John Varley - Persistence Of Vision

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THE PERSISTENCE
OF VISION*
John Varley
All wrtters go through an apprenticeship, a time when they learn about the world and develop their
points of view and sharpen their narrative skills. With most writers, you can see it happening, as
their first attempts and initial fumblings grow and strengthen into mastery. Not John Varley. From
his first year he was clearly a winner, and he has yet to set a foot wrong--whether he is writing
about fast, bright adventures In a high-technology future, like The Ophiuchus Hot Line, or
touching the heart of the reader, as in "The Persistence of Vision," which, to judge from the roar
of approval when ft was announced, Is a popular favorite.
It was the year of the fourth non-depression. I had recenth joined the ranks of the unemployed.
The President had tok me that I had nothing to fear but fear itself. I took him at hi; word, for
once, and set out to backpack to California.
I was not the only one. The world's economy had beep writhing like a snake on a hot
griddle for the last twent~ years, since the early seventies. We were in a boom-and-bus cycle that
seemed to have no end. It had wiped out the sonsi of security the nation had so painfully won in
the golden years after the thirties. People were accustomed to the fac that they could be rich one
year and on the breadlines the next. I was on the breadlines in '81, and again in '88. Thi; time I
decided to use my freedom from the time clock to see the world. I had ideas of stowing away to
Japan. I wa
'Winner, Nebula, for Best Novella of 1978.
forty-seven years old and might not get another chance to be irresponsible.
This was in late summer of the year. Sticking out my thumb along the interstate, I could
easily forget that there were food riots back in Chicago. I slept at night on top of my bedroll
and saw stars and listened to crickets.
I must have walked most of the way from Chicago to Des Moines. My feet toughened up after
a few days of awful blisters. The rides were scarce, partly competition from other hitchhikers and
partly the times we were living in. The locals were none too anxious to give rides to city people,
who they had heard -were mostly a bunch of hunger-crazed potential mass murderers. I got roughed
up once and told never to return to Sheffield, Illinois.
But I gradually learned the knack of living on the road. I had started with a small supply
of canned goods from the welfare and by the time they ran out, I had found that it was possible to
work for a meal at many of the farmhouses along the way.
Some of it was hard work, some of it was only a token from people with a deeply ingrained
sense that nothing should come for free. A few meals were gratis, at the family table, with
grandchildren sitting around while grandpa or grandma told oft-repeated tales of what it had been
like in the Big One back in '29, when people had not been afraid to help a fellow out when he was
down on his luck. I found that the older the person, the more likely I was to get a sympathetic
ear. One of the many tricks you learn. And most older people will give you anything if you'll only
sit and listen to them. I got very good at it.
The rides began to pick up west of Des Moines, then got bad again as I neared the refugee
camps bordering the China Strip. This was only five years after the disaster, remember, when the
Omaha nuclear reactor melted down and a hot mass of uranium and plutonium began eating its way
into the earth, headed for China, spreading a band of radioactivity six hundred kilometers
downwind. Most of Kansas City, Missouri, was still living in plywood and sheet-metal shantytowns
till the city was rendered habitable again.
The refugees were a tragic group. The initial solidarity people show after a great
disaster had long since faded into the lethargy and disillusionment of the displaced person. Many
of them would be in and out of hospitals for the rest of
their. lives. To make it worse, the local people hated them, feared them, would not associate with
them. They .were modern pariahs, unclean. Their children were shunned. Each camp had only a number
to identify it, but the local populace called them all Geigertowns.
I made a long detour to Little Rock to avoid crossing the Strip, though it was safe now as
long as you didn't linger. I was issued a pariah's badge by the National Guard-a dosimeter-and
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wandered from one Geigertown to the next. The people were pitifully friendly once I made the first
move, and I always slept indoors. The food was free at the community messes.
Once at Little Rock, I found that the aversion to picking up strangers--who might be
tainted with "radiation disease"-dropped off, and I quickly moved across Arkansas, Oklahome, and
Texas. I worked a little here and there, but many of the rides were long. What I saw of Texas was
through a car window.
I was a little tired of that by the time I reached New Mexico. I decided to do some more
walking. By then I was leas interested in California than in the trip itself.
