The Long Walk 16.

During the spring of 1969 I’d made a lot of new friends on paper. One of these was Poul Anderson, whose Nicholas Van Rijn stories renewed my hope of seeing a star faring society, possibly before I left this life. I delighted in sprawling on a chaise lounge, under the afternoon sun, with a Braille book, a handful of soda crackers, perhaps a slice or two of cheese. I still love writing in the afternoon or evening, out of doors.

We lived in a neighborhood, which was largely full of settled couples, a few families and a couple of widowed persons. As with all neighborhoods I’ve seen though, there was The Strange Household, known in some regions as The Weirdos. Ours was Stanley Myers and his common-law wife, Ada. Since Grandma Plassman, from Napoleon County Ohio, had been one of the Myers Girls, as they said it back there, Dad joked that Stanley was a second cousin of his. Stan was a merchant Marine who was at sea most of the time and drank when he wasn’t. Ada was an American Indian woman, who’d evidently taught deaf children at one time. She started holding my hand one day, and remarked that she could tell I was uncomfortable with her doing so. She released my hand then and said she’d never hold it again until I asked her to. I never did.

Stanley and Ada had a sort of permanent guest, a friend of theirs who drank as much as they did, named Bill Jess. Bill said he’d been a logger and a muleskinner in the early days of Seattle, back before World War I. He claimed to have been one of the first truck drivers to take a load through Snoqualmie Pass, around 1947. Bill used to wake up in the wee hours and holler about everything from horses to The FBI. Chris and I called him Uncle Bill, mostly to piss Mom off. It worked.

With school out again, I stepped up my reading. I read a number of significant books that summer. Probably the most useful and inspiring, in the long run, were We Are Not Alone by James Sullivan and Profiles of The Future by Arthur C. Clarke.

In Sullivan’s highly readable report on a gathering of scientists interested in extra-terrestrial life, I first learned of the evidence for life elsewhere in the universe. There were also some realistic figures on navigation between the stars and some fascinating material about the attempts to develop an artificial language, with which to communicate with possible intelligence’s light years away. (This was the first book which ever managed to interest me in Grammar!)

Profiles of The Future was in many ways the most amazing book I’ve ever read. In the introduction, Mr. Clarke stated that he did not intend to predict A Future but rather to attempt a definition of boundaries within all possible futures might lie. He then proceeded to examine the limits of size, (how big or little could a human being become,) of speed in various environments and what would be the most reasonable ways of moving ourselves around in those contexts. Then he went on to discuss, within known scientific theory, the concepts of antigravity, time travel, invisibility, travel through higher dimensions, instantaneous travel, transmutation of elements into other elements, and universal fabrication; or a machine which could make anything at all. A later chapter was devoted to orbital communication satellites and the far-reaching global potentials they offered. Lately, a lot of to-do has been made about Virtual Reality, as well as an older concept, Telepresence. In JVR. a virtual universe is in effect created within a computer and user-subscribers can interact with this artificial reality through sight, sound, tactile and eventually direct computer-brain linkages with the computer. In Telepresence, or Remote Handling, An operator receives direct sensory inputs from a humanoid robot, and controls the robot at a distance, using special gloves or even full body suits which note the operator’s movements and relay these as commands to the robot. Arthur Clarke discussed all of these concepts in this book, written around 1960.

The most disturbing chapters of the book dealt with potential computer developments, which Mr. Clarke thought might within a few centuries, entirely dwarf human intellect. Other speculators have since agreed with Clarke. Others have taken exception to his view, but all of the data is certainly not in yet. To me, the most fascinating and useful chapter dealt with instantaneous travel or teleportation. It exemplified Clarke’s way of explaining things. He began by describing how a TV works. A picture is broken down into about 500 lines of about five hundred dots per line. These dots either black or white, (for the sake of simplicity,) are sent from the broadcast station to a home television set, where the lines appear dot by dot and the picture is built up line per line. The picture is refreshed, or resent about fifteen times per second, so the picture sequence can convey the sense of movement. For color TV the story is essentially the same except instead of merely black and white dots, red, green and blue dots combine to make up all of the colors of the artist’s pallet.

Next Mr. Clarke invited the reader to consider the situation of Leonardo d’Vinci, had he attempted to build a television using purely mechanical components and semaphores to transmit signals. The task might be accomplished to some degree, at least in principle, but the effort must be enormous. To transmit and reassemble a human being, using modern electronics, Clarke said, would be comparable to attempting a fully functional TV using whig-whag flags, ropes and levers. One simply needed an entirely new order of technology.

He ended the chapter with a warning that any device that could scan and transmit a person, to be reassembled elsewhere, was inherently a copier as well. How would the world deal with numerous copies of many of its inhabitants, especially officials and other leading figures?

Though Clarke didn’t provide any help in designing a workable teleporter, he at least provided a useful definition of what teleportation was. I’d always assumed, as had the designers of Star Trek, that matter transmission would be handled by turning matter into energy or at least an energetic plasma or stream of particles, conducting the energetic stream to it’s destination, then using the energy or particle stream to reassemble the object or individual originally transmitted. Mr. Clarke pointed out that transmission meant not the sending of sound pictures or solid objects, but rather communicating the pattern from which these things can be reconstructed. This line of speculation set me to devising over the years, many conceptual devices for someday, circumventing the costly and cumbersome business of sending rockets to other planets or stars.

If it might take too long to scan a body atom by atom, I thought, perhaps cell by cell could be managed and new bodies might be built up somehow by assembling skin, bone, blood nerve and other sorts of cells, all mass-produced from the traveler’s own DNA pattern. Alternately, perhaps the brain pattern could be scanned and transmitted. Instead of matter transmission booths, there could be banks of sophisticated robots with artificial brains into the traveler’s personae could temporarily download. Long before this happened, armchair travelers, remaining at home, could receive sight sound and other sensory impulses into their brains from remote control robots, and send commands to their proxy bodies as easily as to their own arms and legs. These ideas developed over the years until on one hand I’ve written my own chapter on teleportation and on the other postulated a new strategy for independent living in a highly complex technological age.

This summer something, though very much in the present, yet the culmination of many dreams, would occur. This was, of course, the first manned landing on the moon. I remember lying in bed with my transistor radio against my ear, listening to the liftoff of Apollo 11, on July 16, at about 6:28 Pacific Daylight Savings Time. Later that day I wrote in my journal notes, that I’d found myself perspiring with the excitement of the event and had felt I was rising up myself to accompany the roaring craft from Cape Kennedy. I concluded by saying that I wished Dr. Goddard could have lived to see this descendant of his pioneering liquid Fueled rocket, Nell.

The manned Apollo missions had begun the fall previous, with first an orbital flight with three astronauts aboard, to test the craft, then a long, looping trajectory around the moon and back. Next the Lander was tested dropping to a very close proximity to the moon’s surface and redocking with the mother ship.

Originally scheduled for July 4^th, the lunar landing took place on the 20^th. There was something like 28 hours of continuous television coverage of the event. I can’t say I was on deck for the entire time, but I was near the TV for the greatest majority of it. I heard my personal hero, Dr. Werner Von Braun. There was also an interview with Esther Goddard. Mrs. Goddard had helped with rockets throughout most of her husband’s career, putting out fires, taking pictures, even sewing parachutes. There were a number of clips from early space travel movies, including Destination Moon, Based on Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo.

I’ve since heard little reference to the following, but at the time, the news coverage was peppered with reports of a spacecraft, presumed to be of Soviet origin, which appeared to be preparing for a moon landing at the same time as the American Eagle. Experts seemed to think the craft was too small to be manned but we did not find out at the time, what it really was. I believed it turned out to be some sort of reconnaissance probe, but the story was not widely publicized afterward, and the conspicuous silence on the part of the Soviets, made the whole affair appear highly suspicious. Whatever the mystery though, it felt good to be a member of a race which was no longer confined to merely one globe.

The other big event that summer, was a trip to see Aunt Winnie, and Greg, my friend from Vancouver. Mom and I planned the trip originally for just the two of us. I was going to take out my banking money from grade school to pay for gas. By the time it occurred though, both my sisters and my Niece Kelly joined us. I got Greg on the phone as soon as I could politely excuse myself for a few minutes. I’d written him a letter a couple of weeks before and our moms had talked on the phone to make sure it would be convenient for me to visit. I’d been invited to spend the night. Greg sounded rather taciturn on the phone, but glad to hear from me again. Mom drove me over to the Jacks’ residence and Greg and I spent a lot of time talking, playing records, discussing things at Vancouver then and now. I showed him my novel and told him about the books I’d been reading. Greg asked me if I ever read anything but science fiction. That sounded a little bit strange because he’d been fairly instrumental in turning me onto the field back when we were in sixth Grade.

I ended up spending two or three nights with Greg, his parents and his younger brother, Kelly. One evening we visited Chris Keppler whom I hadn’t seen since before Christmas Seventh Grade. Chris met us on the porch with a guitar, strumming and yodeling one of Jimmy Roger’s old songs from the ‘30s. We rehashed old mischiefs we’d committed, taking turns breaking each other up with funny tidbits remembered by one or both. Chris asked me about Paul. I told about the trouble we’d had in the last couple of years. He helped me address an envelope to Peyton Products, one of our companies supposedly, which did in fact exist. I had a friend from El Paso Texas, who did not know Paul, and knew of that meat packing company. It was the closest to a company address I had, Peyton Product, El Paso Texas.

