Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  The conductor tidied the mussed bed, plumped the pillow, scoured the sink.

  At Cheltenham the engine was switched. By four o’clock the string of cars was rolling back home to Paddington. Lights cut long arcs through the incessant drizzle.

  Chapter Three

  The Village

  Woke.

  Soft Muzak, sore limbs. He flicked flecks of sleep from the corners of his eyes. He was awake now. His shoes confronted him, propped on the two identical suitcases. Laces dangled from the eyelets.

  He patted his breast pocket. He stood up. The cummerbund, unbuckled, slid down his wrinkled legs. The Muzak glided intoOklahoma .

  The entire room–varnished benches, sooty windows, overheated air, the worn, well-swept floorboards, the twin slates for Arrivals and Departures, the ticking clock, the thick, inverted L of the stovepipe leading to the stove–was transparently probable.

  It was, by this clock, III minutes after IX, a statement that the light slanting through the grimy lattice confirmed.CLOSED hung lopsides before the ticket window grille. Oh, what a beautiful morning!

  There was one Arrival, at 6:30 am. There were no Departures.

  He went out onto the platform, into the incontrovertible likelihood of sunlight, cirrus clouds, the scent of creosote. A white wooden planter, Property of the Village, welcomed him to …? For the entire length of the platform there was no sign to say. Well, to the Village then, in its most absolute sense.

  He knotted his shoelaces, and in front of the mirror that sold chewing gum he tied a bow knot in his bow tie. His hair was not mussed by sleep. The cummerbund went into his raincoat pocket.

  He returned to the platform with his suitcases and followed the arrows toTAXIS . A gravel path hedged with rhododendrons curved to the back of the station and debouched on a street of devastating neatness and typicality, at once folksy and abstract, like a Quaker chessboard. A Grocer, a Druggist and Meat confronted a Stationer, a Cafe and Dry-Cleaning; beyond these emblems of a community, trees and a steeple, admonishing, Italianate, of limestone capped with lead; then cirrus, and then blue sky.

  The taxi stand was empty.

  He carried his suitcases past the Stationer (whose windows celebrated the novels of B. S. Johnson and Georgette Heyer, various cookbooks and garden manuals, and Bertrand Russell’s autobiography) and to the Cafe, which received him with a lush gust of gaseous grease.

  The waitress said, “Ew!”

  “Pardon me,” he said, “but could you tell me—”

  “We hadsuch a fire!” She giggled, wiping her full red face with a dirty towel.

  “—the name of this town?”

  “You wouldn’t of believed it.Nobody would!” “Please.”

  “A cup of tea?” She drew tea from the steaming urn, set the cup before him. “There’s milk.” In a stainless steel pitcher. “And there’s sugar.” In a glass bowl.

  She wiped the towel across the plastic joke that hung above the low entrance to the kitchen: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BECRAZY TOWORKHERE–BUT IT HELPS! She glanced back to see whether he had noticed, whether he would laugh.

  “Could youtell me the name of this town? Please.” “Village you mean.” Pouting, she gave the plastic another swipe.

  “Very well, the name of this village.”

  “Because towns are bigger. I don’t care for towns, myself. They’re impersonal. People forget that you’re a human being. And we’reall human beings, you know. Do you want toast?” “No, thank you. If you—”

  “Negg?”

  “No. I—”

  “You don’t look like you’ve had breakfast.”

  “I’m afraid I got off the train by mistake. That’s why I asked the name of this village. It does have a name, doesn’t it?” “You must take me for some kind of simpleton, Mister. I suppose next you’ll want to know what year it is? And then maybe how many shillings in a pound?” New billows of grease blossomed from the doorway behind her. “Oh, the hell with it!” she shouted. She ran into the kitchen to swat at the burning griddle with her towel.

