The object he’s bashing against brick is his own skull, and with each horrible thwack, with each fist-in-chopped-meat sound comes a spray of blood, each varying in size based on how hard he’s rammed his own skull into the wall.
And with each thud is a cry from him, a tortured war cry, a frustrated gasp of unreality.
Thud. The blows grow weaker. He spreads his palms against the brick and leans slightly forward, obviously supporting his own weight.
Thwack. Followed by scream. He seems to be trying harder now, hitting harder. This last attempt makes him stagger back. You see his face clearly: the lines of blood streaming from his hairline, the fissure in his forehead. He smiles at you but you realize it’s not at all a smile, just a grimace, a rictus of despair. You suppose it was possible that teeth had once settled somewhere in that grin. Now all that remained were cracked and jagged stumps imbedded along the gum line.
Stop, someone yells and you realize it’s you. For the love of god please stop and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t even look in your direction. Why, it’s as if he can’t even hear you.
He drags himself back to the wall and begins again his assault. One more smash is all it should take, you figure, if it’s a good one. And it is.
Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because of Thy … because of … punishment. Something about punishment.
And you can’t remember the rest because it’s been years and years since you even remembered the prayer exists, never mind recited it. Doesn’t matter. God knows what you want. God knows what you mean. He will hear you. He has to because otherwise you’re going to lose your mind. Literally. But then you think, no, not literally, what’s that called? Because anything is better than this, any thought, any possible mental distraction, so you begin.
The people surrounding you never answer your questions, never acknowledge you’re in the same predicament they’re in. At least you think that’s the case, because you’re pretty damn sure you have lost your voice. Could be your hearing of course, but it’s not. You’ve heard sighs. You hear breathing. Gasping. Farting. The soft nuances of everyday life. What you don’t hear is your own voice.
Doesn’t matter. You don’t feel like talking anyway. You sit on the cement floor and ignore your roommate, who is asleep. So you’re not really ignoring him, though you would be if he ever woke up. He sleeps through everything. He slept through the other guy’s suicide. Hell, your cellmate will probably be the next one picked off.
Suicide Guy seems dead anyway. You can’t see his chest moving any more. But you also can’t see his face and don’t know if his eyes are open or shut. Not that it matters, really. The dead’s eyes can be open or shut, so it’s not like that can be a good indicator. Of course if he never gets off the floor again … well, there’s your indicator.
And you remark at the marvel that is the human brain. At its defense mechanism. The insane bits of nonsense flooding in and out of your mind since this all began … when? God only knows. You think days but can’t guess at a number. Okay, so if someone held a gun to your face you’d guess nine. Seven. No, wait. Six. You remember the light outside the high barred windows changing six times. So barring inclement weather and a solar eclipse, you’ve been imprisoned six days.
You’ve seen three people dragged out against their will. You assumed those were the terms since they were clutching the bars and screaming voicelessly the word no as they were being dragged by their ankles by two hooded figures who looked like the negative of a KKK photo. Big guys, wielding blackjacks and using them without hesitation or conscience. Just the one time though. After that it was no longer necessary. After that, everyone complied.
So are you next?
And yeah, so you prayed, but what did you pray for? For someone to rescue you? Or did you pray for forgiveness, knowing deep down The End is Near, that it’s inevitable, that these cloaked figures have become judge, jury and executioner and you’re just an unwilling and unwitting participant?
You think about your wife, and whether she’ll ever know what became of you. Whether she’ll miss you, and wish you were there to help raise your two sons. You have your doubts. Not that she would wish a horrible end for you, she’s just not that sadistic, though you were never her favorite person.
Sleep, you hear. Sleep, sleep, sleep and sometimes it’s in your head. Today it’s not. Today it’s an encouraging voice, piped in through a loudspeaker maybe. Everyone around you is asleep, or struggling not to be. Your eyes twitch and burn and sting and you want to gouge them out of your head. Because when you succumb to sleep, they cart you off. And you never return. Simple. And before you entertain the notion these people are being brought someplace better, you remember the screams. The agonized cries, the howls through echo chambers. And you remember you haven’t exactly been given creature comforts since you began your little stay with your unknown hosts. Chances of being given better accommodations as a follow-up to this seem daunting at best.
