by Anthology
A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village
It has been three weeks now since it happened; three weeks is a long time. You would think that I could accept it now. You would think so, but I can’t. Which means, while I lie here trying to remember, that secret little voice inside of me will be building up its reserves for a scream. One hell of a scream. Then they will come up the stairs, their feet thumping on the dusty, worn tread. They will come quickly down the corridor, mumbling so low that I will not be able to understand any of what they say. One of them will kick the door open while the other will come through and cross to my bed. Choreography of the first class. The one at my bed will tell me to stop screaming. I will try. Really, I will. But that secret little voice that is not really mine (they don’t understand that, of course; they think I can control it) will go on and on, rising higher all the time until the one at the door will say, “Might as well get it over with.” And I wonder why they bother speaking when they don’t have to, when they are Empathists. “Might as well get it over with.” And the other one will say, “Christ!” And then he will hit me. He will strike me with his open hands, again and again until my ears are ringing. Then he will drag me off the bed and throw me up against the wall and hit me some more with his fists until I am finally quiet. I don’t think they really want to hurt me so much. It is just that it takes me so damned long to quit screaming.
But I’ve got to think about it, don’t I? I mean, if there is ever to be an end to the memories, if I am ever to accept what has happened, I must go over and over and over it until I have bleached all the color out of it. All the color and sharp edges and pain. Perhaps repetition is the mother of acceptance.
I repeat . . .
The fan shuttles came under my window then, one every evening, came moaning down the street, their long, heavy bodies dancing daintily on toes of air. It was winter, and the snow kicked up around them in thick, fuzzy clouds until they were completely concealed in the shower they caused. Then the shuttle would stop before the lobby downstairs, up against the front steps. The fans would be turned off, and the coach would settle onto its hard rubber cushion as gently as the snow-flakes settled on the snow-flakes that fell before them. My bed is up against the window. I would lie there on the warm, gray blankets and watch all this with a curious, melancholy detachment, yet with a great deal of excitement for what was to come.
There would be a little while, then, when I would watch the shuttle, trying to see through the windows and pick out the passengers by the dim glow of the ceiling lights. Most of them would be sleeping, their heads against the glass, their breath fogging the panes so—mostly—I could not see much.
After a few minutes, the door at the front of the shuttle would open, and the driver would come out, dressed in a long, blue coat that flapped in the brisk wind. He would hunch against the drive of the snow and cross the walk into the lighted lobby, out of sight. Once, when I was especially curious about what the driver did in the lobby every night, I went out into the hall and crept down the stairs (I am only on the second floor) and looked around the stairwell corner. The driver and Belias, the night manager (big man, much dark hair, little eyes, quick hands), were standing next to the lobby fireplace, drinking coffee out of heavy brown mugs. They laughed a couple of times, but did not say anything. Of course, they’re Empathists and don’t have to talk. After they had finished their coffee, Belias gave the driver three packages that had been mailed from the hotel post office, and the driver left, hurrying out into the snow to the snug haven of his cab. I went upstairs to my room and watched the fan shuttle leave in a gust of white. Then I cried, I think. Anyway, I never went to watch Belias and the driver again.
But I didn’t stop signaling the passengers. Every night, when the two o’clock shuttle swung in against the steps before the lobby, I would have my lamp on the windowsill, the shade off and laid carefully to the side. When the driver left the shuttle, I would rapidly flick the light on and off several times. Then I would pause, waiting for something. I was never completely sure what it was that I waited for. I guess maybe I thought someone in the bus would fiddle with the light over his seat, flash his hand over it to make it pulsate. But no one ever did.
Except once.
Three weeks ago.
Listen . . .
I was lying on the bed, waiting for the two o’clock shuttle. I had moved the lamp to the window and had it ready. Outside, the snow was falling, a dry snow that was easily stirred by the wind, that screeched when it was blown against the glass and whirled away like bits of sand. I kept an old shirt next to me to wipe my breath from the window whenever the pane got too clouded. At one minute until two, the shuttle turned into the street several blocks away, just at the edge of my vision. I had my forehead pressed hard against the glass, numbing it with the cold, and that was how I saw it so far away. First, there was just the dim glowing circles of the headlamps, cut to almost nothing by the driving snow. Then as the shuttle drew closer, the lights became bright, warm things I wanted to touch and hold. My heart was pounding as always, and my fingers were on the lamp switch.
At first, everything was as usual. The shuttle pulled against the curb, blowers whining, fountaining snow on all sides. It settled into the thick white carpet, and the rotars stopped beating altogether. The driver got out and went into the lobby, leaving the passengers alone. Almost panting, trembling, I flicked the lamp on and off six times, then stopped and waited.
That was when things changed. Someone returned my signal. There was a flicker of yellow. Another. A third. Six in all. Frantically, I wiped the window to be sure I hadn’t been seeing things, a trick of lights reflecting on my glass from farther down the street. I signaled again. Now the window was clear, and there was nothing to obstruct my view of the cigarette lighter that burned, then flicked off, then burned again.
