Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  He had already had an idea of where they were taking him during the night when he’d seen the shape of the mountain, a black triangle against the starry sky. But he had rejected the thought again and again, and for a while, even as they approached the little plateau on the opposite side of the valley, where the windmill, a couple of casks and Hakim III’s cabin stood, he still thought it could all be a coincidence. That’s how strong his belief was that there was nothing to be found in the mine.

  Some twenty meters below the cabin at the entrance to the tunnel, they laid him on his stomach behind a boulder, bound his feet with a rope that was then pulled up his back and secured to his neck, and left him there.

  The gag in his mouth still seemed to be swelling. He fought to breathe through his nose, writhed around and groaned. The sun rose over the crest of the mountain. He thought he could hear voices above, but he was unable to turn his head that way. Then it was silent for a long time. Then the bassist came down the hillside, confirmed that the prisoner was still in the same spot, and disappeared again. Finally all three of the men returned, untied the rope at Carl’s back and took the gag out of his mouth. Apparently he could scream now if he wanted to. He didn’t scream. He would hardly have been able to anyway.

  The Syrian filled a carbide lamp with water from a water bottle; what was left of the liquid he sprinkled on Carl’s face.

  Cockcroft, whom Carl had long since stopped addressing as doctor in his head, said a few words in a language Carl didn’t understand, and the bassist answered. Then they led him up to the entrance of the mine and pulled him into a tunnel marked with a soot-black palm and four fingers. There followed a left hand with index finger and ring finger, and a right hand without a thumb. No sign of Hakim and his rifle.

  The beam of the lamp fell on a rusty metal door set into the rock at an angle. Carl could not remember having seen it before. The Syrian opened it with a powerful tug. Beyond was a medium-sized room. Picks and shovels, iron rods and ropes, large wooden crates with the following inscription on them: “Return to Daimler Benz AG factory Düsseldorf”. Smashed rocks, dust, slings. The toolshed of a miner.

  In the middle of the room a chair, the seat of which was made of woven rattan. They sat Carl on it and tied him up. And they didn’t just tie him up, they secured him completely. Nearly an hour went by before the Syrian and the bassist were satisfied with the results. Then Carl’s elbows were bound together behind the seatback, his feet and ankles tied to the front legs and many meters of rope wound around his upper body. They wrapped a rope around his neck from behind. There were even ropes around his thighs. Finally the Syrian took the handcuffs off and tied his wrists together with painfully thin twine. At this point Carl was only able to move his head a little bit and wiggle his fingers. He was sweating with fear. Cockcroft and the bassist left the room without a word; they pulled the door closed behind them. The Syrian lit a cigarette, smiling. Carl was on the verge of passing out. Then the Syrian, too, left the room.

  The carbide lamp belched smoke. The room was silent. Carl pulled and tore at his constraints. Sweat dripped from his chin. When the men returned the Syrian was carrying a metal case the size of a portable radio, which he put down next to Carl. The bassist was swinging a burlap sack that looked like a shopping bag from which he pulled a tangle of blue and yellow cables. He held it up for a moment like a schematic display of the human circulatory or nervous system and then handed it to Cockcroft.

  “Why do they always leave it in this condition?” asked Cockcroft while trying to untangle the cables and moistening two electrodes attached to them. “Only because it doesn’t personally belong to them. It’s the element of human nature that will doom communism.”

  He handed the untangled cables to the Syrian, who plugged them into his gray case. Then they began to fight about where on Carl’s body to attach the electrodes. The bassist and the Syrian agreed that the genitals were the preferred location, though because of the ropes, getting the electrodes to that spot was hardly possible. The ropes in the area of his hips made it impossible even to open his pants. They would have to have removed the constraints in order to place the electrodes.

  “Then the head,” said the Syrian.

  “Head is always a good bet,” agreed the bassist.

  Cockcroft objected. His knowledge of electroconvulsive shock therapy was limited to, as he hinted, an article in a Russian-language psychology journal he had read the previous night, but he claimed that after this reading he was utterly convinced that shocking the brain could be beneficial for various conditions, most notably epilepsy, depression and paranoid psychosis—though never in cases of memory loss. On the contrary, it could lead to additional damage to the memory, and the purpose here was neither to damage the memory nor therapy, but rather a form of truth-seeking. Whether and to what degree there existed lapses in memory was by necessity a part of what they were trying to find out.

  The others could say little to challenge this, and after they had all agreed to limit the electrodes to the extremities and neck, a new disagreement broke out over the question of whether or not the electricity needed to be routed around the heart.

  Carl followed as if in a dream the discussion being conducted before his eyes in big words and poor arguments. The phrases that Cockcroft and the bassist trotted out, as well as the discourses that swayed the Syrian, created an increasingly surreal impression, an impression of rote knowledge and previous experience. And the fact that through it all the protagonists didn’t cast so much as a single glance at the audience just added to its school-theater-like air.

