The forms of democracy are scrupulously enforced on the Island. There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction. For a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, they had been allowed to control the Department of Baboon Maintenance, but this privilege had been withdrawn owing to absenteeism in the Senate.
The purple-assed Tripoli baboons had been brought to the Island by pirates in the 17th century. There was a legend that when the baboons left the Island it would fall. To whom or in what way is not specified, and it is a capital offense to kill a baboon, though the noxious behaviour of these animals harries the citizens almost beyond endurance. Occasionally someone goes berserk, kills several baboons and himself.
The post of President is always forced on some particularly noxious and unpopular citizen. To be elected President is the greatest misfortune and disgrace that can befall an Islander. The humiliations and ignominy are such that few Presidents live out their full term of office, usually dying of a broken spirit after a year or two. The Expeditor had once been President and served the full five years of his term. Subsequently he changed his name and underwent plastic surgery, to blot out, as far as possible, the memory of his disgrace.
‘Yes of course … we’ll pay you,’ Marvie was saying to the Expeditor.
‘But take it easy. It may be a little while yet.…’
‘Take it easy! A little while! … Listen.’
‘Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossessing your wife’s artificial kidney.… They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung.’
‘That’s in rather bad taste, old boy.… Frankly I wish I had never involved myself in this uh matter. That bloody grease has too much carbolic in it. I was down to customs one day last week. Stuck a broom handle into a drum of it, and the grease ate the end off straight away. Besides, the stink is enough to knock a man on his bloody ass. You should take a walk down by the port.’
‘I’ll do no such thing,’ Marvie screeched. It is a mark of caste in the Zone never to touch or even go near what you are selling. To do so gives rise to suspicion of retailing, that is of being a common peddler. A good part of the merchandise in the Zone is sold through street peddlers.
‘Why do you tell me all this? It’s too sordid! Let the retailers worry about it.’
‘Oh it’s all very well for you chaps, you can scud out from under. But I have a reputation to maintain.… There’ll be a spot of bother about this.’
‘Do you suggest there is something illegitimate in this operation?’
‘Not illegitimate exactly. But shoddy. Definitely shoddy.’
‘Oh go back to your Island before it falls! We knew you when you were peddling your purple ass in the Plaza pissoirs for five pesetas.’
‘And not many takers either,’ Leif put in. He pronounced it ither. This reference to his Island origin was more than the Expeditor could stand.… He was drawing himself up, mobilizing his most frigid impersonation of an English aristocrat, preparing to deliver an icy, clipped ‘crusher,’ but instead, a whining, whimpering, kicked dog snarl broke from his mouth. His pre-surgery face emerged in an arc-light of incandescent hate.… He began to spit curses in the hideous, strangled gutturals of the Island dialect.
The Islanders all profess ignorance of the dialect or flatly deny its existence. ‘We are Breetish,’ they say. ‘We don’t got no bloody dealect.’
Froth gathered at the corners of the Expeditor’s mouth. He was spitting little balls of saliva like pieces of cotton. The stench of spiritual vileness hung in the airs about him like a green cloud. Marvie and Leif fell back twittering in alarm.
‘He’s gone mad,’ Marvie gasped. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Hand in hand they skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turkish Bath.
The Examination
Carl Peterson found a postcard in his box requesting him to report for a ten o’clock appointment with Doctor Benway in the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis.…
‘What on earth could they want with me?’ he thought irritably.…‘A mistake most likely.’ But he knew they didn’t make mistakes.… Certainly not mistakes of identity.…
It would not have occurred to Carl to disregard the appointment even though failure to appear entailed no penalty.… Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.…
Carl walked through the Town Hall Square.… Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped themselves under gleaming showers.… The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky.
Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica.…
Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry, strode to the information desk … and presented his card.
‘Fifth floor … Room twenty-six …’
In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes.
‘Doctor Benway is expecting you,’ she said smiling. ‘Go right in.’
‘As if he had nothing to do but wait for me,’ thought Carl.…
The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl’s hand, keeping his eyes on the young man’s chest.…
‘I’ve seen this man before,’ Carl thought.…‘But where?’
He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette.… He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence.
The doctor seemed embarrassed.… He fidgeted and coughed … and fumbled with papers.…
‘Hurumph,’ he said finally.…‘Your name is Carl Peterson I believe.…’ His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner.… Carl nodded silently.… The doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgement.… He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enamelled desk.
‘Mmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson,’ he repeated the name caressingly, pursed his lips and nodded several times. He spoke again abruptly: ‘You know of course that we are trying. We are all trying. Sometimes of course we don’t succeed.’ His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. ‘To adjust the state – simply a tool – to the needs of each individual citizen.’ His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. ‘That is the only function of the state as we see it. Our knowledge … incomplete, of course,’ he made a slight gesture of depreciation.…‘For example … for example … take the matter of the uh sexual deviation.’ The doctor rocked back and forth in his chair. His glasses slid down onto his nose. Carl felt suddenly uncomfortable.
‘We regard it as a misfortune … a sickness … certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say … tuberculosis.… Yes,’ he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection.… ‘Tuberculosis. On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected.… That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected.… We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure.… Nor isolation for certain contagious diseases.… I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hrumph what the French call “les malades gallants” heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily.’ The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy.… Carl realized that he was expected
to say something.
‘That seems reasonable,’ he said.
The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly motionless. ‘Now to get back to this uh matter of sexual deviation. Frankly we don’t pretend to understand – at least not completely – why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex. We do know that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department.’
For the first time the doctor’s eyes flickered across Carl’s face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Carl had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered contempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey medium of the room.
