Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  “But ought not a Number 1, if he wants to play God, preserve something like God’s silence and invisibility? One is anabsolute idea, and reality never measures up to absolutes. As for Number 2, you’ll probably be granted an audience soon enough. Dictators are usually queasy about exposing themselves to the dictated. Understandably.”

  “Have you met him? Off the screen, that is.”

  “ ‘Met’ would be too strong a word. I’veseen him. Which is more than my sister can claim. They’re not friends, but I don’t hold that against him. My sister is hard to get to know. But to return to my theory: take her number as a for-instance. She’s Number 14, which is twice seven. AndI’m Number 7!”

  “Are you twins?”

  “No, but there are nearly seven years between us.”

  “And seven deadly sins.”

  “Andsixth columns. I know all this symbolism is silly, but I do have the feeling that there must be some sort of what would you call it? Not link.”

  “Affinity?”

  “Yes! An affinity between us, seeing that you’re Number 6 and I’m Number 7. At least it’s true of me and Number 8. We’re tremendous friends. At least we were.”

  “What happened? Did you try and help him escape?”

  “Oh no! 8 was very much the company man. What happened is he went around the twist. Paranoia,soaring paranoia. It’s the people who are loyalist to the Village who are the most susceptible. They begin to think everyone is betraying the cause but themselves. And Number 1, ofcourse–no one ever doubtshis loyalty. Which is another good reason he should be invisible. No one doubts what he can’t see.”

  “But they do doubt Number 2’s loyalty?”

  “Especially his.”

  “Speak of the devil,” said a voice from behind the damask curtains, “and I appear.”

  Grandmother Bug crumbled out of her chair with a nervous squeak, dropping cup and saucer on the carpet. The cold untasted tea formed a dark oval that overlapped the interlocking pears.

  “We’d better be going now,” Number 7 shouted, wrestling the old woman back to her feet. “It’s how late I hadn’t realized and—”

  “It was a pleasure,” he said, opening the door for them.

  “The pleasure was mine,” Grandmother Bug chirruped, remembering her party manners. “I don’t knowwhen I’ve had such a lovely little pleasure.” Her hand fluttered about the high collar of her dress, in search of the button of the coat she had not worn these last thirty years.

  Number 7 pulled her out the door roughly. “Weboth don’t know,” he said to the closing door. “And thanks a lot.”

  He faced the drawn drapes which were speckled by the cold flickering light of the television.

  “Thank you, Number 2. You accomplished that very economically. I hope you’re not looking for company, too.”

  “No. I thought I’d take the opportunity to offer you my congratulations on your new honor. Congratulations! And to tell you that your first mayoral duty should arrive at your doorstep any minute.”

  “It can sleep there if it wishes, but it won’t be let in. Ipromised the voters that I’d never perform the duties of my office, and one must keep faith with the electorate.”

  “That would be unkind. You see, this is her first day out in the Village, and she’s still extremely disorientated. It’s the Mayor who explains to newcomers our little customs and mores.”

  “She? Who?”

  “Number 41. But I see—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “—that she’s arrived. So I’ll leave the two of you alone. Do try and be some comfort to her, Number 6. The poor thing doesn’t know where to turn at this point.” The faint glow faded behind the damask.

  He went to the door. Even now, despite the suspicion Number 2 had awakened (the hope, as well?), he might have bolted it. If there had been a bolt.

  He opened the door.

  “Liora!”

  She took a step backward, staring at him, with that ill-feigned unconcern one pays to lunatics and freaks.

  “Pardon me, but I was told that this was the residence of the Mayor. Are you …” She looked at the scrap of paper in her hand. “… Number 6?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Number 41

  He twisted the dial its clockwise limit; the living room became a glare of incandescence in which they examined each other–he to confirm that this was indeed Liora, she as though she were encountering for the first time and without protection the chief suspect in a notorious murder trial, in the very room where the corpse had been discovered.

