A Saucer of Loneliness (3 page)

They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn’t the same. They’d cut a lot of chips and pieces out of the saucer and,
besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that and for once she told them.

“It’s empty now,” she said.

The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, “Listen, I think the way they’ve been treating you stinks. Now get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out
why
you won’t tell what the saucer said. I don’t want to know what it said and I’ll never ask you. I don’t even want you to tell me. Let’s just find out why you’re keeping it a secret.”

Finding out why turned out to be hours of just talking about having pneumonia and the flowerpot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wine glass in both hands and peeping over it at some man.

And one day she told him why she wouldn’t say about the saucer, just the way it came to her: “Because it was talking to
me
, and it’s just nobody else’s business.”

She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own.

He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. “I have no business saying this, but they’re going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don’t let ’em get your goat. You have a right to own something.”

He got up and swore and left.

First a man came and talked to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we are, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if the Earth wasn’t attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook his finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working
for
the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man that was defending her at the trial.

The jury found her guilty of contempt of court and the judge
recited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in jail for a few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose.

That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant, and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much that Mom didn’t want her back home. Mom was drunk most of the time and sometimes used to tear up the whole neighborhood, but all the same she had very special ideas about being respectable, and being in the papers all the time for spying was not her idea of being decent. So she put her maiden name on the mailbox downstairs and told her daughter not to live there any more.

At the restaurant she met a man who asked her for a date. The first time. She spent every cent she had on a red handbag to go with her red shoes. They weren’t the same shade, but anyway they were both red. They went to the movies and afterward he didn’t try to kiss her or anything, he just tried to find out what the flying saucer told her. She didn’t say anything. She went home and cried all night.

Then some men sat in a booth talking and they shut up and glared at her every time she came past. They spoke to the boss, and he came and told her that they were electronics engineers working for the government and they were afraid to talk shop while she was around—wasn’t she some sort of spy or something? So she got fired.

Once she saw her name on a juke box. She put in a nickel and punched that number, and the record was all about “the flyin’ saucer came down one day, and taught her a brand new way to play, and what it was I will not say, but she took me out of this world.” And while she was listening to it, someone in the juke-joint recognized her and called her by name. Four of them followed her home and she had to block the door shut.

Sometimes she’d be all right for months on end, and then someone would ask for a date. Three times out of five, she and the date were followed. Once the man she was with arrested the man who was tailing them. Twice the man who was tailing them arrested the man she was with. Five times out of five, the date would try to find out about the saucer. Sometimes she would go out with someone and
pretend that it was a real date, but she wasn’t very good at it.

So she moved to the shore and got a job cleaning at night in offices and stores. There weren’t many to clean, but that just meant there weren’t many people to remember her face from the papers. Like clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag it all out again in a magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone saw a headlight on a mountain or a light on a weather balloon it had to be a flying saucer, and there had to be some tired quip about the saucer wanting to tell secrets. Then for two or three weeks she’d stay off the streets in the daytime.

Once she thought she had it whipped. People didn’t want her, so she began reading. The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies—all about the pretty ones who really own the world. So she learned things—animals, trees. A lousy little chipmunk caught in a wire fence bit her. The animals didn’t want her. The trees didn’t care.

Then she hit on the idea of the bottles. She got all the bottles she could and wrote on papers which she corked into the bottles. She’d tramp miles up and down the beaches and throw the bottles out as far as she could. She knew that if the right person found one, it would give that person the only thing in the world that would help. Those bottles kept her going for three solid years. Everyone’s got to have a secret little something he does.

And at last the time came when it was no use any more. You can go on trying to help someone who
maybe
exists; but soon you can’t pretend there is such a person any more. And that’s it. The end.

“Are you cold?” I asked when she was through telling me. The surf was quieter and the shadows longer.

“No,” she answered from the shadows. Suddenly she said, “Did you think I was mad at you because you saw me without my clothes?”

“Why shouldn’t you be?”

“You know, I don’t care? I wouldn’t have wanted … wanted you to see me even in a ball gown or overalls. You can’t cover up my carcass. It shows; it’s there whatever. I just didn’t want you to
see
me. At all.”

“Me, or anyone?”

She hesitated. “You.”

I got up and stretched and walked a little, thinking. “Didn’t the F.B.I. try to stop you throwing those bottles?”

“Oh, sure. They spent I don’t know how much taxpayers’ money gathering ’em up. They still make a spot check every once in a while. They’re getting tired of it, though. All the writing in the bottles is the same.” She laughed. I didn’t know she could.

“What’s funny?”

“All of ’em—judges, jailers, juke-boxes—people. Do you know it wouldn’t have saved me a minute’s trouble if I’d told ’em the whole thing at the very beginning?”

“No?”

“No. They wouldn’t have believed me. What they wanted was a new weapon. Super-science from a super-race, to slap hell out of the super-race if they ever got a chance, or out of our own if they don’t. All those brains,” she breathed, with more wonder than scorn, “all that brass. They think ‘super-race’ and it comes out ‘super-science.’ Don’t they ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings, too—super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?” She paused. “Isn’t it time you asked me what the saucer said?”

“I’ll tell you,” I blurted.

“Dear Jesus,” she said devoutly, and began to weep. “And how is it addressed?”

