Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (432 page)

She made me to understand—by pointing to the building, making eating motions with an imaginary spoon, and touching a number on her watch—that supper was served in an hour, and that I was invited. I nodded and smiled beneath her hands; she kissed me on the cheek and hurried off.

Well. It hadn’t been so bad. I had worried about my ability to communicate. Later I found out she learned a great deal more about me than I had known.

I put off going into the mess hall or whatever it was. I strolled around in the gathering darkness looking at their layout. I saw the little Sheltie bringing the sheep back to the fold for the night. She herded them expertly through the open gate without any instructions, and one of the residents closed it and locked them in. The man bent and scratched the dog on the head and got his hand licked. Her chores done for the night, the dog hurried over to me and sniffed my pant leg. She followed me around the rest of the evening.

Everyone seemed so busy that I was surprised to see one woman sitting on a rail fence, doing nothing. I went over to her.

Closer, I saw that she was younger than I had thought. She was thirteen, I learned later. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. I touched her on the shoulder, and she jumped down from the fence and went through the same routine as the other woman had, touching me all over with no reserve. She took my hand and I felt her fingers moving rapidly in my palm. I couldn’t understand it, but knew what it was. I shrugged, and tried out other gestures to indicate that I didn’t speak hand talk. She nodded, still feeling my face with her hands.

She asked me if I was staying to dinner. I assured her that I was. She asked me if I was from a university. And if you think that’s easy to ask with only body movements, try it. But she was so graceful and supple in her movements, so deft at getting her meaning across. It was beautiful to watch her. It was speech and ballet at the same time.

I told her I wasn’t from a university, and launched into an attempt to tell her a little about what I was doing and how I got there. She listened to me with her hands, scratching her head graphically when I failed to make my meanings clear. All the time the smile on her face got broader and broader, and she would laugh silently at my antics. All this while standing very close to me, touching me. At last she put her hands on her hips.

“I guess you need the practice,” she said, “but if it’s all the same to you, could we talk mouthtalk for now? You’re cracking me up.”

I jumped as if stung by a bee. The touching, while something I could ignore for a deaf-blind girl, suddenly seemed out of place. I stepped back a little, but her hands returned to me. She looked puzzled, then read the problem with her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You thought I was deaf and blind. If I’d known I would have told you right off.”

“I thought everyone here was.”

“Just the parents. I’m one of the children. We all hear and see quite well. Don’t be so nervous. If you can’t stand touching, you’re not going to like it here. Relax, I won’t hurt you.” And she kept her hands moving over me, mostly my face. I didn’t understand it at the time, but it didn’t seem sexual. Turned out I was wrong, but it wasn’t blatant.

“You’ll need me to show you the ropes,” she said, and started for the domes. She held my hand and walked close to me. Her other hand kept moving to my face every time I talked.

“Number one, stay off the concrete paths. That’s where—” “I already figured that out.”

“You did? How long have you been here?” Her hands searched my face with renewed interest. It was quite dark.

“Less than an hour. I was almost run over by your train.”

She laughed, then apologized and said she knew it wasn’t funny to me.

I told her it
was
funny to me now, though it hadn’t been at the time. She said there was a warning sign on the gate, but I had been unlucky enough to come when the gate was open—they opened it by remote control before a train started up—and I hadn’t seen it.

“What’s your name?” I asked her as we neared the soft yellow lights coming from the dining room.

Her hand worked reflexively in mine, then stopped. “Oh, I don’t know. I
have
one; several, in fact. But they’re in bodytalk. I’m… Pink. It translates as Pink, I guess.”

There was a story behind it. She had been the first child born to the school students. They knew that babies were described as being pink, so they called her that. She felt pink to them. As we entered the hall, I could see that her name was visually inaccurate. One of her parents had been black She was dark, with blue eyes and curly hair lighter than her skin. She had a broad nose, but small lips.

