He was finally able to stand. The shift in perspective was amazing, and frightening. Suddenly, he felt like he was balancing on a tightrope above an abyss, like he was a taffy-man that’d been stretched out to miles in length and was now in danger of toppling over because he was too thin for his height. His knees kept giving way, and he kept trying to lock them. The taffy-man swayed precariously, as if in a high wind.
Incongruously, he still had an erection. It slapped awkwardly and painfully against his thighs as he moved. He touched it cautiously: the pallid head. Nausea surged through him.
Bradley stumbled toward the bathroom, teeth clenched to keep back the vomit that had suddenly geysered up from the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t feel his feet, although he could see his toes stubbing clumsily against pieces of furniture, and knew that it must hurt. He floated—or slid—down the slowly tilting floor toward the bathroom, using his head as a gyroscope. One foot in front of the other, only momentum to keep you from toppling into the abyss.
The bathroom door irised aside to let him through. He crashed to his knees before the voider, not feeling the jolt. He leaned into the voider and vomited violently, bringing up only an oily, greenish bile. Triggered by his presence, the bathroom began to play soothing Muzak—woodwinds and strings—and to fill the cubicle with subtly perfumed incense: sandalwood. It was all very modern.
Bradley worked his way through the dry heaves and shuddered into stillness. He retched one final, wrenching time and then knelt quietly, his head resting on the lip of the voider. It chuckled cheerfully and energetically to itself, busy digesting his vomit. His stomach spasmed retroactively; muscles fluttered in sympathy along his bowed back. Sweat had drawn itself primly into precise beads on his upper lip.
Throwing up had cleared his head, and made him aware of his body again, but otherwise had not helped much. He still felt horrible.
Don t think why, don’t get on that at all. Just keep moving, get the blood going a little. Or die, damn you. Die and rot in hell forever.
Christ
He went back out into the hall, cursing feebly at the bathroom door as it dilated open and closed behind him. Retching him out. The apartment was warmer—the thermostat reacting in obedience to his own body temperature, shutting down as his temperature dropped in the stasis induced by the egodrex, revving up again as he returned reluctantly to life. Very clever, these clockwork things. They always functioned, no matter what. Automatically he picked up the clothes he had scattered around when the drug had started to depress the higher-reasoning centers of his brain, translating his undermind directly into experience. He threw the clothes into the hamper that led to the building’s reconstituting systems. They’d be pulped and treated and made usable again. So would his vomit. Now that it was almost too late, the government was very big on ecology. Good to the last drop.
There was a full-length mirror (convertible to one way so he could peek into the corridor outside) near the hamper. He studied his nakedness with distaste: fish-belly white, flabby, bristly-haired as a dog. His erection had finally gone down, but now it looked like some obscene, wrinkled slug crawling from a nest of dirty, matted hair. He felt a touch of returning nausea. New clothes. Get dressed. The fresh cloth feeling even more stifling against his dirty skin, but never mind. Cover it all up. Before it begins to decompose..
Dressed, he walked aimlessly into the kitchen, past the sailing-ship wheel. The big electric combination chrome blinked relentlessly at him from the wall: hour, day, month, year. Calibrated to a tenth of a second. Never let you forget. Why did anybody need to know the time that closely? Why did anybody need time? Despite himself, he read the chrome dials, scanning left to right in reflex. Christ, only five p.m.? Work tomorrow. Back to the office, the tapes, the papers, the meaningless files of numbers, punch cards to be sorted. Routing. And Martino promoted over him, in spite of seniority. The second time. Time. All the hours left in this day, all the days left ahead. Unrequited time hung over him like a rock, threatening to fall.
This was going to be bad. This was going to be very bad.
Suddenly, Bradley was having trouble with his breathing. He tried not to think of the seconds turning into minutes into hours into days into weeks into months into years, all ahead of him, all of which he’d have to somehow get through. He thought of them anyway, ticking them off one by one inside his skull. This was going to be too bad to stand. He’d have to. He couldn’t possibly get any more egodrex until Friday. That’d been his regular fix for three years. And he couldn’t afford it anyway—it already took every cent of the small credit margin he was allowed for accessories, illegally transferred, to buy his weekly dose of the egomorphic. But this was bad. He felt another, familiar pressure building up, forcing him toward the other thing. No, not this time. Don’t think about the other thing. Don’t think.
He took stock of his body, to distract himself. He found, to his disgust, that he was hungry. His body was hungry. He wasn’t actually in need of nutrient, and his mind gagged at the thought of eating, but the food he lived on—like most of the government’s products-was mildly addictive (habit-forming was the official term, not addictive) and his body wanted to eat. Chew and swallow: a pacifier. Resignedly, he punched out a combination on the kitchenette at random, not caring what he got. The kitchenette mumbled, the solar oven buzzed briefly, and a tray slid out of a slot, sealed in tinfoil. He peeled away the tinfoil and ate. The food was divided into tiny geometrical sections on the tray, a glob of that here, a spatter of this there. It all tasted basically the same: like plastic. Bradley ate it without noticing it, trying to involve himself to distract his mind from the other thing, failing.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough.
