Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (14 page)

Every detail of the map must be seen with your own eyes. Everything you see gets written down, no matter how small."

"How soon do you need it?" I say.

"By autumn," speaks the shadow at a fast clip. "Also, I want a verbal report. Particularly about the Wall. The lay of it, how it goes along the Eastern Woods, where the River enters and where it exits. Got it?"

And without even looking my way, my shadow disappears out the door. I repeat everything he has told me. Lay of the Wall, Eastern Woods, River entrance and River exit. Making a map is not a bad idea. It will show me the Town and use my time well.

Soon the Gatekeeper enters. He wipes the sweat and grime off his face, and drops his bulk in the chair across from me.

"Well, what is it?"

"May I see my shadow?" I ask.

The Gatekeeper nods a few times. He tamps tobacco into his pipe and lights up.

"Not yet," he says. "It is too soon. The shadow is too strong. Wait till the days get shorter. Just so there is no trouble."

He breaks his matchstick in half and flips it onto the table.

"For your own sake, wait," he continues. "Getting too close to your shadow makes trouble. Seen it happen before."

I say nothing. He is not sympathetic. Still, I have spoken with my shadow. Surely the Gatekeeper will let down his guard again.

The Gatekeeper rises. He goes to the sink, and sloshes down cup after cup of water.

"How is the work?"

"Slow, but I am learning," I say.

"Good," says the Gatekeeper. "Do a good job. A body who works bad thinks bad, I always say."

I listen to my shadow nailing steadily.

"How about a walk?" proposes the Gatekeeper. "I want to show you something."

I follow him outside. As we enter the clearing, I see my shadow. He is standing on the wagon, putting the last sideboard in place.

The Gatekeeper strides across the clearing toward the Watchtower. The afternoon is humid and gray. Dark clouds sweep low over the Wall from the west, threatening to burst at any second. The sweat-soaked shirt of the Gatekeeper clings to his massive trunk and gives off a sour stink.

"This is the Wall," says the Gatekeeper, slapping the broad side of the battlements.

"Seven yards tall, circles the whole Town. Only birds can clear the Wall. No entrance or exit except this Gate. Long ago there was the East Gate, but they walled it up. You see these bricks? Nothing can dent them, not even a cannon."

The Gatekeeper picks up a scrap of wood and expertly pares it down to a tiny sliver.

"Watch this," he says. He runs the sliver of wood between the bricks. It hardly penetrates a fraction of an inch. He tosses the wood away, and draws the tip of his knife over the bricks. This produces an awful sound, but leaves not a mark. He examines his knife, then puts it away.

"This Wall has no mortar," the Gatekeeper states. "There is no need. The bricks fit perfect; not a hair-space between them. Nobody can put a dent in the Wall. And nobody can climb it. Because this Wall is perfect. So forget any ideas you have. Nobody leaves here."

The Gatekeeper lays a giant hand on my back.

"You have to endure. If you endure, everything will be fine. No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This is where the world ends. Nowhere further to go."

On my way back to my room, I stop in the middle of the Old Bridge and look at the River. I think about what the Gatekeeper has said.

The End of the World.

Why did I cast off my past to come here to the End of the World? What possible event or meaning or purpose could there have been? Why can I not remember?

Something has summoned me here. Something intractable. And for this, I have forfeited my shadow and my memory.

The River murmurs at my feet. There is the sandbar midstream, and on it the willows sway as they trail their long branches in the current. The water is beautifully clear. I can see fish playing among the rocks. Gazing at the River soothes me.

Steps lead down from the bridge to the sandbar. A bench waits under the willows, a few beasts lay nearby. Often have I descended to the sandbar and offered crusts of bread to the beasts. At first they hesitated, but now the old and the very young eat from my hand.

As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue. The leaves turn color, the grasses wither; the beasts sense the advance of a long, hungry season. And bowing to their vision, I too know a sadness.

Dressing, Watermelon, Chaos

The clock read half past nine when she got out of bed, picked up her clothes from the floor, and slowly, leisurely, put them on. I stayed in bed, sprawled out, one elbow bent upright, watching her every move out of the corner of my eye. One piece of clothing at a time, liltingly graceful, not a motion wasted, achingly quiet. She zipped up her skirt, did the buttons of her blouse from the top down, lastly sat down on the bed to pull on her stockings. Then she kissed me on the cheek. Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress? Now completely composed, she ran her hand through her long black hair. All at once, the room breathed new air.

"Thanks for the food," she said.

"My pleasure."

"Do you always cook like that?"

"When I'm not too busy with work," I said. "When things get hectic, it's catch-as-catch-can with leftovers. Or I eat out."

She grabbed a chair in the kitchen and lit up a cigarette. "I don't do much cooking myself.

When I think about getting home after work and fixing a meal that I'm going to polish off in ten minutes anyway, it's so-o depressing."

While I got dressed, she pulled a datebook out of her handbag and scribbled something, which she tore off and handed to me.

"Here's my phone number," she said. "If you have food to spare or want to get together or whatever, give me a call. I'll be right over."

After she left, carrying off the several volumes on mammals to be returned to the library, I went over to the TV and removed the T-shirt.

