50
PARTISAN REVIEW
I crouch in my hiding place for hours. Sometimes it seems that
years have passed. I am not a child now. I am waiting.
Beyond The Wall the sky is a feathery blue, or a turbulent
rippled gray. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes the sun glares. I am at
peace, gazing at The Wall. Its wonderful sameness, its mysterious
strength . . . while human beings change . . . grow old, weak,
unreliable. I am at peace here.
If
I hear gunfire in the distance, or
the barking of dogs, I am never agitated. For I do not intend to make
a run for it like the others. I am content to live my life
on this side.
What, precisely, is the Forbidden Zone, from which the citizens
of my country must be protected?
Absolute truth is impossible to come by, since anyone who
climbs The Wall successfully disappears from our world and never
returns; and anyone who climbs The Wall unsuccessfully is killed on
the spot. However, here are the most popular theories:
- There is a paradise beyond The Wall in which men and
women live "freely." (Though of course they must be
bound - how could they fail to be? - by The Wall , just as
we are. Perhaps it is somehow worse for them because our
Wall surrounds them.)
- There are dangerous, diseased, psychotic people beyond
The Wall. A race not unlike ours, but degenerate. A
brother-race? But degenerate. At one point in history
(evidently during the life-spans of some who are still living)
all of us constituted a single race, from which the
population of the Forbidden Zone fell away .
-There is nothing but a graveyard beyond The Wall: a
mere dumping ground for the dead. The bleak truth of The
Wall is that it protects the living from the dead (the noxious
gases of the cemetery); or, as the more subtle among us
reason, it protects us from our own future.
-There is an ordinary world beyond The Wall-our own
world, in fact - but it is a mirror-image, a reversal. None of
us could survive in it.
My own theory? I have none. I think only of The Wall. The fact of
The Wall, which settles so massively in the mind. The Wall exists to
be scaled, like all walls: it is the most exquisite of temptations . The
Wall poses the question -
How long can you resist?