  He left sixpence on the corner, for his tea, and went back outside. A tiny taxi was waiting at the taxi stand. The driver waved his plaid cap. “Hi there!” A short man, blond and ruddy, a Scandinavian in miniature. He took the suitcases and swung them on to his luggage rack.

  “Looks like you’ve had quite a night,” he observed. His face suggested, but did not assert, bland strength and muscle contentment.

  “Could be.”

  The driver opened the back door. His smile metered a precise quantity of bonhomie. “Hop in.” A cardboard sign was taped to the glass partition between the halves of the taxi. DRIVECAREFULLY.THELIFEYOULEADMAYBEYOUROWN.

  “What a beautiful morning, eh?” He had taken his place behind the steering wheel, on the left side of the car. “Where to? Are you going to pay the penalty?” “How’s that?”

  “For last night, the penalty for last night.” (Wink.) “Or will it be a hair of the dog?” “Actually, I thought we might drive to the next town.” “Which?”

  “Whatis the next town?”

  “This is just a local service, you know. But I could take you to the beach.” “Take me to the police.”

  “Don’t take offense, mister. Can’t a fellow make a joke?” “It has nothing to do with you. I simply want to ask them a few questions.” “You’re the boss.”

  They drove, on the right side of the road, past Grocer, Druggist and Meat. There the concrete, encountering green grass, split in two and they took theONE WAY left, between an ornamental, unpopulated park and coy, numbered cottages of gingerbread and vanilla fudge, wee nightmares of inexorable charm.

  “Tell me,” he said, in a tone of cautious indifference, “how do youpronounce the name of this town?” The driver scratched his head. “Well, you know … it isn’t really big enough to be called atown .” “More of a village, I suppose you’d say.”

  The driver, without slowing, turned around. A big, big smile. “You took the words out of my mouth.” He settled back into the plasticine and gave the streets of the Village the same serious attention one must give to a sore tooth. In the park quincunxes of clipped trees alternated with beds of late drooping tulips and fresh poppies. The residences that looked across to this allegory of dullness tried to compensate for its civic stolidity with a kind of metronomic whimsy, as though in each of these diestamped witch’s cottages there lived a banker in a party hat. Chance and individual enterprise could not, unassisted, have created an atmosphere so uniformly oppressive; this village was the conception, surely, of a single, and slightly monstrous, mind, some sinister Disney set loose upon the world of daily life.

  The question was–had this vast stage set been inhabited yet? Where were the elves and gnomes and fairies, the village maidens and the village youths, the old old women in white linen wimples and bombazeen skirts, the old men sucking the enormous pipes on which they had carved their own grotesque and wrinkled effigies? For the little taxi had not passed by another vehicle, and the pavements on the left were as empty as the gravel paths on the right. He had seen, at a distance, a single gardener, crawling through a tulip bed. There had been, moreover, the waitress, and there was now this taxi driver, but neither of them seemed large enough, somehow, for the great godawfulness of the Place. They were not much better than toy soldiers four inches tall while the set demanded figures at least half life-size.

  The park eventually grew bored with itself, at which point a church had grown up in the middle of the road. It almost seemed real.

  He said, “Stop.” It stopped.

  He got out. He walked toward the church. He mounted the first, the second, the third step. There were many, many more and then a door.

  “Cremona?” he wondered.

  No, not Cremona. Somewhere else.

  “Bergamo?”

  Not Bergamo either. Butsomeplace , certainly.

  “Now thatis a pretty church.” The miniature taxi driver had come out of his miniature taxi. His a
pproval encompassed church, park, the beautiful morning, the universe, without, for all that, coming right out in favor of anything. It was possible, after all, that it wasnot a pretty church. What do taxi drivers know about churches?

  “You religious?” he asked.

  Was he religious?

  “I was thinking,” he said (it was not an answer, but then what answers hadhe got this morning?) “that I’ve been here before.” “Lots of people get that feeling. Here.”

  “In front of the church?”

  “In the Village, generally. It seems to do that. You know what I think it is?” “What?”

