More Than Human

do us good. When she couldn’t understand, she figured it was her own failure… and there was an almighty lot she didn’t understand and never could. What went right was our success. What went wrong was her mistake. That last year, that was… oh, good.’

‘So?’

‘So I killed her. Listen,’ I said. I felt I had to talk fast. I wasn’t short of time, but I had to get rid of it. ‘I’ll tell you all I know about it. The one day before I killed her. I woke up in the morning and the sheets crackly clean under me, the sunlight coming in through white curtains and bright red-and-blue drapes. There’s a closet full of my clothes -mine, you see; I never had anything that was really mine before – and downstairs Miriam clinking around with breakfast and the twins laughing. Laughing with her, mind you, not just with each other like they always did before.

‘In the next room, Janie moving around, singing, and when I see her, I know her face will shine inside and out. I get up. There’s hot hot water and the toothpaste bites my tongue. The clothes fit me and I go downstairs and they’re all there and I’m glad to see them and they’re glad to see me, and we no sooner get set around the table when Miss Kew comes down and everyone calls out to her at once.

‘And the morning goes by like that, school with a recess, there in the big long living room. The twins with the ends of their tongues stuck out, drawing the alphabet instead of writing it, and then Janie, when it’s time, painting a picture, a real picture of a cow with trees and a yellow fence that goes off into the distance. Here I am lost between the two parts of a quadratic equation, and Miss Kew bending close to help me, and I smell the sachet she has on her clothes. I hold up my head to smell it better, and far away I hear the shuffle and klunk of filled pots going on the stove back in the kitchen.

‘And the afternoon goes by like that, more school and some study and boiling out into the yard, laughing. The twins chasing each other, running on their two feet to get where they want to go; Janie dappling the leaves in her picture, trying to get it just the way Miss Kew says it ought to be. And Baby, he’s got a big play-pen. He don’t move around much any more, he just watches and dribbles some, and gets packed full of food and kept as clean as a new sheet of tinfoil.

‘And supper, and the evening, and Miss Kew reading to us, changing her voice every time someone else talks in the story, reading fast and whispery when it embarrasses her, but reading every word all the same.

‘And I had to go and kill her. And that’s all.’

‘You haven’t said why,’ Stern said.

‘What are you – stupid?’ I yelled.

Stern didn’t say anything. I turned on my belly on the couch and propped up my chin in my hands and looked at him. You never could tell what was going on with him, but I got the idea that he was puzzled.

‘I said why,’ I told him.

‘Not to me.’

I suddenly understood that I was asking too much of him. I said slowly, ‘We all woke up at the same time. We all did what somebody else wanted. We lived through a day someone else’s way, thinking someone else’s thoughts, saying other people’s words. Janie painted someone else’s pictures, Baby didn’t talk to anyone, and we were all happy with it. Now do you see?’

‘Not yet.’

‘God!’ I said. I thought for a while. ‘We didn’t blesh.’

‘Blesh? Oh. But you didn’t after Lone died, either.’

‘That was different. That was like a car running out of gas, but the car’s there – there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just waiting. But after Miss Kew got done with us, the car was taken all to pieces, see?’

It was his turn to think a while. Finally he said, ‘The mind makes us do funny things. Some of them seem completely reasonless, wrong, insane. But the cornerstone of the work we’re doing is this: there’s a chain of solid, unassailable logic in the things we do. Dig deep enough and you find cause and effect as clearly in this field as you do in any other. I said logic, mind; I didn’t say „correctness” or „rightness” or „justice” or anything of the sort. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.

‘When that mind is submerged, working at cross-purposes with the surface mind, then you’re all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you’re pointing at – that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don’t see the logic. I don’t see that regaining that „bleshing” was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable.’

I said desperately, ‘Maybe it wasn’t worth destroying it.’

Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. ‘ It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you’d had before. I don’t see why and neither do you.’

‘How are we going to find out?’

‘Well, let’s get to the most unpleasant part, if you’re up to it.’

I lay down. ‘I’m ready.’

‘All right. Tell me everything that happened just before you killed her.’

I fumbled through that last day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again: it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead.

I said, ‘What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people’s way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet. I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew’s bedroom and killed her.’

‘How?’

‘That’s all there is!’ I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. ‘It was awful dark… it still is. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her.’

‘All right, all right,’ Stern said, ‘I guess there’s no need to get too gruesome about this. You’re – ‘

‘What?’

‘You’re quite strong for your age, aren’t you, Gerard?’

‘I guess so. Strong enough, anyway.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I still don’t see that logic you were talking about.’ I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, hard, once for each word: ‘Why – did – I – have – to -go – and – do – that?’

‘Cut that out,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

‘I ought to get hurt,’ I said.

‘Ah?’ said Stern.

I got up and went to the desk and got some water. ‘What. am I going to do?’

‘Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here.’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘It was only last night. I took her cheque-book. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the bank when it opened. Cashed a cheque for eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That’s all.’

‘Didn’t you have any trouble cashing the cheque?’

‘I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do.’

He gave a surprised grunt.

‘I know what you’re thinking – I couldn’t make Miss Kew do what I wanted.’

‘That’s part of it,’ he admitted.

‘If I had of done that,’ I told him, ‘she wouldn’t of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker – all I made him do was be a banker.’

I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.

‘You killed her,’ he said – and I knew he was changing the subject – ‘and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must have been less valuable to you than the chance to rebuild this thing you used to have with the other kids. And you’re not sure of the value of that.’ He looked up. ‘Does that describe your main trouble?’