Both forefingers in the wrist opening, she slipped the glove over his hand—not really ragged. It had been slit in a dozen or more places, the bands held here and there by lengths of metal fixed inside. He felt them slip over his fingers’ broad crowns, his knuckles, under his palm’s callus.
Elastic bits stretched.
His hand distended the bands as far as they would go, so that what had been a glove was now a web of black ribbons across the rayed ligaments that ran from wrist to knuckles or over the veins that raddled across them.
“Let me turn it on now—” which apparently meant snapping the metal clasps together at his wrist:
What happened next was fast and complex, but he followed its parts as though he were being patiently taught and rehearsed and taught and rehearsed again in their workings by the most skilled Muct instructor.
A pedal voice—“… stupid, stupid, stupid …”—that had begun sometime in unremembered childhood whenever he’d been asked questions he couldn’t answer, that had continued whenever he’d been asked questions he’d had to answer “no,” and that had finally come whenever he’d been asked any questions at all or even had to ask them, suddenly became audible. A tiny voice, still it had insisted as relentlessly (and as unobtrusively) as his own heartbeat, at least since the man in a circular desk had told him to say, “Yes.”
But the reason he heard it at all, now, was because another voice, which felt and sounded and settled in his mind as if it were his own (but had to have come from somewhere else), suddenly took that small voice up and declared: “… stupid,” on the beat, and then went on, off the beat and overwhelming it: “stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. ‘Stupidity’ is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him- or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,” and he understood why! “The process, however, can be reversed,” the voice continued, “at any time …”
The plate circled his other buttock. He felt her slide the edge between them. She paused a moment and said, “Jeeze …! I never … well, I guess they just didn’t think about toilet cloths for you guys out in the cage!” But what he was much more aware of was that they stood in some tiny, shielded space of coolness on a scorching desert, over which, if you went long enough in one direction, you’d encounter a magnificent canyon, while if you went in another, you’d find a huge city with filthy alleys and deep underground passages and the RAT Institute in it, while a journey in still another would take you back to the polar station; and that there were tunnel tracks between them—he knew all this because someone he didn’t remember had once mentioned in his presence that his world was round; and knew also that he could go to any of them, because he knew how to drive this particular transport: its controls were identical to one of the ones whose workings he’d been patiently and repeatedly taught, along with its care and maintenance, by the man in charge back at the Muct.
Another voice, begun even further back in childhood, had, in the interstices of “… stupid … stupid …” been muttering, “I know … I know …” And though the man at the Muct had reinforced this second voice by telling him, “You know this, now. Remember, you know this,” he had never really heard it before. But it too became audible because the strange voice that sounded so much like his own took it up: “… I know, knowledge: another process, finally no different, in its overall form, from the one called stupidity. Information is not taken into the human organism so much as it is created from the strong association of external and internal perceptions. These associations are called knowledge, insight, belief, understanding, belligerence, pig-headedness, stupidity. (Only social use determines which associations are knowledge and which are not.) Only their relation to a larger, ill-understood social order decides which categories others or yourself will assign them to …” And he understood that too! Like a genius, he thought; and amidst this new, responsive excitement, the disgusted comment of someone to whose care he’d been briefly entrusted when he was ten came back: Well, he’s sure no genius! “Genius,” the new voice took it up, “is something else again … ”
She said: “I guess it doesn’t make too much difference, does it?”
Her cleansing strokes against his thigh, his shin, were firmer.
“No … yeah … I don’t know …” He looked down at her bushy hair, on which was a powdering of his scurf. “I don’t know how to say.”
Frowning, she sat back and looked up.
“Not ‘no.’” He said: “I … know …” It took an astonishing effort to put words to that internal voice while the other drummed (“… stupid … stupid … ”), meaningless now, yet no less insistent for its meaninglessness—an effort that made the back of his neck, his inner arms, and the rear of his knees moisten, not with the sweat of physical strain, but rather the sweat of fear—though fear, along with pain, was something he hadn’t been afraid of since the Institute … no, he did not know how long ago now. Nor did he know how he might create that information from what, as yet, he had in mind. “I know,” he said, out of momentum, “but I can’t say.” Though that was a response to something his mind had abandoned … long ago, it seemed.
Long ago.
She sat back on one knee, with her powdered hair, looking at him with a series of slightly changing frowns, some of which called up expressions he’d seen on other faces from so long ago there was no way to remember what those frowns meant nor what their order might signify, though their opaque suggestion without resolution seemed marvelous and baffling.
“Do you feel any … different?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to say,” which sounded hugely and hopelessly inadequate (“… stupid … stupid … ”) so that he turned to some ancient feeling in him called rage that welled through his body but, because of what they had done to him, connected with nothing, breaking instead like a water jet in some city fountain, reaching its height to fall in white foam, flashing drops, gray spray, and falling, falling …
Rage, which he could name now, had been erupting at least as long as the voices’ drumming.
