Don’t get trapped! His father called to him through the cold. He squinted and looked into the shadows. How could he consider, even in this moment of delusion, crippled by fear and terror, a suggestion to turn back? The irony. Those who would find the body would write down in their notebooks that their investigation had shown he had eschewed the salvation of one prison while fleeing from another. He was hysterical in his panic for his life.
Adrenaline and hope and fear will only get you so far, but together these forces were enough to get him across the battlefield of blowing snow and frigid winds, and when he blinked again he was huddled up against the building and struggling to clear his brain enough to think of what to do now. His victories had come in steps. First he had made it to a fence he did not know was there. From there, he had made it to a threshold in the fence that he could not have even imagined would be there. Now he had made it to the building. Could he find an entrance? Blind luck had gotten him this far, why give up on it now?
He placed his left hand against the building, and as he struggled forward, he kept his frozen fingers in contact with the structure so that his mind wouldn’t forget where he was and would remind him that warmth and salvation were somewhere within that wall. Struggling through drifts and the swirling snow, he collapsed twice, but will and the touch of the wall kept him going as he resumed his trudging. After a few minutes, he noticed a break in the endless expanse, and hurried to the breech as best as he was able. He fell forward and flung himself into an enclosure of heavy cinder blocks and came face to face with an unmarked steel door, painted black—all but for a window placed 2/3 up its height.
He was out of the wind and snow now, and the blessed relief washed over him for a few seconds. Hope began to spark, ever so lightly in his breast, and he shouted out towards the window, not knowing what he said. The window was made of glass, thick and foreboding, crisscrossed with chicken wire and probably shatter proof. Is this a prison?
He shouted again and banged on the glass with his hands, and then screamed even louder with the pain that shot through him into his brain from the impact of his frozen hands on the glass. “HELP ME!” he screamed again and again, as tears, unbidden, began to fall down his face.
The hope that had burned brightly for a mere moment began to dim again after several minutes of banging and screaming. His head slipped down towards his chest, and he noticed for the first time, incongruently, that he now had a beard. He hadn’t shaved in a week. Had it been a week? He noticed because his tears and snow and ice had frozen into it. He closed his eyes. He was under shelter and out of the worst of the weather, but it was well below freezing, and again the specter of death seemed to darken his thoughts. He thought about praying but gave up on the idea. Why start now? He opened his eyes again and looked up, and he saw a light fixture in the ceiling of the entranceway. He looked at it, and as he did, the thoughts only murkily working their way through his brain, he knew he was going to die, but he hoped his last hope that that singular light would come on… and when he did—or as he did—inconceivably, the light blinked on.
CHAPTER 6
Clay pounded on the door, screaming. With his face frozen, his shouts sounded mostly incoherent, even to himself. Somebody here? Somebody hear me! The meaty side of his fist felt dead as it landed with cold steel thuds. He gasped for air. Ceasing his struggles for a moment, he leaned on the door, catching his breath. It is so cold. My being is cold. His thoughts felt like gel in his skull.
There was a small sign next to the door that he missed before but now, with the light, he could see it. It was written in what looked like Russian. Russian? He looked again. Really? Really. There it was. It was unmistakable. There were letters that seemed to be backwards, and others that were clearly not English. Brain freeze. People suffering from hypothermia often report confusion in their thinking. That has to be it. He blinked and tried to refocus. What was he doing? Oh, yeah.
He returned to the futile pain of pounding his fists on the door. He kicked it with his boots, feeling the dead vibrations of the cold shimmer through his leg. He screamed as loud as he could and kept screaming and kicking until, from somewhere—some interminable distance away—he thought he heard a faint sound. Shussle. Click. There it was again. Shussle… Click.
The sound grew closer. It grew closer still. He could hear it through his own pounding and the kicking but the command from his brain to cease his protests had not yet reached the rest of his body. Seconds later, he saw light through the window and watched an inner door open into the small vestibule behind the window. He heard a faint, unrecognizable noise, and then a face appeared at the small, square opening, looking out at him. The face stared at him awhile, squinting its eyes and shaking its head. No voice could be heard, but he could tell from the round and exaggerated syllables the face made with its mouth that it was shouting, “Go away!”