I reflected upon the unicorn skull. I didn't have an iota of proof, but I couldn't help feeling that this mystery skull was the very same specimen of Voltafil-Leningrad renown. I seemed to sense, somehow, an odor of history drifting about it. True, the story was still fresh in my mind and the power of suggestion was strong. I gave the skull a light tap with the stainless-steel tongs and went into the kitchen.

I washed the dishes, then wiped off the kitchen table. It was time to start. I switched the telephone over to my answering service so I wouldn't be disturbed. I disconnected the door chimes and turned out all the lights except for the kitchen lamp. For the next few hours I needed to concentrate my energies on shuffling.

My shuffling password was "End of the World". This was the title of a profoundly personal drama by which previously laundered numerics would be reordered for computer calculation. Of course, when I say drama, I don't mean the kind they show on TV. This drama was a lot more complex and with no discernible plot. The word is only a label, for convenience sake. All the same, I was in the dark about its contents. The sole thing I knew was its title, End of the World.

The scientists at the System had induced this drama. I had undergone a full year of Calcutec training. After I passed the final exam, they put me on ice for two weeks to conduct comprehensive tests on my brainwaves, from which was extracted the epicenter of encephalographic activity, the "core" of my consciousness. The patterns were transcoded into my shuffling password, then re-input into my brain—this time in reverse.

I was informed that End of the World was the title, which was to be my shuffling password. Thus was my conscious mind completely restructured. First there was the overall chaos of my conscious mind, then inside that, a distinct plum pit of condensed chaos as the center.

They refused to reveal any more than this.

"There is no need for you to know more. The unconscious goes about its business better than you'll ever be able to. After a certain age—our calculations put it at twenty-eight years—human beings rarely experience alterations in the overall configuration of their consciousness. What is commonly referred to as self-improvement or conscious change hardly even scratches the surface. Your 'End of the World' core consciousness will continue to function, unaffected, until you take your last breath. Understand this far?"

"I understand," I said.

"All efforts of reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach. Hence, we separate the rind from the pulp. Of course, there are idle souls out there who seem to enjoy just nibbling away on the rind.

"In view of all contingencies," they went on, "we must protect your password-drama, isolating it from any superficial turbulence, the tides of your outer consciousness.

Suppose we were to say to you, your End of the World is inhered with such, such, and such elements. It would be like peeling away the rind of the watermelon for you. The temptation would be irresistible: you would stick your fingers into the pulp and muck it up. And in no time, the hermetic extractability of our password-drama would be forfeited. Poof! You would no longer be able to shuffle."

"That's why we're giving you back your watermelon with an extra thick rind," one scientist interjected. "You can call up the drama, because it is your own self, after all. But you can never know its contents. It transpires in a sea of chaos into which you submerge empty-handed and from which you resurface empty-handed. Do you follow?"

"I believe so," I said.

"One more point," they intoned in solemn chorus. "Properly speaking,
should any
individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness
?"

"I wouldn't know," I said.

"Nor would we," said the scientists. "Such questions are, as they say,
beyond
science."

"Speaking from experience, we cannot conclude otherwise," admitted one. "So in this sense, this is an extremely sensitive experiment."

"Experiment?" I recoiled.

"Yes, experiment," echoed the chorus. "We cannot tell you any more than this."

Then they instructed me on how to shuffle: Do it alone, preferably at night, on neither a full nor empty stomach. Listen to three repetitions of a sound-cue pattern, which calls up the End of the World and plunges consciousness into a sea of chaos. Therein, shuffle the numerical data.

When the shuffling was done, the End of the World call would abort automatically and my consciousness would exit from chaos. I would have no memory of anything.

Reverse shuffling was the literal reverse of this process. For reverse shuffling, I was to listen to a reverse-shuffling sound-cue pattern.

This mechanism was programmed into me. An unconscious tunnel, as it were, input right through the middle of my brain. Nothing more or less.

Understandably, whenever I shuffle, I am rendered utterly defenseless and subject to mood swings.

With laundering, it's different. Laundering is a pain, but I myself can take pride in doing it. All sorts of abilities are brought into the equation. Whereas shuffling is nothing I can pride myself on. I am merely a vessel to be used. My consciousness is borrowed and something is processed while I'm unaware. I hardly feel I can be called a Calcutec when it comes to shuffling. Nor, of course, do I have any say in choice of calc-scheme.

I am licensed in both shuffling and laundering, but can only follow the prescribed order of business. And if I don't like it, well, I can quit the profession.

I have no intention of turning in my Calcutec qualifications. Despite the meddling and the raised eyebrows at the System, I know of no line of work that allows the individual as much freedom to exercise his abilities as being a Calcutec. Plus the pay is good. If I work fifteen years, I will have made enough money to take it easy for the rest of my life.

Shuffling is not impeded by drinking. In fact, the experts indicate that moderate drinking may even help in releasing nervous tension. With me, though, it's part of my ritual that I always shuffle sober. I remain wary about the whole enterprise. Especially since they've put the freeze on shuffling for two months now.

I took a cold shower, did fifteen minutes of hard calisthenics, and drank two cups of black coffee. I opened my private safe, removed a miniature tape recorder and the typewritten paper with the converted data, and set them out on the kitchen table. Then I readied a notepad and a supply of five sharpened pencils.