Clive_Barker_-_The_Body_Politic.pdf

The Body Politic

By Clive Barker

Whenever he woke, Charlie George’s hands stood still.

Perhaps he would be feeling too hot under the blankets and have to

throw a couple over to Ellen’s side of the bed. Perhaps he might even get

up, still half-asleep, and pad through to the kitchen to pour himself a

tumbler of iced apple juice. Then back to bed, slipping in beside Ellen’s

gentle crescent, to let sleep drift over him. They’d wait then, until his eyes

had flickered closed and his breathing regular as clockwork, and they were

certain he was sound asleep. Only then, when they knew consciousness

was gone, would they dare to begin their secret lives again.

For months now Charlie had been waking up with an uncomfortable

ache in his wrists and hands.

“Go and see a doctor,” Ellen would tell him, unsympathetic as ever.

“Why won’t you go and see a doctor?”

He hated doctors, that was why. Who in their right minds would trust

someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?

“I’ve probably been working to hard,” he told himself.

“Some chance,” Ellen muttered.

Surely that was the likeliest explanation. He was a packager by trade;

he worked with his hands all day long. They got tired. It was only natural.

“Stop fretting, Charlie,” he told his reflection one morning as he slapped

some life into his face, “your hands are fit for anything.”

So, night after night, the routine was the same. It goes like this:

The Georges are asleep, side by side in their marital bed. He on his

back, snoring gently; she curled up on his left-hand side. Charlie’s head is

propped up on two thick pillows. His jaw is slightly ajar, and beneath the

vein-shot veil of his lids his eyes scan some dreamed adventure. Maybe a

fire fighter tonight, perhaps a heroic dash into the heart of some burning

brothel. He dreams contentedly, sometimes frowning, sometimes

smirking.

There is movement under the sheet. Slowly, cautiously it seems,

Charlie’s hands creep up out of the warmth of the bed and into the open

air. Their index fingers weave like nailed heads as they meet on his

undulating abdomen. They clasp each other in greeting, like

comrades-in-arms. In his sleep Charlie moans. The brothel has collapsed

on him. The hands flatten themselves instantly, pretending innocence.

After a moment, once the even rhythm of his breathing has resumed, they

begin their debate in earnest.

A casual observer, sitting at the bottom of the Georges’ bed, might take

this exchange as a sign of some mental disorder in Charlie. The way his

hands twitch and pluck at each other, stroking each other now, now

seeming to fight. But there’s clearly come code or sequence in their

movements, however spasmodic. One might almost think that the

slumbering man was deaf and dumb, and talking in his sleep. But the

hands are speaking no recognizable sign language; nor are they trying to

communicate with anyone but each other. This is a clandestine meeting,

held purely between Charlie’s hands. There they will stay through the

night, perched on his stomach, plotting against the body politic.

Charlie wasn’t entirely ignorant of the sedition that was simmering at

his wrists. There was a fumbling suspicion in him that something in his

life was not quite right. Increasingly, he had the sense of being cut off

from common experience, becoming more and more a spectator to the

daily (and nightly) rituals of living, rather than a participant. Take, for

example, his love life.

He had never been a great lover, but neither did he feel he had anything

to apologize for. Ellen seemed satisfied with his attentions. But these days

he felt dislocated from the act. He would watch his hands traveling over

Ellen, touching her with all the intimate skill they knew, and he would

view their maneuvers as if from a great distance, unable to enjoy the

sensations of warmth and wetness. Not that his digits were any less agile.

Quite the reverse. Ellen had recently taken to kissing his fingers and telling

him how clever they were. Her praise didn’t reassure him one iota. If

anything, it made him feel worse to think that his hands were giving such

pleasure when he was feeling nothing.

There were other signs of his instability too. Small, irritating signs. He

had become conscious of how his fingers beat out martial rhythms on the

boxes he was sealing up at the factory, and the way his hands had taken to

breaking pencils, snapping them into tiny pieces before he realized quite

what he (they) were doing, leaving shards of wood and graphite scattered

across the packing room floor.

Most embarrassingly, he had found himself holding hands with total

strangers. This had happened on three separate occasions. Once at a

bus-stop, and twice in the elevator at the factory. It was, he told himself,

nothing more than the primitive urge to hold on to another person in a

changing world; that was the best explanation he could muster. Whatever

the reason, it was damned disconcerting, especially when he found himself

surreptitiously holding hands with his own foreman. Worse still, the other

man’s hand had grasped Charlie’s in return, and the men had found

themselves looking down their arms like two dog owners watching their

unruly pets copulating at the ends of their leashes.

Increasingly, Charlie had taken to peering at the palms of his hands

looking for hair. That was the first sign of madness, his mother had once

warned him. Not the hair, the looking.

Now it became a race against time. Debating on his belly at night, his

hands knew very well how critical Charlie’s state of mind had become. It

could only be a matter of days before his careering imagination alighted

on the truth.

