Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  The ovation went on for fifteen minutes before the curtain was allowed to come down.

  Number 14 regarded the bouquet in her arms with a look of aversion. She seemed about to fling it to the floor. Then, with a more considered contempt, she let it drop.

  They had been left alone on the stage. The cast andstage hands had gone downstairs to their party, while on the other side of the curtains the audience squeezed itself out in a thick human paste through the exits into the lobby and the night streets.

  “There’s no point, is there, going up there?”

  He shook his head. “They’ve gone.”

  “And I’m here, and you’re here, like two punchlines without their jokes.”

  “Am I to believe, now, that you—”

  “Believe whatever you care to, Number 6.” She laughed, almost lightheartedly. “You know, he must regret that he’s missingthis . It’s the sort of thing that would tickle him.” Wearily she zipped open her costume, pulled it over her head. She was wearing, beneath the novitiate’s habit, slacks and a heavy wool shirt.

  “This?”

  “Us, now, here. Oh, for pity’s sake, can’t you see-they foxed metoo . He’d made me think it would bemy escape, just the way he led you along the whole long way he wanted you to go. You haven’t really been doing all this onher account, have you? You wouldn’t look so chagrined, if that were so. The balloon was supposed to be foryou , wasn’t it?”

  “I—” He could see the explanation stretching on to the horizon and decided that an answer would be simpler. “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  “I don’t know. Up to the last minute I couldn’t decide. Earlier tonight when I saw her on the roof, I almost let myself believe—”

  “No doubt she felt sorry for you then.”

  “I wonder,” he began (an entire chorus of alluring Possibilities waved scarves at him from that horizon). But a glance at the doctor’s eyes fixed on him, measuring him like calipers, made him break off.

  “You wonder,” she continued for him, “whetherthey were escaping. Or if this was just another play-within-a-play. I don’t think we can ever be sure. If a play, I fail to get the point, but that happens to me at most plays.”

  “But if it were genuine, areal escape, how did he arrange allthis on his own?” His gesture indicated only the painted prison walls, but she understood what else his words encompassed: the collusion of Number 28, of the waitress, of the cast, the stage hands, even the audience, whose enthusiasm had far exceeded anything the play might have merited on its own.

  “That’s so,” she said. “He couldn’t have done all that.”

  From the wings Number 98, the Stationer’s clerk, approached them, still in the costume of Elbow, the foolish constable. “Number 6?” he called out hesitantly. “There wasa …” He held it out at arm’s length to show that there actuallywas . “One of the guards brought this … this, uh … I told him you were probably still … And I was right!”

  “It will be fromhim , I expect,” the doctor said. “A Parthian shot.”

  Number 98 handed him the sealed envelope, then turned to the doctor. “And there’s this for you, Number 14.” A second envelope.”

  Elbow waited between them, meekly curious. “A note of congratulations? I think everyone thinks that we’ve had a … tremendous … Although the ending … I can’t imagine how the man at the light box could have … But even so, it was … I mean, theaudience … Don’t you think so?”His eyes darted back and forth between Number 6 and Number 14, Number 14 and Number 6. His smile withered.

  “I suppose,” he said, repeating the lesson life had taught him in so many forms, “that you’d like to be alone now.” Neither would contradict this, and he returned to the party below, shaking his head and marveling once again at the coolness of the truly great even in the very furnace of success.

  She finished reading her letter first.

  “It’s what I expected. He jeers sincere apologies. Passion, he must confess, overwhelmed him. Is yours the same? Or didshe write to you?”

  “I don’t know. Here, read it.” He handed her the first page, while he continued with the second. The letter read:

  My dear Number 6,

  There is very little I can offer in extenuation of my conduct. That I have systematically deceived you, all the while protesting my friendship and good intentions, I cannot deny. Yet I would still protest that that friendship is real, that my intentions remain good, and that my actions were dictated by an impersonal Necessity. Isn’t it true that I’ve taken from you no more than you would have taken from me? That is to say, the means of escape.

