As the fire swept aside their lives, the stars looked down at them all, unchanged, unmoved by the singular event that was to shift the course of their destiny. The fire burned everything to the ground, and those same stars watched as his family tried in vain to right what could not be altered. Guilt and bitterness coated Jimmy Eckert like the mess from a slop jar. Years later, when he learned about the inevitability of all things within Black Plains, he came to understand that it was fate that held him transfixed before the fire. It held him now in the vise of daily shifts.
The wind swooped down from the Rockies, and Jimmy Eckert shivered, pulling his coat tighter over his body. All those years ago, when he had tried on his black polyester uniform for the first time in the mirror, he did not know that his shift would be the start of his own prison sentence. He didn’t realize that he was beginning a life on the inside that would change him into someone who could not function outside the walls of Black Plains. He would not have thought that the facility would author his destiny when he first reveled in his uniform and weapon, the license given to him to inflict his will.
He could no longer see beyond the Rocky Mountains. He no longer felt himself to be a free man. He could not hear man’s flurry of murder and procreation, debauchery and virtue, living and dying. He stopped watching television, since he could no longer relate to simplistic scenarios solved in hourly frames. He had long ago stopped wearing a watch and threw all his clocks away. Women, enigmatic creatures that they were, held little interest for him, and he had no patience to decode the endless combinations of their words and feelings. He could take himself in his hand or take an unfortunate to bed. The pithy feeling was the same, an unremarkable sensation that gathered and dispersed. He had become one with Black Plains. He breathed its stale air and tasted its tinlike water even when he was alone in his dead parents’ house. His pillow and bed were framed in concrete. At night, when he closed his eyes, he saw only steel doors and stone floors. He dreamed of scalps rippling with ringworm and rotting flesh. He awoke to the sound of a loud buzzer in his head. There was no escape far enough away from the facility. There were no books, no fiction or autobiography, that could capture what he came to inhabit, for the world outside had nothing to do with the world in which he lived.
It was as if Black Plains, the Secured Housing Unit, Warden Stotsky, the horses, the liquid fire, and the stars—everything—had always been. It had always been as it was in the swirl of time. He began to ask himself difficult questions with difficult answers. The kind of time Jimmy Eckert had come to know was born of something else. He didn’t know if it was evil or justice. It did not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. He was certain of one thing: he was bottled in it, along with the prisoners he guarded.
Jimmy Eckert fumbled with the frozen lock on his car and got in. In the world of the facility, the inmates held infinite combinations, infinite possibilities of wretchedness. He observed them for the specimens they were, for the natural enemies they were. In the showers, each held his own genitalia, the last of what he was, the last of what the prison would take. Each of them with his reasons for crimes committed. And when Jimmy Eckert looked at them, he saw only that they were once males, not men. And inside Black Plains, they were no longer males, they were rodents. There were exceptions, of course. Anomalies. But not enough to change the numbers. Not enough to change the form of the prison state, this hidden nation. None of any of it mattered in Black Plains, a realm unto itself, a world away from the world.
Sometimes, when he stepped into the vomit-green walls of the receiving room for ID check-in, he pushed his baton into its holster and was struck by the fact that he was not permitted to carry a gun, nor had he ever fired one. But in such a place as Black Plains, his real weapon was more powerful than batons or bullets. His weapon was control and the deathlike stillness that came with it. The only currency to be had by any of the rodents was worthlessness. He had earned a wealth of it himself; he would dole it out to those who earned the right to receive it. He reminded himself of these facts daily, as he nodded to the guard at the elevator, as he prepared for his descent. Each day, the elevator awaited Jimmy Eckert to escort him to the underworld, where the souls in the Secured Housing wing writhed in cages seared with fury. Where fluorescent light embedded in the concrete beamed like an Alaskan midnight sun, and he, the falcon, roamed a fiery, encased sky.
