The Night Listener and Others Read Online Free PDF Page A

little…”
    “Vitality,” her husband said.
    “Yes,” she nodded. “Vitality. And as you so cleverly noticed, it may make them ill for a bit, but children are always getting ill in amusement parks, aren’t they? And they recover. They feel fine in an hour or so. They grow up, they grow old—maybe not quite as old as they would have, but what are a few days to an old person? Unless you can take those days…and multiply them.”
    “You touch them,” I said dully. “When you give them the candy, you touch them.”
    “Yes. Just a touch.” She smiled again. “A touch, I do confess’t!” and then she laughed. “It feels so good to confess it, so good for someone to know at last. You’ve no idea how hard it—”
    “How do you do it?”
    She shook her head shortly and looked at her husband, who raised his eyebrows. “How do you walk?” she replied. “It’s been so long since we’ve had to think about it that I doubt if we could explain it in words, even to ourselves. It’s just something we do.”
    “Instinctive,” said Carl Younger.
    “Yes, instinctive. We had to learn at first. Self-taught, I don’t quite remember how. But once we knew we could, once we were able to control it, it became quite second nature. One short season of sharing, and we are primed, charged, secured from the grip of Gerontion until the next summer. And then we begin again.” She sighed. “Retirement has proven to be a most rewarding time.”
    I had to ask it. “How old are you?”
    She smiled coyly. “What a rude question. One I won’t answer, because I doubt you’d believe me. But old enough to have forgotten how we got this old.” She shook her head, frowning. “Don’t look so sour. What we take is so very slight, never even missed. And there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there?” She replaced the frown with a warm smile, the same one she’d used when offering the Hershey bars. “No hard feelings?” she asked, and held out her hand.
    I couldn’t touch it. Instead I backed off, bumping into the next row of benches. Then I turned and walked away from them, away from the bandshell and the grove, unable to make myself look back at the pair of them sitting there. And the three candy bars on the bench beside them.
    I don’t know what I thought at first. I couldn’t think, couldn’t accept something so crazy, so implausible, so totally unreal. So I walked my rounds and looked for slug users, and I didn’t go past the bandshell to see if the Youngers were still there. I knew they would be.
    It wasn’t until I was in my street clothes and on my way home that I began to try and deal with what they had told me as a reality, even if a reality created from an aging couple’s cruel fantasy. At the best, they were crazy. At the worst, they were…far worse. Either way, I had to get them out of the park.
    Or did I? What harm had they really done? Assuming that what they had told me was only their own pitiful delusion, they did no harm at all, except for contributing to tooth decay and nausea, and who was I to stop them? I think that was the main reason I didn’t want to believe them—I simply didn’t know what to do if it were true. It was a lot easier to consider them wacky old coots with a gift for healthy longevity than to believe otherwise.
    But I couldn’t help myself. I did believe them. Ethel Younger had been sane. Her eyes had been as clear and as honest as a child’s. And as young.
    Well then ? she had asked, and I asked myself—well then?—trying to find a path out, to find a way to do nothing and still be able to live with myself. What the hell, I thought, popping open a fourth beer at my kitchen table, what’s a week to an eighty-year-old? And how many kids would even live to be seventy or eighty anyway, with the shape the world was in? Would anybody even be around in good old 2060? What did it matter? And I flopped into bed, mind and room both spinning, thankful that tomorrow was my day off.