(From the Book "Killers, Angels, Refugees" by Peter Hammill)
OPTIONS 
What options are open to us! What challenges we all face
daily! How noble a race is Mankind! How incomparable!
We are all born equal, with
nothing, with the same, with zero, with one hundred per cent possibility.
We can all make of ourselves whatever we want, whatever we believe in;
and what we believe is ultimately what we are. We can all draw from the
fathomless wells of human knowledge and exper-ience. Every day, we do so,
and every individual met, probed and felt is another equation solved in
our self-examinations. We can all transcend. We can all achieve peace,
or turmoil, or boredom, or a Good Life; whatever we self-destinate is ours.
We can all become whole. Hope is not dead. Man survives.
Panander examines his chin in the cracked mirror. The
mirror has streaks of dirt across it like the tracks of proud and un-repentant
tears. There are no tears in Panander's eyes: they are hard and cold grey.
The pupils are small. The whites are blurred and capillaried with blood.
There is a day's stubble on his chin. The stubble is dark, but patched
and dappled in grey. The chin is taut and firm.
Panander decides not to shave;
it hardly seems worth it. He feels the root of a back tooth with the tip
of his tongue. His cheek rumples and distorts in the mirror. The tooth
feels loose, but he.is careful not to dislodge it; his tongue is funghied
and furred.
There is a packet of untipped
cigarettes lying on the bedside table, with five left in it. An empty,
crushed packet lies in the wastepaper basket. On top of the suitcase on
the bedside chair is a pack of two hundred duty-free cigarettes. Two packets
are missing. There is a bottle of duty-free Scotch on the bedside table,
and a half-full tumbler beside it. Panander picks up the tumbler and gulps
from it. He does not shudder. He picks up a cigarette from the packet and
lights it. He blows the smoke out very slowly, with a whistling sigh. He
is waiting for some-body or something, and he has a lot of time.
It is two hours later. The level of the Scotch has dropped.
There is a new packet of cigarettes by the bedside, and the old packet,
crushed, has joined its sibling in the wastepaper basket. Panander is lying
on the bed without shoes or jacket His socks need darning and the material
at the elbows of his shirt is threadbare. He is watching a moth do circuits
around the light bulb. The shade is plastic and it is cracked.
Panander is sitting in this
dirty little hotel room with cracked lightshade with dusty mirror, with
walls which seem to have been painted the colour of the dirt, with a ceiling
scarred by many plaster repairs, with shaking, decrepit bed and musty sheets,
and it all fits. Panander fits in this room. He is comfortable here; he
is blending with his environment like a chameleon, like a sand crab, and
the only parts of him which truly remain visible against the sombre background
of the room are his eyes, which are hard and cold and grey. Behind those
hard, cold, grey eyes he is thinking about what he is going to do when
he leaves this place. He is thinking about the colours his skin must change
to in order to blend with new and gaudier surroundings.
He is trying to decide which
of two daydreams he will inhabit. Both are crystal-bright, sunny, and washed
over in sheets of white. One has dark conifers and scabs of out-cropping
rock through snow. It has speed and steaming breath, exhilaration and endless
parallel lines biting across the white surface of the ground in pale grey.
The other dream is horizontal, inactive, the gentle hiss of water on burning
white sand, sparkling light on the endless deep blue of the sea, cool-ing
palm fronds and long alcoholic drinks. In neither dream is there any waiting.
Another hour has passed. The moth is no longer flying
around the cracked lightshade. It has died under the merciless on-slaught
of a rolled-up newspaper, and is now merely crushed tissue and moist juices
spread over the crossword. The crossword has been completed, and so has
the moth.
Panander is lying on the bed
and thinking about his life. He is not sure that he likes it: there are
certain moments and actions that he find almost unbearable even to think
about. Other parts he lingers over with a dull sense of pleasure. He has
been both a thoughtful man and a cruel one. Sometimes he has been gentle;
sometimes he has been stupid. He is wondering what being happy means. He
is wondering what Good is. He is thinking that maybe his dreams have been
better than his life. His only comfort is the absolute certainty of the
pronouns.
The door bursts open, and four
men come through it. Three of them are wearing sombre, anonymous uniform.
The colour and denomination does not matter in the slightest. They have
black belts and sub-machine guns. The other man has on a badly-fitting
belted raincoat of sandy grey. Under the raincoat is a badly-fitting black
suit. The cut and fit of his clothes do not matter in the slightest. He
has black, greasy hair and an automatic pistol in his hand.
This is not what Panander has
been waiting for.
These are not his friends.
These people were not included
in his dreams.
Panander licks the root of one
of his back teeth. It is loose. He pushes hard on it, and it comes away
from the gum. A small capsule falls from its hollow onto his tongue. He
punc-tures the capsule between his teeth. Sudden dreams come to him, sudden
acridity and acidity. He crumples over onto his side, and his hands tear
at his stomach.
The man in the raincoat walks
over to the shabby figure on the floor and kicks it in the kidneys. Panander
does not worry, wonder, think1 dream, or feel any more.
Of course I do not know any spies. Of course I have never
seen a man standing in a doorway wearing a sand grey raincoat and black
suit with an automatic pistol in his hand. But I validate my life by writing
about death and I fill my life with interest by writing about interesting
death.
Of course, physically, it is
no different from the last asth-matic gurgling cough. Of course it is no
different from the screaming, distorted union with metal and upholstery
on a foggy motorway night. The only interest lies in the last frame of
the mind's movie. The only conclusions to be drawn are derived from the
photofinish, the dead heat that ebbs away into the air and is gone almost
before it can be analysed. Ulti-mately, no conclusions, analyses, answers
- only more questions.
Why did Panander, Rothschild,
Kutz, whoever he may really have been or been imagined to be, explode his
being with a capsule of hydrocyanic acid? Options already form their ranks;
the network of motive and reason stretches out in a spider's web from them.
On one of the threads lies the corpse, first trapped, now husked. How many
options have bred this result?
What if he thought the intruders
were about to shoot him out of hand? Did he wish to deny them such final
control over him? Was this a last assertion of individuality, his last,
his only his? Did he side with the option of decision and self-determinism
to the end? Suicide to deny murder? Suicide for Free Will? Suicide for
a 'good name'? Was there really any choice?
Perhaps he saw it differently.
Perhaps he saw already the grim lines of prison bars; dry bread, stale
water, board bed, interrogation, lights, questions, questions, questions.
Perhaps he saw humiliation, public and private; pain; destruction, within
and without; endless non-life, endless anonymity, endless despair.
Was he already dead in the moment
he saw all of this? Was he dead against capture, failure, ultimate repentance?
Was he dead in the destruction of self-respect? The fast against the slow
and tortured?
Do you think he thought a't
all? Do you think it could have been a charade, a joke, a game, another
dream? Are you dead yet?
It is inevitable that, one day, each of us will lie, crushed
and inwardly seeping blood, in our true colours at last, pinned against
the blank spaces we fill with clever but isolating words and the black
spaces that are our might-have-beens, our broken dreams, our failings.
Perhaps we are all engaged merely in moulding our coffins.
What options are open to us!
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