A corridor:
A sequence of doors. Above, just out of reach, parallel tracks of neon insisted on the raw whiteness of the walls. Far off, where the corridors bent, a single element, six feet of glass-tubed gas, flickered mortally.
Locked. And locked. And locked. And locked. And locked.
The sixth door opened.
A room: metal files. An iron garden-table and three iron chairs flaked white paint on to the concrete floor. On the table: a mug of coffee, still lukewarm; a Martina ashtray brimming butts; a crumpled Senior Service package; a box of safety matches; a Japanese paperback (he could not read the characters); three Danish girlie magazines; a plastic box of transistor elements; a ring of keys numbered from 2 to 15.
They keys unlocked the files; the files contained canisters of film. Each canister was stenciled with a red numeral (from 2 to 15), followed by smaller black code-letters. There were seventeen canisters marked with a red 6. He opened, at random, 6-SCHIZSquinting, he studied frames of the film against the light.
Hisface? And from this angle, the same or another?
Then: mustached, hair darkened–him? Or only a good facsimile? His judgment oscillated between credence and doubt. Yes it was he/No it was not.
Without a projector it would take days to examine all the footage contained in these seventeen canisters. And he had . . . minutes?
There was a second door. Which opened to darkness and a voice said:
“Negative.”
There was a scream, piercing, a woman’s. He eased the door back but did not, quite, close it; he listened at the crack:
The voice, a man’s: “Shall we try that again? Necessity.”
And hers, unsteady: “Inter—” A choking sound. “No, inven—”
“Please, Number 48. Just give the very first word that comes to you.
“Intervention?”
“That’s better, much better. Now: pluck.”
“Courage.”
“Negative.”
And her scream.
His voice: “Again, Number 48: pluck.”
“Cour—”
“Negative.”
The scream.
“Again? Pluck.”
“I . . . eye . . . eyebrow.”
“Very good! We’re making progress today, Number 48.”
Inchmeal, as this dialogue continued, he widened the crack: darkness, and still darkness, though with a faint flicker of bluish light, like the death-throes of neon. Neither speaker in the darkened room seemed to notice the intrusion.
“Now, Number 48: courage.”
“I . . . no, I can’t!”
“Courage.”
“C—Ca—Collage.”
“Continue with the sequence, Number 48.”
He recognized the woman (wires twined into the shingled red-dyed hair, thick body strapped to the chair) shown on the screen as his confidante of a week earlier, the tweedy companion (the wife?) of the goitred man. Had it been the goitres who had left the film to play on unwitnessed in this room? And for what purpose, other than his idle amusement, had he been watching the documentation of this woman’s torture?
“Collage,” she said. “Cabbage . . . Kale . . .” The camera moved in to a close close-up, then tightened to a shot of her wounded eyes, eyes that stared, dilated, into a flickering light.
“Curtain . . . Cur–cour–age . . . Cottage . . . Cottage.” The words she spoke seemed to crumble into their component syllables as they left her lips.
The man’s voice: “Courage? Please respond, Number 48! Courage.”
“Curdle! Curdle . . . curd . . . el . . .”
“Go on: curd.”
“Cord . . . Core . . . Ca—Ck-ck-ck—”
“Core?”
The camera backed away to show the flaccid red lips, the powdered flesh eroded by sweat and tears, the jaw chewing slowly on unspoken words, and in her staring eyes a vague lust for the end of this pain, for nonexistence.
Then, abruptly, a blackness across which a dotted yellow line graphed an optimistic ascent toward the upper right corner: beneath, in bold letters:
The film ended. The tag-end of the reel flapped in the projector’s beam, and the screen blinked a semaphore of black/white/black until he found the switch, flicked it OFF.
AndON , the overhead light.
Beneath the empty canister forDay 4 were six others; the last day–7–was labeledTermination and Review . He replaced the film in its container in the same manner he had once, years ago (he remembered this entire era of his life intact), prepared a package of the personal effects of a friend (gored by shrapnel) to send back to his widow in Châlons-sur-Marne.
Threading the film of 6-SCHIZinto the projector, he wondered if it had been only that brief exchange on the terrace, the message scribbled on a napkin, those few guarded words, that had convinced the jailers of this place to perform their macabre “therapy.” Would other Villagers be asked to pay as high a price for his friendship–for even such a small gesture in that direction?
And, if they were, couldhe , in justice—
A point of ethics he would have to consider at some later time, for now the numbers flashed backward to zero on the screen, and he saw himself waking, walking to a mirror, and staring at the image it recorded with an expression of disbelief and, to a surprising degree, terror.
