Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  He took a seat beside the Riesener secretaire and studied the faces of his two visitors as they chewed on this concept.

  “Number 2 is right,” the goitres announced, having swallowed the concept, digested it, and transported it by blood corpuscles to his brain, where it was shelved in the bulging files of Orthodox Views. In the next month he would often take the opportunity to retrieve it from the files and read it to his fellow numerals in the service of the Village–the very words addressed tohim by Number 2.

  “But how can suicide be prevented?” Number 83 asked. He did not seem to have the same digestive capacity as the goitres.

  “A good question, Number 83.”

  Number 29 began chewing on this good question. It was going to be a full morning.

  “The answer is to be found in almost every aspect of our lives here in the Village. Tell me, Number 83, areyou happy with your life here? Does it seembig enough? Is it active, exciting, stimulating? Is your work as agreeable as your leisure hours?”

  “Oh,yes sir! There’s nothing that—” He raised his empty hands as a sign of his plenteous fulfillment.

  “Nothing!” the goitres echoed emphatically.

  “Nothing that either of you could wish for in addition to what you already have been given,” he summed up for them. “In short, the Village is a kind of utopia for you, and most of us here would have to say the same thing. There iscomfort and affluence. Our work is scaled to our individual capacities, and our leisure is filled to bursting with meaningful and self-improving activities. But that represents only the material aspect of the Village. There is also a spiritual aspect, which can be summed up in a single word–Oneness. The idea of Oneness should inform our every action throughout the day. It should … But I’m getting carried away. I know that both of you, in your own ways, treasure that idea in your inmost hearts. It’s just this–the idea of Oneness–that makes our life so very much worth living that for people likeus the notion of escape, much less of suicide, is literally unthinkable.”

  After a reverent silence, the goitres asked, “But in that case, Number 2, I don’t understand! Why would anyone …?”

  “Unfortunately, Number 29, there are afew people in this Village–and I must confess, to my sorrow, that I used to be the worst of them–a few people who will not accept that idea, or rather–who haven’t been able tounderstand it. Often the more intelligent they are, the more difficult it seems to be for them to grasp the notion of Oneness. In that respect a man like Number 189, though he may be a little slower than we are, is one of the happiest, and mostloyal , citizens of our Village Faith is not a problem for Number 189. Of course, with the right education, faith would not be a problem for any of us. Disloyalty is only a form ofignorance . Always bear that in mind, gentlemen.”

  Loyally, the goitres filed this in the less crowded file reserved for the Eternal Truths, while Number 83 assumed his gravest expression, suitable for advertising the Great Books or an encyclopedia.

  Confident that they would be occupied by these loftythoughts for a few minutes, he turned his chair around to face the papers spread out on the secretaire.

  He froze, without knowing why, as though he’d glimpsed, with his peripheral vision, a glint of the blade above his head. His conscious mind sought for what his unconscious had already sensed.

  It stood in the far left-hand corner of his desk, behind the report from the Employment Advisory Board: a marble egg, rose-colored, in a white egg-cup. A film of dust obscured the mottled grain.

  My God!he thought.How long has it been there?

  Then he recalled that last night, when he’d been working on his security recommendations, he had placed a cup of tea on the same spot, that he had left the cup and saucer there when he had gone to bed.

  He spread open the folder of cost and maintenance figures of the Guardians. Reaching across the desk with apparent casualness, as an addicted smoker might reach for the cigarette he has left burning in an ashtray, he took the egg from the eggcup. He weighed it a moment in the palm of his hand, then, without seeming to notice what he did, he placed the dusty marble egg in his mouth.

  Number 83 rose to his feet. “Number 2!” he said.

  “Mmm?” Turning to confront him with a look of mild annoyance.

  The goitres also rose, realizing from Number 83’s meaningful glance toward the empty egg-cup, that the purpose of their visit had been accomplished while he’d been napping among the Eternal Truths.

