Hanging upside down on a length of rope tied to a bough, I awoke and saw a large figure stumbling towards me.
"You ain't dead yet," he mumbled to me, or maybe he was conversing with himself, couldn't tell initially, he talked into his chest. In any event, he stopped a couple of paces short and bobbed his head up and down, evidently examining the dangling body.
"You don't remember much do you?" he asked. After he finished slurring his words, I hurled, suffering from the inverted perspective; it certainly was not a commentary about my nameless interlocutor. As I can attest to, there is nothing quite as vile as vomiting while dangling upside down from a tree, especially if one is relatively sober. The rush of acid burns doubly when turned on one's head. And the smell! The smell was rank, inescapable and utterly unbearable. No, he was right. I didn't remember anything. I couldn't recall the night before. I couldn't recall the poisons I ingested, if any at all. And I didn't know how I ended up there.
"Boy, did you have quite a night," the nameless man said, evidently content to stand by and provide a running commentary, which, in retrospect, I was grateful for.
I tried to wipe the residue from my mouth, which proved to be a trying task. Sapped of strength and any semblance of dexterity, my right arm was foreign to me. It collided repeatedly with my chest, rapped my nose bloody, before finding its way to my mouth. Upon completing the rather absurd sanitary task, I asked him who he was.
"The town drunk and its only philosopher," he replied. I rolled my eyes in response.
"A philosopher, huh? I guess I should not ask you to cut me down."
"Why not?" he asked.
"Well, because you will ask why or why not until both of us are maggot food."
"That's rather parochial, but I don't judge people or justify what I do. I just do what's expected of me," he said, taking another swig from his paper bag. He offered me a sip; I declined. He took a few steps back and looked intently at the tree.
"A sturdy twig from the looks of it," he said, still giving no indication whether he was going to help me get down, nor was I going to ask; I was quite content to dangle from that uncommon view, at least for the meantime. With blood finally flowing to my skull, I was in a rather contemplative mood.
"Are you from the camp or the town?" he asked.
"The camp, but I think I ventured into town for the night," I replied, unsure whether that was the truth, or merely an anachronistic recollection about some other night on the town, or simply of a night that I had merely heard about. In any event, the drunken philosopher was not convinced.
"You're not from the camp," he said nonchalantly. "You ended up in the camp and couldn't find your way home."
"No, no, no, I'm from the camp. That is where I'm stationed," I replied sharply, slightly annoyed by the implication that he knew better than me about where I was from.
"Were you born in the camp?" he asked.
"Of course not!" I provided a loud rebut, growing further agitated by his questioning.
"Hmm. Hmm. Hmm." He continued in this manner for sometime, pacing back and forth, before walking right up to me.
"So you are not from the camp then now are you?"
"Well, if you want to get technical about it, I am from my mother's womb. Oh, but wait, that's not completely accurate either. I'm from my father's gonads as well. Oh wait, wait, I have it, I'm from my father's gonads, by way of my grandmother's cunt and grandpappy's come. I could go on you know." After I finished my rant, the drunken philosopher strategically positioned himself so that his crotch obscured my line of sight. He stood there a long while, without word or response. It may have been a minute or ten or twenty of silence. I was naturally concerned about my doubly precarious position - vomit below and a crotch in my face. And, I could not see his face. Looking up, I only caught the bottom of his prominent chin; and one can't read a chin. At last, he broke the silence.
"What is a camp?" he asked.
"See, this is what I mean about you philosophers; always asking questions when the answer is right in front of you", I said, motioning behind me to where I thought the camp was.
"Not the camp, a camp, what is a camp?" he asked again, growing more obtuse with every passing word. However, his question barely registered, as my mind wandered elsewhere. The stench of the man's crotch inexplicably aroused thoughts about death, that irrevocable fate of man. The stream of blood flowing from my nose halted; a development that provided me great comfort.
Assured that I wouldn't die of a bloody nose, I imagined death in all its forms, or at least the forms I could think up; a bayonet blade plunged into the throat; a bullet to the head; sleep without awakening; to die of exhaustion after a night of lovemaking; freefalling to the bottom of a canyon; trampled to death by a pack of buffalo, or bulls, or cows, or obese women; setting oneself on fire; incineration; starvation; bodies branded for annihilation; hangman's noose; executioner's axe; Judgment by the invisible hand; atrophy; entropy; an imploding sun; horsemen on the run; and so on and so forth. We all had to go sometime, or so they say; at least I didn't bleed to death dangled in front of a strange man's pungent crotch.
"A camp," I finally responded,"is a series of barracks, a mess hall or two, a shooting range, officer's quarters, and sometimes a gymnasium; all of it surrounded by a giant fence and secured by men with guns eager to shoot." He laughed at my response. I thought he, like any philosopher, dealt in abstraction and metaphysics, and was probably mortified by such a cursory account of surface phenomenon. Nevertheless, he appeared to be pleasantly amused by the description.
"Well, that's one answer," he said while pacing back and forth, at last removing his crotch from my face.
"The deciding factor, of course," he said,"is the possibility of being shot if one leaves without authorization. Is that what defines a camp? Being shot or reprimanded for acting contrary to authority?"
"I guess," I replied, now concerned about whether I exceeded my authorized leave. I waded through my shirt pocket and found the slip, but since I had no clue about the day or the time; the discovery provided me little comfort.
