Brentfield was no sooner finished reading when the second movement of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra resounded majestically, and out on stage, to much clappy ravishment, danced The Tortured Man, in an elaborate choreographed routine, all smiles and poses and high-hat salutes, blowing kisses to the crowd, who howled their approval and drew blood rivulets from their mates. Brentfield, who'd climbed from the stage and was about to return to his seat, looked over at Viola, who sat transfixed by the arrival of the Tortured Man; in a very real sense he no longer existed for her; indeed, he might never have been. He decided not to re-join her (their relationship would be over soon anyway, with the Hex realignment coming), and he slowly made his way to toward the exit, the only unhappy face in the house. The Tortured Man comically threw himself down on a specialized ordeal table and he was strapped in with much histrionics, like a 'victim' at a magic show. Then his table was raised slightly so that he could look out at the crowd and they could observe his face and its paroxysms and screams to come. The cameras of the As Some Pundits Are Calling It network covering him from every angle, as at a football match. There would even be a kind of play-by-play as they moved from torture to torture.
And they tortured him every which way they knew - waterboarding, trussing, shock treatments, razor slices, sluicing, strangulation, decibels, acids on the tongue, beatings, sleep deprivation, mind-altering nightmares, and on it went for hours. The Tortured Man braving it at first, telling little jokes to mock the pain. The crowd weeping as one in ecstasy. And then he began to crumble under the duress, as he must, and by the time they began to flay him he was crying out for his mother, begging the emcee - anyone - to kill him. And at that point hamartia influenced the crowd and their weeping began to be in sorrow and empathy.
Finally they came to the last torture: castration. By now The Tortured Man was in virtually unbearable pain and no longer calmly humorous, as his body refused any more abuse, even as some deep secret source of masochism kept him pressing on. The harlequin clown crew ripped off his pants to great fanfare (the opening chords of Also Sprach Zarathustra now blaring), exposing his nakedness underneath. Then out of the crowd and up to the stage sprung his mum, red lipstick, a perm, a dopey housecoat. She turned once to face the crowd with a wide grin and lapped up their enthrallment. 'Who killed co*k robin?' came a shouted question that delighted the crowd. She turned and faced her 'son'. The Tortured Man implored her with his eyes to be rescued and she removed her teeth and then took a few hyperbolized ballet steps toward him, slid on her knees in front of him, and commenced to perform fellatio, until he got an enormous red erection. This was one part of the act The Tortured Man had not foreseen, and he recoiled in horror, and when he saw his erection with the lipstick he went quite mad. (It was not, of course, his mother, but a persona.)
'No. No. No,' he screamed, and began to fall into cardiac arrest, his body twitching, like a shorted electric wire.
'Oh no you don't,' yelled a doctor on stage. 'Not yet.' And he dragged a defibrillator machine over to The Tortured Man, had some sexy nurses hook him up, and zapped him back to just enough consciousness to allow him to finish his routine.
Then the emcee held up a pair of golden ceremonial shears, the crowd gone wild, with some members fainting as at an old time gospel revival. Still wearing a cartoon smile, he went over to The Tortured Man and proceeded to cut off his balls and penis.
'Sing it!' the crowd screamed. 'Sing it!'
In one last excruciating cry of black humour, The Tortured Man sang meekly (but they turned up the mike), 'Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be / There's a shadow hanging over me"' Then he collapsed and flat-lined. The crowd almost at the very edge of berserk, began punching and biting and pinching each other. O happy days!
Brentfield was not even looking back. He passed Buddhi at the exit without noticing and continued on his way out of the opera house and out into the open air, where the revellers were all turned to the large screen watching the ceremony inside, but just as orgiastic. On the stage, the emcee could be seen pointing in the distance, to one of the exits, and the cameras panned to take in the entry of Victor, new head, new flesh and bone, new lease on life - in fact, now in possession of the shared knowledge, the only knowledge which mattered, that none of them could die. Except the elites, of course, the oligarchs and kleptocrats, the captains of industry and generals of misery. Victor was not looking particularly gratified by such news; in fact, his face showed bleak. And to top it off, they were piping in an ancient, ancient Hank Williams song to celebrate the ironical resurrection, 'I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.'
'Don't worry about it, mate,' yelled someone from the outdoor crowd. 'You'll get used to it.' But this time no one laughed or assented.
Buddhi slowly approached Brentfield, his syngene relative, who had moved away from the crowd and had wandered over to look out at the harbour. From the side, and still at some distance, he could see Brentfield's expression. For a moment he seemed to Buddhi like some Galileo who had had his literally world-changing views banned - or, rather, Buddhi thought better, a would-be Galileo who would never get a chance to be banned. Brentfield began to dry heave violently, nausea overtaking him. His immeasurable despair seemed to Buddhi quite inconsolable.
'You know,' said Buddhi. 'An old-time philosopher once observed that we should be careful about choosing to look into the abyss, for the abyss also looks into us.'
Brentfield did not turn to look at Buddhi, but continued staring straight ahead at the motion of the water, but he recognized the voice of the bartender. 'Yes,' said Brentfield, 'same guy said there are some things we should not want to know.' Buddhi did not reply, but kept the silence with Brentfield.
'And so, dear ladies and gents, that concludes the proceedings,' said the emcee on the outdoor screen behind them, but then paused, 'well, almost,' he added, and you could hear the start of peculiar music offstage growing in volume, getting closer to the stage. The tune was the all-too-familiar, 'Pop Goes the Weasel,' and a weirdly-dressed man was marching onstage.
'Lycergius!' the crowd roared.
Lycergius was a jesture - part mime, part clown -- wearing a kind of box around his waist. In fact, he looked exactly like a Jack-in-the-Box and he was turning a large handle coming out of his right pocket, which continued playing 'Pop Goes the Weasel,' with its plunky sound of rubber plucking metal keys.
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