  Apologetically he let the egg slide out into his cupped hand. “Yes, Number 83, what is it?”

  “We have instructions to accompany you to the administration building. Number 1 wishes to speak to you.”

  “Number 1!”he said, with an expression of transported delight that would have convinced the assembled saints in heaven that this was the real article, a bonafide Beatific Vision. “My God, why did you take all this time totell me?”

  “We were following our orders,” the goitres explained primly. Of all the Scriptures in all his files, he liked this one the very best.

  “Number 1,”he repeated reverently.

  And thought:It’s about time!

  Chapter Nineteen

  The White Room

  “Come in, Number 2,” another speaker said, as he waited before another door.

  The last door unlocked itself and purred upward in its steel frame, like the blade of a guillotine lifted for its next piece of work. He stepped into the white room.

  Into a dazzling void, as though the lips of Reality had parted to show one last tremendous grin.

  In a white alcove of this white room sat Number 1. She tilted her head sideways (a strand of white hair fell across white skin) and asked, with conscious coyness: “Are you surprised?”

  “You’re Number 1?You? ”

  She pursed her lips, nodded once. “You never guessed?”

  “Never once. Though I always had the feeling that there was something … a-bit-too-much about you. But I’ve felt that way about everyone here.”

  “Come,” she said. “Share this window-seat with me. We’ll be friends now, you and me. As we alwaysshould have been.”

  Slowly, across the white floor, darkened not even by his own shadows, he walked toward her. He no longer kept up a pretense of holy awe, but neither did he feel inclined to rush through these concluding lines as he had done when he’d played the Duke. He had expected to feel rage at this moment, for surely rage had been mounting in him these many weeks.

  Instead, he felt … what? Not curiosity: though he might still ask many questions, he knew better than to trust any answers, especially now that he’d made his way to the very source of all these lies. Not caution: caution had seen him as far as it could, and now, having forced the stakes to the limit, he was willing to risk everything on a single hand.

  Did he suspect that this was only the penultimate imposture, not the center of labyrinth but only its antechamber? The thought had passed his mind, but to have reached even so far as the antechamber was a good second-best when he had seen no more than an outer courtyard up to now.

  Was the explanation for his reticence as simple as this–that he’d been schooled, from his earliest years, to show Respect for the Aged, to whisper and to walk with a softer step in the presence of antique flesh?

  Possibly. These tokens that we pay to the very old are the same that we accord to the dying. Beyond a certain point, age and death are indistinguishable. And he did not want to cheat even Number 1 of the solemnity that should attend the moment of death.

  He sat apart from her on the moulded plastic bench of the alcove, trying not to stare at her. Seen against this whiteness, in this sourceless, glaring light, each component of her physical being presented itself to him with unnatural clarity: the series of tiny metal spheres buttoning up the cracked black leather of her high shoes; the folds of the crepe, the crisp little puckers where it was gathered at the neck and shoulders, the flounces drooping at the ends of the long sleeves; the thin strands of white h
air falling across her waxen forehead; the yellow tinct of her fingers, whitening where age had drawn the flesh taut across the bones; the wrinkled face.

  The wrinkles: these above all. Her face had become a pretext for these wrinkles. Unless he made a special effort, all the rest–eyes, mouth, nose, etc.–would blur and varnish into the generality, to become mere special instances of Wrinkliness.

  “You have been waiting for this moment a long time, Number 2.” Her manner toward him was at once warm and distant, as though beneath each simple cordial banality there lurked depths of significance which it were better most of the world should remain in ignorance of, but which she would reveal to him.

  “Yes, a long time,” he said, safely.

  “Perhaps you’d even given up hope.” A statement, not a question, but spoken in such an ineffable tone that it might have meant anything. He was to infer that she lived in those lofty regions where all opposites are resolved into Oneness.

  He refused to make the inference, and replied to her statement as though it had been a question. “No. In fact, itwas more than just a hope. I always knew this moment was inevitable for us.”

