“And kill,” I said. I rose to my full, delicate height, possessed of liquor and intent, five feet three inches of power (Messengers are treasured for this; one must not only be a Downside denizen but a tiny D.D.), and hurled myself against the metal, battered my tiny hands into the walls. Smashed my little feet against the damned iron couch and began to work on it in earnest application then, spinning controls, wrenching dials, moaning. “You too!” correspondent shouted. “You’re just like the rest of them. All of it is machinery!”
Oh, correspondent! he was drunk indeed. Drunk so that I wished my hands were stone so that I could smash the Priest, smash while the whore-attendant returned and saw what I was doing, came to embrace me in a clutch as fierce and warm as death. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s not so bad, you only think it is, but then you learn to live and live with it.” And nuzzled me with lips like steel, this sweet machine of the Arena. Causing me to faint.
If you want Inside you can suffocate.
Correspondent paid for a battered Priest, vintage 1993. Eight hundred and sixteen dollars and forty-five cents, payable in ten percent salary deductions. The machine was a souvenir and here it sits, right here this moment before correspondent, right in his foul little room where he continues to transcribe these notes.
He has, at the present time, so little else to do that he might as well turn to writing. He could stroll through a window, of course, or phone the Protectors. This is useless speculation; correspondent has no plans, has come around to the belief that all energy is merely a cover for The Void; has bigger and better things on his mind as well he might. Circumstances will get better or maybe worse depending on one’s point of view; the important thing is to maintain a caution and open-minded reserve.
Dwarflike but vigorous, correspondent sits in the highest room of the Clinic, behind barricades, and decides exactly what he will Make of His Life. No hammering in the corridors yet. I am glad he did it. He deserved to die. That is a constant.
III
REDUCTION: It hurts. It hurts, it bums, it is a feeling of compression and helplessness coming over in slow, thick waves of illness and impotence; from scalp to toes the body curls in upon itself, the flesh becoming desiccate and Sickly and then folding in a series of snaps like a ruler. Disproportionate it is, terribly so; the limbs are already gnomish when the shoulders and head have not yet begun to gather and the feeling is one of foreshortening: gloom and extended concentration then, the kind of emotions which, I understand, might be known in sexuality or gymnastics when the body, sighing, departs from its humors and takes a more ominous direction. And throughout … throughout the pain, the pain which sears and rends, the helplessness of irreversibility. You cannot stop it, once it begins. The wish to supersede … but nothing to be done.
My God, my God (but Messengers cannot pray), can they not understand? This is being done to people I At the tormented center, the fuse of a soul. (A Downside soul but nonetheless sacred for all that or so we are taught.)
Are the souls of patients larger because they contain us? At the core of my fuse, a light as wicked as death, as constant as night. It lights my lance.
IV
HOW THEY LIGHT THE DOWNSIDE: I think he screamed once as I killed him. Or perhaps it was my own scream in his chambers. Two screams then, melded to darkness. Did both of us die then? If so, why are they out to get only me?
Better talk of Downside.
The way that they work it is this: flyers are pasted all through there, always vandalized of course, but repasted the same day … and you grow up with them. Grow with pictures of the Institute and songs of the Messengers and six times a year there is an enormous recruiting campaign, complete with festival and band. Politicians will venture in during these campaigns, enclosed in glass, to talk through megaphones of the virtues of dedication, the power of paraprofessionalism, and although there have been one or two really spectacular assassinations through the years, by and large the technique is effective. Obviously it is effective.
I love to this day, for instance, to meet celebrities, particularly politicians: it is the sense of connection they provide which is so exciting. Everyone from the Downside understands this right away. Ask them.
It seems that the bare facts of the case are enough. No invention in the recruiting campaigns has yet been noted. Since there is a certain paucity of returned Messengers anyway, the pitch proceeds without difficulty. Be a Messenger and Make Something of Yourself. Come to the lance, be a man. Enlist in the war against cancer. Fight a fighter; it takes one to know one.
