Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  I assumed, in my broken soul, that I was being marched to execution. Even this belief failed to stir anything in me. If I could not save Siuzan then death was the least that I deserved.

  But of course we were not to be executed. In fact, and by the standards of the camp, our punishment was mild: we were hanged upside down, by a rope attached to one leg only, from a frame not far from the barrack. I barely cared. The headless, lacking a head (pardon me for stating the obvious), cannot feel uncomfortable from the sensation of blood rushing there. Instead, batlike, I was a pendant of deadening despair. I had failed Siuzan. Physical discomfort did, eventually, intrude upon my thoughts, but this had the effect of intensifying my self-loathing and misery. The problem was in those of my limbs not actually suspended. The left leg, circled at the ankle, was supported. The right one either folded down so that the knee touched my chest (a most uncomfortable position), or flopped the other way, behind me (which put a painful strain upon my hip); or else I tucked my right foot in behind my left one, which brought relief for a while but which soon enough brought on cramps and sparkles of agony. My arms were easiest if they simply flopped to the side, but this too became unbearable after a while, and I was forced to move them about, fold them against my upside-down chest, or lift them so that they ran along my sides towards my hips. Sleep was out of the question.

  But I could not have slept, even had I been tucked into the most comfortable of beds. I was filled with both a brute, acidic fury and a monstrous unhappiness. Or perhaps the fury was the unhappiness, or perhaps it was the unhappiness that took the shape of fury - an impotent and inward-turning fury. It burned me as a fuse, or as a candle-wick, drawing the clogging sour wax up through my inverted body to sparkle into the black sky as stars, silver braided night-black clouds, and the coin-sized sliced half of moon and, eventually, a much larger conflagration just out of sight beyond the eastern horizon that made the eager angles of the mountain range shine and glow like neon. By the dawn I had lost all sensation in my left foot, and had grown used to the continual aching and straining in my body; but the fury in my head was a fresh and flaying as ever.

  Geza, dangling three metres from me, said nothing but: ‘I am sorry’, which phrase he uttered early. I was too consumed in my tormenting self even to answer him. I should have thanked him, for he had tried selflessly to help me and was now suffering on my account. But I was grieving Siuzan. There is nothing more selfish than grief, except perhaps self-hatred, and that too is a form of grief.

  Six

  The sun had been up an hour or more when two officers came by, released the ropes and dropped us, sacks of meal rather than men, to the dust below. We both pulled ourselves up until we were sitting, and spread our legs before us, rubbing and chafeing the skin to allow the blood back into its former channels.

  ‘Breakfast,’ said one of the superiors, and that was all he said. Indeed, at no time then or afterwards were we interrogated, or questioned, as to what we had been doing. I still do not know what the senior staff thought of it - perhaps they assumed it was a prank, or that we were trying to send a message to family, or that we hoped to access illicit or pornographic images of women in underclothing. I don’t know. I assume they didn’t care. The issue, to them, was whether we obeyed orders or not, and nothing more. A very clarifying perspective on the universe.

  Haltingly, we limped into the barrack to find the porridge bin already there and people helping themselves to ladlefuls.

  After a night of no sleep, and of furious self-accusation and internal strife, I was exhausted. There was another day of marching and drilling to get through; and I managed to do this. I am not quite sure how: for I was not awake, nor yet asleep, through most of the physical manoeuvres. But for this type of drill the higher mind functions are not only unnecessary, but a positive disadvantage. A soldier with nothing more than a spinal cord could, in a manner of speaking, drill; and this is what I was. I marched. I lay down when I was told to and wriggled under netting on my belly. I trotted back to barrack with the others and partook of soup. I came out again, half-alive, and performed all the physical actions required of me. But my conscious thoughts, of the sort that constitute one’s self-aware I, were fission-hot and ugly. I relished my bodily discomfort and fatigue and the near hypnotic state in which I worked through the orders, because this is what I deserved for my betrayal of the woman I loved to a shameful execution.

  The thought of what I had done, or failed to do, was nettles growing inside my mind.

  That evening I returned to the barrack and ate again, but did not take part in the conversation with which the others eagerly filled up the time before the lights went out. They were pleased with themselves for finally having determined the way to share the portion from the soup bin fairly, irrespective of how little, or much (and the portion was, presumably deliberately, very changeable) we were given. Each man took a half ladleful; then the ladle was filled from what remained and passed round everybody who took a single sip before passing it on to his fellow; and the ladle was filled again, if this was possible, until everybody had eaten a whole half-ladle and as many sips as were in the pot. Some inevitably received more sips than others, but we all took turns to move from the front of the line to the back, so over time this evened out.

  ‘We’ve scored our first victory!’ declared Syrophoenician, hand clutching hand and wagging over his head at the ends of his upreaching arms - an absurd, and comical, yet characteristically theatrical gesture of triumph.

  I rubbed my forefinger slowly around the anklet of purple that lay, beneath the level of my skin, all around the bottom of my left leg, where it connects with the foot.

