The liaison nodded, and the two operants exited. It was now the liaison and me.
“If all they were looking for was a skull,” I wondered out loud, “why would they rip up my clothes? How was I supposed to hide a skull there? If there was a skull, I mean.”
“They were professionals. Professionals think of every contingency. You might have put the skull in a coin locker and they were looking for the key. A key can be hidden anywhere.”
“True,” I said. Quite true.
“By the way, did these Factory henchmen make you a proposition?”
“A proposition?”
“Yeah, a propostion. That you go to work for them, for example. An offer of money, a position.”
“If they did, I sure didn’t hear it. They just demanded their skull.”
“Very well,” said the liaison. “If anyone makes you an offer, you are to forget it. You are not to play along. If the System ever discovers you played ball with them, we will find you, wherever you are, and we will terminate you. This is not a threat; this is a promise. The System is the state. There is nothing we cannot do.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
When I was alone again, I went over the story piece by piece. No matter how I stacked the essential details, they didn’t lead anywhere. At the heart of the mystery was the Professor and whatever he was up to. If I didn’t know that, I couldn’t know anything. And I didn’t have the vaguest notion what was whirling around in that old head of his.
The only thing I knew for certain was that I had let myself betray the System. If they found that out—and soon enough they would—that’d be the end, exactly as my smart-ass bank-clerk liaison had been kind enough to point out. Even if I had been coerced into lying like I did. The System wasn’t known for making exceptions on any account.
As I was assessing these circumstances, my wound began to throb. Better go to the hospital. I rang up for a taxi. Then I stepped into my shoes. Bending over to tie my laces, I was in such pain I thought my body was going to shear in two.
I left the apartment wide open—as if I had any other option—and took the elevator down. I waited for the cab behind the hedge by the entranceway. It was one-thirty by my watch. Two and a half hours since the demolition derby had begun. A very long two-and-a-half hours ago.
Housewives filed past, leek and daikon radish tops sticking up from supermarket bags. I found myself envying them. They hadn’t had their refrigerators raped or their bellies slashed. Leeks and daikon and the kids’ grades—all was right with the world. No unicorn skulls or secret codes or consciousness transfers. This was normal, everyday life.
I thought, of all things, about the frozen shrimp and beef and tomato sauce on the kitchen floor. Probably should eat the stuff before the day was out. Waste not, want not. Trouble was, I didn’t want.
The mailman scooted up on a red Supercub and distributed the mail to the boxes at the entrance of the building. Some boxes received tons of mail, others hardly anything at all. The mailman didn’t touch my box. He didn’t even look at it.
Beside the mailboxes was a potted rubber plant, the ceramic container littered with popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. The rubber plant looked as worn out as I felt. Seemed like every passerby had heaped abuse on the poor thing. I didn’t know how long it’d been sitting there. I must have walked by it every day, but until I got knifed in the gut, I never noticed it was there.
When the doctor saw my wound, the first thing he asked was how I managed to get a cut like that.
“A little argument—over a woman,” I said. It was the only story I could come up with.
“In that case, I have to inform the police,” the doctor said.
“Police? No, it was me who was in the wrong, and luckily the wound isn’t too deep. Could we leave the police out of it, please?”
The doctor muttered and fussed, but eventually he gave in. He disinfected the wound, gave me a couple of shots, then brought out the needle and thread. The nurse glared suspiciously at me as she plastered a thick layer of gauze over the stitches, then wrapped a rubber belt of sorts around my waist to hold it in place. I felt ridiculous.
“Avoid vigorous activity,” cautioned the doctor. “No sex or belly-laughing. Take it easy, read a book, and come back tomorrow.”
I said my thanks, paid the bill, and went home. With great pain and difficulty, I propped the door up in place, then, as per doctor’s orders, I climbed into what there was of my bed with Turgenev’s Rudin. Actually, I’d wanted to read Spring Torrents, but I would never have found it in my shambles of an apartment. And besides, if you really think about it, Spring Torrents isn’t that much better a novel than Rudin.
I got up and went to the kitchen, where I poked around in the mess of broken bottles in the sink. There under spears of glass, I found the bottom of a bottle of Chivas that was fairly intact, holding maybe a jigger of precious amber liquid. I held the bottle-bottom up to the light, and seeing no glass bits, I took my chances on the lukewarm whiskey for a bedtime nurse.
I’d read Rudin before, but that was fifteen years ago in university. Rereading it now, lying all bandaged up, sipping my whiskey in bed in the afternoon, I felt new sympathy for the protagonist Rudin. I almost never identify with anybody in Dostoyevsky, but the characters in Turgenev’s old-fashioned novels are such victims of circumstance, I jump right in. I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws. Not that Dostoyevsky’s characters don’t generate pathos, but they’re flawed in ways that don’t come across as faults. And while I’m on the subject, Tolstoy’s characters’ faults are so epic and out of scale, they’re as static as backdrops.
