West by East

Digby wakes as his head crashes into the cognac cabinet. He scrambles to his feet. Blinking, he raises his fists and waits for his vision to adjust. He’s alone. What he thought was his master’s study is actually a small carriage, the cabinet its panelling. The [redacted] who’d forced their way into the house at midnight, mouths set and expressions grim, have disappeared.

The ground trembles beneath his feet, and Digby feels a breeze on the nape of his neck. Turning, he steps toward a small window. Pulling at the curtain, a world of almost total darkness is revealed. He realises he’s in a locomotive of some sort. He can tell that he’s moving at speed because of how the wind – creeping through a minor flaw in the window frame – stings his eyes. His cheeks warm as the hellfire red of an industrial plant breaks the streak of darkness. He’d know those lights anywhere. He’s heading [redacted].

***

Min taps his pen into the inkwell and thinks about how to word his report. The cargo has been delayed again. It’s the third time it’s happened and he’s growing impatient.

A knock at the door makes him jump, and he blots the page in front of him. He curses, then freezes as he realizes which language he’s used. He mustn’t let it become a habit, even when he believes himself to be alone in the facility.

Whoever knocked at the door answers in the same language. Min’s neck stiffens. The stranger’s voice is low. That is understandable. The forbidden tongue – dialect, as he mistakenly thought of it in his youth – hasn’t been spoken in the cities for fifty years. In the villages, as they’re known, some speakers remain, but they whisper to each other, and never speak to strangers. They know the consequences if they are overheard.

The voice comes again. The speaker knows Min’s name. Not the name that he’s known by in the facility. His old name, from when he was a boy. From when he ran barefoot through the villages, shouting as loudly as he could in the forbidden tongue to provoke a reaction from his mother. How foolish he was then. He wonders where his mother is now, whether she’s still alive. He places his pen in the inkwell and turns to face the door.

***

Turning back to the carriage, Digby swallows. His mouth is dry, in a way that no liquor he’s tasted has ever made it. He rarely drinks more than one glass, anyhow, responsible as he is for his master’s wellbeing. He’d taken a mere sip when the men arrived. He’s certain that he’s been drugged. He closes his eyes, forcing himself to breathe deeply and concentrate. He tries to remember his training, though his hands are trembling. What is the last thing he remembers? A knock at the door after the master had retired for the night. A delegation from the [redacted]. Talk of a contract breached, of rules broken.

He sits on the edge of the bed that takes up one side of the carriage. He’s wearing his dress shoes, but the laces aren’t tied the way he would do them, rather in what his master calls the exotic style. He has on a semi-casual suit. The shirt is his, but the buttons are different. They are ivory, like the ones on the jackets worn by the men who visited his master last year. Those men, too, were unsmiling. Digby's master ushered him out of the room, but he listened to the men’s questions at the keyhole. They spoke in the common tongue of trade approved language, and he couldn’t follow all of it.

***

Min leans his head against the glass. It’s cool, and soothes him. He watches the fog of his breath appear and recede. Min is never sure how much the man on the other side can see. He’s sleeping at the moment, anyway, his slight frame rising and falling under the blanket. The floor is littered with his things. Toys, mostly. Items from his childhood that it’s hoped will prompt him to confess. His favourite is the train set. He sits for hours with it, narrating an ever-changing series of events that led to his incarceration admission here.

Min sighs. It’s almost two o’ clock in the morning, and he should go to bed. These late nights are getting to him, making him hear voices, imagine people tapping at his door. He rattles the handle of door 307 to make sure it’s secure, and moves away.

***

Digby raises his head from his hands.

There’s a noise at the door. Someone is outside. The door opens, and Digby gets to his feet. A man stands in the corridor. The man opens his mouth as if in slow motion and speaks. It is the common tongue approved language, the same one spoken in Digby’s master’s study all that time ago. Digby finds he understands even less now than he did then. He has tried to learn it, as is required of him, but the words feel unnatural in his mouth. In silence, he watches the way the man’s lips curl around the sounds.

