by Torsten Krol
He looked at me a long time, so long I’m thinking he’s turning it over in his mind and slowly accepting it because for me to be saying this now doesn’t make any kind of sense unless it’s true, which it is. Then he says, “You worked all that out, did you? Made a little speech about truth, very sincere, very direct. You want me to believe you because you’re actually telling me the actual truth, is that the message here?”
“Yes.”
He smiled at me. So his carved rock face can change after all. It was a terrible smile, like when a crocodile opens its jaws. “I don’t buy it,” he said, and that’s when I knew Pitface is another crazy person like Lieutenant Harding. And I knew that everything I was not looking forward to, the big dark monster, it would be worse even than I figured it will be. That was a bad feeling when I knew that. But I didn’t let him see, because what would be the point? I already let him see me tell him the absolute truth and he let it bounce off his rock face like a blind man. My truth was not his truth. You would think that the truth is the truth, like a broom is a broom. Two men could stand either side of a broom and agree it’s a broom because there it is – a broom. But the broom I’m looking at isn’t what Pitface sees. He sees a garbage can instead. And there is nothing I can do about this, which is the really bad part.
He says, “I’ll be waiting for you.”
He went away down the corridor towards the romper room. I had to take a bunch of deep breaths then because I knew in a few minutes I will have pain shoved down my throat like a fist and I better be ready, which I was not, even if I had been trying real hard all afternoon. When Fogler come along with the handcuffs and two soldiers with sidearms it was almost a relief to have the waiting over with and the pain get started.
This time the two boxers are already waiting in the room along with Pitface. I didn’t see them walk past my cell so this place is bigger than I thought, with other entrances than the one I saw when I got delivered. It makes no difference to me how big. There are only two rooms in this entire building that matter – my cell and the romper room. I was expecting to be sat on the chair again but Fogler says, “This time it’s more interesting than before. This time you get to move around and defend yourself. You know how to do that, Doofus?”
What he said made me feel a little better. This time I could fight back, I thought, and even if I’m not much of a fighter I’m big and can maybe land a few lucky punches before Lyden and Croft tear me apart between them. But that was not what Fogler meant. This is what happened. He left me with my wrists handcuffed behind me, then he put a black bag over my head. I hated that, hated that black bag the second it cut me off from the room, from everything. There is nothing worse than a black bag over your head.
Then they started punching me. They could punch me wherever they wanted, whenever they liked. They liked the kidney punches they couldn’t do this morning, but they also liked a head punch or a belly punch in between. I staggered around the romper room, not knowing what kind of punch was coming at me next, or from what direction, only knowing there’s plenty more on the way. Sometimes I hit the wall with my shoulder I’m lurching around so bad, and one time with the side of my head, which I fell down when that happened and they backed off until I’m on my feet again. I was grateful to them for backing off and not kicking me when I’m down, isn’t that strange, really grateful for that little piece of mercy before they started in again.
They were not pulling their punches because I can hear them puffing and panting through the bag, in between my own puffing and panting. It’s hard to breathe inside a bag, and I passed out once I think from lack of oxygen inside there. They backed off like the last time until I can get on my feet again, only this time I’m not feeling grateful about that. I’m not feeling anything that you could call an emotion or whatever, just concentrating now on getting enough air into my mouth inside that bag to keep on going in circles like a punching bag on legs. That’s what I am now, not a man anymore, not to them, just a thing to be hit over and over till I break.
When I went down the third time it felt like I’m drowning because I just cannot get enough air inside of me to keep alive. Then this voice says in my ear, so he’s bending over me on the floor there, he says to me, “All this can stop. Tell me the truth. Make it stop.” His cigarette breath come to me even through the bag, that’s how bad it is. There’s nothing I can say to him because I already said everything there is to say about what he wants to know. I just sucked air inside myself while I’m in between punches on the floor, taking advantage you might say, but pretending to be thinking about his offer, which is no kind of offer at all on account of his craziness.
