Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  He swore. No other switch in view. He should have thought of this before.

  “—we look to a Higher Power for assistance, as children will turn trustingly toward their loving Father. We raise our eyes—”

  To the front of the church, at a half-run. Lifted the altar cloth, rapped the marble facing of the altar: itsounded solid enough. So, the entrance to the crypt must be concealed elsewhere; they were subtler than he would have supposed.

  Then, to the side-chapels, each resplendent with its own Old Master, so that the church was a kind of digest of the major art thefts of the last quarter-century: Bellini’sMassacre of the Innocents from the Hermitage; one of Ribera’s more graphic martyrdoms (a flaying); the missing panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece, representing the temptations of St Anthony; the Rouault “Judge” from New York, and …

  By a trick of light the fifth side-chapel was as dark as the entrance to a cavern, and by a trick of acoustics the recorded sermon here reverbed with such force that its meaning became lost in its own resonances, like the jabberwocky of a great railway terminal.

  “—the perfect joy of this surrender (OR RENDER) for only by (or render) giving (FORLORNLY) up the illusion of a (UP THE HILL, forlornly) personal identity can we hope (ENTITY) to achieve real (WEEP, entity)freedom (EDAM! EDAM!)—”

  There was something disturbing, something out of plumb about the interior of this chapel. The enfouldered darkness gave it the illusion of being much deeper than the other chapels, while in fact (yes, a glance into the Rouault chapel confirmed his suspicion) it was two to three feet shallower. The placement of the huge, time-blackened canvas on the back wall reinforced this impression (in the other chapels the paintings hung, in the usual manner, on the side walls where the light was stronger), so that the murky recessions of the painting contributed a second false depth to the chapel.

  He took out his pocket torch and played its faint light across the painting. In the upper left corner, the least darkened, an oblate circle was sliced into ochrous stripes by the bars of a tall, ornamented gate, which enclosed nothing more, apparently, than this sunset. The heavy gilt lock of the gate was placed so as to provide the chief focus of interest, while off in the lower right corner, dwarfed by the rocky landscape, two figures stood, two dark silhouettes. The first, with his foot planted awkwardly upon a sharp outcropping, seemed to be trying to push away the second, who stood facing away from the viewer, a hand lifted, admonishing. In the other hand he held a small golden object.

  He stepped closer to the painting; the ellipse of light tightened to a circle and intensified. Now he could recognize the painter–it was a Rubens–if not the subject. The white-bearded man seemed to be Peter. And the other figure: Christ?

  Yes, for there, resting in the palm of his hand, were the two keys that he was offering to the reluctant apostle.

  The painting began to move to the side with a slight squeaking sound. The light of the torch had been intense enough to have registered on the photoelectric cell behind the keys (heavily retouched by another hand) and to trigger the release mechanism.

  He jumped on to the altar and stepped across the ormolu frame (copied from Boulle) on to the first iron tread of the narrow spiral staircase.

  Here the light was bright as in an interrogation chamber. He poked his torch through the thick wire lattice, shattering the light bulb it guarded.

  Five steps farther down, a second bulb, and twelve steps on, the third. Pitch-darkness, and he heard above him the whirr and squeak of the painting moving back into its frame, the last muffled words of the sermon:

  “—within this new hierarchy (IRE) of values (key of) lies the key to (LIES) the sturdy edifice (lies, dead) of our moralit—”

  Silence, and the darkness. He continued the descent.

  Chapter Eight

  Twice Six

  Into:

  A corridor:

  A sequence of doors. Above, just out of reach, parallel tracks of neon insisted on the raw whiteness of the walls. Far off, where the corridors bent, a single element, six feet of glass-tubed gas, flickered mortally.

  Locked. And locked. And locked. And locked. And locked.

  The sixth door opened.

