ROWAN-3
I was nervous. Afternoon had arrived, and for the third straight day, neither Dr. Mulgar or Dr. Bowusuvi, nor the Fatheads had come. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might not come back at all; the source of my unease was that I thought one or the other of them had to show up pretty soon, and, well, Romulus was absorbed with the Grail, and even though he had proven time and time again that his keen senses and remarkable powers of observation were unaffected by even an intense scrutiny of the Grail, it still seemed to me that with his attention divided he had to be unlikely to hear someone approaching the house—and if any of them, particularly Dr. Bowusuvi, were to see him perusing the Grail, well, I didn’t want to find out would happen.
Dr. Bowusuvi was an old man, or at least he seemed so to me. He was all wrinkles, like a birch-bark colored raisin, his face sunken, his hair gray and thinning, his eyes little black beads. An aura of grayness emanated from him: He wore a lab coat always—I never saw him not wearing a lab coat—which was white, but which seemed gray on him, not a vibrant slate- or silver- or flint gray either, but gray more in a seeming dirty colorlessness. He may not in fact have been all that old. Many years later, he looked the same age. It’s possible he was one of those soul-less individuals who never possess the vitality of being to seem young, but who never care about anybody, and so never age. His voice was deep, or at least so flat as to seem deep, and cold; but he seldom spoke to me except to tell me to stand up, turn around, stick my arm out, do this, or do that. He didn’t call me Romulus, as Dr. Mulgar did, except in the presence of Dr. Mulgar; alone with me, he referred to me as “Number Six,” if anything.
He came to the house every day or two—that he’d come yesterday wasn’t evidence that he wouldn’t come today, and yet if he hadn’t come yesterday, he might not come today, either—and any day that he came, the time of day of his arrival was unpredictable as well, it could be morning, afternoon, evening, or any time in between. While at the house, he would examine the talking machine and the wire machine, and then, or sometimes before he examined the machines, he’d examine me, poking and prodding various parts of my body with an assortment of instruments that he produced from the depths of his coat pockets silently and with an astoundingly trivial amount of muscular movement, as if he were conjuring them, or commanding them to his vein-blue hands with delicate, almost unnoticeable twitches or flexions of his fingers. Sometimes he instructed me to swallow pills (which he produced as magically from his pockets as he did his plethora of instruments), other times he had me jump up and down, flap my arms about, or execute some other physical task, after which he would poke and prod me again.
If my response to any of his commands was slow or hesitant, he touched me under my right eye with a small cylindrical metal object that when he placed there felt as if he had hammered a long, spiked, rotating, vibrating needle into my head with a mallet. I could feel it, or imagined that I could feel it, entering under my eye, rotating in my brain with a strafing buzz, and sticking out of my skull somewhere on the left half of the back of my head. This “obedience encouragement,” as he called it, usually only lasted a second or two, though sometimes he would lengthen the application: Slow reactions to his commands got a mere second or two, a smile or a laugh got two or three seconds, a smart remark got me four or five, and anything that could be construed as disobedience seven or eight.
A second or two woke me up, if you will, but wasn’t much worse than getting poked with a tack or needle; but when it lasted more than a couple of seconds, this “eye thing,” as I thought of it, was more painful than anything I’ve experienced since, including being burned and being tortured. But the pain didn’t linger long. For an application of three or four seconds, I’d feel for a few minutes as if I were going to die, that I had to die, but then I’d be fine.
Once before, Dr. Bowusuvi had arrived while Romulus and I were looking at the Grail together, in a profound perusal of trees it was, Romulus informing me of the Jaji words for many of them, and sharing information about them—where they grew, what other trees and plants thrived in their vicinity, the taste of the fruit they bore, whether their leaves changed color in Oliaza, Valakial, or Thronku, and what color they most often turned—that he had gleaned from living in the forest, and that wasn’t always, or even often, provided by the Grail.
When after looking for and not finding me in the main room or in my bedroom, Dr. Bowusuvi walked into the gray room and found me reaching into Romulus’ cage to point at something on the Grail, he, as Romulus later put it, “did not react in a manner consistent with personhood.” (I should mention that it was Romulus’ habit to call his own people, the Jaji, “humans” and to group Jaji and humans together as “people” or “persons.”)
