Man in a Cage

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Man in a Cage Page 17

by Brian M Stableford


  Bedbug is approximately six foot six, and very wide. He weighs about two hundred and sixty pounds. He has hands which can pulverize stones. He has a colossal skull, and nobody knows whether the brain inside it is proportionately colossal, or whether the bone is three inches thick. Nobody ever cared enough to find out. Big brain or no big brain, Bedbug was categorized as the lowest level of idiot, and that was that.

  You know what an idiot is, don’t you? An idiot is someone stupider than you. He’s someone measurably more stupid than you. (You insist on his being measurable, because we live in a world of advertising fidelity, where all labels have to be legally provable, all soaps wash whiter, and all idiots can be treated like dirt. Sometimes hallowed dirt, but dirt nevertheless. There is no soap that can take the labels off people.) An idiot, you say, is someone who can be tried, convicted, condemned, and numbered by something you call IQ. IQ is measured by trying to make somebody do something and penalizing him if he doesn’t. It’s something we invented in order to better castigate the stupid for being stupider than we, lest others should castigate us as well.

  We made a mistake when we labeled Bedbug an idiot. Bedbug hasn’t got an IQ and never did have. He can’t be numbered, except maybe by the algebraic x. And you wouldn’t want to number anyone like that, would you? Except, maybe, the soap which somehow never seems to wash whiter than anything. You do realize, I hope, that I’m not saying Bedbug hasn’t got any intelligence. What I’m saying is that nobody was ever able to get into contact with it. Nobody has ever been able to shake it out so that they could count it and keep the change, so they could weigh it and find it wanting. Equally, they couldn’t hammer it and find it malleable (Bedbug, classification ineducable); they couldn’t bend it and find it plastic (Bedbug, condition incurable).

  Bedbug is a nice guy. He is probably the only man in Canaan capable of real gentleness and kindness and love. Possibly the only man on Earth. Because Bedbug alone hasn’t had his identity kicked into a jelly and sieved through a computer card. People tended to think of Bedbug at one time as a big, shaggy animal, some kind of lovable dog. That was a mistake. Bedbug isn’t like a dog. Bedbug isn’t like anything we know about. (Is that why we hated him?) Bedbug is a man, but not a man like us. The way he thinks and feels is his own, purely his own, and none of us will ever get near him. No one can come within a million miles of understanding him, not now, not in the days when he was a gross, grotesque freak of a baby, not ever. By the time he’d emerged from the womb, nobody who’d looked forward to knowing him wanted to continue to know him, or ever to try to know him. That was okay — they’d have been on to an automatic bummer. They wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  Maybe he sensed that, when he poked his head out into the daylight, and that’s why he never bothered to exert himself in the least to try and know them. I can’t say. I’m no closer to Bedbug than you are. I’m one of you, not one of him.

  You can call it unfortunate if you like that no one could ever give him anything — not even pity. You can call it tragic that no one could ever offer him their crude and savage version of help. You can call it unfortunate that the world simply dropped him and left him to rot in a crazy house.

  I don’t call it anything, and neither did Bedbug. It’s the way things were. That’s the nineteen-seventies for you.

  Let me give you a sketch of baby Bedbug’s life. It’s largely fabricated, as you will undoubtedly know, and you also know that I have one hell of an imagination, but I don’t think you can call me a liar here, because I think this account reeks of reality.

  It was a vast hospital. Such things grow by force of necessity. As society progresses, social maladjustment increases exponentially. (You can check the graphs.) There used to be a time, in the Golden Age (joke) when there were so few people we had to label loony that all you needed to accommodate a whole stateful was one cellar, a couple of cages, and a thriving clergy. By the time Bedbug was born in the seventies three people in four needed institutional head-shrinking at least once in their trivial lives. Psycho shops were busy places. Funny factories throughout the land were having conveyor belts put in.