  A room: metal files. An iron garden-table and three iron chairs flaked white paint on to the concrete floor. On the table: a mug of coffee, still lukewarm; a Martina ashtray brimming butts; a crumpled Senior Service package; a box of safety matches; a Japanese paperback (he could not read the characters); three Danish girlie magazines; a plastic box of transistor elements; a ring of keys numbered from 2 to 15.

  They keys unlocked the files; the files contained canisters of film. Each canister was stenciled with a red numeral (from 2 to 15), followed by smaller black code-letters. There were seventeen canisters marked with a red 6. He opened, at random, 6-SCHIZSquinting, he studied frames of the film against the light.

  Hisface? And from this angle, the same or another?

  Then: mustached, hair darkened–him? Or only a good facsimile? His judgment oscillated between credence and doubt. Yes it was he/No it was not.

  Without a projector it would take days to examine all the footage contained in these seventeen canisters. And he had … minutes?

  There was a second door. Which opened to darkness and a voice said:

  “Negative.”

  There was a scream, piercing, a woman’s. He eased the door back but did not, quite, close it; he listened at the crack:

  The voice, a man’s: “Shall we try that again? Necessity.”

  And hers, unsteady: “Inter—” A choking sound. “No, inven—”

  “Please, Number 48. Just give the very first word that comes to you.

  “Intervention?”

  “That’s better, much better. Now: pluck.”

  “Courage.”

  “Negative.”

  And her scream.

  His voice: “Again, Number 48: pluck.”

  “Cour—”

  “Negative.”

  The scream.

  “Again? Pluck.”

  “I … eye … eyebrow.”

  “Very good! We’re making progress today, Number 48.”

  Inchmeal, as this dialogue continued, he widened the crack: darkness, and still darkness, though with a faint flicker of bluish light, like the death-throes of neon. Neither speaker in the darkened room seemed to notice the intrusion.

  “Now, Number 48: courage.”

  “I … no, I can’t!”

  “Courage.”

  “C—Ca—Collage.”

  “Continue with the sequence, Number 48.”

  He recognized the woman (wires twined into the shingled red-dyed hair, thick body strapped to the chair) shown on the screen as his confidante of a week earlier, the tweedy companion (the wife?) of the goitred man. Had it been the goitres who had left the film to play on unwitnessed in this room? And for what purpose, other than his idle amusement, had he been watching the documentation of this woman’s torture?

  “Collage,” she said. “Cabbage … Kale …” The camera moved in to a close close-up, then tightened to a shot of her wounded eyes, eyes that stared, dilated, into a flickering light.

  “Curtain … Cur–cour–age … Cottage … Cottage.” The words she spoke seemed to crumble into their component syllables as they left her lips.

  The man’s voice: “Courage? Please respond, Number 48! Courage.”

  “Curdle! Curdle … curd … el …”

  “Go on: curd.”

  “Cord … Core … Ca—Ck-ck-ck—”

  “Core?”

  The camera backed away to show the flaccid red lips, the powdered flesh eroded by sweat and tears, the jaw chewing slowly on unspoken words, and in her staring eyes a vague lust for the end of this pain, for nonexistence.

  Then, abruptly, a blackness across which a dotted yellow line graphed an optimistic ascent toward the upper right corner: beneath, in bold letters:

  NUMBER48

  Day 4

  Pr
e-Terminal Aphasic Therapy.

  The film ended. The tag-end of the reel flapped in the projector’s beam, and the screen blinked a semaphore of black/white/black until he found the switch, flicked it OFF.

  AndON , the overhead light.

  Beneath the empty canister forDay 4 were six others; the last day–7–was labeledTermination and Review . He replaced the film in its container in the same manner he had once, years ago (he remembered this entire era of his life intact), prepared a package of the personal effects of a friend (gored by shrapnel) to send back to his widow in Châlons-sur-Marne.

  Threading the film of 6-SCHIZinto the projector, he wondered if it had been only that brief exchange on the terrace, the message scribbled on a napkin, those few guarded words, that had convinced the jailers of this place to perform their macabre “therapy.” Would other Villagers be asked to pay as high a price for his friendship–for even such a small gesture in that direction?

