Beauty and menace.
The sensation passed and he wondered at himself. He was seeing phantoms, focusing too much inward.
“Is it your shoulder?” Jenny asked.
“It'll be all right,” Dasein said.
He followed her down off the truck, wishing he could let himself go, become a laughing part of this group. They were having fun hereâcarrying boxes to tables set under the trees, preparing fires in rock pits. Some wandered off into the trees, returned in bathing suits.
Jenny had attached herself to a group laying out picnic lunches on the tables. Presently, she joined the scampering movement toward the water, shedding her dress to reveal an orange one-piece bathing suit beneath. She was a naiad, limbs flashing brown and lithe in the sun.
She waved to him from the float, shouted: “See you in a minute, darling!”
Dasein watched her dive into the lake with a feeling she was suddenly lost to him. He experienced an intense jealousy,
imagining himself a decrepit old man surrounded by playing children, unable to join them in their happiness.
He looked around at lake and verging woods. There was a breeze across the water. The breeze had summer in it, fragrant with grass and evergreen needles. He wished suddenly for some drink with which to salute this breeze and day, some potion that would make him a part of the scene.
Slowly, Dasein walked down to the floating walk and out onto the boards. There were fleece clouds in the sky, and as he stared down at the water, he saw those clouds floating on the lake bottom. Waves shattered the illusion. Jenny swam up, leaned her elbows on the boards. Her face all dripping water, smiling, had never seemed more lovely.
“Darling, why don't you come out to the float and sun yourself while we swim?” she asked.
“All right,” he said. “Maybe I can scull around in one of those boats.”
“You go easy on that shoulder or I'll tell Uncle Larry,” she said. She kicked away from the walk, swam lazily out toward the float.
Dasein followed, making his way through dripping swimmers running up and down the walk. It struck him as odd how this crowd saw him but didn't see him. They made way for him, but never looked at him. They shouted across him, but not to him.
He moved to the first boat in the line, untied its painter and prepared to get into it. Jenny was swimming some fifty feet out, a slow, smooth crawl that took her diagonally away from the float.
Dasein stood up, moved to step into the boat. As he stepped, something pushed him in the middle of the back. His foot kicked the gunwale, thrusting the boat out into the water. He saw he was going to fall into the lake, thought:
Oh, damn! I'll get my clothes all wet
. The stern of the boat was turning toward him and he thought of trying to reach for it, but his left foot on the dock slipped in a patch of wet wood. Dasein found himself turning sideways without any control over his motion.
The edge of the boat, seen out of the corner of an eye, rushed toward him. He tried to reach up, but that was the side of his bad shoulder. His arm wouldn't move fast enough.
There was an explosion of blackness in his head. Dasein felt himself sinking into an enveloping cold, soundless, all dark and inviting.
A part of his mind screamed:
Beauty! Menace!
He thought that an odd combination.
There was a distant ache in his lungs and it was coldâterrifyingly cold. He felt pressure ⦠and the cold ⦠all distant and unimportant.
I'm drowning,
he thought.
It was an unexciting thoughtâsomething that concerned another person.
They won't see me ⦠and I'll drown.
The cold grew more immediateâwet.
Something turned him violently.
Still, everything remained remoteâall happening to that
other
being which he knew to be himself, but which could not concern him.
Jenny's voice broke on him like a thunderclap: “Help me! Please! Someone help me! Oh, God! Won't someone help me? I love him! Please help me!”
He grew aware suddenly of other hands, other voices.
“All right, Jen. We've got him.”
“Please save him!” Her voice carried a sobbing intensity.
Dasein felt himself draped across something hard that pressed into his abdomen. Warmth gushed from his mouth. There was a blinding, terrible pain in his chest.
Abruptly, he began to coughâgasping, the pain tearing at his throat and bronchia.
“He swallowed a lot of water.” It was a man's voice, almost vacant of emotion.
Jenny's voice came pleading beside Dasein's ear: “Is he breathing? Please don't let anything happen to him.” Dasein felt wetness on his neck, and still Jenny's voice pleading there beside him: “I love him. Please save him.”
That same unemotional male voice answered: “We understand, Jenny.”
And another voice, husky, feminine: “There's only one thing to do, of course.”
“We're doing it!” Jenny screamed. “Don't you understand?”
Even as hands picked Dasein up, began carrying him, Dasein wondered:
Doing what?
His coughing had subsided, but the pain in his chest remained. It hurt when he breathed.
Presently, there was grass under his back. Something warm and confining was wrapped around him. It was an oddly womblike sensation.
Dasein opened his eyes, found himself staring up at Jenny, her dark hair framed by blue sky. She managed a trembling smile.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered.
Hands lifted his shoulders. Jenny's face went away. A cup full of steaming brown liquid was pressed against his lips. Dasein experienced the almost overpowering smell of Jaspers, felt hot coffee burn down his throat.
Immediately, a sense of warmth and well-being began to seep outward through his body. The cup was pulled away, returned when he moved his mouth toward it.
Someone laughed, said something that Dasein couldn't quite catch. It sounded like, “Take a full load.” But that didn't make sense and he rejected it.
The hands eased him gently back to the grass. That vacant masculine voice said: “Keep him warm and quiet for awhile. He's okay.”
Jenny's face returned. Her hand stroked his head.
