Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  “So the most important part in the play is still open?”

  “It’s gaping.”

  “Good! That’s what my brother told me, and I just wanted to be sure. You can put your pants on now. That was thereal reason I had you brought in. I have a copy in the desk drawer, and I want to audition. Now.”

  “Would you have time, with your professional duties—”

  “I have time, in this Village, for anything, and to spare. If it came to that, I’d rather pretend to be an actress than to go on being a doctor in real life. I love theatricals, howeveramateur. When we were little, my brother and I did hundreds of plays together for our parents. Besides, if he’s to be Claudio, it’s only proper that his sister should play Isabella.”

  “Perhaps. But when he’s Angelo …”

  “That’s no problem. Even when we had other children in our productions, Poppa insisted that if there were any scenes that threatened propriety, my brother and I had to act them, since there could not be question, between us, of anything indiscreet. Isabella doesn’t end up marrying Angelo, does she? That wouldn’t be a happy ending.”

  “No, she marries the Duke.”

  “Then I must have the part. I’dlove to marry you.”

  “Doesn’t taste forbid that a doctor propose so shortly after a medical examination?”

  “What taste forbids, Number 6, appetite excuses. Seriously, although I’ll admit it’s hard to be serious about a thing like marriage, I like you. Even something a bit more than that. Didn’t my brothertell you? I told him to.”

  “No. He must have been too embarrassed.”

  “Is it so impossible to credit? That little waitress is still in love with you, as you must know, despite the way you abused her confidence when you escaped. You’ve givenher a part in the play, haven’t you? And Number 41 is Mariana, even though you’ll have to teach her how to pronounce the words. Make me Isabella, and you’ll have every female in the cast in love with you. Isn’t that the principle most directors go by?”

  “There’s still Mistress Overdone, and I don’t think our ex-Mayoress has any designs on me.”

  “The way she flirted with you at your open house? Her husband was giddy with jealousy. Every other time I’ve seen Number 34, the man’s been as taciturn as granite, andthough she can be talkative enough, it’s usually with other mathematicians about the problems of higher mathematics, trigonometry and such.”

  “She’sa mathematician?”

  “I’m told she’s brilliant. But with you she becomes a giggling schoolgirl. You have that effect on women. You can’t pretend you didn’t know that, not the way you exploit it.”

  “How have I exploited it in your case?”

  “By assuming that I’ll go on keeping your secret.”

  “Which is?”

  “That youwere the one who set fire to the films in the church crypt. Number 2 has been worried silly trying to establish that fact.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

  “You needn’t be disingenuous with me. You knew I was auditing your dreams that day, and you understood how we were directing them. Surely you must have figured out by nowwhere we were directing them.”

  “As a matter of fact I wasn’t able to. Whether or not I did in fact set a fire where you say, Number 2 never seemed to doubt that I did.”

  “Number 2 doesn’t doubt it, but Number 1 apparently is unconvinced. I gather that Number 2 thinks Number 1 thinks he did it.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  She smiled, pressing the ballpeen hammer to her lips. “I don’t have to think–Iknow . But, as I was beginning to fall in love with you even then, I didn’t tell. You still don’t believe me; why is that?”

  “Because if it were a ‘secret,’ you would want to keep it. You wouldn’t be speaking of it now, in front of the bugs.”

  “Oh, that! That’s one of the advantages of having a trustworthy staff. My Number 28 can perform wonders with electronics. When I need privacy, I can get it. You don’t think I’d declare my passion to you on television! It would destroy the reputation I’ve been so long building.”

  “You would if you were told to. In any case, as declarations of passion go, it’s a rather tepid thing.”

  “I got your clothes off, Number 6. To have gone any further without your cooperation would have exceeded a woman’s strength. Ifthis was tepid, your rencontre with Number 41 was quick-frozen. Yet you seemed willing enough to credit what she said, and most of what she only implied.”

  “I know Liora.”

