Good day. In my continuing work to get writings out into the world, I submit this piece imagined and written after a dream in 1986, which would have made me 35 or 36 years old at the time of its completion. I've been working on minor rewrites of rediscovered pieces and will continue to post as I finish them. I hope you enjoy...
The 21
Scott
Gardner Merrick
Karl
Ivanovich pressed on.
He
trudged through this frigid midnight’s sooty snow toward his tiny room on the
city's dingy fringe with his fur-capped head lowered into the freezing gusts, heavy
boot over heavy boot, as he was all too used to doing.
The
thick wolf ruff of his overcoat collar was turned up to protect against the
intrusion of that icy wind. He was thinking about nothing.
The
mind of Ivanovich was empty.
There
was a reason for this. The mind of Ivanovich focused with enervating regularity
twelve to fifteen hours per workday, six or seven days per week-depending on
the season, with ninety to ninety-four per cent of its Practically Functional
Capacity spent on keeping books for the State.
These
percentages had been verified by the Party.
As
a result of this tremendously focused effort, maintained as it was for
incredibly long periods of time, a time of mental emptiness was needed. Some other comrades
simply sat at their work-desks for an hour or two after the figurative whistle
had sounded; Karl Ivanovich preferred to make his way home by foot, by foot, by
foot—letting his footfalls lull his mind to rest, breathing the cold night air
regularly and deeply until no thought could penetrate the imaginary tank traps
and fortress walls his mind had constructed during the day and into the night. In
this way he regularly made his way toward home, reaching it sooner than he otherwise
would, and arriving more rested. Tonight, his neatly trimmed full brown moustache was
encrusted with ice and particles of snow. The air was so cold that the hairs
inside his nostrils had become brittle with it.
His
feet knew which way to steer his large frame. The entire trek was over five kilometers,
and it normally took him two and a half hours, give or take a half an hour.
When
he arrived, he would no longer be mentally exhausted, but he would have added
on a layer of physical stimulation and be very, very tired. A cup of thick
black tea, with perhaps a small lump of crude sugar, along with a bowl of thin
soup, would be enough 
to send him to sleep, until the first hints of the next day
would invariably awaken him, and he would rise, wash sparingly, eat a modest
breakfast; and then he would catch public transit back to his small office. He enjoyed listening to the way the train wheels percussed upon
steel rails.
Sometimes,
as was the case tonight, a flickering mental image of a steaming teacup
would intrude upon the emptiness of his mind as he strode along and it would
cause him to interrupt his reverie with an instant of near-normal
consciousness.
He
looked up.
He
was approaching the corner of Malenkov and Kochetov streets, an intersection his boots knew well. At this time of night
there never any traffic, pedestrian or mechanical, and so he once again lowered
his head into the wind and pressed on.
WUUMPH!!!
He was knocked off balance by a person who rounded the corner at precisely
the same instant as he.
In
trying to regain his balance, Ivanovich lost it completely. 
It was the fault of the compressed snow at the corner of
the sidewalk, which was slick underfoot, and he cursed loudly as he went down, flailing out for
support and catching only a handful of ruff from the collar of the other fellow's
overcoat. The fall took the wind out of him. When he
could sit up, he did, and he craned painfully around to witness the tall figure
of a man, dressed much the same as he, receding hurriedly off into the heavy darkness
in the direction of his own home. The other man had not even uttered so much as
an apology.
Karl
Ivanovich picked himself up, muttering under his breath about rudeness and incorrect
manners, and he swiped wet brown snow from his coat. He sighed deeply and
crossed the street, attempting to regain the regularity of his breathing. Before he could accomplish that, he heard a
commotion behind him and started to turn around. Before he had completed
the turn, the heavy impact of a bullet slammed into his right shoulder and he
heard the loud report of a large pistol, oddly in that order. He fell again,
this time for a long, long time.
*****
Karl
Ivanovich awakened in pain.
He
made no sound as his disjointed senses attempted to piece
together this
puzzle. A numb stiffness in his shoulder. Cold, a not unusual sensation. A
pungent antiseptic odor. Gray walls, unfamiliar, clean ones. Blaring
fluorescent ceiling light.
They took him from the hospital barracks soon
after he exhibited signs of consciousness. Sometime during the move, he passed out.