Chris and I made a pact to go to Nashville together, the summer of ’72 when I’d graduate high school. I’d pretty much resigned myself to staying at home to finish school. I expected to recontact Paul someday, after graduation if not before and was still sufficiently naive to think I’d be able to take a trip with someone else, if Paul were back in the picture.

I’d liked Worth McClure and had heard mixed things about Queen Anne High. High school was supposed to be more fun than Junior high, but I’d heard a fair amount from negative sources, notably Paul and Korri. School authorities also kept emphasizing how much homework we’d have in Tenth Grade, as if we’d never had any before.

We’d heard various things about Mr. Conroy too. Many of these were from Mrs. Swanson. The majority of those turned out later to be half-truths of entirely misconstrued. I knew the two of them disagreed on a lot of points. They’d been in conflict for all of the years I’d been in school, but I didn’t know if disagreeing with Mrs. Swanson would necessarily put Mr. Conroy on my side. Besides, there’d been the trouble with Paul.

I had a full schedule of classes that fall, starting in the morning with Algebra, progressing through Language Arts, Ceramics, Gym, French; terminating in Sixth Period with a class called Physical Science. My signing up for Physical Science had been somewhat of a mistake, it being the easiest science course offered at Queen Anne. It was taught however by Mr. Hall, the Physics teacher, who’d majored in Physics, with minors in Chemistry and Psychology and had taken a Master’s Degree in Education. The course, being designed for low-motivation students, had a high-interest content, running the gamut from Anthropology to elementary Physics principles.

Mr. Hall was a soft-spoken man whom if not particularly organized, had a warm sort of curiosity about people and a delight in encouraging students to learn things on their own. I sometimes wondered back then if I might have done better to have signed up for biology my Sophomore year, or possibly getting some of my social science out of the way, but I now recall the time I spent in Physical Science as one of the highlights of my high school career

For Algebra I had a fellow named Mr. Watson who listened sympathetically to my stories about past problems with Math and said, "Don’t worry. We’ll get you back up to speed again." I did improve quite a bit too and for the first time in years, began to think of myself as a good math student.

Sophomore English consisted of four, quarter-long units, in Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction and Fiction. Mrs. Kroft seemed rather stern at first, but she was just interested in avoiding a lot of disruption in her class. If one behaved reasonably, it was easy enough to get along with her. She taught us the basic elements of Poetry in the first quarter and in second quarter; we went on to read The Merchant of Venice, Our Town and Pygmalion.

Our class was held to fairly strict standards this year. Our Vice-Principal informed us that some of the 10^th-graders had earned only two credits the previous year. In the nonlogical way of schools, our Sophomore class was penalized, not theirs. Sophomores this year were not allowed to have Study Hall for example. Mrs. Swanson was upset with me when I didn’t sign up for a study period anyway during our registration at the end of 9^th Grade, but I didn’t see why I should have special privileges just because I was blind. At first on entering my High School classes, I thought I’d made a mistake, but after a few days, found my workload to be nontrivial but certainly manageable.

On the first day when I was down in room 110, working on assignments, (teachers often let us go to the resource room to use braillers or typewriters and the reference books there,) Mr. Conroy called me up to his desk.

Coupla’ Things I wanna’ tell ya’ man," said Conroy, mimicking a not overbright punk kid. "I want you learnin’ your way around this room. You get me man?"

"Yeah, man," I gave him back his own imitation.

"How ’ bout this school?" Conroy asked. "You been having any trouble finding your way around?"

"Some," I told him.

"Good boy!" he yelled. "This is a big school. It usually takes about two weeks to learn it, so if you need help, I want you to ask for it! You get me?" "Okay."

I learned the basic layout in about seven school days.

Though our class was effectively on restriction for the year, we did share the privilege of an open campus. That means we could go down and eat lunch on Queen Anne Avenue if we wanted to and could afford it, or could leave the grounds during other free time. Our Gym class this year consisted not only of blind students but included anyone with a disability, usually kids with injuries but there was also a guy named Ken who been born premature like me and had congenitally deformed hips and experienced trouble running. Ken and I went out for lunch sometimes, sharing fries, buying tacos, and sometimes treating ourselves to burgers and cokes. We smoked cigarettes outside of the restricted zone when we had any.

Originally we were allowed to smoke beyond a six-block radius from the school. This rapidly shrank to three, and then it seemed to be only one block. By the time I was a Junior across the street from the school building seemed to be far enough and on rainy days, smoking was sometimes tolerated within the front stair well.

I had a bit of money now. When I’d finished Fourth Grade, I had twenty dollars in the bank. From time to time over the years, I’d considered using the money for something or other, most recently to finance the trip to Spokane, which had turned out to be unnecessary. Over the five and a half years since I’d made my last deposit, the school account had been quietly building interest and now I had $26.80.

For several months I’d been planning to start a ceramics business. I’d always done well in any class, which let me work in clay. Even my family marveled at what I could do with a piece of plastocene. I drew out my money and went to a Lake City Studio-store and bought five pounds of porcelain clay, some glaze and a small array of tools. Mrs. Marrier, our Ceramics teacher, said I could fire some of my home projects at school. I began making ashtrays, bowls, vases, and small animals for friends, relatives, teachers, and my bus driver. I charged reasonable fees for my custom work. I’d intended to set up a fairly ambitious shop in the garage, where we never parked the car. This project went the way of so many others around our house.

Mom had found an old door that she said would be an excellent tabletop. Dad and I could build a two-by-four framework to put it on and I could work my clay without troubling the interior of the house. The door had peeling paint on it, so I went to work with a scraper and some sand paper and got down to bare wood. Now, I said, all we needed was a few boards and perhaps a pound of nails.

Mom said the door must have a sheet of plywood over it to make a proper tabletop. Never mind that the recessed door panels would have made excellent holding trays for jars and tools, minimizing dropage. The plywood seemed to be a sticking point for some reason and the project never went any further. I continued working on a teetery TV tray in my bedroom.

My parents, particularly Mom, had plenty of good intentions, but their follow-through was poor. I owned a number of print books and magazines that were never more than partially read to me. Models never got put together unless I did them myself. Club meetings or Sunday School classes never lasted more than a few weeks before it became too much bother to get me there.

Though we tried to pretend otherwise, we were not a very happy family. The drycleaners in Lake City continued to decline and we had several employees to pay. Dad drank more and more. Mom talked more and more about leaving. She kept coming up with home business ideas to enable her to make money independently. They were usually based on cooking, gardening, sewing. None amounted to much. Even ideas that might have worked never received enough maintained effort.

When Chris was in 5^th Grade, she had a teacher named Mrs. Vincent. who seemed to be making life miserable for Chris in particular. I don’t know if any other students had trouble with Mrs. Vincent. According to Chris, her teacher was good friends with two girls from our neighborhood, both named Cathy, and their mothers. Chris frequently quarreled with these girls.

One afternoon, Mrs. Vincent kept Chris after school, locked the classroom door and proceeded to interrogate Chris in a manner she felt to be quite threatening. "What do you do to your animals?" Evidently the Cathy’s didn’t like the way Chris played with our cats. Next her teacher wanted to know about Chris’s blind brother.

"What about him?" Chris asked.

"What are you doing running around the neighborhood after school when you should be at home taking care of that blind brother of yours?" Mrs. Vincent demanded.

"I don’t take care of David." Chris said, astonished. "He takes care of me!" Of course that was beyond belief.

Mom went to the school Principal the next day and raised hell. She demanded to know if the teachers had degrees in psychology. The principal said indignantly, according to Mom, that each of his teachers had eight credits in psychology. "What do you think about ten years of the subject?" Mom asked, meaning that she’d dealt with Chris’s problems for ten years and was more of an expert than the teacher. While the conversation per se wasn’t all that profitable, Mom was able to get Chris transferred to another grade school, where she had a tall, very kind teacher, Mr. Levec, whom she liked very much.

At home Chris and I shared a lot of secrets. We were both trying to figure out the mysteries of sex and she was anticipating wearing a bra and having her period. We read articles from women’s magazines together and talked about people having intercourse, from a theoretical perspective. We smoked cigarettes together and shot off firecrackers sometimes when our parents weren’t home. We also fought a fair amount. I’m not speaking of mere verbal quarrels. We hit one another fairly frequently. Kicking wasn’t unknown, we insulted one another, and tore each other down verbally. Someone asked Chris if she actually hit That Blind Brother of hers and she said "Sure, but eventually he catches me and I get it all back again."

I don’t remember exactly what all we fought about. I don’t mean to give the impression that the fighting was all Chris’s fault but she was prone when frustrated, which was often, to take it out on one of the animals or on me. She most generally got the worst of it with me, though we never beat on one another as badly as other siblings we knew. Teasing was endemic in my family. I did it like everyone else. Sometimes the teasing would go on and on until somebody snapped, then the one who snapped would be a Poor Sport. It was supposedly all in fun but it seemed Chris did her best to squelch on or belittle everything about which I was serious. She’d stomp her feet outside my room when I was listening to talking book records, making the needle skip all over the record, flip the channel when I was watching TV, make fun of things I built. It seems petty to bring these things up now, but at the time, I guess I needed no further undermining of my self-esteem, nor did she of hers.

