I was lying on the tablature in what was either the warren or a reasonable approximation thereof. I was wearing my suit, but the helmet had been removed. I wasn’t sure if I had just come back into the warren or was about to go out.
I tried to get up but could not. Something held me in place, and it took me some time to realize that I had been strapped down. Intravenous lines ran into my arms, and hanging from the pole at the top of the tablature was a bag filled with a yellowish fluid.
“Hello?” I said weakly. “Hello?”
I tested the straps but they were firm and without flaw.
“Monitor,” I said, “Loosen these straps.”
Enter override, the monitor said.
“I don’t need a goddamn override,” I said. “Loosen the straps.”
Enter override, the monitor repeated.
I had no override. “Monitor—” I started to say, when I was interrupted.
“It’s no use,” a dim voice said. “It doesn’t understand.”
I turned my head and it was only then that I saw, in the corner of the room, a man.
He was long-legged and gangly, thin-fingered and horse-faced: much different from me. I did not know him, had never met him, but I recognized his appearance from instruction with the monitor: either this was Horak or it was a man who resembled him in every particular and was thus his descendant.
“Who are you?” I asked him.
“You know who I am,” he said. “It was you who removed me from storage.”
And yet I had no memory of doing so.
“Why don’t you sit closer?” I asked. “Why are you all the way across the room?”
He shook his head. “It is safer for you,” he said.
Safer how? I wondered. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked, gesturing with my chin to the monitor.
He shrugged. “Faulty memory,” he said. “Among other things. Had I known, I wouldn’t have strapped you in—though without that, you probably would have pulled out the tubes, so maybe I would have regardless. But what’s done is done.” He gestured down to an ax leaning against the wall beside him. “Before I go, I’ll cut you loose.”
“Why not cut me loose now?” I asked.
“I have a few questions,” he claimed.
“I’m happy to answer them. Cut off the straps.”
“I thought it better to keep you tethered until you had answered them.”
“Why wouldn’t I stay in one place on my own?”
He looked at me curiously. “Perhaps that’s something that you should tell me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Since both other times when I attempted to question you, you fled.”
And yet I had, and still have, no memory of these times either, and even looking back at these pages, I see I have not recorded them. It is as if I have lost touch with my own mind, my own body.
“Shall we start with an easy one?” Horak asked. “What is your name?”
For a long, horrifying moment, I didn’t know. There just wasn’t a name there. Even though he was at a distance, I could feel his gaze resting steadily upon me, like the pressing of a thumb.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember.”
“Not good enough,” he said, forming a basket with his hands. “Try again.”
And there was something in his voice that made me feel I had to. I searched the room, hoping for something to jog my memory, but there was nothing.
And then, suddenly, it came to me.
“X,” I said.
“X?” he said. “X is not a name, it’s a letter.”
“Wollem was to name me,” I said, the memories coming back thicker now. “Something starting with X to maintain the sequence. But if this was his purpose he failed in it and never named me. He never gave me more than a letter.”
“Very good,” he said. “Perhaps X really is your name, if we can call it a name. But why is it that each time I’ve asked you your name, you’ve come up with a different one?”
I am X, I am almost certain of it. I am not, as I apparently variously told Horak, Vigus, Vagus, Unnr, Uttr, Tore, Ture, or any number of others that came earlier. And yet, why would I give Horak these names instead of my own?
What is wrong with me?
He said to me, “What brought you to this place?”
“The warren?” I said. “I’ve always lived here, as long as I’ve existed. I was made here.”
“You call it the warren?” he asked. “Why?”
“That’s what I was taught to call it.”
“Who taught you this?”
“Wollem,” I said. “Who else?”
“And who taught Wollem?” he asked.
“Either Vigus or Vagus,” I said. “I do not know which. This is how we relay information, from an older mouth to a younger ear, with each of us being told what the others before him knew.”
“And where did it all begin?” he asked.
“Begin?” I said. “With the founder, of course. Aarskog, also known by some as Aarskog-Scott.”
