“I’m not vicious,” I said. “Fatalistic. Sure, I’ve been burned up a little in my time, but the fires die. I’m nothing now except tired.”
My suspicious nature told me the slimy bastard was trying to worm his way around to my good side. But I didn’t listen to my suspicious nature these days as much as I had in the long ago. I was almost prepared to accept him at face value. I signaled my approval of all that he had to say with a few slow nods while he stared at me, waiting. Then I stubbed the cigarette out. It had burned right down.
He offered me another, and I shook my head.
“I’m thinking of giving it up,” I said.
“Perhaps as well,” he said. “It might have been your last anyway. Once they start kicking you into shape, you’ll have to fight for every one. Sure you don’t want to enjoy another one now?”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t enjoy it,” I said.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t like doing all this. But I have to stop you getting out of line, and I have to stop you now, before we let you in on what the hell is going on. Hell, you’re not on trial now. I’ve already backed you all the way, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m not going to come down on you. We need a success out of this project. You know why. I’m convinced you’re a horse worth backing. It’s not for me to explain. I’m going to tag you with a nursemaid — I know you don’t want him, won’t like him, and don’t feel it’s necessary — but there’s no way out of it from my point of view. His name is Hurst. He’ll pick you up when you leave this office, and he’ll live in your pocket until . . . well, until. He’ll be as unobtrusive as possible when it is possible, and you have all the privacy you want inside your apartment.”
“Except for the bugs,” I said.
“There aren’t any bugs,” he said. I didn’t believe him. Who would have?
There was a pause.
“I want you on my side, Harker,” he said.
“You made that pretty clear,” I told him.
“That’s all I can do,” he said. “Anything you want? I know it’s a bad question, because whatever you do want I’ll probably have to tell you you can’t have, but I have to ask.”
“There’s nothing I want,” I said. “Yet.”
“Thanks,” he said. His eyes were still boring into mine for long minutes, then looking deliberately away. I followed more or less the same policy. Neither of us was getting anything out of it.
“Can we at least coexist?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can we?”
“I’m asking you because it’s in your hands,” he said. “I have my job to do, and I’m going to do it. That ties my hands. You’re the one who’s free to choose. You’re the one who’s free to be a bloody nuisance if you want to be, and wreck this whole setup.”
“We all have our crosses to bear,” I told him, “and I’m yours.”
We looked at each other. I knew he was finished giving me his line — he was just waiting for me to hand him one back. He wanted me to say something — to volunteer something. Information, promises, reassurances, just downright mockery. Anything. He didn’t want to find out more about me. He already knew just about all there was to know. He’d probably studied every word I’d spoken since childbirth. He just wanted to see me in action. He just wanted us to interact. He wanted something set up between us.
“I’ll tell you something I think,” I said, finally. “I think you’re pretty worried about just one thing. You know I can’t afford to spread a ripple, because my whole life depends on this — all the life I have. From here, I’m either titan or I’m dead in a concrete coffin. Your worries center on just one thing. You’re worried about what I might think when I get all the facts about what I have to do and what my chances are. You’re worried that I’ll get so shit scared I won’t give a damn about things. You’re scared I’ll just stop caring and wreck the whole thing out of fear, of spite, of sheer cantankerousness. I think you’re right. In your shoes, I’d be scared of that, too. But you know as well as I do that no one can tell how I’ll react until I get into reacting position. We’ll just have to see, Colonel . . . you and I. We’ll just have to see how crazy I get when I finally know how crazy this thing is you want me to do. Won’t we? I’ll add this, though, Colonel: from where I sit you seem to be gambling on my being a hero. Now that, to me, seems to be a very brave gamble indeed. Block C, as you well know, is no place for breeding heroes. The army is the place for breeding heroes. Now isn’t that odd, Colonel?”
“If this project went on the way it’s been going,” he said levelly, “my army would be full of dead heroes. We need a live one.”
“You’d better hope, then,” I told him, “that Block C hasn’t knocked every last vestige of heroism out of my soul.”
And he smiled.
“I’m in here for good, aren’t I?” I asked, thinking it was a good time to spring one on him. “You aren’t ever going to let me outside that perimeter wire.”
“That’s right,” he said. “But there’s a lot of room in here. It may be a cage, but there’s more elbow room in it than nine men in ten have in this day and age. Do you know what it’s like in the cities these days?”
“I’ve heard,” I said.
“We’re all in a cage, son,” he said. “That’s what this project’s all about. Unlocking the door.”
Well, I hadn’t expected that I’d be given leave to go whoring in town. But like the colonel said, so what? I’m no nightlifer. And I did know what it was like in the cities. And it may seem too corny for words, but on titan base, I could see the stars at night.
“We’ll have to give you the standard checkout,” he said.
“So search me,” I said. “I could do with a good scrubdown. But if I’d been a nuclear bomb in disguise I’d have blown you all up by now.”