I left the roads and went cross-country where there were no fences to stop me. I found
that it wasn't easy, even in New Mexico, to get far from signs of civilization.
Taos was the center, back in the '60's, of cultural experiments in alternative living.
Many communes and cooperatives were set up in the surrounding hills during that time. Most of them
fell apart in a few months or years, but a few survived. In later years, any group with a new
theory of living and a yen to try it out seemed to gravitate to that part of New Mexico. As a
result, the land was dotted with ramshackle windmill, solar heating panels, geodesic domes, group
marriages, nudists, philosophers, theoreticians, messiahs, hermits, and more than a few just plain
nuts.
Taos was great. I could drop into most of the communes and stay for a day or a week,
eating organic rice and beans and drinking goat's milk. When I got tired of one, a few hours' walk
in any direction would bring me to another. There, I might be offered a night of prayer and
chanting or a ritualistic orgy. Some of the groups had spotless barns with automatic milkers for
the herds of cows. Others didn't even have latrines; they just squatted. In some, the members
dressed like nuns, or Quakers in early Pennsylvania. Else-
where, they went nude and shaved all their body hair and painted themselves purple. There were all-
male and allfemale groups. I was urged to stay at most of the former; at the latter, the responses
ranged from a bed for the night and good conversation to being met at a barbed-wire fence with a
shotgun.
I tried not to make judgments. These people were doing something important, all of them.
They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. That was a wonder to me. I
had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
This is not to say they were all successful. Some made Chicago look like Shangri-La. There
was one group who seemed to feel that getting back to nature consisted of sleeping in pigshit and
eating food a buzzard wouldn't touch. Many were obviously doomed. They would leave behind a group
of empty hovels and the memory of cholera.
So the place wasn't paradise, not by a long way. But there were successes. Cane or two had
been there since '63 or '64 and were raising their third generation. I was disappointed to see
that most of these were the ones that departed least from established norms of behavior, though
some of the differences could be startling. I suppose the most radical experiments are the least
likely to bear fruit.
I stayed through the winter. No one was surprised to see me a second time. It seems that
many people came to Taos and shopped around. I seldom stayed more than three weeks at any one
place, and always pulled my weight. I made many friends and picked up skills that would serve me
if I stayed off the roads. I toyed with the idea of staying at one of them forever. When I
couldn't make up my mind, I was advised that there was no hurry. I could go to California and
return. They seemed sure 1 would.
So when spring came I headed west over the hills. I stayed off the roads and slept in the
open. Many nights I would stay at another commune, until they finally began to get farther apart,
then tapered off entirely. The country was not as pretty as before.
Then, three days' leisurely walking from the last commune, I came to a wall.
In 1964, in the United States, there was an epidemic of German measles, or rubella.
Rubella is one of the mildest of
infectious diseases. The only time it's a problem is when a woman contracts it in the first four
months of her pregnancy. It is passed to the fetus, which usually develops complications. These
complications include deafness, blindness, and damage to the brain.
In 1964, in the old days before abortion became readily available, there was nothing to be
done about it. Many pregnant women caught rubella and went to term. Five thousand deaf-blind
children were born in one year. The normal yearly incidence of deaf-blind children in the United
States is one hundred and forty.
In 1970 these five thousand potential Helen Kellers were all six years old. It was quickly
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seen that there was a shortage of Anne Sullivans. Previously, deaf-blind children could be sent to
a small number of special institutions.
It was a problem. Not just anyone can cope with a deafblind child. You can't tell them to
shut up when they moan; you can't reason with them, tell them that the moaning is driving you
crazy. Some parents were driven to nervous breakdowns when they tried to keep their children at
home.
Many of the five thousand were badly retarded and virtually impossible to reach, even if
anyone had been trying. These ended up, for the most part, warehoused in the hundreds of anonymous
nursing homes and institutes for "special" children. They were put into beds, cleaned up once a
day by a few overworked nurses, and generally allowed the full blessings of liberty: they were
allowed to rot freely in their own dark, quiet, private universes. Who can say if it was bad for
them? None of them were heard to complain.
