Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

through all kinds of conversations with all sorts of people, to skate along affably and go on thinking his own thoughts. He practiced the same thing with his wife. His aim was to give people what they thought they wanted, and continue, himself, solitary and unmolested. Except for his wife, few people had ever suspected what he was up to. But now that he was no longer obliged to give anybody anything, in the ordinary daily way, he put himself in a position where now and again he would have to, as he believed in some way it must be good for him. If he left it all to his own choice who would he talk to? Eugene, that was all. He would get to be a nuisance to Eugene.
    It was on the sea walk Mr. Lougheed heard the first time what Eugene had been proposing.
    “Says he can walk on water.”
    Mr. Lougheed was sure Eugene had said no such thing.
    “It’s all in the way of thinking your weight out of your body, according to him. There’s nothing you can’t control if you set out to. So he says.”
    This was Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey, sitting on the lookout bench catching their breath.
    “Mind over matter.”
    They invited Mr. Lougheed to sit but he remained standing. He was tall and thin and if he kept a sensible pace did not run out of breath.
    “Eugene talks a lot of that kind of thing but it’s just speculation,” he told them. He did not care for their tone on Eugene although he knew it was partly justified. “He’s very intelligent. He’s not cracked.”
    “We’ll have to wait for the demonstration to make up our minds on that.”
    “He’s either cracked or I am. Or else he’s Jesus Christ.”
    “What demonstration is that?” said Mr. Lougheed cautiously, and with foreboding.
    “He’s going to demonstrate walking off the Ross Point pier.”
    Mr. Lougheed said he was sure Eugene had been joking. Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey assured him that it was no joke, a serious undertaking. (Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey, saying it was serious, were laughing a bit and shaking their heads cheerfully, while Mr. Lougheed, saying it was a joke, was frowning and staying aloof.) The time set was Sunday morning. Today was Friday. Ten o’clock had been the exact time picked so that some people could get to church after the walking or the not-walking was over. But, just as Mr. Lougheed suspected, neither Mr. Clifford nor Mr. Morey had actually heard these arrangements being made, they had heard about them from somebody else. Mr. Morey had heard while playing cards with friends and Mr. Clifford had heard in the British Israel Reading Room.
    “It’s getting talked up all over.”
    “Well it might as well get talked down, then, because Eugene is not a fool, or anyway not so much of a fool as that,” said Mr. Lougheed shortly, and continued on his walk. He cut off home by a shorter route than he usually took.

    He knocked on Eugene’s door, which was across the hall from his own. Eugene said, in a serene but warning voice, “Come in.”
    Mr. Lougheed opened the door and was struck by a brisk cool wind blowing right off the ocean and in at Eugene’s window, which was raised as high as it would go.
    Eugene was on the bare floor in front of the window, sitting with his legs bent and twisted that unnatural-looking way, which he declared was now entirely natural to him. He wore a pair of jeans, that was all. Mr. Lougheed contemplated the slenderness, the delicacy, of this young man’s upper body. What work could he do, how many pounds could he lift? Yet he could do all these contortions, twist and stretch his body into the most distressing-looking positions, which he claimed were delightful, of course. He took his pride in that.
    “Sit down,” said Eugene. “I’m coming out.”
    He meant that he was coming out of meditating, which was how he finished up his exercises. Sometimes he sat and meditated without bothering to shut his door. Mr. Lougheed, walking past, always quickly averted his eyes. He did not look to see the expression on Eugene’s face. Rapt, was it supposed to be? He was as alarmed, as appalled, in the furthest corner of himself, as if he had seen somebody making love.
    That had happened, too.
    Living downstairs in the house were three young people. Their names were Calla, Rex and Rover. Rover was apparently a name given for a joke, to a skinny, sickly boy with a twelve-year-old’s body and some days a fifty-year-old face. Mr. Lougheed had seen him sleeping on the hall carpet, like a dog. But Rex and Calla