He awoke in a bed in a dank cell. Bars in the window of a
single small steel door.
For several days no one spoke to him. A jailer
came in twice daily with coarse bread and thick gruel, each time taking away
the wooden plate and bowl left the previous visit.
Once a doctor came in and changed the
dressings on his shoulder. When the flesh had been laid bare, Ivanovich saw the
ugly scab which had formed over the gunshot wound. It appeared to be healing.
The doctor's work was carried out in silence, except for the prisoner's single attempt
at communication. “Please, Comrade Doctor, please, tell me. Why was I shot? Why
am I here?"
He implored the doctor, the skin surrounding
his large brown eyes wrinkled in perplexity, "Why, Comrade?"
The only answer was silence.
The wound was treated with a gelatinous
substance and bound with clean bandages, then the doctor packed up his beaten
black satchel and departed.
Never once had the Comrade Doctor’s eyes met
those of Karl Ivanovich.
Karl kept track of passing time by scraping a
notch in the mortar between two granite blocks in the wall of his tiny cell at
the end of each day. At the end of the 15th day they came for him.
Two large guards in the drab uniforms of the
State came and fitted his hands into heavy manacles and his feet into wide iron
collars connected by a single heavy iron chain. Karl could tell immediately
that words with these men were useless.
What could they communicate that could be of
any use to him?
Out through what seemed like miles of gray
corridors he was led. He found it difficult to walk with the heavy chain, but
not impossible. The guards seemed to have had a great deal of experience
leading men in chains: Once when they reached a short flight of three steps,
they simply picked him up under each armpit (the right shoulder cried out, but
Ivanovich did not) and hoisted him up. Into a small waiting room he was taken,
and the two guards left him alone there. The door shut without a sound.
All Ivanovich was sure of was that he was in
trouble. Think as he might, he could not produce in his mind any reason for the
Party to treat him so despicably. He was a hard worker, he was in no way
decadent, and he was not publicly critical of the State. He was, though, impossibly
confused.
A single guard entered the room.
"Karl Ivanovich," he stated,
"please rise and follow me.”
Karl struggled to his feet and shuffled
through the little door and into a dank smelling empty courtroom.
He was led to an ancient heavy wooden stool,
upon which he sat. He slowly raised his head to survey the other occupants of
the room. There were only three. A stern looking magistrate glared down from an
elevated podium. An angry looking guard stood behind the judge, not glaring
at Ivanovich, but certainly glaring at the world. An emaciated clerk sat
directly across from the defendant, looking bored.
"Guilty as charged," he heard the
judge say, "of the theft of a loaf of bread. You are sentenced to hard
labor in the Wilderness Labor Camps for a period not to exceed thirty
years.”
Karl Ivanovich wanted to scream, but he could
not. Something inside him denied that what appeared to be happening was really
happening. Later, he would put a name that "something." He would
call it: "Foolishness."
*****
He opened his eyes, which fought against the
opening. They felt as if they were glued shut, but the truth was that they were
frozen shut.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim, scattered
light, a loud and constant rumbling bombarded his ears, and the distinct piercing
aroma of stale urine and feces dug into his nostrils.
Yes, he thought, the train.
He lay there for what might have been a long
time. The exact duration was difficult to ascertain since nothing changed: It might
have been an hour; it may have been two days. The straw upon which he lay did
not change. The uncertain light which filtered through cracks in the rail car
did not change. The ice which encrusted the flat iron grid which enclosed
Ivanovich 's tiny cell did not melt or grow perceivably thicker.
The
heavy roaring of steel wheels upon steel track did change. It was changing all
the time. There was a murmur, then a roar, then a stage whisper—a very
loud one; then a maddening, deafening whining followed by a gentle tattoo, then
a little rat-a-tat-tat. Underneath it all droned heavy bass ostinato, forever
and always it seemed to say. Then the roar would steal back into the song,
followed by another long murmur. Sometimes Karl Ivanovich would come to believe
that he had heard all the permutations; and just when he was sure of that, a
new sound would manifest itself.
He
sat up. The effort drove his breath from the warmth of his body out into the
harsh cold of the freight car. Thick clouds of it hung heavily in the air, and
then, like hope, were gone. "You afraid?" he heard a hoarse male
voice inquire.