  She was, unquestionably, Liora. Her appearance had not been modified even by such little changes of emphasis as one expects to encounter in a woman of fashion after a two-months’ absence. The brown suit was familiar to him, the bracelet disguising a watch, the emerald pendant. Her modish Sassoon haircut had grown out to an unmodish length, and he remembered her telling him, during their dinner at the Connaught, that she’d decided to let it grow long again. By all the signatures of identity–her carriage, her speech, the small transitions between two almost identical expressions–she declared herself to be Liora.

  “Do you find the light better in here?” he asked.

  “The implication being that I should recognize you? I don’t, of course, but I expect you’ll want to carry on with whatever little masque you’ve gotten up for the occasion.”

  Even that “gotten” was hers, a declaration of her origins as convincing as any stamped on a passport. (In her case, he recalled, even more convincing, for she had traveled usually as a citizen of a long-defunct banana republic.)

  “Is this a game, Liora, and if so whose side have you taken? Or am I being punished for having declined your recentest proposal?”

  “Shouldn’t you offer me a seat before you open the script? Evidently, the plot is elaborate. And Iam tired, as you know.”

  “By all means, sit where you like. I’m sorry I can’t offer you a Scotch. The last two members of the committee that was here to inform me of my mayoralty left just before you arrived. You can see from the debris that they were thorough.” He lifted the empty green bottle to the light.

  “I never drink Scotch.”

  “There’s gin.”

  “Gin-and-ginger. Thank you.”

  “When I was in London last week,” he said, uncapping a Schweppes, “I tried to call you. Your line had been disconnected. A month before that I reached a bookshop when I dialed the number. Where have you been this month?”

  “So, for all your mummery, this is only to beanother interrogation?”

  He handed the drink to her. “You think I’m one of them?”

  “The alternative would seem to be thatI am. Or that I’m unhinged.”

  He considered other possibilities.

  “Or,” he added after a long pause, “that I am. Unhinged, that is. They do tamper with people’s heads.”

  “If it’s to be this complicated, I shall need pencil and paper to keep it all straight. Let us, for the sake of proper exposition, define our presumptive identities. First, my name is not Liora, it’s Lorna. I’ve been told that so long as I’m detained here that I’m to answer to the name of Number 41, though if you care to tell me now that I’m another number entirely I won’t protest that. I was abducted on the seventh of July, from my flat in Bayswater. It was done with something like ether, I suppose, unless there’s some more contemporary drug that accomplishes the same thing. I don’t know how long I was kept unconscious. I woke in the hospital here, feeling unaccountably weak and quite accountably confused. At first I thought I’d had an accident. I’ve always been terrified that some day I’d injure my brain. A woman doctor with unmatched eyes ran me through an interminable battery of tests. I cooperated for some time, since the tests gave me a sense of security, of being undamaged. Then the hospital staff became inquisitive about things that ought not to interest hospitals, and I stopped cooperating. Some imbecile of a male nurse released me this morning. Of course I immediate
ly tried to get out of the Village. When it had been demonstrated that one does notleave this Village, that one mustescape from it, I went to the local restaurant and enjoyed the view from the Tarpeian Rock. The imbecile from the hospital found me there and gave me a slip of paper with your name–your number, rather–and a sketch of how I was to find your house. And there you have it, everything I know. Now lay downyour cards and let’s see if you have a canasta.”

  “Do you know the Connaught in London?”

  “A hotel?”

  “And a restaurant. Near the American Embassy. You’re still an American, aren’t you, in your new identity?”

  “It’s a relief to know you’re not going to try and persuade me I’m actually Turkish. As for the Connaught, I’m certain I’ve never done more than walk past it, if that. The only hotel I know in London is the Savoy, and that was ages ago.”

  “Then let me begin my story by telling you about the dinner we ate at the Connaught on the evening of June 6th.”

  “And then,” she said, ending his tale for him, “the door-bell rang, and it was me, the girl of your dreams.”

