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!’
‘Contemptus, contemptus!’ says the judge striking the operating table with a reflex hammer. ‘Commercial actio is prohibeo in the Ether Jar.’ An orderly I hadn’t noticed before on the other side of the amphitheatre responds by roughly kicking the tout out. Without turning his head, the judge then extends his arm back to beckon to the orderly still at my side, who wheels me in. There’s a hiss, and dozens of arms reach out to point a plastic scalpel at me. The reflex hammer rises again and the extended limbs return to their original positions. I am parked in front of the operating table, facing the cut-thirsty. The judge begins reading aloud.
‘For the benefit of the vulgaris, and their instruction in bonos mores, the court will present its findings as per the processus per inquisitionem into the counts of breaking and entering into EmPath Industries’ property, the misappropriation of materia medica and tampering therewith, joined with the charge of compelled self-defamation pursuant to the consumption of said contaminated materia by members of the Copywriters’ Association. It is important that we start ab initio with the verdict: The cogito of the court has found the sum of the ergos point indeplorably to the guilt of the accused in mens reas and actus reus.’
‘Guilty, however you slice it, so give us our cut …’ says a voice from the upper gallery. A giant foam hand with a pointing index finger printed with SUE-VENIRS waves briefly, but before the speaker can finish, the hammer has fallen and the boot reflexively struck.
Judge Mannix continues: ‘Procurator Brimlad will now furbish the evidence of culpa verbatim, whereupon the defence counsel will respondeat. Thereafter, all that remains is for the court to deliver sententiae severitatis.’
I fold, dog-eared at the sudden firecracker outbursts. Quiver-bangs of words, too loud, too many, come from all directions. I am uncountenanced. My features stare accusingly at me from the third row. She that’s not me. Un-me. Me. If I’m edited out of existence, will she go on without me and live the life of a brandit as if I never was? It’s either drop my gaze into my lap or lift it to the dome above. I choose to dome out.
In between the metal spokes that hold the glass, I can arrange the wheeling words. And when I’ve spun it all out, I am guilty. Oh well. I knew that. So here I am sitting at The Fork in the Medicine Tree, where barbery-surgery assumed bookish tones and reasoned what to do with our bodies.
That voice, the one speaking now, it smears iodine orange. I turn to see Dr Bromide.
‘It was established that the biometric reading of the right pinna gel impression recorded at the entrance to the Reactor Station programming hub produced a false positive on identity. Based on helix, lobule, tragus, fossa and other geometries, a search through our biometric databases was conducted and a match found,’ he says.
‘Let us bear in memoriam, this heinous act of crimen falsi, knowingly committed …’ says the procurator, before being interrupted by the witness.
‘Are you not interested in the patient match?’
‘Quaestio is the sole preservative of the court,’ reprimands the judge.
‘Veritably, veritably,’ says the flushed procurator.
‘Schizophasic cretins,’ says Bromide softly. He is seated just behind my right shoulder and my restraints Chinese-bangle my skin as I turn to see if anyone else heard. He holds my gaze and raises his fingers, which are curled together like the legs of a dead spider as he carefully licks each one. I don’t know what this message means, but seeing him use a form of mute point condenses like the horror and stench of a stranger’s breath at your neck in the night.
The procurator is trying to pick up on his wavering line of questioning. ‘And what would you say, doctor, is per definitionem the composition mentis of the defendant?’
I don’t care to hear about my state of mind, and neither does she that’s not me, who is sitting spinning in circles on the polished parquet floor. I slump and let the backrest of the wheelchair strike a blue to my head as I rush for the dome of sky. If I could sink my arms elbow-deep into that ether, how would it taste? Of absinthe and ease, louche clouds. This is what I’ll take back to the cell. I’ve managed not to think of it before. But now it clangs dinner slot, breakfast slot. Time slot. Under the thumb of the dust beneath the bed. Still humming electric even though the wiring is definitely loose.
‘Silentium! Silentium! The defendant is vox nihili. Any further disruptionem and sedation will be required. This is the Ether Jar.’