He spent every day ambling down the wing, the line of solitary-confinement cells standing eternally at attention, the seal of each steel door interrupted only by the slot through which he would shove a tray. He would pick up the stack of food rations to be distributed to the fated men and begin walking the row slowly, pushing rations through each slot. He could hear the rodents in the wee hours of his shift, the conversations they had with themselves or other personalities inside of them, how their voices changed to mimic other people. Sometimes he wondered if what they talked about had come from reality, or if it grew from what Black Plains ladled into their minds.
From behind the door marked 02763, there was usually silence. Staring at that door always filled Jimmy Eckert with excitement. He would stare at the numbers stamped onto the steel, listening. He had grown tired of knowing the ending of each prisoner at the beginning. But when he stood by Horus Thompson’s door, he imagined that something was growing inside of the cell, something coveted that he had a hand in creating, a thing he came to own. And it was in certain moments, like when he opened the bean hole and pushed the tray through, that Jimmy Eckert felt as if he was feeding something besides a prisoner.
And sometimes it seemed, even in small acts of rebellion, that Horus Thompson was trying to move to a place where he could not reach him, where Black Plains could not reach him. It reminded Jimmy Eckert of the Mummy. The old man was a sort of mascot of Black Plains, with his weeks of eating three beans a day and cupping his own urine and swallowing it. The Mummy refused food numerous times before escaping into the opaque realms beyond insanity, to which there was not even a window for spectators. He assumed the old man’s mind was too feeble even for nightmares or babbling, and he lived in his own sarcophagus. He worried that 02763 might follow.
He turned the ignition over and listened to the engine struggle with the cold. These were concerns that he could only admit in the backwaters of his mind. Because he needed Horus Thompson there to punish, to talk to, to listen to, to act as an accelerant of his misery—the only feeling he had left. They talked, if you could call it that: him peering through the bean hole to whisper and 02763 writhing in silence, in delusion, in rage. Jimmy Eckert hated and needed all of this. He had given up understanding why.
He put the car into drive. And as it moved forward, he was overcome with the creeping feeling that his relationship with the prison was the relationship he would have had with a whore. Even in brief moments of pleasure, he wanted to strangle the life from her. The years had become one repetitive motion, one rising and falling of the moon. What was left at the start and finish of each day was the call, the obligation, to step through the ruthless jowls of Black Plains yet again. He sat in his car and listened. The wind whipped in short bursts. Coyotes bayed from distant lairs. It was cold and getting colder. Dark and getting darker. He ground his teeth and pulled out of the parking lot. The Rocky Mountains pressed against the starry sky. Through the frosted glass of his car, he could not see the white flickers of the stars piercing the black, but he felt their mockery as he drove away.
Visitation
The construction of the facility had not disturbed the beginnings of the locusts at all, since they were many meters beneath the lowest point excavated. And below that, there was streaming water that no one knew was there, moistening and nourishing an earthen bed for ages. . . .
Horus lay in his cell bed, shivering, his head throbbing. It was the reign of Light. Beams shot like daggers down from the ceiling, and his eyes were tightly closed against them. He tossed and turned for endless hours, taking cover under his blanket, under his pillow, as if avoidi
ng artillery shells. Horus felt around to the back of his scalp, the territory that he was clearing bit by bit. His fingers came to a spot that was wet, and he wondered if it was sweat or blood or the slime that had coated the walls of the labyrinth. He couldn’t be sure.
Time descended on him once more, and he felt that an incantation, a mind pickling, was accelerating. There was a briny taste in his mouth. It bloomed first on his tongue and then sat at the back of his throat. It was so long ago that he was a part of that alien world of tastes, in that foreign time when such things other than the occasional peanut butter taste of roaches might have existed. The briny taste sat at the back of his throat nonetheless, and Horus was sure that it was some new cruel trick of his senses, an imaginary flavoring to accompany the metallic taste that was always in his mouth. But now there was this brine, too, this pickle that he could not explain. And the years were evaporating in the sunless moonless substance in his cell, so that he no longer recognized the functions and features of his own body. He was now a part of Black Plains, and the prison was now a part of him, and each day embalmed the day before.