Am
I afraid, he wondered, "No," Karl answered, although he did not turn
his head toward the sound of the other 's voice, ”no, I have traveled beyond
fear into a place that is colder than any other.”
Silence.
Then,
laughter. It began as a low chuckle, a gurgling, really, and rolled up into a
quiet, shaking hysteria. After a few moments Karl arose and took notice of the
one who mocked him.
The
creature seemed to occupy most of the adjacent cell. It was, or appeared to be,
male, from the deep timbre of its noises, but whether it was human was another
question altogether.
The
cells were a uniform size, and Karl recalled counting them upon entry. There
were twenty-two of them, each occupied by a prisoner, each loosely carpeted
with straw, each furnished with a single bowl for defecation and urination. By
noon, somewhere between three days and a week into the journey to the outlands,
the bowls all overflowed onto the cell floors. The corner of each cell had become
an excretion zone, with the bowl occupying a space at the corner and serving as
a target.
Now,
the giant next door was aiming his shriveled member at his own target/bowl. He was
not really hitting it because he was laughing too hard. He finished his
business and buttoned the fly on his heavy wool trousers, and then lumbered over
to the iron bars which separated his cell from Karl's.
His
huge hands grasped the bars and his filthy face pressed up against them. It was
a grotesque visage, framed by wild long greasy hair and a thick red and brown
beard, the forehead protruding massively under bushy red eyebrows, and a malformed
bulbous node at the end of the large crooked nose.
"Let
me look at ya. Ah, yes," the giant hissed, and hissed again, "Ah,
yessss, a Comrade from the City.” His head turned this way and that, like that
of an inquisitive lower primate checking out the new arrival at his zoo cage.
"Not afraid, are ye." It sounded more
a statement than a question.
"I
have done nothing wrong."
"Not
afraid, because nothing wrong have ye done,” he growled, and then his tone of
voice changed altogether, became civilized, almost delicate. “How curious, how
infinitely baffling." The huge man appeared disappointed and turned away
from the bars, muttering under his breath.
"Wait!"
Karl stood up, painfully, for he had been without exercise for days, at least.
He shuffled to the bars, "My name is Karl Ivanovich, and I think we need
each other.”
The
giant uttered, “Need? Need? What we ‘need,’ my friend, is a weapon. We do not
‘need’ each other." He had to bend slightly to stand upright, but now he did,
and he re-approached the cell divider. My name is Aleksandr Denentyev, Comrade
Karl Ivanovich, and I am a thespian, not a criminal.”
Karl
saw something like a great sadness in the eyes of this gigantic man. He asked
quietly, "What was your supposed crime, Comrade Denentyev? "
The
giant chortled, then spoke in a decidedly British accent, "It so happens
that I did kill a man. But he was attacking me with a loaded weapon. I
protected myself with 
these." He outstretched his
mammoth hands, palms outward.
"I
have talked with many fellow prisoners since my capture, " he continued,
"and some of them are guilty. Quite so. Many are innocent. In the end, it makes
no difference once the corrupt courts get ahold of 
them. Of us. Slave laborers are
all the judges want, though they have no shortage of them. Of us." He
lowered his wide-set eyes and mused,
"It
is the System. We are no more or no less products of it now than we were at our
‘honest’ professions.”
Denentyev’s
bulk sidled away from the bars, off to another corner 
of his ridiculously inadequate
cell. “I must rest. Soon I will 
have a new kind of
Quota to meet, and I suspect that the punishment for not meeting it will be somewhat
more stringent than loss of a bonus. I must gather my strength and be prepared
to work."
Karl
heard him murmuring something about "outrageous fortune,” 
but he could not understand
anything else the giant muttered. After a while, both men lay on their cell
floors, having fallen asleep again.
Sometime
later, Karl made the acquaintance of his only other neighbor, in the cell
across the narrow aisle, one Vsevolod Vardovsky, a student who also professed innocence.
His crime: the theft of a book. The boy appeared
not well to begin with, and by the time the Keeper came to empty the slop bowls
and to dole out a skin of water and a chunk of stale bread to each starving
prisoner, there was that ore less body to feed.
The
Keeper, a silent, grizzly old man with a weighty wooden staff slung over his shoulder, moved from cell to cell repeating
the same routine—handcuffing each prisoner through the front bars of his cell,
tossing down the food and water in one corner, and dumping 
waste from
the bowl into a large barrel he dragged along the rail car’s floor behind him. Finally,
he would relock the cell and retrieve his single pair of handcuffs and then move
on to the next prisoner.