‘Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hrumph symptomatic.’ The doctor suddenly threw himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled.…‘The man is insane,’ he thought. The doctor’s face went blank as a gambler’s. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the sudden stopping of an elevator.
The doctor was studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement:
‘Don’t look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases.’ Once again Carl felt the impact of that cold interest on his face. ‘That is to say reassurance when reassurance is necessary … and, of course, suitable outlets with other individuals of similar tendencies. No isolation is indicated … the condition is no more directly contagious than cancer. Cancer, my first love,’ the doctor’s voice receded. He seemed actually to have gone away through an invisible door leaving his empty body sitting there at the desk.
Suddenly he spoke again in a crisp voice. ‘And so you may well wonder why we concern ourselves with the matter at all?’ He flashed a smile bright and cold as snow in sunlight.
Carl shrugged: ‘That is not my business … what I am wondering is why you have asked me to come here and why you tell me all this … this …’
‘Nonsense?’
Carl was annoyed to find himself blushing.
The doctor leaned back and placed the ends of his fingers together:
‘The young,’ he said indulgently. ‘Always they are in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Carl.… I may call you Carl? I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tuberculosis we – that is the appropriate department – may ask, even request, someone to appear for a fluoroscopic examination. This is routine, you understand. Most such examinations turn up negative. So you have been asked to report here for, should I say a psychic fluoroscope???? I may add that after talking with you I feel relatively sure that the result will be, for practical purposes, negative.…’
‘But the whole thing is ridiculous. I have always interested myself only in girls. I have a steady girl now and we plan to marry.’
‘Yes Carl, I know. And that is why you are here. A blood test prior to marriage, this is reasonable, no?’
‘Please doctor, speak directly.’
The doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Carl, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street.
‘I may tell you in strictest confidence that there is definite evidence of a hereditary factor. Social pressure. Many homosexuals latent and overt do, unfortunately, marry. Such marriages often result in … Factor of infantile environment.’ The doctor’s voice went on and on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, hereditary dysfunction of the hypothalamus.
Carl dozed off. He was opening a green door. A horrible smell grabbed his lungs and he woke up with a shock. The doctor’s voice was strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice:
‘The Kleiberg-Stanislouski semen floculation test … a diagnostic tool … indicative at least in a negative sense. In certain cases useful – taken as part of the whole picture.… Perhaps under the uh circumstances.’ The doctor’s voice shot up to a pathic scream. ‘The nurse will take your uh specimen.’
‘This way please.…’ The nurse opened the door into a bare white walled cubicle. She handed him a jar.
‘Use this please. Just yell when you’re ready.’
There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: ‘If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store.’
Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. ‘Old Glass Cunt,’ he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights.
He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants.
Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skull-less, eyes like burning pus.
‘Something wrong?’ said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up the jar with obvious distaste.
The nurse turned to him: ‘Are you waiting for something special?’ she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. ‘Why no.…’ ‘You can go then,’ she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door.
‘Do I have another appointment?’
She looked at him in disapproving surprise: ‘You’ll be notified of course.’ She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. ‘Something wrong?’
Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals.
‘Let your hair down, chicken. You’ll feel better.’ The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl’s face like a great dangling tit.
‘Fuck off you!’
Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen’s spayed animal brown eyes.
‘Oh! I wouldn’t be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You’re hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Carl demanded.
‘Oh nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘Well, Carl,’ the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl’s mouth. ‘I have some good news for you.’ He picked up a slip of blue paper off the desk and went through an elaboratore pantomime of focusing his eyes on it. ‘Your uh test … the Robinson-Kleiberg floculation test …’
‘I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanlouski test.’
The doctor tittered. ‘Oh dear no.… You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanlouski, weeell that’s a different sort of test altogether. I do hope … not necessary.…’ He tittered again: ‘But as I was saying before I was so charmingly interrupted … by my hurumph learned young colleague. Your KS seems to be …’ He held the slip at arm’s length. ‘.…completely uh negative. So perhaps we won’t be troubling you any further. And so …’ He folded the slip carefully into a file. He leafed through the file. Finally he stopped and frowned and pursed his lips. He
closed the file and put his hand flat on it and leaned forward.
‘Carl, when you were doing your military service … There must have been … in fact there were long periods when you found yourself deprived of the uh consolations and uh facilities of the fair sex. During these no doubt trying and difficult periods you had perhaps a pin up girl?? Or more likely a pin up harem?? Heh heh heh …’
Carl looked at the doctor with overt distaste. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘We all did.’
‘And now, Carl, I would like to show you some pin up girls.’ He pulled an envelope out of a drawer. ‘And ask you to please pick out the one you would most like to uh make heh heh heh.…’ He suddenly leaned forward fanning the photographs in front of Carl’s face. ‘Pick a girl, any girl, any girl!’
Carl reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the pack and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack on Carl’s file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in front of Carl. ‘Is she there?’
Carl shook his head.
‘Of course not. She is in here where she belongs. A woman’s place what???’ He opened the file and held out the girl’s photo attached to a Rorschach plate.
‘Is that her?’
Carl nodded silently.
‘You have good taste, my boy. I may tell you in strictest confidence that some of these girls …’ with gambler fingers he shifts the photos in Three Card Monte Passes – ‘are really boys. In uh drag I believe is the word???’ His eyebrows shot up and down with incredible speed. Carl could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The doctor’s face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Carl experienced the floating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop.
‘Yes, Carl, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colors.… I guess you think this is all pretty silly don’t you now …???’
‘Well, to tell the truth … Yes …’