01 March 2007
“If you imagine a man, an average man, but one who has caused offence. If you think of that man, try to picture him, know who he might be. Now think of him unconscious, think of him passed out, think of him vulnerable. It doesn’t matter what happened to him – drinks, drugs, maybe chloroform – just think of him in a state where anybody could do anything to him, where those he has offended can take revenge.
“Imagine a room, no actually don’t – just accept that somewhere there is a room, though don’t trouble yourself to think of any of the furnishings or detail. It is a space, somewhere with four walls. All you need to know about this room is that there is a radiator. A good, solid radiator. Now, imagine that man is brought unconscious to this room.
“The first thing to happen is that he is handcuffed to the radiator. One cuff clicks to his right wrist, one cuff clicks to his left wrist – both are dug tight into his skin. The chain is looped around the radiator pipe twice, ensuring that any movement towards escape will tighten the cuffs and aggravate him greatly. The man is now a hostage, a prisoner in a place he has never seen. He is more vulnerable than he has ever been before. This is only the beginning.
“If you imagine the man has tape stretched over his mouth, brown sticky tape – there’s a lot to do and if the man should wake before we anticipate, then we don’t want him to scream. Nobody would hear if he did scream, but it would disturb our concentration. No, it’s better to wrap the tape over his mouth, pulling it tight so that his lips and skin bite in pain. Although this is probably not a pain the man will notice, as there is much more to come.
“We take a blade and push it through the man’s left cheek. It’s a silver blade, razor sharp on each side, and we force it through the man’s flesh. We push it into his left cheek, through his mouth, then out the right side of his face – so it protrudes, bloody but still shining silver. The blade, smooth and sharp, balances between his teeth.
“Our next move seems pleasant, we put a pair of headphones on the man. A pair of big stereo headphones through which he can listen to music. Aren’t we nice to him? Aren’t we lovely?
“Then we take our brown tape and wrap it right the way round the man’s skull. We wrap it tighter round his mouth, making sure there’s no possibility of the blade slipping out. We cover the man’s eyes, blind him, wrap it round again and again to make sure he gets not even a glimmer of light. We tape the headphones to his ears to ensure he cannot possibly shake them off. We wrap it round his cheeks and his jaw and his hair and completely smother his head, so when we’ve finished there is only the shape of a face beneath the brown tape. We don’t cover his nostrils though. We want him to breath. We don’t want him to stop yet.
“Then we wait for the man to wake up. We are patient, happy to wait for him to wake naturally.
“When the man does wake, he flinches. That is the natural reaction. It is dark, he has no idea where he is and even though he doesn’t know what we’ve done to him, he knows he feels discomfort. His natural reaction is to reach out with his hands, to try and feel his way in the darkness – but when he tries to move he finds that he’s bound, that he cannot move. His reaction to that is to scream. Well maybe not scream, but yell, cry, shout for help. He knows his hands aren’t free, he can now feel the encumbrance on his head, so it’s natural for him to try and make noise and draw some attention – some aid – to himself. But when he screams his tongue flicks up and slices on the blade. It flicks so high it gashes wide open, or maybe flicks so high it slices in half. There’s blood in his mouth now, lots of blood – have you ever seen a tongue bleed from a nice thick cut? His mouth is awash with blood, but there’s no space between his lips through which the blood could go. It’s all trapped within his mouth. The man tries to swallow it down, but some inevitably seeps into his windpipe and he chokes. He chokes and splutters and the blood comes back up to his mouth, meeting the fresh blood from the cut. So he tries to swallow it down his gullet – because where else can this blood go apart from his gut? He tries to concentrate and swallow it down, and all the time he is screaming and screaming. He is screaming without sound because his mouth is sealed too tight. But he is screaming nonetheless – and all the time his tongue, or the remains of his tongue, flicks up to that blade.
“Then the music starts. Some unseen hand, which the man never suspected was near, hits a button and the music booms out. It’s loud, horrendously loud and it’s pumped into the man’s headphones – headphones the man cannot possibly remove. In case you’re curious, the music is drum and bass. A genre the man himself is quite indifferent to, but which will get inside his head, get inside his heart, and vibrate every single fucking molecule.
