by Adam Roberts
Of course there is no glory in causing another man pain. But, as I say, I was reconciled to the necessity of the pain. Possessing a head makes a man very vulnerable.
Bonnard was on his feet, his own chiller in front of him like a flick-knife. He waved it in the air between us as if to threaten me, but his eyes were fearful.
I wanted to knock upon the door in order attract the attention of the policeman out there in the corridor.
I stepped towards Bonnard with my left hand held outright, palm towards him. He jabbed the chiller at this target and discharged it directly against my skin. It was very painful. My arm seemed to burst at the seams of its nerves all the way up to its shoulders. This was a manageable pain. My fingers contracted about the end of the device, gripping it. With my other hand I took Bonnard’s left ear in a grip that had been first demonstrated to me by a superior in camp one winter’s morning. The difficulty in holding somebody by the ear is that it is a handle both small and flexible, and it too easily slips out of one’s grasp. The way to counteract this is as follows: first take a hard grip of the ear, with the nails of the three main fingers lodged in the behind of the ear and the nail of the thumb jagged into the flesh in the main portion of the ear. Then - it is more easily done than described - force one finger into the ear canal. With a proper application of force this may rupture the eardrum, which is all to your advantage. The purpose of the exercise is not to damage the drum, but rather to give yourself a hold strong enough to permit - for instance - banging Bonnard’s head repeatedly against the inside of the door as a form of knocker.
This, in a way, was the most delicate part of the entire business. It would have been easy, given the supply of anger inside me from which I was drawing, to have crushed Bonnard’s skull with these blows. Perhaps he deserved death. I do not know, and it is not for me to judge, but it may be true. But I had made a vow, and I did not wish to violate it. Accordingly it was a ticklishly precise business hammering his head sufficiently to disable, without more seriously injuring, him. I knocked four times. There was a small window in the door, set a little too high for me to see properly through. The glass was thick and embedded within it there was a grid, like the graph paper schoolchildren have in their notebooks.
A face appeared at the glass, pressing close to see inside. I could see the face. Its expression changed from curiosity to one of alarm.
I pulled Bonnard’s head away from the door. His ear had come partially off from his head, although there was still enough flesh to prevent it from detaching entirely. There was blood on my right hand. Bonnard’s eyes were open, but the eyeballs had rolled up white.
I dropped him. He left his chiller embedded in my frozen, gripping hand and slumped to the floor. I reached round with my right hand and flicked the switch of this device to the off position. The pain stopped, although the hurting numbness remained. I had to pull the device firmly to extricate it from my fingers. My left arm dangled, uselessly.
I looked down at the two fallen men. The second policeman’s body was twitching. It occurred me that he had fallen on his own chiller, and that the device was still on. This, clearly, might prove dangerous if prolonged. I pushed his body over with my right foot and he fell back, wholly unconscious. The hand with the chiller flopped free of his torso.
An alarm began to sound.
I faced the door.
There was a ratchety noise as a lock was unlocked, and the door burst open. A policeman burlied in. I put Bonnard’s chiller in at his face, and he star-jumped backwards, his arms flying out so far that they banged against the door frame. I had to move quickly now. A single leap took me over his still falling body, treading up his chest as a ramp to hop into the air and directly into the man behind him. The chiller in my hand connected with this second fellow’s neck, and he danced himself frantically down to the ground.
I stepped over him, turned right, and started back along the corridor. A camera panned to follow me. The alarm shrieked, its chi-ii-chi-ii-chiii cry enormously penetrating and loud. The door at the far end was open, and through it I could see people hurrying. A policeman in black plastic body armour put half of himself round the door. He aimed a rifle and fired. His weapon popped as it discharged. An object clanged, a tin can, off the wall near me, and clattered to the floor. Smoke as thick as dried ice began tumbling and gushing from one end of it. I saw the door at the far end of the corridor slam shut and then my vision was obscured by the gas. I flipped my neck valve shut, and took a breath from my army-fitted internal reservoir.
I was not certain how long it would take the police to ready their crash team, but I knew my supply of breathable air would outlast the supply of gas in the canister. Tucking Bonnard’s chiller between the numb fingers of my left hand, I ducked down and picked the canister in my right. It was still spewing white steam, like a kettle that had broken its automatic off-switch. I could not be sure what the gas was, although it was making my skin sting.
I threw it into the cell which I had just vacated. Then I walked the length of the corridor through white opacity.
My left arm was still hanging limply. I tried flexing the fingers but nothing happened. I could shrug my left shoulder, but nothing more.
Nearer the end of the corridor I stopped and waited. I could see nothing in the white murk, but I could hear the sounds of confused motion, dulled by the door. There was shouting. A change in the timbre of the sounds indicated that the door had opened. There was another popping sound, and the clatter of another gas canister.
