Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘No, it’s not. I don’t wish to bury the memory. I must know. I must know this one thing. Was it I who attacked you?’ It took a great deal for me to say that out loud.

  For a while she did not reply. I heard the sound of night insects, tiny as raindrops and scurrying through the air, miniature distant scrapes and clicks that built together into the chorus of the night-time. Siuzan seemed to be thinking very long and hard about my question.

  ‘I don’t wish to talk about that night,’ she said finally.

  ‘But this is evasion!’ I said in a low voice. ‘I must assume that such an answer indicates that I was indeed the attacker.’

  ‘You shouldn’t assume so.’

  ‘I must know, Siuzan.’

  ‘You already know,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘Do you know that I love you?’ she asked, almost fiercely.

  I could not answer.

  ‘Does anything else matter? You - listen to me, Jon Cavala. You did not hurt me.’

  ‘Siuzan . . .’

  ‘I cannot be plainer than that. Now listen to me a second time: leave these thoughts. Tomorrow I must be at work earlier than usual, for it is my last day and I must work longer before collecting my final salary. I may not see you tomorrow morning, but I will be waiting on the steps outside the house tomorrow evening. When you come back from your work I will be there, waiting for you. When you come back we will start off together.’

  ‘Siuzan . . .’

  ‘No, listen now: we will walk through the dusk, and we will be well outside the city by nightfall. We will find a quiet place, away from the road, and eat our supper, we will no longer belong to ordinary society. Then we will roll ourselves into a blanket together to share our heat, and so we will sleep. In the morning after we will walk through the heat of the day, every step taking us closer towards our promised land. That is the only important thing.’

  She embraced me again, and then she asked once, and then twice, and then three times, whether I understood her. Finally I said ‘Yes’, and she made her way up the stairs to her room. And that was how we parted that night.

  I went through to mine. I lay down.

  Seven

  I slept, but the truth of my past was not revealed to me in a dream. The headless do not dream.

  In the morning my nausea had passed away, and I ate some pap for breakfast. But my thoughts were still oriented around the hollow place in my mind.

  I walked through the city to my workplace. This, my last day in the city, should have been a day filled with the excitements of future possibility. I did not feel that way.

  The task we all face is to come to terms with ourselves. Or, to put the matter another way: we must determine for ourselves to what extent we can accept love from another person if we have no love for ourselves.

  I stopped at the fountain, in the little square halfway between the house and my workplace, and I sat for a while. The night before she had said, ‘You did not hurt me.’ Those were her very words. I pondered the possible meanings of this statement. She may have been saying, ‘Despite assaulting me you did not hurt me’, as if to say, ‘You did me no permanent hurt’, as if to say, ‘I forgive you’. But this was intolerable. If I were this person, then I literally deserved the death which I had hoped, incompetently, to bring on myself in order to save Siuzan’s head. I deserved the death I had planned to inflict on Mark Pol. How could I walk with this pure woman into the desert to start a new life with such an act on my conscience?

  But love prompts hope, and I also thought: perhaps she had meant the words literally: ‘You did not hurt me’ - another way of saying, ‘It was not you that hurt me - it was another man’. Perhaps she had been saying, ‘It was Mark Pol’, or even, ‘It was Gymnaste’. My heart jumped a little at this possibility. Surely one of the duties love brings with it is the necessity of believing the truthfulness of the loved other? Why could I not take her words just as they were said?

  But then, a downstroke. What if, in saying, ‘It was not you that hurt me - it was another man’ she meant only that it had been an earlier version of me? Perhaps her words could be construed to mean, ‘The you who violated me was a different person to the you with whom I have fallen in love’? But this would hurl me back into the pit again. She might consider the two Jon Cavalas she had met, with an interlude of two years in between, to be two different people; but for me those years had been a continuum. If I was capable of such barbarity before, then I was capable again. Was Mark Pol right when he said that all men are capable of this thing?

  Words can be very hard to understand.

  I do not mean by this that they are incomprehensible. Something the reverse is true, in fact: that there are too many possible meanings, too great a range of comprehension. And yet my future life devolved upon the extent to which I could understand these words.

  I resolved: I needed at any rate to get to work, for the money for a month’s work was no trivial matter and I would forfeit it all if I missed this day. But after work I would go back to the house and meet Siuzan, and together we would walk from the city. Perhaps then, away from the crowds, when it was just the two of us underneath the stars, we would be able to talk more about this. One way or another she could make her meaning plain to me.

  I stood up. There was still hope.

  This, insofar as I can express it, was the resolution I reached in my heart: it was not my proper business to judge myself. If I could not abrogate this business of judgement to the person I loved, then love meant little or nothing. Could I really insist that my self-revulsion trumped her love for me? Could I pretend that my insight was greater than hers? That would be arrogance indeed.