Karl
learned all of this only by pressing his face to the bars and watching as the
Keeper made his way down the center aisle. His own cell was located at the forward end of the
car, beside a door which presumably led to a connecting platform and then to
another 
car. Were
there other prisoners? Other cars?
So
the old troll made his way first down the side of the car which contained a dozen
cells, and then back up the other side, where the space which could have held a
twenty-third prisoner was occupied by a heavy sliding door. In the last cell lay
the corpse of the student. The Keeper was angry when received no response to his order, “Get up, you little girl,” he
growled, “If you don 't get up and come to me, you will have no food nor drink
until I come again, and who knows when that may be. There is an important card
game in the guard car, and I am ahead. GET UP, come on, you son of a hog. No?
You will live in your own stench a few days more, then.”
"He
won’t live at all. He's dead.”
The
voice was that of Karl Ivanovich, and the Keeper's fury now turned upon him. SMACK
went the Keeper 's staff on the bars. “Don’t you ever speak to me unless
I order you to, swine! Do not you ever stick your thieving nose in where
it does not belong!”
"He
was a Christian, and he wanted me to plead for you to see that he has a
Christian burial,” Karl spoke with a level voice.
"I’ll
show you a Christian burial, you smart bastard! "
The
key clanked into the iron door and the door was yanked loudly open. Vsevolod Vardovsky was dragged out by his
worn leather boot heels and left laying twisted upon the floor while the Keeper
strode to the sliding door of the car. Biting wind rushed in, and a
minor uproar issued from the cells. He returned, smiling grimly, and lifted
the student up over his shoulder.
"Oh,
"snarled the Keeper, "I haven’t prepared the body yet. Here,
let me anoint it with oils. He grasped the student 's lifeless hair in his fist
and dunked the dead face into the barrel of waste. 
It came up dripping brown green.
"There,
there young man, that should freeze nicely and keep you your baby-like
expression for all eternity.” The animal smiled broadly at 
Karl Ivanovich before carrying the
student down the aisle and standing 
him at the open door. “I commit
you to your god, you pig-sucking son of a whore,” declared the Keeper as he
shoved the reeking corpse roughly out the door.
"Come
here.” He was back at the front of Karl’s cell. “Give me your hands again. Karl
did as he was told and was once again handcuffed to the front of his cell. His
food and water were taken, and the cell door relocked. The jailer released him,
and his watery eyes met the
cold stare of Ivanovich.
"Maybe
you will join your friend next feeding day, Samaritan. “I will try to come up
with a new and even more entertaining ceremony.”
Days passed.
The straw.
The bars. The ice and the clouds of breath. The omnipresent stench. These
things remained.
The rattling
booming of steel on steel and the rushing whistle of wind and snow stayed with
the prisoners.
Despair did
not leave them, not for an instant.
Karl
Ivanovich lay on his left side, his left arm asleep and perhaps dead forever.
His breath was regular and shallow, and he stared at the bowl in the corner of the
giant’s cell. What we need is a weapon.
With an
effort whose presence surprised him, he rolled over and pulled himself over to
the bars which separated his cage from that of Aleksandr Derentyev.
The giant slept.
"Derentyev,
" Karl choked out, "Derentyev. Wake up.” One large eye opened in that
hairy jumble of a face.
"I want
to thank you for breaking bread with me. But it was not enough. There is one
thing more thing you must do.”
The other eye
opened, and one thick brow curled slightly.
"Break
your bowl for me, Thespian.”
*****
The door at the front of the prisoner car creaked and the Keeper heavily
stepped in. The noise of the train's passage was shockingly loud beyond the open door. The jailer stood for a moment,
staring into Karl 's cell before reaching outside the car and dragging in his
barrel and bag.
"Pig-turds,
oh darlings, he called tauntingly, "rise and shiiine. I’ve come with your
eggs and potatoes, your steak and your wiiine.” He peered into Karl’s cell for an
exceedingly long time, as if to assure himself that the still lump at the back
of the cell was indeed as lifeless as it appeared to be.