A wide face that could have been called (and often had been) Slavic, though anyone who has known the Midlands would recognize the type: the fine brown hair that a single day of sunlight could dull to ash-blond; the rough modeling of brow, cheeks and nose, sturdy Saxon craftsmanship but scarcely a work of art; the thinness of the upper lip that opposed the fullness and slight thrust of the lower; the swag of flesh at the back of his jaw, a detail that had been coded into his family’s genes for generations. It was a serviceable face–not especially noticeable until you noticed it, but (in his line of work) all the more serviceable for that reason. It could express, most easily, stubbornness (indeed, whatever else it might express, that stubbornness would remain, a permanent qualification), but never anything that could be called elegance. Fortunately he had never wanted to be called elegant.
Such was the face that, without paying particular attention to the matter, he was accustomed to. Butthis face, the face on the screen, was this his, too? And (cutting to another shot, in another room)this one?
In the first sequence all the details seemed correct. His hair was the right color; he wore it so. The clothes fit his body, the smile fit his face. But the eyes . . .? The eyes seemed, somehow, amiss. But of course we only know our image from a mirror, unspontaneously; perhaps our unrehearsed expressions are quite different.
The second face was less obviously his own. The hair was darker, parted on the left. This face wore a mustache, though with apparent discomfort, for his hand (his left hand) kept reaching up to touch it, to tug at it, to test its reality. Yet apart from these merely cosmetic differences it was (it seemed to be) his face, his own.
Then: a shot of himself (mustached) walking down a street of the Village–or was it merelya village? Though the candy cottages on each side of the street resembled those he knew here, there were subtle differences in the warp of the land, the silhouettes of trees, the angle of the light. A seasonal difference? Or could there be, for villages as for people, such elaborate facsimiles that only by these slight tokens could the original be distinguished from its reproduction?
The man walking down the street wore a badge on his lapel that identified him as Number 12. Well, if they had to choose a number for his double, it could only be that.
Two stills, side by side: this same “Number 12” in a barber’s chair. First, mustached, his darker hair parted on the left; then, shaven, the hair lightened to its natural (or was it, in this case, natural?) color, parted on the right.
Then: himself–one of these two selves–in a room of bland modernity, sprawled on a modular sofa, looking very much at home, or doing a fair job seeming so. His other self entered at the door.
“What the devil . . .” his other self said. Surely forone of them the surprise must have been feigned. He wished that he were not such a good actor, though of course it would be the double who would be required to act, his own reaction the “genuine” one. No?
They approached each other until the camera included both in a medium close-up. They wore on the lapels of their identical jacket badges with the numeral 6. He could not be certain, seeing them together, which of them had been shown as 12 in the earier footage. Had he seen an episode like this in anymore conventional theater, were he not already convinced thathe had been one of the principles, he would immediately have assumed that this was nothing but trick photography, an actor playing a double role.
The self who had just entered nodded, smiling a thin smile (his). “Oh, very good. Very, very good. One of Number 2’s little ideas, I suppose. Where’d he get you–from Xerox? Or are you one of these double agents we hear so much about?”
His smile, and the voice his too.
The other replied (smiling the same smile, speaking in the same voice): “Since you’ve gone to so much trouble, the least I can do is offer you a drink.”
“Scotch.”
And (he thought) on the rocks, by preference.
The one who’d made the offer went to the wrong cabinet; his doppelganger, almost apologetically, corrected the mistake.
As they faced the bar, their faces turned from the camera, one of them said: “I take it I’m supposed to go all fuzzy around the edges and rush into the distance screaming ‘Who am I?’ ”
Wasthat the way he talked? He hoped not but he wasn’t sure.
“Ice?”
“Please. Oh, careful! Not from the kitchen, you know. That’s an ice-bucket on the second shelf.”
They toasted. Again their two opposing profiles filled the screen. Each man studied his mirror image.
“Do you know–I never realized I had a freckle on the side of my nose. Tell you what, when they film my life story, you get the part.” He turned. The camera followed him. “Cigar? Ah-ah! With the right hand, yes? Yes. And that wasn’t whatI would have chosen for myself. Most people find my taste too individual, so I carry those as a courtesy. Also, they made a slight mistake with your hair–it’s a shade too light.”
The other: “It’s not going to work, you know. I have a particularly strong sense of identity.”
Yes, he thought, he did/I do. Provisionally he accorded this one (the sprawler on the couch, the fumbler at the liquor cabinet) the distinction of being his True Self; the other must be, then, the Double.
The Double answered: “Youhave?” And laughed: in pitch, in timber, in rhythm it was his laugh. “Oh yes, I forgot for a moment–you’re supposed to be me. You’re Number 6, the goodie, and I’m the baddie who’s trying to break you down. Right?”
It might also be maintained against this Double that his dialogue was bad, but then his own reply was not much better:
“Right. Only there’s nosuppose about it.”
“Another drink?”
And so they continued, in close-up and medium close-up, their war of wit, until one of them (he’d lost track, by then, which was which) proposed a more effective test: they would duel.
