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It was into the second year now, and it was maddening.
Everything which had worked before failed this time.
Each day he tried to break it, and it resisted his every effort.
He snarled at his students, drove recklessly, blooded his knuckles against many walls. Nights, he lay awake cursing.
But there was no one to whom he could turn for help.
His problem would have been non-existent to a psychiatrist,
who doubtless would have attempted to treat him
for something else.
So he went away that summer, spent a month at a resort:
nothing. He experimented with several hallucinogenic
drugs; again, nothing. He tried free-associating into
a tape recorder, but all he got when he played it back
was a headache.
To whom does the holder of a blocked power turn,
within a society of normal people?
... To another of his own kind, if he can locate one.
Milt Rand had known four other persons like himself:
his cousin Gary, now deceased; Walker Jackson, a Negro
preacher who had retired to somewhere down South;
Tatya Stefanovich, a dancer, currently somewhere behind
the iron curtain; and Curtis Legge, who, unfortunately,
was suffering a schizoid reaction, paranoid type,
in a state institution for the criminally insane. Others
he had brushed against in the night, but had never met,
and could not locate now.
There had been blockages before, but Milt had always
worked his way through them inside of a month. This
time it was different and special, though. Upsets, discomforts,
disturbances, can dam up a talent, block a power. An
event which seals it off completely for over a year, however,
is more than a mere disturbance, discomfort, or upset.
The divorce had beaten hell out of him.
It is bad enough to know that somewhere someone is
hating you; but to have known the very form of that
hatred and to have proven ineffectual against it, to have
known it as the hater held it for you, to have lived with
it growing around you, this is more than distasteful
circumstance. Whether you are offender or offended,
when you are hated and you live within the circle of
that hate, it takes a thing from you: it tears a piece of
spirit from your soul, or, if you prefer, a way of thinking
from your mind; it cuts and does not cauterize.
Milt Rand dragged his bleeding psyche around the
country and returned home.
He would sit and watch the woods from his glassed in
back porch, drink beer, watch the fireflies in the
shadows, the rabbits, the dark birds, an occasional fox,
sometimes a bat.
The wildness was one of the reasons he had moved
beyond suburbia, adding an extra half-hour to his
commuting time.
Now there was a glassed-in back porch between him and
these things he had once been aprt of. Now he was alone.
Walking the streets, addressing his classes at the
institute, sitting in a restaurant, a theater, a bar, he was
vacant where once he had been filled.
There are no books which tell a man how to bring
back the power he has lost.
He tries everything he can think of, while he is waiting.
Walking the hot pavements of a summer noon, crossing
against the lights because traffic is slow, watching kids
in swimsuits play around a gurgling hydrant, filthy water
sluicing the gutter about their feet, as mothers and older
sisters in halters, wrinkled shirts, bermudas and sunburnt
skins watch them, occasionally, while talking to one
another in entranceways to buildings or the shade of a
storefront awning. Milt moves across town, heading
nowhere in particular, growing claustrophobic if he stops
for long, his eyebrows full of perspiration, sungglasses streaked
with it, shirt sticking to his sides and coming loose, sticking
and coming loose as he walks.
Amid the afternoon, there comes a time when he has
to rest the two fresh-baked bricks at the ends of his legs.
He finds a tree-lawn bench flanked by high maples, eases
himself down into it, and sits there thinking of nothing
in particular for perhaps twenty-five minutes.
Hello.
Something within him laughs or weeps.
Yes, hello, I am here! Don't go away! Stay! Please!
You are--like me . . .
Yes, I am. You can see it in me because you are what
you are. But you must read here and send here, too. I'm
frozen. I--Hello? Where are you?
Once more, he is alone.
He tries to broadcast. He fills his mind with the thoughts
and tries to push them outside his skull.
Please come back! I need you. You can help me. I
am desperate. I hurt. Where are you?
Again, nothing.
He wants to scream. He wants to search every room in
every building on the block.
Instead, he sits there.
At 9:30 that evening they meet again, inside his mind.
Hello?
Stay! Stay, for God's sake! Don't go away this time!
Please don't! Listen, I need you! You can help me!
How? What's the matter?
I'm like you. Or was, once. I could reach out with my
mind and be other places, other things, other people. I
can't do it now, though. I have a blockage. The power will
not come. I know it is there. I can feel it. But I can't use
... Hello?
Yes, I am still here. I can feel myself going away,
though. I will be back. I...
Milt waits until midnight. She does not come back.
It is a feminine mind which has touched his own. Vague,
weak, but definately feminine, and wearing the power.
She does not come back that night, though. He paces up
and down the block, wondering which window, which
door...
He wats at an all-night cafe, returns to his bench, waits,
paces again, goes back to the cafe for cigarettes, begins
chain-smoking, goes back to the bench.
Dawn occurs, day arrives, night is gone. He is alone, as
birds explore the silence, traffic begins to swell, dogs
wander the lawns.
Then, weakly, the contact:
I am here. I can stay longer this time, I think. How can
I help you? Tell me.
All right. Do this thing: Think of the feeling, the feeling
of the out-go, the out-reach, out-know that you have now.
Fill your mind with that feeling and send it to me as hard
as you can.
It comes upon him then as once it was: the knowledge
of the power. It is earth and water, fire and air to him.
He stands upon it, he swims in it, he warms himself by it,
he moves through it.
It is returning! Don't stop now!
I'm sorry. I must. I'm getting dizzy...
Where are you?
Hospital...
He looks up the street to the hospital on the corner,
at the far end, to his left.
What ward? He frames the thought but knows she is
already gone, even as he does it.
Doped-up or feverish, he decides, and probably out for
a while now.
He takes a taxi back to where he had parked, drvies
home, showers and shaves, makes breakfast, cannot eat.
He drinks orange juice and coffee and stretches out
on the bed.
Five hours later he awakens, looks at his watch, curses.
All the way back into town, he tries to recall the power.
It is there like a tree, rooted in his being, branching
behind his eyes, all bud, blossom, sap and color, but no
leaves, no fruit. He can feel it swaying within him,
pulsing, breathing; from the tips of his toes to the roots of
his hair he feels it. But it does not bend to his will, it does
not branch within his consciousness, furl there it leaves,
spread the aromas of life.
He parks in the hospital lot, enters the lobby, avoids
the front desk, finds a chair beside a table filled
with magazines.
Two hours later he meets her.
He is hiding behind a copy of Holiday and looking for
her.
I am here.
Again, then! Quickly! The power! Help me to rouse it!
She does this thing.
Within his mind, she conjures the power. There is a
movement, a pause, a movement, a pause. Reflectively,
as though suddenly remembering an intricate dance step,
it stirs within him, the power.
As in a surfacing bathyscaphe, there is a rush of
distortions, then a clear, moist view without.
She is a child who has helped him.
A mind-twisted, fevered child, dying...
He reads it all when he turns the pwoer upon her.
Her name is Dorothy and she is delirious. The power
came upon her at the height of her illness, perhaps
because of it.
Has she helped a man come alive again, or dreamed
that she helped him? she wonders.
She is thirteen years old and her parents sit beside
her bed. In the mind of her mother a word rolls over
and over, senselessly, blocking all other thoughts, though
it cannot keep away the feelings:
Methotrexate, methotrexate, methotrexate, meth...
In Dorothy's thirteen-year-old breastbone there are
needles of pain. The fevers swirl within her, and she is all
but gone to him.
She is dying of leukemia. The final stages are already
arrived. He can taste the blood in her mouth.
Helpless within his power, he projects:
You have given me the end of your life and your final
strength. I did now know this. I would not have asked it
of you if I had.
Thank you, she says for the pictures inside you.
Pictures?
Places, things I saw...
There is not much inside me worth showing. You
could have been elsewhere, seeing better.
I am going again...
Wait!
He calls upon the power that lives within him now, fused
with his will and his sense, his thoughts, memories,
feelings. In one great blaze of life, he shows her Milt Rand.
Here is everything I have, all I have ever been that
might please. Here is swarming through a foggy night,
blinking on and off. Here is lying beneath a bush as the
rains of summer fall about you, drop from the leaves upon
your fox-soft fur. Here is the moon-dance of the deer,
the dream drift of the trout beneath the dark swell, blood
cold as the waters about you.
Here is Tatya dancing and Walker preaching; here is
my cousin Gary, as he whittles, contriving a ball within a
box, all out of one piece of wood. This is my New York
and my Paris. This, my favorite meal, drink, cigar,
restaurant, park, road to drive on late at night; this is where
I dug tunnels, built a lean-to, went swimming; this, my
first kiss; these are the tears of loss; this is exile and
alone, and recovery, awe, joy; these, my grandmother's
daffodils; this her coffin, daffodils about it; these are the
colors of the music I love, and this is my dog who lived
long and was good. See all the things that heat the spirit,
cool within the mind, are encased in memory and one's
self. I give them to you, who have no time to know them.
He sees himself standing on the far hills of her mind.
She laughs aloud then, and in her room somwhere high
away a hand is laid upon her and her wrist is taken
between fingers and thumb as she rushes toward him
suddenly grown large. His great black wings sweep forward,
to fold her wordless spasm of life, then are empty.
Milt Rand stiffens within his power, puts aside a copy
of Holiday and stands, to leave the hospital, full and
empty, empty, full, like himself, now, behind.
Such is the power of the power.