Under the explosion of light, Horus prepared to open his eyes. It was a stronger dread than the sound of the air vent being shut off or when the Bean Hole Man crept near his slot. He opened his eyes and felt the sharp pains of his corneas, and he cradled his head in both hands as if to stop the drilling inside of it. He then looked around. The toilet was where it had been, stagnant and reeking. The drain at the center of the cell remained the endless, ominous hole into which he would one day slink. The walls remained a floodlit white, stoic and bleak.
Horus pulled the Catacombs back to the center of his thoughts. Had it all been a dream? But he was sure that he had been someplace else. He could still smell the dank mold, the roses and myrrh. He tried to sit up on the bed, but the room began to spin, and he collapsed back onto the stained mattress. He turned to his side, ineffectual against the light beams. He felt as if he was closed into a Mason jar and left under a lamp. In the cell, he was bobbing in a suspension, sinking to the bottom and floating to the top like a trapped jellyfish. His eyes grew teary, and he looked through the watery light and thought of the sea. And there was the audible memory of the ocean’s roll and crest he thought he heard, and he wanted only to float away with it. Sleep and float away.
But then Horus thought of that light in the Catacombs, the warm, clean light that was nothing like the torturous glare of his cell, and wondered where it came from. It was so far away, and he was so tired from the endless walking. He remembered collapsing in the passageway but nothing else. “I was outside of Black Plains,” he said desperately to the ruthless Light. “I was outside.”
Something was dripping inside the mechanisms of the toilet, and Horus listened to the steady beat. The drops grew slower and slower, like the gentle rock and sway of a buoy. The heavier his body became, the lighter his mind became. Balloon-light. Rising. Drifting in curls of smoke. He rose higher and higher still, until he felt himself floating down the prison corridor. And without his heart telling his mind, he knew he was in search of the Mummy. Somewhere in the fog of his mind, he thought the old man would know about the blade of light in the Catacombs. By now, time would have splayed him open like a piece of fruit. He would be pliable. Open. Horus knew that there were many debilitated minds in Black Plains, but none like this one. A mind like this would know something of existence and nonexistence in such a place as a cell, and all the different kinds of cells a man could spend his life in. Or at least, that’s what Jimmy Eckert said about him. Surely the Mummy would know what might be beyond the cages of buildings, the barracks of the mind. He would know the sort of alchemy needed to look into the great expanse. Horus needed to understand more before he traveled any further down the Catacombs, before he tried to reach the light again.
Horus had never been beyond the Secured Housing wing, beyond the shaftlike lift that led to the walled, roofless cubicle where on rare occasions he was permitted to glimpse the sky. And he had never seen the old man’s face, but he was certain that he would find him. He would feel his presence like an energy and move toward it. Black Plains unfolded in his mind like the smooth paper of a blueprint. He was three levels below the surface. The small boxed earth of his subterranean chamber was all he knew for the past seven years. He would see more. Stepping over the Catacombs entrance was a choice. He would choose this too.
Horus lifted, upward through the three levels the elevator traveled. At length, he drifted to a great atrium at sea level that was the heart of the facility. He drifted further still, through the eerie light of hallway after hallway, corridor after corridor, until he came to what he had always envisioned as Lucifer’s chamber, Warden Stotsky’s office. The walls emitted heat. The closed office entrance, with its heavy wooden doors, was less opulent than he thought it would be. Even at this late hour, he could hear someone talking inside. Perhaps on a telephone? He could barely remember what one looked like. He looked at the warden’s name emblazoned in gold lettering as he drifted by. He moved down a long corridor, weaving in and out of the uneven fluorescent light and the tall shadows that hung along the walls. There was a small window at the end, through which he could see the black night. The moon was bright, and the baked ground looked as if it was drizzled with mercury. How long had it been since he saw such a sight?
