Flowers for Algernon

not nearly as attractive as Bernice—but she had been an easy mark for dozens of men who bought her something pretty, or paid her way to the movies. She lived at a boarding house approved for outside work trainees by the Warren

State Home, and was permitted out in the evenings to come to the Center. Twice she hadn't shown up— picked up by men on the way to school—and now she was al­lowed out only with an escort.

'He talks like a big shot now,' she giggled.

'All right,' said Alice, breaking in sharply. 'Class dis­missed. I'll see you all tomorrow night at six.'

'When they were gone, I could see by the way she was slamming her own things into her closet, that she was angry.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I was going to wait for you down­stairs, and then I got curious about the old classroom. My alma mater. I just wanted to look through the window. And before I knew what I was doing I came in. What's bothering you?'

'Nothing—nothing's bothering me.'

'Come on. Your anger is all out of proportion to what's happened. Something's on your mind.'

She slammed down a book she was holding. 'All right. You want to know? You're different. You've changed. And Im not talking about your I.Q. It's your attitude toward people—you're not the same kind of human being —'

'Oh, come on now! Don't—'

'Don't interrupt me!' The real anger in her voice pushed me back. 'I mean it. There was something in you before. I don't know… a warmth, an openness, a kindness that made everyone like you and like to have you around. Now, with all your intelligence and knowledge, there are differences that—'

I couldn't let myself listen. 'What did you expect? Did you think I'd remain a docile pup, wagging my tail and licking the foot that kicks me? Sure, all this has changed me and the way I think about myself. I no longer have to take the kind of crap that people have been hand­ing me all my life.'

'People have not been bad to you.'

'What do you know about it? Listen, the best of them have been smug and patronizing—using me to make themselves superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron.'

After I said it, I knew she was going to take it the wrong way.

'You put me in that category too, I suppose.'

'Don't be absurd. You know damned well I—'

'Of course, in a sense, I guess you're right. Next to you I am rather dull-witted. Nowadays every time we see each other, after I leave you I go home with the miserable feeling that I'm slow and dense about everything. I review things I've said, and come up with all the bright and witty things I should have said, and I feel like kicking myself be­cause I didn't mention them when we were together.'

'That's a common experience.'

'I find myself wanting to impress you in a way I never thought about doing before, but being with you has un­dermined my self-confidence. I question my motives now, about everything I do.'

I tried to get her off the subject, but she kept coming back to it. 'Look, I didn't come here to argue with you,' I finally said. 'Will you let me take you home? I need some­one to talk to.'

'So do I. But these days I can't talk to you. All I can do is listen and nod my head and pretend I understand all about cultural variants, and neo-Boulean mathematics, and post-symbolic logic, and I feel more and more stupid, and when you leave the apartment, I have to stare in the mirror and scream at myself: 'No, you're not growing duller every day! You're not losing your intelligence! You're not getting senile and dull-witted. It's Charlie exploding forward so quickly that it makes it appear as if you're slip­ping backwards.' I say that to myself, Charlie, but when­ ever we meet and you tell me something and look at me in that impatient way, I know you're laughing.

'And when you explain things to me, and I can't re­member them, you think it's because I'm not interested and don't want to take the trouble. But you don't know how I torture myself when you're gone. You don't know the books I've struggled over, the lectures I've sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish. I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to help you and share with you—and now you've shut me out of your life.'

As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.

She was crying silently as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become. She was terrified of me. The ice had broken between us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.

She was right in refusing to torture herself by being with me. We no longer had anything in common. Simple conversation had become strained. And all there was be­tween us now was the embarrassed silence and unsatisfied longing in a darkened room.

'You're very serious,' she said, breaking out of her own mood and looking up at me.

'About us.'

'It shouldn't make you so serious. I don't want to upset you. You're going through a great trial.' She was try­ ing to smile.

'But you did. Only I don't know what to do about it.'

On the way from the bus stop to her apartment, she said, 'I'm not going to the convention with you. I called Professor Nemur this morning and told him. There will be a lot for you to do there. Interesting people—the ex­ citement of the spotlight for a while. I don't want to be in the way—'

'Alice—'

'—and no matter what you say about it now, I know that's how I'm going to feel, so if you don't mind, I'll hang on to my splintering ego—thank you.'

'But you're making more of this than it is. I'm sure if you'll just—'

'You know? You're sure?' She turned and glared at me on the front steps of her apartment building. 'Oh, how in­sufferable you've become. How do you know what I feel? You take liberties with other people's minds. You can't tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel.'

She started inside and then she looked back at me, her voice shaky: 'I'll be here when you get back. I'm just upset, that's all, and I want both of us to have a chance to think this out while we're a good distance apart.'

For the first time in many weeks she didn't ask me in­side. I stared at the closed door with the anger mounting inside me. I wanted to create a scene, to bang on the door, to break it down. I wanted my anger to consume the building.

But as I walked away I felt a kind of simmering, then cooling, and finally a relief. I walked so fast I was drifting along the streets, and the feeling that hit my cheek was a cool breeze out of the summer night. Suddenly free.

I realize now that my feeling for Alice had been mov­ing backward against the current of my learning, from worship, to love, to fondness, to a feeling of gratitude and responsibility. My confused feeling for her had been hold­ ing me back, and I had clung to her out of my fear of being forced out on my own, and cut adrift.

But with the freedom came a sadness. I wanted to be in love with her. I wanted to overcome my emotional and sexual fears, to marry, have children, settle down.

Now it's impossible. I am just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70. And this time we both know it.

June 8

What drives me out of the apartment to prowl through the city? I wander through the streets alone—not the relaxing stroll of a summer night, but the tense hurry to get—where? Down alleyways, looking into doorways, peering into half-shuttered windows, wanting someone to talk to and yet afraid to meet anyone. Up one street, and down another, through the endless labyrinth, hurling myself against the neon cage of the city. Searching... for what?

I met a woman in Central Park. She was sitting on a bench near the lake, with a coat clutched around her de­spite the heat. She smiled and motioned for me to sit be­side her. We looked at the bright skyline on Central Park South, the honeycomb of lighted cells against the black­ness, and I wished I could absorb them all.

Yes, I told her, I was from New York. No, I had never been to Newport News, Virginia. That's where she was