Disruptions by Steven Millhauser

Author:Steven Millhauser [Millhauser, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

IV

THE CIRCLE OF PUNISHMENT

Your crime is grave. Your punishment will be terrible.

Look at me. I said: Look at me. There. That’s better. That’s much better. I see by various signs that despite your age you know a thing or two about punishment. Those scars on your neck, that missing finger on your left hand. You also think you know a thing or two about me. To you I’m bound to seem—mmm, how would you put it? An instrument of oppression? A complacent member of the ruling rich? Look at him!—funny old gent, with the power to crush me. Oh, we know how you think. We know. But enough of this. I’m not here to play games with you. I’m here to announce the result of our twenty-six days of deliberation. I plan to do so in just a moment. But first I’d like to say a few words to you about our system of punishment, so that you may be in a position to understand the nature of what we’ve decided to do to you. For if there’s one thing you can be sure of, in this uncertain world of ours, it is this: we take our punishments seriously.

Is that a smirk? I advise you not to smirk. A smirk makes a bad impression. A smirk, I regret to say, makes a very bad impression. But more than that, a smirk is unworthy of your crime. You do understand, don’t you, that the extreme loathing, the almost physical revulsion, that we feel for your crime suggests a certain, what shall I say…interest? esteem? It would distress me—seriously!—to find myself disappointed in you. And bear in mind, young man: by lifting my right index finger one-half inch, I can have you instantly removed from this court and taken to a punishing cell, where your lips will be cut from your face—a painful ordeal that won’t prevent, but will only delay, your punishment.

Have I made myself clear? Good. But please. Please. Let me be clearer still. I’m not asking you to be humble. I’m not proposing that you grovel before me. That would be an embarrassment for both of us. I ask only that you bear yourself with dignity.

Shall I repeat it? We take our punishments seriously. And what better testimony to that seriousness than our Book of Punishments, with its many hundreds of volumes containing every actual and possible crime, along with the corresponding punishment. No one knows exactly how many volumes the book contains, since even as a new volume is printed, older volumes are being revised and expanded, to say nothing of the addenda and supplements that issue daily from the courts and are bound in small booklets of three or four or a dozen pages, which gradually find their way, often in modified form, into revised versions of earlier volumes.

You find it amusing? Of course you do. You find everything amusing. Let me ask you something. Is it amusing to have your hands chopped off at the wrist? Is it amusing to have your eyelids ripped from your face? But forgive me.

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