So what to do? Risk an early severance, with all the possible

consequences, or let Charlie’s instability take its own, unpredictable,

course, with the chance of his discovering the plot on his way to madness?

The debates became more heated. Left, as ever, was cautious: “What if

we’re wrong,” it would rap, “and there’s no life after the body?”

“Then we will never know,” Right would reply.

Left would ponder that problem a moment. Then: “How will we do it,

when the time comes?”

It was a vexing question and Left knew it troubled the leader more than

any other. “How?” it would ask again, pressing the advantage. “How?

How?”

“We’ll find a way,” Right would reply. “As long as it’s a clean cut.”

“Suppose he resists?”

“A man resists with his hands. His hands will be in revolution against

him.”

“And which of us will it be?”

“He uses me most effectively,” Right would reply, “so I must wield the

weapon. You will go.”

Left would be silent a while then. They had never been apart all these

years. It was not a comfortable thought.

“Later, you can come back for me,” Right would say.

“I will.”

“You must . I am the Messiah. Without me there will be nowhere to go.

You must raise an army, then come and fetch me.”

“To the ends of the earth, if necessary.”

“Don’t be sentimental.”

Then they’d embrace, like long-lost brothers, swearing fidelity forever.

Ah, such hectic nights, full of the exhilaration of planned rebellion. Even

during the day, when they had sworn to stay apart, it was impossible

sometimes not to creep together in an idle moment and tap each other. To

say:

Soon, soon,

to say:

Again tonight: I’ll meet you on his stomach,

to say:

What will it be like, when the world is ours?

Charlie knew he was close to a nervous breakdown. He found himself

glancing down at his hands on occasion, to watch them with their index

fingers in the air like the heads of long-necked beasts sensing the horizon.

He found himself staring at the hands of other people in his paranoia,

becoming obsessed with the way hands spoke a language of their own,

independent of their user’s intentions. The seductive hands of the virgin

secretary, the maniacal hands of a killer he saw on the television

protesting his innocence. Hands that betrayed their owners with every

gesture, contradicting anger with apology, and love with fury. They

seemed to be everywhere, these signs of mutiny. Eventually he knew he

had to speak to somebody before his lost his sanity.

He choose Ralph Fry from Accounting, a sober, uninspiring man, whom

Charlie trusted. Ralph was very understanding.

“You get these things,” he said. “I got them when Yvonne left me.

Terrible nervous fits.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Saw a headshrinker. Name of Jeudwine. You should try some therapy.

You’ll be a changed man.”

Charlie turned the idea over in his mind. “Why not?” he said after a few

revolutions. “Is he expensive?”

“Yes. But he’s good. Got rid of my twitches for me; no trouble. I mean,

till I went to him I thought I was your average guy with marital problems.

Now look at me,” Fry made an expansive gesture, “I’ve got so many

suppressed libidinal urges I don’t know where to start.” He grinned like a

loon. “But I’m happy as a clam. Never been happier. Give him a try; he’ll

soon tell you what turns you on.”

“The problem isn’t sex,” Charlie told Fry.

“Take it from me,” said Fry with a knowing smirk. “The problem’s

always sex.”

The next day Charlie rang Dr. Jeudwine, without telling Ellen, and the

shrink’s secretary arranged an initial session. Charlie’s palms sweated so

much while he made the telephone call he thought the receiver was going

to slide right out of his hand, but when he’d done it he felt better.

Ralph Fry was right, Dr. Jeudwine was a good man. He didn’t laugh at

any of the little fears Charlie unburdened. Quite the contrary, he listened

to every word with the greatest concern. It was very reassuring.

During their third session together, the doctor brought one particular

memory back to Charlie with spectacular vividness: his father’s hands,

crossed on his barrel chest as he lay in his coffin; the ruddy color of them,

the corse hair that matted their backs. The absolute authority of those

wide hands, even in death, had haunted Charlie for months afterward.

And hadn’t he imagined, as he’d watched the body being consigned to

humus, that it was not yet still? That the hands were even now beating a

tattoo on the casket lid, demanding to be let out ? It was a preposterous

thing to think, but bringing it out into the open did Charlie a lot of good.

In the bright light of Jeudwine’s office the fantasy looked insipid and

ridiculous. It shivered under the doctor’s gaze, protesting that the light

was too strong, and then it blew away, too frail to stand up to scrutiny.

The exorcism was far easier than Charlie had anticipated. All it had

taken was a little probing and that childhood nonsense had been dislodged

from his psyche like a morsel of bad meat from between his teeth. It could

rot there no longer. And for his part Jeudwine was clearly delighted with

the results, explaining when it was all done that this particular obsession

had been new to him, and he was pleased to have dealt with the problem.

Hands as symbols of parental power, he said, were not common. Usually

the penis predominated in his patients’ dreams, he explained, to which

Charlie had replied that hands had always seemed far more important

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