I didn’t want to get up again and be punched some more so I laid there long as I could until Pitface saw what I’m doing and had them haul me up onto my feet again, and now the real beating started. Lyden and Croft, they got their second wind while I’m on the floor and now they’re mad at me because I won’t talk. I could tell they’re mad because the punches were harder than before, I mean they really put theirselfs behind every punch, put all their strength into it now to make me speak the truth, and there is nothing I can do except take it because I already know the truth will never save me from a damn thing.
The one thought running through my mind is this – sooner or later this will end. I just had to keep on getting punched until Lyden and Croft got all punched out and hope there isn’t a second punching team waiting outside all fresh and vigorated and ready to hammer me into the ground then stomp on me awhile. If a second team come in I knew I would come real close to wanting to die, that’s how bad I’m feeling by then.
Finally I slammed into the wall spinning away from a punch to the neck, slammed into it hard with my forehead and like they say, I saw stars for a second, then I’m on the floor again, only this time I would not get up. If they picked me up like before I would pretend to be unconscious and crumple down again. I have just had enough, enough, enough of this now. “Put him to bed,” says Pitface, and again, that strange gratefulness come over me. I should hate him for causing me all this pain, but what I really am is grateful that he’s ending it. That is so fucked up I can hardly believe myself.
I got picked up and carried to my cell. They dropped me on the bunk, took off the handcuffs and left. When their footsteps went away I lifted my hands to my head, which is still inside the bag, and felt my face, all swole up and in a few hours it’ll be even bigger, that’s how it goes with bruising like I have got. Then I pulled the bag off real slow because it hurts to move at all, even for something so simple as pulling the bag off. The air felt cool and good. I let the bag fall on the floor and stared a long while at the ceiling which is painted white. Then I moved my head a little and saw that Pitface is standing by the bars. He’s been standing there all the time since they brung me back in here, just watching me.
“I knew you were playing possum,” he tells me. “I gave you a break.”
It’s like he wants to hear me say Thank you or something. I stared at him then turned away because I can’t stand to look at this man.
“You think I’m a prick,” he says, “but I have to do this. People need to be protected from your kind. That’s my job – protection. I do my job and people don’t get blown away by crazies. You have to know that I’ll keep on doing my job until you crack. You were a pussy the first time, not so bad the second. You’re learning to tough it out. That makes me sad, because no matter how tough you are, I’ll break you. I’ve been through this plenty of times, here and other places. The end result is always the same – the guy breaks and tells us what we need to know. And if he doesn’t know anything, which isn’t the case here, he breaks anyway, and he stays broken. I know this. A broken man, that’s a sad sight, especially if he didn’t know anything. But we have to do this regardless, to be sure. When we’re sure, whichever way it’s gone, we stop. But the guy is broken anyway and stays that way. He stays that way forever. He’s not himself anymore, he’s some broken guy that just wants to find a h
ole in the ground and crawl inside and die. That’s what happens. You can’t change it. I can’t change it. Nobody can change it. Tomorrow we’ll start again. You rest up and eat your dinner, it’ll be along pretty soon. There’s pie for dessert, with cream. I like that. Everyone likes that. But tomorrow you won’t want the pie, only the cream, because tomorrow you won’t have teeth.”
He went away but his words rolled around the cell a few times before trickling into my ear like drops of ice water. I believed him. I believed every word.
They brung me the dinner which is pizza from the commissary at the “main camp over the hill”, that’s how the guard explains it, and pie like Pitface said from the same place, so there has got to be a big camp over there for this to happen. Pizza in prison, hooda thunkit. There’s even a cardboard box to keep it warm like back home, only no Pizza Hut or Domino’s on it. Plenty of meat, plenty of cheese. Prison Pizza, that’s what should be on the box, delivered to your cell in five minutes or your money back. There was Coke too, and the pie was apple with cream like I was expecting. Eating all this slow because of my aching face I wondered how I’ll feel looking at the same stuff tomorrow with no teeth. Maybe Pitface just wanted to make me afraid. Well, it worked. I am afraid.
After I’m finished I sat on my bunk feeling all the bruises everywhere, too sore to get up and walk around in straight lines, I would’ve wobbled and gone curvaceous and got in trouble about that, so I just sat and tasted that last bit of pie taste in my mouth.