  In my position, under a surveillance stricter than any you have known, there was no wayI could escape unless I seemed to be playing one of the standard variations on our theme of cat-and-mouse. Do you know de L’Isle-Adam’sThe Torture of Hope? Its premise is that nothing is so conducive to despairas to allow an escape to succeed up to the very moment the prisoner breathes his first mouthful of freedom-then to spring the trap-door under his feet. That was the principle behind your “escape” to London, and it was thestated principle, in my official reports, behind tonight’s affair, though of course inthis case I would hesitate to trace each sub-plot to its ultimate literary source. In any case, while it must be admitted that our lives imitate art, I like to think that sometimes we may invent some little twist all our own before the novelists think of it. If not this time, perhaps the next. (Mycredo .)

  You may recall having debated with me, some time ago, concerning the relative advantages enjoyed by the prisoner and his jailer. I was obliged then to present the case for the prosecution. Now, though my opinions haven’t changed, myposition has, and I am forced to concede (in my own defense) that, yes indeed, the jaileris less free than the prisoner, that the warden’s office is also a cell of maximum security. The very fact that I mustescape proves that I have been, like you, a prisoner-without even your solace of being able to blame someone else. (Though I have always been able to findexcuses .) Ah, this is all philosophy, and I know how we both recoil fromthat!

  Some facts, then, and a bit of explanation:

  All that stuff above (the philosophy) would never have occurred to me–would never, at least, haveaffected me–without your adventure in the archives.I know you set that fire,you know you set that fire, but Number 1, whose imagination at rare moments canequal yours or mine, was not to be persuaded it was as simple as all that. There were films concerning myself destroyed then that had been used to secure my … (Would “allegiance” be the right word?) … to this Village (andthat is not the right word either). Though I pointed out to Number 1 that my “allegiance” had since been secured with links of guilt (which is, I’m afraid, exactly the right word) far stronger than the trifling scandals documented in those films, Number 1 remained suspicious. After all, when the mood hits him, whom does he have to be suspicious of, except for me? Lesser suspicious can be delegated.

  I could measure day by day the growing pressure, the spread of insubordination, and the steady fraying of the cord that held the sword above my head. Had I not succeeded atthis escape, I would have had to take the advice you offered, as the Duke, and “be absolute for death.” That much of an absolutist I am not.

  Goodbye then. Let me express the sincere hope that we may meet again. Perhaps by then the wheel of Fortune will have turned 180 degrees, and you may enjoy (would you?) the sensation of playing Warden to my Prisoner.

  Best regards,

  Number 2

  P.S. Concerning the technology of deception (I hope you take an interest in these details, retrospectively): My persona as a cracker-barrel philosopher was all done with electrons and a 1901 anthology calledHeart Throbs .A character actor was hired and photographed through the entire gamut of what his face could do. This repertoire was coded into a computer. Whenever “Number 2” appeared on television, there was always a live camera on me. My expressions were translated, by the computer, into his, just as my voice was chang
ed to his by the same method. One of my few regrets in leaving the Village is that I can’t take the old duffer along. I’d become quite fond of him. Hadn’t you?

  P.P.S. A last word of good counsel fromHeart Throbs’ endless store:

  Should you feel inclined to censure

  Faults you may in others view,

  Ask your own heart ere you venture,

  If that has not failings, too.

  Do not form opinions blindly;

  Hastiness to trouble tends;

  Those of whom we thought unkindly

  Oft become our warmest friends.

  “Then it was an escape, after all,” she said, handing the letter back to him. “My brother couldn’t have arranged a conspiracy on as large a scale as this evening’s, but Number 2 could have accomplished it with three or four memoes. If irony is any comfort to you, there’s this: it was the two of us, together, who put him on the skids. The fireyou set; the betraying detail in your dream, whichI kept back.”

  “You’re certain it was your brother who wrote thisletter?”