Horus turned a bend and floated down another long corridor and was filled with wonder. There were a handful of men wandering it. They walked listlessly, a few steps in one direction, only to turn around and walk back to where they were standing just a moment before. Horus watched them go back and forth. One stopped to stroke a huge gash in his head. Another was skipping as if in a game of hopscotch, slicing his fingers off one by one with a makeshift knife. Another had a rope around his neck made of sheets. There were two other men huddled together, as if in a lover’s embrace, in front of a door in the middle of the corridor with a sign that read “Special Room.”
One said to the other, “You wouldn’t quit on us, would you? Me, Billy, and the others?”
“Would I ever do such a thing?” answered the other.
The fingerless man noticed Horus. “Waiting, too, are you?” He gestured at the door, his hands bloody mittens. “We can’t leave until our request is granted.”
Horus looked at the fingerless man. In the strange light, he could see the twin black holes of his eyes. “What request?” asked Horus.
“That we live again,” said the fingerless man.
Horus watched him walk a few steps and turn back again, and that was when he understood that they were lingering spirits, restless and unable to leave. “Is that possible? To live again?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the one with the rope of sheets around his neck. “But if you were one of us, you would know that.”
Horus did not know what to say. Would he wander the corridors of Black Plains forever like these spirits, on and on, from one millennium to the next? The thought filled him with trepidation.
“You should know that,” said the fingerless man as he disappeared. “It’s a sin to offend the dead.” Then he was gone and the others vanished in his wake.
Perhaps the specter was right, thought Horus, alone in the corridor. Perhaps that was what he had been thinking on the day he found Sam Teak. A day of pink flowers and sweetness in the air, when the brazen pistols of tulips shot unexpectedly from the ground. But Horus would not think of such things now.
He floated on.
He could feel the Mummy’s energy drawing him, closer and closer. He went through two sets of double doors leading to a long hallway. At the end was another set of double doors. He drifted through them, and they emptied into a large arenalike room. He looked up and saw three stories of cells where the rest of the prison population was kept. It was like a small city housed inside a building. There were overhead lights along the rows, but the cells were not lit. Here the prisoners did not sleep under fluorescent sunlight or grope in the dark. There was a
lonely skylight high above the fifty-foot ceiling, blacked out by the night.
Horus ascended. There were rows and rows of cell doors. He moved through the muted light. From the dark cubicles and hanging in the air were the smells: rotten feet, urine, armpits, unwashed genitalia, shit, curdled blood, the decay of souls.
At last, Horus drifted to a single cell. He was sure this was the one. He could feel the pulse of reason and unreason from within. He moved through it and hovered in the corner, blending with the shadows. The Mummy was lying in his bed along the opposite wall. Horus did not want to move his ragged slipper or disturb his blanket, lest he give the Mummy a heart attack. He would whisper into the rooms of his thoughts.
Hey, Mummy. Listen . . .
Vine of the Earth
Edward, also known as the Mummy, thought he heard a voice in the early hours. Overcome with expectancy, he had been wide awake, awaiting the morning prison buzzer. And unlike most nights, he had not rested in the pleasant arms of a deathlike sleep. Dreams were a thing of long-gone decades, when his subconscious had been able to cut through the brush of disbelief with a machete, when he had the strength to clear a space and glimpse alternative realities, to see the infinite variations of what could have been his life, not this devastating reality.
With increasing impatience, Edward waited on the filthy padding of his cell bed, anxious for the buzzer. For that daily scream, always prompt, always clear, announced the beginning of his day and reunited him with his dearest. He was no longer a young man, and it had taken thirty years for the raging fires of his heart to die down to the sleepy hues of sunset. And even as his bones creaked under the hanging folds of his chestnut skin, his body warmed under rays of anticipation as the morning hours clicked on, like the blood of an old scorpion heating on the sands of the desert.
Time of the Locust Page 16