Moving quickly I located this by its hissing noise, picked it up and wedged it under my arm, with the smoke gushing out behind me.
I turned in the direction of the door again.
Coming forward very slowly, a black-armoured, black-snouted figure emerged from the smoke. He was holding a rifle before him, but I was able to step close enough to him such that he could not aim it at me. What he should have done is brought the weapon up and struck me with the barrel as if with a baton, but this did not occur to him. I put the chiller in at the base of his spine and pressed the button, but the batteries of the device were now almost drained. He reacted, but did not fall. There was a flurried little dance as he tried to get away from me, but I slipped my good hand up to the back of his head and I pushed a finger underneath the strapping of his gas-mask. I didn’t need to lever this entirely off before he had taken in a lungful of the smoke and collapsed, retching and coughing.
I walked forward until the door frame became visible. A second black-armoured and -snouted figure was in the frame, but there was enough space between his head and the side of the door for me to be able to throw the still spouting gas canister through the gap.
The policeman in the door swivelled his rifle towards me and began firing. He expected me to cower, or flee, or perhaps he expected me to fall backwards shot through with many bullets. I did what he did not expect: I reached out with my right hand and grasped the barrel of his rifle. Bullets clattered past me, missing my right flank by centimetres, but missing it for all that. After firing only half a dozen rounds the barrel was hot enough to scorch the skin, but this was a manageable pain. I pressed on the rifle-shaft as if I wished to angle it towards the floor. The policeman, his face unreadable behind its mask, fought my pressure, heaving to keep the gun level and trying to angle it further round to aim at me. A bullet shuddered the barrel and smacked into the floor at my feet. Another. I could feel the projectiles passing along the barrel as my palm burnt. Then I switched direction of my pressure, yanking it upwards, the same direction he was pulling it himself. Still firing bullets the rifle swung sharply. The barrel snapped into his chest. A round screeched off the visor of his mask leaving a scar of melted plastic and, in a panic, he dropped the gun.
I did not pick it up. I did not want a gun. It would have been very hard to preserve my vow holding a gun.
The man was already backing away. I leapt forward, rushed at him, pushing him before me and dominoing another of his colleagues immediate
ly behind him. As they fell I jinked to the left and ducked forward as I ran. The hall behind was not large. Smoke from the grenade I had tossed had not filled it entirely, but it had done enough to disable most of the men there. One masked figure was hurrying forward to help his tumbled colleagues, and I ran straight past him. I leapt through the main entrance of the building.
I landed on my shoulders, as I had been trained to do, and rolled forward, flipping up onto my legs. It was night outside, and although the front of the station was well-lit it was only moments before I was swallowed by shadows.
Nine
The only real advantage I had possessed was surprise, which was itself a function of the ignorance of my captors as to the nature of my military training. The surprise was gone now. I ducked through a series of darkened alleys, and started my circumspect way through the city.
Bonnard had known where I worked, but I had never informed my workplace of my home address. Why would they be interested in such information? They only cared that I turned up to work on time.
Still, it would do to be cautious. Halfway to the house I came upon the fountain, the same at which Siuzan (the woman I had thought was Siuzan) and I had used to meet. It was deserted in the darkness, but I rolled in the water to wash off the stench of teargas, or whatever agent the police had used. The skin on my right palm was sore and burnt. I was starting to regain the use of my left hand.
I hurried on, keeping to dark or poorly lit ways as far as I could. Within twenty minutes I was back at the house.
The woman I had been calling Siuzan was there, sitting on the steps. She leapt up at my approach.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been here for an hour! More!’
‘I met Siuzan Delage,’ I said.
She did not say anything. After a while she sat down, and I sat down next to her. We were silent for a long time.
I listened to the sounds of the evening city, intermixed with which were several police sirens, dopplering towards and away from our location. I planned out my options should the police come to the building - which alleys were best to dash down, whether I could get upon the roofs of nearby buildings, which path had the best chance of escape. All this was part of my military training. But, in the event, we were undisturbed by the authorities.
‘What is your name? I asked eventually.
‘It is Siuzan,’ she said.
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Siuzan. Though not Delage. But when you came up to me that day and addressed me as Siuzan, I responded genuinely.’
‘But since then?’
‘Since then,’ she said, ‘I have tried to be as truthful as possible. I’m sure that seems a poor sort of honour to you, but it’s true.’ She got up, agitated, and stepped away from the house. I watched her moving through the darkness, illuminated only by the light from one upper window. She roamed as far as the road, and then along, and then she returned to the front door and hesitated for a while. She sat down again. I didn’t say anything.