Many children with undamaged brains were shuffled in among the retarded because they were
unable to tell anyone that they were in there behind the sightless eyes. They failed the batteries
of tactile tests, unaware that their fetes hung in the balance .when they were asked to fit round
pegs into round holes to the ticking of a clock they could not see or hear. As a result, they
spent the rest of their lives in bed, and none of them complained, either. To protest, one must be
aware of the possibility of something better. It helps to have a language, too.
Several hundred of the children were found to have IQ'
within the normal range. There were news stories abou
them as they approached puberty and it was revealed that' .,. 40
there were not enough good people to properly handle them. Money was spent, teachers were trained.
The education expenditures would go on for a specified period of time, until the children were
grown, then things would go back to normal and everyone could congratulate themselves on having
dealt successfully with a tough problem.
And indeed, it did work fairly well. There are ways to reach and teach such children. They
involve patience, love, and dedication, and the teachers brought all that to their jobs. All the
graduates of the special schools left knowing how to speak with their hands. Some could talk. A
few could write. Most of them left the institutions to live with parents or relatives, or, if
neither was possible, received counseling and help in fitting themselves into society. The options
were limited, but people can live rewarding lives under the most severe handicaps. Not everyone,
but most of the graduates, were as happy with their lot as could reasonably be expected. Some
achieved the almost saintly peace of their role model, Helen Kelley. Others became bitter and
withdrawn. A few had to be put in asylums, where they became indistinguishable from the others of
their group who had spent the last twenty years there. But for the most part, they did well.
But among the group, as in any group, were some misfits. They tended to be among the
brightest, the top ten percent in the IQ scores. This was not a reliable rule. Some had
unremarkable test scores and were still infected with the hunger to do something, to change
things, to rock the boat. With a group of five thousand, there were certain to be a few geniuses,
a few artists, a few dreamers, hell-raisers, individualists, movers and shapers: a few glorious
maniacs.
There was one among them who might have been President but for the fact that she was
blind, deaf, and a woman. She was smart, but not one of the geniuses. She was a dreamer, a
creative force, an innovator. It was she who dreamed of freedom. But she was not a builder of
fairy castles. Having dreamed it, she had to make it come true.
The wall was made of carefully fitted stone and was about five feet high. It was
completely out of context with anything I had seen in New Mexico, though it was built of native
rock. You just don't build that kind of wall out there. You use barbed wire if something needs
fencing in; but many people
still made use of the free range and brands. Somehow it seemed transplanted from New England.
It was substantial enough that I felt it would be unwise to crawl over it. I had crossed
many wire fences in my travels and had not gotten in trouble for it yet, though I had some: talks
with some ranchers. Mostly they told me to keep moving, but didn't seem upset about it. This was
different. h set out to walk around it. From the lay of the land, I couldn't=' tell how far it
might reach, but I had time.
At the top of the next rise I saw that I didn't have far to go.. The wall made a right-
angle turn just ahead. I looked over it~ and could see some buildings. They were mostly domes,
the: ubiquitous structure thrown up by communes because of the' combination of ease of
construction and durability., There: were sheep behind the wall, and a few cows. They grazed on
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grass so green I wanted to go over and roll in it. The wall enclosed a rectangle of green.
Outside, where I stood, it was: all scrub and sage. These people had access to Rio Grande
irrigation water.
I rounded the corner and followed the wall west again. `
I saw a man on horseback about the same time he spotted me. He was south of me, outside
the wall, and he turned and rode in my direction.
He was a dark man with thick features, dressed in denim and boots with a gray battered
stetson. Navaho, maybe. L
`
don't know much about Indians, but I'd heard they were out here.
"Hello," I said when he'd stopped. He was looking me over. "Am I on your land?"
"Tribal land," he said. "Yeah, you're on it."
"I didn't see any signs."
He shrugged.
"It's okay, bud. You don't look like you out to rustle cattle." He grinned at me. His
teeth were large and stained with tobacco. "You be camping out tonight?"
"Yes. How much farther does the, uh, tribal land go? e' Maybe I'll be out of it before
tonight?"
He shook his head gravely. "Nah. You won't be off it,_. tomorrow. 'S all right. You make a
fire, you be careful, huh?" He grinned again and started to ride off.
"Hey, what is this place?" I gestured to the wall, and he pulled his horse up and turned
around again. It raised a lot .' of dust.
