The Spectral Link (6 page)

I could see the same thing in people that I did in the flimsy material world, this junkyard of cast-off ectoplasm. They didn’t meet expectations either, though, as I said, no one yet has been able to say definitely who or what we are. And I don’t think anyone will ever be able to do so. I don’t think they want to. What I do think they want is to say that humans, real humans, are this and that and the other thing—that there are millions of qualities humans have that nothing else has, and they say all this to keep us confused, to keep themselves confused, about what humans really are, except that they’re not small people. But now I was fixated on the half-smalls. Now my sensibility, my special instinct, had become sufficiently honed to discern who was what. Not that I expected any consolation from such knowledge—it was simply something to do while I decided what to do with myself.

At first, as I walked around town during the summer after I stopped receiving letters from my friend, I wasn’t sure exactly how my sensibility was functioning. I would get a feeling, like a tingling inside me, when I saw certain people strolling down the sidewalk or sitting at picnic tables outside the frozen custard stand that did land-office business throughout the summer months. I’m sure you get the picture, Doc. It was show time and nothing but. No doubt some clickety-clack version of it was being enacted by the smalls, as I was now with some confidence able to imagine after beholding one of their own towns in its construction stage, a poor excuse for even the crummiest human town, if one wants to get into degrees of crumminess, that is.

All things considered, my wits were in relatively fair working order, and my sensibility was becoming more and more sharply attuned. Occasionally, the tingling sensation I felt in the proximity of certain persons caught me off guard and pierced my spine with anxiety, but for the most part I was in control. Within the span of about a week, I not only felt something about those people but also began to see little things about them, things you wouldn’t notice without an exacting gaze. After my confrontation with the small people and detecting the smoothness of their faces, which were bereft of the character bestowed by time, unwrinkled and unworn, I saw a family resemblance in the same people who set off that tingling inside me. I wished my friend could have been there, because I was sure he would have seen the same thing about them—that they were halfers.

Some days I’d walk from one end of town to the other, and I’d pick out the real people from the half-small people. As I passed by each person I would check off their identities in my mind—halfer, real, halfer, real, and so on. Mr. So-and-so—halfer. The old woman who walks her dog in the park every day—real. Schoolteachers—halfers every one. Cops, too, all halfers, which made me think of my friend’s family and the investigating officers who found the literature under his father’s workshop table. The girl who sat next to me in math class—real. I was glad about that. The middle-aged lady in the window at the beauty shop—everyone thought she had a facelift done, but she was a halfer. With children it was more of a challenge sorting out the real ones from the halfers. Most of them I let pass as real. There was one group of kids, though, all spindly specimens with empty stares. They had to be half-smalls.

All told, I judged about half the people in town as real and half as halfers. I had gotten to be quite proficient at spotting our citizens as one or the other—too good, in the end. I really should have shut off my thoughts sometimes, but I couldn’t do that.

***

It was Saturday, and my dad was off work for the weekend. My family always barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs on those days and ate them together around a plastic table in the backyard. We don’t tend to see our parents the way we do others. We’re too close to them. Even if they make you miserable and call you a shameful little bigot, they’re still your parents—special circumstances notwithstanding. But after all the time I spent around town separating the real people from the half-smalls, I scrutinized everyone the same. More to the point, I felt that tingling inside me. Being with both my mother and father for an extended period of time on a Saturday afternoon, and sitting with them around a plastic table in the backyard, I was tingling like mad. My father was smiling slightly and staring with concentration as he always did. But I never noticed that he was really staring at nothing in particular—that he was more or less gawking with bottomless eyes. And though the sun was shining on my mother’s smooth face, her big eyes weren’t squinting. Furthermore, they didn’t look right or left, up or down. They were just big eyes like a big doll would have. The longer I sat with my parents eating hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad with no egg whites, because from the first time I ate potato salad with egg whites I refused to eat it again that way, the more I tingled inside. My parents did what they had to do in order to be real parents to me. But we weren’t biologically related, as I’m sure it says in your file on me. I was adopted as an infant, and now I knew that I was only a prop, something to aid them in not being found out for what they were.

Before they told me, I already knew somehow that I was adopted. And I was never happy about that. But on that Saturday as I sat eating dinner with my parents around a plastic table, I praised whatever there was to praise that I was adopted, or else I would have been a halfer, too, if in fact that’s the way it works. Nevertheless, I was pleased not to be their real offspring. I couldn’t be sure, of course, if reals could give birth to halfers or the other way around, since I didn’t know how the spectral link between the small people and the real people worked. My friend was taken from me before I could learn more about that, and maybe about other things. I hated that—I hated it with all my being. And what happened, as I mentioned, was that all my hate for the small people transferred to the half-smalls. Now I wondered if the reason for that transference wasn’t due to my subliminal recognition of having parents who belonged to that weird species.

