Out of My Mind Read online

  “You’ll forget your qualms fast enough, believe me. It’s purely a pleasure to watch a real expert like him at work.”

  Decius Asculus broke off his singing—he’d been rendering a whorehouse ballad called “The Spear and the Target,” which had nothing to do with either spears or targets. He looked up at the balcony across the courtyard, and his big-jowled face split in such a grin that his eyes almost disappeared in creased rolls of fat flesh.

  “I’ll lay a denarius to a fish-scale that the centurion’s promising to take his fancy friend up the hill tomorrow!” he said. At the words “up the hill”—which meant more than simply that—the young legionary gulped and the torch wavered.

  “You on execution duty tomorrow, son?” the big man said. The boy nodded, and he went on, “First time, hey?”

  “Y-yes, it is.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” Decius Asculus picked up one of the nails he had beaten flat, inspected it critically, and exchanged his hammer for a file. The nerve-racking rasp of metal on metal punctuated the rest of his talk, as he put barbs on the narrow end of the nail to make sure it could not possibly be tugged loose.

  “Besides,” he said, “the little parties we have here are nothing compared to what they had in the old days. Ever hear tell of the Slave Revolt? When they cleared that one up, they put more than five thousand slaves alongside the roads—as a lesson, so to speak.” He swapped nails and began to file another. “I often wish I’d been there. I’ll lay a denarius to a fish-scale that there was sloppy work done on that occasion. It isn’t everyone who has the knack of it, boy!”

  The young legionary muttered something.

  “Know what they call me?” Decius Asculus went on. “They call me the Expert. Not just an expert, but the Expert. They send novices to me for training.” He glanced up and looked the boy straight in the eye. “You take advantage of it while you can,” he counseled. “You watch carefully tomorrow and any other time you’re on duty up the hill. It could be worth a good posting to you, and a bonus, to say that you learned the trick of it by watching Decius Asculus! More than that, I’ll do you a special favour, seeing as how you’re a good lad and I like you well. Give me your hand.”

  The boy hesitated. Decius Asculus shot out a brawny fist and seized him by the wrist. With the skill of long practice he turned the hand over, spread the fingers back, and held them with his thumb, while selecting a prepared nail from the table.

  “See?” he said. “Doesn’t matter how reluctant they are—you can always open the hand up ready for the job. Keep the hand still, that’s very important. I’ve seen sloppy work done you wouldn’t believe, where the man only had to pull and because the nail was ill-placed, he just naturally tore his hand away. Painful, as you’d think, but a man hung up and sick with thirst and sure of death if he doesn’t pull won’t worry about a little thing like ripping off a finger if he can escape the nail.”

  The boy’s face was very white in the light of the torch, and his hand was limp in the big man’s grasp.

  “So!” said Decius Asculus, poising the nail. “You put it there, d’you see? Always get the nail in the middle of the hand!”

  He jabbed the nail down playfully, and roared with laughter as the boy doubled over, letting fall the torch, in order to vomit between his feet.

  Not a bad day, and not a bad crowd following the condemned men. And three was certainly better than two, just as two was better than one. But Decius Asculus had to sigh whenever he thought of the aftermath of the Slave Revolt long before he was born. Five thousand and more hung up for the crows! Ah, that was execution on the grand scale, while the most he, the Expert, had ever dealt with at one time was a measly dozen, the crew of a pirate ship taken off Caesarea.

  However, that was no reason for failing to do a perfect job.

  He hadn’t thought to ask who the three were, lined up for today; he didn’t concern himself with such matters very much. Waiting on the hill among the standing posts for the condemned men to arrive, whipped along the road with the crossbars on their backs, he turned to one of his assistants and inquired.

  “Couple of robbers,” the man said. “And this holy man who’s been kicking up such a row in the town lately.”

  Small fry. Decius Asculus went back to where he’d laid his nails and hammer and checked them over yet again.

