The miranda, p.1
The Miranda, page 1
PRAISE FOR GEOFF NICHOLSON
“An offbeat master of black comedy.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Critics have compared Geoff Nicholson to Evelyn Waugh, Georges Perec and Will Self... Nicholson is incomparable. He doesn’t just give you what you want, he gives you what you never even knew existed.”
— The Independent
“Read him—and laugh yourself sick,”
— Time Out
“A very funny, subversive writer.”
— The Times
“An excitingly inventive novelist.”
— GQ
“Nicholson’s writing is rife with deadpan wit, a style that brings warmth to his characters and a chill to his obsessions.”
— Arena
The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2017 by Geoff Nicholson
ISBN: 978-1-944700-37-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952791
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.
On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
— GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
— EDWARD EVERETT HALE
That’s what’s the deal we’re dealing in . . .
— FRANK ZAPPA, “THE TORTURE NEVER STOPS”
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
How did it work? Well, it never worked exactly the same way twice—that was the nature of the process—but it always started out in an office in an unmarked government building, an outpost in the edgelands; an institutional room, though not quite as anonymous as it might have been: a bright, ground-floor office with a lot of windows and a view of a suspiciously empty parking lot. There’d be a map of the world on one wall, and maybe a calendar illustrated with bright, clear, artless photographs of dogs or sports cars, and a whiteboard on which somebody had drawn a not-so-bad sketch of Felix the Cat.
The encounter would be one-on-one, just me and the “volunteer,” a term I never liked, but it was the one we used, and I definitely thought it was preferable to “subject,” with its overtones both of lab rat and regal underling. All the volunteers I dealt with were men; it got far too complicated with women. There’d be two chairs in the room, but no desk: this wasn’t supposed to look like an interview. Neither I nor the volunteer was armed.
The volunteer walked into the room and looked at me with suspicion and very possibly contempt. No surprises there. I was an unknown quantity. He had never seen me before, but he immediately knew he didn’t like the look of me, could see right away that I wasn’t one of his own kind, and of course he was perfectly right about that, and that was the point. Probably he didn’t like the way I spoke or dressed, or the way I carried myself. Maybe I looked too soft, maybe I looked too professorial, or maybe there was some kind of pheromone I was exuding that alienated him. But that was OK. That was only to be expected. In any case, these were things that would soon be the volunteer’s problem rather than mine.
I began talking immediately, as soon as the volunteer stepped into the room, without preamble, without introducing myself. And again, I didn’t have a set speech, but I usually said something like, “One day you’ll be on a job and you’ll find yourself in difficulties. You may be in the capital of some failing state that’s buckling under the strains of insurrection and corruption, or maybe you’ll be in what looks like a cradle of civilization. We currently imagine that some crazed fundamentalist ideologues will be involved, but these things change constantly. I’m old enough to remember when Maoists rebels were the latest thing.”
I might allow myself a smile at that point.
“Be that as it may, wherever you are, whatever the circumstances, however it happens, there’ll be a fight, a skirmish, perhaps an ambush, and you’ll be on the losing side. You’ll survive but you’ll be captured.”
Now the suspicion and contempt turned to anger. I’d insulted him. This was a strong, confident, competent young man who believed he knew exactly what he was doing, who believed he was in control, who thought that terrible things could never happen to him.
“Of course,” I said, and I sat down at that point, and the volunteer would always do the same, “you might think you’d rather fight to the death than be captured, but strangely enough your enemy may not give you that choice. You will wonder whether your captors intend to kill you, and the answer to that is: possibly but not necessarily. Although we’re only concerned with the second of those cases.
“In that first phase of captivity you will ask yourself why don’t they just do it and get it over with. And the answer to that may be because they want something from you: a name, a set of coordinates, a password, a piece of gossip. But in addition, though hardly separable, they may keep you alive simply because they want to have the pleasure of torturing you.”
The mention of torture focused any straying attention.
“We can argue,” I said, “and governments and politicians and lawyers and military strategists argue constantly, about definitions of torture, about its effectiveness and morality, but when you find yourself in a concrete bunker, naked, bound, wet, hungry, with electrical wires attached to your genitals, these arguments will seem a little academic.”
At this point the volunteer always said something to the effect of “How the fuck would you know?”
And I replied, “Because I’ve been there,” of course being deliberately vague about what “there” meant in this context.
The volunteer scrutinized me. Did I look like a man who’d been tortured? How exactly does a man who’s been tortured look?
