Damon Knight - Orbit 21

He felt that his actions were being endorsed, and when the hand grasped his shoulder, he was ready.

“Wake up, mate,” said the guard, “You’re on next.”

Frank stood. He adjusted the waistband of his breeches. He coughed.

The guards took his arms and led him out of the dressing room. He saw the dingy corridor in absolute detail: olive-green paint, bubbling and cracking; grey concrete floor where his footballs created eddies of sluggish dust; white ceiling where islands of paint were surrounded by seas of bare plaster, fed by spidery cracks. One of the attendants had blood on his toe-cap, the other had tiny spots of blood on his trousers. A black beetle edged into a crack beneath the skirting board as they bore down on it.

Applause broke out wildly above and the attendants grinned at each other. Footsteps ahead told them that someone was coming along the narrow corridor, and they stopped opposite a room with an open door and moved close in to the wall. The interior of the room looked like a medical tent set up in the middle of a field during some bloody Civil War battle. Two men in white overalls were swabbing blood from the surface of a large wooden table; a man with a white mask over his face was threading a large surgical needle with black cotton. Actors and actresses sat on benches around the walls. Some were unconscious, some moaned softly, some were rocking backwards and forwards as if comforting themselves. One man was slowly licking his lips, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Frank saw the hunchback. His face was bloody. And elated.

The little man with the bruised face came along the corridor, supported by two attendants. He was barely conscious. A red stump protruded from his right sleeve. Something was sticking out of the long pocket of his costume. It was a finger. The pocket was slowly staining red. He was taken into the medical room and laid out on the table. Frank imagined him painfully raising himself on one arm, waving his stump, and saying, “Hat-trick—got my hat-trick.” But the little man simply lay there, breathing heavily. The doctor began to tend to the stump.

They continued along the corridor and came into the backstage area. Skirting two glowing braziers in which branding-irons rested, and a long upturned blade mounted on wooden trestles, one of which had a damaged leg (“. . . and now the bloody Spanish Mare’s got a broken leg . . .”) the attendants brought Frank into the wings and stopped him. He could see the stage clearly. It was covered with sawdust, stained red. Instruments of pain and torture hung from iron racks. A wooden gallows was being erected in center stage. On a large cross stage right, the emaciated man hung from coach-nails driven through his hands and feet, moaning softly.

The lights went down and a white spotlight played on the black-clad men working on the gallows. A dim red spot focussed on the face of the crucified man. A voice rang out from the speakers, the kind of effortlessly patronising voice used on popular educational programmes on television. It said: “Since man began to walk upright, he has found it necessary to punish those members of his race who do not conform to popularly accepted Law. In primitive times the tribe would simply stone the lawbreaker to death, but as man became more sophisticated, so he created more sophisticated methods of execution. The ancient Egyptians, for example ...”

The voice faded from Frank’s consciousness. He had often felt that many hidden doors would be opened to him if he could release his hatred, that he would be made new in the clean flame of revealed desire. That his desire meant death and pain to others, seemed nothing now, although it had always kept him sealed like a blast-furnace before. Always the anger had been turned inward until the gnaw of self-inflicted pain was second nature to him. Now the ultimate self-hurt. And by some strange reversal he realised that his pain would be felt by the others, his death would spread through the world like a cancer, turning blood into powder, bones into dust. By killing himself, he was killing them, every one. He was about to snuff the world out of existence.

The gallows was complete. A man in black tights and a black mask was standing on the platform, slowly knotting the noose.

“The Spaniards,” said the narrator, “have long favoured the garotte ...”

Frank felt a glacial calmness—a motionlessness of the spirit that was almost frightening. He stood alone, in the safety of his own body, unassailable and perfect. No one was connected to him, there were no decaying memories of people in the corners of the little fortress in his head from which he observed the world in darkness and silence. I am one, he thought, whole and indivisible.

He drew himself up and squared his shoulders. They tied his hands behind his back and tried to put a black bag over his head. He refused it, and began to touch each of his teeth with the tip of his tongue, first from the back, and then from the front. Three threes before they took him on stage.

“. . . in regular use in this country until twenty years ago. Tonight we re-stage an execution by hanging for your entertainment. A man will die here before your eyes. The hangman is a direct descendant of Pierpoint, the last great artist of this method of execution, but remember—should he fail to gauge the weight of our victim correctly and shorten or lengthen the rope accordingly . . . death will be a long time coming . . . the hanged man will kick and jerk for some time before slow strangulation causes his heart to stop beating. Of course, we all hope that our hangman will be efficient . . . but only the next few minutes will tell. Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you— death by hanging. “

The lights went down. A drum-roll began. The hangman jumped heavily on the trap and then beckoned to the wings.

And suddenly Frank was on stage, smelling the bloodstained sawdust, and off to his right was a great emptiness that drew in its breath and waited. His bowels loosened; his penis stood suddenly and painfully erect. They dragged him up the steps. The smell of the pine overpowering, misting vision, fainting in anticipated pain. Before him the noose, rough and hairy. The nose-tickling smell of the rope. Ah, around his neck. Blood roaring, roaring in his ears. A sudden bang. A feeling of lightness.

I never touched her.

I can’t remember her name.

Light spinning, sound throbbing, and the emptiness was faces; ah, yes—faces all looking at

The emptiness sighed.

The sky was gray. Harris walked quickly, her skirt clinging to her knees. She could feel the hole in her stocking as a ragged circle of cold. Cold touched her through her blouse; her black overcoat was too large and loose. She looked forward to the small pleasure of the next day, when she would wear the jumper over the blouse. She couldn’t wear it more than twice a week; it might be taken as a sign of discontent. Once, at the factory, one of the silent women had been found wearing two sweaters. Nothing had been said, but she had not come back the next day.

Harris walked mechanically, trying not to hunch her shoulders against the cold. In the street were other people dressed in black walking home from work. They did not look at her; she did not look at them. The clouds were full of snow, but none fell.

(it had started with a touch, or the memory of a touch, gentle, unexpected, you are not to be touched, not gently, but she had been touched.)

She turned onto a street in the factory district. At the corner near her building was a small open plaza where the bonfire was set each week. In the center of the plaza was a monument to the end of war. Small sickly trees grew in brick planters at the edges of the plaza. Harris walked past a tree with a blackened crown. The night before, a cat had run screaming from the fire and climbed into the branches. The watchers had leaped back, shaking the sparks from their clothing and laughing.