Chapter 3: Peter Harmon

 

(Cont.)

The photograph changed things.

Not visibly. Arthur went to work. He spoke his corrections. He screamed
during the Two Minutes Hate. He ate his meals and walked his routes and
lay in his bed at night while the telescreen hummed its eternal
surveillance.

But inside, something had shifted. The photograph was proof---not of
anything specific, but of the possibility of proof. Somewhere, there
were records that had not been destroyed. Somewhere, there were
fragments of the past that had survived the Party's machinery of
forgetting.

And there were people like Peter. People who found these fragments.
People who kept them. People who passed them on.

Arthur began to notice others.

Not many. Perhaps one in a hundred, one in a thousand. But they were
there---people whose eyes held that same quality of wakefulness, whose
faces performed the required expressions just a moment too late, whose
bodies carried a tension that suggested something coiled inside,
waiting.

He did not approach them. He did not try to communicate. The risk was
too great, and he had Peter, and Peter was enough.

But he noticed them. And noticing them changed the shape of the world.

The Party was vast. The Party was powerful. The Party controlled the
past and the present and the future. But the Party was also incomplete.
The Party had cracks, and in the cracks, things survived.

Arthur carried the photograph next to the dial. Two small secrets,
pressing against his leg. Two small proofs that the world was not as
solid as it appeared.

#

They talked about the Brotherhood once. Only once.

The word itself was dangerous---a name that could not be spoken, a
concept that existed only in rumor and terror. The Brotherhood was
Goldstein's organization, the secret network of traitors who worked to
undermine the Party from within. No one knew if it was real. That was
the horror of it---and the hope.

"Do you think---" Arthur began, in the fourth-floor lavatory.

Peter cut him off with a sharp gesture. "Don't."

"But if there were others---"

"There are always others." Peter's voice was barely audible, his lips
hardly moving. "That's not the same as organization. That's not the
same as resistance. That's just... not surrendering entirely."

The door opened. They separated. The conversation was never continued.

But Arthur thought about it at night, lying in his bed, the dial and the
photograph pressing against his skin. Not surrendering entirely. Was
that resistance? Was that enough?

He did not know.

#

The friendship---if it could be called that---continued for two years.

Arthur learned Peter's history in pieces, in whispered fragments during
their brief meetings. Peter had been born in a provincial town that no
longer existed on any map---"They renamed it," he said once, his voice
flat, "after they renamed everything else." His parents had
disappeared when he was eleven; he came home from school one afternoon
and the flat was empty, the furniture still there but the people gone,
as if they had simply evaporated. He had a sister once. He did not speak
of what had happened to her, but his hand went to his pocket when Arthur
asked, touching whatever he kept there, and his face went still in a way
that answered the question without words.

Peter learned Arthur's history in turn. The orphanage with its rows of
identical beds. The youth organizations with their marching songs and
their denunciations. The years of correct behavior and proper attitudes
and the slow, terrible awakening that had begun with a shoe and a
chocolate ration.

They did not speak of what they meant to each other. The word for it was
too dangerous to use, even in the privacy of their own minds. But Arthur
knew that if the Thought Police ever came for Peter, he would feel it in
his body like a wound. He knew that Peter's absence would leave a hole
in the world that nothing could fill.

And he knew that the Party, if it ever learned this, would know exactly
how to break him.

#

The last conversation happened on a Tuesday in April.

The fourth-floor lavatory. The usual time. Peter was already there when
Arthur arrived, standing at the basin, his face pale. The light buzzed
overhead. The tap dripped. Peter's hands gripped the edge of the basin
as though he needed it to hold himself upright.

"They're watching me," Peter said.

Arthur's fingers went cold. "How do you know?"

"The routing. My corrections are being checked. Someone is reading
everything I process before it goes to the memory hole."

"That could be routine---"

"It's not routine." Peter's voice was flat. "I've been here
fifteen years. I know what routine looks like. This is different."

Arthur did not know what to say. His hand went to his pocket, to the
dial, to the photograph that Peter had given him.

"You should destroy that," Peter said, watching his hand move. "If
they come for me, they might come for you."

"I won't---"

"You will." Peter's eyes were steady. "When they come, you will do
whatever you have to do. That's not betrayal. That's survival. I would
do the same."

"Peter---"

"Listen to me." Peter stepped closer, his voice dropping to the
faintest whisper. "Whatever happens, remember this: the photograph is
real. The street existed. The buildings were whole. People smiled.
That's not a lie, and it's not a dream, and they can't take it away
from you no matter what they do. The past existed. The past was
different. That's the only thing that matters."

The door opened. A clerk entered. Peter turned on the water, rinsed his
hands, dried them.

"Same time tomorrow," he said as he passed.

But tomorrow, Peter's desk was empty.

#

Arthur did not ask what had happened. Asking invited questions about why
you wanted to know, and questions about interest could become questions
about association, and questions about association led to rooms in the
Ministry of Love where the lights never went out.

He saw the empty desk. He saw the speakwrite being disconnected, the
chair removed, the pneumatic tube capped. He watched a young man take
Peter's place the following week---eager, blank-faced, correct.

Peter Harmon had existed. Now Peter Harmon did not exist.

Arthur went to the fourth-floor lavatory at 10:15 the next morning, and
the morning after that, and the morning after that. Each time, the room
was empty. Each time, he stood at the basin and looked at his own face
in the mirror---pale, lined, the face of a man who had lost something he
could not name.

The photograph was in his pocket. The dial was in his pocket. Two
secrets, pressing against his leg, reminding him of what he had and what
he had lost.

Peter was gone. The whispered conversations, the careful glances, the
shared understanding---all of it, vanished into the same hole that
swallowed everything the Party wanted forgotten.

But Arthur remembered.

He remembered Peter's walk---the slight hitch, the distinctive rhythm.
He remembered the mole on Peter's cheek, the way Peter held his pencil,
the tired eyes that had seen too much.

He remembered the photograph. London, 1952. A clean street. Whole
buildings. People smiling.

The Party could take Peter. The Party could erase Peter from every
record, every memory, every official history. But the Party could not
reach into Arthur's skull and remove the image of Peter's face.

Not yet.

Arthur returned to his desk. He activated his speakwrite. He spoke his
corrections in the flat voice the Ministry expected.

And in his pocket, the dial and the photograph pressed against his
leg---two small weights, two small secrets, two small pieces of a world
the Party had not quite managed to destroy.