While he was thinking about that I said, “Torture affects people in a surprisingly varied number of ways. It can turn strong men and women into cowards, and it can make weak men and women suddenly very heroic. It’s hard to know which kind you are, and nobody can be sure until it happens, but by the time you’re in that concrete bunker, folded into a ‘stress position,’ it’s a little late to start finding out. So that’s why we’re here today. I’m here to help you learn a little more about yourself.”
The volunteer still wasn’t sure what I meant. He might think I was going to regale him with war stories, with my own tales of survival and empowerment, or perhaps he thought I was going to give him a few psychological tips on how to focus the mind, how to endure and transcend. But no, that’s not how it worked.
I got up from my seat, stole a glance into the parking lot, where there was now a large white car: it was always white for some reason, anonymous and unthreatening, except perhaps for the tinted windows. I couldn’t see the men inside, but they could see me, and I knew they were watching me as I walked across the room and stopped when I came to the whiteboard. I took a sponge and erased the drawing of Felix the Cat, which was a signal visible to those inside the car.
Shortly thereafter, three men in nonstandard uniforms, with hoods and masks, entered the room, and there was a struggle, an unfair and unequal fight that went on for as long as necessary, between the men and the volunteer—I stayed well out of it—but it always ended the same way, with the volunteer subdued, tied, blindfolded, and unconscious. Then I could start my real work.
TWO
Naturally the senior members of the Team already knew a certain amount about the volunteers—their aptitudes, their temperaments, family situations, their sexual preferences if any—and somebody in authority undou btedly knew their names, but I never did, any more than the volunteers knew mine. It was thought to be better that way.
When the volunteer came back to consciousness, in darkness, naked, bound, wet, hungry, with electrical wires attached to his genitals, in a concrete bunker (which in fact was simply the basement of the unmarked government building), if he was smart he accepted that this was part of the procedure, a necessary part of the training, something that would make him stronger, more capable. To reinforce this idea, as soon as he was alert, I told him there were rules to this game. I said I was one of the good guys. I said I was on his side. And I told him there was to be a safe word, one of his own choosing. If and when he said that word, the process would end, it would all be over, the mission would be aborted, and he’d be free. I told him there was no shame in that.
Of course we all know that this safe word business is often part of a certain kind of sexual role-playing, and this in itself perhaps quelled some of the volunteer’s anxieties, reassured him that this was indeed just a game. Usually he’d pick what he thought was an inventive or clever or funny safe word, but you know, the safe words were never as inventive or clever or funny as all that.
Torture is a classic form, an ancient calling. I understand from my sources on the Team that there are scientists and technologists out there who are working on new, exotic, probably computer-aided forms of torture, but I never met one of those people. We wouldn’t have had much to say to each other. For me it wasn’t about science and technology; it was more like beating on an old tribal drum, raising the spirits, becoming part of the tradition.
I won’t go into precise details of what I did. For one thing, I’m not allowed to, but the fact is I don’t believe I did anything to the volunteers that would surprise you. I was going to say I did everything you might imagine, but that couldn’t possibly be true. Any of us, even the most innocent and vanilla, can easily imagine forms of torture that are far, far beyond anything that I did, that I was allowed to do, to the volunteers. I stayed within limits. I was constrained by law and decency and to an extent by my own inherent squeamishness. I was, and remained, one of the good guys. But if you were to think of sensory and sleep deprivation, bright light and loud noise, electric shocks, simple physical assault—the punch to the gut, the blow to the head, the belt around the neck, the dog whip—then you’d be on the right lines. And at every stage I said to the volunteer, “Believe me, you’ll be grateful for this one day.”
At some point—sometimes sooner, sometimes very much later—the volunteer inevitably broke and said the safe word. He said “Shakespeare” or “Corvette” or “word” or “goiter,” and sure, this was a kind of defeat, but more often than not the volunteer believed it didn’t really matter, because this was only a simulation, only a game. You could always see the relief in his face, a kind of relaxation, sometimes even a look of triumph as he said his precious safe word.
But the relief never lasted long. I was there to make sure of that. The volunteer said the safe word and absolutely nothing happened, nothing changed, nothing ended. I continued with the process, with my job. The volunteer would complain, of course. I suppose he couldn’t help it. He felt angry or self-righteous or betrayed. He said this was not what he’d signed up for, this was breaking a promise, breaking the rules, this was not the way the good guys conducted themselves. He might say this was a violation of his human rights, a war crime, a crime anyway. And I’d say, “You’re probably right,” and then continue with the process.