  I thought to myself: this unsettlement in my heart may not be quickly or easily smoothed away. Yet with time and labour it might be smoothed for all that. I thought to myself: was my love for Siuzan, and the prospect of a new life with her, not worth this labour, or this time? Of course it was.

  So I resolved: I would swallow my self-disgust.

  I made my way to my place of work. Time was tight, now, and so I was in a hurry. Because I was in a hurry I almost did not see her - or if I saw her, perhaps I did not quite recognise her. It’s possible I saw her before, and did not recognise what I saw, for my mind was in another space. My foot was literally upon the threshold; I could see the check-in board, and the supervisor standing beside it; I could see one of my headless co-workers tapping the datascreen with his name. It lacked five minutes of the hour. I was at work, and in time, with moments to spare.

  But nevertheless I had to pull up my stride. I had to withdraw my foot and step back outside into the morning light.

  She was waiting, twenty yards along the road from my workplace. She was waiting at a bus-stop. All the many weeks I had been going in through that factory door every single morning I had not noticed her there before. Indeed I never did find out whether she generally caught the bus from that stop, or whether this was some unusual quirk in her morning routine. Surely it was the latter. Could I have walked past her so many times without even noticing? I find it hard to believe, but it might be so.

  Everything lurched in my mind. Geologists talk of the occasional upheaval in the orientation of the world’s magnetic field, when it switches its planetwide webwork in a great epileptic convulsion and north pole becomes south and south pole becomes north. This was such a moment.

  I walked over to the bus-stop. I was shivering slightly as I walked. I felt a weakness in my legs. She was standing there, inside the transparent plastic half-shell.

  ‘Siuzan?’ I said.

  She looked round at me.

  ‘Siuzan Delage?’

  ‘Do I know you?’ she asked.

  There was no mistaking her face. It was precisely her full, straight nose, precisely the substantial line of lid and eyebrow about her sharp blue eyes. There had been many times, over the preceding years, when I had tried to remember precisely what she looked like, and had been infuriate
d by my inability so to do. But to see the face again was, in part, to think, Of course! This is what she looks like! She looked extraordinarily like herself.

  ‘Siuzan,’ I said again.

  ‘I’m sorry, she said, smiling. ‘I’m sure I’ve worked with you over this last year - please don’t be offended if I can’t place you. Without the face to prompt us, you know, it’s hard for us headed to recognise the—’

  ‘I’m Jon Cavala,’ I said.

  Her face, still smiling, pondered; her eyes unfocused slightly as she searched her memory for my name, and found nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she started saying, and then, with a little ah! of recognition, ‘Jon? Jon Cavala? Is it you?’

  ‘Siuzan . . .’ I said bleakly.

  ‘But we walked together from Doué to - to here! Years ago, how many years, as many as three?’ She looked really delighted with herself to have remembered. ‘It was you, and those other two - you had all been beheaded in Doué, and we all of us trekked over the desert to Cainon. Now what were their names?’

  ‘Mark Pol Treherne,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, him! He was a lively character, I remember. And the other one, Gymnoplast, or Hymnoplast . . .’

  ‘Gymnaste.’

  ‘Just so. A quiet soul, I seem to remember. Good gracious, what a pleasant surprise! It has been so long. Imagine bumping into you here and now! What are you doing here?’

  I looked back at the entrance to the factory. ‘I work there,’ I said stupidly. What else should I say? I was conscious of a very sharp sense of the ridiculousness of my situation.

  ‘In that place? What does it do?’

  ‘It renders and processes fat.’

  ‘How wonderful that you have found a good job!’ she said brightly. ‘I work now as liaison between the authorities and headless such as yourself. I mean, I work here in Cainon. When I say liaison with headless such as yourself, I don’t mean such as you, James, for you have found a good job. More usually I work with headless who find it harder to readjust to society. What were you before your beheading? I knew once, but I’ve forgotten . . . weren’t you a—’

  ‘Poet,’ I said.

  ‘So you were! I remember now, and a famous one! It seems so long ago. Can it really be only three years? I was naïve. I remember, we arrived in the city and . . .’ She furrowed her brow, as if trying to remember.

  ‘You went into a chemist, to obtain pharmocopy for me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You did not come out again.’

  ‘What? Didn’t I? I’m sorry. How rude of me! Ah well . . . I remember now. I told the chemist what I wanted, for him to make up medication for a headless man, and he asked me some questions, and I told him the reason why. He was very shocked, I recall that. He was shocked that I had gone on such a journey, unescorted, with three headless. It was my first introduction to the prejudices of this city - the prejudice against the headless, I mean. He was quite shocked, I recall. He called the police, I think. After the fuss I came to find you, but you had all gone.’ Her smile wavered. ‘And, do you know, now that I look back - I haven’t thought of this for a long time - but now that I think of it, that was very rude of me, wasn’t it? Not saying goodbye. I apologise. But, then again, how could I find you afterwards, in so big city? Still, never mind. Never mind. You have fallen on your feet, as the phrase goes. What of the other two?’