The man is handsome in the manner that many people from Digby’s homeland, Digby’s master included, used to admire fetishize. The men, and, indeed, the women, of Digby’s homeland thought themselves superior to the people to whom this man belongs. They allowed themselves an attraction to them, but never granted them the respect they deserved. The revenge of this man’s people was perhaps inevitable.

Digby raises his palms in a gesture of incomprehension. The man in the corridor turns to his right and calls to someone. Digby hears the tap-tap of women’s heels along the corridor. The sound prompts a memory to reach up to him. It is hazy, like hands scrabbling beneath the ice. It makes his gut twist with fear.

Digby stares as a woman appears next to the man in the corridor. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders. Digby is sure that he has seen this woman before, although with her hair pulled back in a tight bun. He cannot say where. The woman is beautiful, as he’d known she would be the moment he heard her shoes. Her lips are painted scarlet, as he’d known they would be. They part, revealing slightly crooked, though perfectly white, teeth. When she speaks, it is in dialect the forbidden tongue.

“Good evening, Min,” she says.

***

Patient 307 is waiting for the train to re-appear from underneath his bed. He’s set up the track so that the train disappears for a short while, as if into a tunnel. He has had to improvise, with half of his props still at home. He has written letters requesting that all of his toys be brought to him, but there’s some sort of delay. He smiles as the train emerges and makes its way along the wall opposite him.

He can’t actually remember how he got here. The staff here aren’t particularly cruel, but he knows that they mean him harm. They ask him over and over about his history, where he’s from, whether his family are still in the villages. They ask him if he remembers any of the language of his childhood. What they call the forbidden language, when they’re in their coats, and dialect when they’re pretending to be his friends. Even if he could remember, he wouldn’t tell them. So he tells stories. It would be hard to stick to one untruth, with no omissions or mistakes when re-questioned. So he invents a new story every day, each one involving one of the toys before him.

The train passes the heater. It’s warm in the facility, hot in fact, but he always has it on as high as it will go. He likes the glow of the bars through the train windows.

He can hear someone talking to him from the doorway.

***

Digby stares at the woman. She is smiling, revealing more of her unnaturally white teeth. Her expression is welcoming, encouraging him to respond in the language of his birthplace. It would be a comfort to speak it now, after so long. To move his lips and tongue in the way that feels natural, to hear the sounds in the air of the old place names. To ask where his people are. He takes a breath.

She must be new, or out of practice. She allows her eyebrow to move up, the slightest of fractions. At the same time, her nostril flares. The smallest of movements, but they give her away. To Digby, someone who has grown used to surviving on observation, they’re enormous. She was excited. She’s trying to trap him, and she thought she had him.

Digby closes his mouth, and shakes his head.

***

Hak drops into a chair. Pulling off her wire, she places her feet on the desk and extends an arm. There’s a small hiss, and a cold bottle is pressed into her palm.

“We’ll get him next time.” The official who’s spoken, a body in a chair whose face she can’t be bothered to memorize, opens his own bottle.

“I don’t understand what he thinks he gains from this act.” She had held a begrudging admiration for the prisoner’s tenacity, but it’s growing wearisome. They’ve had to bring in their best resources to try and break him. When the initial tactics caused him to regress to adolescence and childhood, they brought in toys for him, sending a special team into the villages to source genuine ones from his childhood. They’ve set it all up as if he were in his family bedroom.

They’ve even obtained special dispensation from the government to speak the forbidden language to him. She feels sick whenever she hears it, even more so when she’s forced to speak it. The harsh consonants and the drawn out vowels. But it seems the best way to extract a confession, and she believes that they're drawing nearer. “Is there anything in the reports?” She asks.

“Nothing as yet. Another is due in the morning.”

She takes a sip of her drink. She’s growing impatient.

***

Patient 307 is lying face down on the floor. He is too near the heater, and the thin skin of his eyelids and at his hairline burns.

