“I suppose she is.”
“And as for Walter…” The groundskeeper cast a glance at the grave half-filled with dark, damp soil. “Well, maybe he’s better off, too.”
This was the fellow’s first concession to sentiment, and it disappointed Cray. “Maybe so,” he said curtly, and then he left the two men to their work.
Walter was not better off. Walter was dead, and Cray saw no honor in death, no cheer to be found there.
Certainly Walter had not wanted to die. He would have pleaded for his life, if he’d had the wits to do so, on the night Cray killed him.
Cray had waited three days to carry out this necessary task. If Walter had expired immediately after Kaylie’s arrest, questions might have been raised. By Friday, Cray had felt safe enough to act.
He’d made his preparations in the evening. Come midnight, he had visited Walter in his room. At that hour the administration building had been largely empty, and no one had seen him enter.
Even so, he had carefully shut the door behind him, and had kept his voice low….
“Hello, Walter,” Cray said.
Walter, still awake with a single lamp lit, was sulking on the edge of his fold-out sofa. He looked up with a guilty start when Cray entered.
“Hi, Dr. Cray,” he answered softly, a fearful flutter in his voice.
“You didn’t come to work today, or for the past two days. You hardly even leave this room anymore.”
Walter was silent.
“I hear you’ve been skipping meals at the commissary.”
“Not hungry.”
“Is that it? Or is it that you’ve been afraid to come out and face me?”
No answer.
“You did cause an awful lot of trouble Tuesday night.”
“I know it, Dr. Cray,” Walter agreed morosely. Then, as a plaintive afterthought: “I was just trying to help.”
“Of course you were. But don’t you see, Walter, that you can’t help anybody by thinking for yourself? Your brain is all muddled. What comes out of it is so much goop, of no value to anyone.”
“Kaylie’s dangerous,” Walter muttered. “She could hurt you. I didn’t want you getting hurt.”
“Yes, well, you needn’t worry about Kaylie anymore.”
Walter lifted his head in surprise, showing his first, faintly hopeful smile. “Is she… dead?”
“Why, no. She’s our guest. Hadn’t you heard?”
“I haven’t been talking to anybody.”
“I see.” Cray had suspected as much, but he was pleased to obtain confirmation of this fact. “Well, Kaylie is staying with us now, locked up tight.”
“So you’re helping her get better?”
“Oh, I’m helping her, all right. But we’re not through talking about you, Walter.”
“I won’t do it again, Dr. Cray.”
“Won’t do what again? Try to kill Kaylie? Follow me when I go out for a drive? Say too much to the wrong people, as you almost did on Tuesday night?”
Walter was confused by the fusillade of questions. “I–I won’t do any of it anymore.”
“But you will. Oh, not right away. You’re too badly cowed at the moment, too humiliated even to emerge from your room for more than one meal a day. But eventually your shame will ebb. You’ll be back to your old self again, won’t you? But not quite your old self. You’ll be different. You’ll have changed.”
“I… I haven’t… I didn’t…”
“Oh, yes. You’ve changed, whether you know it or not. You’ve acquired a taste of independence. You know how it feels to act on your own initiative. After all these years of doing what you’re told, running errands on command, eating at assigned times — after all that, you’ve finally discovered your glorious ego.”
“I have?”
“It’s remarkable, really. On your own, you’ve retraced the course of human evolution over the past several thousand years. Have you read the Iliad, Walter? Oh, of course you haven’t. It hasn’t got Curious George in it, so how could you? But if you had read it, you’d know that the Greeks of that period possessed no concept of an integrated person. Limbs and breath and blood, yes — but not a person, a totality, moved by a single will. The arm tensed, or the breath came fast and shallow, or the blood pulsed quicker in the veins, but where was the unique, conscious personality, the mind and self that were the unifying principle of it all? There was no person, not in the modern sense. Imagine living with no notion of a self. But you don’t have to imagine it, do you?”
Walter blinked, plain bewilderment showing on his face.
“Then later,” Cray went on as if he’d heard an answer, “came the more sophisticated Greeks — Sappho the poetess, Archilochus the warrior. They discerned a will in themselves, a will to love or fight. What a find this was! They glorified their newfound will, and subsequent Greeks built avidly on this discovery, until you hear of an inscription on the Delphic oracle’s temple that read simply, Know thyself. A platitude now, but originally a new and dizzying insight. Ever since that day, poor humanity has been striving to know itself, to analyze and organize and prioritize its endlessly fascinating inner life. Today we have built a great, towering edifice of self, a skyscraper of Babel, and we worship at its cornerstones, while neglecting and forgetting and denying what animals we really are. Denying the primal truth for the sake of an ever more elaborate illusion, a game of words, abstractions, superficialities. We’ve cut ourselves off from our true nature, from the instincts that really move us. We deny the earth that made us, while striving after a divinity that doesn’t exist.”
Cray allowed himself a smile, a kindly smile directed at the man who had been, in some way, his friend.
“Now you’ve become one of us, Walter. You’ve become a person with a will and a mind and all the tormented conflict and narrow self-absorption attendant on such things. You’ve arrived, Walter. You’re a man of the modern world at last. Congratulations.”
Walter, dazed under this onslaught, comprehending none of it, merely nodded in stupid gratitude. “Thank you, Dr. Cray.”
Cray laughed. Poor Walter.
“The point is,” Cray said softly, “you’re not what you once were. You’ve become unreliable, a random variable, capable of disrupting all the careful equations of my life.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Walter said with the perfect genuineness of a child.
Cray sat on the couch, comfortingly close to the huge, stoop-shouldered man. “Will you take your medicine?”
Walter blinked. “I always do.”
“No, this is new medicine. It’s used only in very special cases, like yours.”
“I’ll take it, Dr. Cray.”
“You haven’t even asked me what it is.”