“Oh, darling,” she said. “I looked at the dock and you were gone. I didn't see you fall, but I knew. And no one was paying any attention. It took me so long to get there. Oh, your poor head. Such a bruise.”
Dasein felt the throbbing then as though her words had turned it onâa pulsing ache at the temple and across his ear.
A blow like thatâshouldn't I have X-rays?
he wondered.
How do they know I haven't a fractured skull ⦠or concussion?
“Cal says the boat must've been tipping away from you as you hit it,” Jenny said. “I don't think you've broken anything.”
Pain shot through him as she touched the bruise.
“It's just a bad bruise.”
Just a bad bruise!
he thought. He was filled with abrupt anger at her. How could they be so casual?
Still, that feeling of warmth spread out through him, and he
thought:
Of course I'm all right. I'm young, healthy. I'll heal. And I have Jenny to protect me. She loves me.
Something about this train of thought struck him as profoundly wrong then. He blinked. As though that were the creative mechanism, his vision blurred, resolved into flashes of gemlike light, red, orange, yellow, brown, green, violet, blue light with offshooting crystal shards.
The light resolved into a membranous inward sensation, a perception of perception that reached out through his mind. He
saw
then strong pulses of his own heart, the tender brain sheathing that rose and fell with the pulse, the damaged areaâjust a bruise, skull intact.
Dasein grew aware then why the Santarogans showed so little concern for his injury. They
knew
the injury through him. If he were like them, he would tell them when he needed help.
Then why didn't they try to rescue me until Jenny came?
Dasein asked himself. And the answer lay there to wonder at:
Because I didn't cry out for help in my thoughts!
“You shouldn't sleep now, I don't think,” Jenny said.
She found his left hand, gripped it. “Isn't there something about not sleeping after a head injury?”
Dasein stared up at her, seeing the dark wings of her hair disarrayed from rescuing him, the way her eyes seemed to touch him, so intense was her concentration. There was dampness on her lashes and he felt that he might look behind her eyes and find the way to a magic land.
“I love you,” he whispered.
She pressed a finger against his lips. “I know.”
I am a Santarogan now
, Dasein thought.
He lay there rolling the thought in his mind, filled by this odd awareness that let him reach out to Jenny even when she released his hand and left him alone there on the grass. There was nothing of telepathy in this awareness. It was more knowledge of mood in those around him. It was a lake in which they all swam. When one disturbed the water, the others knew it.
My God! What this Jaspers could do for the world
! Dasein thought.
But this thought sent roiling waves through the lake of mutual
awareness. There was storm in this thought. It was dangerous. Dasein recoiled from it.
He remembered then why he had come here and saw the conflict from a new perspective. The people who'd sent himâwhat did they want?
Proof,
he thought.
He found he couldn't focus on what
they
wanted to prove. It was all tied up with Jersey Hofstedder's car and the blunt Yankee insularity of these people.
Jenny's friends were noticing him now, Dasein saw. They looked at himâdirectly at him. They spoke to him. And when he felt he wanted to get up and go to the big fire they'd built against the evening chill, strong hands came without bidding and helped him.
Night fell.
Dasein found himself seated on a blanket beside Jenny. Someone was playing a guitar in the darkness. Moon colored half the lake, leaving a great black stone of night against one side. Wind-wrinkled water lapped at the stone and he felt that if the blackness could only be moved it would blaze in light to reveal fairyland.
Jenny snuggled against him, murmured: “You're feeling better. I know it.”
He agreed with her silently.
Torches flamed down by the lakeâpeople securing the boats. Someone handed him a sandwich redolent with Jaspers. He ate, his attention on the torches and the fireâthe trees around them gleaming red, grotesque shadows lurching, dove wings of smoke against the moon. Abruptly, Dasein secreted part of his sandwich in a pocket.
For no reason he could explain, Dasein remembered a time shortly after Jenny had left the school. It had rained. He remembered reaching out his window to feel the rain, seeing the wet sparkle of the lawn beneath a window, like a broken necklace scattered there.
Abruptly, the wind across the lake shifted, stung his eyes with smoke. He swallowed a mouthful of the smoke and it brought him to an intense awareness of the here and now, Jenny beside him ⦠waiting.
As he thought about her, she reached up, pulled his lips
down on hers. It was a long kiss, full of guitar music, remembered rain and the taste of smoke.
How can I ever explain this?
Dasein wondered.
Selador would think me mad
.
Jenny stirred against him at this thought, stroked his neck.
“Let's get married soon,” she whispered.
Why not?
Dasein asked himself.
I'm a Santarogan now.
But this thought brought a surge of fear that tightened his chest and made Jenny shiver. She pulled away, stared at him with worry in her eyes.
“Everything will be all right,” she whispered. “You'll see.”
The worry remained in her voice, though. And Dasein sensed menace in the night. The guitarist struck a sour note, fell silent.
Dasein saw that moonlight had moved into the black area of the lake ⦠and it revealed no fairylandâonly more lake, more trees.
The night was definitely cold now.
Once more, Jenny pressed her lips to his.
Dasein knew he still loved her. It was a real thing to which he could cling. But there was no more magic in this night. He felt that he had skirted madness and the thing had left its taint on him.
When she pulled away, he whispered: “I want to marry you, Jenny. I love you ⦠but ⦠I need time. I need ⦔