Barking Man (2 page)

Peace.
The small departs.

The great approaches.

Good fortune. Success.

Auspicious sign. Why is it, though, that none of us can sleep? A pretty irony: there is no peace in us, it would seem. We have scarcely slept an hour amongst the three of us all week. Anxiety? The stress of change? I am so stupid with exhaustion that I can scarcely manage this whole business of the sticks; I miscount in threes instead of fours, or they fall from the spaces between my claws where I must balance them. All exacerbated by that “Boy,” the monstrous oaf, who keeps pushing his great cliff of a face against our cell. He carries a notebook with him now, in which he makes some blotted smudgy marks with his log of a pen, to what purpose I cannot imagine. We had more privacy at the market.

I’ve taken to reading the oracle at night, safe from this interruption. Now, in the half dark, I can sit up in full lotus position, demonstrating the proper respect for the whole enterprise. The light leaking in from the kitchen suffices me. Of course, I’m always a little distracted by the maddening grate of that wheel, for Li runs on it all through the night now, stopping only for food or water two or three times a day. Wu has dug himself into a cave of chips, in the midst of which I can hear him miserably thrashing. His simple mind has small defense against this sort of suffering. I worry for his and all our mental health, and as I cannot sleep I may as well improve the hours.

Six in the fifth place calls up lines involving the imperial princesses, of which I can make no sense whatever. Though my memory is still perfect (I could not even bear the thought of losing that) this failure of interpretation may be the fault of my disordered mind. But:

Six at the top means:

The wall falls back into the moat.

Use no army now.

Make your commands known within your own town.

Perseverance brings misfortune.

Oh yes. That’s rather more pertinent.
The wall falls back into the moat
. Truly, our condition is controlled by fate alone. There is no use in struggling; all we may do is submit. That’s a reading that might bring peace of sorts, albeit rather dreary sorts. I unfold my legs and stretch out, composing myself not for sleep (alas) but for that thoughtless pale hiatus which is the closest to it I’ve attained these last few days. Soon that squeaking bumping wheel will drive me mad. My arms and legs are all unpleasantly atingle, and there’s a sensation in the bottom of my stomach which feels very much like sudden fear, though it has been there at the same constant level for as long as seventy-two hours. And now, out of that pulsing white nothing my mind seems to be turning into, comes the answer:

Pay heed to the providing of nourishment
…

We’re being drugged, it’s obvious. How could I ever have failed—I picture again the “Boy’s” pen point scoring his coarse papers with deep blue grooves. Why, we’re not pets at all. We’re …
experimental
. The very word makes that cold spot in my belly clench still tighter. I’ve been misled, since we arrived, by the fact that this place seems to conform more to my image of “House” than of “Laboratory. “After all, it is inhabited by a “Family,” is it not? Well, unpleasant as it is to contemplate, it might be better to know. I clutch my oracle stalks into the soft fur of my belly, as comfort of a kind. Perhaps there still is a way for us to regain some degree of control.

After three more wretched days and nights I’ve made a discovery. The poison isn’t in the food. It’s in the water. Which brings our case very near to being hopeless. I managed to get Wu and Li to join me in a day-long experimental fast. But when that had no effect, they both of them refused to do without water. Not outright, but simply as if the advice I gave them did not penetrate. We’re all more than a little blurry now, of course. Still, they did not drink one whit less of the water than before.

That’s deliberate insubordination, certainly, yet I can’t absolutely blame either one of them. This sleeplessness has made us all a little wild. Has it been ten days? I can’t remember. And I am here to testify that going entirely without water is very, very difficult. I managed it, at first, for twenty-four hours, enough to prove my point, for last night my nervous system calmed enough for me to steal a few snatches of sleep, though my swollen, cracking tongue kept me almost as wakeful as before. Another day of total abstinence would be death, so today I let myself drink a little. A very little, yet already I can feel that chemical agitation running through me. It may be possible to strike some sort of balance. Maybe, but the hope is faint. Soon we must all go mad.

Wu, who keeps up his seismic trembling under the chips so constantly I’ve almost ceased to notice it, bursts out of the bedding so suddenly now I can hardly focus my eyes on him. Dazedly I stare as he charges at the turning wheel where Li goes on mindlessly rushing, scrambling on and on without progress. Wu rips at the underside of the wheel with his claws, and I see that he must be trying to stop it, stop it at whatever price. Nor do I blame him, for the endless motion, along with its equally endless squealing, has begun to make me almost physically nauseous too. Li keeps on running as if desperate for an important destination, the narrow wedge of his head stretched out flat before him like a racer pressing toward his goal. And for whatever reason, Wu seems entirely unable to stop the wheel. He clings to it and falls, rises to get a fresh grip, is even carried up a little way on the backspin—and falls once more.

