He kept watching until Revell was far out from the compound, staggering across the field toward the trees, his arms folded across his stomach, his legs stumbling, his head bent forward. Wordman watched, and then gritted his teeth, and turned his back, and returned to his office to work on the monthly report. Only two attempted escapes last month.
Two or three times in the course of the afternoon he looked out the window. The first time, he saw Revell far across the field, on hands and knees, crawling toward the trees. The last time, Revell was out of sight, but he could be heard screaming. Wordman had a great deal of trouble concentrating his attention on the report.
Toward evening he went outside again. Revell’s screams sounded from the woods, faint but continuous. Wordman stood listening, his fists clenching and relaxing at his sides. Grimly he forced himself not to feel pity. For Revell’s own good he had to be taught.
A staff doctor came to him a while later and said, “Mr. Wordman, we’ve got to bring him in.”
Wordman nodded. “I know. Bur I want to be sure he’s learned.”
“For God’s sake,” said the doctor, “Listen to him.”
Wordman looked bleak. “All right, bring him in.”
As the doctor started away, the screaming stopped. Wordman and the doctor both turned their heads, listened — silence. The doctor ran for the infirmary.
Revell lay screaming. All he could think of was the pain, and the need to scream. But sometimes, when he managed a scream of the very loudest, it was possible for him to have a fraction of a second for himself, and in those fractions of seconds he still kept moving away from the prison, inching along the ground, so that in the last hour he had moved approximately seven feet. His head and right arm were now visible from the country road that passed through these woods.
On one level, he was conscious of nothing but the pain and his own screaming. On another level, he was totally, even insistently, aware of everything around him, the blades of grass near his eyes, the stillness of the woods, the tree branches high overhead. And the small pickup truck, when it stopped on the road beyond him.
The man who came over from the truck and squatted beside Revell had a lined and weathered face and the rough clothing of a farmer. He touched Revell’s shoulder and said, “You hurt, fella?”
“Eeeeast!” screamed Revell. “Eeeeast!”
“Is it okay to move you?” asked the man.
“Yesssss!” shrieked Revell. “Eeeeast!”
“I’d best take you to a doctor.”
There was no change in the pain when the man lifted him and carried him to the truck and lay him down on the floor in back. He was already at optimum distance from the transmitter; the pain now was as bad as it could get.
The farmer tucked a rolled-up wad of cloth into Revell’s open mouth. “Bile on this,” he said. “It’ll make it easier.”
It made nothing easier, but it muffled his screams. He was grateful for that; the screams embarrassed him.
He was aware of it all, the drive through increasing darkness, the farmer carrying him into a building that was of colonial design on the outside but looked like the infirmary on the inside, and a doctor who looked down at him and touched his forehead and then went to one side to thank the farmer for bringing him. They spoke briefly over there, and then the farmer went away and the doctor came back to look at Revell again. He was young, dressed in laboratory white, with a pudgy face and red hair. He seemed sick and angry. He said. “You’re from that prison, aren’t you?”
Revell was still screaming through the cloth. He managed a head-spasm which he meant to be a nod. His armpits felt as though they were being cut open with knives of ice. The sides of his neck were being scraped by sandpaper. All of his joints were being ground back and forth, back and forth, the way a man at dinner separates the bones of a chicken wing. The interior of his stomach was full of acid. His body was stuck with needles, sprayed with fire. His skin was being peeled off, his nerves cut with razor blades, his muscles pounded with hammers. Thumbs were pushing his eyes out from inside his head. And yet, the genius of this pain, the brilliance that had gone into its construction, it permitted his mind to work, to remain constantly aware. There was no unconsciousness for him, no oblivion.
The doctor said, “What beasts some men are. I’ll try to get it out of you. I don’t know what will happen, we aren’t supposed to know how it works, but III try to take the box out of you.”
He went away, and came back with a needle. “Here. This will put you to sleep.”
Ahhhhh.
“He isn’t there. He just isn’t anywhere in the woods.”
Wordman glared at the doctor, but knew he had to accept what the man reported. “All right,” he said. “Someone took him away. He had a confederate out there, someone who helped him get away.”
“No one would dare,” said the doctor. “Anyone who helped him would wind up here themselves.”
“Nevertheless,” said Wordman. “I’ll call the State Police,” he said, and went on into his office.
Two hours later the Sate Police called back. They’d checked the normal users of that road, local people who might have seen or heard something, and had found a farmer who’d picked up an injured man near the prison and taken him to a Dr. Allyn in Boonetown. The State Police were convinced the farmer had acted innocently.
“But not the doctor,” Wordman said grimly. “He’d have to know the truth almost immediately.”
“Yes, sir, I should think so.”
“And he hasn’t reported Revell.”
“No, sir.”
“Have you gone to pick him up yet?”
“Not yet. We just got the report.”
“I’ll want to come with you. Wait for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wordman traveled in the ambulance in which they’d bring Revell back. They arrived without siren at Dr. Allyn’s with two cars of state troopers, marched into the tiny operating room, and found Allyn washing instruments at the sink.
Allyn looked at them all calmly and said, “I thought you might be along.”
Wordman pointed at the man who lay, unconscious, on the table in the middle of the room. “There’s Revell,” he said.
Allyn glanced at the operating table in surprise. “Revell? The poet?”
“You didn’t know? Then why help him?”
Instead of answering, Allyn studied his face and said, “Would you be Wordman himself?”
Wordman said, “Yes, I am.”
“Then I believe this is yours,” Allyn said, and put into Wordman’s hands a small and bloody black box.
The ceiling was persistently bare. Revell’s eyes wrote on it words that should have singed the paint away, but nothing ever happened He shut his eyes against the white at last and wrote in spidery letters on the inside of his lids the single word oblivion.
He heard someone come into the room, but the effort of making a change was so great that for a moment longer he permitted his eyes to remain closed. When he did open them he saw Wordman there, standing grim and mundane at the foot of the bed.
Wordman said, “How are you, Revell?”
“I was thinking about oblivion,” Revell told him. “Writing a poem on the subject.” He looked up at the ceiling, but it was empty.
Wordman said, “You asked, one time, you asked for pencil and paper. We’ve decided you can have them.”
Revell looked at him in sudden hope, but then understood. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that.”