  When it was at last time for the job, he grinned, rubbed his hands together, drew himself up, and—fully aware that he had admirers in the crowd—gave his orders as crisply as a general planning a battle. Crossbars up! Ropes over the bars! Arms out, ropes over ’em! Haul away! Hold ’em steady!

  He spat on his hands and took up the first nail.

  This was his climax. This was the thing he lived for, the thing he had made his own: the poising of the nail between thumb and finger, his own little finger extended, strong as a bar of iron, pinning the fingers of the condemned man flat on the wood while he made the final minute adjustments, and then bam.

  Sometimes they screamed as the single gigantic blow drove the metal crunching through the flesh and the bone, and sometimes they fainted. He preferred them to scream. It indicated that they were strong and likely to live for a while. It was a boast of his that—unless there was a knot in the wood of the crossbar—he never used more than two blows, i the second being a light tap to fold the nail upwards so that it bent over and jammed the hand hard against the wood. The blood oozed from the holes; almost at once the flies swarmed down and began to sup at it.

  Then he called for one of his larger nails and attended to the feet, first having the ropes removed which held the arms while the hands were being nailed, because it was very hard to swing the legs and try to kick when the weight of the whole body was being carried on the nails in the middle of the hands. Long practice had taught him how best to gather the man’s ankles both in one vicelike grip, slam them against the upright post, break the feet downwards with his knee, and then follow the knee blow with the driving of the final nail. The feet usually bled much more than the hands, but that was to be expected.

  There was considerable racket going on among the crowd, but he scarcely noticed. He was concentrating so hard that his head was buzzing; his breath came fast, and the tautness in the pit of his stomach grew and grew. It was always like this. To see the nail go home, watch the blood run, and the flies come down to taste it, was more to Decius Asculus than food and wine—almost more than women. But whenever he had done a first-rate job, he let the women of the town know about it afterwards, sometimes as many as eight or ten of them before the accumulated excitement had been worn away.

  The robbers were good value. They struggled; one of them defied the pain and almost managed to kick him in the face before he secured the feet and smashed them flat against the wood.

  The third one, though, was a disappointment. He was so spiritless, Decius Asculus thought with contempt, that it was hardly worth hanging him up. He made no attempt to resist—just spread his hands out ready for the nails. Worse yet, he did not scream as the robbers did when the nails went home, but simply closed his eyes and hung his head. That annoyed Decius Asculus. It suggested that he would not live long, and some people might assume his early death to be due to a mistake on the executioner’s part. It came near to spoiling his exhilaration.

  To pay the man out for it, when he came to nail the feet he gave an extra vicious twist to flatten them, and made sure when he turned the nail over that the whole of its head sank deep into the flesh.

  “There, you liverless weakling!” Decius Asculus muttered under his breath, and looked up, feeling the wonderful sense of buoyancy that always followed an execution go through every limb. He began to turn away.

  And stopped.

  The eyes of the man on the cross were open and gazing directly into his.

  “You were so right about your Expert!” the elegant young man said warmly, holding out his goblet for more of the fine Samian wine. “I was tremendously impressed with his skill the other day.
You have another execution tomorrow, don’t you? I must say I’d like to be there and watch him again.”

  The centurion frowned. “You can be there if you like,” he said. “But Decius Asculus won’t be.”

  “Why not? Oh!” The elegant young man chuckled. “Don’t tell me! Some covetous visiting general spied him and had him posted out from under your nose. I can tell by your expression.”

  “No,” the centurion said. He went on frowning. “No, it wasn’t like that. It was another of the peculiar things that have been happening around town lately. I was doing my rounds that same evening, after the execution you came to, and I happened to pass the barrack room where Decius Asculus was supposed to be sleeping, and I heard a banging noise, and then I heard his voice sort of—well, trying to sing that awful song he’s so fond of. You heard it. So I called up the patrol and went in to see what was happening. And there he was.”