  “Youthink you know her.”

  “All right then, as you claim to be speaking to me in confidence, tell me–doI know her? Ought I to believe, if not in her story, in her candour?”

  “On principle you should never believe in a woman’s candour. As to whether she’s who you think she is or who she says she is, anything I told you would only add to the confusion. Even assuming you would believe inmy candour (and remember, I’m a woman with a woman’s best motive for deceiving you), how can we be sure that I know the truth in this case? I’m told only as much asthey want me to know, and that often includes a great quantity of falsehood. I could read you the list ofnames in her dossier. Or I could—”

  “Just answer this one question–why did I call that bookshop? Why wasthat number in my head?”

  “Ididn’t put it there. I had nothing to do with your casetill you were brought back from London two weeks ago. Beyond that, it’s all speculation, fog, and upset stomach. You shouldn’t take these things so seriously, Number 6–what is true, what isn’t true. Doubt, as I’ve seen it noted in your dossier, is your Achilles’ heel. Choose a truth that suits you and stick with it.”

  “Truth, then, should be whatever is most agreeable?”

  “Has it ever been anything else? In this case, haven’t you given Number 41 the benefit of your doubt, and wasn’t it agreeable to do so? You love her, and you’re determined to believe she loves you. I love you, and I’ve managed to persuade myself, against every evidence, thatat root you must love me in return, or at least that the seeds are there. After all, look how long we’ve been talking together, and you haven’t even started putting your shoes on. That must mean something. I entertain you. God knows, Itry to entertain you.”

  “Since you’re part of the establishment, I can afford to let myself be entertained by you; I could never afford to trust you.”

  “Did I ask you to? Trust isn’t a precondition of love. In fact, in most cases, the opposite is true. I’m sure I wouldn’t have grown so fond ofyou , if I weren’t terribly jealous of Number 41. Do you trusther? You trust her even less than you do me for the sound reason that with me you know where you stand I’m one ofthem , and the fact that I’mnot one of them makes no difference, since you’ll never be convinced of it. But you needn’t let that stand in the way of affection. You’re putting your shoes on. You no longer are entertained. Is that because I’ve finally convinced you that I mean what I say?”

  “It means I’m hungry. Your guards didn’t give me time for lunch.”

  “But my audition! At least let me try out for Isabella.”

  “You won’t have to. I think you’re a great actress, and you have the part. Start learning your lines. We rehearse the first two acts tonight.”

  “I’ve already learned them, Number 6.” She kissed the tip of the hammer and waved it at him. “Bye-bye. I’ll see you at eight.”

  “Now, sister, what’s the comfort?”Number 7 asked, entering the examination room a moment later by a second door.

  “Why, as all comforts are: most good, most goodindeed.”Then, since Isabella’s next lines strayed from topicality: “The play goes on, and I’m to be the leading lady.”

  “Have you ever been anything else? Between the two of us, there’s scarcely a scene in the whole play that we can’t steal. And even behind the scenes …”

  “Will everything be ready when the curtain rises? There, I mean–on the set behind the scenes
?”

  “I’ve been busy with it all day. The hardest part is accomplished. I got the remains of the sphere (Thank God for Number 2’s niggardliness!) out of the storeroom and up to the roof of the theater. Your Number 28 has already knit up the major damage, but there are still fifty little rips to be mended where it was abraded by the cliff after it had burst. We won’t know for certain, of course, till everyone is in the theater and we can inflate it. You won’t be afraid?” he asked in a concerned and brotherly way, a Claudio to her Isabella.

  “My blood is saturated with adrenalin, but I don’t knowif it’s fear or the excitement. I’ll feel no more afraid, certainly, at the ascent than when I have to go on as Isabella:

  And have you nuns no farther privileges?”

  He replied, falsetto:

  “Are not these large enough?”

  And she, rolling up her blue eye and her brown, ethereally:

  “Yes, truly. I speak not as desiring more,

  But rather wishing a more strict restraint

  Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare.”