We stopped talking right before Dr. Bowusuvi entered, in anticipation of his arrival—not because we feared reprisal, but just because he was an adult and we were kids, and that’s what kids do when adults enter the room, they stop talking. It was my habit, as well, to be silent in Dr. Bowusuvi’s presence unless he asked me to speak.
He didn’t look surprised at what, to him, had to be a surprising state of affairs, what with this naked befouled being he considered an animal bent forward in the posture of a scholar studying some abstract text; but he paused for a long second, as if collecting himself, then looked impassively at Romulus studying the Grail, and said to me in a tone that might have had a tinge of disgust in it, “Retrieve your learning device from your pet.”
I was unsure whether or not he realized we had been talking. Based on his reaction, I thought not; if he considered Romulus my pet, which I knew from the Grail was an animal kept for pleasure or companionship, then there was no way he could believe that we had been communicating, because animals couldn’t talk. Yet, it seemed to me that what we’d been doing had to have been quite obvious, and that he had to know. Of course, since I knew what we’d been doing, and knew that we could communicate, my perception wasn’t hindered by a belief that what had happened couldn’t happen—but I wasn’t thinking of that, then, I was trying to determine in a sort of frantic, wordless, visceral way, what the disgust in his voice meant, why it was there, and how how much he knew might affect the actualization of his disgust.
Romulus, sensing trouble, handed the device to me without question, dispute, or delay. Ominously, the old man departed without putting me through any kind of test or exercise. I loitered in the main room, sensing from the break in routine that there was going to be more to this episode; and indeed Dr. Bowusuvi returned perhaps forty-five minutes later and without a word administered the eye thing on me for about fifteen seconds. Laughably, as it was happening, I remember thinking that at least there would be no probing or prodding today. I was wrong about that.
I was fairly certain that time that I was going to die: after the application, I was so dizzy that I couldn’t stand up without leaning against the wall, and was so nauseated that I had to squeeze my eyes shut and press my cheek against the cool plaster of the wall to keep from losing consciousness. My legs felt heavy and weak, my eyes were on fire, and my head felt as if it had a hole in it from under the eye through the brain, and out the parietal bone. I managed somehow to get to my bed, though, and after lying there with my head in my arms for thirty or forty minutes, maybe an hour, the pain and nausea subsided enough for me to fall asleep, and after sleeping a couple of hours, while a sort of wobble still pervaded my body, I was alive enough.
Thereafter, however, I was always fidgety when Romulus studied the Grail, tense, on the alert for any sound of approach, which of course I couldn’t hear, and which I was dependent upon Romulus to perceive, he who seemed too preoccupied to perceive anything—and this anxiety became more pronounced when it had been awhile since anyone, especially Dr. Bowusuvi, had visited.
And today, it had been two days since anyone had come, so I was beside myself with nervousness. Romulus was unconcerned, however, as always. He told me not to worry, that if anyone approached the house, he’d hear them and would then return the “device” to me with the “utmost alacrity.” (He was ever putting together combinations of synonyms he found in the Grail dictionary; in the following hours, he found moments to say that if need arose he would return the device with the “greatest promptness,” “unlimited eagerness,” and “complete zeal.”) My nervousness was unassuaged however, and all morning I couldn’t focus on anything; I did nothing except pace back and forth in the foul miasma of the gray room, or sit near Romulus’ cage, fidgeting, as he, either with obliviousness to or unconcern about my feelings, studied on, undeterred.
I had asked Mind early in the morning when Dr. Mulgar’s and Dr. Bowusuvi’s next visits were going to be, and in fact had had him show me what those gentlemen, as Mind was wont to call them, had been doing yesterday; and while this sleuthing had been, arguably, of some little help in determining when to expect them, the precision of the questions I would have to ask Mind to narrow down if, and if so, exactly when, they were going to come today daunted me. I had an innate sense that nervousness eradicates patience, and that asking Mind either, “Show me this room in one minute,” “Show me this room in two minutes,” etc., or “Show me Dr. Bowusuvi in one minute,” “Show me Dr. Bowusuvi in two minutes,” etc., until I knew exactly how many minutes it was going to be until he showed up would simply frustrate me further.