  “Was it? I’m still trying to decide. You’ll admit that my story is no more improbable than yours?”

  “Only somewhat more ornamented. It remains, however, a story. You, on your side of the mirror, will claim the same thing. It was a long way to go to reach the same impasse. Again we see that either I am lying or you are lying.”

  “Or neither,” he added.

  “Or we are both Cretans, but we can’t consider that possibility with any pretense to consistency, though dramatically it would be the most appealing.”

  “If I’m lying, it would mean that you’re of interest to our jailers on your own account. Are you?”

  “Hopefully, I’m interesting to all kinds of people. Contrariwise, ifI’m lying, my arrival would be part of the general plot against your sanity, yes?”

  “Yes. And if neither of us is lying, it’s a plot against both our sanities.”

  “It’s a nice theory,” she said, if only on account of allthemachinery that would have to be involved. If one of us is lying, then we must act out a simple melodrama of innocence pitted against iniquity. While, if we’re both perfectlysincere in contradicting each other, then it’s a matter ofour much larger innocence andtheir enormous iniquity. There would be ambiguities, in every glance and clues buried in every commonplace. So if we’re to continue in our roles, stagecraft as well as etiquette seems to demand that we assumethat to be the case. Do you agree?”

  “For the time being.”

  “So it stands thus–that we both think we’re telling the truth. Now, Mr. Pirandello, resolve that.”

  “Either I did know you and you are Liora, or I didn’t and you aren’t. If the second case obtains, then I’ve been brainwashed into thinking otherwise, and the brainwashing would have to have been donebefore I was brought here, since I tried to call you within hours of my arrival.”

  “Possibly while those other memories were being amputated, these were being grafted on.”

  “Possibly,” he said. “But I’m inclined to believe that it wasn’t anyone connected with the Village who arranged my amnesia. If they had, why would they be bothering with me now? They’d have what they wanted.”

  “Perhaps they want you to work for them.” A tinselly laugh underlined her irony.

  “Then why set me loose after they’d ordered my brain to their liking? Simply sowe could dine at the Connaught?”

  “Let’s grant that Occam’s razor won’t slice that, though we’re alreadymiles from the simplest solution. You think we must posit another set oftheys to account for your amnesia?”

  “I think so. If there is someone who is desperate toobtain information, there must also be someone equally desperate to keep it to themselves. Couldn’t you imagine your own people doing the same thing, if they thought there was a likelihood of your telling their secrets to, for instance, our jailers?”

  “I can imagine it all too easily. So, I’ll allow you both sets oftheys . The problem then arises, why would these othertheys want to make you believe you knew me? After all, it was thesetheys , here in the Village, who have arranged our meeting.”

  “And it’s a problem I have no solution for. Unless boththeys have interlocking Boards of Directors.”

  “The mind boggles.”

  “That’s what they’re hoping, Liora–that the mind will boggle.”

  “Lorna, please.”

  “There’s one other reason why I don’t think the manufacturers of my amnesia could also be the engineers of the presumed ‘false memory’–and that is the clear recollection I have of our dinner. They could have inserted false memories into our past, but how could they have dibbled with my future? That dinner took placeafter they’d done their work, and immediately after the dinner I set off from Paddington. The next morning–or to be precise, the next time I woke–I was here.”

  “This dinner that you harp on–just how distinctlydo you recall it? Most of the dinners inmy memory are jumbled into one big stewpot of leftover scraps.”

  “I remember what the waiter looked like, the ring on his hand, the wax on his mustache. It was you, in fact, who pointed out those two details. I remember the bouquet on our table, a single rose in a silver vase. I remember howyou looked and things you said. I remember thetaste of each dish, the wines that accompanied each course. With the bisque we had a Solera, Verdalho Madeira, 1872. With the salmon, Coindreu—”

  “I’m certain if Ihad had dinner with you and you’d played the wine-snob so grossly, I would have laughed in a most memorable way.”