  He hopped gleefully atop the examining table.“Then, Isabel, live chaste —”

  And she tapped out the iambs on his kneecap:

  and, brother, die:

  More than our brother is our chastity.”

  Wresting the hammer from her, he adopted a graver tone, judicial, sober, sanctimonious, without dimples. He became Angelo. “Did the prisoner, when he was here, exhibit any signs ofsuspicion ?”

  “Indeed, milord. He suspects everything, except the truth.”

  “He suspectsme , in that case?”

  “Not of setting this up on your own behalf, but I think he’s worried that you’ll betray him to Number 2. After all, have you presented him with any better motive for your helping him than altruism?”

  “That’s the motive he expectsme to believe. He’s going to all this trouble, he explained, forher sake, for Mata Hari.”

  “But if he’s sayingthat , how can you be helping him forhis sake?”

  “I said right out that I didn’t believe him, that I wasn’t that naive. As soon as I explained myreal reason for wanting him out of the Village, he admitted that they wereboth escaping, but that he couldn’t tellher , because he’d promised her he wasn’t coming.”

  “Do you think he does intend to take her with him?”

  “We’ll never know, will we?”

  “And what was yourreal reason?” she asked.

  “I want him far away from you, jealous, possessive brother that I am.”

  “And so you are.”

  “And, when you’ve left him behind, I’ll have accomplished that purpose too: you will be far away from him.”

  “And from you. Aren’t you going to miss me?”

  “Terribly. You know that.”

  “Then whydon’t you come along?”

  “Me? Why, I get dizzy just climbing a ladder. I’d die of terror in that thing. It will be bad enough to think of you sailing off like another Phaeton, or Icarus, or Medea. In any case, once you’re gone they’ll probably have no more use for me. I’ll promise never to tattle on them, and they’ll send me back to London, and we’ll live happily ever after. Yes?”

  She gave him a sisterly kiss. “I hope so.”

  He patted her hand. “You can stake your blue eyes on it. Within two weeks we’ll be back together. I don’t suppose you’ll be returning to your old flat, not right away. Shall we set a time and place?”

  “For our rendezvous? Yes–somewhere sentimental.”

  “The Tower of London?” he suggested.

  “Another prison? That’s not the sort of sentiment I had in mind. Besides, it’s so big, and if the weather is nice I’drather wait outdoors. Let’s make it Westminster Bridge, on the side by Big Ben. If this were a movie, we’dhave to meet there. So that even Americans could tell it was London.”

  “Once a week?”

  “On Saturdays.”

  “At one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “It’s a date.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Measure for Measure

  “My beard! Is it on straight?” Number 7 asked earnestly.

  “Yes, but you’ve forgotten this.” He reached forward and removed from the young man’s hand the signet that he had, as the Duke, just entrusted to Angelo. “You’re Claudio now. Remember to whine.”

  “The theater’s full? I’ve been up on the roof, with 28.”

  “All the seats are filled, except the two we had predicted: Number 1 and 2 declined their invitations. What of the balloon?”

  Number 7 edged toward the wings. The brothel scene had opened, and Mistress Overdone (Number 33) was entering, swathed in an entire rummage sale of tattered indelicacies. “It’s inflating,” he said absently.

  “The wind?”

  “Is seaward.” As his tongue licked nervously at the horsehair fringe pasted beneath his nose, he reviewed withabbreviated gestures the blocking of his next scene. In proportion as he neared the stage, the play’s success concerned him more than the progress of the escape.

  In the brothel the First Gentleman asked Mistress Overdone:“How now! Which of your hips has the most pro-found sciatica?”

  And Number 33:“Well, well; there’s one yonder arrested and carried to prison was worth five thousand ofyou all.”

  “Who’s that, I pray thee?”

  “Marry, sir, that’s Claudio, Signior Claudio.”