The key
jangled into the lock, and the grizzly old man entered the cell, his staff pointed
at the lifeless corpse. He took two steps into the cage and brought his staff
heavily down upon its leg.
There was a
heavy thud and that was all.
He took hold
of the dead man's heavy boots and dragged him out of the cell, leaving him
bent and crooked on the floor as he moved heavily down the aisle to the side
door. It slid open, and once again the icy wind rushed in. This time, though,
there was no sound from the prisoners. That struck the Keeper as strange, and
he turned slowly to survey the cells. What he saw was a dozen faces, tired and
in various stages of dishevelment and exhaustion, uniformly pressed up against
cold iron.
"So. The swine want their feed, " crooned the Keeper. “It
looks as though the twenty-two has dwindled to twenty. But never you mind, you see,
I get paid whether I arrive with twenty-two or with two. The Party, the Party
knows it is a long and difficult journey. Long and difficult, yes, it is. I am
paid by the rail mile, not by the prisoner! Ha,” he laughed, “and,” he looked back up the aisle to where
the dead man lay, “we’ll be stopping tonight, you see, we'll be stopping
tonight at the rail station outside of Kirtutsk
for food and water and fuel to take you deeper, yes, deeper into the deep deep
taiga, where you will work to build this world, yes” he spoke to them all as if
they were a seated assemblage of Union Workers, and he shuffled down the aisle,
shouldering his staff. “Yes, many hands, light work, hee, hee.”
The lifeless body
of Karl Ivanovich was much heavier than that of the student, so the Keeper dragged
it to the door instead of 
throwing it over his shoulder. It
was in the dragging that both arms fell out behind the corpse, and the Keeper
noticed that there was something in one of the hands.
“Wha…” the man
began to ask, but it was too late for questions.
Ivanovich
was up and knocking over the jailer with a stout 
hammering of his fist to the man
's forehead. The old man grappled for the staff on his shoulder, but
again, too late. Into his throat something was deeply driven, and Karl felt the
burning heat of the man's blood flood over his hand. He ripped the sharp fragment
of bowl sideways and the Keeper collapsed in a heap, his head all ajar on
his blood-spewing neck.
Karl
Ivanovich stared down at the man he had killed.
Into his
pocket went the sharp shard of wood from Derentyev’s broken bowl. He rifled the
jailer's pockets and came up with the precious 
key. From the dead man's shoulder,
he slipped the staff. He held it up so that it gleamed brightly in the soft
light. It was a beautiful thing, and he pointed it at the corpse and
squeezed the handle just so.
A pinpoint beam of blue light issued from the business end of the
staff, and it lit upon the mangled face of the Keeper. The shaft of light vanished and so did the ugly head.
Karl strode to the
open door and took a deep breath of fresh cold air.
Luminescent snow
globes blew past almost horizontally, their speed enhanced by that of the train
car. The dazzling blue sheen of them was almost blinding. Each crystalline bulb
was different in shape from all others, and Karl looked out over the
plains, 
witnessed their bursting by the
millions upon impact with the glistening yellow ground. Beyond, out beyond the
taiga, the bright turquoise forest spread out forever. There was shelter there,
and 
there was forage, and whole new
worlds to be fashioned out of those vast wells of raw material.
We
will disappear into those forests, enter those hills and find us a valley, he
thought. And when we have built something, we will make our way back into
the city and we will steal us some fine women and disappear again. We will
make a world. We will make our own Party. Our Comrades will be our true
brothers, victims of the Old Way, harbingers of the New.
The New World
's New World.
We will call
ourselves The 21.
In but a few
moments he had freed the other men. They were bunched up behind him at the door.
He leaned his
face out into the cold rushing wind. Off in the distance he could just make out
the tiny image of Kirtutsk, a large city really, the connection not only
between the cities and the Wilderness but also between Earth and 
the New World, replete with shiny
steel towers and, there, the little bubble, the gigantic bulb, which enclosed
the living quarters of a million and a half people, with its Elevator
Lines 
stretching out into the white sky
on up, on up to the orbiting station.
Through the
swirling blue ice snow he could only just make out the shape of one giant
shining sun, glowing blue, but indistinct. Perhaps if it cleared later in the
day the little red sun would be visible, too. Perhaps it would warm. A
little.
Oh, but he
felt alive, for the first time in years.
It was time
to get to work.
He jumped and
rolled.
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