  No one had time for hopeless cases except amateurs and experimenters. You can call it a crying shame if you like, that no real pro could spare the sweat to tinker with Bedbug for a couple of hours a week, but let’s face it, it was more a merciful escape. Whether you agree with me or not will depend on how shrunken your own head is.

  But they fed him, clothed him, and treated his diseases. (Society isn’t all bad — did I ever say it was?) They gave him opportunities to talk, which he didn’t take. They gave him music to listen to, but they never found out if he even heard it. They tried to house-train him, and they gleefully chalked that up as their sole success. It wasn’t the training, though. Bedbug couldn’t be trained. It was simply his way. What he did, he did for his own reasons.

  He walked, too, and used his hands cleverly. But no one ever managed to get through to him that what he ought to do with his hands was what they wanted him to, not what he wanted to do himself. This hurt their feelings greatly. Because he walked and used the toilet they were convinced he could understand them if only he’d want to. But he didn’t. That’s partly why we hated him.

  One day, however, the great wheel of unhappy chance found him out. (Yes, I’m going to talk about the events leading up to the incarceration. I know I said I wouldn’t because it doesn’t matter, and that still goes. The events I am about to detail are quite fictitious, coming out of my own handsome head. I don’t know why Bedbug is in Block C, and it doesn’t matter. In all probability, the truth is stranger than fiction. But the fiction is more real, and that’s what I’m going to set down now.) As I was saying, one day . . .

  After twenty years and maybe a week or two more, of only occasional, cursory, and incidental attention, Bedbug was discovered. Obscure geographical regions do not mind this happening to them (though they might if they thought seriously about the consequences). Girl starlets positively dream of its happening to them. Bedbug, characteristically, did not even know that it had happened to him. In the beginning.

  His case and his cause were enthusiastically adopted by a group of young doctors. Youth, as you know, has its own built-in drive and determination, and nutcracking as a profession is fitted with a compulsion to interfere. A bastard branch of medicine, shrinkery had adopted for itself the surgeon’s holy motto, if in doubt, cut it out, and the primary directive of the needle-wielding experimental physiologists, shoot anything that moves.

  These youngsters were therefore experimentally minded and unawed by the most mountainous of Mahometan challenges. They started, of course, with a handful of behaviorist tenets; cause and effect, these particular youngsters believed, was the God-given core of all things scientific. Stimulus and effect. Study stimulus and effect and you could crack any nut.

  Unfortunately, Bedbug reacted to no stimuli.

  Did they pack it up and call it a day? Like hell they did. These boys had no experience to chalk it up to. The discards of the last generation were already marked down in their black books as the first of their triumphs.

  Bedbug must react!

  He didn’t mind the electric shocks.

  He did not react to all the things they showed him — pornography, mirrors, signs.

  He didn’t mind the ultrasonics.

  It didn’t do anything to him when they stuck the needles in, masturbated him, dropped spiders down the back of his neck, filled him brimful of psychotropics, emetics, or laxatives. He didn’t respond when they said please. The witch doctor failed to raise a laugh. The rite of exorcism was a dismal flop. Total darkness and blinding light came alike to him, as did stroboscopic alternation of same. Complete immobilization, ice baths, and sensory deprivation bothered him not in the least.

  Apart from the processes of natural life, there was only one thing that Bedbug was known to do, and that was dream. They cou
ld spot the rapid eye movements while he was asleep. (Not while he was awake.) So they tried keeping him awake, keeping him away from his dreams. Had it failed, they would probably have resorted to starving him, asphyxiating him, or vivisecting him. All in a good cause.

  As it turned out, though, there was no need to go to extremes. Torturing him with lack of sleep, denying him access to the only world that he knew to exist, eventually elicited a reaction.

  He killed them all.

  Every last one. He smashed up a lot of the hospital in the process, but he killed only his tormentors, and all his tormentors. He did not run amok, he simply knocked down a few doors, bent a few steel bars, and mashed the people he wanted to mash.

  Nobody ever tried again.

  Breaking out of Block C is impossible. Bedbug can do it. It remains impossible. Bedbug is Bedbug now. Incorruptible.