“If ever I challenge you to a duel in earnest,” he said, the tip of his foil pressed against the other’s throat, “your best chance would be battle axes in a dark cellar.”
They raced, but of this the cameras had recorded only the finish: the Double’s triumph, his own chagrin, the resulting fight—and his further chagrin. He was spared from a definitive defeat only by the arrival of one of the Guardians, which shepherded them toward the Village’s administration center.
Cut to:
The office of Number 2. Here the modernity was anything but bland; it was the nightmarish progeny of the union of the Ziegfield Follies and IBM. It assaulted the senses, attacked taste, made pageants of plastic and Day-Glo paint. Was this the “warmth and simplicity” that Number 2 had boasted of?
Was this, for that matter, Number 2? This stripling youth, in hornrim glasses, dithering on in that pure Oxonian accent that only a few Fulbright scholars ever master? So–since the events of this film there had been at least one shuffling of the staff. It was another evidence of their weakness, and he welcomed it.
Cut to:
Himself, or his double, strapped and wired into the chair (or its double) in which Number 48 had received her “aphasic therapy.” Dilated irises reflected the blinking light.
The voice of (the anterior) Number 2: “Who are you?”
And he: “Would you mind switching that idiot light out? I’m getting cramps.”
“Who” (very owllike, his who) “are you?”
“You know who I am. I’m Number 6.”
“Where do you come from?”
“You know that too.”
“How did you get here?”
“Ah! Now there’s something you’d know better than I. I was unconscious at the time, if you remember.”
The irises flared with a brighter burst of light, and his lip curled back in pain.
“What was your purpose in coming here?”
More and more, he decided as he watchedthis Number 2 go on, he preferred his own. If nothing else, he was a better entertainer.
“I had none. I’ll go away if you like.”
This time, at the cue of light, he cried aloud.
“How did your people know that Number 6 was here?”
“What people?”
“How did they know enough abouthim to produceyou ?”
“I don’t understand.”
Number 2, mildly: “What were you doing in the recreation room?”
“Showing this synthetic twin of mine how to shoot and fence.”
So: this was the one he had supposed was ersatz. Then why (again the light flared, and he writhed in an agony that could not have been faked) were they torturingthis one?
“For the last time, what do you people want with Number 6?”
And, screaming: “I’mNumber 6, you sadist!I’m Number 6, you know I’m Number 6. I’m Number 6, I’m Number 6, I’m Number 6, I’m Number 6.” Until, mercifully, he fainted.
There was this to be said for caution–that he could never, in any case, stay to see all seventeen instalments of the serial; even if he could, it might be that he would learn only so much from it as his jailers wished him to know. The film seemed carefully edited–but to what purpose, on whose behalf? There had been something (he had known this all along) too pat about this undertaking, as though it had all been prearranged–the false escape, the alarm, his discovery of the secret staircase, the open door to the film archives, the keys laid out on the table, the projector left running. But if they hadmeant him to see this, were they likely to interrupt him now?
Curiosity, on the other hand, did not need apologies. It had become by now his dominant passion. He resisted it only to the extent that he adjusted the Fr/Sc dial toMAX . A blur of images skittered across the screen: his face, his other face, their dialogue a jabber of chipmunks; a woman (to him unknown); the three of them careening about Number 2’s office, bobbing up and down in chairs, gesturing, chirruping.
Then, a procession of geometric images almost too rapid to be seen singly–squares, circles, crosses, star, and three wavy lines. Rhine cards–the abbreviated Scripture of the ESP fanatics, though howthese had come into it . . .
Abruptly (half an inch was left on the reel) the tone of the film altered. He reduced the speed, backtracked, and saw:
His two selves, standing silhouetted in a cottage door-way. About them the dead black of a moonless night. The camera-work, unlike that which had preceded it, was shaky, botched, as though this one scene had not been stage-managed for the benefit of a television crew.
One of the two figures broke from the doorway (had they been fighting?) and ran across the lawn for several yards.
And stopped.
Directly before him stood one of the spheres. The street-lamp made of it a crescent of beige (“Rover” therefore) above the great, shadowed, pulsing mass. It advanced on the man who had run from the cottage; who, with terror, addressed it:
“The Schizoid Man!”
Rover rolled to a halt.
The other man stepped from the doorway and addressed the same watchword, though with more assurance, to the sphere.
It swayed and quivered, rolling toward the man in front of the cottage, then back to the other, like a wolf that stands at an equal distance above two equally attractive sheepfolds, unable to choose. The first man chose for him–he broke. He ran.
The sphere, pursuing, hit a stone in its path, sailed a few feet into the air, settled with a quiver, and swerved down the same sidestreet where the man had disappeared. The camera held the shot of the deserted street: there was a scream.