  Save I alone, everybody was laughing at Syrophoenician’s mummery. One or two even cheered, and then the number above the door flipped to 8:00 and the sound was instantly gone.

  Day followed day. I buried thought, or at least I tried to do so. I was only intermittently successful. The rote of training helped me. One day we had to walk underwater. ‘The ladder is laid along the bottom of the lake,’ the superior of the day declared. ‘You must walk by tucking your toes under the rungs of this ladder, and in this fashion proceed to the far side. Anybody who floats to the surface will feel the truncheon.’ Knowledge of this last detail concentrated the mind very effectively upon tucking under one’s toes, and creeping forward through the murky water. The purpose of this exercise was for us to become used to the facts that our new army-issue neck valves contained a ring of breathable compressed air, and that it was possible to relax the metal sphincter such that we could breath underwater - or, we were assured, in space vacuum. It was a strange experience. A quarter of an hour, or maybe a little more, of breathable air had been sequestered by the device from the general air, but it did not feel, as I worked my lungs and hooped my chest inwards and outwards, the way that actual air does. It felt thin and unsustaining, and part of the mind rebelled against the sensation. For some of my comrades this sparked panic; but not to me. I had found, as I moved my feet through the awkward ballet of snagging underwater rung after underwater rung, an ideal correlative to my misery. I was breathing the very air of misery, barely enough to keep life in me. Depression, you see, is a sort of asthma of the mind. It is a strangulation of the emotions. I could not see my feet. I could only see my hands if I tucked them in at the elbows and presented them, directly, to my visual receptors. Everything was particulate and grey.

  I emerged from at the far side of the lake, and the heat and light broke over my head like a cosh. It was better in the gunmetal-coloured murk of the lake. That was my element now.

  Bil Costra returned to us after his time in the hospital, but a querulous yearning for self-protection had become entwined with his nature. He was over-cautious, which in many of the training exercises proved more dangerous than boldness or even recklessness. He always seemed to be bruising himself. Once he ran at a trench, ordered to leap it, and instead of running hard and trusting his legs to the leap, he stuttered at the edge, and
fell, barking his chest against the lip of the far side and snapping his collarbone. For more than a fortnight after that, and despite the intervention of the medical officer (who implanted a staple to link the bones), Costra spoke no words except words of complaint. ‘How it hurts,’ he would say. ‘The edges of the bones rub one against the other. Oh! Oh! Oh!’ It was a tedious business listening to him.

  I escaped serious injury during training, although I was often bruised. On occasion - though much more rarely than at the beginning - I would receive the blow of the truncheon, as would the others. But where pain continued in hideous freshness for Bil Costra, it became stale and tedious to me, and I paid it little attention.

  When I thought of my great failing, things were much worse. Prompted by some oblique association, or chain of associations, Siuzan Delage’s face (say) would reoccur to me, and this would provoke the remembrance of what I had done. That would be a bad day. I became fixated upon the illogical conceit that, lacking eyes with which to cry, my tears were building up within me in a reservoir of grief. I knew this was not physiologically possible, for tears are created in the same head that vents them, but it expressed some truth about the way I felt.

  Syrophoenician, in his clumsy and bright-coloured way, tried to console me. One time he told me ‘What’s done is done; it can’t be undone. There’s no road backwards in time.’ But this was no consolation, for it reminded me of the terrible implacability of my action, or rather of my lack of action. If I could go - not even travel myself, but merely send back a voice to myself in the police cell, I would say to my earlier self, Confess now! Your chance will not come again! This fantasy played itself through my thoughts many times.

  Other times Syrophoenician would say, ‘Think how things might have been worse! She will still have her life, even though her head has been taken.’ But I knew that, for a person of Siuzan’s purity and perfection, a shameful life - a life of headless ignominy - was much worse than death.

  On none of these occasions did I reply to Syrophoenician’s attempts at consolation. For several weeks I talked to nobody, except once, in a small voice, to thank Geza for attempting to help me, and for enduring the dangling punishment with me. But otherwise I was quite silent, and the troop seemed to accept that I had withdrawn from the world of conversation. They included me, as much as they could; and some evenings before the lights went out it was almost warming to sit in the circle with them all and listen to their chatter. But I did not take part. I had been severed from the world. Or I had severed myself by my cowardice.

  In the daytime I pushed my body harder than any of the troop, throwing myself into whatever the Superiors ordered. This won me no plaudits, and did not distinguish me in their eyes; they were not, after all, interested in distinguishing any of the headless, but merely in rendering them efficient machines for prosecuting war. But I found a solace in the blanching fatigue of it, in the bruises and scratches, in the deep creaking ache inside my muscles.