This went on for a considerable time. There was no script at this point, no handbook. There were many variables, and ultimately it all depended on the individual. But even the dumbest of the volunteers eventually worked out that there was nothing he could do, nothing he could give me, no name, no set of coordinates, no password, no piece of gossip, no promise or threat that could make any difference. He had nothing of value, nothing that I wanted. He perceived that this was torture for its own sake, for the sheer hell of it. He decided that I was as bad as anybody on the other side, a monster and a psychopath; that I’d gone rogue, gone off mission, turned into some bargain-basement Kurtz. Of course he was wrong about that, but I was happy for him to believe it, and it concentrated his mind wonderfully. It also, of course, gave him a genuine, practical insight into the nature of torture and into the nature of himself.
Eventually we would have been together for several days, at least a hundred hours, usually more, and the volunteer would have seen nobody but me. His world began and ended with me. By now, if I was doing it right, and I always was, the volunteer had some intuition of endless, unassuagable pain, which it seems to me is crucial to any vision of hell, theological or otherwise. The volunteer had been forced to confront and accept his own weakness and powerlessness, which was absolute. Now we were getting somewhere. The volunteer was able to recognize himself in ways he never had before. My job was almost done.
And then, inevitably, inescapably, without fail, a moment would arrive and the volunteer broke again, but in a brand-new, more profound way than he had before. He didn’t just give in, he succumbed, he surrendered, he submitted. It was always a perfect, exquisite moment: physical, mental, no doubt partly sexual, perhaps spiritual, if you believe in that stuff. I looked into the volunteer’s eyes and I could see that he was simultaneously there and not there. It had happened. He was ready. He had reached the place where he had always been destined to arrive. He understood. He knew in every cell of his body. He was, you might say, enlightened. I’d done what I set out to do. Then I administered an injection, and the volunteer passed out, not for the first time, and when consciousness returned I was gone. He would never see me again.
As the volunteer stirred back to life, he was no longer bound, naked, wet, and the rest, certainly in no concrete bunker. He was traveling fast in an unmarked SUV with a couple of other men he’d never seen before—not friends, not colleagues, but recognizably members of his own tribe. They were taking him home. There would be no debriefing, no discussion. If the volunteer tried to talk to the men in the vehicle about what had happened, they’d ignore him. The men would behave as though nothing had happened, because in several important senses nothing really had.
Am I making this sound a lot more casual than it was? Perhaps. It was certainly hard work for me, both physically and emotionally, and it wasn’t the kind of job you could leave behind at the end of the shift when you went home to your wife, though god knows I tried to. On the other hand, in some respects it was a job like any other, with a job description, a salary, terms and conditions, and, ultimately in my case, when I quit because I couldn’t stand it any longer, a less than generous golden handshake. Banal stuff for sure.
And yet the satisfactions were beyond anything most people will ever know in their work. The volunteers were all good men, and they became even better with my help. I made them bigger, stronger, wiser versions of themselves. Most of them, anyway. I never doubted there would be failures. And one thing of which I was absolutely certain, had known right from the very beginning: sooner or later the failures would come back to haunt me.
THREE
It seems very long ago that I was employed by the Team, though we know that time is elastic, and in reality it was no time at all. It was the kind of work that anybody would grow weary of sooner or later, the kind of work a man might choose to put behind him and try to forget, if he had any choice. I have no data on the Team’s staff turnover, but common sense suggests this was not a career that encouraged a lifetime of service. Certainly my immediate superior, the person I reported to, Christine Vargas, didn’t seem remotely surprised when I told her I was quitting. She remained as calm, as quiet, as steely as ever.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I think I might do some walking.”
It was a reasonable enough reply. I’d always been a walker, right from when I was a kid. I didn’t like sports—I didn’t care about competition—but I could walk forever. Sometimes I walked with my dad; sometimes I walked alone. Sometimes I walked in order to get places; sometimes I walked for the hell of it. When I grew up, when I became a serious person, I sometimes walked very seriously, as a hiker, a trekker. Sometimes I took two- or three-day solo hikes into and out of the wilderness. Sometimes I walked coastal paths and mountain trails; sometimes I was an urban explorer. But sometimes there was nothing very serious about it at all: I just strolled or sauntered or meandered. Pretty much any kind of walking was fine by me.
