There are logical limits for any pretense--limits beyond which the
pretense becomes demonstrably absurd. Mother-love enabled the woman
Helen Douglas to evade logic up to and beyond the point of absurdity,
but even mother-love is not proof against the turmoil of the
subconscious. A survival factor pried up a safety valve, and Helen
Douglas found herself suddenly face to face with the admission that
she had so desperately suppressed. She reacted with a terrible storm
of weeping that shook the bed and was watched with complete disinterest
by the dry-eyed imbecile beside her. Two-year-old Timothy Wainwright
Douglas, congenital idiot, couldn't care less. It was nothing to him
that his mother had at last faced the ugly knowledge that her only child
should have been born dead. It was less than nothing to him that she
could almost find it in her heart to wish him dead.
* * * * *
Release from the crowded womb brought no immediate awakening from the
long sleep of gestation, for a sense of identity comes only slowly to
the very young, the new-born. He did not realize that his intellectual
awakening, gradual as it seemed to him, was really extraordinarily
rapid, a matter of only two or three weeks after birth. To him, with no
frame of reference, it was a time of mystery that was not recognized as
mystery. At first there was only Warmth and Hunger, for which he had no
names but which he recognized by their presence or absence. There was
the satisfying of Hunger, Sleep, and the return of Hunger. Had he been
inclined to philosophy at that tender age, he would have considered the
cycle a complete and satisfying one. In a few days, however, there were
longer periods between the satisfying of Hunger and the coming of
Sleep--a sort of comfortable, full-stomached reverie that was the
beginning of the end.
With astounding precocity of which he was completely unaware, he began
rapidly sorting and cataloguing noises that had previously conveyed no
meaning. He now learned to associate certain sounds with certain sources
and place others under tentative listings while awaiting further data.
Smells received the same treatment as noises and often the two could be
related. A certain smell and a certain gobbling sort of noise were often
followed by a frightening swoop as he was lifted, but his eyes were not
yet focused and could give him little information as to the manner or
purpose of lifting.
In his fourth week of life he began to be troubled. His little handful
of memories centered around a growing and not entirely subjective
awareness of himself as an individual. Clearly, life could be divided
into "me" and "not me." To have arrived at that conclusion twenty-odd
days after birth was an incredible achievement. His mind was quick,
but it could not reason further without a basis for logic, a system
of reference, learned data from which further data could be inferred.
There was uneasiness in him, but no warning of danger; only a stirring
of memory that tried to rise to the conscious level. Wonderingly he
prodded the memory a little, as an inquisitive child pokes at a
slow-burning firecracker or a wary pup approaches its first cat. Like
the sharp crack of a squib, the quick spit of a cat, the memory erupted
and flung him back on his mental heels.
He felt a sensation that he knew was death though he had no name for
it, and his immature defenses sprang into action, tried in vain to block
the memory, to thrust Death back into its Pandora's Box. He impeded the
flood by an infinitesimal fraction of a second, and then full awareness
came and with it an understanding of the terrible thing that had
happened, the thing that he?--yes, _he_ had done.
The fledgling identity of "me" and "not me" sank forever into
submergence, never to rise again.