My old man didn’t know about the bonus. That is the best indication of the kind of seed from which I sprang.
Even without the question of a bonus, however, it appealed to him. For my eighteenth, as a coming-of-age present, he pulled me from a pocket Arena and took me to the enlistment office. There they told him of the bonus and their gratitude as well; he wept for humility, he took the bonus and attempted to hit the multimutuels for everything that they had taken from him in the forty-odd years intervening between Transfiguration and Death.
He did not succeed.
Were this my father’s story rather than mine, I would now go into the particulars of his failure … but the hell with him, the hell with all of them; center stage to Leslie, please. Leslie overtakes all, even his father … because I learned through channels recently that the old bastard had applied for admission, as a subsistence patient, to Clinic #5 in Houston for the removal of his cancer. A subsistence patient! Charity! Of special value! He claimed relative privileges, of course. Somewhere in the recruiting bulletin this is promised and it had been read to him.
He found out, I am sure, the value of the Institute’s promise.
But at this moment, even now, even writing these notes, I am convinced that that collection of angles and systems which he had accumulated through four decades — four! — stood him in good stead when confronted by the ninth race and that, even at the odds, he could have beaten the game. Do not bet fillies against colts. Never bet maidens in a mixed field. Watch for sudden drops in class. How painfully acquired, how preciously, he submitted these dicta to me! They were my only legacy.
This hardly matters. My tentative post-murder maturity assures me that ninety-nine percent of life is sheer abstraction and the remainder, all of it, can be handled as if it were. Nothing matters. None of it. All lies and small entrapment, manipulated cunning in the dark.
(A speculation for old time’s sake: I see him lying on his bed somewhere in the last of the miserable, furnished apartments in Downside which have been his life. His eyes glint, his face sags, he looks through drugs at the ceiling. He is finally aware that he is dying and can even bring himself to say it—the game is up, my laddie, the machines have now locked, it is now post time — but inescapably, at some comer of consciousness, he is not sure of this. He wishes to think differently. Perhaps it is all a final elaborate hoax rigged by the Telegraphics to test his innocence.
(Three or four insects scuttle across the sheets. They chat with one another, wander on his palm. His eyes Hutter, screams of children outside, the noise of Downside Hooding the room in an expiring moan. Watch for sudden drops of weights. He gathers to absorb that sound, rises, gasps, air comes into his lungs. Look out for lightly raced three-year-olds in allowances for threes and up. Now he feels pain: pain in filaments and fragments, pain working through him at all levels, and he tries to hold it off. He shakes his head, mumbles, the noise rises, his breath sags. He falls. Watch the condition factor carefully. He expires, dreaming of four figures on the tote, rolling gracelessly from bed to floor then; exhibiting an acrobatic he has never shown previously.
(All reverence to this discovered grace of a father whose limbs insects now occupy. Insects and metastases. Cancer and apprentice jockeys.)
“Be a professional,” he said to me in chronotime, “and make something of yourself. You’re nothing now, you and me both, but you’ll really be something if you’re lucky enough to get
into the Institute.”
Lucky enough to get into the Institute! “You don’t understand, Father,” I said (I was only eighteen), “the Institute takes everyone. Everyone. Why do you think they push it all the time? Why the campaign?”
“Because that gives them the widest and finest selection of young men to choose among; that way they can sift for the cream of the crop.”
“No. They’ll take anyone.”
“No sir, no sir,” he said and fairly leaped for emphasis, “there you are wrong. They want you to feel that it is easy when it really isn’t. The requirements are high, the processes, testing, and some of the very best do not make it. You’ll be in by hundreds if we can get you in there.”
I was not naïve, after all — a childhood in Downside, while no real preparation for Messengery, is an education against vulnerability of a different sort — but his intensity was alarming. “I don’t know,” I said. “I hear stories. I don’t want to be a Messenger.”