  We all hate him.

  Well, not quite. Everyone in Canaan likes him.

  Madman’s Dance

  In the Prison of My Dreams

  She is naked, and because she knows my mind and its subtle convolutions she dons glittering jewels, which become stars decking the firmament of her body and soul. She is, herself, as dark as the night sky, and she is beckoning, and laughing with a hint of mockery. She is one, and she is a thousand, and she is a million. She is not temptation (I am temptation) but promise, promise fulfilled a thousand times, and times without number.

  While she dances, the stars that she wears circle and wheel and sparkle and shine, and sing the hollow lament of the rhythm of the spheres. The pallor of the stones in their setting, and their life and their vibration fill me with an amber liquid sensation which drags at my throat and warms me within my breast like a glowing coal. The chaos of the cold stone lights and their sensuous welcome make me mad with misunderstanding.

  And when she lays her body on the ground and allows herself to flow and fuse, she smiles with transport, the blackness of her eyes is limitless, and the lissome curling of her body as gentle as slow water in a level stream. She taunts me with her eyes and bewilders me with her gemstones, and she moves herself into strange imaginary constellations as she rolls. She is free and honest and she does not pretend, but the music of her movements has only lies to tell me. Her arms and her legs, her thighs and her breasts shine with constant sweat like distant stardust, drawing my vision beyond the limits of resolution, where I can see nothing real except with the treacherous eye of my mind. Her breasts, when she is clothed, bear shells of ruby-red sarcophrase and stars of white sapphire. Even then, she disturbs my silence as deeply as my own fears, and the very scent of her body casts my thoughts into a wild abyss of hope and dream and foreboding from which I hurl myself with desperation and dread. Hidden menace dances perilously close to haloed triumph in the sonorous melancholy of the pavane, and I am forever looking over my shoulder lest some faceless presence be lurking there to threaten my exclusive reward.

  I think I see before me the echoes of another existence, peopled with madmen and — worse still — mad gods. I look at her, and out of the corner of my eye I see a looking-glass Alice, a strange fragment of a long-destroyed incarnation. In the lamplight stars of her decorated skin, I can almost see diamonds on a pack of playing cards, and jacks and queens and bullet-riddled aces. And a hundred thousand children and young men who claim to be the faded hours of Harker Lee, consigned and consigning to the oblivion of dead memory and replowed engrammic earth.

  Who sends these ghosts to haunt me?

  And the candle whose light is reflected in the facets of the stones of enchantment flickers and dies, and there is no light to fire my fancies and my fantasies, and I lay myself to sleep in the cradle of her thighs.

  But in sleep, there comes no rest, for I pass only from dream to dream to dream, and there is no possible remission in the fateful continuity of life. I feel that the constancy of the flow of images is breaking me apart; I cannot stand the everlasting flow of it all, and I can no longer split the current of images into separate scenes. I am caught in a long transition, dreaming that I am dreaming that I am dreaming, and I flee down endless corridors of sleep, rebound through an infinity of mirror images, with not the least prospect of escape. There is no court of appeal. And yet, why should I need one? You are dead, Harker Lee, whoever you were. You cannot haunt me — why am I forced to live with these — the residue of your futile life — why? Who pursues me? I am alone. In all the universe, there is only myself. I am all that there is: I, mock-Satan, hiding my face behind a million masks and discarding a million more. There is no one here but my victims.

  No one.

  Leave me alone. I will not be a prisoner in my own skull. I will not yield to my foolish fears. If the hound of hell himself is after me . . . why, then, I will wait for him and he will lick my hand.

  Yet the ghost whispers in my ear that you have me prisoner, that you have me locked in the condemned cell. Who is this ghost? There is no man-in-a-death-mask. There never was.

  Who dares to put me to the question? Who dares to pretend to be my judge? This is hell, nor am I out of it, and I am Lord in hell as in all the universe. There is no one. . . .

  I did not see Attila born.

  I did not see the sun rise on Agincourt.