  The Syrian argued emphatically for a combination of the left hand and right foot, for the very reason that the current would cross the heart. The bassist pointed to his own groin and explained that using the left hand and right foot would also be an alternative way to ensure the current ran across the genitals, which seemed important to him, while Cockcroft ultimately prevailed with: right hand, right foot. And under no circumstances have the current cross the heart.

  In the meantime the Syrian had taken another item out of the burlap bag, a gleaming black semicircular box with two knobs on it that looked like the foot pedal of a sewing machine and quite possibly was one. With a spiral cable he connected the small black box with the large gray one. An indicator light came on.

  “Are we ready?” asked Cockcroft.

  55

  The Black Box

  LUKE SKYWALKER: Your thoughts betray you, Father. I feel the good in you, the conflict.

  DARTH VADER: There is no conflict.

  Return of the Jedi

  “WE ARE GOING TO ASK YOU a few questions,” said the dubious psychiatrist, who had sat down on a long Daimler Benz AG crate directly in front of Carl. At his feet lay the black box. Further away, in the darkest corner of the cave, the bassist stood and smoked a cigarette, a glowing tip. The Syrian was squatting between the electrical connections on the ground.

  “Very easy questions. Answer only with yes or no or clear, declarative sentences. Do not ask counter-questions. You have already been asked all the questions we have for you. At least most of them. But we have reason to believe that the answers we have got from you to this point do not bear a particularly close relationship to the truth. Which is why we are asking them again. And I will begin with the easiest of all: What is your name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Truly? If you are already struggling with this relatively easy question—do you have any idea what is in store for you?” Cockcroft had leaned forward. Crumbs of tobacco clung to his beard. “I repeat: What is your name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That is your final word?”

  “You know that I don’t know.”

  “Don’t speculate about the extent of my knowledge. I know more than you think. Answer the question.”

  “If you really were a doctor you would know.”

  “I am a doctor. Do you remember my name?”

  “Cockcroft.”r />
  “Dr Cockcroft.”

  “But you’re no doctor.”

  “You are mistaken. But that isn’t the question. The question is: Who are you?”

  “Do you know?”

  “What did I say about countering questions with questions?”

  “But you know, don’t you? You know who I am? Or what I did? Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “Because you haven’t even answered question number one. And you now have one last chance to do so.” Cockcroft lifted his foot, held it a few centimeters above the black box and repeated in exactly the same tone as the first time: “What is your name?”

  “I! Don’t! Know!” yelled Carl.

  The foot hung in the air indecisively for a moment then stomped down. Carl’s body seized up in panic. His head flew back, he forced air out of his nose intermittently and sucked it in again through his back teeth.

  He had tensed all his muscles in anticipation of the electric shock. The absence of pain brought tears to his eyes. The bassist, who had come closer, watched Carl’s reaction contentedly, the Syrian watched with squinted eyes and Cockcroft with a furrowed brow. He turned the gray case off and then on again and pressed once more on the switch. With a slight time lag, Carl tensed up again. Again no pain. Cockcroft looked Carl in the eyes, waited a few seconds, and then made three quick, irregular motions with his foot. Carl tried as best as he could to tense up in the same rhythm and to groan. Cockcroft shook his head. With a few swift kicks he dispatched the black box out of view. It was silent for a moment. Then irritable stomps on the switch.

  “The guy doesn’t feel a thing,” said Cockcroft.

  The men examined the connections, shook the gray case and turned it over. They took the electrodes off Carl’s skin, held them up to their own forearms, wet them with spit and stuck them on again. They ran their hands along every bit of cable. The Syrian pulled out the connector plugs and polished the metal clean. They jiggled the contacts, they unscrewed the foot switch and put it back together and tapped away on it. After excruciatingly long minutes they finally discovered a regulating screw on the back side of the gray case. Relieved, the Syrian turned the potentiometer all the way to the right, and the bassist said: “Are we ready?”

  They turned back to the prisoner. Cockcroft closed the circuit and Carl flew in his chair into the wall.

  It felt like liquid explosives had been pumped into every artery, every vein, and they were silently detonating.

  “Amazing given the fact that he can’t move at all,” said the Syrian. Together with the bassist he righted the chair and checked the ropes.

  Then they discussed whether they should turn down the potentiometer or weigh down the chair with rocks. Carl struggled for air the whole time and came to with the sensation that he’d been hit in the throat by a millstone.

  The next thing he was aware of was a chunk of rock in his lap. A blinking indicator light. A smile framed by a beard.

  “We’ve come to the exciting part of tonight’s program,” said Cockcroft.

  56

  Electricity

  Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear… and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.

