Anne took the cutting from him when he had finished it. “I don’t think you should go back there,” she said.
Carpenter found himself shivering and moved nearer the orange glow of the apartment’s electric heater. “What do you mean? I’ve got to go back. Horden must have known about this. He lied to me.”
“The job’s not important,” Anne said. “Not a job like that.”
Carpenter turned to her. “What do you mean the job’s not important? A couple of weeks ago you were glad I’d got it.”
“Don’t shout at me, hon.”
“I’m sorry,” Carpenter said. “I’m upset about Horden lying to me. Why would he do a thing like that? Deliberately keeping me in the dark.” He put his arms around her, wrapping her slight figure in his body. “Do you want me to quit the job?”
“It’s the thought of that poor man,” Anne said. “I don’t like the idea of you as some kind of jailer. I didn’t think you’d want to be used that way either.”
For a moment they stood together wordless and swaying slightly, enjoying the warmth of each other’s body. Then Anne broke away almost guiltily. “Think about it, hon,” she said.
“I will. I will.”
* * * *
One morning the prisoner awoke and knew it could not go on. There was no purpose in remaining alive, in dragging his body through the torture of extreme cold or in dragging his mind through the torture of exhausted memories. The memories had sustained him at one time, but they were scanty and largely morbid glimpses of a childhood that had never seemed happy and of an adulthood that had so far been a chronicle of failure, of drifting from job to job and worthless relationship to worthless relationship. The more he reran these scenes in his mind the more unreal they seemed, like the less-than-credible plot of a particularly melodramatic movie. The movie faded out into mental blankness sometime before his imprisonment and picked up again sometime after, when existence was his cell and memory was no real memory at all but merely days running out like identical grains of sand. The terminal memory was a suitably bizarre one. He had once run a bar, a dim basement grotto beneath a pawnbroker’s in the slum area of the city. He remembered a poet, a young Jesus-haired character (who knows, he might have thought himself the messiah of his age) who used the bar’s toilet to fix himself and then came to sit and talk to him while the heroin worked in his blood, an untouched beer before him for appearances. He talked about things the bartender could understand: disillusionment, a lifetime of bad breaks and unkind people. He talked about what it was like to poison yourself with heroin until the kick began to kick you back, until it became a necessity like air. It was a form of suicide, the poet said, suicide without real decision, an easy suicide for people with weak minds. The bartender asked him if it was really any different from drinking yourself to death or, for that matter, driving a car until statistics singled you out as one of the x percent killed every year in motor accidents. The poet merely smiled and said no, he supposed all life for everybody was one prolonged suicide, that you started killing yourself on the day you were born.
The poet had once given the bartender a book of poems. They were by T. S. Eliot and the bartender had put the book aside, saying he didn’t read poetry. One morning he’d just opened up the bar when there was a scream of brakes outside. He went up to the road where a small crowd was already beginning to form. A big saloon was wedged diagonally across the road. Its rear fender had scraped paint from three cars parked along the opposite curb. Something was wedged under the rear wheels and the bartender saw it was the young poet. The driver, a plump man in a neat business suit, was leaning on the car’s open door. His face was streaked with blood from a cut on his forehead and he was appealing to the bystanders. “The kid must have been crazy ... He just stepped out in front of me. Did he want to get killed or something? What was I supposed to do? You saw it, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
The bartender went back to the bar. He remembered the Eliot poems and found the book. He read one called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” which ended:
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
He didn’t understand the poem, except that it seemed black and pessimistic, somehow a suitable epitaph for the young poet.
Memory faded...
Perhaps it was a suitable epitaph for him too, the prisoner thought. The cold would kill him eventually, he knew, but he was afraid of the discomfort and suffering and that it would take too long. He dwelt on the fear. Briefly it seemed to warm him, but soon it was just another stale taste in his mouth. He realized that he wasn’t afraid, after all, and that he had come to an acceptance of what he had to do. It wasn’t fear that led to suicide, he realized, but a lack of fear and a lack of any prospect of ever experiencing fear again.
He took off his shirt and tore it clumsily with numbed fingers into strips. He tied the strips together until he had formed a serviceable rope several feet long. He tied one end tightly about his neck.