Early in the afternoon, as I sat on the ground near Romulus’ cage, wiping my lunch bowl of gruel clean, and sucking the last bits of flavor from my fingers, my tension was at last relieved. Romulus indicated (by saying, “Someone is approaching”) that someone was coming, and returned the device to me through the bars of his cage with, indeed, the utmost alacrity, whereupon I ran with it into the main room, sat down on the brown couch pretending to study, and had twenty seconds still to wait before the sounds of the unlatching of the front door began, some moments after which Dr. Bowusuvi entered in all his grimness.
The distinctions of the expressions of his emotion were pretty subtle. His anger was the dripping of ice from his colorless eyes, for instance, not a curse, or even a gritting of his teeth; his satisfaction was the slightest raise of his eyebrows, his dissatisfaction the slightest narrowing of his eyes. So, when on his way across the main room, from the front door to the couch, where I sat waiting in perfect obedience for him to put me through the usual paces, his thin nostrils dilated as if in shocked response to the horrible pervasion of Romulus’ foulness, and he turned an eye on the passageway to the gray room, I knew he was disgusted. His look, no more than a glance, really, was expressionless, but the mere turn of his head was an indication of his revulsion.
His disgust, of course, wasn’t in this case directed at me, but it made me nervous nevertheless. He would be, I thought, less patient with me, more prone to become dissatisfied with the promptness or accuracy of my responses to his commands. If Dr. Mulgar had asked me to do the same things as Dr. Bowusuvi asked, which amounted, essentially, to putting my arm out, turning my head, looking up, looking down, bending over, sitting down, pumping my arms, squatting, or standing still while he attached any of several instruments to my body, I would have executed what he asked of me without the slightest bit of difficulty, but with Dr. Bowusuvi, I was always tense. No matter how many times he came, the dread shade of his actual presence far outweighed the memory of it, and as such I felt stiff, uncoordinated, and jittery whenever he was there, which of course made a smooth execution of his commands more difficult. And today, with him already disgusted, I was doubly nervous: his beady, demonic eyes seemed to me to be ready to catch me in any moment of even slight disobedience.
Yet, he seemed satisfied with me as I responded to him with, I thought, clumsy imprecision; and while we were doing our little call-and-respond, the Fatheads arrived. This was a new thing: Dr. Bowusuvi and the Fatheads had never been there at the same time. Dr. Mulgar and the Fatheads had arrived at the same time once, on which occasion Dr. Mulgar had treated them with an authoritarian friendliness; and Dr. Mulgar’s and Dr. Bowusuvi’s visits overlapped from time to time, on which occasions the two men talked together about me in a manner that seemed both stilted and formal. But the visits of Dr. Bowusuvi and the Fatheads had never overlapped. He now favored them with a slow inclination of his head and sliding of his eye, but said nothing. The third one, the newest of the bunch, nodded at him (a salutation that he ignored) but the other two didn’t even look at him as they headed straight for Romulus’ room carrying their usual buckets and bags.
Within moments I could hear the usual commotion. I knew what was going on: The Fatheads were the fellas who came in every day, or almost every day, to clean up. They scrubbed Romulus’ cage and emptied the trashcans in the kitchen and my bedroom, and every now and then re-stocked the kitchen cabinets with more boxes of gruel, or else changed the sheets on my bed or took away my dirty shirts and pants and returned the clothes, now clean, that they’d taken a few days before. That’s pretty much all they did, though they acted as if they were being driven like Narian slaves to the brink of physical collapse. It was my job to sweep the floors, wash any cups, plates, forks, or spoons that I used, and wipe down anything else in the house that got dusty or grimy.
