Myths from Caves
Never a visitor before. He didn't move at first, because the clink and rattle sounded like the mouth sliding up. His slop tin got through his cell door that way. The guards didn't have to unlock it, just open the mouth and slide the tin into his cell along the lino. But no more rattles from the mouth and no tin. It couldn't be sheet day either, and not Christmas and certainly not release. The bolt in the door shot home, and hard. That he sat up for.
"Who?" he called, from the farthest corner of his cot.
The door swung open half-way. Dust snowed down from the jamb, stirred along and carried deeper inside his cell by an inhale of fresh air. The dust motes whirled around him, lighting on his arm like tiny insects; one, then another, now three. If he tried, he could see smaller things than dust in the dark. The Dark taught him how to see, what to see: the shadow-puppet images of itself for which he had invented a thousand reverent words. He had no words for what happened next. Blazing not-dark from the hallway thrust a thick spear of flaming white into the heart of his cell's gloom.
He shielded his closed eyes, as if they might adjust after this long in the hole. Every glint of white from his cell's lino scorched his optic nerves. Yet he strained to adjust himself to the not-dark, because of the unknown of it—more! there must be! confess!—the seduction of it.
"You could stand by," a strange male voice said from the hallway. "He could flee."
"On fifty milligrams for breakfast?" the guard said as he left. His laughter rumbled like metal drums beaten by truncheons. "Keep your cart out here. They steal."
The visitor loomed in the doorway, silhouetted against the glowing white from the hall. His shoulders almost touched either side of the doorframe, and he stooped to avoid striking his head against the door jamb. He held a gleaming metal stepladder and asked to come into his cell. No one ever asked him before for such permission. They entered, they left.
"This is wrong," he told the visitor.
"Just replacing the tubes," the man replied. He invaded: ladder and belt full of tools clanking, rushing and pushing straight to the center of the cell, where the lino pattern changed from triangles to stains. His hand formed a mask over his nose, as if he smelled something liquefying, something dead.
"Leave!" he cried to the man. "Get out of me."
"Warden says Lamper Charlie-alpha—that's me—replaces the fluorescent tubes in cell 231-F." He planted the stepladder in the centre of the cell, climbed three steps, and began yanking at a translucent plastic thing in the ceiling. "You got used to it is all."
Used to it? But there had only ever been the Dark. Had he been bad? Had the Dark abandoned him? He struggled to be good good good ever since the bad time. And he had repented: he hoarded coins and pondered his beauty and believed in the shadow of things. He didn't even know he had a fluorescent tube, because he spent all day in the position: on his belly, watching the floor, thinking about the teachings. A mole shall not climb a mountain. A mole shall not waste electricity on the night sky. A mole shall not signal the white points up there with a flashlight: SOS-SOS-SOS. He shall be re-educated into darkness, born again.
The man tore a thin rectangle of plastic from the ceiling and lay it atop the stepladder. He ran his hand against the tubes and then flapped his hand in front of his face, spitting and blowing. "Goddamn!" he said. He sneezed. "How long you been like this? Dust is thick as carpet." He yanked at a tube until it came free, and then pulled at the other until he held both. When he stood again at the bottom of the ladder, the man offered him the blackened tubes.
He raised his hand, then yanked it back again as if from a hot stove ring—it was a test. The Dark had thrown him into the white desert to assay His instrument.
"You want to touch it?" asked the man. "Go on. I know you got nothing else."
He couldn't help himself; the man thrust the tubes at him. He recoiled and closed his eyes, but his finger brushed a thin, cold, gritty tube. It felt like his own beautiful thigh.
"You think that's something." The man disappeared out the door and returned with two polished white tubes. "Run your hand over the real thing." He thrust the tube into his hand. It felt smooth, but still cold, cold. He recoiled again, wiping and wiping his hands on the sheet. He snarled at the man. "Don't like it, eh?" the man said. "No sense left in you moles. Not that this lot'd ever do more than drug it out of you." The man ascended the ladder again, carrying the two tubes, then propped them atop the ladder so they wouldn't roll off. He took up the first one, jammed it into the metallic box in the ceiling, and twisted it home; he did the same with the second. He left the plastic cover sitting on the top of the ladder, hopped down, and walked over to the switch by the door. He flicked it up. "Let there be light!" cried the man.
