John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

At the end of the first day, there came a noise at the door. It was the beautiful Miss Daw. Behind her was Sister Twitchett, the school nurse.

“Am I to be released?” was the first thing I asked them. To me, it seemed as if I had already been in the cell for as long as would serve any purpose, as long as could be imagined.

Miss Daw took out a tiny tape recorder of a type I had not seen before; it played a crystal disc that shimmered with rainbows instead of a cassette. When she pushed the button, the sound of her own violin music filled the cell. It was one of these intricate things by Bach, all grace notes and mathematically symmetrical themes and counterpoints. Even though my powers were off at the moment, and my higher senses were dim, I could still tell it was flattening space in the area around me.

“I didn’t know you could do that with a recording,” I said. Again, no answer from either of them.

Without speaking, the Sister took out a hypodermic, rubbed alcohol on my elbow, found the vein with her needle, and gave me an injection.

The first of several.

They no longer trusted us to drink our medicine, and I am sure the doses were larger. I grew faint from the medicine, and they dressed me and put me to sleep in the cot.

I wish the drug had knocked me out. After they went away, I spent most of the night unsleeping, feeling sorry for myself, and fearing that I would roll off the cot in the night and choke to death.

Two days went by, then three. The only person I saw was Miss Daw. She would appear at the door, holding a bowl of food and a beaker of water, dressed in some smart outfit of plum or burgundy or palest rose to bring out the color in her peaches-and-cream complexion. On the third day, there was a fresh roll of toilet paper on the tray.

She would pick up the bowl from the previous meal, which I was supposed to have washed with my limited supply of washing water, and carry away the chamber pot.

In the evening, she would come by with a bucket of warm water, lead me over to the drain, undress me, and give me a sponge bath. I wore the same nightgown I had before, and the same school uniform by day, plaid skirt and white shirt. They did not have any prison tunics, I suppose.

The only fun thing I did on the third day was trying to use my trick to decrease the mass of the collar. I waited till just before Sister Twitchett and her nightly hypo were due, figuring that Dr. Fell’s foul drug would be weakest at that time.

I found I could move a few of the plumb-straight world-lines, which ran from the collar toward the core of the Earth, to the left or right. This did make the collar lighter, but it now wobbled unexpectedly on my neck, shifting weight oddly, as if it were on the deck of a pitching ship, even though my body was firmly on shore. That hurt more.

A fourth day went by. A fifth.

Miss Daw was always dressed nicely, as if for a social call. I do not know which was more ill-suited to a dungeon; her high-heeled pumps and sleek semiformal dresses, topped by tiny Continental hats pinned to her hair, or my schoolgirl’s uniform, knee socks and jacket and with a bow in my hair. And heavy iron collar and chain. Let’s not forget that. At least I did not have to wear that dumb necktie.

I complained about the collar to her. She was clearly under orders not to talk to me but, when I talked about chafing and bruises and raw spots around my neck, she nodded. “I’ll see what I can do, dear.”

That was the only human voice I heard for days. That one comment. “I’ll see what I can do, dear.”

And that was my life.

No, he wasn’t kidding. Yes, they put me in a jail.

And jail was boring. Bee, owe, are, eye, an, gee. Boring.

I began to find other things to think about. I wondered how old I really was.

You would think I could have at least established a minimum age, right? I mean, count how many winters since you started having your period. Find something you know happened the summer before that, and the Christmas before that.

One problem was, I did not know, when I was young, that I was supposed to start counting. I did not even know people had ages, till I came across the idea in a book I read when I was young. I started keeping track then, but how old was I when I started reading? There were no younger kids around to measure myself against, except for Colin and Quentin and Vanity. They started reading younger than I did.

A person who had met a hundred five-year-olds, and had them clearly identified, knows what a five-year-old looks like. At what age do boys grow beards? A normal person knows the answer, or at least can give a range of dates. All I had to go by was Shakespeare’s speech about the ages of man given in As You Like It . When I was young, I thought I would know when Victor had reached the age of being a soldier because he would start having strange oaths on his lips.

What age is a girl when she develops breasts? Nine? Twelve? Twenty? All I knew is that Vanity had them before I did, and I thought they would get in the way of swimming and wrestling.

I did not know years had numbers until we came across them in a more modern history book. Herodotus and Thucydides didn’t have dates in them, aside from so-many-years since so-and-so. No dates are given for anything in the Bible, except, “Augustus ordered all the world to be taxed…” Or “When Herod was governor of Syria…”

We had lessons, but we did not have grades. I could not say to myself, “I must have been in grammar school when I read Euclid and college when I read Lobechevski…” because I did not know when other students read things.

Once or twice, we were let out to play with some of the children in nearby Abertwyi. Mrs. Wren organized a game, or something. If, during our chatter, some topic came up from schooling, the village children simply seemed like bumpkins to us. Even children much older than us seemed not to know grammar, or languages, or geometry, or logic, or rhetoric, or astronomy, or electronics, or the sciences. I met a boy I was sure was older than me, once, who told me that the Earth has weight because of the spin on its axis. I asked him if things were weightless at the North Pole, and he was stumped. Other boys we sometimes played ball with talked about people they wanted to be like when they grew up. I had never heard of any of them. Were they sports figures, perhaps? Rock-and-roll stars? But they did not know who Admiral Byrd or Sir Edmund Hillary or Yuri Gagarin were. They never heard of Sir Ernest Shackleton. They thought Captain Cook was a character from Peter Pan .

They seemed to know a lot about how to cheat on tests, they knew all about their computers and electronic games, and they knew about the characters on television. We were only allowed to watch the television in the Common Room once a week. Headmaster said it would rot our brains if we saw too much.

I just could not believe that everything the Headmaster said was a lie. So much seemed to be true. I believe what he said about television, for example.

But when I added up memories, and counted events, I knew I was older than the fourteen years he gave me. Unless my puberty was very late, I doubt that I was actually twenty-one.

But, thinking back, I realize that Headmaster Boggin certainly must have lied. I did not envy Vanity when she started having her period, and frankly I was not that much enamored of growing up to be a pale sissy like Miss Daw. And if I could control my body so much as that, why hadn’t I always stayed stronger and faster than Colin and Quentin? It was absurd to think that I secretly desired to be defeated, overpowered, and outmuscled by men.