Hornets and Others

He sang loud, laughing, thrusting his hands up, watching Arcturus through the barred window rushing down toward him, Vega, Deneb and Aldebaran and all the rest, yellow, blue, red, white, dwarf, giant, hurrying pieces of themselves toward him, toward him!

He leapt to meet them, hands grasping, and faintly heard his father shout as he hit the bars, tried to push his face through to meet the stars, his father shouting, 'For God's sake, Donald!' before he brought his face back and then swiftly forward, wanting to meet the stars halfway to heaven, and then, his father's grip on him now. His father suddenly let go, staring out through the bars with his mouth open, before blinking and then taking hold of Donald once more. Donald hit his head against the bars amidst his father's repeated cries—

Every day was Dr. Smith day.

He was put in a room with no window. White walls: he could feel the winter stars pulling like burning magnets through the thick concrete. When he tried to ram his head through, they transferred him to a smaller room with padding over the cinder blocks, no sink or toilet. There was a thick door with a convex-lensed porthole, through which nurses gaped like fish. He could smell the fragments of stars, ever larger, knew they were just outside the walls, waiting to rush upon him, nuzzle, claim him.

So he began to dig toward them, a tiny quarter inch at a time, pulling back a flap of padding to work on the concrete wall with a spoon from supper they didn't miss. All night, each night, he sang to himself and burrowed, hiding his progress.

His parents came and he sat between them in Dr. Smith's office, knees up, head down.

They talked as if he wasn't there.

'Acute schizophrenia,' Dr. Smith said. 'This is the way it progresses, sometimes. The manifestations get worse as they get older.'

So sad she sounded: a voice to soothe his mother, who sat rocking herself, sobbing into a handkerchief.

'Doctor,' his father began, uncomfortably, 'is there. . . any chance that what Donald sees is real? There was a brief moment the other night when I thought I saw something, what looked like particles of light—'

'Tiny bits of stars visiting your son?' Dr. Smith's look of indulgent superiority quieted him. 'I'm no physicist or astronomer,' she said, 'but I think that if the stars moved in the sky we would know about it. And, of course, if even one entire star were to actually 'visit' the Earth...'

She trailed off, aware that in her eagerness to be clever she had spoken too dogmatically. She quickly added. 'It's quite possible you saw something, of course—or at least thought you did. Dust motes, perhaps. But I would characterize it as a sympathetic illusion, a way of identifying with your son.'

Donald's father looked away uneasily, and his mother was taken by a renewed bout of weeping.

'And now,' Dr. Smith continued, 'we must think about how best to care for Donald...'

Later, in his cell, Donald continued to dig, eating powdered concrete, spoonful by spoonful.

In the middle of May the hole was nearly finished. All winter he had felt the winter stars pulling at him, finally giving way to spring. The constellation Orion left him, but the stars of Leo pulled high overhead, calling out, growing stronger as the wall gave way.

Soon!

Soon!

One night the spoon poked through to darkness.

It was as if electricity had shot through him. He pressed his face to the tiny hole, heard the singing stars outside. He began to cry with happiness. He widened the tiny opening, pressed his straining wide eye to it, staring out.

He saw little, the outline of a low, close row of bushes, the leg of an outdoor bench on the path that wound through the grounds. He looked up, and saw the merest flicker of a tiny light—Regulus, the Lion's paw—singing to him!

These are the orbs that burn so bright—

These are the things that fill my sight—

STARS!

He wept, pressed his hands to the wall, tried to move it out, biting at the bottom of the tiny opening with his mouth, tried to swallow the wall and make it go away:

STARS!

Donald screamed. He felt a singing, magnetic, painful need in his body. Pale blue-white Regulus held its hands out to him, sent a scintilla of itself to dance in front of him, called to him, strained toward him—

STARS!

He beat at the wall, willed the wall to go away, to let him hold his own hands out to Regulus. And as he screamed in need again, pressing his wide eye tight to the opening, reaching out with his sight, all the stars of Leo—Regulus, Denebola and Algieba and Zosma—all the stars!—sent fingers of themselves rushing at him, swirling and dancing, holding their bright atoms out to him, pulling at him and he cried and screamed and beat his hands on the unmoving wall—

And then suddenly he stopped screaming and turned, wide-eyed, to see human faces staring in at him through the fish-eye porthole.

As he pulled himself back away from the hole, he saw the particles of stars whirl up and fly back away from him.

'No!'

But already it was too late. Dr. Smith and the others were through the door and running at him, bending down, their hands on him—

'No!' he screamed, straining his eye back to the hole. The star bits returned, whirled and stopped near the hole and again he heard their singing—but already it was too late. The hands were strong on him, many hands pulling him back. Donald bit and screamed at them and his eye grew wide and strained against the hole as the hands sought to pull him back and his own hands tried to reach out through the walls.

They could not pull him from the hole, his wide eye squeezed tight to it—and now he felt himself going through, his eye and then the rest of him would squeeze through the tiny hole and the stars were waiting, dancing, singing for him and they would all finally come to him!

And then they pulled him back mightily, many hands, and he cried, 'NO!' and pushed his eye out of its socket and through—

For the tiniest moment he felt the stars touch him, their warm fingers on him, holding tight, almost coming to him, particle by atom all of them ready to spring upon him, caressing his eye up through his optic nerve, almost, almost!—before there was a quick shutter of blackness and pain and the attendants yanked him back and away—

Late in the night they had him strapped into a straightjacket, in Dr. Smith's office in a chair. His hands were bandaged, his head heavily dressed around his empty eyesocket. He had bitten two of the attendants; they gave him sour looks as they passed the open doorway.

^'...it will be better, and, I'm afraid, legally necessary at this point, to move him to the state facility,' Dr. Smith was saying.

Donald's father looked tired and limp in his suit, looked at Donald briefly and then away.

'I can't believe he did that to himself!' his mother said. She did not look at him, but at Dr. Smith who received her anger. 'Why in God's name did he do that?'