  “What did you find?” The elegant young man sipped his wine.

  “I found—” The centurion looked uncomfortable. “For the sake of all the gods, don’t let this get around, or people may start talking. Well, there he was, sitting at the table in the middle of the room, with a little flaring lamp in front of him, and his hammer, and a stack of nails, and he had nailed his own hand down on the table. He was just sitting there looking at it, with the other men in the room starting up from their sleep because of the sudden noise. And when I asked what he was doing, he just shrugged and said he was trying to work out how he could nail down the other hand as well. Perhaps by holding the hammer in his teeth, he said.”

  “What an extraordinary thing!” exclaimed the elegant young man, and started to talk about something else.

  Present

  ORPHEUS’S BROTHER

  The last story was about a man who said he was a god—or, to be strictly accurate, I suppose, who said he was God. This is about a man who someone else said was a god.

  It has been argued that we moderns have debased the concept of the Hero, preferring to create the Celebrity, whose claim to be famous is founded on his being well-known: a closed circle. Certainly we have degraded the related notion of “legend”—a singer, a movie star, gets killed in a crash, and instantly he’s plastic for the public relations mold, myths being made to order out of his death.

  And yet … the giants of legend were most likely ordinary men, whom we see through the magnifying glass of memory. This is the process which gave us our Heracles, our Orpheus.

  Suppose the process could be consciously directed; suppose the meretricious myth-making of the publicity departments could be transformed and somehow become real. …

  A third Linus likewise lies buried at Argos: he was the poet whom some describe as a son of Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope—thus making him Orpheus’s brother.

  —Robert Graves: The Greek Myths

  All the reasons why I was not glad to find him waiting in the dark in my apartment would make a long list. He had a gun; he was eighteen years old; he was very frightened; he hated me.

  And he looked very like his brother.

  His face was pale as a corpse’s: waxy, the skin stiffened with fear, the lips “drawn back from sharp young teeth, the eyes wide and brilliant. He was wearing a black shirt and black jeans—Rock’s trademark. Hero-worship, perhaps.

  The phrase struck me as amusing, relieved the iron-bar solidity of my first tense alarm at finding him here, and started me casting about for ways to make him put the gun down without using it. I stood with my left hand on the light switch and my right extended to close the door, exactly as I had been when I realized he was here. I moved only my eyes, scanning the room. It was not quite as I had left it. Certain objects had been disturbed—though nothing was missing; this was an honest burglar by his own lights—and all the doors leading to other rooms had been opened, except one. He would certainly have tried that one and found it proof against anything short of dynamite.

  “Come inside,” he said in a thin voice. “Shut the door.”

  Moving carefully, so as not to startle him, I complied, and then walked towards the Louis Quatorze chair which was the twin of the one in which he had chosen to sit waiting for me to return. The muzzle of the gun followed me jerkily.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “What do you want?”

  “You know who I am,” he said,

  “Of course I do!” I snapped. “You’re Laurie Suggs—Rock’s brother. You’re damned lucky I recognized you, or I’d have slammed that door and called the police before you’d got used to the light being on. Or I could have jumped you. I may be old enough to be your grandfather but the dazzle would have slowed you down. Didn’t it strike you that it was silly to wait in the dark?”

  He swallowed, making his Adam’s apple bob on his boy-stringy neck. That bulging prominence ran in the family, apparently—Rock had had it, and their father, too.

  “You bastard,” he said after a while. “You know why I came here.”

  I considered a possible retort along the lines of, “If I know your family, it’s to get money out of me.” But it would be safer not to make him angry as well as scared.

  “No, I don’t,” I said finally. “And I don’t know why you think you want that gun, either. Put it down.”

  He softened the waxen pallor of his face enough to form a sketchy smile, and shook his head very slightly.

  “Put it down!” I repeated more loudly. “It isn’t a toy—guns are for killing, and they call that murder.”