  HITCHCOCK,

  Spellbound

  HE TALKED ABOUT EVERYTHING he knew, and he talked about the things he didn’t know, too. And he still didn’t know what they wanted to know from him. They asked what his name was and where he lived. But they didn’t want to know what his name was and where he lived, they wanted to know whether he was ready to admit that he was faking, so he admitted it. Then they repeated their question, what was his name, and he said he didn’t know and they gave him electric shocks. He said his ID paper listed the name Cetrois, and they gave him electric shocks. He said he might be named Adolphe Aun or Bertrand Bédeaux, and they said his name wasn’t Adolphe Aun and it wasn’t Bertrand Bédeaux and it definitely wasn’t Cetrois, and they gave him electric shocks. He said he didn’t know his name and he said he did. He made up names and stories, and when he’d had enough shocks he made up other names and stories and begged them to stop, and screamed out everything he knew about himself in the hope that they would recognize his goodwill, screamed out his entire life story from the barn up to this moment, and they gave him electric shocks. They said that wasn’t what they wanted to know and repeated the first question, and the first question was the question of his name, and he said his name was Carl Gross. And they gave him electric shocks.

  They asked what a car and a boat had in common, and gave him electric shocks. They asked what he had been doing in Tindirma and whether he remembered the tyrant of Acragas, and had him count backwards from a thousand by thirteen. And gave him electric shocks. They wanted to know if he’d got out in the desert and whom he had met there. And gave him electric shocks. They asked the name of his wife. They asked him if he knew the joke about the skeleton in the cave and the spies and why he had approached Helen at the gas station rather than the German couple in the VW bus. They asked for a personal description of the women he’d been with at the hotel, and a description of the objects in the yellow Mercedes. They asked who Adil Bassir (“Adil who?”) was and what his relationship to him was. How it came about. They asked about his friend. They asked his name. And gave him electric shocks. They asked how he was able to find his Mercedes in Tindirma given his memory loss and gave him electric shocks. A soda can? A barber shop? A pen? They asked about details, pointed out contradictions or claimed they had pointed out contradictions, and gave him electric shocks.

  They seemed sure that he knew what they wanted from him, or they tried to give the impression they were sure in order to make him think they weren’t going to give up interrogating him until he had told them everything. As if they wanted him to identify the most important things, as if they were afraid to influence him. Almost as if they themselves didn’t know what it was all about. But he had already said everything ten times over and told them what he could remember and he no longer knew what to say, and he asked them what they wanted. And they gave him electric shocks.

  What did they want? The same thing Adil Bassir had wanted, of course. Whom they’d shot. The mine. But what mine?

  If they were looking for this mine, why were they interrogating him? They’d already found it. And if this was about the two things in the pen, why had they brought him here? It made no sense. He drifted off, answered mechanically, images appeared in his head. One recurring image was of him falling from a tall building and landing with a pleasant thud. Nothing before and nothing afterward, no story, just the fall and the thud. Another image was the old man with his musket. With an eye peering through his sights he stormed through the metal door and started shooting. Cockcroft’s head burst apart like a bearded watermelon, next up were the bassist and the Syrian. And they gave him electric shocks. They weren’t even daydreams. Carl wasn’t doing anything to dream them, but he also couldn’t do anything to stop them. Someone snapped his fingers in his head and the door opened silently and Hakim of the Mountains administered justice. What had they done with him? Had they eliminated him? Bought him off? Was he one of them?

  He was unable to think about it. He was in pain, and when he wasn’t in pain the anticipation of pain coursed through his body and erased any thoughts. He had the feeling that his life depended on these thoughts, depended on his ability to concentrate and to logically figure out what they had done with the old miner, he who was the only one who could still rescue him, and then again he felt that his life didn’t depend on that after all and that the old man was part of a system totally independent from his thoughts. And then it occurred to him. What this was all about. It wasn’t about the mine. It wasn’t about gold, either. There was
no gold here. But there was something else. Something hidden. That they couldn’t find. He raised his gaze, looked Cockcroft in the eyes and said: “I’ll take you there.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I can’t take it any more. I’ve had enough.” Carl tried to sound confident, and because he knew his facial expression would give him away, he let his head loll back and forth on his chest. “If you untie me I’ll take you there.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s deeper into the mountain. I can’t describe it. A tunnel with just one finger. I know where it is. I’ll take you.”

  A few long seconds went by, then came the next shock, and Carl’s head jerked around.

  So that wasn’t it either. What the hell was it they wanted here?

  “May I ask a question?”

  “No,” said Cockcroft, stepping on the switch again. “And you may not ask whether you can ask questions.”

  “Why here?” Carl shouted. “Why are you interrogating me here of all places?”

  “What kind of a question is that?” Cockcroft furrowed his brow as he looked at the prisoner. “Do you want to be tortured in a public market? I don’t want to test your middle-school intelligence too severely, but what we’re doing here isn’t exactly compatible with the laws of this country. Or with the laws of our own country, by the way.”

  And so it continued. In response to the question of why he had been in the Empty Quarter, he said he preferred the Kinks to the Beatles; in response to who he worked for, he said he liked the Beatles better than Marshal Mellow; and to the question of what his real name was, he answered that the line judge would condemn them. And they gave him electric shocks.