He smiled again. He wasn’t amused, though. Security men don’t have such a thing as a sense of humor. He dropped the smile to stare at me with a sudden penetrating intensity, but I didn’t flinch. I was used to his eyes playing games with me.
He stood up and extended his hand. Though he hadn’t pressed any buttons, the door behind me opened, and Goodman came in with another man, who was presumably my shepherd. They stepped up smartly, one to either side of me.
I shook Henneker’s hand.
“I hope things work out,” he said, in parting. I thought he was going to call me “son” again, or something equally sickening, but he just left the sentence dangling, as though he’d thought better of it. He’d probably judged me well, and with the data in his files he could probably have carried on my side of the conversation as well, private thoughts and all. Security men are hell on wheels to talk to — no surface at all, just limitless depths of concealment and illusion — but I practically liked Henneker. Which didn’t mean to imply that I thought my time in titan was going to be anything less than hard.
We left, in single file, and went straight for the “standard checkout.” It didn’t improve my outlook on life one little bit. They’d have taken off my skin to irradiate it, demagnetize it, and strain it through a micropore filter if it hadn’t been attached.
But once I was through, I really felt that I was on the Project. I felt like a chessman, unable to play the moves myself, but feeling I had to understand them all.
And that, more or less, is what I was.
Cage of Darkness
Claustrophobia
The thing about Block C (C for crazy, I think, but we make it C for Canaan because we have one hell of a sense of humor) is that it is a different world not only from the world outside, but also from the world inside. We breathe different air; we are in a different dimension. The other blocks are just as remote, just as unreal, to us as the wide world of freedom is to the poor bastards who didn’t inherit the label “crazy” and go through the daily bureaucratic machinery of the rehabilitation game a
nd the parole pantomime.
There are no infant crocodiles or gray-clad phantoms moving in and out of the corridors of Block C. There is no hum of life and human activity, no human smell, no dynamic crowds, no purring machinery. Just the soft hollowness of decay. Even the prison has a purpose — even if the purpose is a con — but in Block C there is a little cesspool where even the prison purpose is negated, brought under the executioner’s ax. Block C is simply to contain, to confine, to cocoon. C for coffin. C for condemned. Condemned not to death, but to eternal empty life. Block C is impregnable. Even now, when it is far behind me, it is impregnable. The inmates — some of them — think about escape, dream about escape, but their dreams are nothing more than the hysterical effusions of Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about premature burials and the horrors of awakening in the grave. There is no escape from Block C. The inmates are shrouded. Ferried across the Styx.
There are no less than five sets of gates — two solid, three just wire netting — which seal off the main prison from the world outside. Five cages. There are only doors and dogs and guns in between the main prison and Block C. One of the doors is two steel slabs set outside a thick layer of concrete. It is set in a concrete wall. That is the womb-wall of the crazy house. It does not conduct sound. But we don’t do any screaming — the sound it kills is the sound that comes in to us from outside. You can’t imagine the thinness of the trickles that creep through the multiple keyholes. Completely intangible unless you press your ears right up to the orifices.
There aren’t many of us in Block C. We are the only part of the prison which isn’t crammed to bursting point. No overcrowding in Canaan. Rather the reverse. Only the chosen people qualify. The prisoners, in addition, do not choose to make themselves obvious. They are fugitive creatures, rather reminiscent of animals in the zoo. It is the guards who are prominent. The actual objects of their attention secrete themselves, so far as they are able, and do not respond to the constant observation.
The guards are participants in the atmosphere of rottenness which clothes the block. They always whisper, never talk. They peer from behind glass partitions, lean over the banisters, and contemplate the antisuicide netting; they sit and scratch away with their silent felt-tipped pens in their little offices, which are more like cells than the cells. Guards outnumber prisoners in Block C by six-to-four, an amazing reversal of the situation in the outer prison, where one-to-twenty is the ratio demanded by regulations. The guards in Canaan work a lot of overtime. They spend so many of their working hours in our communal coffin that we wonder whether the small shafts of freedom sandwiched between duty and sleep mean any more to them than the effluent of the keyholes means to us. They are largely superfluous, because there are cameras everywhere.
The worst of it all is that the surfeit of empty space, the unused cells, and the perpetual smiling lights cannot even touch the sense of claustrophobia which envelops all of us. It is not simply the multitude of locks and keys and secret signs and little rituals and regulations and procedures, but the complete deathliness of the whole fabric of life. This is a world with neither future nor past nor hope, nor even despair. The lighting, which is absolutely uniform, is symbolic of the constancy — absolute stillness — of the whole externality of life. There are no windows to let in even the world of the outer tomb. The air cycles constantly — the fans are absolutely silent.
In Block C we — we the prisoners — live deep in our individual subconsciousnesses. Where the guards live I simply have no idea. If, existentially, we change at all, are going anywhere at all, it is a voyage inside our heads and hearts. Deep space. A starless firmament.