  “They didn’t call it murder when you killed my brother, Mr. Wise,” he said.

  The air in the room went suddenly cold, and my mind with it. I really had expected him to have come after money; I’d paid a great deal to Rock’s relatives, without much regret. I had taken for granted that his tour of the apartment, picking up and putting down the jade, the silver, the porcelain, was to help him estimate how much he could force me to pay. The gun, on that basis, would be purely for reassurance, something to fondle netsuke-fashion in the dark hour of waiting before my eventual return.

  Not now.

  I looked at the gun as though seeing it for the first time, and its round smug mouth seemed to form a soundless word.

  Death.

  If there was any salvation for me now, it lay in that twist of the mind which makes the act of killing most meaningful when one knows the man he kills: not a stranger in the sights of a rifle, a sleeved limb shattered from its body by a bomb, but a person, an individual, upon whom is performed the most terrific act of love.

  There might well be no safety even there. Nonetheless, I felt a tingling need that the moment be later, because although the patient’s knowledge of the agent adds little to the act, I had always feared that I might be ended by an anonymous nobody: a driver on a freeway or a petty hoodlum. And I did not know Laurie Suggs yet, nor he me.

  He has come here to kill me. He is probably sustained, therefore, by a sense of loyalty and the inspiring concept of vengeance. Take those from him, show him the emptiness of the deed in the eyes of others, the absence of glory—and then perhaps. …

  I gave a short laugh. “You’d better be careful making accusations like that, Laurie,” I said. “That’s nearly as dangerous as playing with guns.” I saw now I had been wrong to say his gun wasn’t a toy. It would help if I could attack the line of his weakness by making his behavior childish. So: playing.

  He shook his head again. “You killed Jack, Mr. Wise,” he said in the same thin voice. “That was what you had in mind all along. I got pictures showing you did it.”

  “Then you’re the only person who has,” I said. “And you weren’t even there. How’d you get the pictures—draw them yourself?”

  I thought so. Kid stuff, drawing. Finger painting in the schoolroom. He shifted on his chair and for a second pressed his lips together as though to stifle an angry answer. The fact that he didn’t want to get angry was on my side, too.

  “Shit,” he said. He put his left hand awkwardly behind him to r
each at the right hip pocket of the black jeans. “I mean real pictures, everyone saw. These!”

  He tugged out a soiled and folded wad of clippings from newspapers, not quite old enough to be yellow but on the turn. Left-handed, he tossed the wad to me. It opened a little in the air and fell on my lap.

  “Spread ’em out,” he said. “Look at ’em. You’re right there with the rest clawing at Jack, like a hound going on two legs. You smile, I’ll kill you slow, shoot you in the belly first and let you bleed awhile. Hear me?”

  I took the clippings and separated them, trying not to tear them where they had rubbed on the folds. They were all the ones I had expected. The big shouting headlines came at me like train-whistles.

  FANS MOB SINGER, KILL IN FRENZY!

  ROCK CARELESS DEAD IN AFTER-SHOW RIOT!

  POP SINGER DIES AS FANS SCREAM!

  God, how they loved it! Coast to coast and around the world they loved it, drooled it out in their huge ill-detailed black and white pictures. Oh yes, I was there—where else should I be, manager of this singer so loved by his fans they didn’t want anything less than him?

  I said in my calmest and most reasonable tone, “Laurie, you’re talking crazy nonsense.”

  “You’re right there with the rest,” he said. “Tearing at him. Pulling at him. Like dogs breaking up a rabbit.”

  “Now you shut your dirty mouth!” I flared. “What the hell did you expect me to do—stand back and let those lunatics do as they wanted? God damn you, I was beaten nearly to death myself trying to get Rock out of the middle of it! You take another look at these pictures. I’m not trying to rip your brother to pieces; I’m trying to help him get away from the crowd! What do you think I am—a cannibal?”

  I balled the clippings up and threw them back at him.