  I did not see the collapse of the Aztec Empire.

  I was not present at the death of Tamburlaine.

  This hound of hell is chasing me, through all the fading years he seeks me still to seize me in his savage teeth and stain the waters of the world with my heartfelt tears.

  My jailers threw away the key a thousand years ago. They have left me here to rot away. But the bones they left in hiding are growing flesh again, and bloodbeat is returning to my veins. They think one day I’ll break in two, so they hate me all the more, and while they wait for me to break they’ll add it to the score.

  Their fear is eating their hearts like acid, they really want to run. But they need someone to blame it on, and it’s going to be me.

  It wasn’t me who stole your wives, it wasn’t me who killed your king, it wasn’t me that burned those effigies of Jesus, it wasn’t me who scorned your gifts of love.

  It won’t be me who dies tonight, whatever you might do. There’s nothing I can do for you; it isn’t me you fear. Tonight the falling stars are faster in their fall, like pointing fingers in the sky. And the words they spell in starlight might tell you that I’ll die. But your words and signs can’t hurt me, if that’s the thing you want. If you want to see the streets run red, if you want to see me bleed, the hound of hell can’t catch me, you can’t hold me till he does, you’d better use a goat.

  However much you hate me, I’m not going to die tonight. Not for you, not for anyone. This time, you can do your own dying. Not me. Not me.

  I don’t care what your name is. I don’t know any Judas.

  I never did.

  Titan Nine

  The Man Who Came Back

  The doctor to whose care Lindquist had been consigned was named Martinez. He was a little guy who looked as if he ought to be smiling all the time. He wasn’t smiling now.

  “How is he?” Jenny asked. Pure ritual.

  “The same,” Martinez told her, inevitably.

  No better, no worse. How much worse could the poor bastard get? He just lay there, looking every inch a cadaver. No engagement whatsoever with his body. Blank features, blank eyes, absolute stillness. There was a silver helmet on his head which was connected to a computer input. Across the room was a console with a plotter and line printer. The chatter of the printer had been gagged so that it did no more than murmur, but the plotter had been able to keep its occasional click. And click it did, about three times a minute, to testify that Johnny Lindquist was still in there somewhere and could still flick a pointer with the best of them.

  “Look at the plot,” said Jenny.

  The paper was hanging down to the
floor and rolling up. I tore off a strip and inspected it. I saw more or less what I’d expected to see. Big, slow deltas.

  “So?” I said.

  “Never mind the waves,” she said. “Look at the subplots.”

  The subplots were the resonance currents — the traces which correlated best with the cytoanalogues in the brain — the life of the mind. It was impossible to track each neurone block, of course — even the helmet hadn’t that much ambition — and a lot of incomplete patterns and ephemeral patterns didn’t register, but the resonance finder went down deep — well below the crude frequency-sort into alpha, beta, and so on.

  The real analysis would be coming out of the line printer, but you can usually gather a good idea of what’s going on and what’s not from a brisk scan of the trained eye through the subplots. My eye, of course, wasn’t trained.

  “What can you see?” asked Hurst, who was suitably impressed by the clinical complexity of the operation.

  I felt obliged to pretend so as not to disillusion the poor boy. I was surprised to find that I could make some sort of sense of it. I hadn’t forgotten everything.

  “Normal paleocortical activity,” I said. “But with no knowledge of the mind-code it’s difficult to see . . . is he right-handed?”

  “Yes.” It was Martinez who answered.

  “Well, the impulses from the left neocortex are considerably different from those in the right. The fields are unbalanced — the right half is depleted. So if the left neocortex correlates with right-handedness he’s not making a lot of use of his learning. If his cytoarchitecture is stacked normally he’s a very active little lad inside his skull. The pons is cutting out all the bodily responses, though — not even a twitch.”

  “You’re missing the point,” said Jenny. I wasn’t surprised.

  “So okay,” I said. “Did we come here to play guessing games? You’re the one with the mind-reading license. It’s only a hobby with me.”

 

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