James P. Flood
Anna
David Zimmer
Peter Stillman, Jr.
Peter Stillman, Sr.
Fanshawe
In writing Fanshawe's name, it occurs to him that a second name was mentioned during Flood's visit as well, a name he heard in association with the reference to Flood's dream in chapter thirty of the book, but grapple as he does to recall what it was, he cannot come up with the answer. Something to do with chapter seven, he says to himself, something to do with a house, but the rest is a blank in Mr. Blank's mind. Galled by his own inadequacy, he nevertheless decides to put down something, hoping the name will come back to him at some future moment. The list now reads as follows:
James P. Flood
Anna
David Zimmer
Peter Stillman, Jr.
Peter Stillman, Sr.
Fanshawe
Man with house
As Mr. Blank puts down the pen, a word begins resounding in his head, and for several moments after that, as the word continues to echo within him, he senses that he is on the brink of a serious breakthrough, a crucial turning point that will help clarify something about what the future has in store for him. The word is park. He remembers now that shortly after entering the room, Flood suggested they hold their conversation in the park across the way. If nothing else, that would seem to contradict Mr. Blank's previous assertion that he is being held captive, confined to the space in which these four walls surround him, blocked forever from sallying forth into the world. He is somewhat encouraged by this thought, but he also knows that even if he is allowed to visit the park, that does not necessarily prove he is free. Perhaps such visits are possible only under strict supervision, and once Mr. Blank has savored a welcome dose of sunlight and fresh air, he is promptly led back to the room, whereupon he is again held prisoner against his will. He finds it a pity that he did not have the presence of mind to question Flood about the park—in order to determine whether it is a public park, for example, or merely some wooded or grassy area that belongs to the building or institution or asylum in which he is now living. More important, he realizes for what must be the umpteenth time in the past several hours that it all comes down to the nature of the door, and whether it is locked from the outside or not. He closes his eyes and strains to recall the sounds he heard after Flood left the room. Was it the sound of a bolt sliding shut, the sound of a key turning in a cylinder plug, or simply the click of a latch? Mr. Blank cannot remember. By the time the conversation with Flood came to an end, he was so agitated by that disagreeable little man and his whining recriminations that he was too distracted to be paying attention to such petty concerns as locks and bolts and doors.
Mr. Blank wonders if the moment hasn't finally come to investigate the matter for himself. Afraid though he might be, would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty? Perhaps, he says to himself. And then again, perhaps not. Before Mr. Blank can decide whether he has the courage to travel over to the door at last, a new and more urgent problem suddenly asserts itself—what might most accurately be called an urgent urge. Pressure has once again begun to build in Mr. Blank's body. Unlike the earlier episode, which was situated in the general area of his stomach, this one appears in a spot several inches lower, in the southernmost region of Mr. Blank's belly. From long experience with such matters, the old man understands that he has to pee. He considers traveling over to the bathroom in the chair, but knowing that the chair will not fit through the bathroom doorway, and further knowing that he cannot execute the pee while sitting in the chair, that a moment will inevitably come when he will have to stand up (if only to sit down again on the toilet seat if he is attacked by another rush of dizziness), he decides to make the journey on foot. He therefore rises from the chair, pleased to note as he does so that his equilibrium is steady, with no signs of the vertigo that plagued him earlier. What Mr. Blank has forgotten, however, is that he is no longer wearing the white tennis shoes, not to speak of no longer wearing the black slippers, and that there is nothing on his feet anymore but the white nylon socks. In that the material of those socks is exceedingly thin, and in that the wooden floor is exceedingly smooth, Mr. Blank discovers after the first step that it is possible to slide his way forward—not with the rasping shuffle of the slippers, but as if he were moving along on ice skates.
