More Light
by Sol Smith
It’s been three days since the sky went dark.
There are windows on the outer wall, high up, that usually let you know if it’s night or day. But for the last three days, only the turning on and off of the lights—like clockwork at
The first thing I remember is Nicholas telling me “Hey, something funny’s going on,” he whispered this from his cot right after lights out. “You notice?”
I hadn’t noticed anything. I spent the day in meditation, as I spent most days.
“They took the TV out of the C wing. They didn’t take anyone out to the exercise yard today. No one at all.” C wing is the only place with a TV. It was a matter of time before they fucked it up for themselves and got it taken away. As for exercise, I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t care.
But that was when the paranoia started. Rumors, whispers, bullshit. All of it coming through the lips of Nicholas. All of it I tried to ignore. There were fewer guards. There were fewer walks up and down the corridor. There were fewer bed checks. There was less talk.
It wasn’t until I hadn’t been out of the cell for a week that I really cared at all. The first prison I was in had this shower dolly; a portable shower that they carted from cell to cell, letting you get cleaned up without letting you more than a foot out of your cage. It was fine with me. I didn’t have much of an interest in getting much further.
But here the cells were overcrowded. Each cell made for one man, but from time to time we’d be stuck with three men. Nicholas and I had been lucky for the last few months, just the two of us. Here they walked us single file to the showers every day. In shifts. And even then Nicholas smelled rank and rotten. After a week of no showers, I could hardly stand the thick must that hung in the cell.
I’m not here, I’d tell myself. I don’t hear, I don’t see, I don’t smell. I slow my breathing. I retreat inwards. I’m dead. I never was.
They gave us a bar of soap each, and we were told to wash off in the water fountain. Each cell has a little water fountain attached to the toilet. It’s insulting. The piping could easily have been hidden behind the wall, but they show us the connectivity of the water we drink and the water we flush, just to make us less than human. And now, we wash in it too.
I don’t know anything about meditation. Or Buddhism. Or much of anything else. But I tell people, whenever I talk to them, that I’m Buddhist. My own homemade brand of meditation doesn’t bring me any closer to God or Nirvana, but it takes me further away from here. I meditate for hours, until for one little instant a feeling of weightlessness surrounds and penetrates me. It’s dark. It’s relief. It’s escape. I leave the cell and enter nothingness. The three or four times a week that this happens is all I live for anymore.
And, besides the smell, the only time Nicholas pisses me off is when he yells in my face after an hour of meditation. I pretend it doesn’t bother me. I tell myself that distraction only sends me deeper down.
But it’s no used. I get clouded with hate. Clouded with the hot desire to grab this jackass by the throat and throttle him. And I see her face again.
A month after the paranoia started, I really noticed the change. The smell didn’t bother me anymore. But there were fewer guards. Fewer faces passing by a fewer amount of times. And portions of food were smaller and smaller, until we were splitting one meal between the two of us.
“Hey,” Nicholas said, “maybe you can have one meal, I can have the other.” Two squares a day. We were down to that between the two of us. “That way we can feel full once a day.”
That lasted for three or four days before we each got two meals again. And that was only because of Gabriel.
Gabriel went to school with me. We lived on the same block. Our dads worked in the same shaft. We both went to
He never acknowledged that he recognized me, but he makes eye contact with me if I let him. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t nod, just looks as he goes by. He doesn’t have pity in his eyes, but that’s what I always look for. And then he started giving us two meals two times a day. Maybe the pity was there, hidden under the steely eyes.
“You notice?” Nicholas said to me at lights out. “You notice the sounds?”
“What sounds?” I try not to sleep when the lights go out. I try to meditate. When I fall asleep, which happens every night, the screaming starts. I hear screaming the instant I fall asleep, every single time. Right in my face. Real as anything. Women screaming. Guttural, shrieking, painful screams of someone dying. Like someone being eaten by a shark. Like someone reverting to that animal survival instinct and screaming for all they’re worth. It wakes me up. I fall back asleep. It happens again. I pray for the light of day.
“All the sounds,” Nicholas said cryptically. “All of ‘em.”
“I don’t hear anything,” I said. I don’t hear. I don’t see. I don’t smell. I don’t feel, I tell myself.
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “No footsteps but a couple times a day. No supply trucks out the window. Hell, on a usual Friday night when the wind is right, you can hear the city from here at night. God, how that sounds tortured me. But there’s nothing now. You notice? No talking from cell to cell, only whispers.”
I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t care. All I heard was the screaming at night.
Gabriel and two other guards were all that we ever saw after that night. And it was quiet and still, just like Nicholas had said. And the food got worse. MREs. Those fucking field rations we got in
When Gabriel brought us ours one day, I spoke up. “What gives,” I said. “Why are we getting this shit?”
“You’re lucky,” he said. “You two each get two.” This last part, he whispered. By the time he said the word “two,” he was only mouthing it. His eyes were wide and intense and told us to keep the secret. He was wearing jeans and a gray t-shirt. All three gaurds had stopped wearing their uniforms.
page 2
0 comments:
Post a Comment