More Than Human

‘You’re going to hypnotize yourself. You do everything yourself. I just point the way. I point your toes to the path. Just point your toes. No one can make you go anywhere you don’t want to go, but you want to go where your toes are pointed where your toes are limp where your…’

On and on and on. And where was the dangling gold ornament, the light in the eyes, the mystic passes? He wasn’t even sitting where I could see him. Where was the talk about how sleepy I was supposed to be? Well, he knew I wasn’t sleepy and didn’t want to be sleepy. I just wanted to be toes. I just wanted to be limp, just a limp toe. No brains in a toe, a toe to go, go, go eleven times, eleven, I’m eleven…

I split in two, and it was all right, the part that watched the part that went back to the library, and Miss Kew leaning towards me, but not too near, me with the newspaper crackling under me on the library chair, me with one shoe off and my limp toes dangling… and I felt a mild surprise at this. For this was hypnosis, but I was quite conscious, quite altogether there on the couch with Stern droning away at me, quite able to roll over and sit up and talk to him and walk out if I wanted to, but I just didn’t want to. Oh, if this was what hypnosis was like, I was all for it. I’d work at this. This was all right.

There on the table I’m able to see that the gold will unfold on the leather, and whether I’m able to stay by the table with you, with Miss Kew, with Miss Kew…

‘… and Bo

‘Baby is three,’ she said.

There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a… a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.

And this is what was inside. All in one flash, but all this.

Baby is three? My baby would be three if there were a baby, which there never was…

Lone, I’m open to you. Open, is this open enough?

His irises like wheels. I’m sure they spin, but I never catch them at it. The probe that passes invisibly from his brain, through his eyes, into mine. Does he know what it means to me? Does he care? He doesn’t care, he doesn’t know; he empties me and I fill as he directs me to; he drinks and waits and drinks again and never looks at the cup.

When I saw him first, I was dancing in the wind, in the wood, in the wild, and I spun about and he stood there in the leafy shadows, watching me. I hated him for it. It was not my wood, not my gold-spangled fern-tangled glen. But it was my dancing that he took, freezing it forever by being there. I hated him for it, hated the way he looked, the way he stood, ankle-deep in the kind wet ferns, looking like a tree with roots for feet and clothes the colour of earth. As I stopped he moved, and then he was just a man, a great ape-shouldered, dirty animal of a man, and all my hate was fear suddenly and I was just as frozen.

He knew what he had done and he didn’t care. Dancing… never to dance again, because never would I know the woods were free of eyes, free of tall, uncaring, dirty animal-men. Summer days with the clothes choking me, winter nights with the precious decencies round and about me like a shroud, and never to dance again, never to remember dancing without remembering the shock of knowing he had seen me. How I hated him! Oh, how I hated him!

To dance alone where no one knew, that was the single thing I hid to myself when I was known as Miss Kew, that Victorian, older than her years, later than her time; correct and starched, lace and linen and lonely. Now indeed I would be all they said, through and through, forever and ever, because he had robbed me of the one thing I dared to keep secret.

He came out into the sun and walked to me, holding his great head a little on one side. I stood where I was, frozen inwardly and outwardly and altogether by the core of anger and the layer of fear. My arm was still out, my waist still bent from my dance, and when he stopped, I breathed again because by then I had to.

He said, ‘You read books?’

I couldn’t bear to have him near me, but I couldn’t move. He put out his hard hand and touched my jaw, turned my head up until I had to look into his face. I cringed away from him, but my face would not leave his hand, though he was not holding it, just lifting it. ‘You got to read some books for me. I got no time to find them.’

I asked him, ‘Who are you?’

‘Lone,’ he said. ‘You going to read books for me?’

‘No. Let me go, let me go!’ He wasn’t holding me.

‘What books?’ I cried.

He thumped my face, not very hard. It made me look up a bit more. He dropped his hand away. His eyes, the irises were going to spin…

‘Open up in there,’ he said. ‘Open way up and let me see.’

There were books in my head, and he was looking at the titles… he was not looking at the titles, for he couldn’t read. He was looking at what I knew of the books. I suddenly felt terribly useless, because I had only a fraction of what he wanted.

‘What’s that?’ he barked.

I knew what he meant. He’d gotten it from inside my head. I didn’t know it was in there, even, but he found it.

‘Telekinesis,’ I said.

‘How is it done?’

‘Nobody knows if it can be done. Moving physical objects with the mind!’

‘It can be done,’ he said. ‘This one?’

‘Teleportation. That’s the same thing – well, almost. Moving your own body with mind power,’

‘Yeah, yeah, I see it,’ he said gruffly.

‘Molecular interpenetration. Telepathy and clairvoyance. I don’t know anything about them. I think they’re silly.’

‘Read about ‘em. It don’t matter if you understand or not. What’s this?’

It was there in my brain, on my lips. ‘Gestalt.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Group. Like a cure for a lot of diseases with one kind of treatment. Like a lot of thoughts expressed in one phrase. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’

‘Read about that, too. Read a whole lot about that. That’s the most you got to read about. That’s important.’

He turned away, and when his eyes came away from mine it was like something breaking, so that I staggered and fell to one knee. He went off into the woods without looking back. I got my things and ran home. There was anger, and it struck me like a storm. There was fear, and it struck me like a wind. I knew I would read the books, I knew I would come back, I knew I would never dance again.

So I read the books and I came back. Sometimes it was every day for three or four days, and sometimes, because I couldn’t find a certain book, I might not come back for ten. He was always there in the little glen, waiting, standing in the shadows, and he took what he wanted of the books and nothing of me. He never mentioned the next meeting. If he came there every day to wait for me, or if he only came when I did, I have no way of knowing.

He made me read books that contained nothing for me, books on evolution, on social and cultural organization, on mythology, and ever so much on symbiosis. What I had with him were not conversations; sometimes nothing audible would pass between us but his grunt of surprise or small, short hum of interest.

He tore the books out of me the way he would tear berries from a bush, all at once; he smelled of sweat and earth and the green juices his heavy body crushed when he moved through the wood.

If he learned anything from the books, it made no difference in him.

There came a day when he sat by me and puzzled something out.

He said, ‘What book has something like this?’ Then he waited for a long time, thinking. ‘The way a termite can’t digest wood, you know, and microbes in the termite’s belly can, and what the termite eats is what the microbe leaves behind. What’s that?’

‘Symbiosis,’ I remembered. I remembered the words. Lone tore the content from words and threw the words away. ‘Two kinds of life depending upon one another for existence.’