He put down his fork. Hands cupping the eyes, squeezing. Keep it in.
Maybe you’re finished this time. You’re going to do it again, aren’t you? No. Yes, you will, you know it. (He shook his head, arguing with himself.) Maybe they’ll catch you this time. Maybe they’ll just put you away. Rot in the darkness, no light. Maybe they’ll just put you the hell away. Huh? Degradation. Disgrace. You’ve been lucky all these years, in a way. Nobody’s ever found out about the egomorphic drug—only psychologically addictive, no needle-marks, no lasting metabolic effects: the thinking man’s junk. But someday they’ll catch you. Maybe this time. Today.
Bradley got up and walked stiff-legged around the apartment, circling around and around his furniture, looking but carefully not touching anything. His furniture. His things. He said. They weren’t really. The apartment and everything in it belonged to the government. The exchange was automatic. He never saw any money, there wasn’t really any such thing as money anyway. The bank computers balanced the credit tally he earned against the credit debit he owed to rent the good things in life a GS 8 was entitled to. Nothing more or less. Food, clothing, antique lanterns—the government allowed him to rent these things from them as reward and compensation for his services. There was no place else you could get any of them. There was only one game in town. If he rose to a higher grade, he would be allowed to rent more good things from the government, of correspondingly finer quality. And when he died, the government would continue to rent the same facilities to someone just up from GS 7, including the same reprocessed food and clothing—although in practice there was an inevitable attrition rate, a little always lost from the system, something else added.
My things. God save me from my things.
He looked out the window: Baltimore faded into Washington into New York into Boston.
There was no place to go. Outside the door, along the corridor, down the elevators and escalators, past the concrete arcades and recycled fountains, past the glass-and-steel hives of the other GS residences, past the drabber cinderblock sections for the rank-and-file, past the cadet nurseries and crèches, the tank and algae farms, the oxygen reinforcement systems, the industrial quarter, the rec areas, the outer maintenance rim, then the edge of the megalopolis. And beyond that: only anarc
hy and death. And the armed patrols, walls, minefields and barbed wire that guarded the City from chaos. No way out that way, not at all.
And no one else there. In all the four hundred miles of the City, in all the raped lands beyond, no one else there. No one here but him.
He sobbed, gasping air. Isolation filled his lungs like syrup.
He would do it now, it was too late to stop. Suicide? He thought briefly of suicide, of hurtling himself down from his window and falling forever until the ground caught him. No, he was too scared. Too afraid to be alone. He would do the other thing instead, as he always did.
Bradley walked to the viewphone. It was handsome, done in polished artificial wood and steel, with a wide screen. Trembling, he sat down.
The company representative had not even bothered to pretend that his spiel was not a spiel, that he wasn’t speaking it from rote. He explained the merits of the new viewphone network in a rehearsed tone. Bradley listened numbly. They were both bored. It was all a formality anyway. Bradley had received a bonus for seniority—he had to rent something new whose cost would correspond to the bonus. He had to: there could be no such thing as a credit unbalance. The only initiative he could execute was in the selection of the item. He could choose from about five equally priced items. The company rep seemed to be pushing the viewphone network, maybe because they were overstocked—
Bradley activated the network, waited for the set to warm up. He opened a drawer, took out an address book, looked up a scribbled number. It had taken him three days this time to find the right girl, to follow her home, to find which apartment in the hive was hers so that he could look up the code number. He had been terrified every waking second of those three days, and he had almost been stopped and questioned by a security guard. Every time it got harder, every time he came a little closer to being caught. The view-phone hummed. The dialing pattern appeared on the screen.
The greatest advantage of the viewphone network, the company representative had told Bradley mechanically, is its intimacy. It can save you a great deal of unnecessary travel—it’s every bit as good as being in the same room with the person you want to talk to. It enables you to perform all your social and business functions-
Bradley punched out the code number. Six short, savage jabs of his finger. He counted each click distinctly to himself. The dialing pattern disappeared; static swirled on the screen. With one hand, he reached down and opened his pants, unsealing the magnetic flap along the front. He had become excited, thinking of what he was about to do—he took his erection in his hand, squeezing, feeling the blood throb under his fingers. His mouth was painfully dry, and he was quivering with tension. Static condensed, became a young woman’s face. Pretty, long dark hair, big golden eyes. “Yes?” she said, not recognizing him. Bradley stood up, letting his pants drop down around his ankles. Her eyes widened. She stared at him in shock—but there was also a quick flicker of fascination behind her eyes, and something else. Recognition? Longing? Love? It is love, he wanted to tell her, it is you and me, it is us. We touch here. But he only thrust his pelvis, a little more forward. She watched in fascination, lips parted, tongue against teeth. After a second, she dutifully—almost reluctantly—opened her mouth to scream. He flicked the set off. Silence echoed. As her scream must be echoing now, in her own apartment, in her own hive. Gradually, he lowered himself back into the chair. He sat there with his pants bunched around his ankles and listened to the clock tick in the kitchen.
—in the convenience of your own home—
Then he began to cry.