“And who came before Aarskog?”
“No one came before Aarskog,” I said, a little offended. “He was the founder. He was the first.”
He pulled himself forward a little in his chair. “Who taught Aarskog?” he asked.
“Nobody,” I said.
“Then how did he know?”
“He just knew,” I claimed, though in truth I had never considered the question before and did not want to consider it now.
Horak said to me, “What are you, exactly?”
I tugged against the straps. “Cut me loose,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not until you answer my questions. What are you exactly?”
I responded, “I’m human, just like you.”
“Not just like me,” he said.
“No,” I conceded, “maybe not.”
“How do we differ?”
“We are both bipedal,” I said.
“That’s how we are the same,” he said.
“I don’t care to talk about this,” I said.
“Look at you,” he said, ignoring this. For the first time, he stood and approached me. As he came closer, I could almost feel the heat radiating off him. I shrank back a little, as far as the straps would allow.
“That’s right,” he said. “I don’t mean to hurt you, but you should be afraid of me.” He reached out and I saw the flash of steel that he had in his hands, but with my arms strapped had no way of avoiding it or parrying it. He slashed deep and through the fabric of my suit and spread the lips of the slash wide.
“Lift your head,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
“No,” I said.
“You see here,” he said, and pointed down at some part of my chest that, because I refused to lift my head, I could not see. “That patch of black there, just below the skin?” He reached out again, and when I felt first a pressure and then a rush of pain, I knew he must have sliced into it. “It’s been dead for some time, that patch, and the tissue around it as well.”
“A body is just material,” I said.
“What does that mean, ‘material’?” he asked. “The body has been dead for some time, but you are still animate. Why?”
“A body is just material,” I repeated.
“What are you?” he said, his voice rising. “Tell me! What are you, really? What have you done with all the rest of us? Why have I changed? Why am I the only one still alive?”
I had no answers to these questions, which struck me as entirely the wrong questions to ask. And so, despite his anger, despite his prodding, I remained silent.
After a while, Horak was reduced to silence. For a moment, he put his hands around my throat and choked me, but when he remembered what his touch did to my skin, he pulled his hands off and backed slowly away, finally calming and settling in his chair in the corner. He sat there for a long time, running his hands through his hair, gathering his thoughts.
“You still insist you are human,” he said.
“I am bipedal,” I said.
“You are not what you think you are,” he said.
He bowed his head and stared at the floor, rubbing his face with his hands. I watched him do this for a long time and then asked, “Are you done with your questions?”
“This body of yours is dying,” he said. “It is already dead.” He stood up and approached me with the ax. I thought that finally he intended to release me, and so I moved my head a little to one side and watched, placidly, as he raised the ax.
“What happens to a human when he is cut?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Surely, this machine called a monitor has taught you this information. Is it that you simply can’t recall?”
“A human bleeds,” I quoted.
“What color is this blood?”
I had learned nothing about this from the monitor, but I had seen my own blood, had vomited it out, and sometimes watched it escape my body after I had been hurt or injured. “Yellow,” I said. “Growing deeper in shade when exposed to air.”
“This is the same with the air inside of what you call the warren as without?”
I thought for a moment and then shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I have bled in the suit and in the warren but never to my memory outside.”
He nodded. “And you are, you claim, a human?”
“I am a person,” I said, and nodded.
“And you claim that these two things are the same? To be a human and to be a person?”
I thought back, trying to remember what, if anything, the monitor had told me about that. But it had, as far as I could recall, told me nothing. Perhaps I simply had not asked the correct questions.
I remembered, though, the monitor’s query: What do you mean by “person”? As if it were willing, for whatever reason, to accept my definition of what a person was, to modify its own. If I had claimed to be a human rather than a person, would its answer have been different?
Too often, I told myself, that is the problem: we do not know to ask the right questions.
“Why not?” I said at last. “Why would ‘human’ not be the same as ‘person’?”
