“Oh, I’m great. They cured me. They found a cure.”
If she’s telling the truth then it’s strange, because I’ve never seen her look this bad. I can’t put my finger on why, because she seems as healthy as I’ve ever known anybody to be, not only not sick but radiant with health. For some reason I find myself remembering again those porcelain dolls of my grandmother’s, with their white skin, their black eyes, all of their flawed perfection.
For the first time, I think I understand Jenny. Not this Jenny sitting in front of me, with her neatly-styled hair and her faultless smile, but the Jenny I cared about all those years ago. Suddenly I want to feel sickness writhing in my gut; I want decay and impurity, and fever burning under my skin. More than anything I want to know I’m alive. It occurs to me that this place, this clinic, was never designed for living things to inhabit.
I look at the pristine walls, dizzyingly white like the face of the sun. “Shit,” I say, “it’s all so ugly.”
Jenny only smiles back at me, uncomprehending. “It’s kind of boring, isn’t it? They’ve taken good care of me, though.”
“Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad to hear that.” I cough and scuff my feet, no longer sure how to say what I came to say. Then I realize it’s really very simple. “Listen, I had an interview a couple of days ago, and, well—I have a job. They’re flying me out to Portugal next week, and I really just came by to see how you were and to say goodbye.”
“That’s great. It’s what you always wanted.”
It is, isn’t it? Suddenly I’m not so sure anymore. Still, I’ve done what I came for. Not knowing what to do next, I lean over and kiss Jenny on the cheek. Her skin is astonishingly smooth. My stomach revolts, just for an instant.
“Goodbye,” I say again, and she smiles and waves back as I walk out the door.
Outside, I pause to lean against the wall. My thoughts are a whirlpool, and my breath comes in shudders. “Goodbye, Jenny,” I whisper, one final time. It’s not meant for the stranger in the room beyond, but for that impossibly fragile girl I walked away from. Probably I’m the only one who knows to grieve her passing, but a whispered farewell is all the mourning I can offer. Because I can’t carry her in my head anymore.
I’ve got what I wanted; has Jenny as well? She’s gone through health and found something beyond, something as virulent as any disease. She’s annihilated herself as certainly as any suicide.
I wonder if the doctors realize how she tricked them.
THE SILENCE OF THE ASONU
Ursula K. Le Guin
The silence of the Asonu is proverbial. The first visitors believed that these gracious, gracile people were mute, lacking any language other than that of gesture, expression, and gaze. Later, hearing Asonu children chatter, the visitors suspected that among themselves the adults spoke, keeping silence only with strangers. We know now that the Asonu are not dumb, but that once past early childhood they speak only very rarely, to anyone, under any circumstances. They do not write; and unlike mutes, or monks under vows of silence, they do not use any signs or other devices in place of speaking.
This nearly absolute abstinence from language makes them fascinating.
People who live with animals value the charm of muteness. It can be a real pleasure to know when the cat walks into the room that he won’t mention any of your shortcomings, or that you can tell your grievances to your dog without his repeating them to the people who caused them.
And those who can talk, but don’t, have the great advantage over the rest of us that they never say anything stupid. This may be why we are convinced that if they spoke they would have something wise to say.
Thus there has come to be considerable tourist traffic to the Asonu. Having a strong tradition of hospitality, the Asonu entertain their visitors courteously, though without modifying their own customs. Some people go there simply in order to join the natives in their silence, grateful to spend a few weeks where they do not have to festoon and obscure every human meeting with verbiage. Many such visitors, having been accepted into a household as a paying guest, return year after year, forming bonds of unspoken affection with their quiet hosts.
Others follow their Asonu guides or hosts about, talking to them continually, confiding their whole life stories to them, in rapture at having at last found a listener who won’t interrupt or comment or mention that his cousin had an even larger tumor than that. As such people usually know little Asonu and speak mostly or entirely in their own language, they evidently aren’t worried by the question that vexes some visitors: Since the Asonu don’t talk, do they, in fact, listen?
They certainly hear and understand what is said to them in their own language, since they’re prompt to respond to their children, to indicate directions by gesture to inquiring tourists, and to leave a building at the cry of “Fire!” But the question remains, do they listen to discursive speech and sociable conversation, or do they merely hear it, while keeping silently attentive to something beyond speech? Their amiable and apparently easy manner seems to some observers the placid surface of a deep preoccupation, a constant alertness, like that of a mother who while entertaining her guests or seeing to her husband’s comfort yet is listening every moment for the cry of her baby in another room.
To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.
Some visitors to their world are convinced that the lips of these quiet people are locked upon a knowledge which, in proportion as it is hidden, must be valuable—a spiritual treasure, a speech beyond speech, possibly even that ultimate revelation promised by so many religions, and indeed frequently delivered, but never in a wholly communicable form. The transcendent knowledge of the mystic cannot be expressed in language. It may be that the Asonu avoid language for this very reason. It may be that they keep silence because if they spoke everything of importance would have been said.
To some, the utterances of the Asonu do not seem to be as momentous as one might expect from their rarity. They might even be described as banal. But believers in the Wisdom of the Asonu have followed individuals about for years, waiting for the rare words they speak, writing them down, saving them, studying them, arranging and collating them, finding arcane meanings and numerical correspondences in them, in search of the hidden message.
There is no written form of the Asonu language, and translation of speech is considered to be so uncertain that translatomats aren’t issued to the tourists, most of whom don’t want them anyway. Those who wish to learn Asonu can do so only by listening to and imitating children, who by six or seven years old are already becoming unhappy when asked to talk.
Here are the “Eleven Sayings of the Elder of Isu,” collected over four years by a devotee from Ohio, who had already spent six years learning the language from the children of the Isu Group. Months of silence occurred between most of these statements, and two years between the fifth and sixth.
1. Not there.
2. It is almost ready [or] Be ready for it soon.
3. Unexpected!
4. It will never cease.
5. Yes.
6. When?
7. It is very good.
8. Perhaps.
9. Soon.
10. Hot! [or] Very warm!
11. It will not cease.
The devotee wove these eleven sayings into a coherent spiritual statement or testament which he understood the Elder to have been making, little by little, during the last four years of his life. The Ohio Reading of the Sayings of the Elder of Isu is as follows:
“(1) What we seek is not there in any object or experience of our mortal life. We live among appearances, on