“The music is loud enough to deafen. The man will be startled. The cuffs will wrench into his wrists again. No matter how much it hurts, he will try to wriggle and escape. He has so much other pain now, that the pain in his wrists is inconsequential. He is swallowing to keep the blood back, his ears are booming, his ear-drums shattering, he has to be free – but there’s no way he can be free, no way he can get out. The man is trapped, he is a prisoner. And gradually he realises this, gradually he settles down. Or maybe he doesn’t truly comprehend it, maybe in tiredness and impotent fury he just gives himself to exhaustion.
“The music is ceaseless. It’s a never-ended boom-boom-boom (literally, as the CD player is set to repeat.) It comes from every side, breaking his ear-drums, breaking his head. He hears high-pitched pops as the cells within his ears die. He hears it again and again and then Boom! The ear-drums themselves are gone and he’s left almost without sound. I say ‘almost’, as even with every atom of hearing taken away, the vibration of the beat still penetrates his skull. It still punches and bangs and pounds its way into his consciousness. Even if his ears had been sliced off – and we have no interest in slicing off his ears – then he would still feel the noise, it would still assault him from every angle.
“What happens to a man in such a situation? Some would go insane, their minds immediately cracking, so all they’d hear was a scream within their head they could never stop. That’s how life would end, with the man’s mind screaming distractions to itself. Distractions to the noise, to the pounding, to the blood, to the loose bit of tongue that is maybe floating in his mouth, to the pain. I imagine if you scream long enough, scream so that’s all you ever hear, then you get to a place where the sound of screaming is normal, you get to a place where you like it. Death will still come, but whether the man has gone crazy enough to smile behind the brown tape – I don’t know.
“However, maybe the man will keep his sanity, maybe it will be his body that reacts. Perhaps his body will try to put a halt to the pain, to the blood, to the noise (that boom-boom-boom that never leaves) by shutting down, by launching into a fit. His body will spasm, but of course that does the body no good as it further injures the wrists and damages the tongue and strains the muscles. A white liquid will mix with the blood in his mouth, it will foam, but again there’s nowhere for it to go but back down his gullet. But the man doesn’t have the wherewithal anymore to know he should swallow it back rather than let it drown him, and so maybe that’s what happens – he chokes himself to death. Maybe that’s how he dies.
“Or maybe the man is stronger than that. Maybe he learns the lesson about not trying to wrestle his wrists free, learns to keep the jagged remains of his tongue idle at the floor of his mouth, learns to glug-glug-glug the blood down. Maybe he quickly gets used to the music, to his sudden deafness. Maybe he exhibits a strength that amazes even himself. Maybe.
“I imagine a man like that will make efforts – tentative perhaps – to escape. Maybe he’ll reach out with his feet and legs and try to feel something that might help him. But there will be nothing, there will just be the man and the radiator and the handcuffs and the tape and the blade and the music and nothing else. Maybe the man will sometimes believe there are others in the room with him. He could never be sure as he wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t hear them, his head would be so fucked that he wouldn’t notice any vibration of the floorboards. But sometimes – erroneously or not – he believes there is a person in the room with him, watching him. He raises his head when he senses this, looks up (as if he could look), tries to plead (as if he could plead), but there is no help, no relief, only false dreams and false promise.
“But even a man like that, who will ward off insanity and stop himself from causing more pain than need be; even a man who gets used to that boom-boom-boom and can take it when it’s no longer a sound, but a constant pounding to the fabric of his skull – even that man needs to drink, needs to eat. And as the hours go by, and the days pass, and nothing in his predicament changes – then his body becomes weaker, his strength dies, even his sanity must start to slip. And he ends up a man dying against a radiator. A man who has valiantly battled all we’ve thrown at him, but is now too weak, too pathetic to go on and so fades away. He is a man dead at a radiator in a room he has never seen, awaiting burial by the very people who have done this to him. A man covered in blood and piss and shit, who has suffered tenfold for everything he has done.
“My friend, in seventy-two hours, that man is you.”
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