  “Of course. You don’t think …”

  “That it was from her? Is there any evidence, in the letter, to prove it couldn’t be? There isn’t.”

  “Look more closely. There must a lapse, somewhere– some way of standing a sentence on its head, a pet word, something that’s characteristic of only one of them.”

  “Give Number 2, whoever he is, credit for subtlety. Anything we might point to as ‘characteristic’ could have been planted in the letter just for us to point to. The only certain proof would be if one of us had carried on a dialogue with Number 2 while either your brother or Liora was present in the same room. I haven’t. Have you?”

  “No. But doesn’t that make my brother the likelier suspect, in view of all the times I’ve been with him and all the times that Number 2 has intruded on me, at my cottage, in the lab, on the street? The coincidence seems mountainous.

  “On the other hand, isn’t this the best explanation of the paradoxes and impossibilities inher story?”

  “Perhaps–but say what you will, until it’sproven one way or the other, I’ll be convinced it was him. It all seems, in hindsight, so in keeping with hischaracter .”

  “And I’ll remain convinced it was her. I imagine all of this has been devised with some care just so each of us would reach the conclusions we have.”

  She smiled wistfully, as though remembering a pleasant weekend spent, some years before, on a country estate subsequently destroyed in the blitz. “Hewould have enjoyed this so much.

  “Or,” she added politely, “shewould have.”

  The last performers entered on to the stage, a six-man squad of night patrolmen. After a flourish of jackboots, the leader of the chorus (or squad) stepped forward and saluted the couple at center stage. He seemed to be waiting fororders to carry off the dead bodies. Would he believe that this had only been a comedy?

  “Yes?” the doctor said.

  “You are Number 14?” the squad leader asked.

  “Apparently. As of this moment.”

  “We have orders to arrest Number 2.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve arrived well past the nick of time. Number 2 escaped, with a friend, in a helium balloon, some minutes ago.”

  The squad leader consulted with the members of his squad. After stomping them back to attention, he again addressed the doctor: “There appears to be a misunderstanding here, Number 14. We have orders to arrest the man standing beside you.” He pointed to Number 6, standing beside her.

  “You very well may have orders to arrest him, butthis man is Number 6.”

  The squad leader smiled with tolerant amusement at Woman’s ability to misunderstand whatever she needs to. “As ofthis moment, ma’am, that man is Number 2.”

  She turned to him, wavering between hilarity and bewilderment. “Haveyou been … All this time? No. No, not you.”

  She turned back to the squad leader. “May I ask what your orders are, once Number … 2 has beenarrested? ”

  “He’s to be locked up, pending further orders.”

  “From Number 1?”

  “Our instructions, Number 14, are that we’ll receive orders from you.”

  They looked at each other and, with better timing than in any earlier scene in the play, began to laugh. They grewhelpless with laughter. Each time either of them tried to talk, nothing came out but a few sputtered syllables and then more, and more helpless, laughter.

  “Pardon me, Number 14,” the squad leader interposed. “Pardon me! Please, if you will, ma’am,pardon me!”

  “Yes?” Still stifling giggles.

  “We’d like to be told what we’re to do with the prisoner. Where shall we take him?”

  “Why–to prison, of course.”

  “Yes, Number 14. But—” He hunched his shoulders, as though to say: But there are somany prisons.

  “Is there any particular prison you’d prefer, Number 6? Number 2, rather.”

  “One’s as bad as another, it seems to me.”

  “Very well then—you will keep the prisoner confined to this prison until I’ve issued further orders.”

  The guard looked about suspiciously. At last, despite the pain of having to show his naïveté before a superior, he had to ask outright: “Which prison is … this?”

  She pointed to the painted canvas. “A prison in Vienna,” she explained. “See that he doesn’t escape.”

  PART IV

  COUNTDOWN

  “In the dream of the man who was dreaming, thedreamed man awoke.”