He went to stand beneath the small barred window slit. It required an almost superhuman effort to pull himself up to the slit, but he reflected that it would be the last effort ever required of him and jumped, wedging one hand into the slit and grabbing a bar with his cold fingers. The stone lip of the window cut at his wrist, sending shooting pains along his arm, but he hoisted himself up until he came abreast of the slit. Quickly he tied the rope’s other end around one of the bars. The strength was slipping rapidly out of his arms as he pulled the knot tight. He took a last look out of the slit. The sky was as cold and grey and hopeless as ever and with his last remaining strength he threw himself backward from the wall.
* * * *
Carpenter dropped the cutting on Horden’s desk. Horden glanced at it briefly and said: “I see.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Horden? You must have known what was going on.”
“Yes, I knew. But you’re making it sound unnecessarily sinister....”
“I’ve reason. You lied to me.”
“I told you a harmless untruth, yes. I didn’t see why such things should concern you. I still don’t. Really, does it matter? You were happy enough doing the job when you didn’t know about it. Does this really change anything?”
Carpenter went to the door. He felt confused by Horden’s questions. “A job’s a job,” he said, “even if I don’t particularly like myself for doing it. I don’t like being lied to, that’s all.”
Horden waited until Carpenter had left the office; then he leaned forward and pushed a button on his intercom.
* * * *
Carpenter went down to the Box to find Elleston on duty.
“Where’s Levinson?” he asked. It disturbed him to find a familiar routine interrupted. “Is he sick?”
“More than sick,” Elleston said. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” For a second the word genuinely puzzled Carpenter, like a case of jamais vu.
“Yeah, the poor little kike. Apparently he collapsed in the street yesterday, in the snow. He should never have gone out, not in that sort of weather, not with a heart condition like his.”
“He had a heart condition? I never knew that.”
“Yeah, he’d had a bad heart for years. He must have known it would catch up with him sooner or later.”
Carpenter felt a profound sorrow for the small, nervous Jew. He wondered if Levinson’s uncle really owned a delicatessen out east. Probably not. There had probably never even been an uncle.
“Well, I’m going to grab some rest,” Elleston said. “I sure hope they can get somebody to replace him soon.”
“They will,” Carpenter said. “There’s always s
omebody.”
Elleston nodded and left.
Carpenter approached the Box. He wondered what Keller was doing at this moment, what he was thinking. Perhaps he was asleep. He tried to imagine what six months in isolation would do tohim, but it was unimaginable. Like trying to imagine death, he thought. Surely no man could endure such isolation and remain sane? What sort of man would volunteer for something like that anyway, something that would very likely destroy him? A disappointed man? An idealistic man? He remembered what he had told Elleston: “There’s always somebody.”
He ran his fingers along the seam of the Box’s door. The man had volunteered, but there still remained a moral question. The full burden of it lay upon the scientists who had devised the experiment, but Carpenter carried some of it on his own shoulders. Ought Keller to be held to his voluntary decision, a decision almost certainly made without full knowledge of the consequences? Absently, experimentally, Carpenter took a coin from his pocket and tried it in one of the bolts that secured the door’s time lock. He twisted and the countersunk bolt turned easily. He gave it several turns. He watched the bolt as it threaded smoothly away from the covering plate and felt suddenly dizzy. What was he doing? If he freed Keller, he possibly freed a man with no desire to be free. And he certainly lost a job that paid good, regular wages. Carpenter screwed the bolt back firmly and dropped the coin into his pocket.
He went back to his seat by the wall and noticed for the first time, with some irony, that Horden had at last replaced the chair. The new one was larger and fully upholstered. Carpenter settled himself into it comfortably. He had only been watching the Box for a few minutes when a stranger in a white lab coat arrived, accompanied by a tired-looking, disgruntled Elleston.
“Are you Carpenter?” the stranger asked. “Will you come with me?”
Carpenter looked questioningly at Elleston, who merely shrugged and took Carpenter’s place in the chair. Carpenter followed the stranger along quiet corridors to an office practically identical to Horden’s. Instead of an impossible object, however, there was a print of Brueghel’s “Massacre of the Innocents” on the wall. The stranger sat behind the desk and Carpenter sat opposite.
“Cigarette?” The stranger offered him a box in which cigarettes and cigars lay partitioned and segregated. Carpenter declined and the stranger took a small cigar and lit it from a desk lighter that reminded Carpenter of a miniature version of the Box. It was shiny chromium. The strangertapped its top and a lid opened automatically.
