There was a sound like plastic crumpling and rubbing against surfaces. It filled the room as the men, clad only in their leak-proof diapers, arose from their chairs and made their way to the exit of the assembly hall. Bunnu could now feel the sweat pouring down in rivers and canals through the dense forest of hairs on his chest. Those cherubic bastards had not returned the temperature to its normal level. In fact, the assembly hall was now particularly hot and moist, like a steam sauna, causing Bunnu to wonder if, in fact, this wasn’t an intentional provision of this new initiative on the part of the administrators.
He sighed as he found himself silently wondering what his body could have been communicating during the assembly and, more importantly, with whom. A rash had now formed on the palm of each hand, though he couldn’t be sure why, except for his nagging suspicion that his Will had somehow been betrayed and overridden by the mechanisms of his Form. His Form and his Will were, in fact, bitter enemies, who each constantly sought to overcome the influence of the other. Now, it was the Form that was winning. But it wasn’t winning truly so much as it was being aided by external forces that rendered unto it a distinctly lopsided advantage. To see these rashes upon his hands now meant that some interaction was occurring on the biochemical level between him and someone else without the necessity of their consent. Just thinking about this now, as he walked back down the corridor to his cell, he couldn’t help but feel violated at the intrusion upon his distinct physiological mechanisms.
He wondered how the other person felt about this and then thought that this, too, was of no consequence, as he saw it fit not to acknowledge any connection between the two of them, to begin with. He certainly wasn’t about to start a conversation to find out either. 5 years of silence…and enough time had now passed that there could be no reason good enough to start speaking again. In any case, as far as he understood, most spoken language seemed to bear with it the purpose of building and maintaining social networks, creating alliances, or even confirming—by means of either mutual identification or confrontation—one’s identity within the larger social framework. However, he saw no use in endeavoring to do any of these things. His stay at the Asoka Plains Detention Facility would be temporary and, as such, he saw no virtue in making the situation a comfortable one, as it would only seem to complicate matters further.
This is not to say, however, that the other inmates simply understood just by looking at him that he wished to be left alone. And thus, he had, on numerous occasions, been forced into a position in which he had had to rebuff—though not verbally—the multitude of attempts on the part of his fellow inmates to reach out to him for one reason or another. Their adulation, after all, was embarrassing and tiresome. To be put on a pedestal by those one couldn’t be less concerned about was an esteem not worthy of one’s own acknowledgment. He didn’t seek or deserve their respect…and he didn’t need to speak to them to know that doing so would simply be a waste of his time.
However, it wasn’t solely this collective need for idolism that prompted the other inmates to break from their daily routines and wander in Bunnu’s direction. There were other forces at work, not just within the facility itself, but all around him in the air: other motives advancing inward, other agents of influence. And thus, the inmates’ appeals to him had presumably been steeped in some agenda, unclear to him, prompting him, as though sensing an immediate threat to the purity of his inclinations, to retreat further from others and seek reclusion, as he had done in the schoolyard as a child. The last thing he needed was to be a pawn to some unknown scheme. Who knew what the others had in mind for him?
There had, after all, already been enough acquaintanceship plaguing his existence, thus far, to last him 10 lifetimes—or life sentences as the case may be—and, as such, Bunnu had become inclined to assume that those who sought him out, whether in his present or in his past, could only have been doing so as a consequence of some underlying sphere (or spheres) of influence that were conceivably out of his immediate grasp or capability to perceive. These spheres could only serve to catalyze a response (or series of responses) from him which followed trajectories that—when extrapolated—would pull him further and further away from his purest and most individual of dispositions. And if he were to follow such trajectories, these influences would only manage to mask themselves further until he ceased to be aware of the sweep of tides that guided him from one action to the next.
Yet, despite his determination to insulate himself from the influences surrounding him, he remained dimly aware of the oscillating cycles, chemical and otherwise, that appeared to surround him and beckon for his compliance whenever he happened to be in possession of something that met the demands of the surrounding environment. These factors he could not control. Yet, the influence of other people upon this environment served to engage Bunnu’s form into an indirect mutualism, inevitably symbiotic in its biochemical processes, from which there could be no means of escape. Naturally, this breed of mutualism would only be a source of perverse pleasure for those droves of maniacal zealots among the prison populace who sought biochemical union with their godly and beloved Bunnu by means of this broad-scaled process. Nevertheless, Bunnu managed to actively resist the tendencies of the very cells that comprised him, in an attempt to exert the power of the Will over the Form and invoke a conscious state of stasis.
He had once heard a story from Rakesh-7 in which the protagonist, an inmate of a prison facility, had been told by his guards that he was expected to grow a beard as a form of retribution for his crimes. Yet, the protagonist was strongly averse to the idea of punitive facial hair. So, in a form of protest, he invoked what he called cessation at the follicle as a means of civil disobedience and managed to keep the skin of his face smooth and hairless for the duration of his 20-year term. And upon leaving the prison, he relinquished conscious control of his hair growth only to end up with a beard down to his chest within the matter of an hour. This accelerated facial hair growth continued for the remainder of his years and it became necessary for him to employ a team of barbers to follow him around constantly and assist in the trimming and disposal of newly grown hair. Despite this inconvenience, the man lived to a ripe old age, never once regretting the defiance he had exercised toward his captors: a fact that, in and of itself, never ceased to impress Bunnu, regardless of how many times the Outlander told that story.
Naturally, to prevent one’s facial hair from growing required a great deal of concentration, to be sure, but with enough strength of resolve, certainly anything could be possible. And so, Bunnu tried to do the same by attempting to limit the intake and outtake of molecules at the cellular level, in the hopes that this should allow him to isolate himself from interaction with his surroundings, and hence from the influence of other inmates. But then, such attempts could only serve to be detrimental, as it was imperative that his cells somehow interacted with their surroundings, if for no other reason, than to allow for their own respiration. However, he had now reached a point in which he couldn’t have cared less what happened to them. They could shrivel up and die for all he cared. It was difficult to imagine that there should be anything worth looking forward to that would cause him to have even a modicum of concern for his own physical health.
And as a natural consequence of this thinking, it certainly came as no surprise that his health had started to deteriorate rapidly. He had first begun to notice this the previous month as he was putting on his shoes to go out to the Yard for Courtship Hour. On the inside of each shoe was a kind of yellowish-gray residue—a powder from the looks of it—that, when poured out upon the floor of his cell, left a mound that looked like wet sand, though it was much softer in texture. Upon putting his shoes on, he found that they were slightly bigger in comparison with the size of his feet than they had been the previous day. This meant one of two things: (a) he was truly starting to shrink in size, as he had surmised earlier on in his imprisonment, or (b) the yellowish-gray residue had nothing to do with
his body shrinking and he was simply letting his imagination run away with him again. Either way, he could do nothing more than shrug the matter off and assume that some dust from the outside was getting into his shoe.
And so, everyday, he swept away the residue, tied his shoelaces tight and ventured outside to the corner of the Yard, where he spent his afternoons staring through the glass of the Geodesic Dome and over the concrete wall that fortified the complex at a distant peak of the Panta Rhei-21 mountains. He stood as he always did, with his back slumped against a wall and his hands in his diaper pockets, eavesdropping on the yips and howls of the other men, as they chased one another back and forth, engaged in intricate mating calls and dances.
The Gentleman Caller