“To the loneliest one
 …”

“How did you know?” she whispered.

“It’s what you put in the bottles, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Whenever it gets to be too much, that no one
cares, that no one ever did … you throw a bottle into the sea, and out goes a part of your own loneliness. You sit and think of someone somewhere finding it … learning for the first time that the worst there is can be understood.”

The moon was setting and the surf was hushed. We looked up and out to the stars. She said, “We don’t know what loneliness is like. People thought the saucer was a saucer, but it wasn’t. It was a bottle with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean to cross—all of space—and not much chance of finding anybody. Loneliness? We don’t know loneliness.”

When I could, I asked her why she had tried to kill herself.

“I’ve had it good,” she said, “with what the saucer told me. I wanted to … pay back. I was bad enough to be helped; I had to know I was good enough to help. No one wants me? Fine. But don’t tell me no one, anywhere, wants my help. I can’t stand that.”

I took a deep breath. “I found one of your bottles two years ago. I’ve been looking for you ever since. Tide charts, current tables, maps and … wandering. I heard some talk about you and the bottles hereabouts. Someone told me you’d quit doing it, you’d taken to wandering the dunes at night. I knew why. I ran all the way.”

I needed another breath now. “I got a club foot. I think right, but the words don’t come out of my mouth the way they’re inside my head. I have this nose. I never had a woman. Nobody ever wanted to hire me to work where they’d have to look at me. You’re beautiful,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”

She said nothing, but it was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practiced moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

“D
IG THERE
,”
SAID
O
SSER, POINTING
.

The black-browed man pulled back. “Why?”

“We must dig deep to build high, and we are going to build high.”

“Why?” the man asked again.

“To keep the enemy out.”

“There are no enemies.”

Osser laughed bitterly. “I’ll have enemies.”

“Why?”

Osser came to him. “Because I’m going to pick up this village and shake it until it wakes up. And if it won’t wake up, I’ll keep shaking until I break its back and it dies. Dig.”

“I don’t see why,” said the man doggedly.

Osser looked at the golden backs of his hands, turned them over, watched them closing. He raised his eyes to the other.

“This is why,” he said.

His right fist tore the man’s cheek. His left turned the man’s breath to a bullet which exploded as it left him. He huddled on the ground, unable to exhale, inhaling in small, heavy, tearing sobs. His eyes opened and he looked up at Osser. He could not speak, but his eyes did; and through shock and pain all they said was “Why?”

“You want reasons,” Osser said, when he felt the man could hear him. “You want reasons—all of you. You see both sides of every question and you weigh and balance and cancel yourselves out. I want an end to reason. I want things done.”

He bent to lift the bearded man to his feet. Osser stood half a head taller and his shoulders were as full and smooth as the bottoms of bowls. Golden hairs shifted and glinted on his forearms as he moved his fingers and the great cords tensed and valleyed. He lifted the man clear of the ground and set him easily on his feet and
held him until he was sure of his balance.

“You don’t understand me, do you?”

The man shook his head weakly.

“Don’t try. You’ll dig more if you don’t try.” He clapped the handle of the shovel into the man’s hand and picked up a mattock. “Dig,” he said, and the man began to dig.

Osser smiled when the man turned to work, arched his nostrils and drew the warm clean air into his lungs. He liked the sunlight now, the morning smell of the turned soil, the work he had to do and the idea itself of working.

Standing so, with his head raised, he saw a flash of bright yellow, the turn of a tanned face. Just a glimpse, and she was gone.

For a moment he tensed, frowning. If she had seen him she would be off to clatter the story of it to the whole village. Then he smiled. Let her. Let them all know. They must, sooner or later. Let them try to stop him.

He laughed, gripped his mattock, and the sod flew. So Jubilith saw fit to watch him, did she?

He laughed again. Work now, Juby later. In time he would have everything.

Everything.

The village street wound and wandered and from time to time divided and rejoined itself, for each house was built on a man’s whim—near, far, high, small, separate, turned to or away. What did not harmonize contrasted well, and over all it was a pleasing place to walk.

Before a shop a wood-cobbler sat, gouging out sabots; and he was next door to the old leatherworker who cunningly wove immortal belts of-square-knotted rawhide. Then a house, and another, and a cabin; a space of green where children played; and the skeleton of a new building where a man, his apron pockets full of hardwood pegs, worked knowledgeably with a heavy mallet.

The cobbler, the leatherworker, the children and the builder all stopped to watch Jubilith because she was beautiful and because she ran. When she was by, they each saw the others watching, and each smiled and waved and laughed a little, though nothing was said.

A puppy lolloped along after her, three legs deft, the fourth in the way. Had it been frightened, it would not have run, and had Jubilith spoken to it, it would have followed wherever she went. But she ignored it, even when it barked its small soprano bark, so it curved away from her, pretending it had been going somewhere else anyway, and then it sat and puffed and looked after her sadly.

Past the smithy with its shadowed, glowing heart she ran; past the gristmill with its wonderful wheel, taking and yielding with its heavy cupped hands. A boy struck his hoop and it rolled across her path. Without breaking stride, she leaped high over it and ran on, and the glass-blower’s lips burst away from his pipe, for a man can smile or blow glass, but not both at the same time.