  And, if they were, couldhe , in justice—

  A point of ethics he would have to consider at some later time, for now the numbers flashed backward to zero on the screen, and he saw himself waking, walking to a mirror, and staring at the image it recorded with an expression of disbelief and, to a surprising degree, terror.

  A wide face that could have been called (and often had been) Slavic, though anyone who has known the Midlands would recognize the type: the fine brown hair that a single day of sunlight could dull to ash-blond; the rough modeling of brow, cheeks and nose, sturdy Saxon craftsmanship but scarcely a work of art; the thinness of the upper lip that opposed the fullness and slight thrust of the lower; the swag of flesh at the back of his jaw, a detail that had been coded into his family’s genes for generations. It was a serviceable face–not especially noticeable until you noticed it, but (in his line of work) all the more serviceable for that reason. It could express, most easily, stubbornness (indeed, whatever else it might express, that stubbornness would remain, a permanent qualification), but never anything that could be called elegance. Fortunately he had never wanted to be called elegant.

  Such was the face that, without paying particular attention to the matter, he was accustomed to. Butthis face, the face on the screen, was this his, too? And (cutting to another shot, in another room)this one?

  In the first sequence all the details seemed correct. His hair was the right color; he wore it so. The clothes fit his body, the smile fit his face. But the eyes …? The eyes seemed, somehow, amiss. But of course we only know our image from a mirror, unspontaneously; perhaps our unrehearsed expressions are quite different.

  The second face was less obviously his own. The hair was darker, parted on the left. This face wore a mustache, though with apparent discomfort, for his hand (his left hand) kept reaching up to touch it, to tug at it, to test its reality. Yet apart from these merely cosmetic differences it was (it seemed to be) his face, his own.

  Then: a shot of himself (mustached) walking down a street of the Village–or was it merelya village? Though the candy cottages on each side of the street resembled those he knew here, there were subtle differences in the warp of the land, the silhouettes of trees, the angle of the light. A seasonal difference? Or could there be, for villages as for people, such elaborate facsimiles that only by these slight tokens could the original be distinguished from its reproduction?

  The man walking down the street wore a badge on his lapel that identified him as Number 12. Well, if they had to choose a number for his double, it could only be that.

  Two stills, side by side: this same “Number 12” in a barber’s chair. First, mustached, his darker hair parted on the left; then, shaven, the hair lightened to its natural (or was it, in this case, natural?) color, parted on the right.

  Then: himself–one of these two selves–in a room of bland modernity, sprawled on a modular sofa, looking very much at home, or doing a fair job seeming so. His other self entered at the door.

  “What the devil …” his other self said. Surely forone of them the surprise must have been feigned. He wished that he were not such a good actor, though of course it would be the double who would be required to act, his own reaction the “genuine” one. No?

  They approached each other until the camera included both in a medium close-up. They wore on the lapels of their identical jacket badges with the numeral 6. He could not be certain, seeing them together, which of them had been shown as 12 in the earier footage. Had he seen an episode like this in anymore conventional theater, were he not already convinced thathe had been one of the principles, he would immediately have assumed that this was nothing but trick photography, an actor playing a double role.

  The self who had just entered nodded, smiling a thin smile (his). “Oh, very good. Very, very good. One of Number 2’s little ideas, I suppose. Where’d he get you–from Xerox? Or are you one of these double agents we hear so much about?”

  His smile, and the voice his too.

  The other replied (smiling the same smile, speaking in the same voice): “Since you’ve gone to so much trouble, the least I can do is offer you a drink.”

  “Scotch.”

  And (he thought) on the rocks, by preference.

  The one who’d made the offer went to the wrong cabinet; his doppelganger, almost apologetically, corrected the mistake.