A new form of pleasure has become available to him, and after two or three experimental glides between the desk and the bed, he concludes that it is no less enjoyable than rocking back and forth and spinning around in the chair—perhaps even more so. The pressure in his bladder is mounting, but Mr. Blank delays his trip to the bathroom in order to prolong his turn on the imaginary ice by a few moments, and as he skates around the room, now lifting one foot into the air, now the other, or else floating along with both feet on the floor, he again returns to the distant past, not as far back as the era of Whitey the rocking horse or the mornings when he would sit in his mother's lap as she dressed him on the bed, but a long while ago just the same: Mr. Blank in his high middle boyhood, roughly ten years old, perhaps eleven, but on no account as advanced as twelve. It's a cold Saturday afternoon in January or February. The pond in the little town where he grew up has frozen over, and there is the young Mr. Blank, who was then referred to as Master Blank, skating hand in hand with his first love, a girl with green eyes and reddish brown hair, long reddish brown hair (tousled by the wind, her cheeks red from the cold, her name now forgotten, but beginning with the letter 5, Mr. Blank says to himself, he is certain of that, perhaps Susie, he thinks, or Samantha or Sally or Serena, but no, none of those, and yet no matter, for in that it was the first time he ever held a girl's hand, what he remembers most keenly now is the sensation of having entered a new world, a world in which holding a girl's hand was a good to be desired above all others, and such was his ardor for this young creature whose name began with the letter S that once they stopped skating and sat down on a tree stump at the edge of the pond, Master Blank was bold enough to lean forward and kiss her on the lips. For reasons that both baffled and wounded him at the time, Miss S. burst out laughing, turned away her head, and rebuked him with a sentence that has stayed with him ever since—even now, in his present abject circumstances, when all is not right in his head and so many other things have vanished: Don't be silly. For the object of his affections understood nothing of such matters, being but ten or eleven years old and not yet ripened to the point where amorous advances from a member of the opposite sex would have any meaning for her. And so, rather than respond to Master Blank's kiss with a kiss of her own, she laughed.
The rebuff lingered for days afterward, causing such pain in his soul that one morning, noticing her son's grim demeanor, his mother asked him what was wrong. Mr. Blank was still young enough to feel no compunctions about confiding in his mother, and therefore he told her the full story. To which she replied: Don't worry; there are other pebbles on the shore. It was the first time Mr. Blank had heard the expression, and he found it curious that girls should be compared to pebbles, whom they in no way resembled, he felt, at least not in his experience. Nevertheless, he grasped the metaphor, but in spite of understanding what his mother was trying to tell him, he disagreed with her, since passion is and always will be blind to all but one thing, and as far as Mr. Blank was concerned, there was only one pebble on the shore that counted, and if he couldn't have that one, he wasn't interested in any of the others. Time changed all that, of course, and as the years went on he came to see the wisdom of his mother's remark. Now, as he continues to glide around the room in his white nylon socks, he wonders how many pebbles there have been since then. Mr. Blank can't be sure, for his memory is nothing if not defective, but he knows there are dozens, perhaps even scores of them—more pebbles in his past than he can possibly count, right up to and including Anna, the long-lost girl of so many years ago, rediscovered this very day on the infinite shore of love.
These musings fly through Mr. Blank's head in a matter of seconds, perhaps twelve, perhaps twenty, and all the while, as the past wells up within him, he struggles to maintain his concentration so as not to lose his balance as he skates around the room. Short as those seconds may be, however, a moment comes when the bygone days overtake the present, and instead of thinking and moving at the same time, Mr. Blank forgets that he is moving and focuses exclusively on his thoughts, and not long after that, perhaps less than a second, two seconds at most, his feet slip out from under him and he falls to the floor.
Luckily, he does not land on his head, but in all other respects the tumble qualifies as a nasty spill. Pitching backward into the void as his stockinged feet struggle to gain a purchase on the slippery wooden planks, he thrusts his hands out behind him in the vain hope of softening the impact, but he nevertheless hits the floor smack on his tail-bone, which sends forth a cascade of volcanic fire through his legs and torso, and given that he has also fallen on his hands, his wrists and elbows are suddenly ablaze as well. Mr. Blank writhes around on the floor, too stunned even to feel sorry for himself, and as he wrestles to absorb the pain that has engulfed him, he forgets to contract the muscles in and around his penis, which he has been doing for the last little while as he skated into his past. For Mr. Blank's bladder is full to bursting, and without making a conscious effort to hold it in, as it were, he is on the verge of producing a shameful and embarrassing accident. But the pain is too much for him. It has pushed all other thoughts out of his mind, and once he begins to relax the aforementioned muscles, he feels his urethra give way to the inevitable, and a moment later he is pissing in his pants. No better than an infant, he says to himself as the warm urine flows out of him and runs down his leg. Then he adds: Mewling and puking in his nurse's arms. And then, once the deluge has ceased, he shouts at the top of his lungs: Idiot! Idiot old man! What the hell is wrong with you?