“You are a person,” said Horak. “At least by some definitions. Considering there is no longer a legal authority in this place to make a judgment on the matter, we will accept that without debate. But you are not human.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
“If you were human, you could live in the air outside without damage,” he said. “Just like me. If you were human, you would be like me.”
I began to grow angry. “Who is to say that I’m not the one who is human and you who is not?”
“Blood is to say,” he said, and with a sudden powerful movement of the ax he struck through the wrist of the suit and cut off my hand.
It was just as I had told him, and put, I thought at first, the lie to his initial statement that I was not human. A pale yellow fluid pumped out of me, rapidly congealing into a sticky paste. In its glove, the hand flexed its fingers and struggled to right itself, and managed through a series of contortions to worm backward until it was in the pool of paste. I moved the stump of my wrist just a little until the hand and the wrist touched and sealed again together. I flexed my fingers and felt them shoot through with pain. I would have to be careful with the hand for a few hours, and it might have adhered crookedly to the wrist—it was difficult to get the right seal with my arm strapped down—but soon it would be as good, or almost as good, as new.
“There,” I said, “you see? Human after all.”
“Watch,” said Horak, and bared his own wrist. This he did not cut off but simply slid the blade along gently, making a shallow cut. A reddish substance immediately filled the wound and slowly began to leak down the wrist. Unlike my blood, this did not congeal properly but remained liquid for far longer than was optimal to prevent infection.
“What are you?” I asked.
“I’m human,” he said. “What does that make you?”
Though I was willing to agree that only one of us was human, I was not willing to agree with him about which one of us was. Perhaps he had been human once, but he was no longer—even with the fragmented archive that the monitor had, I knew that much. If one of us was to be considered human, that person should be me.
When I continued to argue, he said, “Shall we ask the monitor?”
“You’ve already told me that the monitor is broken,” I said. “Who knows what madness it might offer? Whether it said one or both or neither of us, it would prove nothing.”
He nodded. “Why does it matter if you are a human or not as long as you are a person?” he asked. And though I didn’t have a good answer to that question, I still felt, in some way, that it did matter.
“If not a human,” I asked, “then what am I?” And, when he could give me no adequate response, I thought that yes, I was the one who was human, not he. But if our situations had been reversed and I had been the one trying to answer the question about him, wouldn’t I have been as unsuccessful as he?
And yet, I kept arguing.
In the end, he sighed.
“I was hoping to avoid this,” he said. He left the room. When he came back he was carrying a mirror. He propped it up on a table near the tablature and then bent so he could confirm that I saw myself in it.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said, moving his hand higher on the ax handle so that he could hold it balanced with one hand. Then, taking hold of a clump of my hair, he struck off my head.
I was surprised by this, but even more surprised when I realized that though my head was severed, I could still see out of its eyes. He had lifted me by the hair and was pointing my face at the mirror, and I could see the lips of the head moving in the reflection of the glass.
“Look at the neck,” he said, and looking down I could see, among the pool of yellow fluid where the spinal column should be, a vague feathering dark strand or rope that undulated for a moment and then, as I watched, knotted in upon itself and slipped back down the neck. And then, very suddenly, I realized that for once I was alone, that there were no other selves half-slumbering and waiting to wake up completely, that I was alone in the head while the rest of us, the other selves, were elsewhere, in the body.
For a moment, I felt ecstatic, and then, quickly, felt very lonely.
“Put us back,” I said. It came out as a vague, airless rush but either Horak understood me or he had intended to put the head back all along.
He carefully replaced me, and a moment later I felt head and body come back together and the rushing back into my consciousness of those other, slumbering selves. Then Horak with four blows severed the straps that bound me and extended the haft of the ax to me to help me to stand.
He directed me again before the mirror, pushing me forward with the butt of the ax handle, and stood near me as I surveyed myself. Something was wrong, a little off, but it wasn’t until I had looked at myself for a long time that I realized what it was, that my head had been replaced crooked, just a little askew.
“So you don’t forget,” said Horak. And then he turned and left the warren.