Just a Couple of Days (22 page)

General Kiljoy liked to see the looks on people's faces when he showed them holy hell, and it was equally priceless for him. The visage was identical from person to person, he told me, and I was no exception.

“It's fascinating,” he said, muting the external noise. I hadn't been aware that he had that power, so I was somewhat awestruck when a wave of his hand caused such impossible pandemonium to cease, like God twitching a pinky to still an earthquake. “It's an expression I've never seen anywhere else.”

“Do I still have the expression?” I asked, feeling the lines of my face as a blind person might, only I lacked such tactile talent.

“No, now you just look confused.”

“How did I look before?”

“I don't know, Fountain, that's what I'm trying to tell you. There's confusion in it, but also surprise, panic, awe, pity, and amusement. It's an entirely new pattern of contracting and relaxing facial muscles. I've never seen it before.” He studied my face inquisitively. “Did I tell you I'm a dilettante physiognomist? It's a hobby. I study people's faces for clues to their personality. It helps me professionally.”

“Um.” I became painfully self-conscious of my possible expression. Conversing with someone concerning your countenance is about as comfortable an interaction as discussing the dynamics of eye contact. Consequently, I had to turn away, only to be greeted by the sight of the two formerly weeping men now mercilessly beating the third, the dizzy one who'd fallen and
vomited upon them. I turned back to General Kiljoy, but was only met with his physiognomic scrutiny once again. “What's happening?” I pointed to the brutal violence occurring to our right, attempting to change the focus of attention from my face. “Is that normal?”

“Happens all the time in cities all over the world,” General Kiljoy talked through a yawn. “Seems normal enough.”

“I mean, is that behavior symptomatic of the Pied Piper virus?”

“Hard to say for sure. That's why we're interested in some subjects without a history of violent behavior. Anyway, any behavior after infection has to be taken as an effect of the Pied Piper virus, since losing your linguistic capacity must certainly alter the entirety of your perceptions. With these prisoners, anyway, there's certainly been an increase in violence.”

“Have there been any deaths?”

“I knew you were going to ask that, I could see it in your face. I suppose now you're going to accuse me of lying to you and start your self-righteous moralizing again. Well, save it for Tibor, I'm sick to shit of it. These men were condemned to death anyway, and besides, I didn't lie. The Pied Piper virus doesn't
directly
result in death, that's what I said.”

“Why don't you just say your fingers were crossed?”

“If they were,” General Kiljoy sneered, “it'd have to be good enough for you. Now drop it, Fountain, that's the end of it.” He jabbed his beefy index finger in my chest. It hurt. “You're here to do a job,” he continued, mellow but menacing, “and I expect you to do it. Are we clear?”

I nodded, rubbing my throbbing breastbone. I then asked in a professional tone, “I think it's relevant information for my
research, however, to know how many have been indirectly killed.”

“Forty-three, last I checked. Forty-four, if they keep it up on that bastard.”

I looked to my right, just in time to see Dizzy's head crushed under the boot of one of his cellmates. His skull collapsed as if it had been a mere watermelon, and they continued kicking his now lifeless body. Inevitably, the aphorism “no sense kicking a dead horse” popped into my mind. Try as I might, however, I could find no wisdom in that adage, for there is even less sense in kicking a living horse.

 

74
‘Yep,” General Kiljoy said, droll and aloof. “Forty-four.”

Horrified and disgusted, I began to dry heave.

“Don't go hurling in here, Fountain,” he reprimanded. “You saw what happened to that guy.”

“What?” I asked between gags.

“You heard me, wonderbelly. You would've never made it in 'nam.”

“Vietnam?” I said, swallowing a retch.

“Four years,” he bragged, driving us farther down the corridor. “I've had my fair share of skull-crushing, I can say. Strange feeling, putting the heel of your boot through someone's brain. Both crunchy and squishy. Once, on routine patrol, our platoon was ambushed by some VC. They came at us from all sides, but I'll never forget, something came over me that day. I went absolutely berserk, pure combat, flawless form. I have thin memories of racing through the brush, hitting every gook I aimed at, completely . . .” He paused. “. . . aware. I couldn't fail, and I knew it,
knew it like I had never known anything before.” He became sickeningly passionate in his description. “I had this grace, this totality of perception. When it was over, only two men in our platoon sustained injuries, and twenty-seven Vietcong lay dead, fourteen or fifteen by me—we weren't sure who got one of them. I was awarded the Medal of Honor for that, and it got me to the position I'm in today.” He paused wistfully. “I told Tony Temper about that once. He was in my platoon, got into that Buddhism crap after the war. He told me it was a Zen moment. I slugged him for that, joining an enemy religion, I mean.”

“Hmm.”

“The last person I killed that day was only wounded before I ran out of ammo, so I had to stomp his skull in. Tony Temper, he also told me he was psychic, like he could read minds, you know. He told me he knew what the last thing to go through that slope's Oriental brain was that day. You know what it was?”

“What?”

General Kiljoy grinned enormously. “My boot.”

 

75
General Kiljoy encouraged me to continue observing the subjects as we slowly moved down the corridor. I declined and, reminding him that I was hungover, warned that I could offer no guarantees of digestive normalcy. His only response was to hit the brake suddenly, causing me to lurch forward. I somehow managed to keep myself from turning inside out, but I heaved so hard I blacked out momentarily.

“Sorry!” He slapped me on the back. “Couldn't resist.”

I smiled weakly and asked to please return to the observation lounge.