Chris sometimes brought in friends to join in harassing me and though I as the older brother was expected to keep some sort of order, I had no real authority or age-related privileges. Mom always brought up the fact that Chris had psychological difficulties and could not be made to feel insecure. She couldn’t accept having fewer privileges than me because in her mind, she was as mature as I was.

Chris and I looked out for each other generally when real need arose. I knocked down one of several boys who were bothering Chris and her friends in our front yard one-day. Chris helped me with stuff too; sometimes reading to me or narrating TV shows that we both liked. Things were not all bad between Chris and I or between me and anyone else in the house, but constant harping on Mom’s part about Chris’s psychological difficulties, in the face of no effort expended to actually help her, got very old after a while. It was easy enough, at a time when feeling underrated and insecure was already easy enough, to think that the family might be a lot better off if I wasn’t in it. Then Mom could devote all of her attention to Chris.

One morning while I was sitting in Conroy’s room, doing my Algebra, Paul walked in, went straight to Conroy’s desk and started a conversation. At first I didn’t know it was him because they seemed to be talking about school and I’d never heard Paul say very much about school as such, mostly he complained about teachers or other students.

I heard Conroy say, "You’ll go a lot further with a high school education," and "Is there a place you can get a shower? You can never be too clean you know." Still I wasn’t absolutely certain. Then Conroy said "Hey Plassman, this Paul Cline guy, do you know him?!"

"I know him," I said, still not sure how to play this game. Paul and Conroy talked some more, and then Paul walked casually back to my desk.

"Is everything still the same between us?" he asked.

I said that it was. Paul asked if we could go for a walk. My math was done so I got up and we went outside, talking openly, going where we felt like. I was tired of hiding. It wasn’t anybody’s business where I went when my homework was finished. This time I didn’t even consider telling my parents about Paul’s reappearance. I knew they could probably find out, but I decided just not to sweat it a whole bunch.

Paul and I fell naturally back into our conversations of a year and a half before. I was anxious to follow up on his claim that he’d found my real mom. Paul always had a grand flair for the dramatic and this was one of his most fascinating stories.

There had been it seemed, a couple who owned a truck and operated out of Fort Worth Texas. They had two children. They’d fallen on hard times and had to give the first child up for adoption. They had gotten back on their feet and had a second child, who was born somewhere in Texas. Tragedy had struck again though and this child too, had to be given up. The Shaws couldn’t allow one of their own to starve. They’d grieved all these years until recently. Well they might. Their second child was myself. Their first and eldest, had been Paul, born Clayton Shaw, my natural brother.

The story didn’t stop there. Toward the end of my eighth grade year, Paul had supposedly found the Shaws by calling every Shaw in every town he passed through, or something like that. Paul was never too clear on the details. The summer just past, before I entered High School, Paul said he had spent some time with Our Parents, had evidently done some trucking with them.

One day they were travelling together, they in their truck, Paul in his. Paul was some distance behind and suddenly, he saw a terrible wreck just ahead. He’d gotten to the scene just in time to hear our mother ask him plaintively to please take care of his little brother.

"Now I know we’re kin," Paul said, "I figured we needed to help each other. I spent more’n a year thinkin’ about it and finally made myself come up here and see you." I gave Paul some change I had, for bus money and divided my lunch with him. I made it to French Class on time and whispered to June Claflan, a girl who sat next to me, on whom I’d had a crush for a while now, that I’d just found out I was born in Texas. June was used to my rather eccentric utterings and she said that yes, she’d be very excited if she were to learn suddenly that she was born in Texas.

Later on that day when I was down in 110, Mr. Conroy called me up to his desk and said he knew Paul and I were walking around at lunchtime and that was okay so long as Paul wasn’t causing any trouble. He said "I threw him out of here a couple years ago and I don’t particularly want him back, but I think it would be good for Paul if he cleaned himself up and tried to make something of himself." I told Mr. Conroy I’d been talking to Paul about getting back into school. This was true. Paul had said the coming back to school dodge was just an excuse to get in and talk to me, but I asked Paul to think hard about finishing his diploma. Mr. Conroy said it was good that I was trying to get Paul to turn over a new leaf. The interview ended amicably.

Paul and I started getting together at lunchtime when weather permitted. Weather or no, I’d be out in front of the school, waiting through my lunch period. In those days I liked to stand around outside without a coat. It was a toughening up exercise, but I didn’t suffer much from the cold. I became a bit of a fixture from about Noon till Twelve Thirty and I met some interesting people. A girl named Rose, a Junior, razzed me for being a Sophomore and protested my calling her Honey, but kept coming back to reengage. Another girl once walked over and handed me a kitty, which over Paul’s objections, I held, until it jumped down.

One day a Senior boy named Wes came up to start a conversation and inquired if he could ask me a personal question. I bristled a bit. Was he going to try and sell me drugs or recruit me for a subversive organization? Personal questions were a red flag for me. I told him I’d listen to his question. The poor guy asked if I felt my schoolwork had been more difficult due to my blindness than it would otherwise have been. (I felt like two cents.) I told him I’d never noticed that being blind was really much of an educational handicap, which was true enough. Generally, if I were willing to listen and to read the text at least once, things tended to come fairly easily. That had been my general experience in most of my classes. Exceptions seemed to have little to do with lack of sight.

Another day, a Man named Joe Marshall introduced himself and asked what year I was. He wanted to know if I planned to go on to college and I said yes. He said he was looking for students who might want to work when they got through with high school. Not going to college had never really seemed a viable issue for me. I told Mr. Marshall that I might work after graduation, but I’d be going to college as well. I’d hear a fair amount from Joe Marshall over the next few years, sometimes as a mentor, sometimes as an irritant.

Early on, Paul started in again about our need to leave Seattle and go to Texas. I’d been chosen Roll-room president and Student Council Rep. I was making good marks in everything but French, and even those were definitely passing. I argued that I’d be graduating in about two and a half years, then I could arrange to go to college in Texas. Meanwhile we could meet when we wanted too. I’d be learning to take the bus soon.

Paul said he had only eight weeks in which to leave Seattle. This was based on a recent conversation with God. It wasn’t a matter of eight weeks going by and plans being still underway, it had to be accomplished within the eight weeks, otherwise Paul had permission from God to kill himself if this situation got screwed up. The implication was that I'd dragged my feet so badly before that we were being given one chance and one chance only.

Paul and I had been planning to run away since late in my Seventh Grade year, so this was no new idea, but I argued that I needed to finish my education. Paul countered that correspondence courses were available on tape. I could finish high school that way. The implication of that was that Paul knew where to get such courses and would have them ready for me by the time we left.

I prepared a list of the courses I’d need to complete high school and set a departure date for three and a half weeks hence. I think I wanted to finish my first quarter or complete some work I was doing for the Student Council or something. I began putting together packets of things I figured I couldn’t do without and bringing them to school to pass along to Paul. There was my policeman’s badge, my tape from Colonel White, my ninth grade annual and flirt award, seven albums, my science project note book from Mrs. Oliver’s class. I didn’t pack much in the way of clothes. We’d always assumed we’d need to disguise ourselves, dye our hair and the like.

In the intervening weeks it was very easy to magnify each slight which came my way, adding it to the enormous grudge pile I was building to justify my leaving. God having sent Paul to me to save my life had easily become transfigured into me needing to do things for Paul in order to obey God’s will. Things were never for Paul one understood, but it always worked out with Paul getting the money, gifts and now me too. Still, God was the focus and "because God said so" could not be questioned. It was very easy in fact, to feel quite righteous about what we were planning to do.

A boy called me a chicken or something and I told him to wait a few days and he’d find out that I had courage. My family didn’t appear to notice anything differently about me, nor evidently, did people at school. Mr. Conroy received a call from Mrs. Kroft, my English teacher, that she liked me very much and was giving me an A for the quarter. Mr. Watson was giving me a B. in Algebra, but told me with a little more work I could raise that to an A for the semester. I realized I liked Math and even liked English now. I’ve gotten an A in every English class I’ve taken since, with the exception of a B. in my college Sophomore year, when I’d just moved into the dorms and was having too much fun than was good for my grades.

In the last chapter, I mentioned my ill-fated love for Roseana Bartok and my subsequent interest in Nora Jelineau. I’d kept in touch with Nora by phone through the summer and fall and had wanted to take her to a school football game before I left Seattle, possibly forever. Though I gave Nora plenty of time to think things over she wouldn’t tell me yes or no until I pushed the point, the afternoon before the event, when she said she had other plans and couldn’t go with me. I really thought Nora could have been a bit more honest about just not wanting to go out with me, which later on she admitted was the case. I still feel so, but it was part of the nonsense of growing up and dealing with the brutal subtleties of the dating scene I guess. At the time, I’d been jilted by the woman I loved and this was an enormous cherry atop the self-pity Sunday.

A couple days before the planned bugout date when Paul showed up I told him I was sick of the suspense. There was no reason to hang around anymore. I was ready. "Let’s go then," he said. We caught a bus near school, transferred downtown and headed out south toward Boeing Field where Paul had his apartment.

Paul lived in a studio with a shared bath. It was the downstairs half of a house, with the landlord and landlady upstairs. Paul and I shared my lunch. I had a pear off the tree at home. It turned out Paul loved pears, so I let him have it all. I had half a sandwich and a cooky. Paul said he’d always thought it would be fun to have a contest with somebody to see who could eat a whole pie. That sounded like a fun idea, so he went to the grocery store, to buy a cherry pie for me and an apple one for him, plus some cans of pop. Just then, I wasn’t ready to overeat, so the pies were tabled, so to speak, and I never did eat mine.

