That night in his grandfather’s spare bedroom, which had once been the room his mother had shared with her sister Mildred, charged with the sense of freedom Cage’s book had given him, hell-bent and exultant, reveling in the thought that his month-long silence had come to an end, he wrote the first and second drafts of what was undoubtedly his most crackpot effort so far.
THE DROONS
The Droons are happiest when complaining about the condition of their land. The mountain dwellers envy the people who live in the valleys, and the people in the valleys long to migrate to the mountains. The farmers are dissatisfied with the yield of their crops, the fishermen grumble about their daily catch, and yet no fisherman or farmer has ever stepped forward to accept responsibility for his failure. They prefer to blame the land and the sea rather than admit that they are less than good farmers and fishermen, that the old knowledge has gradually been lost and they are no more skilled at what they do than untrained beginners.
For the first time in my travels, I have come across what I would call a lazy people.
The women have lost hope in the future and are no longer interested in bearing children. The wealthiest ones spend their days stretched out naked on smooth slabs of rock, drowsing in the warmth of the sun. The men, who seem to prefer roaming among jagged outcrops and areas of extreme declivity, resent the indifference of their women toward them, but they do little about it and have no clear plan about how to change the situation. Every now and then, they will mount a feeble assault and throw stones at the recumbent women, but the stones usually fall short of their target.
For some time now, each newborn child has been drowned at birth.
On my arrival at the palace, I was greeted by the Princess of Bones and her retinue. She led me away from the latest skirmish into her garden, where she served me a bowl of apples and discussed the passions of her people. What new defiance were they preparing against the custodians of virtue? she asked. Although she spoke of grave matters, the princess did not seem perplexed or unduly alarmed. She laughed often, as though at some private joke, and went on fanning herself throughout our conversation with the bamboo fan that had been given to her as a girl, she said, by the ambassador of China. In the morning, she gave me provisions for my journey.
There are many villages, all of them ringing the tower in a series of eight concentric circles. From the shore, icebergs are always in sight.
The tower is said to be the oldest structure on the island, built in a time before memory. It is no longer inhabited, but legend tells that it was once a site of worship and that the oracles emitted there by the soothsayer Botana governed the Droons in their golden age.
I mounted my horse and decided to head for the hinterlands of the interior. After three days and three nights, I arrived at the village of Flom, where, I had been told, a new cult has infected the imaginations of the people and is threatening to destroy them. According to my source (a scribe at the palace), the contagion of self-loathing that is spreading among the citizens of Flom has reached such proportions that they have turned against their own bodies and seek to diminish them or disfigure them or render them useless in what the scribe called an orgy of dismemberment.
Orgy is not the word for it. Orgy suggests transport and ecstatic pleasure, but there is no pleasure among the people of Flom. They go about their business with the intense calm of religious zealots.
Once a day, a ceremony known as the Endurance is performed in the central square of the village. The participants wrap themselves tightly in gauze from head to toe, leaving only a small hole for the nostrils to prevent suffocation, and then four servants of those mummy-like figures are ordered to pull on the limbs of their master or mistress, to pull as energetically as possible for as long as possible. The test is to withstand the torture. In the event that a limb should be ripped off in the process, a great roar of exaltation rises up from the crowd. The Endurance has now been transformed into what is known as the Transcending. The severed limbs are preserved in a glass case in the Town Hall and worshipped as sacred objects. Amputees are accorded the privileges of royalty.
The new laws passed by the municipal government all reflect the principles of the Transcending. Services to the community are rewarded with painless amputations, whereas convicted criminals are forced to submit to a lengthy operation, during which additional body parts are sewn onto their flesh. For a first offense, it is usual to attach a hand to the area around the stomach. For repeated offenders, however, more humiliating punishments are prepared. I once saw a man with the head of a young girl attached to his back. Another had baby’s feet sprouting from his palms. There are even some who seem to be carrying around another entire body.
In their daily comings and goings, the people of Flom try to dispel the fears one might associate with their precarious existence. They are not inclined to forgetfulness — their anguish persists even when no sign of it is visible to the naked eye. They have therefore chosen to confront it and in that way overcome the obstacles that have prevented them from knowing themselves. They make no excuses for having transformed their solipsism into a fetish.
It is not merely their bodies that they wish to overcome but their feeling of separateness from one another. One man put it to me this way: “We can’t seem to find a common ground. Each one of us carries around his own world, which seldom overlaps with anyone else’s world. By reducing the size of our bodies, we hope to diminish the spaces that lie between us. Remarkably enough, it is a proven fact that amputees are more inclined to participate in the lives of others than most four-limbed Flomians. Some have even been able to marry. Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe.”
Including the time he spent pacing around the room between paragraphs, along with the minutes lost in making a cup of instant coffee and retrieving a fresh pack of Camels from his overnight bag, it took Ferguson a little under two hours to compose that preliminary draft. When he had finished writing it, he put down his pencil and carefully read over what he had done, sat back in the chair, paused for a while to smoke and scratch and think, and then picked up his pencil and started writing the chapter again. Six versions and nine days later, only four sentences from the original draft remained.