  As they faced the bar, their faces turned from the camera, one of them said: “I take it I’m supposed to go all fuzzy around the edges and rush into the distance screaming ‘Who am I?’ ”

  Wasthat the way he talked? He hoped not but he wasn’t sure.

  “Ice?”

  “Please. Oh, careful! Not from the kitchen, you know. That’s an ice-bucket on the second shelf.”

  They toasted. Again their two opposing profiles filled the screen. Each man studied his mirror image.

  “Do you know–I never realized I had a freckle on the side of my nose. Tell you what, when they film my life story, you get the part.” He turned. The camera followed him. “Cigar? Ah-ah! With the right hand, yes? Yes. And that wasn’t whatI would have chosen for myself. Most people find my taste too individual, so I carry those as a courtesy. Also, they made a slight mistake with your hair–it’s a shade too light.”

  The other: “It’s not going to work, you know. I have a particularly strong sense of identity.”

  Yes, he thought, he did/I do. Provisionally he accorded this one (the sprawler on the couch, the fumbler at the liquor cabinet) the distinction of being his True Self; the other must be, then, the Double.

  The Double answered: “Youhave?” And laughed: in pitch, in timber, in rhythm it was his laugh. “Oh yes, I forgot for a moment–you’re supposed to be me. You’re Number 6, the goodie, and I’m the baddie who’s trying to break you down. Right?”

  It might also be maintained against this Double that his dialogue was bad, but then his own reply was not much better:

  “Right. Only there’s nosuppose about it.”

  “Another drink?”

  And so they continued, in close-up and medium close-up, their war of wit, until one of them (he’d lost track, by then, which was which) proposed a more effective test: they would duel.

  It developed into a minor pentathlon. In all the events the one he’d elected to be the True Self came in a poor second. His score on the electronic pistol range was six hits to the Double’s perfect ten. When they fenced (not without appropriate references toHamlet , Act 5, scene 2), the True Self’s movements were overwrought, rough, even desperate, while the Double executed each thrust and parry with consummate ease, as (he pointed this out himself) one would expect of a fencer on the Olympics team.

  “If ever I challenge you to a duel in earnest,” he said, the tip of his foil pressed against the other’s throat, “your best chance would be battle axes in a dark cellar.”

  They raced, but of this the cameras had recorded only the finish: the Double’s triumph, his own chagrin, the resulting fight—and his further chagrin. He was spared from a definitive defeat o
nly by the arrival of one of the Guardians, which shepherded them toward the Village’s administration center.

  Cut to:

  The office of Number 2. Here the modernity was anything but bland; it was the nightmarish progeny of the union of the Ziegfield Follies and IBM. It assaulted the senses, attacked taste, made pageants of plastic and Day-Glo paint. Was this the “warmth and simplicity” that Number 2 had boasted of?

  Was this, for that matter, Number 2? This stripling youth, in hornrim glasses, dithering on in that pure Oxonian accent that only a few Fulbright scholars ever master? So–since the events of this film there had been at least one shuffling of the staff. It was another evidence of their weakness, and he welcomed it.

  Cut to:

  Himself, or his double, strapped and wired into the chair (or its double) in which Number 48 had received her “aphasic therapy.” Dilated irises reflected the blinking light.

  The voice of (the anterior) Number 2: “Who are you?”

  And he: “Would you mind switching that idiot light out? I’m getting cramps.”

  “Who” (very owllike, his who) “are you?”

  “You know who I am. I’m Number 6.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “You know that too.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Ah! Now there’s something you’d know better than I. I was unconscious at the time, if you remember.”

  The irises flared with a brighter burst of light, and his lip curled back in pain.

  “What was your purpose in coming here?”

  More and more, he decided as he watchedthis Number 2 go on, he preferred his own. If nothing else, he was a better entertainer.

  “I had none. I’ll go away if you like.”

  This time, at the cue of light, he cried aloud.

  “How did your people know that Number 6 was here?”

  “What people?”

  “How did they know enough abouthim to produceyou ?”

  “I don’t understand.”