Clay pleaded to the face. It was a man’s face, and a man should have compassion, shouldn’t he? His thoughts marched through the muck of his mind before spilling out of his mouth in his cold and frozen language. “Hypothermia,” his tongue spat out. Somewhere in his brain he thought that this should be enough, but he forced his face to form more words. “C’mon! Dying! Need Help! Nowhere… to… go. Can’t go! Need to warm up, that’s all. Don’t leave me out here, man!” He didn’t know if the words were intelligible or not. He didn’t know if they could be heard, but this is what his brain told him he was saying.
The face of the man in the window refused. It shouted back, and Clay could now hear a voice, although the sound was muffled and distant. “This is a secure facility! No one is allowed in here. You need to go away! You can be arrested or shot. Just go away!”
Clay laughed. He was hysterical. “Arrest me then! Or shoot me,” he shouted, laughing heartily through his weakened state. He hoped that the face could hear him. He had to will himself to concentrate. “Arrest me! Please.” Then his voice dropped to a whisper, and he leaned his head on the glass. “I’m dying. I’m as good as dead anyway.”
That’s it, he thought. I’ll just die right here. Yelling again, he made his closing plea. “If you don’t let me in, I’ll just die right here in the doorway. Then you’ll have to deal with my body in the morning!” Each word was exaggerated in elongated, shallow syllables. “If you don’t open up right now, I am going to lie down here and… I’ll die, man. I’ll just go to sleep…”
As he said those words he felt a bone-aching tiredness wash over him like he had never felt before. Sleep. He looked at the face in the window, and a Whitman quote streamed forth out of him before he could even think of why he remembered it: “I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” He shouted the line at the face in the window and the face looked back, as if it was considering how beautiful death might be, how lovely it would be to see it. Then the face dropped out of the window and disappeared.
Clay felt his whole body slump and suddenly recognized the tension that had gripped him while he had been pleading for his life. He strained his eyes in the mix of dark and light and shadow, looking around for the best place to lie down and die. Going painfully to one knee on the frozen concrete, he was just about to sink into the snow when there was a rattle of keys at the door. The lock turned and the door slowly opened. Clay turned to look behind him but was instantly blinded by the light as he stood to his feet. He heard the voice that had just been shouting from behind the door.
“Get in here. Quickly.”
****
“Thank you,” Clay muttered, stumbling through the doorway before the body of the man at the doorway. “Thank you.”
“Listen, pal,” the man said, dipping his head in an attempt to look Clay in the eye. “I don’t know what you’re doing out in this mess, and I really don’t care. Don’t ask me for anything, don’t ask any questions, and only speak when you’re spoken to. You got it? I can get in big trouble for letting you in here. You got any weapons?”
“No.”
“You
have any warrants?”
“Any what?”
“Warrants. You wanted for anything?”
“Ummm. No, sir. Nothing I know of.”
“Don’t be cute. You do or you don’t.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, that’s good. At least that’s something. OK,” the man said, pointing to a chair across the tiny vestibule. “Sit over there and be quiet.” Clay stumbled to the chair, almost falling from the weight of his burden as the heat from the room rushed into his body. The man lifted Clay by the arm and helped him out of his backpack.
The man was tall, solidly built, and clearly not very happy. His hair was thin and wispy and brown and he spent a good deal of time trying to cover that fact, if the swirls on his head were any sign. He wore black fatigue pants and a black windbreaker with the word SECURITY printed on the back in yellow. He looked Clay up and down, then unzipped the backpack and rifled through it for a minute.
“Anything in your pockets?” the man asked, brusquely.
“A fish,” Clay replied without thinking, only then remembering that he still had the brown trout in his pants pocket.
“A fish?”
“One brown trout, sir. Gutted and scaled. Possibly frozen.” Silently he got permission to pull out the fish. Clay extracted the fish, still wrapped in the plastic bag.