  “I think itrepresents something.” He stroked his small, square chin, savoring the plum ofrepresents . “People come here from other places. Like you. And they see our Village, and they get the feeling that something has always beenmissing from their lives.” “And the Village represents that, the thing that is missing from their lives?” “It was only my idea,” the taxi driver demurred. Clearly, it was doubtful whether taxi drivers ought to have ideas.

  “And this thing that’s missing–what is it?”

  Startled, the taxi driver looked for it on the steps, up in the steeple, admonishing, Italianate, in the cirrus clouds.

  “Something good? Or—”

  “Oh, certainly! Something like … I don’t know …” He turned to his taxi for help. “Like being contented!” Triumphantly.

  “With?”

  “With?”

  “What is it like being contented with?”

  The taxi driver shrugged. “This kind of life. The kind of life that the Village represents.” “The way it contentsyou ?”

  “Oh my god! Jesus! Of course! Say, what is this? Where are you going?” “Don’t you remember? To the police.”

  “Yeah. Well then, let’s go there.”

  The police station (it lay not more than fifty yards from the church) occupied the gray stone building that would have been, in the usual scheme of things, the episcopal residence. A mansard roof peered out over the top of adolescent elms, each one protected from the world by its own individualized prison of wrought-iron spikes that dissembled their ferocity as fleurs-de-lis.

  He approached the door (it was the kind of door that insists upon ceremony, like a rich relative who had only condescended to visit this house after many misgivings) slowly, gravely, as though he might shame some kind of justice out of this Village by his own stern gaze and conscious dignity.

  He pushed the bronze handle of the door. He pulled.

  He read the card in the small glass frame above the bell. Its brief message was printed in florid script, like a wedding invitation:

  Police

  Closed

  With a wonderful sense of appropriateness, the taxi driver chose just that moment to make his break for it. He had left the two Knocabouts on the curb.

  He walked through a bed of marigolds to stand beneath the window just left of the door. He looked into what appeared to be the waiting room of a very fashionable dentist. The armchairs were decorated with antimacassars of yellowed lace, the end tables with copies ofVogue andBazaar . A framed document (the dentist’s diploma?) punctuated the rhythm, mild as Mantovani, of the wallpaper. The room was empty.

  He walked, with less mercy now for marigolds, to the next window. This was the dentist’s office, where, at a Danish teakwood desk, his stenographer took dictation in the morning, where, twice a week, his cleaning lady dusted the shelves, where it was demonstrated to clients that there was no need to be afraid, it wouldn’t hurt at all.

  At all the other windows, the blinds were drawn and the curtains lowered. There was no way to know therefore, whether things went quite as smoothly for the dentist’s patients as they had been led to hope. Probably he used gas. Or might it be that he had taken such good care ofeveryone’s teeth that he had simply put himself out of business?

  Abandoning the marigolds to a lingering death he returned to his bags. Fortunately Hartmann luggage is designed for people who have no patience with porters: his hands gripped the moulded leather as naturally as though he had picked up a pair of perfectly mated foils. He took his way west along a residential street that promised to take him more directly than the boulevard bounding the park back to the railway office.

  He had not quite lost sight of the police station before he saw it ahead on the left, set back only a few feet from the pavement: his new home, the converted gatehouse he had leased through Chandler & Carr. There, at the corner of the steep tile roof, was the glided weathercock he had intended to take down as his first act of possession. There was that single dormer window, standing open now as it had stood open in all the photographs, like certain celebrated politicians who can command, during an entire career, only a single facial expression, which they wear, like a badge of office, to every function they attend. There (he stood directly before the gatehouse now) was the big red number torn living from a first-form workbook for arithmetic and screwed to the oak muntin of the door:

  6

  And there, with his hand resting on it, was the brass knob of that door.

  The hand and the knob rotated clockwise ninety degrees.

  The door swung open.