I think I laughed. I know I lunged against the window, trying to see better, for that was when I knocked the lamp off the sill. It bounced once on my bed, fell over the side, and smashed loudly on the floor.
I scrambled after it, discovered the bulb was ruined. The rest of the lamp seemed undamaged. But I needed a bulb. Any minute now, the driver might finish his coffee and go back to the bus, leaving me alone, taking away the man or woman with the lighter and leaving me by myself. I needed a bulb. Badly.
I remembered the one in the floor lamp on the other side of the room. In the darkness, I stumbled across to it, tripped over a leg of my only chair, and fell before I could throw my hands up to protect my face. I bruised my jaw and snapped off the end of a front tooth. The tooth was driven forward into my lip which was bleeding steadily and which was the only thing that really hurt. I lay dazed, feeling the floor roll under me like small breakers on a warm beach. Finally, I got up and went on, found the floor lamp and tried to get the bulb out of it.
My hands don’t work so good. They were both broken several times and never set properly. I’m missing three fingers altogether, which doesn’t help much. And I don’t have any feeling in my right thumb, though it can grip things readily enough. I was a musician. That’s why it was just my hands that were worked over. I really didn’t get as bad treatment as some Stunteds got.
I fumbled with the bulb, but it kept slipping out of my hands. I cursed it, wrenched at it, tripped again, bringing the lamp down onto the floor with me.
Well, dammit, you know how it was. A man comes along with the Empathy Circuits to augment the brain, and you are happy to let them install one in your own head. I mean, everyone’s one big family now. No war. No misunderstandings. Only love. Right? Well, eventually. It’s going to be great. Someone’s having problems, everyone helps straighten him out, gives him love and understanding so that he can eventually come to terms with himself. And no words are needed. Man, not when everyone is an Empathist! So you come out of the operating room, chrome and white and tile and crisp nurses and doctors that smell of antiseptics, all around you. And that’s when you find out, in your case, the circuits
didn’t work. At first, everyone is afraid, because they think it means a lot of people are going to be unreachable. Then, five years later and a few billion simple operations later, they know the unreachables are not many. Just a few. Stunteds. Closed to telepathic understanding. Always wanting to talk, talk, talk when talk is no longer necessary. So they are singled out immediately as being different. Different. And one day when some of your children and more perverted older citizens beat a Stunted around just for fun, you join in. It wears off, this streak of sadism, and you are ashamed. Mankind is rapidly approaching total sanity and you realize your attack on the Stunteds was a last fling of bestiality, the last brutal act before the coming of age. So the next stage in the Empathist establishment’s treatment of the Stunteds is to, in a flurry of liberalism, pass flocks of laws under whose wings the Stunteds will be protected. So things are rosy, right? So there is a happy ending, check? So, forget the Stunteds. And slowly, it becomes obvious that the Stunteds need more than laws to protect them from physical violence. There is another kind of violence that is much more deadly, much more defeating. It is the violence of indifference, the violence of being a caste apart from the rest of the world, the violence of being ignored, the violence of sitting alone, living on a pension, searching through the tattered, yellowed pages of old books for the lingering warmth of human understanding the writer may have been able to impart to his words. Look up other Stunteds. Yeah, try that. Only problem is that there are only fifteen thousand of them in a world of four and a half billion. And when you do find some, you discover that the mental type that is not susceptible to the Empathy Circuits is not always stable to begin with. Finally, you realize there is no place to go. Absolutely no place at all . . . And the men who keep them, the sleazy hotel operators, the two-bit roominghouse executives don’t mind beating them a little to keep them quiet, because Stunteds don’t really exist, do they? They aren’t really people, are they? It is no longer the bestiality of out-and-out torture, just the rather boring, necessary task of discipline.
I lay with the lamp, holding it, saying, “Dear Jesus, don’t let the bulb be broken; Dear Jesus, don’t let the bulb be broken,” over and over until I suddenly realized how eerie I sounded. I shivered a while and felt like I might vomit. Then I pulled myself together and felt around the inside of the lampshade. The bulb was intact. I whimpered while I fumbled it out of its socket, but I couldn’t help it. I was so happy!
A minute later, I was back at the window. The shuttle was still there, but it could not stay for long. I picked up the table lamp and tried to unscrew the broken bulb. My hands slipped, and I slashed my fingers on the paper-thin glass, but I got it out. I screwed the new bulb in and brought the lamp back to the window. I was about to flash a signal to the passenger with the cigarette lighter when the driver and Belias came out of the hotel lobby.
I stopped my work and leaned my head against the glass, shivering. I felt miserable. My head was all covered with sweat. It dripped into my eyes and made them sting. Yet my stomach was cold—cold and flopping around like a dying fish. I had missed my chance. I had utterly missed it. After a few moments, I raised my head and looked back at the shuttle, expecting it to be gone. I don’t know why I was still interested in watching it. Perhaps it was because I was curious about Belias being outside. He never went outside before. It was always the other way around: the driver came in. And they drank coffee by the fireplace and laughed but didn’t talk and transferred the mail and I cried about it but didn’t know why. Anyway, when I looked up, I saw something else strange. Belias and the driver were lifting the sidewalk SHUTTLE STOP sign into the luggage rack on the rear of the bus. They shoved it back in. The driver stayed there, chaining it in place so it would not roll against the passengers’ luggage. Belias went back inside. When he finished with the sign, the driver followed him.