  “For us!” He seemed not to understand that this was to have been his moment, not theirs, the moment of his fulfillment, a gift from the infinite One to the finite Two.

  “Us, certainly. Here we are, after all this time, actually confronting each other, face to face.” He stared directly into the wrinkles, where one thin line amid the calligraphic maze formed what on another face would have been a smile.

  “Such a strange way you have, Number 2, of putting it–a confrontation!”

  “Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’d have said before my conversion.”

  “Exactly what I had thought.”

  “Whyam I here?”

  “Should you have toask , Number 2? Isn’t it enough tobe here?”

  “Here–in this room?”

  “Here, with me. Why all these questions? Can it be so hard to look at old Granny in this new light?”

  He ignored her question to ask his own: “Do youlive here, in this room?”

  She ignored his to askher own: “Do you like it?” She waved a regal hand at the bright void before them, quite as though it contained a boutique’s worth of particulars for his admiration and applause: bouquets of hair-flowers under glass bells, a collection of her finest red and white embroidered roses, albums of photographs, a cast-iron chandelier.

  “It’s very plain,” he said noncommitally.

  “But it’s a plainness thatsuits me.”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed, “it does that.”

  “One grows tired of ostentation more quickly than of plainness.” She employed “One” not as an impersonal pronoun but as a monarch would refer to himself as “We.”

  “In principle I agree, though in practice I think that plainness can be carried too far.”

  The old woman rose from the “window-seat,” wringing her hands in agitation. She followed a zigzagging path across the room, as though for her there were obstacles everywhere. She looked all about, focusing on one particular point in this void after another. “I wish,” she said (becoming, for the nonce, helpless, vague old Grandmother Bug), “you’dtell me what it is! Thesehints will drive me out of my mind. If there’s something you don’t like, then for pity’s sake, say what it is, and I’ll have them take itaway !” She removed from one ruffled sleeve a lace handkerchief, in case she found herself obliged to cry.

  He could not decide if the Empress really believed herself to be clothed. “There’s no one thing I could point to,” he said carefully. “It’s a more general impression. Perhaps it’s only that I’m notused to it.”

  This seemed to satisfy her, for she tucked the handkerchief back up her sleeve.

  “Oh, but you willgrow used to it,” she assured him sweetly, and it was then, for the first time, for the only time, that he experienced true terror, the terror he had glimpsed in other Villagers, that had been occasioned, for them too, by something as disproportionate, as ludicrously mild as these few words, spoken so warmly, with such a gentle refinement. “Oh, but you willgrow used to it.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  One could not doubt his conviction. “No?” she asked, without a doubt.

  “It just isn’t to mytaste .”

  “Really?” She returned to the alcove, as the crow flies, straight at him. “AmI to your taste, then?” she insisted, thrusting the crumpled parchment of her face into his smooth vellum.

  A smell of musk issued from the wrinkles.

  By an effort of the will he did not draw back, nor could anything more be read on the vellum than a certain bland befuddlement. “In whatsense , Number 1?”

  She withdrew the parchment. His mere utterance of her number seemed to reassure her. Remembering to be Granny, she seated herself, folded her venerable hands in her lap, smoothed out the parchment to show that it had actually been a generous Bequest, to which she now added, as a kind of codicil, a smile, while her eyes, unsmiling, preserved a clause ofin terro rem .

  “Dear, dear Number 2,” old Granny said, leaving no doubt that dear, dear Number 2 was expected to reply in kind. When he did not, she added a second log to this blaze of affection: “I wish there weresomething I could do foryou .”

  Heshould have said: “It’s enough that you allow me to serve your cause.” And further rhapsodies on that theme.

  Hedid say: “There is. You could answer some questions that have been troubling me for quite some time.”

  The hands awoke in her lap and disarranged themselves. “Questions! Oh dear. Are you sure you want to ask them ofme ? I’m very bad at questions.”