Now Mr. Blank is in the bathroom, stripping off his pants, underwear, and socks, all of which have been drenched and yellowed by his involuntary loss of control. Still rattled by the blunder, his bones still aching from the crash to the floor, he flings each article of clothing angrily into the tub, then takes the white washcloth Anna used for the sponge bath earlier and wipes down his legs and crotch with warm water. As he does so, his penis begins to swell from its present flaccid state, rising from the perpendicular to a forty-five-degree angle. In spite of the multiple indignities Mr. Blank has been subjected to in the past minutes, he can't help feeling consoled by this development, as if it somehow proved that his honor was still intact. After a few more tugs, his old companion is sticking out from his body at a full ninety-degree thrust, and in this way, preceded by his second erection of the morning, Mr. Blank exits the bathroom, walks over to the bed, and climbs into the pajama bottoms that Anna stowed under the pillow. Mr. Bigshot has already begun to shrink by the time the old man pushes his feet into his leather slippers, but what else can be expected in the absence of further friction or mental stimulation of some kind? Mr. Blank feels more comfortable in the pajama bottoms and slippers than he did in the white trousers and tennis shoes, but at the same time he can't help feeling guilty about these sartorial changes, for the fact is that he is no longer dressed all in white, which means that he has broken his promise to Anna—as per the demand of Peter Stillman, Junior—and this pains him deeply, even more deeply than the physical pain that is still reverberating through his body. As he shuffles over to the desk to resume his reading of the typescript, he resolves to make a clean breast of it the next time he sees her, hoping she will find it in her heart to forgive him.
Several moments later, he is once again sitting in the chair, his tailbone throbbing as he wriggles his backside around until he settles into a more or less acceptable position. Then he begins to read:
I first heard about the trouble in the Alien Territories six months ago. It was a late afternoon in midsummer, and I was sitting alone in my office, working on the last pages of my semi-annual report. We were well into the season of white cotton suits by then, but the air that day had been especially hot, bearing down with such stifling heaviness that even the thinnest clothing felt excessive. At ten o'clock, I had instructed the men in my department to remove their coats and ties, but as that seemed to have little effect, I dismissed them at noon. Since the staff had done nothing all morning but fan their faces and wipe sweat from their foreheads, it seemed pointless to hold them hostage any longer.
I remember dining at the Bruder Hof, a small restaurant around the corner from the Foreign Ministry building.
Afterward, I took a stroll down Santa Victoria Boulevard, going as far as the river to see if I couldn't coax a breeze to blow against my face. I saw the children launching their toy boats into the water, the women walking by in groups of three and four with their yellow parasols and bashful smiles, the young men loafing on the grass. I have always loved the capital in summer. There is a stillness that envelops us at that time of year, a trancelike quality that seems to blur the difference between animate and inanimate things, and with the crowds along the avenues so much thinner and quieter, the frenzy of the other seasons becomes almost unimaginable. Perhaps it is because the Protector and his family are gone from the city then, and with the palace standing empty and blue shutters covering the familiar windows, the reality of the Confederation begins to feel less substantial. One is aware of the great distances, of the endless territories and people, of the chaos and clamor of lives being lived—but they are all at a remove, somehow, as if the Confederation had become something internal, a dream that each person carried within himself.
After I returned to the office, I worked steadily until four o'clock. I had just put down my pen to mull over the concluding paragraphs when I was interrupted by the arrival of the Minister's secretary—a young man named Jensen or Johnson, I can't recall which. He handed me a note and then looked off discreetly in the other direction while I read it, waiting for an answer to carry back to the Minister. The message was very brief. Would it be possible for you to stop by my house this evening? Excuse the last-minute invitation, but there is a matter of great importance I need to discuss with you. Joubert.
I wrote out a reply on department stationery, thanking the Minister for his invitation and telling him that he could expect me at eight. The redheaded secretary went off with the letter, and for the next few minutes I remained at my desk, puzzling over what had just happened. Joubert had been installed as Minister three months earlier, and in that time I had seen him only once—at a formal banquet held by the Bureau to celebrate his appointment. Under ordinary circumstances, a man in my position would have little direct contact with the Minister, and I found it odd to have been invited to his house, especially on such short notice. From all I had heard about him so far, he was neither an impulsive nor flamboyant administrator, and he did not flaunt his power in an arbitrary or unreasonable way. I doubted that I had been summoned to this private meeting because he was planning to criticize my work, but at the same time, judging from the urgency of his message, it was clear that this was to be more than just a social visit.
For a person who had attained such an exalted rank, Joubert did not cut an impressive figure. Just short of his sixtieth birthday, he was a squat and diminutive man with bad eyesight and a bulbous nose who continually adjusted and readjusted his pince-nez throughout our conversation.
A servant led me down the central corridor to a small library on the ground floor of the Minister's residence, and when Joubert rose to welcome me, dressed in an out-of-fashion brown frock coat and a ruffled white cravat, I had the feeling that I was shaking hands with an assistant law clerk rather than one of the most important men in the Confederation. Once we began to speak, however, that illusion was quickly dispelled. He had a clear and attentive mind, and each one of his remarks was delivered with authority and conviction. After he had apologized for calling me to his house at such an inopportune moment, he gestured to the gilded leather chair on the opposite side of his desk, and I sat down.
—I take it you've heard of Ernesto Land, he said, wasting no more time on empty formalities.