"Yes," I continued, "I'm free, namely not getting shot or disciplined, if I obey." The hulking man let out a hearty laugh.
"The outsider," he began again, "is lead into the camp, for training, for rectification, for quarantine, for indeterminate detainment, or for his ultimate demise; and for him, freedom is simply the other side of the fence."
"Obedience," he continued, "is merely done for the sake of survival." He turned around, looked up at the rope wrapped around the bough, and smirked. "Freedom always comes with risk," he said, "the possibility of failure or punishment or further incarceration comes with the possibility of freedom. Let me ask you: is this inverted noose your idea of freedom?"
I noticed that I had assimilated to my inverted perspective, and, alas, it lost its novelty.
"No, it was rather interesting at first, but now it's pretty inane."
"So you want me to slice you down?"
"Sure, but make sure I don't fall face first into my own vomit."
"I can't assure you of that," he replied, "its a risk you have to take."
"Alright, I want down anyways."
He disappeared from my sight. I looked around and caught him climbing up the tree. He navigated along the bough, pulled out his pocketknife, and, as he worked on the rope, I readied myself for the fall. He sliced through the rope and I started my descent, managing to avoid the vomit, and landing relatively unscathed on my side.
"Thank you!" I shouted, astonished by how ecstatic I felt about my release. He nodded to recognize my voice. Surprisingly, I got to my feet with relative ease in spite of earglier struggles with my arm. He jumped down from the tree and turned to walk towards town.
"Where are you heading to?" I asked.
"Back to work," he said.
"Really?"
"Yes, they need to see the town drunk living in abject squalor to confirm their place in society."
"And the philosopher?"
"Well, he's never been needed; it just happens that only the town drunk has the lucidity to philosophize. He's the marginal character, the rambling jester, paraded out as a comedic spectacle, for the rest to consume or ignore. The beauty is that both roles come with the same set of demands; hence, they are one in the same."
I smiled and waved goodbye, until I realized I needed to figure out the date and time.
"Wait, wait, I shouted to him, I need to head into town as well."
"Heading home?" he asked in a rather sardonic tone.
"No, I have to figure out the date and time."
"For what reason?" I pulled out my slip, only to realize that the information on it was utterly illegible. He looked over at the slip, held up by my trembling hands.
"Time, evidently, has no measure without the sovereign Word," he said.
I no longer was in a mood for his abstractions.
-----
I remember a young recruit, named Jeb or Jess; the name is rather extraneous to the story, so let's say he was named Jim. Jim tried to steal into town one night to visit his girl visiting from a town over. He navigated through an underground network of tunnels, built up over the years by men seeking clandestine nights in town, and all seemingly went as planned. That was until he unwittingly took a wrong turn. Rather than ending up in the utility shed outside the walls of the camp, safely obscured from the sightlines of the eager watchmen, he popped through the floorboards of the Commanding Officer's quarters, uh, let's say he was named Yanic, who had company at the time.
CO Yanic was a rather domineering and tough public figure. He would openly beat recruits he deemed disobedient or incompotent with his trusty metre stick. The violations would range from a loose shoelace to an untimely chuckle. But usually he didn't need particular provocations to whip out the stick.
"Man is the measure of all things," he would recite. "You boys don't measure up!" The distant sound of a tapping metre stick haunted the barracks long after he returned to his quarters. Well, returning to Jess', I mean, Jim's story, the details are rather unclear. First, we couldn't figure out why in the world there was a tunnel leading to the CO's quarters. If one's aim is to make it out of the camp, a tunnel leading to the CO's quarters is a rather cruel, and in Jim's case, a fatal joke. Second, we had no definitive account of what went on in the room that night, before and after Jim made his unexpected appearance. There were several accounts.
One, Yanic had a female companion, usually a particularly fetching prostitute imported from the town named Lorelai, or was its Lori? Anyways, just as Yanic gathered momentum, getting a lather going, as the saying goes, the jarring sound and sight of Jim popping through the floor made him lose his cool and he climaxed prematurely into Lori's experienced orifice. The prostitute, as the story goes, giggled at the officer's predicament, providing an unfavourable comparison of Yanic to a twelve-year-old virgin. Yanic, needless to say, was incensed, pulled out his metre stick, and beat Lori beyond all recognition, shattering several in the process, or, so the story goes. Jim's fate was considerably more drawn out and, well, cannot be delved into without sorting through some of the other accounts.
Another account purported Jim had found himself alone in the room with Lorelai. Well, the name itself probably tells the story. He was lured to bed by the alluring siren-whore, apparently abandoning all rational faculties - if he had them, he would have realized that CO Yanic would appear at any moment. And, of course, Yanic appeared on the scene readied to enjoy Lorelai's company, only to see a lowly recruit ravishing her rather expertly on his bed. Exhausted from his trip through the tunnels and the carnal encounter, Jim could not fight off Yanic, who easily subdued and violated him with his metre stick.
The official story held that Jim attempted to strangle the CO in his sleep only to be subdued by Yanic, who won a struggle with Jim. There was no attempt at explaining why Jim ended up in Yanic's room or why there were murderous intentions. They needed justification, no matter how erroenous or irrational, for the punishment to be meted out in private darkness. In any event, all we knew was that Jim was never to be seen again after his cruel turn in the tunnels. Not one of us in the camp could find out what happened to Jim; we could only imagine the reprimand or executions soon to be validated in order to kill innocents - innocents in the particular sense, not the universal.