"Why you asking?" He looked a little suspicious.
"I dunno. Just curious. It doesn't look like the other places I've been to. This wall..."
He scowled. "Damn wall." Then he shrugged. I thought that was all he was going to say.
Then he went on.
"These people, we look out for 'em, you hear? Maybe we don't go for what they're doin'.
But they got it rough, you know?" He looked at me, expecting something. I never did get the knack
of talking to these laconic Westerners. I always felt that I was making my sentences too long.
They use a shorthand of grunts and shrugs and omitted parts of speech, and I always felt like a
dude when I talked to them.
"Do they welcome guests?" I asked. "I thought I might see if I could spend the night."
He shrugged again, and it was a whole different gesture.
"Maybe. They all deaf and blind, you know?" And that was all the conversation he could
take for the day. He made a clucking sound and galloped away.
I continued down the wall until I came to a dirt road that wound up the arroyo and entered
the wall. There was a wooden gate, but it stood open. I wondered why they took all the trouble
with the wall only to leave the gate like that. Then I noticed a circle of narrow-gauge train
tracks that came out of the gate, looped around outside it, and rejoined itself. There was a small
siding that ran along the outer wall for a few yards.
I stood there a few moments. I don't know what entered into my decision. I think I was a
little tired of sleeping out, and I was hungry for a home-cooked meal. The sun was getting closer
to the horizon. The land to the west looked like more of the same. If the highway had been
visible, I might have headed that way and hitched a ride. But I turned the other way and went
through the gate.
I walked down the middle of the tracks. There was a wooden fence on each side of the road,
built of horizontal planks, like a corral. Sheep grazed on one side of me. There was a Shetland
sheepdog with them, and she raised her ears and followed me with her eyes as I passed, but did not
come when I whistled.
It was about half a mile to the cluster of buildings ahead. There were four or five domes
made of something translucent, like greenhouses, and several conventional square buildings. There
were two windmills turning lazily in the breeze.
There were several banks of solar water heaters. These are flat constructions of glass and wood,
held off the ground so: they can tilt to follow the sun. They were almost vertical; now,
intercepting the oblique rays of sunset. There were a ` few trees, what might have been an
orchard.
About halfway there I passed under a wooden footbridge. It arched over the road, giving
access from the east pasture to the west pasture. I wondered, What was wrong with a simple gate?
Then I saw something coming down the road in my direction. It was traveling on the tracks
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and it was very quiet. I stopped and waited.
It was a sort of converted mining engine, the sort that
pulls loads of coal up from the bottom of shafts. It was=
battery-powered, and it had gotten quite close before I heard,
it. A small man was driving it. He was pulling a car behind -
him and singing as loud as he could with absolutely no
sense of pitch. _
He got closer and closer, moving about five miles per hour, one hand held out as if he was
signaling a left turn.: Suddenly I realized what was happening, as he was bearing. down on me. He
wasn't going to stop. He was counting fenceposts with his hand. I scrambled up the fence just in
time. There wasn't more than six inches of clearance be~: tween the train and the fence on either
side. His palm-' touched my leg as I squeezed close to the fence, and he-r stopped abruptly.
He leaped from the car and grabbed me and I thought I,
was in trouble. But he looked concerned, not angry, and felt'
me all over, trying to discover if I was hurt. I was embarrassed. -
Not from the examination; because I had been foolish. The=
Indian had said they were all deaf and blind but I guess I
hadn't quite believed him. -
He was flooded with relief when I managed to convey to-.= him that I was all right. With
eloquent gestures he made me; understand that I was not to stay on the road. He indicated that I
should climb over the fence and continue through the: fields. He repeated himself several times to
be sure I understood, then held on to me as I climbed over to assure himself that I was out of the
way. He reached over the fence ands held my shoulders, smiling at me. He pointed to the road and
shook his head, then pointed to the buildings and nodded. He touched my head and smiled when I
nodded. He
climbed back onto the engine and started up, all the time nodding and pointing where he wanted me
to go. Then he was off again.
