My new crew
The day was just dawning and a cool mist revived me just enough to open my eyes. The streets were deserted. I could see in the faint light that these men were in rags and guessed that they must be "lickers". Then it struck me that they were the ones referred to by the official the day before when he mentioned "dogs". I’d never heard the word applied to them before but it fitted them perfectly. They cowered along the fringes of the street even as they hurried. They looked like beggars.
We made our way to a row of wooden bunkers near the harbor. These buildings had no windows. I was taken into the furthest of these barracks. The door opened and I saw before me a long table and at least forty more of these strange men all sitting at it, eating from crude, wooden bowls and licking their spoons, giving me only a cursory glance as I was ushered in. I was taken along the line to an empty seat, and a bowl of some kind of porridge was set before me. As no spoon was brought along with it, and everyone else was silently minding their own business, I began eating the gruel with my fingers.
Now I was sure that this was a company of lickers. Such a grim and rough-looking bunch of shaggy-bearded men could be nothing else. I remembered from years earlier that they were never to be spoken to, as they had all taken vows of silence and wanted their ears left alone. Their tongues now had no more business with words.
They lived in a self-imposed poverty, on the cheapest of foods. Their clothes were as white as their faces but often in rags from so much washing. They each owned a bowl, a spoon, a bell which they kept tied to their belt, and a canister for paint, which hung all day about their necks, like the albatross, though it was their one useful tool. They had no identity cards. Their persons and their comfort had been sacrificed to the service of the Church.
After breakfast I was given a bell and a canister, and a bunk was pointed out to me as my own. There was a single blanket folded at the foot of it. It was a bed of planks. My empty bowl was to be stored beneath it.
Besides the two rows of bunks along the walls, and the central table, there was nothing, except for some washbasins at the far end of the room. As I looked around I could see why the state had no need for prisons. This was penal servitude in its most perfected form, and its walls were adamantine, rooted deep within each prisoner's mind.
The strange thing was that I remembered the lickers, in their pristine days, as the true pride, the glory, the storm-troopers of the Church-militant. There was no task too big, too tedious, too dangerous for them. At a single command they would set to work and swiftly and silently carry out each assignment to its end. Their number was legion. They contained all the best and most fiery blood of the young recruits.
I remember how thousands of them, in two summer weeks, with only their belts and buckets and tongues, licked the whole Bay Bridge white, from its underbelly to its highest spanners. They worked day and night, and hundreds fell to their deaths in the attempt. Yet the job was done, and rewarded with only the report, and respect.
They accomplished many such grand feats in the early years, and people stepped aside and waved to their ranks, as tight as any Roman legion on the march, as they jogged on by in the streets.
But the first, high enthusiasm waned, as I suppose it must, even before I left the cities. Their complexion was already changing into the one I could now plainly see. The big projects ran out or were performed by more professional workers. The lickers slowly turned into a beggarly order, wandering in small groups like stray dogs, mostly through the debris of construction sites, looking for any refuse or corner they could whiten. They were often given unsavory tasks and so they came to be associated with foulness and trash. And being silent and given to obedience, how could they complain?
The company I now sat amidst looked as if they’d been carrying out this sad drudgery for an eternity. They must have been in their late twenties or early thirties, but they looked like old men, disheveled, stooped, grim and prematurely toothless from years of spitting paint and mouthing all sorts of foul objects for the purpose of coating them. I wasn't feeling too chipper myself and I suppose I fitted right in, which was a good thing, as I’d had enough of being singled out in this society.
That first morning I could barely walk. I was led with the rest to the nearby wharves. The leader of our squad was the man who had pointed out my bunk. He was as sad and as taciturn as the rest and his only distinction, as far as I could tell, was a staff and a pointed beard that was longer than anyone else's.
We spent the whole, long day standing in cold water, from ankle to waist deep, spitting up paint against the understructure of the docks. We were directed in our labor by the goads and proddings of our leader's stick, and sometimes by blows when we moved too slowly. Our canisters were filled every half-hour by two lickers standing nearby with a drum in a wheelbarrow. Not a word was heard all day and we retired exhausted at nightfall to another bowl of the same gruel and then to our bunks. We were exempted from attending services, either because we were so holy as to need no encouragement, or because we were so ragged.
That winter was the darkest and worst of my whole life, which was never sunny. I spent my waking hours crawling and groping and spitting with this abject crew, usually in the harbor district. Each morning we trudged off in single file to our project, sometimes the rusty hold of a ship, sometimes the high rafters of a workhouse, but most often the dumps around worksites or behind factories, ringing our bells whenever pollution was found, gathering around it like children finding an old shoe, then coating it as if we were removing one more bit of evil from the eye of the universe.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the profound shock of my capture and torture and hard labor had deadened my mind. I lived as if sentenced to a slow death from which there was no escape, killing all hope and self-concern. I stumbled out of my bunk each morning to a wordless, rainy day, and back each night exhausted, to a dreamless sleep.
My health deteriorated. My wounds had left painful sores that didn’t heal. A rheumatism invaded my bones, and a constant cold infected my lungs. Even though I didn’t think of escape, I doubt if I had the strength to run away. I had barely enough energy to shuffle through each day, like an old man. Besides this, I was always surrounded by my fellow laborers, while our captain kept a close watch over us, stick in hand.
Since the days of winter were short we were often led indoors in the evenings and set to work by lamplight, whitening up the workplaces after everyone else had gone home. We were sent to a cafeteria sometimes and I remember eating all the scraps I could find. We put things in our mouths so often no one noticed. The others, I believe, were too far gone to think of improving their meager diets. Life for them had come to assume a stranger meaning.
It was with this occasional food and the warmer days of spring that my mind, as it were, thawed and showed fresh signs of life. I had dreams again and often thought of Ben, Hiram and my lost tribe. I made vague plans to get away as soon as my health improved, to travel through the forests to my people and even come back afterwards and rescue Ben and his children, setting up stations of supplies along the way to make their journey comfortable.
The rest of my existence that spring was bleak beyond description. I realized one day that my hopes for escape were only daydreams, played out like movies to mask my wretched lot. My health was not improving and I had no solid plans for a getaway. I was in the center of the city, under constant surveillance and my clothes marked me as one always supposed to be with my group. I thought of a night escape or else swimming the bay or even stealing a boat. But by now I had just enough life in me to want to preserve it, and with my present strength such an attempt seemed suicidal.
So my thoughts turned grim, to match my fate. "A plague upon us," I thought, "Why couldn't we use brushes, like the rest of the world, and finish our work in half the time? Why couldn't we talk, at least to receive and acknowledge directions, like the public workers around us? We make ourselves contemptible for no reason!" I was disgusted with my group and often near other people, and loved hearing, even listening, to their chit-chat and joking.
I looked up to carpenters and masons as blessed beings. They seemed to talk constantly, I guess because they worked without blueprints, or rather whiteprints. Foremen were constantly explaining things in loud voices, or drawing figures in the dirt when they were at a loss for words. Not so for us. The bell and the stick completed our world. On occasion a word would escape me inadvertently, but a sharp blow to my back would recall me to my fate.
Then again, ours was a religious task, not a public one. And our religion was not cheerful. Only it’s color was white. Its spirit was dark, as with all shifts born out of desperate and tragic times. Its theme was death, a reintegration with the universe, a worship of the great, white flash that was supposed to start and end it all. Our lives were meant to represent a steady march towards this end, an "enwhitenment" of ourselves and everything around us, a preparation for death, and a death in life.