“I won’t even ask what that is all about.”
The man looked at Clay from head to toe again, then did a quick and cursory pat down before shaking his head again. “A brown trout. Now I’ve seen everything. Ok, man, here is the deal. I’ve got a holding cell here by my office. You can use it for tonight, but you’ll be unceremoniously kicked out of here in the morning. And I mean it. I can get you some coffee and a little bit of food. Maybe I’ll cook your fish. I might even be able to dry your clothes. But you are out of here in the morning even if hell itself has frozen over, you understand?”
“Yes, sir. Out in the morning.”
“Ok, then. My name is Todd, Todd Karagin, Officer Karagin, but you can just call me Todd,” he said. He turned and walked back through the second door, indicating that Clay should follow him. He continued talking as he walked. “This place is a juvenile detention facility, but don’t let that make you think you’re in a day care. This facility is for long-term, hard-core criminals. Murderers. Rapists. That sort of thing. This ain’t Oliver Twist. Some of the people in here will cut you up like you cut up that fish.”
Clay tried to look around as he shuffled after Todd, but he shivered so much that his teeth ground together and his vision vibrated and was cloudy and dark.
“I am… Cl.. Cl… Clay. Sorry. I’m very… cold.”
“Ok, Clay,” Todd said, leading him down a small hallway before stopping to open a series of locks on a door. He motioned Clay through and Clay walked along the hallway feeling the thaw in his face as he worked his jaw to get back his feeling in it. “Here we are. In here.” He felt a hand on his shoulder as Todd guided him into a lighted cell to his left. “Let’s see if we can get you warmed up. We call this place ‘The Tank’. It’s your standard temporary holding cell. There’s a heavy blanket in here and a pillow. Strip your clothes off and wrap yourself in the blanket. I’ll go get you some warm clothes you can wear. I hope you don’t mind prison orange.”
“No…no… no, sir. I don’t mind,” Clay said, though something in him did mind just a little.
He looked around the cell. It had a large, thick, reinforced glass window that ran the length of the hallway, and the cell itself was approximately eight feet long on each wall. The bed was a concrete slab built into the opposite wall, and there was no sink. There was a small stainless steel toilet built low to the ground. No mirror. The mattress was a thin foam pad, covered in cloth, and stained from who knows what. On the mattress were a folded army blanket and a pillow in a clean pillow case.
“Listen, Clay,” Todd said sharply, “I have to run and get you some clothes from supply. Here is the way this works. I’m not going to lock you in, but you need to know that I’m helping you out at huge risk to myself and my own future. I like my job, so until you walk back out that door, I’m God to you. I am the law and the testimony in this place.” He stopped speaking for a minute, and looked at Clay shivering before him.
“You a Democrat, Clay?”
“Man,” Clay shook his head, stomping his feet and shaking his hands from the cold and shivering uncontrollably, “I’m… I’m whatever you say I am until I leave here, Officer Todd.”
“Just Todd. Good. The election’s in four days. Could go either way, don’t you think? It don’t matter much to me who wins, though. We’ll still be here doing our thing.” His voice trailed off, causing Clay to wonder whether he might have some deeper meaning. Then the man snapped to and said, more in command than suggestion, “Alright, get out of those wet clothes and I’ll go find you something dry.”
“Thanks again, Todd,” Clay said to the man’s back as he sat on the bed and watched the word “SECURITY” in bold yellow walk out of the cell and then turn to the right, only to take an immediate left and disappear down a darkened hallway.
A split-second later, just as Clay started to clutch at his clothes and the pain in his fingers shot through with warmth, Todd re-appeared in the light, the circular orb in the ceiling making his face look ominous and shadowed. He raised his voice to call Clay from the hall, through the window. “Listen, Clay. I’m serious. There’re some bad actors in here. Don’t go nosing around. Stay put. Don’t make me sorry I let you in.”
“No problem, Todd,” Clay nodded, even as he wondered why Todd felt it so necessary to stress the point.