“What’s that? Not a Messenger! Coward, you take me, the old man who has raised and nurtured you. I’m too old, too cold, got bold but slack in the limbs, got no potential any more. They wouldn’t take me now. If they had had this thing when I was your age, it would have been the making of me. I’d enlist in two seconds. If only they had it when I was younger.”
So I went down, we downed, through the corridors of Downside, holsters at ready, two steps behind my old man, into the main sector and right to the booth, which was hot and cramped and smelled of ozone. On the wall were posters showing Messengers twelve feet high advancing on a battlefield, lances at ready. The Messengers were clean and solemn, bright faces washed to vacancy by commitment, and in one of the posters a Minister was delivering a blessing under the line you’re really something when you’re a messenger. The booth was occupied by a fat man who breathed poorly; every time he exhaled, the papers on the walls and desk jumped. There was something about the aspect of the office which indicated that he had not had company for a while. Small marks of vandalism around the door hinted, however, that in its own way Downside kept him in mind.
“Take him, take my son!” my father said with a series of antique flourishes resembling those with which he encouraged horses by teletape. “Take this boy; he’s just a young lad now with a streak of cruelty and bad manners but he’s my own son and he has potential. I told him that you’ll make something out of him, bring him to his purposes. It’s all in the training; training is a wonderful thing when it works with the young animal. He wants to serve humanity, sir, he only needs a director.”
“Of course,” the recruiter said, “he looks like a very promising lad; indeed he does, and his height is good too. He has wonderful height.”
“I told him, told him that smalls were tall,” the old man said and winked. “It’s grace, that’s what it is, and entrance into small alleys, moving the good way.”
“I have to ask a few questions, of course,” the recruiter said. “It isn’t automatic; we have a selection here. Firstly, to whom should the bonus be made payable?”
“Bonus? Bonus! You say there is a bonus?”
“It varies as to the conditions, the length of enlistment, qualifications and so on. You mean you weren’t aware?”
The old man put his hand on my shoulder and I felt the grip move toward pain. Of Simpler stock than his son, he showed emotional reactions in blunt physical ways. “Of course I knew that,” he said. “You’re not meddling with an old fool and his tiny son; I just wanted to make sure that that came front.”
“You mean you didn’t know that?” I said. It occurred to me for the first time then that my father was insane. He had driven me toward the Institute not for money but for commitment’s sake; this was inexplicable.
“I said I knew it, didn’t I?” he asked sullenly and looked at his nails, uneven and green in the pastel light. “I know all that stuff.”
“You don’t think they’d get people into this for nothing, do you?”
The recruiter gave me a look, an expression strangely Far paralleling my father’s, and I took the papers he handed me, began to sign them indiscriminately. My insight had changed my life: I had not realized until that instant how badly I needed to get away from him. There is no future in being influenced by a man who believes that the Institute can get voluntary admissions.
“It should be several thousand dollars,” I said. “Make sure of it. Large money in Downside.”
“Several thousand dollars; that’s just what I expected and one of the very reasons I brought my boy down this morning. He’s a fine boy, brought up to be of high quality, and in these filthy circumstances that is not easy, of course. When do I get these thousands of dollars? It should be today, right?”
‘’Why should you get it?” I said. “Then, on the other hand, why shouldn’t you? Let it be my gift to you.”
“It’s only a small return on my investment in you.”
“We still have to get the questionnaire complete,” the recruiter said, moving one palm against the other palm, “and we can talk out these arrangements a little later. If you’ll just take a few inquiries now —”
“Just give me the dough,” the old man said, having settled on the essential thread of the interview. “Just pass it over to me, for I’m entitled. It’s all mine for raising him. The boy isn’t of age anyway but there’ll be some good investments for him too. I think of everything. I have plans.”
The recruiter and I looked at one another in some horrid comity of understanding and then, perhaps, put all that to one side. “Your history,” he said, “your biography, the details if you will. It’s not necessary but a good option to tell the truth. Hold back on nothing; the Institute wants to know the best way to train any problems which might come up sooner or later.”