  “Claudio to prison? Tis not so.”

  “Nay,”she replied, fluttering scraps of lingerie at the spotlight,“but I know tis so. I saw him arrested, saw him carried away, and, which is more, within these three dayshis head to be chopped off.”

  Number 7, having added the whiskers and stripped to the tights that made him Claudio, smiled just such a smile as the condemned dandy, overhearing this, might have smiled, an expression at once bright and miserable, compounded of insatiable vanity and a dying, desperate faith in the power of his own boyish charm still to prevent the worst. In the first scene, as Angelo, Number 7 had had to act; to portray Claudio nothing more seemed to be needed than that he remember to be himself.

  The red beacon winked its patient message of on and off, on and off, from the spire of the church, a spike of blackness thrust against the lesser blackness of the hazed night sky. Farther away, squatting on its artificial hill, the unfenestrated mass of the administration building glowed in aperpetual twilight of mercury vapor lamps. The Village streets wove serpentine patterns of light across the nether blackness of the earth, but the cottages along these streets were uniformly dark. Even in the neutralizing darkness and from this altitude, he could not regard the place as the picture postcard it tried so hard to be: it remained the same inimical caricature he’d seen on that first taxi ride through its streets.

  Behind him on the gravelled roof, the blue plastic, filling with helium, bulged and popped and lurched toward its one-time sphericity under the attentive supervision of Number 28.

  On the ledge a makeshift speaker crackled the pentameters of Act III, Scene 1, a prison in Vienna.

  A figure emerged from behind the swelling balloon and approached him. Shimmers of dark rayon in the darkness, slither of rayon on gravel.

  “I came up to see how the work was progressing,” he said. “It occurred to me that you might be here too.”

  “It’s progressing,” she said, “and I am here.”

  “All this time? People were beginning to worry.”

  “Since the start of Act II. I told Isabella–the doctor–that I was feeling queasy. She said I needed air. Once I was here I couldn’t tear myself away. It’s a kind of torture to watch it. Growing so slowly. I can’t believe it will be all round and floating in the air in time.”

  “If I’d paced the first two acts any slower, the audience would never have stayed in their seats. There’s not one archaic pun or proofreader’s error cut from the script.”

  “Yes, you’ve done wonders drawing it o
ut. It just goes on and on and on.”

  Her voice trailed off into a vacancy, which was filled by Number 14’s–Isabella now–thin, wavering declamation:

  “There spake my brother: there my father’s grave

  Did utter forth a voice. Yes, thou must die:

  Thou art too noble to …”

  “And on,” he said. “At least no one can accuse me of having done this for art’s sake.”

  “For mine then? I’m grateful. Did I say before that I was grateful?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Because I didn’t believe, till now, that it wasn’t all an elaborate trap. I’ve been waiting each day for the bite of its teeth. I shouldn’t let myself believe itnow . I look at this absurd plastic beast, and try to imagine myself lifted up by it, and carried off, and it’s like …”

  The speaker:“… a pond as deep as hell …”

  “It’s like the first time my mother explained to me where babies come from. I couldn’t believe that such elaborate machinery was needed to produce such a simple-seeming result. Being brought here between sleeping and waking, then leaving likethis –I shall never believe, if I do get away, that I was here at all. And you …” She took one of his hands between hers, lifted it, like a housewife trying to estimate whether the weight stamped on a package was to be credited: was thisreally a full pound and a half of hamburger?

  “You findme no more probable than the rest of this?”

  “If anything, Number 6, somewhat less. I’ve always suspected that there were dragons in the world, but todiscover, after I’ve been chained to the dragon’s rock, that there is a Perseus as well–it’s too providential. I owe you—” She paused, still weighing his hands in hers, doing calculations, reluctant to name the exact sum of her debt.

  Fifty feet below, Isabella, in the chaste passion of her indignation, shook the bars of her brother’s cell, a sound reduced by the speaker to the merest rattling of a die.