  “There’s no one else who can answer the questions I have in mind.”

  “That’s very likely,” she said. “But even so!”

  “What is the purpose of this Village, Number 1?”

  “Purpose? Village? Such an odd question. Villages don’t have purposes–they havepeople .”

  “The purpose of this organization, then.”

  Again Granny rose and walked to the middle of the white room, as though, being far-sighted, she could only observe him closely from this distance. “Organization issuch an ugly word. Though I suppose it’s to the point. What is the purpose ofany organization, Number 2? To grow. And to exist. We want to grow as much as we can, to exist as long as we can. And, though it’s not forme to say so, I think we can be proud of ourselves, of all that we’ve done so far in these two respects. Though we can’t slackennow .”

  “How long has the Village been here? When did the organization begin toexist ?”

  She tapped her lips with a bony index finger, frowning. And sighed. “I’m sorry, but I have such a terrible head for dates. I hope that wasn’t one of theimportant questions.”

  “Did you come to this Village? Or did youmake it?”

  “I made it.” With a modest smile, as though she had been praised once again for her wonderful pineapple upside-down cake.

  “You–whoare you?”

  “But you cansee me, Number 2! I am what I appear to be, neither more nor less.” She shook her head at the absurdity of having to explain anything so obvious: “I’m Number 1.”

  A memory, from the farthest darkness of his past: of riding in a school-bus at night, sitting alone in a double seat. While he stared at the hypnotic flicker of the white lines on the highway, the other boys had sung an endlessrefrain of: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because …”

  He wondered if, after all, there was no other explanation for the Village than that: because it was here. Possibly at one time it had possessed a purpose, but over the years that purpose had been forgotten, or lost. Indeed, Number 1, as she threaded her way through the private labyrinth of the empty white room, seemed to be pantomiming some kind of search: she lifted cushions, peeked behind clocks, examined dusty shelves, looking for something she was certain she’d misplaced, though she had forgotten what that had been. Her s
pectacles perhaps? Her embroidery hoop? Her teeth?

  And then–of course!–she found it in the pocket of her dress: her platinum buttonhook!

  “You can answer this much, at least,” he demanded. “Whoruns the Village? Who makes its laws? Who judges us?”

  “I do, Number 2,” she said sternly. “Your questions become less and less necessary.”

  “Bear with me–I don’t have many more.How do you do it?”

  She stared at the notched tip of the buttonhook, frowning the wrinkles into a pattern of vexation. “By delegating authority, Number 2. By delegating it toyou .”

  “Why? Why me? Why did you wantme to become Number 2?”

  “I didn’twant it. Youare Number 2. Now–have youfinished with these silly questions, and mayI say something toyou ?”

  Was he ready to admit defeat? He had not in any case expected to win this part of the contest. It was time, therefore, to proceed to the second part, which (he smiled grimly) hewould win.

  Number 1, interpreting the smile as his consent, began to shake the platinum buttonhook at him energetically. “Number 2, 1 must say that I have been very disappointed with you today, very disappointedindeed ! Your attitude suggests to me that your conversion has been anything but—”

  She saw the tensing of the thigh, the shift of his torso. She raised the buttonhook to her mouth and bit down firmly on the notched end.

  But not, by a nanosecond, soon enough. He had already sprung forward from the bench, out of the alcove, when the sound wave of the implosion crashed about the room.

  He raised himself from the white, unshadowed floor, blinked sight back into his eyes. Number 1 stood by the far wall of the room, fondling the buttonhook.

  Behind him, where the alcove had been, a perfect rectangle of blackness negated the middle third of the wall.

  “I should like to know, Number 2, what it is you think you’re doing?”

  “And I’d like to know what you did.”

  “Stay away from me! Stay away, or I’ll do it again!” She raised the buttonhook threateningly, but his step did not falter. There were no more alcoves now, and she would not spring the jaws of any trap in which she might be caught as well.