  ‘We were arrested,’ I said dumbly, as if the need to explain it all to this woman - to this woman of all women - was somehow ridiculously improper.

  Her smile was replaced by what I took to be her professional expression of concerned understanding. ‘It is common amongst the newly headless,’ she said.

  ‘Chevaler Bonnard told us that you had been . . .’

  ‘I know him well!’ she interrupted, in a pleased voice. ‘The crusty old chevaler. I often rub up against him in my work. He has many dealings with the headless, of course, in his professional capacity.’

  This was very nearly too much. I stalled over my words. It took great effort of will to say, ‘He told us that you had been assaulted.’

  She was puzzled. ‘I had been assaulted ? Why would he say that? I haven’t been assaulted. Or did he mean, perhaps, the car crash? I feel foolish even calling it a crash, it was nothing but a bump. I didn’t really need to go to hospital; that was simply a precaution. I only wore the neck brace for a few days.’ She laughed. ‘I suppose stories can grow up about these things. Assaulted! The very idea! I shall have a word with the chevaler. Rumour is a strange thing, though, isn’t it? But see, there again: that little accident was a full six months ago, and yet it feels to me like it happened yesterday. Whereas that walk, under the stars, all the way from Doué to Cainon, that feels to me like it happened a lifetime ago! But here comes my bus now - I must be off - how wonderful it was to bump into you again, James . . .’

  ‘Jon.’

  ‘Of course, I’m sorry, Jon. Jon Cavala. I do remember! I’m so sorry that I have to go. I’m already late today. Which is to say, I’m early, but they’ve called a crack-of-the-day meeting so in that sense I’m late. It was so good to see you again.’ And she hopped up onto the bus, and it pulled away, and I was left standing at the side of the road.

  I stood for a moment without any thought at all in my mind. My feet moved almost of their own accord back to the door of the factory, prompted by some vestigial sense in my body that it would be a shame to let a whole month’s wage go slide for the want of one more day’s work.

  ‘You’re late,’ said the supervisor, as my numb fingers pressed the datascreen to enter my name.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have to take a half-day from your monthly,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I said thank you because he was legally entitled, if he so wished, to dismiss me from employment there and then and pay me nothing. The words were automatic. I went through to the changing room and pulled on a plastic overall, and stepped on into the main chamber of the place.

  I went through the motions of the job that day. What else could I do? I was aware of a thought in my head I must think about this, but I didn’t know how to begin such thinking. I needed a wholly new paradigm. I needed to reorganise almost everything in my thoughts. This was too large a task. My mind was too exhausted to do this.

  As the end of the working day approached I found that I needed to think what I was going to do - to think, in other words, in purely practical terms, even if I could not think through the fullest implications of it all. Was I to return to the house? Siuzan - or the woman I had been calling Siuzan, the woman who had deceived me - would be there, waiting, ready for us to walk away from the city and begin a new life. Could I do this? Was it a possibility? I had not loved her as a liar and an impostor. Could I begin a new life with her, now that I knew the truth?

  I don’t know what I thought. My thoughts were not coherent. I went through the motions of the job. Time did not pass in any noticeable manner. It seemed stuck.

  It was late in the afternoon when two policemen came through to the work area. The supervisor, nervous at this intrusion of the proper authorities, hovered behind them. He was saying, ‘How can I help? Please allow me to assist!’

  All of us stopped working and turned to face the newcomers.

  One of the policeman called out: ‘Which one of you is Jon Cavala?’

  ‘We have nobody here of that name,’ declared the supervisor. ‘Please. I know my workers. They are good workers, law-abiding though headless. There has been a misunderstanding.’

  ‘If Jon Cavala does not come forward,’ said the policeman, ‘we are legally empowered to test the DNA of all workers in order to identify him. I should add that by not stepping forward when requested, Jon Cavala will add the charge of resisting lawful arrest to the other charges outstanding against him.’

  I did nothing. I felt as if all motivation and passion had gone out of my body - almost as if an aperture had been opened in my heel and my total r
eservoir of willpower had literally flushed out through the gap. I simply stood there. I had become a great block of passivity on two legs.

  The other policeman unholstered a DNA gun and stepped over to one of my colleagues. The dart made a snk as it popped through his overalls before snapping back into its home. The policeman spent a long time staring at the little screen on top of the device.’

  ‘Well?’ his colleague demanded.

  ‘He is covered in animal fats,’ said the second policeman. ‘The animal DNA is confusing the device.’

  Still I stood there, a perfect statue of passivity. As I look back on that moment I am surprised I did not at least try to get away: to run past the two men, to get outside, to avoid incarceration. I did not. It was not even that I saw the chillers hanging from their belts and decided against the attempt; although they did indeed have chillers on their belts, and had I made the attempt they would easily have floored me and taken me into custody. But the truth is I made no active decision at all. I simply stood there.