Flowers for Algernon

He peered up at me for the first time since we'd walked into his cubbyhole office. 'You know as well as I do that you don't need to work here any more.'

'Mr. Donner, I've never worked anywhere else.'

'Let's face it. You're not the Charlie who came in here seventeen years ago—not even the same Charlie of four months ago. You haven't talked about it. It's your own af­fair. Maybe a miracle of some kind—who knows? But you've changed into a very smart young man. And operat­ing the dough mixer and delivering packages is no work for a smart young man.'

He was right, of course, but something inside me wanted to make him change his mind.

'You've got to let me stay, Mr. Donner. Give me an-

other chance. You said yourself that you promised Uncle Herman I would have a job here for as long as I needed it. Well, I still need it, Mr. Donner.'

'You don't, Charlie. If you did then I'd tell them I don't care about their delegations and their petitions, and I'd stick up for you against all of them. But as it is now, they're all scared to death of you. I got to think of my own family too.'

'What if they change their minds? Let me try to con­vince them.' I was making it harder for him than he ex­ pected. I knew I should stop, but I couldn't control myself. 'I'll make them understand,' I pleaded.

'All right,' he sighed finally. 'Go ahead, try. But you're only going to hurt yourself.'

As I came out of his office, Frank Reilly and Joe Carp walked by me, and I knew what he had said was true. Hav­ing me around to look at was too much for them. I made them all uncomfortable.

Frank had just picked up a tray of rolls and both he and Joe turned when I called. 'Look, Charlie, I'm busy. Maybe later—'

'No,' I insisted. 'Now—right now. Both of you have been avoiding me. Why?'

Frank, the fast talker, the lathes' man, the arranger, studied me for a moment and then set the tray down on the table. 'Why? I'll tell you why. Because all of a sudden you're a big shot, a know-it-all, a brain! Now you're a reg­ular whiz kid, an egghead. Always with a book—always with all the answers. 'Well, I'll tell you something. You think you're better than the rest of us here? Okay, go some­place else.'

'But what did I do to you?'

'What did he do? Hear that, Joe? I'll tell you what you did, Mister Gordon. You come pushing in here with your ideas and suggestions and make the rest of us all look like a bunch of dopes. But I'll tell you something. To me you're still a moron. Maybe I don't understand some of them big words or the names of the books, but I'm as good as you are—better even.'

'Yeah.' Joe nodded, turning to emphasize the point to Gimpy who had just come up behind him.

'I'm not asking you to be my friends,' I said, 'or have anything to do with me. Just let me keep my job. Mr. Donner says it's up to you.'

Gimpy glared at me and then shook his head in dis­gust. 'You got a nerve,' he shouted. 'You can go to hell!' Then he turned and limped off heavily.

And so it went. Most of them felt the way Joe and Frank and Gimpy did. It had been all right as long they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.

Fanny Birden was the only one who didn't think I should be forced to leave, and despite their pressure and threats, she had been the only one not to sign the petition.

'Which don't mean to say,' she remarked, 'that I don't think there's something mighty strange about you, Charlie. The way you've changed! I don't know. You used to be a good, dependable man—ordinary, not too bright maybe, but honest—and who knows what you done to yourself to get so smart all of a sudden. Like everybody's been saying—it ain't right.'

'But what's wrong with a person wanting to be more intelligent, to acquire knowledge, and understand himself and the world?'

'If you'd read your Bible, Charlie, you'd know that it's not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord in the first place. The fruit of that tree was forbidden to man. Charlie, if you done anything you wasn't supposed to—you know, like with the devil or something—maybe it ain't too late to get out of it. Maybe you could go back to being the good simple man you was before.'

'There's no going back, Fanny. I haven't done any­thing wrong. I'm like a man born blind who has been given a chance to see light. That can't be sinful. Soon there'll be millions like me all over the world. Science can do it, Fanny.'

She stared down at the bride and groom on the wed­ding cake she was decorating and I could see her lips barely move as she whispered: 'It was evil when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It was evil when they saw they was naked, and learned about lust and shame. And they was driven out of Paradise and the gates was closed to them. If not for that none of us would have to grow old and be sick and the.'

There was nothing more to say, to her or to the rest of them. None of them would look into my eyes. I can still feel the hostility. Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? 'What in God's name did they want of me?

This intelligence has driven a wedge between me and all the people I knew and loved, driven me out of the bak­ery. Now, I'm more alone than ever before. I wonder what would happen if they put Algernon back in the big cage with some of the other mice. Would they turn against him?

May 25

So this is how a person can come to despise himself—knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop. Against my will I found myself drawn to Alice's apartment. She was surprised but she let me in.

'You're soaked. The water is streaming down your face.'

'It's raining. Good for the flowers.'

'Come on in. Let me get you a towel. You'll catch pneumonia.'

'You're the only one I can talk to,' I said. 'Let me stay.'

'I've got a pot of fresh coffee on the stove. Go ahead and dry yourself and then we can talk'

I looked around while she went to get the coffee. It was the first time I had ever been inside her apartment. I felt a sense of pleasure, but there was something disturbing about the room.

Everything was neat. The porcelain figurines were in a straight line on the window-ledge, all facing the same way. And the throw-pillows on the sofa hadn't been thrown at all, but were regularly spaced on the clear plastic covers that protected the upholstery. Two of the end tables had magazines, neatly stacked so that the titles were clearly vis­ible. On one table: The Reporter, The Saturday Review, The New Yorker; on the other: Mademoiselle, House Beautiful, and Reader's Digest.

On the far wall, across from the sofa, hung an ornately framed reproduction of Picasso's 'Mother and Child,' and directly opposite, above the sofa, was a painting of a dash­ing Renaissance courtier, masked, sword in hand, protect­ing a frightened, pink-cheeked maiden. Taken all together, it was wrong. As if Alice couldn't make up her mind who she was and which world she wanted to live in.

'You haven't been to the lab for a few days,' she called from the kitchen. 'Professor Nemur is worried about you.'

'I couldn't face them,' I said. 'I know there's no reason for me to be ashamed, but it's an empty feeling not going in to work every day—not seeing the shop, the ovens, the people. It's too much. Last night and the night before, I had nightmares of drowning.'

She set the tray in the center of the coffee table—the napkins folded into triangles, and the cookies laid out in a circular display pattern. 'You mustn't take it so hard, Char­lie. It has nothing to do with you.'

'It doesn't help to tell myself that. Those people—for all these years—were my family. It was like being thrown out of my own home.'

'That's just it,' she said. 'This has become a symbolic repetition of experiences you had as a child. Being rejected by your parents… being sent away…'

'Oh, Christ! Never mind giving it a nice neat label. What matters is that before I got involved in this experi­ ment I had friends, people who cared for me. Now I'm afraid...'