While I have been in Block C, there have been five suicides that all the netting and all the regulations failed to stop. They were all guards. The guards have the option, you see — they are free not to be guards. They are amphibious, creatures of several worlds. No guard in the prison works more than three days in twelve in Canaan. But then, there is a suicide rate in all the other blocks as well. One mustn’t read too much into bare figures.
I have no idea why no prisoners have committed suicide during my term in the crazy block. No idea at all. You’d think that no ordinary man could possibly stand it down there. And some of us are ordinary. Some of us were good men and true. Which doesn’t mean that they didn’t commit their crimes. They did. But I’ll say now and I’ll say over and over again before I reach the end of this story that the crimes don’t matter, don’t ever matter, aren’t relevant in the least.
Take Cannon, for instance. Cannon isn’t relevant to this account — I didn’t know him well. He didn’t interest me. But consider him. This is a man in a living grave, remember.
Firstly, Cannon is a guy you don’t have to feel sorry for. He is a good guy. He’s the type of guy all you tight-lipped, tough-talking, hero-loving imbeciles love to identify yourselves with, if he’s a sportsman, or some other idol of the idle.
Steve Cannon could have been a soldier, and he’d have won medals because he was developing into the perfect society robot. He could have been a Hemingway hero: grace under pressure was written into every sad sideways glance of his gorgeous gray eyes. He could have been the sheriff in High Noon, maybe David in his anti-Goliath days, or an Armstrong reciting his lines while stepping out onto the surface of the moon.
Steve Cannon could have been just about anybody, so far as we were concerned. But that’s not really the man we want to talk about. The man we want to see is the leading man after the last curtain call, the acrobat after they’ve dismantled the big top.
Cannon doesn’t really exist inside himself. Only outside. He’s like one of those life-sized rubber women we can order through the mail as the ultimate mate in our masturbatory fantasies. His purposes are only those of other people. He exists for them and in them. He is good and kind and honest and utterly, utterly lovable. Only, like Bishop Berkeley’s chair, when you close the door on him, he ceases to be.
I suppose you’d like me to go into sordid details about which hour of the TV screen was Steve’s, which cereal packet gave him away free, which ghostwrote his autobiography, which painted plastic inflatable wife he took home to which painted plastic palace. Most of all, you’d like to hear an explanation about how such a wonderful man could do all those terrible things and end up in Canaan.
But that’s not what I’m trying to make you see at all. That doesn’t matter (and I’ll keep telling you that until you understand). What matters is that Steve Cannon is a part of you; you’ve created him, so that he owes you something. But he really could exist, if he somewhere managed to find the chance. You don’t want him to exist, you only want him to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, read Dostoevski in the bath, play a hot game of billiards, and spill himself all over the color screen and the color supplements so you can digest his life into yours.
Even his crimes. You even ate up his crimes.
You wouldn’t let him be. We wouldn’t let him be at all.
We live vicariously through our bloody (I mean literally bloody) TV sets, and for us the world is a 24-inch color screen. We don’t know about Steve Cannon, and I can’t explain it to us.
And you don’t even know what I’m talking about, so forget it all and remember only this. Steve Cannon, a man you could look up to and befriend and respect, is still closed in Block C. He has no part in this story, and if he had, his dialogue would be just as empty and futile and hopeless as any of mine or Judas Dancer’s, and his grace under pressure would be of no account whatsoever.
I can tell you this much about survival, though. Survival in conditions like you made for us in Block C. I never once thought of committing suicide because I was already entombed. There was no life in Canaan. How could there be death? There was no life in Cannon, either. Not ever.
The trouble with 1990 and the population explosion is that all the too many people who are being born are being born dead, but still consuming.
No
te: Harker Lee’s prison notes, whether contemporary (as are his descriptions of the prison) or retrospective (as are his descriptions of his fellow inmates), do not show the same type of aberrant pronoun usage as do the autobiographical writings. They are, however, continually distorted and exaggerated, particularly in their concerns with other prisoners. Lee’s main purpose in writing about his fellow prisoners is to articulate his accusations against society. It is not surprising that such accusations are vague and sometimes contradictory. It is precisely this vagueness that makes these accounts so valuable in reaching an understanding of Lee’s mind. What he says about the prisoners is largely untrue, but in the archetypes which he creates out of them we can see the way in which he imagines society to operate.
— j.f.s.
Madman’s Dance
Tempus Fugitive
Harker Lee walks along the edge of a shifting, almost formless plain of sand and sandy soil. The sun rises and sets at intervals which seem to be composed of only a few fleeting moments. The scene flickers eerily, as day and night alternate with furious frequency. The ground beneath his feet is hazy and indistinct, and the sky is vaporous and ill-defined. He walks on in substance, his pale eyes roaming the horizon. He is beginning his own odyssey, but this is not really his world. He had little or no part in the making of it. For him, it can hardly be any less a confinement than Canaan itself. And yet he is an instrument in the judgment. He is at home here. He can live here.
Man in a Cage Page 4