He thinks he is alone once more, but he can’t be sure. He cannot remember how he came to be lying here, but he thinks it was something to do with the people who spoke to him from the doorway. He believes there were two of them, a man and a woman. They spoke to him in dialect the forbidden tongue. He nearly responded, with his mind fuzzy and warm from watching his train. He caught himself just in time. When he refused to speak, the woman grew angry. Not much is clear after that.

He stays on the floor, listening out for the comforting whizz and click of his train.

***

After several hours of lying on the carriage floor, listening to the sounds of the locomotive, Digby pulls himself up onto the bed. They must be passing a particularly large industrial plant, because the whole cabin is glowing, and his face is burning.

***

Min sits at his desk. He managed to sleep, a dreamless sleep that nonetheless provided no rest. He woke up in bed, but aches as if he has slept on a hard surface. The report that he started last night has disappeared. He swears softly, and takes a fresh sheaf of parchment from the drawer. He needs to get a hold of himself.

He presses Play on the tape recorder. Nothing happens. Opening the drawer, he finds it empty.

Min sighs, and begins to write what he can remember.

***

Hak raises an eyebrow. She holds the report between her thumb and index finger, as if its contents could contaminate her. Inmate 307’s voice rambles in the background. “He believes himself to be conducting research?” She says.

The official, whom she knows to be different to yesterday’s simply because he takes up more room in the chair, nods. “He thinks he is a researcher at the facility. He believes his voice on the tape is that of another person.”

Hak nods. It’s an interesting strategy. Allow the inmate a level of perceived freedom. Let him wear the coat and give himself a title. Give him the medicine to induce the ramblings, and provide a tape recorder. When he comes to, provide ink and parchment for him to write up his ‘reports’. Wait for him to slip up and speak the forbidden tongue. Moreover, wait for him to confess to where the others are.

***

Digby wakes as his head crashes into the cognac cabinet.

- Digby? What an odd name. His name from the villages, you say? It is in the backwards style of those people. Keep using it when you visit him, as it seems to draw a reaction.

He scrambles to his feet. Blinking, he raises his fists and waits for his vision to adjust. He’s alone. What he thought was his master’s study is actually a small carriage, the cabinet its panelling. The Tartars who’d forced their way into the house at midnight, mouths set and expressions grim, have disappeared.

- Tartars? It is not strictly the forbidden tongue, but nobody outside the villages would ever use such a term. Remind me of its meaning. Ah, yes, the name for us, those feared people from the East.

The ground trembles beneath his feet, and Digby feels a breeze on the nape of his neck. Turning, he steps towards a small window. Pulling at the curtain, a world of almost total darkness is revealed. He realises he’s in a locomotive of some sort. He can tell that he’s moving at speed because of how the wind – creeping through a minor flaw in the window frame – stings his eyes. His cheeks warm as the hellfire red of an industrial plant breaks the streak of darkness. He’d know those lights anywhere. He’s heading east.

- East. He, like the other resistors, is always heading east in their accounts. It doesn’t cross their minds that the movement in fact went the other way. That what they believe to be a foreign land is actually the barren ground of their precious villages, the land they protected with their imagined borders. They will never admit that they needed us, that they, thirsty and starving, welcomed us with open arms. Grateful for our charity, which we allowed them to call trade, they forced their toneless tongues around our language. They slept with our women, and our men, still thinking themselves superior. Thinking themselves in control. They welcomed us into their villages, allowed us to improve them. The majority assimilated quickly, of course, being as they were desirous of survival. But as is always the case, survival brings an unfounded sense of merit, and forgetfulness.

Still, we are making progress. The prisoner’s personas are merging. I see here that the Oriental style of shoelace and ivory button creeps into his account of the train. Here, he is unsure which side of the mirror he is on, researcher or subject. Continue as you are, and I anticipate that we will have his confession within the month.

***

Digby wakes as his head crashes into the cognac cabinet. He lies still for a moment, wondering if he should even raise his head. He can feel the bristles of the carpet against his forehead, taste the dust on his tongue. He sighs, and pulls himself to his feet, fists raised.

***