The man's words alarmed him. He squirreled back into his bedding. The tubes hummed. They flickered once, twice, and then a jet of pulsating, violet white shot to either end of the tubes, curling in on itself, burning.
"Goddamn it," the man said. "Bloody ballast." He flicked the switch and the white in the tubes died cold, cold. "Make yourself at home. I'll be back." The man disappeared out the door. "Edie, get Facilities. I need a new ballast in 231-F. Coffee again? Never mind, I'll get it myself."
A breeze blew through his open cell door. No guard and no man. Just him and the cold white tubes that once boiled with burning filaments. "No," he moaned. "No no no no!" He implored the Dark. He whipped himself with his bed sheet. Good good good. It wasn't his fault; forgive him—he'd been possessed by the man's devil sorcery. It made him push his bedding aside and move to the edge of his cot. On his feet, he trembled and wavered like a newborn calf. Fortunately, he'd lost his three-meal privileges, or he might have been forced to walk those ten feet. It threw him to his hands and knees and dragged him across an expanse of floor that was his equivalent of ascending a sheer cliff. By the time he hit the doorway, his body had left a trail of skin and sweat behind him and his arms felt like nausea. He wedged his back against the wall, by the door, his breath coming and going like an asthmatic.
In the dimmed corridor, he saw the man's teal cart with its many tubes and wires and tools. He would throw himself out there, let the guards save him. But it forced his hand to grope up. He failed on the first try, because he yanked it back. Again, only this time it used his free hand to prop up his probing arm, until both spasmed and fell to his lap. He lay there, groping for his wind. He inhaled, and it heaved him up by his legs, his back pushed against the wall, sliding him up and up, making him swat with his hand at the switch, letting him crash to the floor not knowing if he'd won or lost.
He wiped the salty wet off his cheeks and peeked up. Above the ladder, both ends of the tubes glowed with violet white.
"Still in there, Lamper?" the guard called from the hall.
He wanted to repent, but it dragged him to the base of the ladder, heaved his arm over the top rung, pushed him up.
"What do you mean he went to Facilities? The cell door's wide open."
Footfalls, fast, pell-mell.
Two running now. "He was okay," the man shouted, distant, down the corridor. "Where'd he go?"
His struggle existed beyond penitence. He fought each step. But the man's sorcery forced him up, rung by rung, propelling him by numb limbs towards the white. Two rungs from the top, he flung his legs out into the air. He hung there on the verge of falling, the Dark's shadow claws locked around his flailing legs. It kicked his legs at the Dark and shot him up, and he found himself groping above his head at the violet white, caressing the hot tube.
"Get down, you miserable bastard!" the guard roared. The man rushed in behind him.
"He just wanted to touch it," the man said. "I let him touch the old one."
The guard yanked him down from the ladder, throwing him onto his bed as easily as if he were a hollow pillow. "What's that he's got in his hands? Against his chest?" The guard raked at his arms, struggling to pry them apart.
"Leave him be. He's just a child, no older than my boy. It's all up there. Look for yourself."
"Put the cover back on and get out."
"But the ballast—"
"Damn the ballast. He lived in the dark, he can die in the dark."
The man rattled the cover back into place and snapped off the switch.
"Don't leave me!" he cried to the man. "I want to live!"
The guard shoved the man out. "Sorry, boy," the man choked out.
His breath went. The door closed against him. He shivered, awaiting the crush of the Dark's frigid grip. He only breathed again when he noticed what he'd received when he'd touched the white, shimmering tube. Cupped against his breast, violet, hot and luminous—a response to his signals sent so long ago—a beacon to a brighter realm.
Copyright 2006 by A. Alan Beck
A. Alan Beck writes:
