Both orderlies are starting to stamp and snort like impatient carthorses now, but the copywriter is not done yet.
He looks directly at me and says, ‘Your prefer-nots have all come for you now. I’m afraid there’ll be no more preferences, only assumptions.’
The words run through me like a crack in the wall of my reveries. Is that what this is all about? Proving to me that he’s beaten the programming of my patch and that he can do what I always failed to – twisting Bartleby’s diction to his own bitter ends? Or is he actually using unbranded LipService and just got the necessary lines down patter in advance? It’s impossible to know. And that is what will torment me.
One at each strong arm, the orderlies start shuffling me off. I see Wordini beaming, his mouth a grin as perfectly ironed across his face as the crease in his trousers.
19
There’s that humming again. I bang the wall till my sashimi fist is just a pound of blood and the hum turns to a whimper. Then I know it was me all along, but I don’t recognise myself. I’m a speaker picking up the drone of my own alternating current. She that’s not me has returned to oppose me and set in motion my mind’s voltaic reversals. I hum electric. I live by the rule of hum. You think that’s what I would say? I am a liar and an imposter. Out, out all copyblighter’s cant!
I try to keep track of the dumbstruck days with thumbprints in the dust under my bed. But she that’s not me (or is she?) walks free, swaying to a warble croon. The gusting flurries of her skirts hustle up the dust and I lose time. I don’t want to be alone and un-me any more.
The door slot clangs dinner. Once I crouched at the door, waiting for the slap of rubber soles and then the hand to reach in the slot and remove the empty tin plate. I just wanted the taste of something beyond the plaque scum that coats everything in this room – the cement floor, bed linen, steel basin and toilet, as well as the identical sets of pyjamas. I even deluded myself for a moment it might be Stillwell, but my palm closed around an okra wrist as mucilaginous as the fingers of the orderlies that brought me here. Before I could wince away, a fork shivved into my hand. It wasn’t mine; I don’t get a fork to eat with.
There she goes with my body. Three paces to the sink. The proxymate sits on the steel basin and I on the bed. Do my thighs graze ham or yoghurt? Or yogham? Aggghh – a veritverbal abomination. Forswear all hateful words in advertguise that try to be in two places at once. Stop infiltrating my hideous languish! Why do You torment me? She that’s not me slips through the door – four paces to the threshold – crossing the language barrier. No, don’t let me go. She’ll probably give them everything, leave nothing for me. So I squeeze her gassy windpiping with its pseudo-copywriter talk. I need to speak; I need to have something left to tell. I haven’t been interrogated since the day after I arrived here. I need to hear my say.
I wake to orderlies. They haul me stickily to my feet. And then I’m outside the cell, in the corridor, with a clear line of sight for twenty metres. The pull on my eyes of such expansiveness is like the tug over the railing from the fiftieth floor. I stumble. A sharp left turn into another room – this one with a window – and I stand neck-deep in the eiderdown of sunshine. The rays of hysterical happiness don’t part until I hear a voice say, ‘Please sit.’
There’s a woman at a table, indicating the chair opposite her. ‘My name is Petula Ormod. I am your defence council.’ She looks at me. ‘Unfortunately, your history of language offences, which speaks to your animus noncendi to LipService, has made it impassable for me to provide you with a transdermal. I don’t require your dictum anyway. The procurator will provide me with the ratio decidendi.’
Her shoulder pads look as if she had received an emergency massage while still wearing her jacket. She speaks with a similar wrung-out weariness. I haven’t heard words for so long, I just want to put all of them in my mouth like a one-year-old – even if they’re the legal profession’s Arguendo LipService. But she’s ruining it for me, the way she heaves and dumps language like bags of cement.
‘It has been duly derided to bring your case before your peers. A date has been set for next month. Appropriate vestimentum will be delivered de futuro for your appearance. After all, the case will be heard in the Ether Jar – the surgical amphitheatre. May I remind you, salus populi est suprema lex.’
I look at her blankly and shrug.
She huffs in exasperation. ‘The rights of the brand take presidents over the rights of the individuum. The role of the law is to protect corporate identities from crimen injuria.’
I should ferment my anger, rise frothing, but the patch of sun holds me in yellow inertia.
‘This will be our only consolation,’ she says rising and extending her hand.
It takes me a moment to realise she must mean ‘consultation’. Or maybe she doesn’t.
I pinch bruises on my arms to feel the days but still they leave no marks. My body won’t retain even the simplest authorgraph. So there’s a new series of thumbprints in the dust under my bed. More than thirty. Petula Ormod said next month, but still no one comes for me. You used to be stuck in my head but who’s trapped now? Has un-me gone a-courting without me? Who’ll be the judge of this? I demand an interrogation!
The door slot clangs for the clearing of the dinner plate. But in the plate’s place is a pile of fabric. A message from the mutes. No, they’re new, starchy pyjamas that stick stodgily to the palate. ‘Tomorrow, 8am,’ says a voice beyond the door.
With the clang of breakfast, I leap from sleep to frantic washing, scattering water droplets and spilling thoughts. On my third mouthful of cold porridge, the door opens. Two orderlies push in a wheelchair: ‘Sit.’ I wave refusing hands and hop on eloquently articulating legs, but they continue their advance. They don’t stop till ranting arms and legs are bound and still. Only when I’m strapped to the chair do they set the hospital corridors rolling by me. Buckled leather clams up tight the tasture of cockles.
As I am brought to a side passage leading into the Ether Jar, the procurator, Petula Ormod and the judge are scrubbing up. ‘Ah, the clean hands doctrine,’ murmurs one of the orderlies reverently as I am parked in the wings with a view of the tiered semicircular gallery of public seats. Directly ahead of me is a display case containing the glass bulb and wooden mouthpiece first used in this very amphitheatre. An audience of surgeons and students witnessed the administration of ether by inhalation to render a patient insensate before surgery. The plaque says so. Overhead, a glass cupola presses outwards against that other ether, the great blue opiate for the incarcerated.
The procurator and defence counsel take their seats in the first row, on either side of the centre aisle running up the tiers. Petula looks more crushed than ever. One shoulder is higher than the other, as if the pad on that side of the jacket had curled into a defensive ball. A tissue waives the white flag from the sleeve that hangs longer.
One of the orderlies escorting me steps forward into the amphitheatre and announces, ‘All incise for the honourable Judge Proctor Mannix.’ The audience dutifully stands and hacks at the deeply notched benches in front of them with little plastic scalpels that were handed to them as they filed in. ‘For every rewrite, there is a remedy; where there is no remedy, there is no rewrite,’ intones the orderly bailiff. Behind me, the judge is taking his place at the wooden operating table when a man in the audience wearing a huge purple top hat with a sign above saying SUE-VENIRS leaps up and shouts, ‘Give us our cut and get to keep your souvenir scalpel!’