The prisoner known as A, however, was not an aficionado of rhythm. He was a man who knew many things—but drumming was not one of them.
And yet he listened.
Finally, half an hour before lights-out, the prisoner known as A shifted on his cot. He turned toward the headrail, gave it a cautious tap with his left index finger, then another. He began tapping out a simple 4/4 beat. As the minutes went on, he tried the beat on the mattress, then the wall and the sink—as if testing them for timbre, tone, and amplitude—before moving back to the bed rail. As he continued to beat out a 4/4 time with his left finger, he began beating a second rhythm with his right. As he played this simple rhythmic accompaniment, he listened intently to the outpouring of virtuosity next door.
Lights-out arrived, and all went black. An hour went by, and another. The prisoner’s approach subtly changed. Carefully following the drummer’s lead, A picked up an unusual syncopation here, a three-against-two beat there, adding them to his simple repertoire. He meshed his own drumming ever more closely into the web of sounds coming from next door, taking cues from his neighbor, picking up the tempo or lowering it according to the drummer’s lead.
Midnight, and the drummer in cell 45 continued—and so did the prisoner named A. A found that drumming—which he had always dismissed as a crude, primitive activity—was curiously pleasing to the mind. It opened a door from the tight, ugly reality of his cell into an expansive, abstract space of mathematical precision and complexity. He drummed on, still following the lead of the prisoner in 45, all the while increasing the complexity of his own rhythmical patterns.
The night wore on. The few other prisoners in solitary—there were not many, and they were far down the hall—were long asleep. Yet still the prisoners in 44 and 45 drummed on together. As the prisoner named A explored more deeply this strange new world of external and internal rhythm, he began to understand something about the man next door and his mental illness—as had been his intent. It was not something that could be put into words; it was not accessible to language; it was not reachable by psychological theorizing, psychotherapy, or even medication.
Yet nevertheless—through careful emulation of the complex drumming—the prisoner in 44 began to reach that place, to enter the drummer’s special world. On a basic neurological level, he began to understand the drummer: what motivated him, why he did what he did.
Slowly, carefully, A took a measured foray into altering the rhythm along certain experimental pathways, to see if he could take the lead, induce the drummer to follow him for a moment. When this experiment proved successful, he very subtly began to alter the tempo, morph the rhythm. There was nothing sudden in his approach: every new beat, every altered rhythm, was carefully controlled and calculated to lead to a desired result.
Over the space of another hour, the dynamic between the two prisoners began to change. Without realizing it, the drummer became no longer the leader, but the follower.
Prisoner A continued to alter his own drumming, slowing it down and speeding it up by infinite degrees, until he was certain he was now setting the rhythm; that the Drummer in the cell next door was unconsciously following his tempo and lead. With infinite care, he then began to slow his own drumming: not in a steady way, but through speedups and slowdowns, through riffs and changeovers he had picked up from his neighbor, each time ending at a slightly slower tempo—until he was beating out a down-tempo as slow and sleepy as molasses.
And then he stopped.
The man in solitary 45, after a few tentative, lost beats, halted as well.
There was a long silence.
And then a breathy, hoarse voice came from cell 45. “Who… who are you?”
“I am Aloysius Pendergast,” came the reply. “And I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”
An hour later, blessed silence reigned. Pendergast lay on his bunk, eyes closed but still awake. At a certain moment, he opened his eyes and scrutinized the faintly glowing dial of his watch—the one item prisoners were allowed, by law, to keep. Two minutes to four in the morning. He waited, now with his eyes open, and at exactly four o’clock a brilliant pinpoint of green light appeared on the far wall, dancing and jittering before gradually settling down. He recognized it as the output of a 532nm green DPSS laser—nothing more than the beam from an expensive laser pen, aimed through his window from some concealed spot far beyond the prison walls.
When the light had stopped trembling, it began blinking, repeating a short introduction in a simple monophonic cipher, compressed to keep transmission short. The introduction was repeated four times, to make sure Pendergast recognized the code. Then, after a pause, the actual message began.