<
* * * *
* * * *
Gene Wolfe, who wrote The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories, presents now an intriguing story told by a man born with no head. Being headless gives him a peculiar viewpoint, and enables him to see things in life that you and I usually miss.
THE HEADLESS MAN
by Gene Wolfe
It’s really very good of you to read the history of someone as grotesque as I—or perhaps you like grotesques? Most people would turn away. Or stare. Or be sick. I have no head.
No, I’m not joking, and this is not some silly story about an execution. I was born this way.
I don’t remember it, of course. But Pliny (Pliny the elder, I think; you could look it up) told all about us. He said we lived in India. (I live in Indiana, which shouldn’t be the same thing at all, but somehow is.) And in old manuscript illustrations of Marco Polo we appear. (I say we because I feel a kinship. It’s a lovely little picture, a miniature, and there is also a man—he’s Pliny’s too—shading himself with his foot, and another with one eye.) Even though Marco Polo didn’t say he saw— You know. We were gone by then, I suppose; except for myself, and I wasn’t born.
Just in case you still don’t know what I look like, let me describe myself. My hands reaching up beneath my shirt tell me (and the old miniature); I never look in mirrors. My eyes are very large—twice, three times the size of yours. The lids are elaborately curved and open wide. They are large, bright eyes and are placed just where the functionless nipples of most men are. I think my eyes are probably my best feature.
I have a wide mouth, reaching completely across my belly, and big teeth. My lips (because I can bend at the waist I can look down, when I’m naked, and see them) are redder than most people’s lips, so that—ridiculously—I look as though I am wearing lipstick. And mine is not a straight mouth at all. I suppose it would be called a cupid’s bow if it were a woman’s mouth, and not so wide. My nose is large and rather flat, which is a blessing because it doesn’t make much of a bulge under my coat—of course it is possible that it has been flattened by the pressure of clothing all these years.
Having no head, naturally I have no neck. (An unoccupied stump sticking above my shoulders would be silly, after all. I suppose it was thalidomide or something.) I’m sure you’re wondering how my internal, organs are distributed and all that, but the truth is that I have no idea. I mean, would you, if you couldn’t assume you’re just like everyone else? My mouth I suppose opens directly into my stomach; and my brain must be situated somewhere close to my heart, which no doubt assures it of a good supply of well-oxygenated blood—but this is just guesswork.
As I said, I was born this way. It must have been a dreadful shock to my poor mother. At any rate she took (at least I suppose it was she, though she may have been carrying out instructions from my father) a head—I mean a dummy head, in this case a doll’s (some dolls’ heads resemble very closely the heads of human infants, and they are easily obtained), and attached it to my shoulders by straps. Fortunately the faces of babies are not very expressive, while the faces of dolls— I mean the better quality dolls—are surprisingly suggestive. With my nose, my mouth, and my eyes all covered by the gown she made me wear in public I dare say I cried almost continually, and the deception was completely successful.
My first memory is of that doll’s head. I was playing with blocks—colored wooden blocks painted not only with the letters of the alphabet and numbers but with pictures of various (mostly farmyard) animals. I picked up one of these and it occurred to me that it was extraordinarily like the object on my shoulders. (Don’t smile. The memory, even now, is tender to me.) It was a yellow block smelling of the new paint, and I believe I put it in my mouth afterward. It’s lucky I didn’t swallow it. (Why is it that a few moments of time are recalled so distinctly and the events to either side—often more striking—forgotten?)
I was a sickly boy, and this, as well as my peculiarity, prevented me from taking part in scouting, sports, and the other ordinary boyish activities. Save for a few weeks in late spring just before vacation, my mother drove me to school and picked me up afterward. A letter from our family physician delivered me from the embarrassments of the athletic program, although it occurred to me—I think at about the time I entered high school—that if I had been of more robust build, and been permitted to unstrap my head (by this time made by one of those craftsmen who
furnish ventriloquists with dummies—a long thread, cemented to the skin between my lower lip and my navel, sufficed to move the jaw when I spoke) I might have done well in football.
My classes presented problems. I had discovered—or rather, my parents at my insistence had discovered for me—a very cheap brand of boys’ shirts whose material was so flimsy as to constitute almost no impediment to vision at all; but it was necessary that I sit in the first row of every class—and that I slouch in my chair, with my hips forward and my weight resting on my spine, in order to see the blackboard. This, I think (since I am not going to reveal my name) is your best way of determining—assuming you wish to determine it—whether I was in one of your classes. If you remember a rather blank-faced boy who sat in the manner I have just described, in the front row, you may have been a classmate. To be certain you may wish to look for my picture in your yearbook, but the blankness will not be apparent here. My head at that time, as well as I can remember, possessed eyes of the kind called roguish, freckles, and an upturned nose.
Of course it was necessary to exchange the old heads for new every year or so as I grew older, and I do not retain them. My current one is quite handsome, and has a speaker in the mouth to reproduce the words I whisper into a microphone; but handsome though it is I cannot bear to wear it a moment more than necessary, and remove it immediately as soon as my apartment door shuts me off from the headstrong, pigheaded dummkopf (love that word) world outside.
Universe 2 - [Anthology] Page 19