Then they come for me again and I got hauled to the romper room, feeling very bad because Pitface told me we’ll start again tomorrow, not tonight, so that was a lie to get me feeling like I’ve got time to get prepared for pain, which now I have not got, the lying shithead. I hate that guy. He was in there smoking another cigarette with no ashtray like before, and I only saw him for a second or two before they put my black bag on again and here comes the punching all over again, thump thump thumpthumpthump ...
Then one of them punched me real hard in the guts, and all that good food come up again and I barfed inside the bag, the entire meal. The smell was so bad it made me puke again till there’s nothing more to come up. They kept on hitting me all through this, so finally I went down on my knees and doubled over to make them quit for just a minute so I can get some air. But they were not inclined to give me that minute, not even five seconds. Soon as I’m down they started hammering at my back and kidneys hard as they can. The inside of the bag was coated with stinking puke that made me ashamed it come from inside of me, almost as bad as shit.
They hammered and hammered and all I can think about is breathing through my mouth so I don’t smell that awful smell, then I fell over completely and they backed off. Pitface come over and squats next to me. He says, “Where is Dean Lowry and who are his friends?” I couldn’t say anything, I already told him that, so maybe he wasn’t really expecting an answer, I don’t know. Then all of a sudden they’re going at me again on the ground, only now it’s boots not gloves, combat boots so these are not ballet shoes that keep thumping into my ribs and back and legs and arms. “Not the head,” Pitface tells them, and again I feel this awful gratefulness to him about that, which knowing this is not right to feel that way made me feel even badder than before.
Just for something to do, and maybe take my mind off of things, I started counting those kicks, for distraction you might say. When the number climbed past twenty, thirty, forty, I felt a kind of amazement that they could do that, kick a handcuffed and headbagged man forty-three, forty-four, forty-five times without stopping. These guys are dedicated to getting the truth out of me, all right. At kick number fifty-six Pitface says, “Enough,” only this time I’m so fazed by everything I can’t even feel grateful. I can’t hardly feel nothing at all.
They picked me up and carried me back to the cell and dumped me there, but this time they left the bag over my head and the handcuffs on so’s I can’t reach up and take it off. That awful puke stink got sucked into me every time I took a breath, which I took plenty because getting beat up like that leaves you exhausted. I bet Pitface knows this. I bet he knows every single way to make someone feel bad and he uses one way, then he uses another way, then another, kind of like choosing which gadget to put on your handydandy all-purpose kitchen power tool – the cutter, grinder, chopper or blender. Pitface is the Celebrity Chef of Pain. He is Dr Feelbad.
Before they left me alone Pitface says to me, “I can tell you’re depressed, Deefus, so I’ve arranged a little phone conversation for later. You’d like to hear the voice of your fiancée, wouldn’t you? I’m setting this up as a favor. Do you love her very much? Sure you do, so hearing her voice will cheer you up, I guarantee it.” I heard his footsteps go away and the cell door closed. I thought about talking to Lorraine and didn’t know what I could say to her, or her to me, not after she set me up with that phony breakout and was all along humping Cole Connors. If it’s true and we can talk on the phone like Pitface says, I’ll give her a piece of my mind about all of that. She needed talking to, that woman.
Maybe an hour went by with me breathing in the stink of my puke, then someone come in the cell and took off my handcuffs. I pulled off the bag and sucked in fresh air a minute or two. Out in the corridor they were setting something up on a little table but I didn’t want to know about that until I need to know, because I bet it’s something to make me feel like shit. Finally I looked over and what they have done is set up this laptop computer and right next to it a tape recorder, which did not make sense. How can they make me feel bad with these things?
Well, they showed me how after it all got switched on. The screen on the laptop has got me right there in a chair with some stuff tied around my chest and one of those blood pressure cuffs around my arm and some wires taped to my palm. It’s me in the police station in Callisto getting lie detected! I wondered if somehow Officer Larry Dayton has sold the tape to the government like he wanted to sell it to me. It isn’t the whole tape, they left out the part where Andy Webb screwed up the interview by butting in. This is just the part where I made myself mess up their lie-detector readout by thinking about Jody having to shoot his lovely pet yearling. They had it arranged in a loop, so all you see over and over is me blubbering like a big idiot, that’s how I looked even to myself.