I finished Rudin and tossed the paperback on top of what had been a bookcase, then I returned to the glass pile in the sink in search of another hidden pocket of whiskey. Near the bottom of the heap I spied a scant shot of Jack Daniel’s, which I coaxed out and took back to bed, together with Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. What can I say? I seemed to be in the mood for passé literature. In this day and age, how many young people read The Red and the Black?
I didn’t care. I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel’s basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.
Walls.
A world completely surrounded by walls.
I shut the book and bid the last thimbleful of Jack Daniel’s farewell, turning over in my mind the image of a world within walls. I could picture it, with no effort at all. A very high wall, a very large gate. Dead quiet. Me inside. Beyond that, the scene was hazy. Details of the world seemed to be distinct enough, yet at the Same time everything around me was dark and blurred. And from some great obscure distance, a voice was calling.
It was like a scene from a movie, a historical blockbuster. But which? Not El Cid, not Ben Hur, not Spartacus. No, the image had to be something my subconscious dreamed up.
I shook my head to drive the image from my mind. I was so tired.
Certainly, the walls represented the limitations hemming in my life. The silence, residue of my encounter with sound-removal. The blurred vision of my surroundings, an indication that my imagination faced imminent crisis. The beckoning voice, the everything-pink girl, probably.
Having subjected the hallucination to this quick-and-dirty analysis, I reopened my book. But I was no longer able to concentrate. My life is nothing, I thought. Zero. Zilch. A blank. What have I done with my life? Not a damned thing. I had no home. I had no family. I had no friends. Not a door to my name. Not an erection either. Pretty soon, not even a job.
That peaceful fantasy of Greek and cello was vaporizing as I lay there. If I lost my job, I could forget about taking life easy. And if the System was going to chase me to the ends of the earth, when would I fin
d the time to memorize irregular Greek verbs?
I shut my eyes and let out a deep sigh, then rejoined The Red and the Black. What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.
I wouldn’t have noticed that the day was over were it not for the Turgenevo-Stendhalian gloom that had crept in around me.
By my keeping off my feet, the pain in my stomach had subsided. Dull bass beats throbbed occasionally from the wound, but I just rode them out. Awareness of the pain was passing.
The clock read seven-twenty, but I felt no hunger. You’d think I might have wanted to eat something after the day I’d had, but I cringed at the very thought of food. I was short of sleep, my gut was slashed, and my apartment was gutted. There was no room for appetite.
Looking at the assortment of debris around me, I was reminded of a near-future world turned wasteland buried deep in its own garbage. A science fiction novel I’d read. Well, my apartment looked like that. Shredded suit, broken videodeck and TV, pieces of a flowerpot, a floor lamp bent out of shape, trampled records, tomato sauce, ripped-out speaker wires,… Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy novels spattered with dirty vase water, cut gladioli lying in memorium on a fallen cashmere sweater with a blob of Pelikan ink on the sleeve,… All of it, useless garbage.
When microorganisms die, they make oil; when huge timbers fall, they make coal. But everything here was pure, unadulterated rubbish that didn’t make anything. Where does a busted videodeck get you?
I went back to the kitchen to try to salvage a few more sips of whiskey, but the proverbial last drop was not to be found. Gone down the drain, to the world of the INKlings.
As I rummaged through the sink, I cut a finger on a sliver of glass. I studied my finger as the blood fell drop by drop onto a whiskey label. After a real wound, what’s a little cut? Nobody ever died from a cut on his finger.
I let the blood run and drip. The bleeding showed no sign of stopping, so I finally staunched it with kleenex.
Several empty beer cans were lying around like shell casings after a mortar barrage. I stooped to pick one up; the metal was warm. Better warm drops of beer than none, I thought. So I ferried the empties back to bed and continued reading The Red and the Black while extracting the last few milliliters out of each can. I needed something to release the tensions and let me rest. Was that too much to ask? I wanted to nod out for as long as it took the earth to spin one Michael Jackson turnaround.
Sleep came over me in my wasteland of a home a little before nine o’clock. I tossed The Red and the Black to the floor, switched off the light, and curled up to sleep. Embryonic amid devastation.
But only for a couple of hours. At eleven, the chubby girl in her pink suit was shaking me by the shoulders.
“Wake up, please. Please!” she cried. “This is no time to be sleeping!” She pounded on me with her fists. “Please. If you don’t get up, the world is going to end!”
16
The Coming of Winter
I WAKE amidst reassuringly familiar smells. I am in my bed, my room. But the impression of everything is slightly altered. The scene seems re-created from memory. The stains on the ceiling, the marks on the plaster walls, small details.
It is raining outside. I hear it, ice cold, striking the roof, pouring into the ground. The sounds could be coming from my bedside, or from a mile away.
I see the Colonel sitting at the window, back as straight as ever, unmoving as he gazes out at the rain. What can there be to watch so intently in the rain?
I try to raise my hand, but my arm refuses to move. I try to speak but no voice will issue; I cannot force the air out of my lungs. My body is unbearably heavy, drained. It is all I can do to direct my eyes to the old officer by the window. What has happened to me? When I try to remember, my head throbs with pain.