You also remember why you think you’re here … and feel maybe this isn’t so unjust after all.
But if only you could stay awake forever. This isn’t such a terrible existence, you believe. You could do this. You could adjust. Of course you have to stay awake. Somehow awake. You wonder, if given a sharp knife, if you could bring yourself to slice off your own eyelids. To stay awake? You think maybe you could.
You drift off and dream about your boys. REM sleep comes within seconds, destroys that waking barrier, you think, as you always think when sleep finally takes over, if for a handful of fleeting seconds. You sleep standing, you sleep kneeling, you sleep flat on your back. It doesn’t matter because your mind makes you sleep, even if only in snatches. Ten second periods. Doesn’t matter because your mind makes it happen. You slept once while exercising. Amazing what the brain is capable of.
So you dream of your boys and you think, it’s not so bad, they’ll be okay and know they’re better off without you, so much better off, at least now they’ll have a chance in life, a chance you could never give them. A chance they would never have if you were still in the picture.
You wake standing, leaning against a wall. Two have disappeared and two new victims are in their place. The new ones make the same mistake you all did: they try to talk. They discover they can’t. It’s not as if you can’t make any noise, because you can—grunts and moans, and certainly tortured screams, as you’ve heard countless times, but words fail you. Words fail them as well, words fail everyone. But the newcomers try anyway, screaming and crying past various stages of red until they start turning blue or green and shut up once and for all once they realize the futility.
You see them staring at you imploringly but you quickly look away. No sense in making eye contact because you can’t speak. Wasted effort is what it is, and an exercise in frustration.
You haven’t been here long but feel like an old pro. Too bad. It’s one thing you’d rather not excel at.
Suicide Guy’s body is gone. You assume he was a Suicide Guy, though it’s not like you got to check him for a pulse. Doesn’t matter. His death, like his life, meant nothing to you. One fewer person to wonder about, that was all. His being there and his disappearance were of equal value to you: none. He didn’t affect the food supply, didn’t change whether you slept or not, didn’t—couldn’t—hold a conversation with you. Gone now. It was like he’d never existed. And it had never mattered anyway whether he did or didn’t exist.
You wonder what they did—the nameless, voiceless victims. Funny that you chose the word victim. You wonder if this is how you see yourself, how you can justify that title for yourself after all you’ve done in your life. But what is a victim, really, but someone at the mercy of someone else? And this is what you are—your fate now rests with an unseen captor, an unknown jailor. So you’re reduced to victim, and you hate it. Hate the helplessness, hate not having control of your life. You could even face your own death if you had some control over it. But this? This ma
kes you feel weak, impotent. This makes you a victim, no doubt. This makes you one of them. Something you’d created, not something you were. This makes you the lowest life form.
You look at the woman in the cell closest to yours. She’s around your age, you guess. Thirty-something. You spend a few minutes trying to narrow down the years because there’s fuck all else to do. Short brown hair. You think. Maybe once blond, before captivity and lack of bathing. Clothes torn, shredded in places, bloody in others. Gashes everywhere skin is exposed. She fits right in around here. One of the guys. She’s attractive but you don’t want to fuck her. You don’t want to fuck anyone. Not anymore. It’s not like they’ve taken your dick but they might as well have. You know if you were home right now you’d have to have surgery on that ruptured testicle. A hard-on brings pain now so you’ve trained yourself to stop having them. Life keeps getting better.
The woman across from you offers nothing more than a momentary diversion that you happily accept. Breaks the monotony. She doesn’t seem to care you’re staring. In fact, she doesn’t seem to care about much of anything. She stares off into space, as if concentrating hard on air molecules. Because even though she’s staring intently at you, it’s obvious she isn’t seeing you at all. She looks shell shocked. You’re not at all surprised. You do wonder what she’s done. Why she’s here.