She didn’t ask my name, so I didn’t offer it. No one asked my name, in speech, the entire time I was there. They called me many things in bodytalk, and when the children called me it was “Hey, you!” They weren’t big on spoken words.

The dining hall was in a rectangular building made of brick It connected to one of the large domes. It was dimly lighted. I later learned that the lights were for me alone. The children didn’t need them for anything but reading. I held Pink’s hand, glad to have a guide. I kept my eyes and ears open.

“We’re informal,” Pink said. Her voice was embarrassingly loud in the large room. No one else was talking at all there were just the sounds of movement and breathing. Several of the children looked up. “I won’t introduce you around now. Just feel like part of the family. People will feel you later, and you can talk to them. You can take your clothes off here at the door.”

I had no trouble with that. Everyone else was nude, and I could easily adjust to household customs by that time. You take your shoes off in Japan, you take your clothes off in Taos. What’s the difference?

Well, quite a bit, actually. There was all the touching that went on. Everybody touched everybody else, as routinely as glancing. Everyone touched my face first, then went on with what seemed like total innocence to touch me everywhere else. As usual, it was not quite what it seemed. It was
not
innocent, and it was not the usual treatment they gave others in their group. They touched each other’s genitals a
lot
more than they touched mine. They were holding back with me so I wouldn’t be frightened. They were very polite with strangers.

There was a long, low table, with everyone sitting on the floor around it. Pink led me to it.

“See the bare strips on the floor? Stay out of them. Don’t leave anything in them. That’s where people walk. Don’t
ever
move anything. Furniture, I mean. That has to be decided at full meetings, so we’ll all know where everything is. Small things, too. If you pick up something, put it back exactly where you found it.”

“I understand.”

People were bringing bowls and platters of food from the adjoining kitchen. They set them on the table, and the diners began feeling them. They ate with their fingers, without plates, and they did it

slowly and lovingly. They smelled things for a long time before they took a bite. Eating was very sensual to these people.

They were
terrific
cooks. I have never, before or since, eaten as well as I did at Keller. (That’s my name for it, in speech, though their bodytalk name was something very like that. When I called it Keller, everyone knew what I was talking about.) They started off with good, fresh produce, something that’s hard enough to find in the cities, and went at the cooking with artistry and imagination. It wasn’t like any national style I’ve eaten. They improvised, and seldom cooked the same thing the same way twice.

I sat between Pink and the fellow who had almost run me down earlier. I stuffed myself disgracefully. It was too far removed from beef jerky and the organic dry cardboard I had been eating for me to be able to resist. I lingered over it, but still finished long before anyone else. I watched them as I sat back carefully and wondered if I’d be sick. (I wasn’t, thank God.) They fed themselves and each other, sometimes getting up and going clear around the table to offer a choice morsel to a friend on the other side. I was fed in this way by all too many of them, and nearly popped until I learned a pidgin phrase in handtalk, saying I was full to the brim. I learned from Pink that a friendlier way to refuse was to offer something myself.

Eventually I had nothing to do but feed Pink and look at the others. I began to be more observant. I had thought they were eating in solitude, but soon saw that lively conversation was flowing around the table. Hands were busy, moving almost too fast to see. They were spelling into each other’s palms, shoulders, legs, arms, bellies; any part of the body. I watched in amazement as a ripple of laughter spread like falling dominoes from one end of the table to the other as some witticism was passed along the line. It was fast. Looking carefully, I could see the thoughts moving, reaching one person, passed on while a reply went in the other direction and was in turn passed on, other replies originating all along the line and bouncing back and forth. They were a wave form, like water.

It was messy. Let’s face it; eating with your fingers and talking with your hands is going to get you smeared with food. But no one minded,
I
certainly didn’t. I was too busy feeling left out. Pink talked to me, but I knew I was finding out what it’s like to be deaf. These people were friendly and seemed to like me, but could do nothing about it. We couldn’t communicate.

