He padded back into his bedroom, closing the bathroom door behind him. He looked at his books and ran his fingers over the backs of the bindings. He opened a cigar box and looked at the shells he’d collected at Marblehead last summer. He turned out the light and went over to the window and opened it. He knelt for a time with his chin on the sill and looked out. Boston lighted the sky. He could see the familiar single streetlight across the backyards. It was haloed with soft snow. Snow was falling in Chelsea, sticking to the bare branches of the big elm in the back yard.
Somebody in the neighborhood had Christmas carols on the radio. He wondered if he’d get the bike. They said it was too dangerous in the street, and the police wouldn’t let you ride on the sidewalk. Heck, you could be careful, couldn’t you?
He crossed the dark room, knelt for the barest minimum of prayer, and scrambled up between the crisp sheets, nestling down, pulling the blankets up over him. A red bike. Joey’s was blue.
He yawned and turned onto his side, warm and certain in the knowledge that after he was asleep his mother would look in, tuck the blankets in, kiss him. He could hear Daddy down in the kitchen with some of his friends. He heard the low voices and then the rich explosion of baritone laughter, suddenly hushed. He guessed Mother was telling them not to make so much noise.
He banged at the pillow, turned onto his other side, and gently coasted down the long velvet slope on the magical red bike, into the deep sweet shadows of sleep.
He came vaguely awake when she came in, and he stirred at the touch of her lips. “You think I’ll get it?”
“Get what, dear?”
Irritation at such density. “The bike. The red bike.”
“We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? Now go to sleep, dear.”
Firm hand fixing the blankets. He was faintly aware of the tallness of her standing over him, the faint sweet scent of her. The floor creaked as she crossed to the window, closed it a little. Somewhere people were laughing in the night. She closed his door behind her as she left the room. She hummed to herself as she headed toward the stairs.
Eleven
School was getting harder all the time. That darn Miss Crowe. Always making it tough just before vacation. All the kids were excited about the Chinese invading Korea. He wished he’d been a Marine in Korea. Patrols. Fire fights.
That darn Miss Crowe. “Children, we are going to study projection.” She wrote it on the board, spelling it as she wrote. “Now you all know what electricity is.” She stepped to the front seats and tapped Joey on the head. She made that funny smile, like when she thinks her jokes are funny, and said, “Joseph’s head is full of electricity. It’s what he thinks with.” The whole class laughed and Joey got red as a beet.
“But Joseph’s electrical field is unorganized. Think of one of those big signs overlooking the Common. Now those signs spell out words. All the light bulbs light at once to spell out a word. If all those little light bulbs were flickering, going on and off without any order at all, we couldn’t read the word, could we? Sometimes Joseph, by accident, makes all the little bulbs light at once, usually when he’s very excited or upset, and then we can sometimes see his thoughts, not clearly of course, but enough to know for a split second what he is thinking. It happens so seldom, however, that we never recognize it as true projection. We call it a hunch, or a good guess. In projection we will all learn first how to make the words clear. And after we have made the words clear, then we will learn how to project real images. We’ll project dogs and cats and new toys and everything we can imagine.”
“A red bike?” Dake said without thinking.
Miss Crowe looked at him. “Yes, a red bike, Dake. But I shouldn’t advise you to try and ride it.” Everybody laughed at him and he got as red as Joey had been.
Maralyn, who was always asking questions and bringing junk to Miss Crowe, stuck her hand up.
“Yes, dear?”
“Miss Crowe, if all that goes on in somebody’s head, how can somebody else see it?”
“It isn’t exactly seeing, Maralyn. Joseph has energy in his brain. Projection is a case of learning to focus that energy. And because each of us uses the same sort of energy to do our thinking, Joseph can learn to focus it so strongly that he actually does our thinking for us.”
“Suppose I don’t want him doing my thinking for me,” Maralyn said with contempt.
“As we are learning projection, dear, we will also learn how to close our minds against it.”
Maralyn sat down, flouncing a little in the seat. Dake hated her.
Miss Crowe went back to her desk. Joey looked happy to have her stop tapping his head. It seemed to make him nervous.
“Now, class, this will be a little demonstration to show you what we will be able to do, every one of us, before summer vacation.”
Dake liked that part. She just sat there looking at the class, and, gosh, she put songs in your head, and band music, and she made some poems, and then a whole lot of puppies came running in through the closed doors, and bright-colored birds flew around and made a heck of a racket. It was really keen the way she could do that.
But after that first day, the fun was all gone. It got dull and hard. Standing up there like a goof and trying to give the whole class some dopey word. Miss Crowe would write it on a piece of paper, write a lot of things on pieces of paper and you drew out your piece and it was always some dopey word. House, farm, cow, seashell, road, lamp, doctor. Never good words like bike, pirate, sloop, robber, pistol.
You had to practice at home, too, and Mother and Daddy could do it so much easier and better than you could that you felt like you’d never learn anything. He guessed it was important stuff, all right. Miss Crowe had cut out all the other subjects, and it was nothing but that projection, projection, all day long. She kept saying you had to learn it when your mind was young, or something.
Christmas came, and no red bike because it was too dangerous. There were skis, but it turned warm and there wasn’t any snow. He horsed around with Joey most of the vacation and they projected stuff at each other, and he worked at trying to make a bike he could see, even if he couldn’t ride it, like Miss Crowe said.
He got so he could make some stuff, but not a good bike. One afternoon he made a real sharp red bike, right in his room, but he couldn’t hold on to it. It got shimmery and went away and he couldn’t bring it back.
When school started again the whole class got so they could do the words loud and clear. Then there were little sentences. Kid stuff. I see the horse. The horse sees me. My uncle owns a cat. It has kittens. It sleeps in the barn. That Maralyn was a pain. She projected words so sharp they hurt your head and you wished there was some way you could put your fingers in your ears to stop the racket.
Next they got hard words. You want to do cat and you can think of a cat all right, but a word like thought or religion or doubt — it was tough to think of ways to put it across. But finally they all got that. And then they had to take turns going further and further down the hall and doing the hard sentences. Maralyn was the only one who could go way out in the school yard by the swings and still make you hear. It was pretty faint and you had to strain for it, but she could do it.
Next came learning how to shut it out. In order to push out the words you had to sort of brace yourself against a sort of imaginary membrane in your mind. Miss Crowe called that the “first screen.” Finally they all got the trick of being able to sort of get that membrane around in front of your thoughts. You had to kind of slide through it and then hold it up in the way, and it blocked out all the projection. It sure was a relief to be able to stop hearing that screamy noise Maralyn could put in your head.