each other most of the time. I got to like Janie a lot, but we never talked much. Baby talked all the time, only I don’t know what about.

We were all busy and we bleshed.

I sat up on the couch suddenly.

Stern said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter. This isn’t getting me any place.’

‘You said that when you’d barely started. Do you think you’ve accomplished anything since then?’

‘Oh, yeah, but- ‘

‘Then how can you be sure you’re right this time?’ When I didn’t say anything, he asked me, ‘Didn’t you like this last stretch?’