Finally she spoke. ‘To begin with I was surprised by how forcefully you seemed to recognise me. How certain you were that you knew me. I told myself: perhaps I had known you, in the days before the beheading. And at the beginning I was happy to have a friend, a roof under which to sleep, food, work, all these things. I listened to your story, of all the things you said about your time with the other Siuzan. Of course I understood that you had mistaken me. But then, as I grew to know you better, and as we talked, then . . .’ She tailed off.
‘Then?’ I prompted.
‘Then, falling in love with you, it seemed to me that it had been more than chance that had provoked your misrecognition. What are the chances that you would confuse me with another woman also called Siuzan?’
‘It’s a common name.’
‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘Well, well, of course I shan’t hold you to an undertaking you made when you thought - thought I was another person.’ She stopped. ‘What will you do?’
‘I must leave Cainon,’ I said. ‘Tonight, I think.’
She was silent at this.
‘Do you love me?’ I asked. ‘Truly?’
‘Enough to be ashamed of the misunderstanding that brought us together,’ she said. ‘But also enough not to - pester you with my presence. Yes, I love you. I thought fate had brought us together.’ She was silent for a while, and then she asked: ‘What happened when you met the - the other Siuzan?’
‘She was not beheaded.’
Siuzan pondered this. ‘I do not understand,’ she said. ‘You told me that she had been beheaded? You said you felt responsible, and that this Mark Pol was—’
‘Indeed. I was deceived.’
‘Well,’ said Siuzan. ‘Has a headed woman and a headless man ever made a couple? Has there ever been a marriage between two such?’
‘It is not that,’ I said, a little impatiently. ‘I met her, and she was . . . less than I remembered. There was much less to her than—’ I stopped.
‘Than?’
I had been going to say, Much less to her than there is to you. But I think she knew what I had been going to say. ‘She was a very ordinary person,’ I said instead. ‘She chittered on about nonsense and gossip, and then she fled away on a bus.’
‘Oh,’ said Siuzan.
‘What is your surname?’
‘Visage. Even the surname mimics the sound of the other woman’s, do you not think? Delage, Visage. Or, perhaps, it was only the urgency of my own desire that prompted my sense of the fatefulness of this coincidence. Perhaps there is no fate involved here at all.’
‘I don’t want,’ I said cautiously, ‘to adopt an interrogator’s tone, for I don’t have the right. But perhaps I may ask this: how much of what you said to me was true? Your changing attitudes to fate? Your life?’
‘Oh, I tried to tell no active lie at all. When I had to lie I tried to lie by omission. But I know the All’God hates a lie, and a liar, and I’m certain He would not be impressed by the pedantic rationalisation of my sin. Everything I said positively was true. But some things I did not say, deliberately to allow you to continue in your false belief - that’s where the lie was.’
‘I do find the scripture alarming,’ I said. ‘About the lie, I mean. About the liar. Perhaps, as somebody once said, it means that the All’God must hate us all. For I spent three years worshipping an image in my memory, concocted largely from my own imagination, and telling myself that I loved it. But what I told myself was a lie. I do not love Siuzan Delage. I love you.’
‘I didn’t think that,’ she began, and then stopped. She made another rush at a sentence: ‘Perhaps the best thing would be—’
She stopped.
‘We had better go,’ I said. ‘The longer I stay here, the greater the chance that events will conspire to prevent us both starting our lives anew. The longer I stay, the greater the chance something will come along to poison the happiness I have known with you, Siuzan, over these last weeks. The happiness. . .’ She was trembling a little. So was I. ‘That hasn’t been imaginary,’ I said. ‘It’s the simple truth. Simple truth in a simple story. Sadness is the lie and happiness the truth. Let’s both go to the Land of the Headless together and marry and do all we said we would do.’
‘I’ve been waiting here an hour already,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to go.’
We rose together and walked, with our wandering steps and slow, away from that house. We walked out into the darkness and away from the city, and into the empty landscape.
Reader, we married. We live now in Montmorillon, and great things are in prospect, and not the least of those great things is a child, presently plumping Siuzan’s belly. When we married, and since my name was poison, I took hers and became Jon Visage. We registered legal documents, at a cost of one totale and thirty divizos, with a local community legal centre, and this is the name in which all relevant documentation is filed. I had to supply DNA, of course, but I borrowed this from a friend who lives in the mountains, and who for
his own reasons wishes to have nothing to do with the official world of Pluse. Some of the great things in prospect, of which I speak, have to do with this friend, and others like him. By the time this account is published I daresay they will have come to fruition.
In honour of my marriage and my new name I wrote a poem. This poem was my first composition for many years, and perhaps will be my last - for I am busy with other business now. But this poem has its place in this present account, for, of course, ‘visage’ means ‘face’.
A windowglass:
you on the far side,
and my own face
semi-reflected there
where light and surface share.
This is how we slide
one into another:
this superposition of faces.
The connection of lovers
is a union of graces
as in prayer.
The eye that sees itself
and heart that frees itself.
There