“Winter,” says the Colonel, tapping his finger on the windowpane. “Winter is upon us. Now you understand why winter inspires such fear.”
I nod vaguely.
Yes, it was winter that hurt me. I was running, from the Woods, toward the Library.
“The Librarian brought you here. With the help of the Gatekeeper. You were groaning with a high fever, sweating profusely. The day before yesterday.”
“The day before yesterday …?”
“Yes, you have slept two full days,” says the old officer. “We worried you would never awaken. Did I not warn you about going into the Woods?”
“Forgive me.”
The Colonel ladles a bowl of soup from a pot simmering on the stove. Then he props me up in bed and wedges a backrest in place. The backrest is stiff and creaks under my weight.
“First you eat,” he says. “Apologize later if you must. Do you have an appetite?”
“No,” I say. It is difficult even trying to inhale.
“Just this, then. You must eat this. Three mouthfuls and no more. Please.”
The herbal stew is horribly bitter, but I manage to swallow the three mouthfuls. I can feel the strain melt from my body.
“Much better,” says the Colonel, returning the spoon to the bowl. “It is not pleasant to taste, but the soup will force the poisons from your body. Go back to sleep. When you awaken, you will feel much better.”
When I reawaken, it is already dark outside. A strong wind is pelting rain against the windowpanes. The old officer sits at my bedside.
“How do you feel? Some better?”
“Much better than before, yes,” I say. “What time is it?”
“Eight in the evening.”
I move to get out of bed, but am still dizzy.
“Where are you going?” asks the Colonel.
“To the Library. I have dreamreading to do.”
“Just try walking that body of yours five yards, young fool!” he scolds.
“But I must work.”
The Colonel shakes his head. “Old dreams can wait. The Librarian knows you must rest. The Library will not be open.”
The old officer goes to the stove, pours himself a cup of tea, and returns to my bedside. The wind rattles the window.
“From what I can see, you seem to have taken a fancy to the Librarian,” volunteers the Colonel. “I do not mean to pry, but you called out to her in your fever dream. It is nothing to be ashamed of. All young people fall in love.”
I neither affirm nor deny.
“She is very worried about you,” he says, sipping his tea. “I must tell you, however, that such love may not be prudent. I would rather not have to say this, but it is my duty.”
“Why would it not be prudent?”
“Because she cannot requite your feelings. This is no fault of anyone. Not yours, not hers. It is nothing you can change, any more than you can turn back the River.”
I rub my cheeks with both hands.
“Is it the mind you are speaking of?”
The old officer nods.
“I have a mind and she does not. Love her as I might, the vessel will remain empty. Is that right?”
“That is correct,” says the Colonel. “Your mind may no longer be what it once was, but she has nothing of the sort. Nor do I. Nor does anyone here.”
“But are you not being extremely kind to me? Seeing to my needs, attending my sickbed without sleep? Are these not signs of a caring mind?”
“No. Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”
I close my eyes and try to collect my scattered thoughts.
“From what I gather,” I begin, “the mind is lost when the shadow dies. Is that not true?”
“It is.”
“If her shadow is dead, as she tells me, does this mean that she can never regain her mind?”
The Colonel nods. “I have seen her records in the Town Hall. There has been no mistake. Her shadow died when she was seventeen. It was buried in t
he Apple Grove, as dictated. She may remember. Nonetheless, the girl was stripped of her shadow before she attained an awareness of the world, so she does not know what it is to have a mind. This is different from someone like me, who lost his shadow late in life. That is why I can account for the movements of your mind, while she cannot.”
“But she remembers her mother. And her mother had a mind. Does that have no significance?”
He stirs the tea in his cup, then slowly drinks.
“No,” says the Colonel. “The Wall leaves nothing to chance. The Wall has its way with all who possess a mind, absorbing them or driving them out. That seems to have been the fate of her mother.”
“Is love then a thing of mind?”
“I do not want to see you disappointed. The Town is powerful and you are weak. This much you should have learned by now.”
The old officer stares into his empty cup.
“In time your mind will not matter. It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living. You are fond of the girl and I believe she is fond of you. Expect no more.”
“It is so strange,” I say. “I still have a mind, but there are times I lose sight of it. Or no, the times I lose sight of it are few. Yet I have confidence that it will return, and that conviction sustains me.”
The sun does not show its face for a long time thereafter.
When the fever subsides, I get out of bed and open the window to breathe the outside air. I can rise to my feet, but my strength eludes me for two days more. I cannot even turn the doorknob. Each evening the Colonel brings more of the bitter herbal soup, along with a gruel. And he tells me stories, memories of old wars. He does not mention the girl or the Wall again, nor do I dare to ask.
On the third day, I borrow the Colonel’s walking stick and take a long constitutional about the Official Residences. As I walk, my body feels light and unmanageable. Perhaps the fever has burnt off, but that cannot be all. Winter has given everything around me a mysterious weight; I alone seem an outsider to that ponderous world.