Why so much security for children?
Clay stripped off his cold, wet clothing, and when he was naked he wrapped himself in the wool blanket. It felt good to have something against his skin that was not frozen and wet. He began to shiver again, and some of the shivers went down the whole length of his body and even hurt as his lower back shook furiously.
He sat for a moment and felt his heart pump and tried to inspect his fingers and toes for frostbite. As he did so, some faint but transient insight blinked on in his brain… what was it? What was that thought? His mind struggled against the cocktail mix of senses and emotions that churned inside him. Confusion, on the rocks, but with a warm radiant buzz, shaken, not stirred. He felt drowsiness and apathy and a strange sense of pain, comfort, and victory. Groggy, almost as if he had a concussion, and his brain hurt when he tried to focus too hard on one thing. He felt thrilled to be alive, but he was overwhelmed with worry and fear. Looking around again, he heard a small voice scream silently inside himself as the flash of insight clarified for him again. This is a cell! Don’t stay in here! You might be locked up, trapped, with no way out!
He dismissed the thought as quickly as it formed. He wasn’t here as a criminal or some offender. He was a guest. Even Dad would understand that. He pressed his fingers through his newly-grown beard. He could leave right now if he wanted to. Can’t I? Sure I can. But he didn’t want to. Not yet. He had almost died in that storm.
The room was of cinderblock construction, painted institutional white with light green trim that looked like someone had painted it in a hurry. Or maybe the workmen had painted it with their feet. That was something his dad always said when he’d done subpar work... Did you do that with your feet? It was sloppy in its lines and drips of paint were scattered along the edges of the floor. It made him feel claustrophobic so he moved over into the doorway and from there he took a step out into the hallway.
Across from him stood another locked doorway—like the exterior door through which Todd had brought him into the facility. The window on the door was also crisscrossed with chicken wire. The hallway adjacent, which Todd had walked down before disappearing into another set of locked doors, was dark except for some very low emergency lighting inset into the ceiling about every ten feet. The hallway was about twenty yards long. The hallway where he stood as he stepped out o
f his cell continued another twenty feet or so to the right, where it was bisected by another, similar door. Was this the door he had just walked through? He suddenly found himself disoriented. Through the glass he could see the hallway continued about twenty feet, where it terminated at a third door, from which light poured forth.
Ten feet from Clay’s cell, on the left, looked to be an office, the kind you could pass right through into another part of the building. Clay listened down the hallway but heard no noise emanating from there. He had presumed (with a cloudy head and very little real information) that Todd must have disappeared into a security office, and passing through it there must be a hallway that opened into another part of the facility. Standing in the hallway, the facility reflected and multiplied eerie silence. There was no sound, save the sound of his breathing.
Standing barefoot on the highly polished floor he tried to focus his thoughts, choosing for the moment to think of warm things—the sun on his face through the bay window in the old farmhouse, Hemingway at a bullfight in Madrid eschewing the more expensive “la sombra” (shade) seats, to sit in “el sol” (the sun)… his fire bed last night… was that just last night? When had he seen Clive? Yesterday? Was that yesterday? It seems like a week ago, now. His brain hurt and confusion overwhelmed him again.
Hypothermia was funny, in an unfunny way. He could remember some things, things he didn’t even try to think of, with alarming clarity, and others were all scrambled up like eggs in his brain. He heard his father saying, “You have to play the cards you are dealt, but leave yourself a way out.” He tried to remember what Clive looked like. A moment later, after a struggle, he said, “Sam Elliot,” but no one was around to hear it.
He walked forward, unthinking, just moving in order to create some modicum of warmth. Unconsciously he started to jog in place, but doing that made him feel precariously balanced and he feared he might slip on the shiny surface of the floor, so he stopped and just rocked back and forth, trying to use his thighs to produce some element of heat for his blood. He looked up into the window across the way, and then his eyes focused for a second and he moved forward again, looking down the hall and through the second door towards the bright light in the distance.
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