Luckily the humming stops. Looking around for the source, I find the proxymate in the audience again. She-me flicks a lighter, singeing the hair of the woman seated in front of her. The filament snake-dances in the flame before coiling up into a fiddlehead fern. How can I possibly see this from metres away? I am not her. I am not the one who sets heads ablaze, even if I had hoped to.
Petula Ormod is called to cross-examine Dr Bromide the next day. She stands and I notice that she has no shoes on, only stockinged feet. Blazing bunions, undimmed even by the haze of hose, apparently explain this. I’m afraid Petula Ormod is a woman always before a hump. The condition of her jacket remains unchanged. ‘Nolo contendere – there is nothing to contest,’ she begins. ‘Nevertheless, I argue that the doctor must conceit, credo quia absurdum est. The defendant’s innocentia is shelf-evident because it is absurd. Can you deny this, Doctor?’
Bromide makes a strange spitting noise and Petula pirouettes back to her seat.
Most mornings the wheelchair comes for me and I sit in the courtroom. I try to listen but the words circle like water-bloated food in a blocked sink. Sooner or later I etherise into the upper reaches of the dome. The light changes. There is the occasional passage of birds, a plane. Clouds accumulo and nimbus. Down below, the words swill round and round.
After breaking for lunch, the procurator calls a new witness.
There’s a sound like a body bag being moved. Mother appears wearing a red-trimmed, transparent pink raincoat over a knee-length black shift dress. Red manicured nails hold the edge of the hood over her head as if a sudden sousing gust might blow it back. Mother knows how to make an entrance. The bare skin of her arms simpers through the rose-coloured PVC. She sits in the witness chair behind my right shoulder. I refuse to turn and look at her.
The bailiff orderly swears her in: ‘Do you swear on the power of speech invested in the transdermal and pains of a second cerebral haemorrhage to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’
‘I do.’
‘Madame,’ says the procurator, who hasn’t been nearly so gracious in addressing previous witnesses, ‘you are the defendant’s mater familias, correct?’
‘Yes,’ she whispers in her most tragic voice.
‘Perhaps you could provide a dictum about the lapsus linguae inflicted on you?’
‘Oh sir, I’m afraid you’re going for the absolute opaques and leaving it all to the imagination.’ I don’t need to look to know she’s producing a full ingénue’s blushfulness.
‘The unbranded LipService in flagrante delicto,’ explains the procurator.
Mum fatale has told them about how I tried to get her to use unprogrammed LipService.
‘Oh, yes. There’s no merrywidow with her, it’s all boxer nastiness. My daughter is ill fitting and rides up my back because of it. It was chest-bindingly cruel to force that unbranded pastie onto me. I would never go commando, I always wear my Frisson Froufrou. But do you think I sagged a bit? No.’
The procurator is standing just in front of me, bordelloed over. I don’t think he understood a word but he’s rushing over to her. My neck snaps round to follow him and for the first time I look at Mother sitting in the witness chair with the procurator on his knees to her right, clasping her hand. On her left the judge crouches, clutching her other hand. The light from the dome above illuminates the rose raincoat and Mother is transfigured into the madonna of the sunset corona. She’s a woman on fire, and through the glow I swear I see she-me standing behind Mother, arms over head, holding the lighter aloft. Mother is the brand made flesh, Frisson Froufrou incarnate. The men of law are weak-kneed before her.
Petula stamps her foot but it makes no sound in its hushed-up hose. ‘Objectio, objectio!’ The judge hurls the reflex hammer at her but it glances off her bunched shoulder pad. I start laughing. It’s an ugly sound, but I can’t stop.
When order is finally restored and the adorers have regained their feet, the procurator says, ‘The testimonium of this charming gentlewoman is lux in tenebris, a great illuminator. For what does it reveal?’ He pauses uncertainly.
I see them all waiting on the gallery’s hard wooden benches, waiting to understand and participate in the court’s catharsis. For once they aren’t all looking at me, and I search the rows for Stillwell, but he’s not there.
‘What does it not reveal!’ he declares triumphantly.
With that court is adjourned for the weekend.