Strange, for Wu is the most powerful of the three of us, without question.
Fool
, I think,
you have only to jump up there with him, knock him out of there, that’s the way to manage it.
But what can have come over me, to promote strife among my companions? Even in a thought? Wu has given up, collapsed in the chips below that fretfully spinning wheel, his back disconsolately humped up. Oh, for some word that might cheer him, but I have none. He makes a quarter turn and I just see a red flash in his eyes before with another spring he is on
me
. Tumbling me over backward and, inexplicably, without the least provocation, sinking his teeth into the thickest meat at the bare base of
my tail
.

An involuntary squeak breaks out of me, surprise and pain in equal mixture, and without thinking I whip around and rake at Wu’s broad face with both my forepaws. A mistake, for Wu outweighs me at least an ounce, and moreover he is of the Samurai class and so has martial training, whereas I have none. I’m winded by a rear paw buried in my belly, stunned by a forepaw hammered behind my ear, flung bodily up and out in a giddy arc that stops with a slam into the bars. Even unarmed, Wu is formidable. As I slide down I feel the hot needles of his teeth pierce into my tail again, a little closer to the tip this time.
God! God! Buddha! How it hurts me!
Tears flood my eyes, and I grip the bars with my forepaws, for I dare not venture any further resistance.

Perhaps I can reason with him somehow? But this is all so senseless! It’s insanity, of course, I knew it would come, though I never suspected it would take such a form. Cautiously I peer back over my left shoulder. Wu’s eyes, hot rabid red, rise to meet mine for an instant, and he gives my tail an agonizing shake, as if to emphasize some point. He doesn’t want me to look at him? All right, I won’t. As I turn back, fixing my trembling muzzle between two bars to hold it firm and keep from crying, Wu shifts his bite again. I tremble to the core, for this time I think Ífelt one tooth cut through to bone.

I must set my mind to something else, some distraction, anything. But I can summon no bright work of images to dance for me now; the pain drives everything before it. The interlocking squares, where the Changes are recorded, twirl before my eyes as crazily as Li’s wheel, as I struggle to fix on one of them, it hardly matters which. What was it that ironic draw of
Peace
was turning into? Wu bites through on a new and narrower section of my tail, and the fresh burst of pain seems to underline it:

The wind drives across heaven:

The image of
The Taming Power of the Small
.

Thus the superior mouse

Refines the outward aspect of his nature.

Ohyesohyesohyes … That would seem to be my only choice for the moment. Clearly there is not the least thing I can do to change this circumstance. But oh, let me bear it with patience, with fortitude. I will let nothing forth from me but the gentlest acceptance, check Wu only with my meekness. Such is
The Taming Power of the Small
. And already, far out beyond the razor edges of this pain, I can envision the gently lapping borders of a great placid sea of calm.

It’s been five days, or is it six, since last I was able to consult the oracle. The torment so steadily administered by Wu has kept my attention fully occupied. So painfully that at times I’ve been tempted to wonder what offense I could possibly have committed to bring such a punishment down on me. Though that question is itself inspired by decadent, almost barbaric thinking.

Surely, it must be karma.

But for most of last night, and all of today, Wu has left me in relative peace.
Peace
, if you like to call it that. He’s tunneled back into the chips again, and now rarely emerges even to eat or drink. While Li still rattles and scrapes interminably along the infinite curve of his wheel. How he keeps it up I can’t conceive … As for me, I have remained wedged here in this corner of the cell for the most part, reluctant to move because movement hurts my poor tail terribly. My tail, so recently a fine and flexible whip of flesh, is swollen to several times its normal size, and covered from base to tip with red-ringed puncture wounds, some still bleeding a little, most already beginning to fester. These last few hours the pain has dimmed to a dull ache—small comfort, since all it means is that amputation will doubtless soon be necessary. I cannot even flex it, though I can’t be sure if the relevant tendons have been completely severed, for any attempt in that direction makes me half faint from pain. To drag it limply behind me as far as the food dish or water spout is excruciating enough.

In default of all else, I gather my sticks and laboriously calculate the Changes. Never mind that it’s broad daylight. Never mind that the “Boy” has come and that he’s watching me, has opened his notebook and is boring furiously into it with his pen. He’ll never comprehend the significance of my action anyway, so why should I trouble to conceal it?

On the mountain, a tree:

The image of
Development
.

Thus the superior mouse abides in dignity and virtue

In order to improve the mores.

Dignity and virtue, what droppings, what owl pellets, indeed. This superior mouse is abiding in agony and idiocy, like it or not. Of course, it is true that the mores around here could bear a little improvement.
Screek screek
goes that demented wheel, so that I can barely string a thought together, and for one delirious instant I’m overwhelmed by the thought of how delicious it would be to fling Li down from it and gnaw some intimate part of him clear to the bone. But I must calm myself—