Letter to Canaan
Dear Judas,
I am addressing this letter to you because of the individual-to-individual rule imposed by the prison, but I hope that you can use your own judgment wisely as to the extent to which you communicate these contents to your fellow inmates.
I’ve been out only a matter of days, but I don’t really want to talk about being out, and I’m not allowed to talk about being in, so what am I going to talk about?
My purpose in writing this letter is the same as my purpose in writing all my letters, and the same as your purpose in writing all yours: I need somebody to talk to. And it’s always easier to talk to people when I’m on my own. You know how much easier it is to cry on a shoulder that isn’t there.
I can’t tell you where I am, or why, but I can tell you that I don’t like it and I’m scared of it. Most of all, I’m scared of people. I’ve been away from the sort of people-contacts that these people use for a long time. I can’t go around treating them as if they were homicidal maniacs condemned to life, now can I? But this isn’t like the other time — the time I told you about, when they only wanted to reel my brain out onto miles and miles of magnetic tape, and they didn’t expect me to be a person — just a specimen. This is different.
I never got a chance to say good-bye, and this is no time or place — this whole letter is to say hello. I don’t know what you thought when they just took me out and never brought me back. Perhaps you think I’m dead. Reassure yourselves, I’m still in the land of the pseudo-living. Or is it reassurance? Am I just going to condemn you to jealousy? I hope not. I think not. I’m sure not. You’re not going to turn to hate me because I’m in a different cage. Sure, there might be slight cause for envy — I can see the sun and I have space — but life here isn’t going to be that much different from life there.
I’m afraid — I guess that is the real reason why I’m setting pen to paper so quickly, so urgently. Sheer cowardice. Events are moving fast, after standing still for years. The world is moving me (certainly not I moving the world), and I’m afraid of opportunity and action and ambition.
But enough of orgiastic self-pity (a lie — when did anyone exhaust his supply of self-pity?). What am I talking about? What can I talk about? I’ll just venture to say a few simple things — nothing that anyone could object to — and hope they’re still in the letter when it gets to you. I’ll write on one side of the paper only so that if they cut bits instead of erasing or inking them, you won’t lose what’s on the other side.
Harmless comment one. I’m working on a Project. You must know that already. For what other purpose do they snatch people out of the coffin? Only for guinea-pig purposes in exceptional circumstances. This is Project with a capital P, which means that it’s serious — they haven’t hired me out to a crackpot, as — it is rumored — may have happened in the past.
As you know, I have spent years wrestling with the burdensome superabundance of my talent — I am probably suited only to Projects and not to projects. Do you know the difference? I suppose not. You got off the carousel fairly recently compared to poor bastards like Manny and Luis who were in before me, but even so you didn’t get much of a chance to study the ways of the world. Briefly, projects with small ps are the kind of thing where any guy with a bit of paper can amuse himself more or less harmlessly. They’re in the territory where the language of bits of paper and letters after the name is quite adequate for communication. You don’t have to be a Whiz Kid. They’re work — bread and butter. Trivia. Projects with big Ps, on the other hand, are not 99 percent perspiration and zero percent imagination. They are tasks which demand a certain waywardness in their exponents. They are crazy men’s scientific territory — what some would call the products of genius. This is blind-man’s-buff country, where work and diligence are not the answers to all questions. This is territory where there are more questions by far than one can hope to answer. I know it. I feel it. And I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case.
You remember the last Project I was on. Quite crazy. Reading minds. Not sensibly reading minds, like the guys in the SF movies or the stage acts, but actually reading minds, like by taking a trace of the resonance currents in the cortex (and everywhere else), sorting them by computer, and printing them out into a language. Then translating the language and reading — literally reading — the mind. We were successful on that one, as you know. Somebody somewhere has a copy of my mind. Maybe lots of people. I’m the textbook mind. The textbook insane mind, that is. Do you know, they could read my mind far better than a sane one? I was more consistent. I had aberrations that were strong enough to record and sort and print, yet specific enough to decode. Ain’t that a triumph for science? I have the only fully decoded mind in existence. They think. Course, it doesn’t do much good being able to read the minds of crazy people. As far as I can see, that is. Not that I know. Nobody bothered to keep me up to date. Just thanks a lot, bye-bye, and good luck in your coffin. Jenny and I got along just fine, but facts were facts, and there was nothing could be done. Anyway, that’s all in the past, and I’m telling you this only so you can understand the sort of thing that they need people like us for.
By the time you get this letter, knowing the speed of the mail these days, especially with the various holdups which the letter might accidentally fall prey to, I shall probably be a lot more settled, maybe even a bit comfortable. Almost certainly, I will have written you again. You know me — always scribble, scribble, scribble, like a gibbon. Even in the cells I set a new record for notebooks. They wouldn’t give me an extra supply, so I used yours and Bedbug’s and some of the others. I’m used to writing down my thoughts, and there’s no point here in me filling notebooks for the benefit of Security and no one else. I might as well communicate while I have the chance. I know you’ll read this and I know you’ll make whatever sense of it there is to be made, and I know that it’ll mean something whether or not. I will try to tell you something of how I am and how I am feeling.
You write to me. I cannot put an address on this letter, but I think if you get me put on your official list of correspondents the prison will know how to get the letters to me. I know you have little enough to tell, but you know that I want to hear from you and I want to know what you have to say. Curse me for my luck, if you imagine I’m lucky. Tell me anything — nothing you say to me is wasted and you know it. I’m only sorry I haven’t set you a better example here, but you know how my mind runs on and away. Irresponsible. I plead insanity, and I have the means to prove it. . . . You have to humor me, so they say. . . .
Finish, for now. Events will be descending upon me any minute.
All the best,
Harker