  Sometimes I thought of the two companions who had walked with me to Cainon: of Gymnaste and of Mark Pol Treherne. Of the former I could not think with kindliness; the memory of his over-fastidious veracity was acid to the twisted metal sheet of my mind - for he also could have saved Siuzan, if he had chosen, by confessing to the crime, though the confession was a lie. His ‘truthfulness’ was, to me, nothing more than an absurd and prideful impediment to the saving of Siuzan. Of course I can see now that this simmering fury at Gymnaste was simply a transferred version of my fury at myself. For if Gymnaste could have confessed to the crime, even in his innocence, then how much more true was it to say that I could have confessed - asked three times, like Peter the apostle, and denying her three times too. Moreover there had been a greater motivation for me, for it was not Gymnaste but I who had loved her.

  Now she was wandering Cainon headless. Some nights I would lie in my bed and ponder where she was; had she returned to Doué, or remained in Cainon? Perhaps she was living amongst other headless continuing her mission, but now as one of the afflicted instead of a saintly headed helper. Perhaps she had made her way to Montmorillon, the Land of the Headless. Perhaps she had been made its queen.

  Several of us, myself included, developed clenching, painful guts and a loose and flowing stool, evidently from drinking from the toilet, which was not a clean source of water. Of course, once the diarrhoea started nobody wanted to drink from the toilet any more. The urge to defecate would possess me, and I would become no better than a cow producing its gushing cow-flop. If I were in the barrack I would run to the toilet. If it was occupied, as sometimes it was, I would find myself compelled to pour my lower guts upon the floor, and afterwards I would have to scoop it up with my bare hands - painstakingly wiping away every mark and streak with my fingers - or risk the truncheon in the morning. This was a filthy business, which I would perform completely naked, and after (if I had enough uninterrupted time) I would wash my body with toilet water and flush the last of it away. If I felt the telltale griping in my gut during parade, I begged permission to excuse myself. Sometimes this was granted; but if the superior were not in the mood this might result in me soiling myself and the ground beneath me. Then I would have to dig a bowl out of the dirt to contain my effluent and cover it over, and could only clean myself after with dust. My meadhres, hideously caked on the inside, I would clean in the toilet later when the chance arose.

  There were several other of the troop in the same position as I. But I alone secretly revelled in my degradation. This was what I deserved.

  ‘We have been foolish,’ Syrophoenician complained. ‘We ought to have reserved the toilet only for drinking, and not polluted it with our bodily wastes.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ scoffed Garten, ‘you feel we should have held inside all our waste matter, by holding our breath and crossing our legs?’

  ‘But,’ Syrophoenician insisted, ‘we might have gone outside and dug holes in the dirt in order to—’ But before he could complete this sentence Syrophoenician was compelled to run moaning to the toilet, where he stayed for long minutes.

  ‘Our preacherly comrade forgets,’ said Costra, to nobody in particular, ‘that the barrack door is locked at night. What must we do in that circumstance?’

  Eventually our guts restored themselves. Nobody risked drinking from the toilet after that. We were often thirsty, but it seemed that there was enough fluid in our soup to keep us alive.

  Several weeks passed for me in a sort of purposeless, unfocused agony, the only release from which was the mentally uncoupled business of drilling, of training. Depression is a silting down of thought, a sliming over of the pebbles that constitute the course of thought’s bright flow. It is a cumulative thing. It becomes a habituated state of mind.

  Every two weeks we were ordered to line up in the Medical Officer’s anteroom. We were not seen singly; instead a nurse came out - white-uniformed, but with the pale blue armband of a regular officer. Each fortnight he gave us each our pharmocopy pouches, and plastic cups of clean water, and we gobbled them down.

  Outside the brightness of the sunshine was like a form of bleach; it overloaded the information processing capacities of my software. The height and near-palpable weight of the mountains beyond the perimeter seemed, somehow, a specific rebuke to me.

  We learnt to fight without weapons, the forceful ballet of punches and hand strokes that might disable or kill an unarmed enemy. ‘I do not believe,’ declared Syrophoenician one evening, ‘that we will ever encounter an unarmed enemy. We will have guns, as will they. We should concentrate upon mastering guns. This training is fruitless.’

  ‘I disagree. I may use it,’ said Geza, ‘upon my comrade headless, if he becomes too preacherly.’

  ‘And I may use it,’ laughed Syrophoenician, ‘to defend myself against cowardly assault.’

  It is not possible, I daresay, to maintain the full intensity of rage on any subject for more than a few weeks, even on such a one (The woman I loved! The one woman in my life I was fated
to love above all others! The perfect woman - violated and beheaded!) that touched me so completely. Fire, being a combustion, is always in the process of rendering itself inert. I found that my fury became a feature of my existence, like a leg or a lung. What I mean by this is that it became something that only very rarely intruded itself on my consciousness. It did not fade and it did not vanish, but it ceased to occupy the centre of my thoughts. What is inside a volcano? Is it the fire and gleaming lava that washes the face with heat? Or soot and black dust, choking hillfuls of choking ash? Or perhaps the question should be: which quantity outweighs the other? This is a difficult mathematics.

  I settled.

  My misery became habitual to me, and therefore a matter of indifference. I suppose, had I thought about it, I might have preferred my medium to be happiness rather than misery; but I did not think about it. Thought was no friend. Better was the drill.