“You're probably dying to know what's going on with your friend, eh?”

I nodded submissively. In turning the cart around, we were brought face to fundament with a single man in a cell, naked, pressing his buttocks up against the glass, mooning us. He stepped away from the glass for a moment, then threw his posterior up against the glass once again.

“Now that's a sick bastard,” General Kiljoy commented. “He was at boot camp for the Marines, seemed a damn fine cadet, when he suddenly went ballistic and raped and murdered his drill sergeant, then threw a grenade into his bunkhouse. Killed more than a few good men. Since he's been in here, he's managed to do the same to his cellmates.”

“How are the corpses removed?” I asked, suddenly curious as to this little housekeeping detail.

“It's all automated,” he waved off my question. “This compound is equipped with state-of-the-art automation routines, to eliminate the possibility of human error. But listen, his little episode at the Marine barracks resulted in a top-secret court-martial. I was present.” The Marine took another flying leap backward onto the glass. “You know what that asshole's only statement was?”

I shrugged.

“All he kept saying, over and over again, was
‘Semper fi, semper fi, semper fi.'
”

 

76
In truth, boredom is a fine stimulus to creativity. If you stare at an empty wall long enough, your mind will begin to occupy itself with hallucinations. Sensory deprivation chambers
operate on this principle. Take away all the noise, and what you're left with is far from nothing; indeed, nothingness can be something else entirely. Thus, while many assert that you can't get something for nothing, you can certainly get something
from
nothing. This is, after all, the nature of the universe. Creation
ex nihilo
.

I am hemming and hawing about so much nonsense here because I have nothing pertinent to say. I am avoiding the issue, it seems, but it can be avoided no longer. The story was pretty much unfolding on its own, until suddenly I found myself struggling to relate the ride back from holy hell to the observation lounge, during which time nothing at all happened. Certainly I could have said,
We returned uneventfully to the observation lounge
, but I could not satisfy myself, nor would I presume to ask you to be satisfied, with such a cheap segue.

But it is the fact of the matter. Nothing happened. An event is, by definition, anything that happens, but the ride was, as I said, uneventful. I suppose I breathed, as did General Kiljoy, and the wheels rolled, and we may have shifted in our seats, but these hardly qualify as events, do they? Holy hell was unmistakably happening, this entire story has been one significant occurrence after another, but the ride back to the observation lounge was without incident.

Stories are eventful, full of circumstances of importance and intrigue, but this is not at all an accurate reflection of life. Life, like this chapter, can be rather uneventful at times. Oftentimes you find yourself on the toilet, or in a traffic jam, or watching television commercials, or countless other instances that get edited out when someone asks what you did with your day.

Blip sometimes boasted of how little he did on some days.
As he argued it, the aphorism that you can't get something for nothing is dubious at best, and is probably a product of our culture's capitalist work ethic. Therefore, he said, he actively did nothing, especially when the money politics of the university aggravated him. He saw his behavior as subversive, akin to factory workers who deliberately slow down the pace of their work to reduce the owner's profits.

Blip told me of a time last spring when he continued doing nothing even when he was home from the university. All evening he sat in an easy chair in his living room, no book, no television, nothing. Every time Sophia wandered in and asked him what he was doing, he replied, “Nothing,” and immediately fell silent again. After the third or fourth time, Sophia finally insisted that he must be doing
something
, even thinking, but Blip persisted in asserting his inactivity. Sophia could not accept this on a philosophical level, and attempted to engage her husband in a debate as to whether or not one can actively do nothing. This only made Blip irate. He told her she was interfering with his subversive act, and declared her a strikebreaker. Sophia responded that he shouldn't bring his work home with him. Blip conceded that she had a good point, and proceeded to occupy the rest of the evening unsuccessfully attempting to communicate the significance of the incident to me over the telephone.

I thought he was crazy when he related that story to me, but now I find myself taking his advice and actively doing nothing much of the time. It is not difficult, at least in more mundane states of consciousness. One need only recognize that most of the moments that pass us by do not carry events of any consequence. To give an example, if you watch a pot of water until it boils, the only moments that carry any meaningful events are
those when bubbles of steam begin to form at the bottom of the pot to ultimately rise to the top. After staring at a pot of water for ten minutes, this can be profoundly momentous. It is a moment in which something actually
happens
.

Out of all the moments we perceive, those that actually carry events that command or attract our attention are relatively rare, and should be treasured. This does not mean, however, that we should lament the unending procession of naked moments, the peaceful pulsations flitting constantly past with every flap of a hummingbird's wings, offering us nothing but the incessant assurance that a tock will soon follow their tick. An uneventful moment gives us a grand opportunity to explore nothingness, which is really something else entirely. Boredom is the coward's reaction to staring at a wall.

Just before writing this chapter, in fact, I was sitting at the desk in the laboratory where General Kiljoy makes me work, actively doing nothing. I did not wish to do what I was being told to do, and as I said, I was altogether stumped as to how to proceed with this story. I had been sitting with my feet on the desk for perhaps twenty minutes, just looking at the various objects in the room, when very suddenly a book fell sideways on the shelf, startling me and causing me to jolt upright. That moment was
eventful
. The variables that caused that happenstance had been gradually gathering strength for an untold amount of time. Pages were settling, weight was shifting, the stress on the forces holding it upright was building, all at an imperceptibly slow pace, until WHAM! Wake up! A tree falls in the woods, and a moment has spoken. What does it say? It says nothing. It only smiles, and it is gone.