We sat and talked things over for a while. I’d thought we would be heading for the Southwest as soon as we could, since Paul had told me our Navajo friends had decided I was dead, having not been heard from for so long. Now Paul was saying we’d best wait till May or June before leaving Seattle. By then the heat would in large measure, be off. I said we should leave before anyone was sure we were gone. Where were all of those trucks and truck drivers? Paul said he’d talked to Mack Davis from the phone booth when he’d gone out to the store. He’d farted at Mack over the phone and Mack had said, "I don’t want any more comments like that!" I’d be able to talk with Mack and the other drivers when it was safe for me to leave the apartment. Finally we agreed to leave sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Paul admitted he’d still need to find the address for a correspondence school. He obviously had no idea what he was doing. He also said he’d buy or steal what we needed to disguise ourselves. He’d asked me to listen to commercials about women’s hair dye so he’d know what sort of things to get. Originally we’d talked about coloring our skins as well. He’d even mentioned that there was such a thing as eye coloring.

Since the time Paul had been in Queen Anne and we could exchange letters on a daily basis, I’d been making contingency plans against the time we might leave Seattle. I knew we’d be easy to spot, since I was blind. Mom always said my eyes looked very normal and there’d be no reason to mark me as being blind if I weren’t trying to find my way or something. I’d been yelled at to open my eyes when I’d accidentally bumped into sighted kids at school. They’d usually apologized when I’d told them I couldn’t see. Paul said he could pass as fully sighted, which I doubt. He said if I quickly followed his own movements, communicated to me by his arm, I could keep people from knowing I had a vision problem either. I rather doubted this as well.

I was at this time, five-foot six and weighed 105. I had quite delicate features, slender hands and feet. Our bus driver, Mary, had once remarked, not unkindly, that I could probably pass as a girl if I was dressed appropriately. In those days a boy didn’t have to grow much hair to be thought of as girlish and there were always headscarves.

I put it to Paul that the police would be expecting to see two boys travelling together, not one boy and one girl. That might be the one thing we could do to mislead people who noticed I was blind. He said he saw what I meant, then "If we do that," he said, "let me know how it feels to wear a dress."

Paul brought out a tape recorder he said he’d built for me to use in my studies. It certainly looked like something put together by hand, but it appeared to work. I knew Paul had an interest in electronics and believe he had some knowledge in that direction, but he was always so glib that it was difficult to assess what he really knew or did not.

As the evening wore on, Paul started going through all my things, saying he needed to find out if I had anything with which to hit him over the head. I probably should have called him on that, but he was prone to being paranoid. Though it seemed fairly obvious to me that were I to want to hurt Paul I’d do it near school, not somewhere from which I couldn’t find my way back. I let him examine my things though and he found nothing suspicious.

Next he started playing the record albums I’d brought, singing along with the fast songs, skipping over the slow ones. He was particularly excited about the Dave Dudley record I’d brought. He’d not been able to find that particular album, he said.

After a while, Paul noticed I was neither smiling nor in any other way participating in the merriment. "You’re not having a very good time of it, are you?" he said. I told him I was feeling bad about my family. Whatever had passed among us, I knew they’d be distraught. Truth to tell, I found myself in a horrible deja vu. A year and a half before I’d dreamed of running away from home and feeling terrible about Mom, seeing flashes of her and Chris at home, as if watching scene changes on TV. In the months to come, I’d wonder just how I’d actually made myself leave home, with a dream like that to ponder, but I was in a very confused emotional state. Impending sadness was only one of the feelings with which I must deal and I managed to submerge that which would provide me with copious guilt for years to come, by focusing on the conviction that the family would somehow be better with me gone.

Paul said rather defensively that he probably shouldn’t have taken me away in the first place and he’d better bring me back. What precisely he meant by that, was difficult to ascertain. Whether Paul intended to leave me at school at Eight O Clock in the evening or perhaps take me to my home address, I, having gone to the trouble of running away, was certainly not going back that easily!

Paul and I talked about other things for a while. This was the first time in years we’d been able to talk all we wanted without school bells or returning parents to stop us. Paul told me he went out once a week and got "fucked up" meaning drunk, evidently. I couldn’t go along of course, because of The Disease. I wasn’t allowed to drink. I asked him if he had a girlfriend. He said "You probably won’t approve of this, but every week or so, I go out with some whore or other, just to keep me going." To Keep Me Going was Paul’s way of saying I want it and am going to have it and if I can’t get it, there’s no point in me staying alive. We of course had been down that road many times.

Paul said that he’d had sex with Korri Whitaker whom I’d known the year previous. "I got her," was actually what he said, but it hadn’t meant anything. He’d just been using her to pass letters and hide stuff, mostly my stuff. She must have been pretty good at hiding it too, since there was no trace in Paul’s home, of the jeans and red sweater he’d wanted so desperately a year and a half before.

Paul also told me of how he and Chris Buckley, whom we’d known down at Vancouver, had gotten together sometime within the past year. It wasn’t clear where they’d met, but they’d evidently been making plans to get married. He said they were about to take off someplace private and go to bed, when Chris’s dad had shown up. Like me, Chris had been given an interdict from her parents not to see Paul. Chris was nineteen or twenty at this time and could legally have gone with Paul had she wanted. According to Paul, Mr. Buckley, finding them together, gave her the choice of coming home Now, or losing her family. She had turned on Paul and cussed him as if he’d abducted her or something. I have no way of knowing how much truth, if any, there is in this story. I’ve met Chris once, very briefly, since that time, but had no opportunity to speak with her at any length, certainly not about private matters.

Inevitably, the conversation got around to The Disease, Paul had told me when last we’d discussed matters, that my semen would be deadly to any woman with whom I had sex. "I’ve seen it happen!" Paul said. "A guy’ll be workin’ away, then all of a sudden, the gal Dies!"

There was another problem too. Paul claimed he’d been Drying Out, meaning he hadn’t been able to ejaculate for a while. That, he claimed, was what happened in an extreme phase of The Disease, right before death. If one could correct the problem, the progress of The Disease might be reversed or at least arrested.

DP#1. Using the theory that sperm injected through the rectum could restore function to nonfunctioning testicles, Paul said that even though my semen would be deadly to a girl, it could restore him. I was to penetrate him, providing the restorative injection, incidentally saving his life. Once he was back in operation, he would return the favor and his restored, presumably healthy sperm would counteract my deadly semen production and somehow Teach my misfunctioning testicles to produce properly hereafter.

DP#2. This sounds like an antibiotic theory I suppose and I wish I’d known more at the time about male reproductive physiology. Though the prostate can be stimulated through the rectum, I know of no direct route from the lower intestine to the prostate or the testicles. Nor do I know of any reason why any sort of sperm should have any effect on the male reproductive system, unless it carried a pathogen. Though toxic shock can occur from a variety of causes, I know of no disease process which can cause a woman to die immediately through contact with semen. Paul’s disease theories smacked a good deal more of magic than science.

DP#3. Since Paul and I had known one another, he had never seen my penis erect, something he complained about sometimes, as if I were purposefully withholding something from him. Since our encounters were nether sexual nor pleasant for me, it would have not have been very natural for me to function as if they were. Before we could go further though, Paul said he needed to see and feel how I ejaculated. He managed to bring me to orgasm by hand. He said I produced a great deal of semen, but it took me way too long to do it and about 40% of my output was that deadly chemical of which he was speaking. This was the last time we engaged in the Checking activity. We never did proceed with the mutual cure strategy Paul had requested. Other events intervened.

When I’d met Paul in Seattle at the beginning of 8^th Grade, I’d excitedly pointed out my friend Buck Ritchie the D.J. on the radio. I’d met Buck at a Country KAYO picnic in Fourth Grade and had communicated with him off and on, since. Paul took an immediate dislike to Buck’s voice and radio manner and said he was a big joto, a Spanish word which Paul said meant stuck up, but actually means queer. I never got clear as to why Paul disliked Buck Ritchie. Paul usually didn’t require reasons to dislike people.

By the time we met again, early in my 10^th Grade year, Paul and Buck were, according to Paul, Good Buddies. This impression seemed largely due to the fact that Buck and other D.J.s at KAYO let Paul hang around the station and gave him money. Paul reciprocated by stealing records from the station. He bragged about it to me.

That evening, around twelve-thirty or later, we went to bed, still wearing our clothes. Paul told me he frequently went out and walked at night. He did that night. I think it was about Four-thirty in the morning when Paul woke me, saying Buck Ritchie had made an announcement on the radio, about Us!

We’d been listening to the radio on the half hour, to see if there’d be any reports from the police. Till now, there’d been nothing. In his radio spot, Buck Ritchie said the people of Seattle were asked to assist in finding two missing blind boys. He gave our names and some physical description, saying I was last seen at Queen Anne High the previous morning. There was no mention of runaways. I was told later that Buck had put the announcement together to let me know effort was being made to find me. I’d assumed that once I was discovered missing, all suspicion would be focused upon me and Paul too, as having run away together. A vindictive police dragnet would immediately go into action to bring me back. It never occurred to me that everyone would assume I’d been kidnapped. This whole process taught me a great deal about how people in general and my acquaintances in particular, viewed blind people, primarily as victims, persons who couldn’t do anything very bad, because they were helpless.

I really hadn’t intended to leave without any trace. I’d intended to confide in Nora but that hadn’t worked out. I suggested to Paul that I make a very brief call from a phone booth and hang up. I reasoned that a very brief call could hardly be traced. I’d been told as much by people who appeared to know about such things. Paul called upon his faithful standby when dealing with officialdom. "How do you know what kinds of stuff they have for trackin’ you that they don’t tell us about?" he asked. Paul came up with a counter proposal though. That was for me to write a note in Second Grade or contracted Braille. Everyone who knew Paul should be aware that he had never learned the system of contractions and had to spell things out letter by letter.

I wrote the letter with my pocket slate, telling my family that I had left of my own accord. I had not been kidnapped. This was something I just needed to do and I was very sorry for any pain I caused in doing so. As it happened, the letter would have done little good. Mom and Dad had no idea of how much Braille Paul did or didn’t know. He might have been studying Braille since I’d seen him last for that matter. At the time the letter seemed like a good idea, but we never had a chance to mail it.

I tried to go back to sleep after the Paul’s announcement of Buck’s newsflash but Paul was restless and the report had managed to spook us. I don’t know what we’d expected, but somehow a Lost report scared us more than a bulletin about runaways.

I put the question again about getting the hell out of Seattle. Paul said that would probably be wise. He said he had a friend in Portland and we could stay there a while, before working our way toward Texas. To be even somewhat safe though, it seemed best to wait till dark.

It was a rotten plan. Had we done what I’d originally suggested, I.E. head directly from school to the Greyhound Depot, Paul being older than me, could have posed as a big brother or even some sort of adult helper. Lots of kids traveled around the city during school hours, because school let out at different times for different students and for various reasons. Since I wouldn’t be missed till 4:30, (Mom said it was actually Six O Clock before she got sufficiently worried to call the school bus dispatcher,) Paul and I couldn’ve been out of the state before we were officially reported missing and there’d be no particular reason to assume we’d gotten to any given direction.

By the time we did try to leave town, bus and train depots, airports and ferry terminals had all been alerted and police had handbills out with a recent picture of me and physical descriptions of both of us.

Now Paul and I must pass a rather tense day. We responded now and later by acting rather silly, while being quite scared. Paul offered me breakfast, but I couldn’t eat and kept putting off any suggestion of a meal. This in itself was a measure of the anxiety I was suppressing. Normally I ate great quantities of food. Paul and I smoked, drank pop, talked, he showed me various items of truck hardware he had.

Paul claimed to know just about all there was to know about diesel engines. His apartment was littered with engine and transmission parts. I told him I intended for him to teach me all about diesels too. I’d teach him about rockets and spacecraft and we’d know the same stuff together.

The news reports became more alarming in tone. Paul showed me some items of clothing he’d saved from when he was about my age. Nothing fit me. It looked like the disguise idea wasn’t going to work, at least not right away!

Mom said that after learning I hadn’t been on my bus, she’d called Mr. Conroy at home. A student being absent from the bus wasn’t in and of itself a cause for concern, since lots of students had after school activities or stayed in the area of the school to visit friends. Mr. Conroy had evidently managed to get someone over to the school to check the attendance records. It was found that I’d skipped my fifth and sixth periods after lunch and I’d never cut a class before. Mr. Conroy called back then and said "Mrs. Plassman, I’m going to tell you something that’s going to scare the hell out of you. Paul Cline has been hanging around the school for the last month."

I’d always assumed that if I ran away, they’d immediately think of Paul but they evidently hadn’t. There’d even been some silly notion that I might somehow, have wandered away from school and fallen down a hole or something. Needless to say, the news about Paul scared everyone.

Sometime, about mid morning, there was a knock at the door, subdued voices then more knocking. We sat very still. Paul whispered very quietly, "I wonder if they’re getting ready to break the door down." Then we heard a car door slam.

"Did you hear just one car door slam?" Paul asked presently. I said I thought I’d heard only one. "I wonder if one of them is still outside." Paul said. He was pretty sure they came in twos or more when they were trying to get into a house. There were no windows on the side of the apartment where the front door was, so we had no idea who or what might be out there. Paul said that if they tried to get in, he’d better put me in the closet, then he could act as if he knew nothing about me being gone and say he’d been here all of the time. Then he said, "Would you assault an officer in a good cause?" adding, "I would." I said that I wouldn’t unless it was the only possible way of getting out of a fatal situation, that I still respected the law even if I didn’t always obey it.

Later in the day there was more knocking. This time there were three voices and more distinct. Paul whispered that one of them was his landlord.

"Who lives here?" a policeman asked.

"A man," Paul’s landlord answered. He added that he didn’t know much about Paul, that he lived alone and was pretty quiet. A policeman asked if the tenant might be sleeping, did he work?" The landlord said he didn’t know. He asked if the officers wanted him to open the door. (Paul and I tensed.) They said they couldn’t enter the apartment. More knocking, then the police went away, two door slams. (Darkness couldn’t get here soon enough to suit me!)

I continued to feel bad about what my family must be going through and Paul threatened to take me someplace where the police could find me and bring me home. He didn’t want to venture out right now though and I told him things had gone rather far for me to just show up on a street corner somewhere.

Finally, in an effort to lift my spirits, Paul said "I was saving this for Christmas, but you need something to cheer you up now, so I’m sorry, but you’ve spoiled your surprise." He handed me a hard-backed book. "That’s your book, Through Time And Space," he told me. "We had this one printed up special for you. Billy Holder had em use silver ink and that stuff’s real expensive!"

I said wonderingly that Through Time And Space was only 20 pages long in Braille, less than half that in print. "Didn’t you write something about The Future?" Paul asked, "a longer book?" I said this was true. He told me that Billy Holder, editor of the Alamagordo Daily News, had taken it upon himself to make a collection of all the stories and the book I’d written in Eighth Grade. Thinking back, I doubt that every word of fiction I’d so far written to date would have filled a book of the size I was holding, but Paul sounded so sincere that it was natural enough to believe him.

I asked Paul to read the table of contents for me so I could see exactly what I had. He acted as if he were making a serious effort to pick out a word here and there, but finally said he was sorry, the print was just too small and he couldn’t make any of it out, that he needed a magnifying glass.

Toward evening, we began preparing for our escape. Paul asked me to carry for him a round file and a little wrench he wanted. He also gave me seventy dollars to hold. I’m not sure why he did that. I’d given his a ten-dollar-bill the day before, the last of my bank money. This was supposed to help with food while we were on the road. For the first time, I think, I realized Paul was on Welfare. I guess I’d assumed the Company could be sending him some money. He was Twenty-one now, No longer any need to conceal anything. Still, if the Company could send him Some Money, why not a Lot of Money. The stories were wearing thin.

Paul got a paper sack that we could take turns carrying. He put in it the microphone from the recorder he’d shown me and his safety razor. I said I wanted to take the slim plastic notebook that held the write-ups and reports from my Ninth-Grade Science project. It was a plan to manufacture alcohol and oxygen from bio-products in a lunar base. I said it was worth a lot of money. Paul said he knew it. Then he said he had to bring along my letters.

These were stories and missives I’d been writing him during the weeks since we’d met again, quite a hefty sheaf of Braille paper, which filled most of the sack. I was still clutching my book.

Paul said, "You know, I had a dream about us leaving just like this. You were standing right about there and were holding your book and of course you knew we couldn’t take it along with us...." I think I get angrier at this statement than almost anything else Paul ever said or did. Not angry so much at Paul, this was just so true to form for him, but angry at me! I just let the words Of Course stand in for a logical reason why I had to leave behind a single volume while Paul could fetch along five pounds of loose paper I’d written myself and could have duplicated or bettered. Of Course, if I’d confronted Paul with the fraud his gift obviously was, he’d have come up with some silly excuse about how he’d feared for my emotional wellbeing and had given me this book temporarily in place of the real one that would be coming along just any day now. Still it would have been some satisfaction later to have caught him out in this flat lie.

We left my contracted-Braille letter in the middle of the floor, figuring it wold be at most a few hours before the police would find it and could get someone to read it for them. We stepped off Paul’s back porch, setting off at a dogtrot through Seattle’s industrial scenery.

There’s no way I can exactly reconstruct the route we took. We began somewhere at the south end of Boeing Field in South Seattle, and we ended up somewhere near the Greyhound Bus Terminal near the center of town. We’d covered ten to twelve miles, mostly at a trot. We threaded through train yards for a while, once nearly being caught between two rows of boxcars which Paul thought would slam together when a freight train came rattling through. Once we ran across the tracks in front of an on coming train.

We crossed a truck yard Paul knew and hid for a while in a semi trailer until some nearby activity died down. We crouched down from time to time to avoid being spotted, hiding behind tractors and trailers. I recall peeing in several stages, having to clamp down suddenly when Paul spotted someone drawing near, then resuming when the intruder passed.

We went on and on and my legs and lungs began to burn. I’d been running a mile or more in Gym, but this was more exertion than I’d ever had to put out at a single stretch, even down at Vancouver. At one point I sat flat-legged on the filthy ground, too exhausted even to crouch. "They’re going to know we’re runaways," Paul said, "because you’re so dirty and greasy."

At last we reached the lower business district, through which there was really no point in running. A car went by and slowed but did not stop. We walked on, looking as nonchalant as we could.

"Fellows!" We were within six blocks of the Greyhound Depot. Perhaps the shouting wasn’t for us. We kept walking. "Fellows!" this time louder and closer. We still kept going but were soon blocked by two men. "We’re city engineers," said one of them "and I think you guys are lost. Lots of people are looking for you."

I told him we weren’t lost at all, that my name was Joe Parker and this was my big brother Jonny. We’re were heading back to our folks house in Portland. We’d just been up to Seattle on a visit. Paul and I had run over this alibi before leaving his apartment. The engineer said we’d need to talk to the police, then maybe they could get us back where we were headed. He asked his partner to call from a phone booth.

It didn’t take long for the police to arrive. Two officers had soon joined our little group. One of them identified himself to me and asked if I thought I could feel a policeman’s badge. I told him I believed he was a policeman but that he had the wrong guys. "We’re catching a bus to Portland," I said.

"What’s your name," the cop asked. "Joseph Parker," I told him.

"Your name’s David Plassman, isn’t it?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"Where do you live, David?" the cop asked.

"Portland," I said without thinking.

"You tricked yourself," the cop observed. Paul had meanwhile refused to answer anything to questions sent his way. "Okay," the policeman said not unkindly, "let’s get in the car." He guided me to the back seat of the police car and Paul got in after me.

"David," said the other cop, "You’d never make a crook." I said no, I wasn’t a crook and I’d like to work with the police someday. This wasn’t empty verbiage. I was a devotee of Dragnet, Adam Twelve and The Smith Family, all cop shows and unlike Paul I had a good deal of respect for the police. The situation in which I now found my self was embarrassing more than anything else.

"Maybe a miracle will happen," said the second cop "and you will be able to work with us." Though I’d spent the last several hours running, trying to stay away from the police, few things in my life ever felt better than sitting back in that patrol car seat. Not only had we covered a dozen miles but we hadn’t eaten since the night before and I’d hardly slept the last two nights. The night before I left was difficult and the night away had been interrupted prematurely by Paul’s announcement about Buck Ritchie’s message.

As we drove the cop who wasn’t behind the wheel, read from the description furnished by Mom and Lois. My appearance and clothing I’d had on the day before were described, along with the notation "David walked very straight and erect with his arms held out in front of him." This made me sound like some kind of Frankenstein monster I thought. Somehow, they’d also gotten a description of Paul, possibly by accessing records either at Queen Anne or Vancouver. Paul’s height and approximate weight were given, along with "Paul frequents the Industrial district and is known to sleep in boxcars."" "Hell , I like That!" Paul exploded. I think that was the first thing he said since we were apprehended. Then Paul said, " I suppose I’m going to jail?""

"I don’t know," said the cop who was driving.

"What is going to happen now?" I asked next.

"I don’t know," the driver repeated. "We’ll have to go to headquarters and see the Captain and find out what he wants to do."

Paul was still complaining about the boxcar remark as they led us into the Public Safety Building at 3^rd and James, just a few blocks from where we were spotted.

"They’re going to kill you now, Dave," Paul said.

"Yeah," I said, "and you too, Paul." We had a good laugh over that, nervous, covering up fear, but it felt brave and tough.

"We want a chance to talk to your parents with an officer present, don’t we?" Paul asked. I agreed.

One of the police officers asked if we were hungry. My stomach was still knotted up but I was very thirsty. I asked if I could please have a drink of water. A female voice suggested that I might use the drinking fountain in the hall. Somebody said something to her, I’m not sure what, and a large, glass cup full of water, was handed me. We seemed to be standing in an office area. I could hear telephones and typewriters about me.

"We need to talk to you guys in separate rooms," an officer said.

"Well, I don’t know," I said. "What do you think, Paul?"

"We want to be able to think for ourselves," said the cop a bit condescendingly. He led me into an interview room.

"I’m Officer Parks," said a policeman sitting across from me. He was surprised when I offered my hand. He shook it. He asked my name and age, for the record. I gave him correct information. He asked if I knew what color my hair and eyes were. I said my hair was blonde and my eyes were blue. Then I said

"This one goes like this," and I tapped my plastic eye with my right forefinger.

"Don’t do that!" Officer Parks said, sounding horrified. "Doesn’t that hurt?" I told him no, that the eye was artificial. At school I’d nearly made some jocks lose their lunch and had delighted Roseana.

Next he asked me why I’d been away from school and my home. I told him I’d run away with my best friend Paul, that Paul had not kidnapped me. He asked me why I’d run away, were my parents cruel to me? I thought about it a moment, then said no, my parents weren’t cruel to me, but I was tired of being treated like a child. He asked me what I meant by that.

I told him I was being held back, that I couldn’t leave the yard without an escort. Nobody thought I was mature enough to do anything for myself. I told him I was a pretty smart guy and intended to become a scientist. I was concerned that when it came time for me to graduate high school, my parents would decide I should work in a sheltered workshop or become a business Major or something ignominious like that! A great majority of this was true though not all of it was my parents’ fault. Mom had made noises about how an effort must be made to see if any blind person had ever done science before, since I wasn’t much of a pioneer. I never did figure out that one! I still wasn’t allowed to cut my meat at home nor had anyone bothered to teach me any other significant household chores. What I knew pretty much came from Vancouver. Paul had plenty of material with which to work and much of what I was saying now, grew out of Paul’s oft repeated admonition that if I hung around home, I’d be a baby forever.

Officer Parks said I was a very smart person and the way to handle my problems with my parents was to become a scientist when the time came and show them I could do it. Nobody could stop me from doing that. He asked if these were my real parents. I told him I was adopted. He said I was lucky, that a lot of those kids grew up as orphans. (I addressed this point in Chapter One and won’t again.)

Then he asked me why Paul and I had felt we needed to run away together. I told him that because of a lot of vicious rumors, my parents had gotten the idea that Paul was a homosexual. We were best friends but were never allowed to visit one another or do anything together. I said I knew Paul wasn’t a homosexual because he had a girlfriend. Ruth Johnson had told me that a homosexual boy wouldn’t have a girlfriend, (though I had heard of gay men having female companions to hide their true nature.) Mom had told me that homosexuals were disgusted by all women. Still down at Vancouver, Paul had been criticized by Chris Buckley’s house parent for being too free with his hands, indicating that he was probably a sex maniac.

Officer Parks told me that some men were interested in both sexes and were called Bisexual. I hadn’t known about that. I figured you were one thing or the other. He asked if there’d been any sex between us while we were at Paul’s apartment. I said no, that it made me feel sick to my stomach to think about something like that. Did he know what I meant? He said yes, he did know.

Next Officer Parks said, "We have the bag you boys were carrying. Is there any reason we’d need to look in there?"

I said "You can look in there if you want. It’s mostly Braille notes, but you could probably find somebody to read them for you if you wanted."

He said, "Yes, there are people right in this building who can read and write Braille." (I wondered who.) While on the subject I asked

"Paul and I know a publisher down in New Mexico. I’d been writing stories and getting them published. Is there anything illegal about that?" According to Paul, virtually everything he claimed to provide was against the law and some joto or jota would surely screw it up for me if I were to let on what I was doing.

"No," said Officer Parks. "I wouldn’t think there’d be anything wrong with that, though I’m not a lawyer."

"Why wasn’t I read my rights?" I asked.

"Because there wasn’t a crime and you weren’t being arrested," he said, then amended "well Juvenile Runaway is a crime, but we thought you were lost." I told him I did feel badly about concerning everyone, including Buck Ritchie, my D.J. friend, because Buck was a good guy.

"Yes," Officer Parks said enthusiastically "he is a good guy. I listen to him on the radio in the morning when I’m coming to work." Then we discussed some of the other D.J.s at KAYO.

I’m sure I said other things during our interview but I was not rude or profane and kept my composure, evidently not acting in the manner he was used to from kids just pulled in off the street. He said my parents had been called and would be here soon. Was I willing to talk with them? I said something to the effect that they’d be taking me home. He acted as if he doubted this. Officer Parks had no idea of how much Mom objected to letting anyone else have control over one of her kids, no matter how upset she was with him She essentially regarded us as property.

I said, "When I talk to my parents I want Paul to be here and I want an officer present. We’re going to keep running away until my parents stop being so ridiculous."

I found out later that Mom was incredibly insulted by my request to have a police officer present. She assumed I was saying that I was terrified of her and feared reprisals, which of course diminished her as a mother. This however wasn’t the reason I insisted upon a mediator. I wanted to get in a few words edgewise.

The next bit I got from Mom and have no way of checking the validity of her rendering. Officer Parks, leaving me in the interview room, had gone out to talk to my parents. Mom and Dad, Chris and Lois had driven down to the station at what must have been three-thirty in the morning. Arriving in the station they were told that I appeared to be all right, then were asked if they wanted to declare me incorrigible.

Mom said "Of course not! "I’ve just gotten him back. I want to take him home."

"When you talk to this boy I think you’ll change your mind," Officer Parks had supposedly said. Mom interpreted this as meaning that he thought me to be a hardened criminal. This may have been so, but I have some trouble believing it. I’ve since wondered if Officer Parks’ remark had more to do with my willingness to go home.