There was more snow.
I watched it.
I watched the dark shapes of the passengers’ heads against the window, thought about them resting in there between sleep and wakefulness, thought about them being lulled by the dull roar of the blades and the soft swish of the snow as they barreled through the night from one place to another.
Then I remembered the lamp.
I was about to signal when Belias and the driver returned. They were carrying a lobby sign indicating the hours the shuttles arrived and departed, rates and so forth. They started putting that in the luggage compartment too.
And then I understood. The fan shuttle was not going to come through town anymore. This was the last trip. From now on, some new air-cushion by-pass, some fast solid surface that would give the fans a better beat top to press against. An open stretch without buildings on both sides so that there would be no necessity to cut speed to keep from breaking windows. They would go away, leaving the streets empty, and that was how the streets would stay. Tomorrow night, I would look out the window, and there would be no warm, yellow lights coming brighter and brighter. There would be no thundering fans. No clouds of displaced snow.
The lamp switch was slick with blood from my fingers.
I got off the bed and found the door, somehow. I had to get down there. There was nothing to do but get down there. I went into the hallway and started running, but found I was going in the wrong direction. I came to a dead end on the other side of the hotel and just stood there, trying to think what had happened. Then I remembered where the stairs were and said, “Shit!” though I almost never swear, and ran back the other way. I found the stairs and went banging down them and across the raggedy lobby carpet.
I pushed through the glass doors and went down the steps. I slipped on the ice and fell across the sidewalk, caking myself with dry snow that melted against me and became ice on my clothes when it refroze. I remember that I was crying—and that I was embarrassed because I was crying—and that I just couldn’t stop. Again, my gut heaved like I would vomit, but all that came out of my throat was a dry, racking heave that made my eyes water. And me a grown man.
The driver and Belias had not seen me yet. I got up and swayed back and forth, the wind very cold and sharp against my skin. I went along the side of the shuttle until I found the fifth window where the cigarette lighter had fluttered. I rapped on the glass until a face turned to me. It was a woman, very heavyset, with long, stringy brown hair. She looked at me oddly while she tried to find my thought lines, then opened her mouth in a little round “O” and looked right through me—that look a Stunted gets used to.
I shouted at her. “Hey!” I beat on her window. “Hey! Hey!”
Suddenly there were arms around me, Belias’ arms. He held me firmly, and I finally stopped trying to get away. The driver came around and looked at the woman in the seat. They were all talking, but I couldn’t hear any of it. Then I saw a small boy in the seat beside the woman, and I guessed what it had been. The boy had seen me flicking the light and had taken his mother’s lighter out of her purse. Maybe she was asleep, one of those lulled by the rushing and the beating of the fast machine. He had flicked it at me in answer. His mother had awakened and had taken it from him, had changed seats with him to keep him out of trouble.
Children are the only ones who can really be cruel anymore. They go through a stage when taunting is fun to them.
But, at least, there was one consolation.
He did not look through me.
No glass eyes. No fish stares. Our eyes met once, quickly, before Belias carried me back inside.
He made me go back to my room, back to my bed. I lay with my face down on the mattress, panting and shaking and trying to think. Then there was the roar of the fan shuttle blowers starting up. I got quickly to the window, kneeling on the bed, just in time to see the bus disappear down the road, its canopy of blown snow sealing it permanently out of sight.
That was when I started to scream.
Belias came and kicked open the door. The other man, whose name I do not know, came to me and told me to stop. I tried to stop. I really did. But the repress
ed sob would catch in my throat when I tried to force it down and come back twice as hard. I screamed and cried and couldn’t seem to make enough noise to satisfy me. I thought of the quiet streets, the quiet snow falling softly, noiselessly upon other snow; I thought of the quiet of the hotel and of the quiet way in which the driver and Belias had talked to the fat woman. I screamed even louder. The nameless one backhanded me several times across the face, then dragged me from the bed and threw me against the wall the way he always does. He slammed a fist into my stomach three times, very quickly, and knocked all the breath out of me. But I screamed silently. And when the breath came back, the scream came with it.
Belias crossed to my lamp and turned it on. The light was dim and ugly. The second one thrust me into a chair and began slapping me again and again, back and forth, top to bottom, until there was blood coming out of my nose. He split my lip farther than my fall had, and he punched once at my teeth, breaking loose the one I had partially damaged earlier.
While he was hitting me, I saw his face for the first time. It had always been dark before, and I had never been able to see him. It was an ordinary face—except that he was not looking through me. He was looking at me. Directly at me. And he was laughing. His mouth was pried wide by his broad, white teeth, and there was laughter wrapped around his tongue. I knew, immediately, why he was able to beat me. He was not an Empathist. He was a Stunted like me. Probably roomed here too. A sort of handy man to keep the other invisible people quiet.