Stern didn’t say anything. I turned on my belly on the couch and propped up my chin in my hands and looked at him. You never could tell what was going on with him, but I got the idea that he was puzzled.
‘I said why,’ I told him.
‘Not to me.’
I suddenly understood that I was asking too much of him. I said slowly, ‘We all woke up at the same time. We all did what somebody else wanted. We lived through a day someone else’s way, thinking someone else’s thoughts, saying other people’s words. Janie painted someone else’s pictures, Baby didn’t talk to anyone, and we were all happy with it. Now do you see?’
‘Not yet.’
‘God!’ I said. I thought for a while. ‘We didn’t blesh.’
‘Blesh? Oh. But you didn’t after Lone died, either.’
‘That was different. That was like a car running out of gas, but the car’s there—there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just waiting. But after Miss Kew got done with us, the car was taken all to pieces, see?’
It was his turn to think a while. Finally he said, ‘The mind makes us do funny things. Some of them seem completely reasonless, wrong, insane. But the cornerstone of the work we’re doing is this: there’s a chain of solid, unassailable logic in the things we do. Dig deep enough and you find cause and effect as clearly in this field as you do in any other. I said logic, mind; I didn’t say „correctness” or „rightness” or „justice” or anything of the sort. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.
‘When that mind is submerged, working at cross-purposes with the surface mind, then you’re all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you’re pointing at—that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don’t see the logic. I don’t see that regaining that „bleshing” was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable.’