I debated what to do. Most of me said to turn around, go back to the wall by way of the
pasture and head back into the hills. These people probably wouldn't want me aroand. I doubted
that I'd be able to talk to them, and they might even resent me. On the other hand, I was
fascinated, as who wouldn't be? I wanted to see how they managed it. I still didn't believe that
they were all deaf and blind. It didn't seem possible.
The Sheltie was sniffing at my pants. I looked down at her and she backed away, then
daintily approached me as I held out my open hand. She sniffed, then licked me. I patted her on
the head, and she hustled back to her sheep.
I turned toward the buildings.
The first order of business was money.
None of the students knew much about it from experience, but the library was full of
Braille books. They started reading.
One of the first things that became apparent was that when money was mentioned, lawyers
were not far away. The students wrote letters. From the replies, they selected a lawyer and
retained him.
They were in a school in Pennsylvania at the time. The original pupils of the special
schools, five hundred in number, had been narrowed down to about seventy as people left to live
with relatives or found other solutions to their special problems. Of those seventy, some had
places to go but didn't want to go there; others had few alternatives. Their parents were either
dead or not interested in living with them. So the seventy had been gathered from the schools
around the country into this one, while ways to deal with them were worked out. The authorities
had plans, but the students beat them to it.
Each of them had been entitled to a guaranteed annual income since 1980. They had been
under the care of the government, so they had not received it. They sent their lawyer to court. He
came back with a ruling that they could not collect. They appealed, and won. The money was paid
retroactively, with interest, and came to a healthy sum. They thanked their lawyer and retained a
real estate agent. Meanwhile, they read.
They read about communes in New Mexico, and instruct-. ed their agent to look for
something out there. He made a_ deal for a tract to be leased in perpetuity from the Navaho..
nation. They read about the land, found that it would need a lot of water to be productive in the
way they wanted it to be.
They divided into groups to research what they would need to be self-sufficient.
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Water could be obtained by tapping into the canals that carried it from the reservoirs on
the Rio Grande into the. reclaimed land in the south. Federal money was available for the project
through a labyrinthine scheme involving HEW, the Agriculture Department, and the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. They ended up paying little for their pipeline.
The land was arid. It would need fertilizer to be of use inraising sheep without resorting
to open range techniques.: The cost of fertilizer could be subsidized through the Rural=
Resettlement Program. After that, planting clover would' enrich the soil with all the nitrates
they could want.
There were techniques available to farm ecologically, without worrying about fertilizers
or pesticides. Everything was recycled. Essentially, you put sunlight and water into one end and
harvested wool, fish, vegetables, apples, honey, and: eggs at the other end. You used nothing but
the land, ands replaced even that as you recycled your waste products back into the soil. They
were not interested in agribusiness with huge combine harvesters and crop dusters. They didn't
even want to turn a profit. They merely wanted sufficiency.
The details multiplied. Their leader, the one who had had= the original idea and the drive
to put it into action in the: face of overwhelming obstacles, was a dynamo named JanetReilly.
Knowing nothing about the techniques generals and: executives employ to achieve large objectives,
she invented. them herself and adapted them to the peculiar needs and limitations of her group.
She assigned task forces to look into solutions of each aspect of their project: law, science,
social planning, design, buying, logistics, construction. At: any one time, she was the only
person who knew everything' about what was happening. She kept it all in her head; without notes
of any kind.
It was in the area of social planning that she showed: herself to be a visionary and not
just a superb organizer. Her' idea was not to make a place where they could lead a life "s that
was a sightless, soundless imitation of their unafflicted
peers. She wanted a whole new start, a way of living that was by and for the deaf-blind, a way of
living that accepted no convention just because that was the way it had always been done. She
examined every human cultural institution from marriage to indecent exposure to see how it related
to her needs and the needs of her friends. She was aware of the peril of this approach, but was
undeterred. Her Social Task Force read about every variant group that had ever tried to make it on
its own anywhere, and brought her reports about how and why they had failed or succeeded. She
filtered this information through her own experiences to see how it would work for her unusual
group with its own set of needs and goals.
The details were endless. They hired an architect to put their ideas into Braille
blueprints. Gradually the plans evolved. They spent more money. The construction began, supervised
on the site by their architect, who by now was so fascinated by the scheme that she donated her
services. It was an important break, for they needed someone there whom they could trust. There is
only so much that can be accomplished at such a distance.
