Palindrome

by E. Z. Rinsky

  We go around the beige, stucco exterior of Sachar. Looks so innocuous from the outside. Could easily be a shitty public library or insurance office. Across endless acres of flat, tired grass rises the old factory, which now houses the Category One dormitory. I can also make out the admissions center, where Harrison works, and what I think is the front gate. Without a golf cart, it’s a pretty long walk. Especially with a bleeding ankle.

  Front doors of Sachar. Unquestionably cameras on us now.

  As if reading my mind, Courtney mutters, “Just relax, Frank. With a little luck, they’ll never even have reason to review any footage.”

  I grip the ID card around my neck. There’s the little magnetized black square to the left of the reinforced glass doors. I bend over and extend the card like I saw Dennis and Luke do for each of the doors inside. Moment of truth. When it beeps and I hear the lock click, my breathing speeds up again. We’re going for it.

  I exchange a look with Courtney as I pull open the heavy door and step inside, adrenaline firing like a drum circle in my brain. Court’s mouth is closed; he’s breathing loudly through his thin nose.

  We’re in the same bland, green-­tiled entranceway we stood in a few days ago, but it feels distinctly different this time. I’m more cognizant of how many murderers and rapists we’re sharing this building with.

  Courtney points his long chin, this way.

  Down a silent corridor illuminated by caged-­in fluorescent tube lights, past those dozens of blue doors.

  They can’t hurt you through those doors, Frank.

  Turn a corner. Another identical hall with more identical fluorescent lights and identical blue metal doors. Pain and fear seem to be heightening my senses, making time move slowly and each square inch of linoleum appear in high-­res.

  “You remember how to get upstairs?” I whisper.

  Courtney doesn’t respond, just plows ahead with the purpose of a man possessed. I try to keep up with him. Try to ignore the pain in my ankle and the pulsing fire in my stomach. Turn another corner that I don’t remember from last time. Think about my ceramic knife in my backpack, think about how quickly I could have it out if one of these—­

  I jump out of my skin as a sudden pounding from one of the doors snaps the quiet. It’s the same guy from a few days ago, face smushed against the window of his cell, white of his eye as big as a silver dollar and flat against the glass, throbbing red veins, staring at me.

  Courtney snatches my elbow and jerks me along.

  “We don’t know how much time we have,” he whispers. “My guess is staff shows up at nine, but who knows.”

  Half tripping over each other, we jog down the hallway. I’m keeping my eyes straight ahead, ignoring looks or sounds coming from the cells. Ignoring the fragrance of the distinctly institutional cocktail of high-­potency cleaning products, very nearly disguising the smells of bodily fluids, rotting food, and man—­which will never leave these hallways no matter how long you scrub.

  I’m leaving a faint stream of blood; a drop every ­couple feet, like I’ve got a light bloody nose I’m not bothering to tend to. Make the mistake of glancing over my shoulder to see the shimmering trail of dried blood leading down the hallway and around the corner, a breadcrumb trail in case we need to retrace our steps.

  I rip the ID card off my necklace as we approach the door at the end of the hallway. Clicks open, and we’re climbing a metal staircase. I’m pretty sure it’s the same one Dennis and Luke carried us down, but in truth it’s really only notable for its complete lack of distinguishing characteristics.

  Clank up the stairs, trying to keep close to Courtney. And at the top, I buzz us through another door. This feels half familiar, like I’ve only seen this place in bad dreams. We’re into the top level.

  “This is right.” Courtney pauses to catch his breath, bends over and rests his hands on his knees. “Employee lounge area.”

  No windows. Beige wall-­to-­wall carpeting and a collection of heavy blue metal doors, differing from their counterparts downstairs only by their lack of reinforced glass slits.

  I’m moving from door to door, looking for Dr. Nancy’s office. Courtney finds it before me and calls out softly. I limp over, leaving a thin blood trail on the carpet, holding the ID card out in front of me like a torch, warding off the evil darkness that’s palpable in this place, even so early in the morning.