“Ah …” which was more guttural than the syllabic with which it was written—the words moving through his mind were all attached to a bevy of written signs! “Radical … Anxiety …” he whispered, and took a breath; “Termination …” pronouncing the three words clearly, seeing the three supernumerary hieroglyphics that supplemented the syllables and alphabetics which, till now, had merely been marks on cubes that danced on the fountain’s ever-shattering tip.
She blinked. “You mean that it really …? Well, I guess the transition must be kind of … difficult!”
He watched her decide she could not comprehend what he was going through. Those were the words that her frowns, finally, had led him to. She went back to cleaning his thighs, his genitals, his shin, his ankle.
“Transition,” he repeated. “What is …?”
Stupid, stupid, stupid, it roared, because he was asking a question. Not to know, to have to ask, was stupid, stupid, even while the new voice explained, yet again, that that was knowledge. But—and this came with words too—whatever the glove had done had not changed who he was any more than the invisible gamma lasers had changed him years back; and for nearly fifteen years now he had been a man who was not afraid of the most astonishing and monumental inner occurrences including his incomprehensible stalling in the great desert of no occurrence at all. He asked, “What … is transition?”
“Change,” she answered thoughtfully (though the glove had already told him), running the plate’s edge under the inside of his foot’s ball, then the outside, then beneath his toes. “It means chan
ge. The change you must be going through is probably quite hard. I think your feet are beautiful.” She brushed them off. “I’ve never been much of a foot fetishist, but I’ve known a few who were. Here, give me the other one.”
He did; and gave her also, “I have to use the words I already have, to speak.” He gave it because he heard silences around him in a new way now, as though voices moved and pulsed in them that wanted words. To listen to those voices and speak them was easier than remaining silent before the older, ritual drummings. “The new ones, like ‘transition,’ take time to …”
She blinked, surprised. “… settle?” she offered back. “Settle in place?” She stood.
Settle wasn’t a word he’d used often and not for many years. “… to settle,” he said. “In place.”
“I think I …” she smiled—“understand.” Taking up his other arm, she passed the plate down it, and down again, now over, now under, brushing away powder, now brushing her own hair.
Powder lay in a ring on the sand about them.
“What is it,” she asked, “that you want to say?”
“… didn’t have a father,” he repeated, because something brought back the words he’d said before—the momentum that had impelled speech since his arrival at the Institute, if not before.
I know.
Don’t want to know.
The doubled voice made a stutter in his mind, in the middle of which, between know and want to know, desire for knowledge bloomed and fountained and obliterated rage, to which, at the instant each question posed its interrogative tingle, the glove responded with a million tastes that, on no diet at all, he’d never known existed; he shook his head to get away from their overwhelming bitternesses and sournesses and saltinesses and sweetnesses and burnings.
She dropped his other hand, clean as the one in the glove now. “What is it?”
“I think,” he said, “in this world it is very important not to have a father if you want … to know anything.”
She gave him her most confused grimace. Then laughter broke through it (while his own mind began to catalogue reason after reason why his statement had been preposterous, meaningless, inaccurate, interesting, suggestive, insightful, right, wrong …); she said, “I think that’s very wise. Only I haven’t the faintest idea how that could have come into your head. I mean now, here. Nobody mentioned fathers to you. What are you talking about?” But she was pleased. “Here,” she said. “Please …” slipping the plate off her hand. “Please, I want you to clean me now.” She looked back and forth between his hands. “I guess you put it on the … Well, no. You decide.”
He took the plate and slipped it over his bare hand, recognizing and wondering at the approval that wrote itself from bottom to top of her face. (Moments later he realized her approval was because she most likely thought the gross currents in the plate might have interfered with the workings of the glove had he put it on the other hand; she had taken his choice as sign of the glove’s success.) He felt a small surge of pleasure at her response, even as the glove informed him by a series of angular pronouncements and diagrams, slapped blindly across his mind, that she was wrong: the glove contained enough stabilizing circuits and bracing units so that it would not have been bothered by the plate’s impedance at all. The pleasure was as unconnected as the still towering rage—yet he enjoyed it even if enjoyment meant as little as the rage did.
He reached for her shoulder with the humming plate, brushed her shoulder with his other hand—but nothing much to brush, which made her laugh. Anyway, she’d brushed every two or three passes.
“You do that very well.” She closed her eyes. “Almost as well as I do. And that’s nice.”
“… good,” he said. In her smile and closed eyes there had been a request (rather than a question) he could not read; and for years he had been someone who’d feared questions and answered requests.
“You’re not the same rat I brought from the polar station!” Suddenly she opened her eyes with a kind of delight. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I’m the same,” he said, and was confused because that wasn’t what she wanted, but what she wanted was not what he knew. He ran the plate’s edge beneath her left breast, then her right: she took a surprisingly large breath and closed her eyes again.
The strap was very tight around his hand.