But it got worse when they turned on the tape recorder. What come out of that is some pieces of conversation from the FBI bug they put in Lorraine’s phone. She wasn’t talking to me, she’s talking to Cole Connors about me. This is very painful, this part, because she’s telling him what a dumb bastard I am but okay to use for a prison guard. Then they started talking dirty, describing things they did last time and what they’ll do next time, including the Dark Deed whatever that is, but Cole knows what it is and he must like it because he goes, “Whoooohoooo, show me that thing!” This tape was looped also, playing over and over. What’s interesting is the way it seems like I’m listening to the tape on the computer screen and crying about it, blubbering away like a baby while Lorraine says that dirty stuff. I know Pitface set this up to make me feel bad, but he fucked up this time because watching myself cry about Lorraine did not hurt half so much as getting kicked and punched. It did hurt, but in a different way. I think this is supposed to be mental torture, not the physical kind, and I will take this any day of the week over what happens in the romper room, so this did not work like Pitface wanted, which made me feel good. Hah!
After awhile I didn’t hear the crying or the dirty talk anymore, just stared at the camera way up there on the wall and kind of drifted away inside my head, thinking about how I come to be here and how bad my luck is for that to happen without I intended it to, and how there’s more bad stuff waiting for me tomorrow, things like that. Then Fogler come along with this police type baton that he bangs on the bars real loud and says, “Doofus, you’re pissing me off. Every time I look at my monitor back there I see you looking straight at me. I don’t want to see you looking at me like that. It’s bad eno
ugh I got to look at you at all, I for sure don’t want you looking back at me that way. Take your eyes off the fuckin’ camera, okay? Do it now. You got your own TV entertainment center here so why keep looking at the camera. Doofus!”
I just plain ignored him and kept on looking at the camera. Well, that got Fogler mad. He says, “If you don’t quit looking at that camera I’m coming in there and I’m gonna fuck you over real good. Doofus, I mean it!”
I kept on staring at the camera, kind of enjoying it that I’ve made him mad. He won’t come in here, I’m thinking, he’s all talk. But then he’s opening the door and coming at me with that baton swinging back to take a crack at me. It seemed like it’s happening real slow, but my mind was working fast. Fogler, he must’ve forgot I don’t have the handcuffs on now, so when he got close enough I jumped up and grabbed his baton arm and twisted it back hard as I can till he dropped it. He sure was surprised about that. His face went all red and he opened his mouth to yell but I didn’t want that, didn’t want soldiers running in there to beat me up some more just because this asshole wanted to give me more pain outside of business hours to make himself feel good. So I socked him hard in the chin and his teeth clicked together, then while he’s still being surprised about everything I socked him again hard in the guts and the wind come out of him in a big whoosh.
I loved that sound, I really did. If I didn’t know he’s been emptied out I would’ve hit him again the same way to hear that sound again. But instead I pulled both his arms behind him and marched him over to the chemical toilet which I crapped in one time already plus a couple pisses since I got here and I forced his head down into that thing till he’s in up to his fucking neck and starting to kick and struggle to get free, but I’m in no mood now to let this prick out of my hands, nossir, I held his face in the shit another half-minute maybe then brung him out and run him across the cell and straight into the wall before he can even get his breath back. He hit hard and fell down like a sack of cement. That felt great, seeing him go down like that. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kick him and punch him and gouge his eyes out, I am not kidding. I know this is mental behavior but that is what happens when you get pushed too far like I have been today. But I had to smash something to stop myself killing Fogler, so what I did, I went out in the corridor and picked up that laptop computer and flung it the entire length of the corridor, which it fetched up against the door there and come apart very satisfying in a dozen pieces. No more cry-baby Deefus. Then I picked up the tape recorder and smashed it hard on the floor. No more dirty-talking Lorraine.