  Courtney holds up a finger to me: wait. He raps gently against the door. My heart jumps to my throat. Didn’t even consider that she might be in there. He raps again. Nothing. Now he gestures to the black square. I click my card against it and wait for the beep that never comes. The little light turns red instead of green. I try again. Same fucking deal.

  “Shit,” I whisper.

  Courtney’s eyes are wide, unblinking, staring in disbelief at the mocking red light.

  “Let’s just go for Silas,” I say.

  “We really need that file,” Courtney whispers. “Five years of observation. Could be invaluable. What if he mentioned the tape?”

  I close my eyes hard, not even sure what I want anymore. No, I know what I want. I want to be with Sadie. That’s making this job even harder than it has to be; not being able to unwind with her at night, recover partially from the day stomping on me, grinding me down like a cockroach under its heel.

  When I open my eyes, Courtney is kneeling to inspect the lock. This isn’t like the cell doors, which only open via key card. This one also has a metal handle and a spot for a real key.

  “It’s just a big old dead bolt. I can open this.”

  I kneel beside him. He hands me a penlight from his bag. I squint into the keyhole. It’s big, but simple. Standard issue.

  “Go for it, boss.”

  Courtney slaps on a stethoscope and carefully chooses three picks the size of needles from his red bag. He places the chest piece just below the knob, like he’s listening for the door’s arrhythmia. Inserts the first needle carefully into the keyhole, eyes closed in intense concentration, fingers moving with surgical precision.

  I sit down on the carpet and look at my ankle wrapped in a bloody T-­shirt. It’s not really bleeding anymore, but I’m going to need to sterilize the hell out of this thing as soon as possible. I roll the leg of my scrubs back down so I don’t have to look at my wound. Grit my teeth as I watch Courtney, thinking that if I hadn’t asked him to help on this case, I probably would have never gotten near this place. Probably would have packed it in after the cabin. Probably would be back taking pictures of adulterers by now. Definitely wouldn’t have gotten the shit kicked out of me or gotten my ankle gashed by rusty barbed wire.

  It could all be for naught, but that’s not what my gut is telling me anymore. There’s something Greta isn’t telling us, some further reason she’s so sure this thing exists. Otherwise why would she risk throwing away fifteen grand in up front and expenses?

  Courtney takes off his stethoscope.

  “Frank,” he whispers. “This is gonna take me a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Twenty, twenty-­five minutes. There’s a magnetic tumbler I didn’t notice. Very tricky.”

  I bite my lip. “We can’t wait that long.”

  Courtney’s eyes are like a raccoon’s caught rummaging through the trash. “We gotta have those files,” he says.

  I breathe in deep. Stare at the door.

  “I can get in,” I say. “But they’ll know we were here.”

  The terror of indecision flashes on Courtney’s face. He reflexively moves his hand to tug on the billy-­goat chin hairs he had to shave off for our disguises. Then he says, “Do it.”

  I pull myself to my feet and open Courtney’s bag. Remove the minidrill he used on the brick wall, his hammer, and my ceramic knife. From my bag I take my propylene hand torch. Perhaps my favorite tool. It gets so hot that it could probably just
cut through the door alone, but the smoke would set off the fire alarm.

  Courtney grimaces at my crude instruments.

  “Two minutes,” I promise.

  First I turn the torch on the keyhole, hold it for forty-­five seconds until the metal starts glowing orange. Drop the torch and drill the lock while it’s still soft from the heat, savoring the satisfying feel of the hammers being mangled. Courtney winces from the high-­pitched whine the drill emits, but it’s over quickly. Then I stick my knife in what’s left of the keyhole and bash the hilt with the hammer. Once it’s in I jiggle it until the door glides open.

  The keyhole is totally mangled; they’ll definitely review video footage now. But we’ll worry about that later.

  I follow Courtney into the office. I check my watch: 8:02.