  Jorge Luis Borges,The Circular Ruins

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Conversion

  “I trust,” Number 14 said, “that you can hear me, though if you can’t, it’s of no importance. What I say is addressed to Number 6, a person who will soon no longer exist, and who, if he can hear me, probably wishes that he could not. So I don’t know why I bother saying this. Another apology? You’ve heard too many already, from all of us. ‘I am doing,’ we each say, ‘what Necessity requires.’ It has always seemed to me that that is rather worse than crimes committed out of a pure zest for evil. No, I’ll offer no excuses.

  “An explanation, that’s all it is. When the worst happens, I’ve always thought it would be a small comfort to be informed of its exact dimensions. It’s that, my faith in meremeasurements , more than any special competence or knowledge, that makes me a scientist. Perhaps it’s a faith you wouldn’t share, and if this weremy earthquake, I don’t know whether I would be that interested in the seismograph readings. Perhaps in the labyrinth of my motiveswhat I am offering in the name of charity–this explanation–is only a new twist of the old thumbscrew. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps–the word multiplies itself as wantonly as an amoeba. I won’t say it again.

  “When I outlined this project, it was then an abstracter kind of crime. The prospectus was completed before I knew thatyou existed, months before you were brought back to the Village. I did wonder, later on, whether their decision to retrieve you had been determined by the parameters I’d drawn up for selecting an optimum subject. (Subject! there’s a lovely euphemism. We psychologists have invented a richer treasure of cant than all the gentlewomen of the 19th Century together.) If thatwas their purpose, then they took long enough getting around to it. Perhaps–oh, I’ve said it!–perhaps Number 2was your friend, insofar as it must have been he (or she) who kept you from this day for … how long? Over two months. Surely it’s significant that the order to set to work should be issued immediately Number 2 had escaped, departed, whatever.

  “I keep saying ‘they.’ What I mean, of course, is Number1. Number 1 has never been able to find a lieutenant exactly to his taste. Either they have been enterprising and imaginative in performing their duties, in which case they have invariably shown an imperfect loyalty, a tendency to place their individual interests above the interests of the Village and of Number 1. (An orthodox faith would not distinguish between the two.)Or he would be
a man of unquestionable loyalty who proved, at a moment of crisis, to be a nincompoop. Once, Number 1 discovered a subordinate who combined both failings–he was a disloyal nincompoop–but he’s never found someone who was at once fanatically loyal and a brilliant administrator. Few dictatorsever have had that good luck, with the possible exception of those four paragons of the Golden Age of Authority, the ’30’s and ’40’s.

  “For a dictator nothing is impossible: that is the first tenet of orthodoxy. Number 1 decided that since he could not find an ideal 2, he would have one made to order. I was brought here expressly to design a model of this superveep and to work out a method by which that model could be converted from graphs and equations into flesh and blood. Since science hasn’t yet advanced to the stage where it can create a true homunculus from raw scraps of DNA, it was clear that something like a metamorphosis was called for. It was also clear that it would be more feasible to graft loyalty to an already existing imagination than the other way round.

  “Which is not all as easy as you may think. Though it would take at most 48 hours to transform you, or someone of your sort, into a perfectly loyal minion, such a transformation would virtually destroy those qualities that would make your loyalty worth having: initiative, creativity, and all those other vague words that are lumped under the heading of (that vaguest word of all) Spirit. The usual techniques of brainwashing affect these virtues the way ordinary laundering affects the more perishable kinds of clothing: at worst they are demolished, like laces, and at best they shrink, like argyle socks. The merit ofmy program is that those useful qualities will be preserved, while your loyalty is shifted, ever so gradually, from its present locus to where Number 1 would like to see it, revolving in a worshipful orbit about the sun of that exalted idea: One, Oneness, Number 1. Since your present loyalty is centered not on any particular nation, institution, or surrogatefather, but about a pantheon ofideas –Truth, Justice, Freedom, and the rest of the Platonic tribe–its transfer to this new orbit will be relatively easy, for the idea of One is no less abstract, vague and exalted than, for instance, the idea of Freedom.