Anarchaos

XVII

I no longer spent my sleep periods entirely in unconsciousness, but woke at intervals, to lie a while in thought amid the still limbs and soft breathings of the others, and then uneasily to drop off once again.

There were two reasons for this. Most obvious, I did not now spend my waking hours in exhaustive labor, but sat in comfort on the stool by the number machine. But there was also the constant pain in my left wrist, which refused to finish healing itself and which now and again twinged me out of slumber. The doctor kept the stump wrapped in cloth and when, from time to time, I was taken to him for the bandage to be changed, the same hot musky bloody smell always bloomed out as the cloth was removed. The doctor appeared to treat me with a competence unlit by interest, yet I had confidence in him and believed he would eventually make my wrist well again.

In the meantime, the pain was a constant background hum to my existence. It might be that it was this continuing pain which kept my brain awake and forced me back into being when I had already — like the other fourteen, snuffling and sleeping around me — ceased, in any way that matters, to be alive.

The periods of wakefulness in the shed, while all around me the others slept, seemed the worst parts of my life at that time, though ultimately they must have been the best for me. But they were so empty, so boring. During the work periods, though I had little myself to do, there was at least the activity outside my window with which to distract myself, while in the sleep periods there was just nothing at all. Around me lay the thin, white, wire-muscled bodies, all entwined together in the endless search for warmth. Under me was the straw, over me the wooden walls and roof of the shed, with long streaks of daylight showing the broad cracks where water came through when it rained.

It was in these restless periods that I did my most constructive thinking, the major part of the reconstruction of my personality and memory. And it was in such an interval that I connected at last the fact of my dead brother Gar with the incident of the visitor who had called me Malone and claimed that I was dead.

The visitor could not have meant me, even though he had used my last name, because he and I had never met before, of that I was certain. But if the last name were right, and if I looked quite similar to the person he’d been thinking of, and if the person he’d been thinking of was truly dead, the conclusion was belatedly obvious: He had mistaken me for Gar. And that meant he had known Gar! Might even know for certain what had happened to him, and why.

If only I’d thought it all out so clearly at the time, I could have asked him.

Usually I tried to keep perfectly still while awake in the shed, since movement disturbed the others and made them groan and twist about, but the agitation of this series of thoughts was too much for me. I shifted this way and that, disturbing them and not caring, and though they thrashed and muttered with their eyes squeezing shut I nevertheless still heard the sound of paper crackling just beneath my ear.

In my moving around, my head had come to rest directly atop the paper, which had been tucked down into the straw just barely below the surface. Turning my head, I could see it there, so close as to be out of focus. I picked it out and found it to be a small white scrap of notepaper, folded over once. Opening it, I read the three words shakily written on the inside:

Unite? The concept seemed to me then as mysterious as the sender. I looked around, trying to think who could have sent such a note and what he might have intended. Surely it had come from another slave, but what had he wanted, and why had he chosen such an unlikely method of communication? It would have been simpler merely to arrange to sleep beside me, and whisper his message to me while the others slept.

Of course, the problem was even more complex than that, because the note had clearly not been directed exclusively at me. The writer had tucked it away in the straw with the apparent hope that someone would see it. And, of course, someone had.

It had been left there recently, that was one thing I could know; we had had rain just two sleep periods ago, a very bad rain which would surely have left evidences of itself on the note. So it was recent, and it was an attempt at communication from someone who, like myself, was not entirely sunken into vacantness.

But there was no one like that among the fourteen. And where would a slave have found pencil and paper? And what did the note mean? Above all, what was I to do about it? (And there was still the revelation about the visitor and Gar to distract my mind.) I couldn’t think. Clutching the paper, falling now and then into uneasy dozes, I spent the rest of that sleep period in frustrated attempts at concentration.

It was later, during the following work period, that I thought of the answer to a part of the problem. I was positive the note had been written by a slave, but just as positive he was none of the slaves with whom I slept in the shed, and while sitting at the number machine I finally thought of the explanation. The slave population was divided into three groups, or shifts, who slept in the same sheds one after the other; the note must have come from a member of one of the other groups!

As to the meaning of his message, that too came clear to me. There were better ways to live than as a slave at this mine, but the officials would not permit us to make any change. Still, there were more slaves than officials, so that if we were to unite together and insist on changing our way of life, possibly we would get what we wanted.

I could understand the theory, and even found myself excited by it, but I couldn’t begin to visualize its application. The other fourteen in my shed were already united, to one another, bonded together in work, in exhaustion, in the search for warmth, in brute mindlessness. I had no desire to reunite myself with them, nor could I see any way to get them to unite with me. It had taken the amputation of my hand to shock me back to self-awareness; an equivalent shock would be necessary for each of the other fourteen, and I could see no way to supply it.

Yet there might be a way. Perhaps he who had sent me this message also had some idea how to carry it out. For that reason, I kept his note with me all that work period, and used the back of it the next sleep period to send him my reply. Out of dirt and saliva I made my ink, a blade of straw became my pen, and laboriously, slowly, one small line at a time, having to wait and wait for each stroke to dry before going on to the next, I wrote my one word answer:

I had intended to put a question mark at the end, but the process was so long and tiresome I decided the message would have to be comprehensible as if was, and I tucked it away into the straw as close as possible to where I had originally found it.

At the next sleep period, it was gone. I was elated; contact had been established! I couldn’t sleep at all.

I never heard from the note writer again.