Chapter 2: The Speakwrite

(Cont.)

The next day, Tillotson's desk was empty.

Arthur noticed it when he arrived at the Records Department---the
cubicle three rows to his left, which had contained Tillotson and
Tillotson's speakwrite and Tillotson's carefully arranged stacks of
correction slips, was now bare. The speakwrite had been removed. The
chair had been removed. Even the pneumatic tube terminal had been
disconnected, leaving only a capped hole in the wall where the brass
fitting had been. The desk surface had been wiped clean. There was no
evidence that anyone had ever worked there.

Arthur walked to his own desk and sat down. He activated his
speakwrite---still irregular, still fluctuating without the
regulator---and began his first correction of the day.

No one mentioned Tillotson.

The morning passed. Clerks came and went. The telescreen read
statistics. The Two Minutes Hate arrived on schedule---Arthur screamed
with the others, threw his fist in the air, felt the familiar surge that
emptied him out---and then it was over, and work resumed, and the
screaming was forgotten as if it had never happened.

Tillotson's cubicle remained empty.

Arthur had worked three cubicles away from Tillotson for four years. He
knew Tillotson's face---thin, anxious, with a nervous habit of touching
his collar as though checking that his neck was still there. He knew
Tillotson's voice---high and precise, the voice of a man who worried
about being misunderstood. He knew that Tillotson took his lunch break
at 12:30 exactly, that Tillotson preferred the synthetic coffee to the
synthetic tea, that Tillotson had once made a small joke about the
weather and then looked terrified for the rest of the day, as though
waiting for the Thought Police to materialize from the walls.

He did not know Tillotson's first name. He had never asked. Asking
invited intimacy, and intimacy could be used against you.

By midday, the empty cubicle had acquired a new occupant---a young woman
Arthur had never seen before, with the blank, eager face of someone
recently assigned to the Ministry. She activated her speakwrite and
began working with the careful precision of a person who had not yet
learned to cut corners, who still believed that the work mattered in
itself rather than as a performance of proper devotion.

No one introduced her. No one explained where she had come from or what
had happened to the person whose desk she now occupied. She simply
appeared, as though she had always been there.

Arthur ate his lunch in the canteen and did not think about Tillotson.
He returned to his desk and spoke his corrections into the
malfunctioning speakwrite, his voice adapting to the machine's
irregular rhythm. He walked home through the cold evening streets, the
dial in his pocket.

That night, lying in his narrow bed, he tried to remember Tillotson's
face.

The features were already blurring. The thin face, the anxious
eyes---but had the eyes been brown or gray? Had the collar Tillotson
touched been buttoned or open? The details were slipping away, replaced
by a vague impression, a shape without substance.

In a week, Arthur would not remember Tillotson at all. In a month, he
would not remember that there had been someone to forget.

This was how it worked. People vanished, and the vanishing was absorbed,
and life continued. The Party did not announce arrests. The Party did
not explain disappearances. The Party simply rearranged the furniture
and waited for memory to fade.

Tillotson had existed. Now Tillotson did not exist. The difference
between those two states was smaller than it should have been.

Arthur lay in the darkness and touched the dial in his pocket. The metal
was cold now, room temperature, no longer warmed by the machine or his
hand. A small thing. A broken thing.

But it was still there. It had not vanished. It had not been rearranged
or forgotten or absorbed.

The dial existed, and Arthur knew it existed, and that knowledge was his
alone.

#

A week passed. Then two.

Arthur's productivity remained below quota. The speakwrite's irregular
rhythm forced adaptations that cost time---pauses where there should
have been flow, corrections where there should have been smooth
transcription. His daily reports showed the numbers honestly: eighteen
rectifications, nineteen, seventeen. Never the twenty-two that had been
his standard before the dial came loose.

No one mentioned it. No one called him into an office or asked for an
explanation. The system absorbed his reduced output as it absorbed
everything else---a small variation in the pattern, noticed and filed
and forgotten.

But Arthur noticed that he was being noticed.

It was nothing concrete. A glance from a supervisor that lasted a moment
too long. A slight change in the routing of his correction slips---more
routine work, fewer complex cases. The young woman who had replaced
Tillotson had begun working on the kind of historical adjustments that
Arthur had once handled, the sensitive rectifications that required
careful judgment.

He was being observed. Evaluated. Measured against a standard he was no
longer meeting.