Automatically a second, smaller box rose from within the first. Its lid, in turn, opened to reveal a third box which rose up, its uppermost surface glowing like a hot plate. The stranger touched it to his cigar, smiling. “Chinese boxes. It’s a favorite toy of mine. My name is Maynard. Horden has asked me to speak to you, to explain why we have to fire you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve shown yourself to be disturbed by certain aspects of the work,” Maynard said. “It would be dangerous to let you remain.”
“Dangerous in what way?”
“Dangerous to the experiment and possibly dangerous to you. It would be a pity, for instance, if you got it into your head to try and release Keller.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Not everybody has the mentality of a prison warden, Carpenter, which is in effect what you’re expected to be. For certain people—I’d say for practically everybody these days—it goes against the grain. That is why Horden had to lie to you. He has standing orders to conceal the nature of the work whenever possible.” Maynard looked at Carpenter through a haze of cigar smoke. “You see, we live in a liberal society, a society educated in the politics of freedom and human rights. It’s not always possible to find people who will accept the role this particular job calls for.” He smiled. “It’s true of the job situation as a whole these days. Education is more than assimilating facts. It’s acquiring a whole system of behavioral rules and values. At the present period of history people have been educated to expect a better deal than society can manage to give them. Hence unemployment and unrest. There are too many well-qualified people going after too few really worthwhile jobs.
“You look surprised, but I should have thought you’d have realized this yourself, Carpenter. You’re no fool. You’re smart. Not so many years ago you wouldn’t have been chasing dead-end jobs. You’d have held some senior management post. Now, however, there are too many people like you. And everybody can’t be in management.”
Carpenter nodded. “Perhaps I did realize it all along. But it’s not an easy thing to accept.”
Maynard took a packet from his desk and gave it to Carpenter. “Here’s a month’s pay. What’s the matter? You don’t look too happy.”
“It’s just one thing that still puzzles me about the Box. You said in that article that Keller was going to be isolated for eighteen months, that he’d be taken care of by various gadgets inside the box and also that he’d have no way of curtailing the experiment himself. When Horden gave me the job, he said it involved watching for anything ‘untoward,’ but it seems to me you’ve got the untoward pretty well sewn up. What’s the point of hiring people to watch a foolproof system? Is it just making jobs for the unemployed?”
“No. It’s an essential safety measure. You see, there is one way Keller can curtail the experiment although not directly through an act of his own will. It’s a way he didn’t even know about. We don’t monitor his life functions, but they’re linked directly to the time lock. If, for some reason, they become critical or indeed, stop, then the door automatically opens.”
Carpenter felt sick. “You mean the only way he could escape would be by committing suicide. Is that likely?”
“By no means likely, but possible. There are so many unknown factors in this experiment and we have to cover every eventuality. Almost certainly he’ll fantasize and some of the fantasies may involve symbolic suicide. From that it’s only a small step to the real thing.”
Carpenter swore at Maynard, dragging up the most considered, unsubtle epithet he could think of. “There’s another reason you employ people to watch that Box,” he said. “You’re the prison wardens, Maynard, you and your kind, but you need someone to take over your role. You hope it will absolve you of responsibility but it won’t. And I think you know it won’t.”
He stood and went to the door. Behind him he heard a voice squawk from Maynard’s intercom. It was Horden and he sounded overexcited. There was another voice in the background, possibly Elleston’s. Carpenter didn’t pause to hear what they were saying. He was afraid he knew and he hated himself because he knew he could have prevented it. He left the building, walking past the basalt fountain and across the campus to the highway. Above him the sky was grey and cold like the underside of a great steel lid.
<
* * * *
GENE WOLFE
A METHOD BIT IN “B”
I suppose it was because I had attended a film just before going on duty. I have the late tick—what we occasionally call the “graveyard” tick—and that makes it possible for me to visit the one cinema our little village boasts before I go on. Since a new film comes not more than fortnightly, I don’t indulge myself in this way often.
The fog had been extraordinarily thick. We have a great deal of fog in every month of the year; still, that night was exceptional. I remember stepping in through the doors of the station house and having it roll past me in great billows as though it were being blown from behind me; and that is strange, because now that this terrible business at the manor house is over, or nearly over, that is the first moment I can recall clearly. It’s as if all my previous life were nothing more than a preparation for holding the dying girl in my arms out there on the moors, or looking into the man’s horror-ravaged face. When I try to recall anything else, service experiences from the four years I spent in the Glousters for example, or something that has happened during the time I’ve lived here in the village (Stoke-on-Wold
is what we call it), nothing seems to have taken place at all.
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 19