The Living (10 page)

Inside there were things like scanners with cylindrical
cell-chambers
. I knew the set-up well: as a child I had a lot of brain scans. They wanted to find some defect in me, something organic that made me different from the others…

They told us to get undressed and lie on the trolley. I don’t remember the experiment very well.

I think the surface of the trolley was cold and smooth. I think they strapped us down and put some kind of medicine into a vein. From then on I only have fragments of memories.

Professor Leo, he says that the ray won’t hurt a bit.

My friend Cracker, his neck covered in crimson spots, he whispers something about the Five Seconds of Darkness.

Ef’s mirror face, his monotonous voice breaking into a
deafening
racket. He wants to stay, but the scientists take exception, and they have some sort of advantage in this dispute.

The Butcher’s Son, he whimpers, he does not want to lie naked on the trolley. Professor Lot thanks us for our contribution to science and says ‘no death’.

Our trolleys go into the dark maws of the scanners…

It’s like I’m in a container…

I’m a blind worker termite…

darkness…

We have just completed the first experiment with the directed Leo-Lot ray. We did not get the results we had expected. Our experiment is a mistake, and therefore we are cancelling all the remaining sessions we had planned. The directed ray is not operational. In the future we should look for other, more optimal methods for incarnational retrospection. We consider our method to be dangerous. It should be banned.

Afterwards, when Ef was asking me about what happened during the experiment, I didn’t remember anything. I told him that I had had a dream, but that was a lie. I didn’t remember anything, even any dreams, I just wanted him to leave me alone. He said tell me your dream, and I told him about a dream that I used to have quite a lot. I’m little and Hanna and I are sitting by a river and I’m building a lovely castle for Hanna out of sand and stones. My castle is finished and she looks at me and laughs, and I destroy it, and then I start rebuilding – and then I knock it down. I build, then knock down, build, then knock down… I’m happy, I could build and knock down this castle my whole life long, as long as Hanna is laughing…

‘What next?’ Ef asked.

‘Nothing. I woke up and realised that she’s gone.’

‘She is still here,’ Ef hummed. ‘But that’s not important right now. And your dream isn’t important either. When you woke up, while you were getting dressed and all that… The correctees and Leo and Lot – what were they saying?’

‘Nothing. Only thing was Cracker said that he was wrong.’

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘He thought that during the experiment they would put us on pause. But that didn’t happen.’

Cracker was wrong. He thought that during the experiment they would put us on pause, but that didn’t happen.

Something else happened. I lost him forever.

We were separated immediately after the experiment. We weren’t even allowed to share a few words, to say goodbye. I was calm. At that time I hadn’t yet realised why the
planetman
was preparing to move Cracker in a separate van. They had taken us to the experiment together, and I would have
suspected that something was up when Cracker was led off down a white corridor, but they also immediately took the pre-pauser off somewhere – he hadn’t managed to cut his PTC in half – and the one from the middle group (I think he was called Joker) was taken off on his own as well. So they took me to the House of Correction with only the Butcher’s Son for company and I thought anything’s possible with all their rules and regulations.

On the way back the Butcher’s Son did not play with his chains anymore but looked somehow despondent. A couple of times I tried to do the ‘piggy’ for him, pressing my nose up with my finger like Cracker did, but he didn’t react at all and I left him in peace.

Only when I had gone back to my group, at daily roll call, did I realise that something was up with Cracker. The group warder didn’t read out his name and I got scared that she had got angry at him for some violation of discipline, but I explained it to myself by saying that they just hadn’t brought Cracker back from the lab yet. She looked at me like I had pissed myself in front of everyone. And the whole group stared at me like an idiot too. Then someone started cackling with laughter.

‘Correctee Cracker is no longer a member of our group.’ As she looked at me the warder smiled slightly at the corner of her mouth, as if she wanted to laugh along with everyone else, but was still restraining herself. ‘What are you lot up to?’ She looked round at everyone. ‘Why haven’t you explained to your friend what has happened?’

They probably said something back to her in second layer because her face suddenly went strict.

‘He’s not connected to
socio
,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean that he’s not your friend. Or that he’s not every bit as good as the rest of you. He’s just different. And it’s your job to show him care and kindness. Otherwise I might register your behaviour as
cruel
.’

There is nothing worse for a correctee than being accused of cruelty. Cruel behaviour brought with it corrective measures. It was written down in the ‘Rules of Correction’ which hung on the door of every dormitory:

‘First-degree cruelty (oral or social mockery of the physical defects of correctee friends, oral rudeness to a pet): one-off disconnection from
socio
for forty minutes.’

‘Second-degree cruelty (physical violence towards correctee friends): daily disconnection from
socio
for seven days.’

There weren’t many people who exhibited second-degree cruelty, only total psychos. Even first degree didn’t happen that often: they all suffered so badly when they were disconnected. They cried, begged for forgiveness or rocked from side to side, staring at a fixed point. Those that had been disconnected even once became affectionate and attentive, like the nannies from the infant group.

Third-degree cruelty (physical violence towards a pet) was quite unthinkable. The sentence for that was confinement to a solitary chamber with life-long minimisation of
socio
. No one had ever gone as far as the third degree… Except Cracker.