  In an instant, Courtney is at Dr. Nancy’s file cabinet, furiously combing through paperwork. Psychiatrists and PIs, in my experience, seem to be the two types of professionals who resist technology the most adamantly, hold out the longest. Is it because we prefer the personal scrape of pen on paper, of seeing our notes in our own handwriting? Or because we’ve seen so much humanity in our work that we’ve become skeptical and paranoid, unwilling to share our thoughts even with a machine?

  I stare at Dr. Nancy’s pictures of landscapes. Today, rather than calming me, they serve only to remind me of how many other places I’d prefer to be at this exact moment. Between the pain and maybe getting a little light-­headed from blood loss, I start losing myself in a portrait of a tropical beach: electric-­blue water licking white sand, palm trees arching in the distance.

  “Got it,” Courtney declares, frowning, and slams Silas’s folder down on Dr. Nancy’s desk. I turn to watch him pull a spy camera from his red bag and—­in a well-­rehearsed motion—­flip from page to page, photographing each one in half a second without even looking through the lens. Dr. Nancy’s handwriting is messy. That’s going to be a pain in the ass. When he gets through all hundred-­odd pages, he flips back to the front. Beckons me over.

  There’s what looks like a typed patient dossier tucked in the front of the folder. Birthdate, weight, height. A black-­and-­white mug shot of a man I vaguely recognize from the video Courtney showed me. Courtney’s index finger settles under a paper-­clipped half page that seems to be a kind of summary.

  Updated 4/11/12

  Steady symptoms of manic depression; delusional and paranoid schizophrenia, symptoms manifest more severely and frequently when in company of other patients. Recommend continued exemption from group activities, including recess and group meals; meals to be delivered to cell. Additional one-­on-­one session per week recommended, to replace group session. Current medications: 1500 mg Lithium Carbonate, 20 mg Haldol daily—­

  Courtney’s dirty fingernail stops dead:

  Recommend continued residency in Western Sachar wing, for increased quiet, isolation, and sunlight.

  “Western wing,” he muses, looking at me with his slightly inset green-­grey eyes. He licks his dry lips. “That can’t be where we were before. Those halls ran along the east and north sides of the building, I think.”

  He shoves all the papers back in the folder and crams it back into its place in the filing cabinet. We’re out of Dr. Nancy’s office, back in the hallway of the employee lounge area, and I close the door behind us.

  “Which way is west?” he whispers to himself.

  I duck back into Dr. Nancy’s office to check the direction of the sun, emerge and lead Courtney to a door across from where we entered via the metal staircase.

  Courtney raises an eyebrow.

  “You sure?” he asks warily.

  “Sun rises in the east, right?”

  Courtney scrunches his forehead.

  “I can never remember,” he says.

  “I’m like eighty-­five percent.”

  I beep my key card on the western door, and my heart sinks with dread as it clicks open. We enter another stairwell that looks exactly the same as the one across the hall. At the bottom of the single flight of stairs though is a sign that reads Western Wing. I click my card, and we enter.

  The Western Wing could be described, very roughly, as the penthouse suites of Sachar. There’s no hallway. Just a central, circular room the size of my apartment. There’s no second floor built over this wing, as evidenced by a circular skylight, which is truly a huge upgrade over the flickering fluorescents of the other halls. Brown-­stained linoleum floor.

  Six blue doors: the one we entered through and five cells. I check my watch: 8:12. The chamber glows purple under the light of the late January morning that’s creeping in through the skylight. Courtney and I move wordlessly around the circular chamber, from one door to the next, peering through the reinforced glass slits, looking for our man. These rooms all have small windows looking out onto the Sachar fields. The view of brick, grass, and chain-­link fencing isn’t much, but I imagine it makes a huge difference in mental health to wake up with the sun.

  Because of the windows, there’s enough light to see them in their beds. They’re all still sleeping. Two have blond hair; can’t be him. One is way too fat. That leaves two, one of whom is black. The other has the sheet pulled over his head, so we can’t see his face, but it’s gotta be him. I pull the ID card out of my pocket and press it against the black square. Green light and click.