So I filled out the forms. Filled them out in three minutes in their full complexity and meaning and was then rewarded with a moist Recruiter’s Handshake, a winsome Recruiter’s Wink and a deft Recruiter’s Check, postdated. The check I turned over to my old man, the others I kept. He took the money.
What I am trying to make clear is that money did not interest me, then or now. My motives are never mercenary. Life in Downside is always the same, money or not, and the Institute is a way out. If he wanted money to color the question of his existence, my old man was entitled. This is the kind of thinking which one can entertain at eighteen. It lingers. I never did anything for money.
So I took my travel orders and went.
There’s no waiting at the Institute, a new cycle begins every month, and in the meantime they give you a fine dormitory to lie within and interesting puzzles to perform. This is a Good Thing, at least from the point of view of the Institute, because one is provided a long waiver with lots of subclauses and qualifications and, thinking of this waiver, having time to consider it at home, might turn a speculative soul around. The waiver contains phrases like “irreversible reduction” and “accidental mortality” and “disclaim infective contamination” and even though faithful correspondent could not read or write well at this time (imagine that!) he took note of some of them with interest. “Don’t worry,” the recruiter had said, “it’s purely routine, just a routine little waiver. No one ever gets injured on the job, not really. Nothing ever happens.”
Recently, there were riots in Downside. Seventeen of the booths were bombed or burned out; one unfortunate recruiter happened to be working late when this occurred. (But, unfortunately, not mine.) Since then recruiting is allowed only at certain times of the year and in special circumstances: this means only that instead of being empty most of the time the booths, when they are opened, draw huge lines. Still, a few things have changed: a different quality of man was entering the Institute, a kind of Messenger who might be inclined to dance in the intestines. Consequences seem less final. Still, superficial change is still superficial: they will still not recruit women, Hulm’s inheritors being a proper sort. Not that women have shown undue eagerness. They are still a minority of t
he patients.
Clatter of wood in the distance. Definitely they are on to me now. It is only a matter of time, but time enough to continue. They will not spare me. I will have to write it all down before this ends.
V
LIFE AT THE CLINIC: If only I had killed the first case, I would have been spared all of these convolutions. Confronted by simplicities, we do not act; we circumvent, we come back to it only much later and at a scuttle. The purity of the solutions before us is something we cannot grasp. Still, I am relatively content; I could have not done it at all.
Matters settled in at Clinic #4. Much of my revulsion was of the longer-term variety, not to be confused with apprehension. Clinic #4 of the Hulm Institute for Metastases, Easterly Division, deposit in full upon admission. Landscaped grounds: an aura of green for brief, recuperative walks. Private toilets for all patients. Erected in only 2019, it was a modern facility. Diamonds glittered in the lobby fixtures.
Correspondent was given a private full at the end of a corridor a mile long and half a mile high, a full plug into the music system. Correspondent was given full access to the employees’ courtesy shop, the employees’ lounge, the employees’ cafeteria, the employees’ recreational facilities. No possessives, of course. No mingling with the patients. Enough contact is enough. Correspondent was given a uniform with his house name stenciled thereupon in red, he was given with all due ceremony his own Projector. Mine to keep and treasure forever, liable to pay for the damages for the duration of my term as Messenger. My house name was lones. I had requested but been denied a Hebraic. There is no sense of humor in the Institute. Imagine a tiny Goldstein in your gut!
I was given a tour of the facilities and an orientation lecture by Miss Greenwood, head of employee services, who made an obscene suggestion to me in an alcove. “I like Messengers,” she said. It is impossible for even a Miss Greenwood to understand that Messengers are functionally neutered. If it is not congenital, it is nonetheless effective for all of that. Neutering is not, strictly speaking, a requirement of the job (and some Messengers have been known to flex their tiny limbs in copulation) but it usually works out that way. Sex too is a mystery and how many mysteries can we sustain?
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 41