  The furniture that he might have bought (could he have afforded it) yesterday in London–the chairs he had seen at Mallett’s, the table from J. Cornelius, the Sirhaz carpet, the Riesener secretaire, even the three-legged, spiraling object that had amused him momentarily by its studious lack of any other purpose than that of standing, as now, upright against a wall–was disposed about the room, his living room, just as he might himself have disposed it. It was as though the usual gap between desire and necessity had been bridged during some freakish fit to absent-mindedness on the part of old Father Reality, temporarily indisposed with sunspots. His first sensation could not be anything except pleasure, for here were all his pumpkins turned into carriages with the gilt still fresh and the price tags in full view. But if one is not willing to believe in fairy godmothers, such pleasures burst at a finger’s touch: they are not real.

  What then, with any certainty, was?

  He thought he recognized the answer in a mirror, until he noticed with chagrin, that his trouserfly had been left unbuttoned.

  By himself?

  No. Though heseemed to remember, now, forgetting to do this.

  The Village, this splendid room, the mirror in its frame of ormolu, and even the image in the mirror were not to be trusted. What, then, was?

  His body, the body beneath these wrinkled evening clothes, that could be trusted.

  And his mind.

  Because these things could not be tampered with.

  He could trust (as finally, we all must) himself.

  Chapter Four

  The Villagers

  “Can I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “Please. I am trying to reach a number in London-COVentry-6121.” “I’m sorry, there is no provision for me to accept long distance calls from a public telephone.” “AndI’m sorry, but this is an urgent call. I have no telephone at my residence. I’m sure the party who answers will accept the charges.” “I’m sorry, there is no provision—”

  “Then let me speak to your supervisor.”

  A click, a hum, two clicks, and a muted rattle. Then she said: “COVentry-6121?” “Yes.”

  “I will see if there is a line free.” Then, after a suitable interval: “I am sorry, but at present our outside lines are all engaged. If you would like to wait, I will call back as soon as—” “I’ll try and place the call later; thank you.”

  He left the glass booth, and the man with goitres who had been fretting outside the door all this while rushed in and began to speak excitedly into the telephone in a language that resembled Bulgarian. He had not bothered to dial.

  He returned to his seat on the flagstone terrace, at the table farthest from the chirruping little orchestra. He looked out to the sea where, a brighter white amid the whiteness of the midday haze, a sailboat came ab
out and made toward the northern limit of the bay. He took a small cigar from his leather case and lighted it, shielding the match against a salt breeze that puttered aimlessly about the terrace, fluttering the fringes of umbrellas, the pages of menus, the hems of skirts, moving now in from the sea and then a moment later moving out toward it, fitful as a child with nothing he can do and no one he can play with.

  The waitress returned to his table and asked, in a voice as crisp as the black nylon of her uniform whether he had made up his mind.

  “Coffee.”

  “Just coffee? Wouldn’t you like to see the pastry cart?” “No, just coffee.”

  “A sandwich perhaps?”

  “Very well, a roast beef sandwich.”

  She shook her head. “We don’tdo roast beef, sir. When you’ve made up your mind, I’ll come back.” She remained standing by his table, looking westward to the obscured horizon. Her hand brushed a gauze of blond hair from her eyes.

  “It’s a remarkable view,” he said, “from up here.”

  “Yes, it must be. Everyone says so. And some days it’s much better than this. You can see all the way out there.” “You must become quite busy here, this time of year.”

  “Never much busier than this, really, and never much quieter either.” “But the tourists …?”

  “Oh, tourists never find their wayhere . You’re not a tourist, are you?” “More or less. Unless, just by being here, I’m not.”

  She smiled morosely. “That’s rather good–I’ll have to remember that. But I’d better get your coffee now. And I’ll see if we have any roast beef left.” She hurried off toward the small brick building behind the platform where the orchestra of three old men was wending its weary way through Ziehrer’sFaschingskinder Waltz .