When things were ready for them to move, they ran into bureaucratic trouble. They had
anticipated it, but it was a setback. Social agencies charged with overseeing their welfare
doubted the wisdom of the project. When it became apparent that no amount of reasoning was going
to stop it, wheels were set in motion that resulted in a restraining order, issued for their own
protection, preventing them from leaving the school. They were twenty-one years old by then, all
of them, but were judged mentally incompetent to manage their own affairs. A hearing was
scheduled.
Luckily, they still had access to their lawyer. He also had become infected with the crazy
vision, and put on a great battle for them. He succeeded in getting a ruling concerning the rights
of institutionalized persons, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which eventually had severe
repercussions in state and county hospitals. Realizing the trouble they were already in regarding
the thousands of patients in inadequate facilities across the country, the agencies gave in.
By then, it was the spring of 1988, one year after their target date. Some of their
fertilizer had washed away already for lack of erosion-preventing clover. It was getting late to
start crops, and they were running short of money. Neverthe-
less, they moved to New Mexico and began the backbreaking job of getting everything started. There
were fifty-five of them, with nine children aged three months to six years.
I don't know what I expected. I remember that everything was a surprise, either because it
was so normal or because it was so different. None of my idiot surmises about what such a place
might be like proved to be true. And of course I didn't know the history of the place; I learned
that later, picked up in bits and pieces.
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I was surprised to see lights in some of the buildings. The first thing I had assumed was
that they would have no need of them. That's an example of something so normal that it surprised
me.
As to the differences, the first thing that caught my attention was the fence around the
rail line. I had a personal interest in it, having almost been injured by it. I struggled to
understand, as I must if I was to stay even for a night.
The wood fences that enclosed the rails on their way to the gate continued up to a barn,
where the rails looped back on themselves in the same way they did outside the wall. The entire
line was enclosed by the fence. The only access was a loading platform by the barn, and the gate
to the outside. It made sense. The only way a deaf-blind person could operate a conveyance like
that would be with assurances that there was no one on the track. These people would never go on
the tracks; there was no way they could be warned of an approaching train.
There were people moving around me in the twilight as I made my way into the group of
buildings. They took no notice of me, as I had expected. They moved fast; soma of them were
actually running. I stood still, eyes searching all around me so no one would come crashing into
me. I had to figure out how they kept from crashing into each other before I got bolder.
I bent to the ground and examined it. The light was getting
bad, but I saw immediately that there were concrete side
walks crisscrossing the area. Each of the walks was etched
with a different sort of pattern in grooves that had been
made before the stuff set lines, waves, depressions, patches
of rough and smooth. I quickly saw that the people who
were in a hurry moved only on those walkways, and they
were all barefoot. It was no trick to see that it was some sort
of traffic pattern read with the feet. I stood up. I didn't need to know how it worked. It was
sufficient to know what it was and stay off the paths.
The people were unremarkable. Some of them were not dressed, but I was used to that by
now. They came in all shapes and sizes, but all seemed to be about the same age except for the
children. Except for the fact that they did not stop and talk or even wave as they approached each
other, I would never have guessed they were blind. I watched them come to intersections in the
pathways-I didn't know how they knew they were there, but could think of several waysand slow down
as they crossed. It was a marvelous system.
I began to think of approaching someone. I had been there for almost half an hour, an
intruder. I guess I had a false sense of these people's vulnerability; I felt like a burglar.
I walked along beside a woman for a minute. She was very purposeful in her eyes-ahead
stride, or seemed to be. She sensed something, maybe my footsteps. She slowed a little, and I
touched her on the shoulder, not knowing what else to do. She stopped instantly and turned toward
me. Her eyes were open but vacant. Her hands were all over me, lightly touching my face, my chest,
my hands, fingering my clothing. There was no doubt in my mind that she knew me for a stranger,
probably from the first tap on the shoulder. But she smiled warmly at me, and hugged me. Her hands
were very delicate and warm. That's funny, because they were calloused from hard work. But they
felt sensitive.
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
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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 end ballet at the same time.
I told her I wasn't from a university, and launched into en 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 panda 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 openthey 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 hove 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
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