My groupmates told me everything. They were very kind to me.

They said it was all about the snail, Cracker’s pet.

They said that, poor thing, she had got an infection under her shell. While Cracker and I were being taken to the lab, she had ceased living.

They said that the entomologist had taken the snail for an autopsy. A foreign object was found under her shell –
something
made by Cracker.

They said that Cracker was cruel, that he was being put in solitary. They said they didn’t know what the object was.

But I knew, I knew all too well: it was a little piece of paper with a diagram on it. A week ago Cracker had pushed it inside the snail’s shell: he thought it was a ‘natural hidey-hole’. I’ve
mentioned already how he would set up hidey-holes
everywhere
… Of course I’ve already mentioned it.

He was accused of third-degree cruelty for violence towards a pet. But I knew, I knew very well, that this wasn’t just about cruelty. The House administration could hardly have been thrilled about the ‘foreign object’ itself.

Perhaps it was irony on the part of the House administration or evidence of some sort of favour, or even sympathy; whatever it was, they set up Cracker’s solitary chamber in his favourite place. In the special maximum security unit, on floor minus two, under the fluorescent lights. In the blindingly white hall, opposite the Son’s chamber.

I went to visit them there every day.

After the experiment the Butcher’s Son became depressed and apathetic. He was probably not sleeping well. Grey-blue shadows like spread wings had formed under his eyes. As if a moth had settled on the bridge of his nose… Later, when I found out what happened during the experiment, I started to think that the way the Son had changed was totally
understandable
. If he had really seen
what
he had done back then, then he must have been horrified. It’s unlikely that the Son really realised that it was him who carried out this slaughter. But he probably sensed that it had something to do with him. In any case the very sight of it would be enough to give anyone sleepless nights…

…It turned out that I didn’t get a chance to ask any of the other subjects of the experiment about what they had been through. On that very day, immediately after the experiment,
the pre-pauser Ivanushka was taken off to the Pause Zone at the Festival for Assisting Nature. I tried to look for correctee Joker, but the warder of the middle group told me, with no little
irritation
, that the correctee with that nickname had temporarily ceased to exist. He had hanged himself in the shower cubicle, without leaving a note. They didn’t like suicides in the House of Correction, their warders didn’t get a pat on the head.
Unmotivated
premature pause is, firstly, very stupid (what can you possibly change by doing that?), and, secondly, it is evidence of some pedagogical error on the part of the warder, and thirdly, and this was the main thing, it made life difficult for the staff. He was a healthy man, not that old, he could look after himself – and now, there you go, a screaming baby, feed him, wash him, change his nappies. So the warder’s irritation was entirely understandable.

I never again crossed paths with any of the scientists that had run the experiment. They never appeared at the House of Correction and completely different people took us on the next trip to the Farm.

And Cracker, what about Cracker…? He couldn’t say anything to me. Sitting next to him, on the other side of the soundproof glass, I remembered with bitterness that not long ago, in this very place, we had swapped secrets.

Now I was searched before I could enter the Special Unit – to be sure that I didn’t have any writing implements or any other materials which I could use to give Cracker information. I had to cover the lower half of my face with a mask so that Cracker wouldn’t be able to read my lips.

The information vacuum was the chief corrective measure for Blacklisters.

At first Cracker seemed surprisingly lively, almost happy. He gesticulated animatedly, smiled, did the ‘piggy’ for the Son, moved his lips inaudibly (I only managed to understand one thing: ‘cracker can break any password cracker can break
through any defence’) and waved to me when I came and when I left.

After a few days this unnatural jollity was replaced by
complete
despair. He spent whole days lying on the floor of his cell, hunched over, his slender legs tucked under his stomach. He started to look even more like a spider – stock still, pretending to be unliving on the brightly lit floor. When he saw me, he emerged from hibernation, seemingly grudgingly, as if against his own will, and slowly got up and came over to the
transparent
wall. There was an emptiness in his eyes: I had seen something like it before somewhere. Hanna’s eyes used to get like that when she was in deep layers. But Cracker couldn’t be in deep layers. His access to
socio
was minimal now, like all the Blacklisters. Only music and shows – oh, and maybe some adverts.

And then he stopped reacting to me. Completely. As if he didn’t see me. As if his chamber were covered on the inside by some light-resistant film.

I still kept coming. I would sit and look at Cracker in his torpor, at the Butcher’s Son and his ‘black moth’. I also started sleeping badly. Without Cracker and his snoring, without the familiar game of pistons. I needed that rumbling noise; I was used to sneaking off to sleep in the little periods of quiet. When Cracker was moved to the Special Unit, I started listening to the breathing of the other correctees, trying to feel for their rhythm and tune into it. I actually did manage to hear it – their shared rhythm, rapid and fussy, all scrunched up like a ball of thin barbed wire, strident, like the buzzing of a swarm of bees. I got caught up in it, stuck in it, and, as I drifted off, it was like I was tearing off my skin. I tried to take my mind off it, to block out their breathing with my own breathing, or coughing, or fidgeting, I even whistled quietly – useless. Their uneven rhythm. I could no longer not hear it.