"What have you been doing?"
"Days—I've been thinking, reading, and writing; and nights—wandering in search of myself. And I've discovered that Charlie is watching me."
"Don't talk like that," she shuddered.
"This business about being watched isn't real. You've built it up in your mind."
"I can't help feeling that I'm not me.
I've usurped his place and locked him out the way they locked me out of the bakery.
What I mean to say is that Charlie Gordon exists in the past, and the past is real.
You can't put up a new building on a site until you destroy the old one, and the old Charlie can't be destroyed. He exists.
At first I was searching for him: I went to see his—my—father.
All I wanted to do was prove that Charlie existed as a person in the past, so that I could justify my own existence.
I was insulted when Nemur said he created me. But I've discovered that not only did Charlie exist in the past, he exists now.
In me and around me.
He's been coming between us all along. I thought my intelligence created the barrier—my pompous, foolish pride, the feeling we had nothing in common because I had gone beyond you.
You put that idea into my head.
But that's not it.
It's Charlie, the little boy who's afraid of women because of things his mother did to him.
Don't you see?
All these months while I've been growing up intellectually, I've still had the emotional wiring of the childlike Charlie.
And every time I came close to you, or thought about making love to you, there was a short circuit."
I was excited, and my voice pounded at her until she began to quiver. Her face became flushed.
"Charlie," she whispered, "can't I do anything?
Can't I help?"
"I think I've changed during these weeks away from the lab," I said. "I couldn't see how to do it at first, but tonight, while I was wandering around the city, it came to me.
The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can't be solved as intellectual problems are.
That's what I discovered about myself last night.
I told myself I was wandering around like a lost soul, and then I saw that I was lost.
"Somehow I've become separated emotionally from everyone and everything.
And what I was really searching for out there in the dark streets—the last damned place I could ever find it—was a way to make myself a part of people again emotionally, while still retaining my freedom intellectually.
I've got to grow up.
For me it means everything. …"
I talked on and on, spewing out of myself every doubt and fear that bubbled to the surface.
She was my sounding board and she sat there hypnotized.
I felt myself grow warm, feverish, until I thought my body was on fire.
I was burning out the infection in front of someone I cared about, and that made all the difference.
But it was too much for her.
What had started as trembling became tears.
The picture over the couch caught my eye—the cringing, red-cheeked maiden—and I wondered what Alice was feeling just then.
I knew she would give herself to me, and I wanted her, but what about Charlie?
Charlie might not interfere if I wanted to make love to Fay.
He would probably just stand in the doorway and watch.
But the moment I came close to Alice, he panicked.
Why was he afraid to let me love Alice?
She sat on the couch, looking at me, waiting to see what I would do.
And what could I do?
I wanted to take her in my arms and…
As I began to think of it, the warning came.
"Are you all right, Charlie?
You're so pale."
I sat down on the couch beside her.
"Just a little dizzy.