The reel ended with a final still: a tabletop, and on it a belt-buckle, a keyring with two keys, some nails, a cigarette lighter, a few odd-shaped tiny lumps of silvery metal, and a small silver disc of the type that surgeons use in repairing fractured skulls. Presumably, but for these few artifacts, the other remnants had proved digestible.
Was it of any significance that he had never had a silver plate in his skull? (More precisely, that he did notremember anything of that sort?) Finally, could he neverprove he was who he believed himself to be? Finally, can anyone? Conviction is not a proof, for he was inclined to believe that it had been the Double they had tortured, not himself, and he (the Double) had certainly been persuaded that he was Number 6. It was just that, the strength of that conviction, that made him think the man was synthetic: for he did not think that he (himself) at root wouldinsist on being a mere number.
But it made no difference, really, who he was, who he had been, what he remembered and what he had been made to forget: he was himself, and he knew the interior dimensions of that self. This was sufficient.
Once again he reversed the reel. Again he watched the sphere start off after its victim, hit the rock, bound up, and settle, quivering.
There–in those three seconds of film, and not in any vortex of speculation and ravelled deceit–lay thesignificance of the thing; even if they had set up this private screening for some involuted reason of their own, they had betrayed their hand.
It was enough to make him laugh.
Using the safety matches on the table, he set it alight. With luck and good ventilation the blaze might reach the file drawers he had left gaping open; it might even work through the walls and into other rooms or through the ceiling to the church. With this in mind, he propped open the door to the corridor.
He remembered another time–when? long ago, years and years–like this: a room of gutted files and the first flickering as the heaped documents began to catch; himself standing, as now, on the threshold to–where had that happened? Ostrava? Or that other town across the border, a suburb of Krakow: Skawina? Wadowice? Well, that was the past–eventually, even without assistance, one forgot the names, the dates, the faces. There were just a few bright images here and there, like the sweepings from an editing room floor.
He paused at the foot of the spiral staircase. A voice said: “What the hell?” And a second voice, the goitres: “Someone has smashed the damnedbulbs !”
The squeak of the Rubens closing, and the slow clanking descent of the two men in darkness.
Carefully, distributing his weight among all four limbs, he twined his way up the spiral of the stairs, pressing close against the central support-pole. At the twelfth step he stopped: the footsteps were now very near, the voices only slightly farther away:
“Hey, do you smell—”
“Smoke!”
The footsteps quickened to a staccato. He reached up blindly, caught a trouser cuff, and pulled. There was almost no resistance. A scream, a thud. An obscenity silenced by a second thud, and the irregular cascade of limbs and torso down to the foot of the staircase. No, not to the foot: three more muffled bumps. There, he had reached the bottom.
“Eighty-Three?” the goitres called down into the well of darkness. “Are you . . . did you trip?”
The air was tinged with smoke that tickled his nose and throat. His heartbeat not much louder or faster than usual.
“Maybe I should . . . go . . . and warn . . .” The tone conveyed, like a Reuters photograph coded into binary blacks and whites, the image of his leg lifted at the knee, hesitating whether to place the foot on the tread above or the tread below, poised between two fears.
The foot came down on the lower tread. The goitres was more afraid, at last, of the consequences of neglected duty. He moved down into the thickening smoke by fits and starts, still calling on Number 83, who, in reply, had begun to groan.
Either his eyes were now adjusting to the darkness or some faint glimmer from the fire was lighting the stairwell, for when the foot, shod in white buckskin, came into view he could just discern it.
The goitres had not developed momentum equal to his companion’s: when his leg was pulled out from under him, he fell solidly on his behind. He caught hold of the central pole, resisting the hand that would pull him farther down. He began to scream.
The buckskin shoe came off in his hands. Throwing it aside, he clambered up the steps to the goitres’ level. A hand clawed at his trousers.
The goitres’ face was a gray oval above a lighter gray triangle of shirt-front. He struck him across the side of his head in a manner intended more to startle than to cause real pain. He felt no malice toward their pawns. God knew what kind of men they might have been once!
The body tumbled slowly, moaning, from tread to tread.
He raced to the top of the staircase, where the smoke with no egress, was thickest. He tried to push the painting to one side, but it stuck firmly in place. Regretfully, he kicked his way through the lower left-hand corner (the viewer’s left as he faces it).
Squirmed out through this hole, hopped down from the altar to the diapered floor. He turned back to make certain he had not damaged any of the finer passages. No, the rip did not extend beyond the dark jumble of rocks. A competent restorer would have no great problem with that. From the newly-made fissure in these rocks smoke curled forth in black, baroque designs. He thought of the harrowing of hell and left the church, still unobserved, whistling a tune he hadn’t remembered for years, another shard dislodged from the proper strata of memory, while inside the velveteen voice continued to promise some kind of salvation to anyone (“you”) who would surrender his insignificant identity to a Higher Power, which remained unspecified.