The upper part bare and the bottom part in pants and sandals, her body was oddly interesting. There was a small scratch on her ribs, and he realized he was unused to seeing scars on women’s bodies. Certainly in the rat cage and in the city he’d seen injured women—but the women in the projected shows at the Muct were never scarred, so that the … stereoptical view (and that was suddenly a concept he understood well enough to make a metaphor out of it—and metaphor was another concept, a stereoptical concept …), which that gave him, blended to blur the real through the idealizations/flaws inherent in any representation.
All sensations, as well as the faintest memories associated with them, were given a word and three written versions of it, in syllabics, alphabetics, and ideographs, each of which dragged behind it connections, associations, resonances … He’d known about the ideograms and the alphabet; but he’d never known his written language included syllabics before.
The new condition was not so much an alternate voice loud enough to drown the voices of childhood as it was a web, a text weaving endlessly about him, erupting into and falling from consciousness, prompting memory and obliterating it, that was simply more interesting than the drumming voice asserting or denying ignorance or knowledge.
She said, “Remember, you’re cleaning a truly extraordinary bitch. I want you to do exactly what you’d do if a beautiful … female asked you to clean her—before you went to the Institute, I mean. Wait a minute—” She reached down and unsnapped her pants, letting the flaps fall open, pushing them down her hips a little. “And you can pretend I’m wearing my face,” which was what, in that language, the wire masks were sometimes called: though he’d never known that before. (But the glove now told him.) “Myself, I can’t stand the things. So I don’t usually wear—”
The feeling was in his body; and perhaps he moved his body, in the course of moving the plate over her shoulder, to locate the feeling more clearly; discomfort was the word that joined it, followed by a correction: sexual discomfort.
“Yeah,” he said, knowing as he said it that it would also not be what she wanted. So he changed it to, “Yes,” a form of the word he hadn’t used since that day at the Institute.
She frowned at him. (She too must have thought it odd.) “Don’t tell me you got to the Institute before anybody ever got to you …?” She touched his face. “The scars there, from the epithelial herpes—you must have had it rather badly. Frankly, though, you see so much of it these days, once the actual sores are healed, like yours, I find the pits and texture rather attractive.” She paused again, dropped her hand. “How old were you when you went to the Institute? I know they don’t take you under fifteen …”
“Nineteen.” He lifted her arm as she had lifted his, to clean beneath.
“Just how many sexual encounters did you have before you went to the Institute?” She still frowned.
The rush of accurate memories, enhanced by verbal tags, produced a strain he hadn’t known since becoming a rat. “Fifty …” The strain made him speak slowly, while the figure was corrected within the muscle of his tongue: “A hundred fifty …” which was obliterated by more fragment memories, averages, extrapolations, approximations. “Maybe two hundred fifty. Maybe more.”
“Well!” She laughed. “You certainly outdo me! I doubt I’m that much younger than you, and I think of myself as quite a sophisticated woman—with a mere twenty-seven men behind me. I don’t have to worry about your knowing what to do with a bitch!” But the frown battled through. “How many sexual encounters have you had since you went to the Institute?”
“One …” he said after a different rush of words, of concepts, memo
ries of the little man in the tall mask, the tall man at the Muct, of approximations no less complicated than the others for all the difference. “Two, maybe. You’re—maybe—the third.”
“Oh. Well, like I said, I want you to do whatever you would have done in any of those situations.” She closed her eyes. “You can do what you want. Anything. Anything at all. How does that sound to you? No, don’t answer.”
He lifted her other arm, trying to understand, in the play of signs, memories, and facts that stuttered about the glove, what answer she might want. The silence that for years had hung about words uttered in his presence filled with ordered comprehension. Yet there was another silence, a cube bare of all inscription, outside the answer she’d made clear she did not need or want, that as clearly was wanted, was needed. Many people purchase slaves for sex, the man at the Institute had said. Recalling it now, however, was his new knowledge’s result, not its cause.
“Do what you want,” she repeated. “You’d better do it, too.” She closed her eyes again. “Because, afterwards, I intend to do just what I want with you.” She opened them, frowned.
He said: “I’m not …” The word rocking his tongue in his jaw’s cradle was one he’d heard before but, like so many, had never tried to say. “… Not het—heterosexual.” As though the glove responded to his difficulty, a host of colloquial synonyms flicked up from his hand to beat about his head. “A front-face …” He said that one, while the list continued: a quick-in-and-out, which was a term he’d actually used before he’d come to the Institute, but was not one he would ever have thought of using to one of them, even a bitch. So instead he said one further down the list: “… not a stiff-stuffer—”
“Yes?” she said, blinking. “Oh, shit …!” She took the smallest step backward, small enough so that the glove said it was the swaying of a larger than usual breath coupled with the slightest movement of one heel, but—because he had not changed—he chose to read it as a stepping back. “Wouldn’t you know! My luck … No, you don’t have to say any more!” Then she stepped six inches over sand toward him.