"Do either of you have any idea how much distress you’ve put everybody through with this little fiasco?" Mom said when she sat down next to me in the interview room. "I think so," I said. Dad had also sat down with us. Paul was across the room with Officer Parks.

"Well David," Officer Parks said, "You had something you wanted to say to everyone?"

I began by explaining Paul and my dissatisfaction that my parents had refused to listen when we’d tried to explain that we were just good friends and had not allowed us to associate. I also said that it seemed right for me to leave home. My little sister had emotional difficulties and needed all the support she could get. In Paul’s way of self-pitying his way to grandeur, I’d convinced myself that by leaving home I was obeying God and helping Chris at the same time.

"Mom asked Paul if there was noone he could look to for companionship besides a 15-year-old boy. Couldn’t he find friends his own age?

"I’ve got lots of friends," Paul retorted.

Officer Parks said we had a problem since Paul was 21 and I only 15, technically a crime of kidnapping had occurred. I said I’d gone willingly so it couldn’t be kidnapping. He said Paul was harboring me though.

Paul wanted to know what harboring was. I told him.

Then Officer Parks said, "In a case like this, the parents are pretty much the law. If they say you two can’t be together, That’s the way it’s going to have to be. You don’t want to start a police record." Then he asked me how long it would be until I was 18.

"Two and a half years," I said.

"That might sound like a long time," he said, "but couldn’t you just behave yourself until then?" "Yes," I said, "I can." (actually, that’s what I’d tried to tell Paul in the first place!)

"Couldn’t you just leave our family alone, Paul?" Mom entreated. "How long does this have to go on?"

"Yeah," Paul said. "I could do that."

"What’s your solution to this whole fiasco, David?" Mom wanted to know. What my solution had been was thwarted. If someone had said even now, The bus is that away. Go ahead. I’d have gone, but that wasn’t going to happen.

"I want to go home," I said, "though I suppose you don’t want me." Dad who’d been pretty quiet up till now said "You want to go home because that bed and hot food looks pretty good." I said that had nothing to do with it and I’d go somewhere else if that’s the way he felt. Mom shushed the situation.

Officer Parks said when he was a teenager he’d had trouble with his parents over a friend who’d been involved in criminal activity. It was a good thing for him that he’d listened to his parents, he said, since he’d wanted to go into police work and couldn’t afford a criminal record.

We stood up and Paul gave me back my ten-dollar-bill. I gave him back his money and also his wrench and pliers. Paul insisted on shaking hands with both my parents. Officer Parks said Goodbye to me as we left.

"Come on," Mother said, grabbing me. "I think you’re headed for a psychologist!" Lois, who’d been standing in the corridor, asked me if I was all right. I said I was though I didn’t feel very all right.

The ride home was basically recrimination. Dad said I’d found my true calling, I’d make a great actor. I’d fooled everybody, making them think I cared about them but didn’t care about anybody but myself. Paul was going to end up in the State Pen and I was going to end up there too.

Mom described the enormous debt to society I’d incurred and how many miles through the streets of Seattle she’d walked, trying to find her son, whom, she had until today, she’d have bet her life would never do such a thing to her. She’d told everyone she knew I’d been kidnapped. How was she ever going to face all of those people again?

I said I’d face them for her. "Good deal," she said, not sounding as if she believed me much.

Throughout the whole thing, the main thread seemed to be how I’d fooled everybody. Nobody had any idea what I was planning to do. It didn’t seem worth mentioning that the point was to maintain secrecy. I wasn’t just making a cry for help.

When we got home, the hammering was still going on. I told them I’d done what I had because I had thought it was the right thing, that I did love them. Lois started crying and asked how I could do such a frightening thing to them if I loved them so much? Now I was crying too. Mom put her arms around me and I said, "I’m just so ashamed," which suddenly, I was.

"That’s all we were waiting for you to say," Mom said.

Dad ran a tub for me and took my clothes. I was filthy. I got clean and into something, I don’t recall what and had some milk and turkey sandwiches. We were all hungry. I think that was one of the few times I was asleep just about as soon as I hit the pillow. I was very willing to get on the school bus later that morning but Mom said I needed to stay home at least for a day or two.

That night I had a very erotic dream, not about Paul, but about another boy from Vancouver. I dreamed I performed oral sex on him seven times, then found that I’d somehow lost my penis. I woke up about noon, feeling rather disgusted with myself. Mom asked me if I wanted to get up, saying I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to.

Mom sat down next to my bed and began telling me what the last couple of days had been like for her, my family and it seemed, most of the community. She had spent the day going to my school, to a dormitory where Paul had stayed at one time, to the police, to the radio station, to the TV studio. Dad had been told to go home from work and had lost a day and a half of wages because of me. Teachers from several schools had evidently been out looking for me, as had my Aunt Katherine and Uncle Lyle.

My cousin Steven from Billings, now an Army Private at Fort Louis, had been shining his boots when he heard the announcement about me on the radio. He’d called to offer his condolences. Down at Vancouver, Mr. Burhow and some of the older boys had been searching the campus and the surrounding area, incase Paul and I turned up there. Closer to home, Bill Jess, our rather lovable alcoholic neighbor had been in a turmoil the whole time, calling the police and threatening to go to school and interrogate my teachers.

The list went on and on and if I don’t report more it’s because I can’t recall the whole of it. "And we all had to go through all of this because of Paul Cline!" Mom said at several times during the discourse.

As I’ve said before, I had no idea my leaving would cause such a turmoil. I thought the response would be a desire to catch and punish, not a public effort to rescue me. I’d never thought of myself as being all that helpless, or for that matter, all that handicapped. Mom had played the blindness card to the hilt. Still, it was she, just about two years before, who’d said she didn’t want me anymore and Dad had agreed.

I’d been lectured about Paul many times over the last three years and I’d never listened to any of it except as material to debunk or upon which to build my anger. Now though, the words began finally to penetrate. Perhaps being with Paul for an extended period had finally gotten across to me how much of his stories were lies and braggadocio. I still suspected there was a trucking company, but now my position was more agnostic than zealot.. I suddenly realized how misguided my behavior over the last three years had been and how little justification there had been for it.

A call came in from Mr. Conroy and Mom talked to him for a while. She hung up saying that Mr. Conroy was very regretful about not intervening when Paul started hanging around the school. He’d said that Paul was of no particular merit academically, but was like a Svengali, pulling puppet strings. When he decided to manipulate me I had no defense against him.

Indeed, considering this chapter and the three that preceed it, it is a thing of astonishment to me how a 17-year-old boy, which Paul was when I first met him, could have learned such abilities at not only manipulating, but downright brainwashing. I may have been an easy mark, but by no means the only one, merely the most staunch and long lasting evidently.

Mom and I talked for a long time that day. I tried to explain to her why I’d felt alienated at school, from Roseana’s games in Ninth Grade, to the hecklings of Fred Knudson who liked to call me a dipshit, to Brooks in Ceramics, a boy who liked to blow in my face and throw balls of clay at my head. Beyond that, Mr. Conroy called us Little Fairies, which I felt was aimed at me. The school was full of druggies. I don’t think I really had any more on my plate schoolwise than anybody else, but I had built things up larger than life. I’d learned how to do that very well.

I tried to explain to Mom how hard it was for me to abandon someone who was in as much need as Paul. I knew he had some sort of health problems and he was also very lonely, though he claimed to have lots of friends.

Mom said that she was sure that when I’d been no longer able to provide the degree of love and support Paul craved, he’d have turned on me and might well have killed me. She told me how she’d visited a dormitory maintained by The State Services For The Blind for summer training sessions. Paul had lived there a while, though he was nowhere near college bound. The boys with whom Mom talked had evidently said nothing about homosexuality but some of them had admitted to selling drugs to Paul. I think this, more than anything else, convinced me that Paul was not the person I thought him to be. Young men had risked their reputations and possible legal charges to convince Mom, as if convincing were necessary, that Paul was a dangerous person.

Later in the afternoon, Uncle Frank and Aunt Wilma came over and had dinner with us. That put a temporary stop to the intense conversation. Later, Berry Durane and Marty Lanser both called to ask how I was and welcome me back.

The following day Mom went to school and had a conference with Mr. Conroy. She came back with the opinion that Mr. Conroy was a fiercely protective advocate of blind students. This was in large measure true, though advocacy can often imply domination. My gym teacher Mr. Tucker had been consulted about my endurance and Mr. Tucker said that given the distance I’d covered with Paul I couldn’t possibly have done it on my own. I must have been drugged. This was nonsense. I’d had no drugs save nicotine and adrenaline, certainly nothing mood-altering. Years later Mom was still convinced that I’d been given drugs. Somehow the idea leaked out into the school. In my Senior year, when I had made a date with a girl named Laurie for the annual cruise, Laurie was asked by a friend who she was going with. "Dave Plassman," Laurie said.

"Oh," said the other girl, "That was the guy who ran away a couple years ago and took some L.S.D."

