Pfefferkorn, mindful of the phrase “scrotal electroshock,” sat down in the wooden desk chair. He picked up the puck of hash. He spread the butter across it and shoved the whole thing into his mouth. It tasted like scarcity. He got it down as fast as he could and chased it with the tea. He sat back, wishing he had something to chase the tea with. His chest hurt. It was too much food to take in at once and he could feel its mass exfoliating the interior of his gullet. He had a premonition that he would soon be tasting it in reverse.
“Sir, the Party salutes you,” Zhulk said.
A door opened and closed. The maid staggered into view, pushing a wheelbarrow full of books and papers. Zhulk held open the cell bars for her and she carted the wheelbarrow in. She set it down near the desk and began unloading it.
“Sir, you will find these items inspiring.”
The books were old and musty, with broken spines and dangling covers. There were a lot of them, and the maid was perspiring lightly by the time she finished. She took the empty tray, curtsied to Pfefferkorn, and exited the cell.
“Sir, it is the intention of the Party to provide you with all that you require, within reason. Please state any additional needs and they will be seen to.”
There was a silence.
“I could use a shower,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Very good,” Zhulk said. He spoke harshly to the maid, who trudged off again. “My wife will accommodate this request as soon as possible.”
“Your wife?”
“A proud and humble servant of the Party,” Zhulk said. “No different from any other comrade of the revolution.”
“Right,” Pfefferkorn said.
Zhulk bowed. “If there is nothing further, sir, I, the individual, shall leave you to great thoughts.”
95.
He had been given eleven reams of writing paper, an assortment of the finest West Zlabian leakproof ballpoint pens, four different linear English translations each of the West Zlabian edition of Vassily Nabochka, a compendium of errata, a Zlabian-English dictionary, a Zlabian rhyming dictionary, a Zlabian thesaurus, the complete Encyclopædia Zlabica, a bundle of maps as thick as a phone book, a copy of the Party writings, D. M. Piilyarzhkhyuiy’s seventeen-volume history of the Zlabian peoples, an anthology of Marxist literary criticism, and reprints of Zhulk’s speeches dating back to 1987. There were several photo albums filled with picture postcards of the local countryside. There was a calendar, a freebie distributed by the Ministry of Sexual Sanitation. Each month highlighted another venereal disease. Zhulk had circled three days in red. The first was that day’s date. Pfefferkorn counted twelve more days of chlamydia before the clap rolled around and the countdown to the festival began. The thirteenth was opening night, and the Friday prior was labeled final deadline in Zlabian.
Twenty-two days.
He tossed the calendar down and picked up a plastic-wrapped copy of the East Zlabian Pyelikhyuin. He couldn’t understand why Zhulk would provide him access to capitalist media. He tore open the plastic and unfolded the paper.
EXTREMELY FAMOUS AND VERY PROMINENT AUTHOR EXECUTED
According to the article, the mood at the Kasino Nabochka had been uplifting. The Cirque du Soleil theater had been filled to capacity with people eager for the first public execution in more than a year. Face value of a ticket was US$74.95, but scalpers had been asking as much as four hundred a pop. The festivities kicked off with a rousing speech by Lord High President Kliment Thithyich. He promised the same bloody fate to anyone who dared cross him. Next there had been a dance performance by his entourage. In honor of the proceedings, the ladies wore special black “Grim Reaper” miniskirts and twirled neon sickles. The president had then decreed a weeklong reprieve from interest on all gambling debts owed to him. Seeing as how most of the populace was cripplingly in hock, this announcement elicited enthusiastic cheers. A T-shirt cannon was fired, and at last, the execution got under way. Notorious American hack thriller writer and international fugitive from justice A. S. Peppers was brought out hooded and handcuffed. He was made to kneel. The president asked if he had any last words. Peppers shook his hooded head, and the president made a joke about not having such a big vocabulary after all. Laughter and jeers flew at the condemned man. Thirteen sharpshooters took up positions. They raised their rifles. At the president’s command, they fired. Peppers’s bullet-riddled body was removed, the T-shirt cannon brought out once more, and accordion music played.
Pfefferkorn supposed that, for PR purposes, it was almost as good to kill a faceless A. S. Peppers as it was to kill the real him. He also understood why Zhulk wanted him to read the article. In the eyes of the world, A. S. Peppers, Arthur Pfefferkorn, and Arthur Kowalczyk no longer existed. Nobody would come looking for him. However terrible this realization was, it was not nearly as terrible as knowing that someone had died solely because he happened to be about Pfefferkorn’s height.
A door opened and closed. Zhulk’s wife appeared shlepping a massive, sloshing bucket, a burlap sack slung over her shoulder. She put the bucket in the crook of her arm and fought to get the keys out of her apron without setting her burdens down, all the while doing an uncomfortable little dance. Pfefferkorn recognized the feeling. He remembered doing similar things on early mornings, thirty years ago: trying to bottle-feed his infant daughter with one hand, for example, and make coffee with the other. Zhulk’s wife succeeded in getting the right key into the lock. The cell door swung open. She left it ajar, brushing past him as she carried the sack and the bucket across the room. As long as he was chained up, there was no danger of his making a break for it. At the same time, he found her indifference to her own safety peculiar. He could have severed her carotid with one of his leakproof pens. He could have jammed his fingers into her eye sockets and popped out her eyeballs. Harry Shagreen and Dick Stapp had done that on more than one occasion. He could have strangled her. The chain tethering him to the desk looked long enough for him to gather the slack off the floor and get it around her neck. Yet she didn’t hesitate to bend over with her back turned. Was he that unintimidating?
She set the bucket and the sack down. She straightened up, winded, her hand pressed to the small of her back.
“Thank you,” he said.
She curtsied.
“You don’t need to do that,” he said.
She glared at the floor.
“Really,” he said. “I mean it.”
She looked up, meeting his eyes for a fraction of a moment. Then she turned and left.
Inside the burlap sack were a towel, a washcloth, and a hunk of rancid soap. The towel and the washcloth were identical to the ones at the Hôtel Metropole. He took off his clothes, leaving the left leg of the woolen pants and the left leg of his underwear strung along the chain. He stood over the floor drain and sluiced himself with water from the bucket. For a moment he allowed himself to fantasize that the soap was a high-density dubnium polymer, and that it would split open, revealing a weapon or a key. But it turned to lather in his hands.