Joe Spork stares up into a face made of gold.
An eyeless face, with a snapping turtle’s jaw and the merest suggestion of features on the burnished plate.
Not a mask.
A face.
An un-face. An un-man.
The Ruskinites close in. They have him, and they are taking him. He screams.
That’s all he knows, because someone clamps something cold over his mouth and he inhales.
XIII
Panopticon days;
Coffin Man;
Escape.
The room is very small. In the centre of each wall, and in the centre of the floor and ceiling, there is a circle of transparent stuff with a light bulb behind it. The bulbs are always on. Behind or in the walls—Joe isn’t sure—there are speakers. Sometimes they blare out instructions. Sometimes they play music, very loud. Sometimes they just shriek, electronic wails of protest.
He’s not sure how long ago it was that he tried to go to sleep, or how long they have kept him awake. He thought he knew roughly, because there’s only enough stubble on his chin to indicate a day or so, but when he finally did sleep—he realises he has slept many times since he arrived, but he doesn’t know for how long—he woke to find a ghost face very close to his own and a razor moving very precisely over his cheek. He jerked away, or rather, he tried, but found he was restrained. When he kept trying, someone pressed a cold thing against his neck and his world was fizzy and bright and he screamed a lot. He assumes the cold thing was a taser. The linen face peered at him, as if wondering why he was upset. He wondered whether it was human or not, whether it was like the one he’d seen. He wondered whether he’d dreamed that part.
When he came back to himself after the taser, he was inexplicably and appallingly aroused. He wondered if they had drugged him, and then wondered why they would. Then he realised that this kind of dialogue about himself was probably what this was all intended to achieve. They are asserting ownership of him. They own his sense of time, his captivity, his sleep. They have his body entirely; it’s not relevant whether they have drugged him. It is only relevant that they could. The one thing he can preserve from them is his mind—and that is what they want. They cannot approach it directly, so they are holding his body to ransom.
He remembers reading about a man who had been tortured. The man said the worst part was when they played the same music over and over and over until he thought he would go mad. He said even the razors were not as bad as the sense of losing himself. Joe is greatly concerned that he has very little self to lose, and so this will not take long.
He shouts out something, and regrets it instantly. He does not want their attention. Mr. Ordinary comes, anyway.
Mr. Ordinary has a face like a country vet’s. He is not a Ruskinite. He is apparently a specialist, brought in for the occasion. When he speaks, he has a mellow baritone, suited to explaining that Rover has the canine pox or that Tiddles will do better on a more varied diet.
He asks questions. It doesn’t seem to matter what Joe says in answer to these questions, so he begins to make up jokes. Mr. Ordinary is apparently of the opinion that funny jokes merit a reduction in discomfort. Silence is punished mightily. Mr. Ordinary is kind enough to explain this on the first occasion that Joe becomes mute.
“By all means, lie. Lying is fine. Or if you have no notion what I’m talking about, you should feel free to babble, make stuff up. That’s fine, too. Mulishness, however… I take that as a sign of disrespect.”
When Joe obstinately clamps his lips closed, Mr. Ordinary sighs, and directs operations with a sort of genial competence. They put Joe into strange positions and make him stay that way. The pain arrives quickly and he accepts that, was expecting it. It becomes blinding much later, when he has become used to the aches, and thinks he’s doing quite well. Mr. Ordinary listens to him screaming, and does not appear to react at all. Joe starts to speak, randomly selecting the price list for repairs to self-winders, hoping that compliance, however belated, will yield mercy.
It does not.
He loses track of everything, but at some point the man with the hate-filled eyes sits in front of him and listens to him screaming.
Brother Sheamus moves with the same alarming fluidity he displayed that day in Joe’s shop. It is as if his bones are articulated in more places than they should be. His head moves smoothly to follow Joe’s eyes, to peer into his face. Blank, black-linen monster. Eggshell face. Mask. And yet, somehow, not expressionless. Whether his emotions are carried in his body, or whether they are so strong that Joe is catching the lines of the face through the shroud, the way he feels is quite apparent in the tiny room.
He hates Joe Spork. He hates him as you hate someone you have known your entire life and whom you cannot stand. Whose existence in the world offends you in your bones. Every line of his liquid body aches with it.
Joe has no idea what he can have done to inspire such wrath. He is not old enough to have hurt Brother Sheamus in that way, and would surely know if he had inflicted an injury of that kind on his fellow man. He has, after all, dedicated his life to being mild.
He tries to say so. Unfortunately, he can’t speak, because when he tries his teeth chatter and his tongue won’t behave.
“You have formed impressions of me, Joshua Joseph Spork,” Sheamus says clinically. “It cannot be otherwise.”
He is not asking a question, so by Mr. Ordinary’s rules, Joe doesn’t have to respond.
“You imagine I am a man in authority but under orders. You may know that I wear a variety of hats and crowns, and you may imagine that where these things contradict it is evidence of deception. But those impressions are shallow things. They are based on an understanding of the world which is impoverished by modern weakness, by this modern irony, which is so frightened of grand ideas that it must pick pick pick them apart. Britain’s ultimate triumph, Mr. Spork: a world of shopkeepers.” This last with contempt. Joe makes a mental note: modernity, shopkeepers: bad.
“I am so much more than you imagine. I am more, and yet I am a fraction of what I shall be in days to come. My victory is inevitable, child of my hate, because I shall become God. And being God, I shall be perfect, and being perfect, I shall always have been perfect. All of this apparent meandering is a straight line to my apotheosis, when viewed from the timeless and ineffable understanding of the divine.”
Joe Spork receives all this and knows that a week ago he would have laughed at it. Not now, not here, in this room. The eyes are not funny at all. In them he sees himself vivisected—not for interest, but for enjoyment. He knows absolutely that that is what this man would like to do. His only hope is that the master of the Ruskinites is lying, that he is indeed held in check by someone. And then, with a sinking feeling, he joins the dots and realises that the man so tasked would be Rodney Titwhistle, and the good Rodney has already sacrificed conscience in this matter for some greater good which only he can see.
“A different question, then, for variety. But you must get this one right, no half-answers. Are you ready? Good.
“If I have the mind of Napoleon, but the body of Wellington, who am I?”
And at Joe’s stricken look, he laughs, quite genuinely.