At first, there were just two Fatheads, but to clean Romulus’ cage, they had to open it, and when they opened it, Romulus would try to dash out. The two of them would wrestle him to the ground, and it was the job of one of them to hold him down while the other one cleaned the cage. They were big-shouldered, big-torso’d guys, about twice the size of Romulus, but he would thrash and wriggle and bite and scratch with such desperate, indefatigable gusto that the guy cleaning the cage often had either to help, or spell, the guy holding him down. The two of them, thus, had to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning the cage, and both of them almost always walked away with a few bruises, scrapes, or scratches. And at some point, a third guy, big-torso’d and big-shouldered like the original duo, and like them, always dressed in white, started coming along with the others, and it was his sole job to help hold Romulus down.
I imagined that Dr. Bowusuvi must have really let them have it, in his quiet, staring way, when they told him they needed help handling the little Jaji, and this in all likelihood contributed to their hatred of him (of Romulus). And they did hate him, or so it seemed to me. After they had cleansed his cage and forced him back into it, they often came out of his room cursing and shaking their heads, and referring to him as an animal or a “filthy walnuthead!’ as I have recounted.
“Fatheads” was a term Romulus applied to them, perhaps in response to their calling him a “walnuthead,” and which I started using because it satisfied a certain impetus I had to strike out at them. It was in reference to the fact that they were young, muscular guys, strong and fit, yet with fleshy faces, a little puffy even, which made their heads seem big and fat. This characteristic wasn’t something that I noticed—I hadn’t seen enough people in my life to realize that it was unusual—but since I hated them, and “fathead” seemed derogatory, I gladly habituated myself to the designation.
And I did hate them just as much as they hated Romulus. I don’t know why. After the three of them had completed their business with Romulus, the third guy often sat beside me on the brown couch while the other two worked. He’d call me “Kiddo,” ask me questions such as “How’s it goin’?” or “How’s it hangin’?” and try to persuade me to do arithmetical calculations because he was amazed at how fast I could do them. It seemed to me that he was mocking me in some way. He might have been or might not, I don’t know, but it seemed to me, then, that he was. Other than this arguable, and small, antagonism all three of them pretty much ignored me. Yet I found them repugnant. I feared Dr. Bowusuvi because of the eye thing, but also just because he was a fearsome individual to a child; and I felt a certain tension with Dr. Mulgar because he expected so much from me, but I didn’t hate either of them. I hated the Fatheads, though, them and their fat heads.
Romulus didn’t hate them. He called them Fatheads in playful jest and would often smile to himself when he heard them arriving, as if looking forward to the coming duel. Then, when they actually entered his room, he’d smile at them, like a Zandolosian warrior confronting Narian invaders; but he never gave them a thought beyond when they were there. He never looked at them with the cold hatred with which he regarded Dr. Mulgar and Dr. Bowusuvi. He fought them only because he wanted to be free.
Anyway, as the sounds of commotion continued, Dr. Bowusuvi favored the passageway to Romulus’ room with a third turn of the head. This terrified me: as his mood deteriorated, I thought, the eye thing became a much greater possibility; but instead of becoming more exacting in his commands and unforgiving about my responses to them, he ushered me, with a subtle pointing gesture, to my bedroom, where he concluded his examinations with an occasional “Satisfactory,” before inspecting the machines, and removing from inside the big wire one some thin, clear cloth, which he examined, squinting.
At some point during the bedroom part of Dr. Bowusuvi’s examination of me, one of the Fathead guys came in with some clean shirts and pants, which he stuffed into the black chest of drawers, pretending as he performed his task not to notice Dr. Bowusuvi and me. Dr. Bowusuvi favored him with a fourth turn of his head, and although as he took the dirty clothes from the corner behind the room’s open door, he continued not to notice us, he seemed to feel the glare of his boss (it was my perception, at least, that Dr. Bowusuvi was his boss), and his pace increased to a near-hurry. His exit was sheepish, which greatly satisfied me, and in fact made me sort of like Dr. Bowusuvi for a moment or two. Still, as Dr. Bowusuvi’s look of dissatisfaction followed him like a black demonbird, I became more apprehensive that the old man’s ire would fall upon me; but I had naught to fear: the good doctor left soon thereafter.
Within minutes, it seemed like, of Dr. Bowusuvi leaving, which in due course was followed by the departure of the Fatheads, Dr. Mulgar arrived.