You’re running out of thoughts, distractions. Running out of ways to stay awake, because your mind wants to shut down, begs you for sleep. It doesn’t understand why you keep saying no. Why you won’t allow the slightest respite. Just … close your eyes, your mind implores, it’ll feel so good … just ten seconds, maybe thirty. It can’t hurt, right? What could possibly happen in thirty seconds?
Water has been brought in but somehow you missed that as well. You miss everything. One second after you blink everything has changed. So maybe your sleep theory is wrong. Maybe they don’t drag away the sleepers. How the hell would you know, anyway, since you keep missing it all? But you decide it’s not worth risking your life to test your theory. You decide to stay awake, and not play with your theories. Your best guess has been right so far. If it ain’t broke and all that.
You drink the water because unlike sleep, you have no choice. You wonder if the water’s been drugged because now you’re even more tired. Probably not, though. It’s not like you’re out cold. Just sleepier. So maybe they drug you slightly, or maybe you’re just getting more paranoid in your exhaustion.
The woman across from you has woken from her semi-comatose state and warbles at you. Hands stretched imploringly through the bars. She throws her head back and screams, screams until her body shakes, until she drops to her knees. When she glances at you again her face is wet with tears. She looks at you with what you believe is contempt, as if she somehow blames you for her latest station in life. As if you, a fellow prisoner, have any control over what happens to her. The idiot. Anger you can understand. Misplaced blame just pisses you off.
She opens her mouth, wide, to yell some more you think, yell even louder if that’s at all possible, and you see the big empty space where her tongue had once been housed. With some it’s tongue, with others larynx, and if nothing has been removed then something caustic had been poured down the throat. Like your throat.
What? you want to say. You mouth the word. She scowls, turns away. You shrug, although that anger is building again and you’d like to slap her, hard. Across the face probably. In the back of the head would be satisfying too.
You walk away. Well that was exciting. You again wonder what she’s done, why she’s being judged. It makes for an interesting game, a diversion at least. Thirty seconds more killed in the barren wasteland of boredom, of dead brain cells. Dead because they probably committed suicide in the name of ennui.
“Ung ing,” she says slowly, and you look up, sharp, suddenly interested. A poor excuse for a word, sure, but a word nonetheless. You wonder what that word had been. Ung ing? Hunger? Onion? You doubt she’s saying onion.
You shrug. You have no voice. You have a tongue but no ability to speak. You believe this anyway because absolutely no sound escapes your mouth. When you swallow you still hear little clicking noises inside your head. But you can’t hear the sound of your own whimpering and crying. You can’t hear your own screams, because they are truly soundless. It’s the most desolate sound in the universe.
“Unging,” she says more urgently, pointing at you. You try to read her body language, and her lips. “Ung-iiiiing,” she says, “fawww … oooooh!”
Now you study her mouth and it looks very much like she’s saying coming for you and you step back, step away from her, from the bars.
She smiles then, and her smile chills you, makes you want to shriek your silent screams. A smile practiced in the art of deception and hate. A smile meaning anything but happiness. You believe she’s insane: truly, clinically, bat-shittily insane. Then she laughs again, and wanders away, moves to the other end of her tiny cell.
You lay on the cement floor, beside your cellmate. His chest rises and falls so you know he hasn’t died yet, and you wonder how he could possibly sleep through this. Then you envy him that he can. It’s not about the ability, not even about the desire, it’s about the act of submissiveness, about the ability to succumb to the true desires of the body. Something as simple as the want to sleep, and the mind’s ability to accept this, and to give in. No matter the cost.
And you think, I’d give anything to sleep like that and suddenly realize you can. Nothing stopping you but you. And the fear of closing your eyes. The fear of death. You know—the little things. So sure, go ahead, you can sleep … you know you want to. But you also know it may be the last time you do. It will probably be the last time you get to do anything.