On returning from her talk with Conroy, Mom said the school was full of filthy rumors about me, concerning what I’d been doing while away. I’d need to stay away from school a couple more days while "the faculty gets the rumors under control." In truth I never found any evidence of dirty rumors ever having existed. Most kids didn’t even know who Paul was, nor did they care. "Dave ran away from school, big deal." Anyone who’s been much around a high school knows how hard it is to stop kids from talking if they feel like it. I was affected by Mom and Mr. Conroy’s assertions that everybody was wondering what I’d been doing and assuming the worst. On returning I started a couple of smallish tiffs, thinking I'd been slighted, when probably it was an offhand remark, but it didn't amount to much. A few of my close friends let me know privately, how worried they were about me when I'd turned up missing. Mrs. Kroft, not given to jokes particularly said she was sure I’d just missed her so much (she’d been absent herself for a few days due to illness,) that I just hadn’t known what to do with myself.

Otherwise I pretty much stepped back into the same stream I’d left, perhaps a few hundred feet down-current. No, I was standing on my own feet, not clutching at illusory branches to bolster me.

I’ve had a lot of years to wonder why I’d fallen and stay so fixedly under Paul’s spell for so long. I was obviously ripe for this sort of picking. I’d always been prone to flights of fancy and had mostly perceived my life as being just plain boring. My self-esteem in seventh Grade must have been far from adequate. I was small for my age, had for some time been doing poorly in what should have been my most important subject, Math. Nobody really seemed to believe I could do much of anything. I was 17 before I was allowed to fix my own plate and Mom was still insisting on combing my hair.

Hindsight isn’t much good in any practical way, but I think a moderate amount of mentoring would have helped me a great deal. Mom often threatened me with a psychiatrist, "To fix what’s wrong with you." This was unfortunate and ridiculous. To represent psychiatry or other therapy as the means of removing the parts of one that someone else doesn’t like, is a simplistic ignorant view, not to mention highly selfish. I suspect that I could have derived a lot of benefit from the right kind of counseling. So could the rest of my family.

What Paul did most was to let me think that somebody believed in me. Most of the designs I submitted to be turned into hardware by Our Company were either absurd or so general to have not really counted as designs, but Paul always acted as if I knew what I was doing. Even when he was unhappy about my not doing what he wanted, at least I had enough power to screw things up.

Some supported design and prototyping experience would have been very good for me. I’d have learned that I was a design genius at age 13 or 15, but that I had some talent, which could be developed. I’d have learned something about the work I’d set myself to do throughout my life. When I arrived at university, I found that many of my peers had been to Science Camp or in Junior Engineering Technologists. Most of them had more to work with as teens, had been taken more seriously by teachers and counselors. Yes, I could have done a lot more with a little support.

A couple days after I return from The Long Walk, a term Mom coined to describe my running away, Mom and Lois went to visit Paul at his apartment. They offered to make a Dr. appointment for him to address some of his physical issues. Paul was evidently quite touched that they’d come and see him. He said they should give him a couple of days to think it over, then drop him a card. He’d respond. He gave back all my record albums, save for the Dave Dudley, which I never saw again, nor did I ever see again my police badge, my reel from Ed White and of course my anthology all done in silver ink!

The card was never sent to Paul. Mom somehow decided that it was Paul’s responsibility to get in touch with her, how she figured that, I’m not sure.

The weekend after our excursion, I said that I thought it would be good for us all if the whole family got up on Sunday and went to Church. Mom and I went to Maple Leaf Lutheran Sunday morning and we continued there for a few months. Eventually Chris started attending but Dad refused to go. Mom was evidently offended by my attempt to make ours a church-going family again. She said that when I’d run away I could hardly have been thinking about God. Though it’s true that my thoughts were misguided in large measure, the assertion that I wasn’t thinking about God could hardly be further from the truth.

Mom suddenly stopped taking me to Church after one Sunday when I supposedly smarted off at the Pastor. What I’d said in the reception line after service, was that Mom had been bad in Church today. It was a joke, though she had been giggling and making half-witty comments during the sermon. I’m sure Pastor Ringo knew I was kidding, but according to Mom he was Very Embarassed on her account. Right or wrong, my church attendance and youth group participation ended suddenly. Follow through was never a strong suit of my family.

For a while we talked about moving out in the country, where Dad could be close to his job and we could get a little farm. Mom and Dad had been talking about that since I was four or five. Chris was terribly threatened though, by the mere thought of having to leave her school and her friends. The dream of moving to the farm in the country, where drugs did not exist and family values were strong, or so we believed, was tabled once more.

In spite of everything, we had a nice Christmas. I spent the ten-dollar bill from school savings, which Paul had returned to me; to buy presents for the family. I baked cookies for a few of my teachers. The blind kids took up a collection to buy Mr. Conroy a bottle of whiskey, with which he was delighted! He told us several times to give ourselves a big hand.

Though Paul was gone, he continued to haunt my dreams. He still does, especially of late when I’ve been writing these chapters. At first he’d appear to me as a poor, threadbare dog or coyote, living in my back yard. Later he’d appear as a taunting, threatening, malevolent figure, sometimes with a new friend. I’ve killed him several times, usually with a sword or knife, sometimes with a gun. Most recently he’s appeared merely as someone who assumes he can make me do what he wants. Most of these dreams are scary.

I’ve gone some distance toward writing a novelization of my experiences with Paul, having us escape from the State School when I was 13, with me actually disguised as a girl. Paul eventually abandons me, leaving me with a young, alcoholic woman, who has taken us in, and from whom Paul has stolen the rent money.

I saw Paul once more, near the beginning of my Junior year. I was walking with two friends on Queen Anne Avenue, near an agency called Community Services For The Blind, which was holding some kind of meeting which Paul had attended. Paul came up to us and said, "Can I ask just one question?" I said yes. He asked, "Are you doing alright?" I said I was. Whether Paul had come to Queen Anne Hill in some hope of seeing me again, I don’t know. I never heard of him returning to C.S.B.

I’d promised Mom this time that I would have nothing further to do with Paul and would let her know if he tried to contact me. This was of my own free will. I told her of my meeting with him and how pitiful he seemed. I think Mom was comforted that I’d confided in her. Though I think I made up for what I’d done to a goodly extent in years to come, Mom never has forgiven me for running away.

From time to time over the next dozen years or so, Dad would see Paul in the industrial district of South Seattle, where the truck yards he loved so much, were to be found. Where Paul is now, I have no idea.

I was to visit Police Headquarters at 3^rd and James, several times over the next few years. The first time was as a high school student, doing a report for Health Class about drug-related crimes. The last was for a college communications course, to discuss the relationship of the police with the media. On each visit I asked someone to give my regards to Officer Gary Parks, to let him know I was okay and was staying out of trouble.

Before I leave off writing about Paul, at least for the sake of the present project, I need to make a few more observations, which I’ve never been able to put into neat, logical boxes. Perhaps everything Paul told me about The Company, The Navajo Tribe and his ability to cure The Disease were all complete fiction. Perhaps Paul’s very strange behaviors and apparent shifting of personalities can be described in terms of either mutiple-personality or disassociative disorder. Paul did show me some things however which were quite concrete, and supposedly related to The Disease. There was a depression at the base of Paul’s sternum, which appeared to give him much pain. Paul also had my feel the bones of his shoulders, the under side of the bone over his eye-sockets and the bone of his jaw. There were fairly deep notches in the bone in all of these places. The bone was eroding, he said. I was not imagining this. I felt the notches with my own fingers.

Here is something more astounding. When I first met Paul, I had nothing unusual about my bone structure. As our 7^th-grade Health teacher, Mr. Olson told the boy’s class, "This is the greatest period of body exploration of your entire life." That meant a lot of exploring, not necessarily that it was great or should be, though it was! I found no abnormalities at the beginning of the year or of Health Class. By the time the year had ended, I had a similar spot in my sternum like Paul. It gave me discomfort if I pressed on it, though not as much pain as Paul. There were similar notches in my eye sockets, in my shoulder bones, in my jaw. The right side of my collar bone had developed a strange and very pronounced curve which did not match the other side. Since then, just a few years later in fact, the notches and the strange deformation went away. As far as I know, my bones are normal. Whether they were truly abnormal or whether this was just part of maturation, I don’t know. People who should know the answers, seem not to comprehend what I’m talking about when I try to describe the process. The point I’m making here is that I had, at least at the time, some evidence to believe Paul’s Disease Explanations and reason to be afraid.

Toward the end of 8^th Grade I had talked to a person using Paul’s voice, but rather different manner of speaking, who claimed to be a spirit from God. He asked me if I’d like to have everything back the way it was before Paul and I met. That sounded like cutting a couple of years out of my life. Besides I was reckoning the tremendous investment I’d already put into the relationship with Paul. I said no. I don’t remember precisely, but it seemed that a couple of years after Paul was no longer on the scene, my bones started looking more normal than when I knew him, though nothing can make things the way they wold have been had I never met Paul.

My mysterious acquaintance, talking in Paul’s voice, yet not sounding like Paul, also said I was to have a gift, something very special which he couldn’t tell me about at present. I’ll probably never know what that gift was supposed to be, though I can make guesses. In a few more chapters I’ll have set the stage sufficiently to make at least a stab at a guess. In trying to compile evidence as to whether Paul was telling me the truth, ever, I’ve largely tried to ascertain whether this supposed spiritual being had told me anything that Paul cold not have known. At the time it seemed so, but Paul was very clever. If there was anything of the supernatural in this series of conversations we had, it would seem that the gift, if it were real, must be something that Paul didn’t know I wanted. Perhaps something I didn’t know I wanted. I’ll have more to say later. Do I believe that I was talking to a supernatural being? I have an open mind.