Afterwards, we all trooped outside, except the cleanup crew, and took a shower beneath a set of faucets that gave out very cold water. I told Pink I’d like to help with the dishes, but she said I’d just be in the way. I couldn’t do anything around Keller until I learned their very specific ways of doing things. She seemed to be assuming already that I’d be around that long.

Back into the building to dry off, which they did with their usual puppy dog friendliness, making a game and a gift of toweling each other, and then we went into the dome.

It was warm inside, warm and dark. Light entered from the passage to the dining room, but it wasn’t enough to blot out the stars through the lattice of triangular panes overhead. It was almost like being out in the open.

Pink quickly pointed out the positional etiquette within the dome. It wasn’t hard to follow, but I still tended to keep my arms and legs pulled in close so I wouldn’t trip someone by sprawling into a walk space.

My misconceptions got me again. There was no sound but the soft whisper of flesh against flesh, so I thought I was in the middle of an orgy. I had been at them before, in other communes, and they looked pretty much like this. I quickly saw that I was wrong, and only later found out I had been right. In a sense.

What threw my evaluations out of whack was the simple fact that group conversation among these people
had
to look like an orgy. The much subtler observation that I made later was that with a hundred naked bodies sliding, rubbing, kissing, caressing, all at the same time, what was the point in making a distinction? There was no distinction.

I have to say that I use the noun “orgy” only to get across a general idea of many people in close contact. I don’t like the word, it is too ripe with connotations. But I had these connotations myself at the time, so I was relieved to see that it was not an orgy. The ones I had been to had been tedious and impersonal, and I had hoped for better from these people.

Many wormed their way through the crush to get to me and meet me. Never more than one at a time; they were constantly aware of what was going on and were waiting their turn to talk to me. Naturally, I didn’t know it then. Pink sat with me to interpret the hard thoughts. I eventually used her words less and less, getting into the spirit of tactile seeing and understanding. No one felt they really knew me until they had touched every part of my body, so there were hands on me all the time. I timidly did the same.

What with all the touching, I quickly got an erection, which embarrassed me quite a bit. I was berating myself for being unable to keep sexual responses out of it, for not being able to operate on the same intellectual plane I thought they were on, when I realized with some shock that the couple next to me was making love. They had been doing it for the last ten minutes, actually, and it had seemed such a natural part of what was happening that I had known it and not known it at the same time.

No sooner had I realized it than I suddenly wondered if I was right.
Were they ?
It was very slow and the light was bad. But her legs were up, and he was on top of her, that much I was sure of. It was foolish of me, but I really had to know. I had to find out what the hell I was in. How could I give the proper social responses if I didn’t know the situation?

I was very sensitive to polite behavior after my months at the various communes. I had become adept at saying prayers before supper in one place, chanting Hare Krishna at another, and going happily nudist at still another. It’s called “when in Rome,” and if you can’t adapt to it you shouldn’t go visiting. I would kneel to Mecca, burp after my meals, toast anything that was proposed, eat organic rice and compliment the cook; but to do it right, you have to know the customs. I had thought I knew them, but had changed my mind three times in as many minutes.

They were making love, in the sense that he was penetrating her. They were also deeply involved with each other. Their hands fluttered like butterflies all over each other, filled with meanings I couldn’t see or feel. But they were being touched by and were touching many other people around them. They were talking to all these people, even if the message was as simple as a pat on the forehead or arm.

Pink noticed where my attention was. She was sort of wound around me, without really doing anything I would have thought of as provocative. I just couldn’t
decide.
It seemed so innocent, and yet it wasn’t.

“That’s (—) and (—),” she said, the parentheses indicating a series of hand motions against my palm. I never learned a sound word as a name for any of them but Pink, and I can’t reproduce the bodytalk names they had. Pink reached over, touched the woman with her foot, and did some complicated business with her toes. The woman smiled and grabbed Pink’s foot, her fingers moving.