His thumb found the dial through the fabric of his pocket, a habit that
had formed over the two weeks---pressing against the worn grooves,
confirming that it was still there. The gesture was not visible to the
telescreen. His hand went to his pocket naturally, the movement hidden
by the angle of his body, by the edge of his desk.

But he knew he was doing it. And the knowing made him careful.

Careful was dangerous. Careful meant you had something to hide. Careful
meant you were thinking about what the telescreen could see and what it
couldn't, and that kind of thinking was itself suspicious.

Arthur forced himself to stop touching the dial. He kept his hands on
his desk, visible, proper. He spoke his corrections in the flat voice
the Ministry expected and did not let his rhythm falter.

But the dial was there. The dial was always there.

And somewhere in the Ministry, someone was watching.

#

The Thought Police came on a Tuesday.

Not for Arthur. For a clerk named Henderson in the Historical Archives
section, a large, sweating man who had worked in the Ministry for twenty
years and who had, it was announced, been harboring thought-criminal
tendencies that his own wife had patriotically reported.

Arthur was in the corridor when they brought Henderson out. Two men in
the black uniforms of the Thought Police, their faces expressionless,
their hands on Henderson's arms. Henderson was not struggling. His face
had the slack, stunned look of a man who has just learned that the
ground beneath his feet is not solid.

"Thoughtcrime," someone whispered behind Arthur. "His wife heard him
talking in his sleep."

Arthur did not turn to see who had spoken. He watched Henderson being
led away---down the corridor, through the double doors, into the lift
that would take him down to the vans that waited in the Ministry's
basement. Henderson's feet shuffled on the polished floor. His head
hung forward. His shoulders had already begun to curve inward, as though
his body was trying to make itself smaller.

Henderson did not look back. His eyes were fixed ahead, focused on
nothing, already beginning the process of disappearing.

The corridor emptied. People returned to their desks. The telescreen
continued its program---a documentary about the textile factories, the
happy workers fulfilling their quotas, the Party's benevolence
providing for all.

Arthur walked to his cubicle. He sat down at his speakwrite. He
activated the machine and waited for the hum that meant it was ready.

The dial pressed against his leg.

Henderson had seemed so ordinary. A large man who sweated too much, who
talked too loudly, who had never expressed a thought more complex than
enthusiasm for Big Brother. His wife had heard him talking in his sleep.
His own thoughts had betrayed him while he slept, escaping through his
unconscious lips.

What did Arthur think about while he slept? What words might escape his
lips in the darkness, when his conscious mind was not there to guard
them?

He had no wife. He had no family at all---the Party had seen to that,
moving him from dormitory to dormitory as a child, ensuring that no
attachments formed, no loyalties developed outside the greater loyalty
to Big Brother. There was no one to listen to him sleep. No one to
report the words that might come unbidden.

But the telescreen was always listening. The walls were thin. The
neighbors were as desperate as everyone else to prove their loyalty.

Arthur spoke his first correction of the day into the grille. His voice
was steady. His face was calm.

The speakwrite hummed and clicked, transcribing his words, recording his
voice, documenting another day in the life of a man who had nothing to
hide.

#

That night, Arthur took the dial from his pocket and held it in his
palm.

The telescreen murmured its evening program. Arthur sat with his back to
it, his body hiding his hands, the dial resting against his skin. The
metal was cool. The grooves pressed into his palm.

He should throw it away. Drop it in the rubbish, or the memory hole at
work, or simply leave it on the street for someone else to find. The
dial was evidence of nothing---a broken component, valueless,
meaningless---but its presence in his pocket had become a weight he
carried everywhere.

Henderson had talked in his sleep. His own words had betrayed him. And
now Henderson was in the Ministry of Love, learning what happened to
people whose minds were not sufficiently controlled.

Arthur closed his hand around the dial. The metal pressed into his
palm---hard, real, present.

He should throw it away. He knew he should throw it away.

But he didn't.

The dial went back in his pocket, and Arthur went to bed, and he lay in
the darkness and listened to the telescreen's low hum and wondered what
words escaped him while he slept, and whether anyone was listening, and
whether those words would be the words that destroyed him.

A colleague who had vanished. A fat man being led away by men in black
uniforms. A broken piece of metal that he could not bring himself to
discard.

Arthur lay in the darkness. The dial pressed against his thigh.

His.

***