Retrospectively, it made all the sense in this clockwork world that my father and mother were halfers—the way they reproached me so often about being a shameful little bigot when in truth I was not a bigot but a real person who was afraid of the small people and couldn’t accept the arrangement the big world had with them. Maybe real parents would have understood that, I don’t know. I wanted to think so. I wanted to think that there was something sensible, or at least something of marginal value about the tick-tock world I had been born into. But the two halfers sitting with me at that plastic table only berated me as a shameful little bigot, certainly because they wanted to stifle my sensitivity to how things were in the world at its deepest level and to muddle my brain as I came of age, going through all the adjustments in the process so that I could be presented in company—that is, so that I would be a sightless moron like everyone else, everyone except people like the only friend I ever had in my life. In a split-second, as I sat munching my hamburger or hot dog and watching my mother and father that day, I was hopelessly possessed by hatred for them.

That night I lay awake in my bed for a long time, earnestly trying to arrive at some way to live with the household status quo, just as real humans had arranged at some time in the past to live with the small people, though no book I could find would pinpoint when that was or how it was done. But there was no way I could do that—no way at all.

It must have been around the middle of the night—I didn’t plan a specific time—when I entered my mother and father’s bedroom. They were lying on their backs in bed, the moonlight glowing on my father’s slightly smiling face and concentrating stare as well as on my mother’s smooth face and big eyes, which were open. Both their eyes were open. I don’t know why. Maybe they didn’t sleep. It wasn’t as if I was the sort of person to peek into his parents’ bedroom to see what they were doing.

“Dad, Mom,” I said, just to get their attention. They didn’t even sit up in bed, though. Maybe they were sleeping, in their own way. “Listen,” I continued. “I want to tell you something. What I want to tell you is…” Then, with all the lung power I could summon, I screamed: “I’m a shameful little bigot. I hate the small people. I hate them for all I’m worth. But more than I hate the small people, I hate you.”

Then I jumped on the bed and was all over them with the knives I’d gotten from the kitchen.
Push, push, push. Chop, chop, chop.
They didn’t make a sound the whole time. I can tell you one thing—halfers aren’t soft like the smalls. I really had to work on those things that called themselves my parents.

***

I wasn’t exactly amazed that I never saw the inside of a courtroom, knowing as I did what I knew. I didn’t know, however, what would ensue in the aftermath of my deed—that I would be locked up in this place. Whatever it is, it isn’t a prison, not with the superlative educational facilities you’ve provided, allowing my mind and sensibility to flourish. If our positions were reversed, that would be my scheme—cultivate me like a plant, breed me into something that could express its view of the world at its deepest level. You were ready for me from the very first, so I have to assume I’m not the only one to do what I did, and for the reason I did it. That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor? But I’ve been here so long. How many more doctors must I see who want to hear my story? Are you in training or something? I’m as sane as your shoes, we both know that, even though I should have gone mad long ago from my dreams alone. Why can’t we make a deal, come to an arrangement? I’m practically an old man. My coming of age came and went. I’d kill myself if I thought you’d let me. That’s not what you want, though, is it? Could you please give me an answer just once?

Everything is such a mystery with you people—halfers I used to think, but I don’t know anymore. I lost my instinct for that the moment I stepped into this place. Did you do that? And what about the tingling? That hasn’t happened in who knows how long. It would be nice to see a clock or a calendar every so often. Don’t you care about time, whatever you are? How about space, existence, all the commotion of reality? I’ve known it was all just a preposterous mess for ages now. I also learned that I should be on the outside, and the rest of this ludicrous world, or most of it, should be in here for study and rehabilitation, adjustment and readjustment, if that’s the point. What are you trying to accomplish? Whatever it is, you seem to be doing a terrible job of it. Is everything still as crummy as I remember it? Your world, whichever one it may have been, was an offense to my eyes. And it didn’t have to be that way. But maybe that’s the way you wanted it—a nightmare from morning stool to bedtime stories.

Oh, here they come—the big boys. You can tell them to take their hands off me. Big boys with big hands. But are they really big, or only half big? I believe an autopsy could establish the facts, if you’d allow me the pleasure. My parents were half-smalls. The alignment of their bones was human enough, but their organs seemed all of a piece. It could have been they were starting to convert, I don’t know. So what’s inside of the small people, Doctor? My guess is that they’re composed of some doughy substance inside and out—a flabby clay that can be molded into any form, having no identity of its own. Is this really our world, the real world, or is it theirs? Did the right hand of evolution know what the left hand was doing? And what about the spectral link? I have my theories. I’ve had lots of time to think about that, for what it’s worth—thinking. Give me a hint, something to mull over. I just need a speck of hope to keep me from going to pieces—a little truth to hang onto. Answer me, Doctor, before I’m dragged off. Who are you? What are you? Answer me. For the love of all that is real—Who am I? What am I?