  Courtney and I look at each other for a long moment. His high forehead is creased, and he’s frowning in nervous anticipation.

  “You go first,” he says. I notice that his hands are trembling.

  I swallow and nod, pushing the door open gently. The figure under the sheets doesn’t move.

  I peer in cautiously. The room is about ten or eleven feet square. Contents are limited to the knee-­high cot on which he’s sleeping, a wooden footlocker, a metal chair that’s bolted to the metal floor, and a little stainless-­steel protrusion from the wall, which it takes me a moment to identify as a toilet. A few of the other inmates had posters or magazine clippings taped to the wall. Silas has nothing.

  Through the window by the head of the bed I can see an empty basketball court beneath a grey sky. I flick on the lone switch beside the doorway, and my eyes adjust to the harsh light provided by the bulb hanging from the ceiling, protected by a mesh cage that presumably prevents patients from smashing it and using the glass as a weapon.

  Courtney cautiously enters behind me and sets his pack down to keep the door propped open. We both stare at the lump hidden by the cot’s thin green sheet. No snoring. No breathing. Courtney points to me: This is all you.

  “Silas,” I say softly.

  Immediately the sheet flies off, and my chest constricts. Staring up at us from the cot is something barely recognizable as human; an emaciated face with sunken cheekbones sits upon a withering skeleton shrouded in hospital whites. The only relation this pitiful specimen bears to the newspaper clippings in Greta’s folder and the cell-­phone video is the tattoos.

  I can’t stop staring at them.

  They’re much brighter and more intricate than I’d imagined; wild swirls of deep reds, royal purples and stretches of black as dark as coal cover every surface of his face and bare scalp. Most of them are faces, I realize. Faces etched into skin. Though most prominent is a tattoo wrapped around the circumference of his bare head. A dark black, sinewy line. Two snakes, one eating the other’s tail in the center of his forehead. Or is it one snake that wraps all the way around and is consuming itself?

  Silas’s little black eyes are fixed on Courtney and me. His body is rigid, like a rat frozen by a streetlight. I take a step toward him, and he just keeps staring at us, his face stone, impossible to decipher. I sit down on top of the footlocker and gesture to Courtney to sit in the lone chair behind me.

  It’s hard to picture this scrawny creature in the cabin basement wrapping a plastic bag around Savannah Kante
r’s head. He still hasn’t budged.

  I lean in and say again, “Silas—­”

  He jerks away from me, pins himself against the wall and bares his teeth, breathing hard. His fingernails are long and yellow, his teeth brown and dry. His eyes are tiny holes, sunken craters in the colorful maze painted on his face.

  “Who are you?” he rasps. His voice is dry and hoarse.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “Who sent you?” he croaks, his lips quivering.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” I assure him, but this appears to provide him little comfort.

  “Demons,” he whispers to himself and brings his left hand to his mouth to chew on the tips of his fingernails. His hands are red and peeling from eczema.

  Courtney and I exchange a quick look.

  “Silas,” I try again. “We need your help. We’re looking for something.”

  “Who sent you?” he asks again. “Who sent you?”

  “We’re looking for a tape,” I say.

  His eyes widen in fear, and he appears to stop breathing for a moment.

  “I don’t have it!” he finally whispers. “I told you I don’t have it! Leave me, demons. Leave me be!”

  Then he drops back into a fetal position on his cot, throws the green sheet over his head. Cries over and over, “Leave me be!”

  I look over my shoulder at Courtney, who still appears to be shocked by Silas’s appearance.

  Turning back to the lump on the bed, I wring my hands. It’s clear I won’t be able to beat anything out of this specimen. He’s too far gone, wires completely fried. No way I’ll be able to frighten him as much as whatever’s inside his head. Similarly, logical reasoning is probably off the table. And interrogation without using fear or reasoning is like golfing without arms. How do I approach this?