They’re coming, you think, knowing on some level it’s true. You’ve witnessed everyone around you disappear, watched them end up replaced by new faces, new expressions of fear, regret, horror, and you so far have not been one of the ones chosen. Everyone else has come and gone, gone to oblivion, gone to face judgment, gone to face his own reality. You wonder again why you haven’t been chosen, feel almost upset you’ve been excluded and decide it’s the exhaustion making these irrational little twinges of jealousy. Jealous of what? That you haven’t yet been dragged away kicking and passing for your own version of the silent scream? Going to face your punishment? Going to face agony and torture?
Going to face … whatever? But yes. It is time to face it. Time to deal with whatever it is you’re meant to deal with. Time to stop being a goddamned coward.
So you close your eyes and know sleep will come easily. It’s been searching the darkness for you.
You open your eyes and wonder if you’ve slept, although it doesn’t feel as if you have. Somehow you feel different, those subtle nuances only you can detect, tiny changes in your patterns or biorhythms or brain waves, who knows? but it knows the changes, that body or brain of yours. But not this time, not really. Maybe some tiny difference. But nothing has changed, not around you anyway. Not the placement of the light in the room—that same sallow fakey light that is supposed to be sunlight but feels more like fluorescence. That energy- and vitamin-sapping pretend light. Even though it’s coming from outside, from the sky, you suppose, it doesn’t seem right. Doesn’t seem real. But whatever the source, the light remains unchanged.
And you wonder for the first time if you’re losing your mind. Or if you’ve already lost it. Anything is possible, no? You consider the possibility you’re in a coma, or an asylum, withdrawn into some form of catatonia. Hell, those are as good as any other explanation. More likely, in fact. So maybe those people around you represent people or events in your life. Maybe Suicide Guy was supposed to have been you, during your Dark period. Hell, Cézanne had one. Van Gogh. Why not you?
Because you didn’t, and you know it. Nothing remotely interesting happened in your life. You had a crap wife, a crap job, crap kids. You smoked too much and drank too much and watched football to
o much and you were Mr. Whitebread America.
Okay, maybe not all that whitebread. What is it people say? Everyone has two faces—isn’t that it? So yeah, on the surface you rooted Mets and Jets and took the kids to the park and drove the wife to the mall on weekends to escape the monotony of city living. This is what people see when they look at you.
Good job.
This is why you play the game you do, guessing why everyone else is here. It’s not just about the monotony, it’s about the curiosity. What are they hiding? you wonder. And: Is their secret worse than yours?
Maybe not worse, but secrets just the same. Do they wake up screaming in the middle of the night, drenched in the sweat of their night terrors? Terrors of their own making, you consider bitterly. Their own damn fault you decide, feeling no empathy, choosing instead to feel pain for their unknown victims. Once again you find yourself siding with the victim, despite a lifetime of what some might consider sadism. It’s like being reborn, like finding God but late in life this time, almost too late but just almost, because there is no deadline, now is there? No statute of limitations, just you seeing the Path of Righteousness, just you finding The Way, only instead of God it’s Victims, those stupid masochistic lambs to the slaughter. Only this time you empathize because you can identify. This time you know how it feels, the abuse, and you want to be accepted as one of Them. And there’s there rub, isn’t it? You’re ready to be accepted—but are they willing to accept you? Are you truly one of Them? How much of a Victim are you, really? Do you even have the right to be empathetic?
As you consider this you close your eyes, again wait for sleep that refuses you. You would scream in anger and frustration if you could, but what good would it do anyway? Your eyes refuse to stay closed. It’s as if they know better; maybe they’re protecting you from sleep, from what they believe will result in your death. After all, it’s what you believed just a few short hours ago, so why should they believe any differently? It’s for your own good! they would tell you if they had a voice. And haven’t you given them one after all? They have as much a voice as the rest of you.
In The End, Only Darkness Page 19