  “My snobbery took me in the other direction: I didn’tmention the wines then. But, as the dinner set me back almost fifty pounds, I do recall the vintages quite well.”

  “It strikes me that this scene isunnaturally clear. Especially since the backdrop to it, your whole pastbefore that, is as misty as the moors in November. Didn’t it bother youthen that there were these blank spots?”

  “My entire past isn’t gone, just key areas, and I can only say that I didn’t notice their absence then. One doesn’t miss something, after all, until one begins looking for it. Possibly I’d been specifically instructed not to go delving where they had excavated. By …” He smiled wryly. “I’ve blocked the word.”

  “By post-hypnotic suggestion?” she suggested.

  He nodded, saying no more.

  “Yes. Yes, there would have had to have been something like that, if your story is to make any sense. Even so, I’m still suspicious about that evening. The focus is too sharp, and the colors are too clear. It’s like a good Hollywood movie where everything is more real than reality. What I would suggest is this–that the whole thing, all that you think you remember about me, including the dinner, was fashioned right here in this Village, either on the day you arrived (for you admit to waking in the station withoutquite knowing how you’d got there), or else you never left the Villageat all . The whole interlude in London was a dream, an illusionthey manufactured. You’ll notice that my theory doesn’t require two sets oftheys .”

  “Why stop there? An even simpler theory would be that my entire life has been a dream.”

  “And mine as well. Or we may both be figures in some larger dream, though that won’t solve our problems, for surely the dreamer dreaming us will require us to solve his conundrums as though we were real. But whimsy aside, I’m serious in suggesting that the false memories were graftedhere .”

  “To what end?” he asked.

  “We’d have to know to what larger end we are their means in order to answer that. Perhaps it’s enough that we should be asking ourselves questions like these. What is real? Who am I? Do I wake or dream? Then, when we’re hopelessly muddled, they’ll tell us the answers they’ve already prepared.”

  “All right, that takes care of my case. I’ll agree that if my memory of you is false, it was falsified here.Now , what if it is your memories that have been remodeled?”
>
  “In principle it would amount to the same thing. There’s no problem, in my case, as to when they could have gone to work on me, since I did wake up in the hospital. However, with me they’d have had to revise a lifetime’s memories; for you they need only insert a chapter entitled ‘Liora’ here and there. How importantwas she to you? Were you in love?”

  “In and out. We see-sawed very skillfully, so that we seldom were both in at the same time, or out.”

  “That much sounds like me, at least. What particulars can you tell me about her? For instance, was she married or single?”

  “We tried not to be inquisitive. When we were alone, we would pretend that our lives were uncomplicated. I believed you were single.”

  “I’m divorced, twice over. When did you meet her? What things did you do together?”

  “I remember our first meeting quite well. But I should remind you that we probably have listeners. There are more bugs in this cottage than in an embassy in Washington. It must have been in order that one of us should start answering such questions that this interview was arranged. I can answer indirectly by asking you a question: have you ever been in Bergamo?”

  “Bergamo … I wasthrough Lombardy at different times, but eventually all those churches and palaces and piazzas, they blur. Isn’t it likely that we were all in Bergamo at one time or another?”

  “We?”

  “People in our line of work.”

  “Then you admit that much at least.”

  It was as though he’d seen across these endless mists of speculation a single, real, hard-edged object, a bicycle with a dented fender, a kiosk papered with the morning’s headlines.

  “It’s a trifling admission. You–or they–had to havesome reason for abducting me. Even if my charms rivaled Helen’s, I could have been raped without all thisequipment .”

  “Then there’s nothing in my story that relates to the worldyou know? If you’re Liora, they can’t have reshaped your entire past. The easiest thing would have been forthem to chop out the scenes where I appear and fill up any cracks with putty. But they can’t have filled all the cracks. Life, even when it seems fragmented, is too much of a piece to allow such operations not to leave scars.”