Tide of Stone

by Kaaron Warren

  “They all make the same gurgle at the end.

  “Doesn’t matter the age.

  “A little gurgle before it’s over.

  “I’ll make it nice for you,” he said. “If you’ve ever thought you’d had enough. I can help with your passing.” He was too weak now. He said, “There are some who ran to me, so keen were they.”

  The Ball dropped.

  The storm

  came over at last, having threatened for days. I watched the village through my telescope, and saw the empty streets, a few foolhardy teenagers out testing the wind. So empty. It made me think I was seeing into the future, when our town inevitably died. I watched cars blow over, trees uproot.

  I hid in my room, updating photos.

  There was no damage to the Time Ball Tower, although the entrance flooded, and I had filthy mud to clean up. It seemed an endless task, and I was tempted to go, to signal with a flag and to leave it behind.

  But I thought that would make a victory for the prisoners, that they would feel they were better than me because they had toughed it out, choice or not.

  So I stayed. I thought about my boyfriend who I’d dumped. And the other men on the mainland. I thought they’d seem ordinary after these long-termers. But beautiful. Very beautiful and alive. I’ll want to touch their skin, just for the suppleness.

  Would I be able to understand people, or would they talk too fast?

  I would lack patience for them all.

  They would annoy me, and I’d want to smack them, want it white hot.

  Wee Willie Winkie said, “You can’t imagine how satisfying it is to watch the blood spill out and that annoying person silenced. It’s a beautiful thing. I wasn’t always the oldest, you know. The other one died. What was his name?”

  But no one knew.

  The storm lasted for two days.

  I felt a flu coming on and wanted to be home desperately. I wanted my doctor who knew me since a child. I felt suddenly homesick.

  Not so much I wanted to run the flag, though.

  I cleaned the kitchen, scrubbing out the oven, washing the floor. It didn’t really need it, the cleaner had done a good job, but it was on the list, so I did it. Am I an order follower? I guess so. Other people have always made decisions for me. For us. Makes for a less stressful life.

  In glorious clear and calm after the storm, I swam down amongst the rocks, but it wasn’t really swimming. I loved the water over my head, though, loved the silence it brought.

  Those rocks had taken the life of one child in my memory. He’d been out there showing off, displaying no fear and he’d slipped between two of the rocks.

  His friends said the rocks chewed like a giant’s teeth. He was mangled, but no adult blamed anything but the surf and the rocks.

  I tripped over the wet stones and banged my head. Momentary black out.

  I woke up chilled to the bone.

  How long was I out? Had they moved me?

  My thighs were parted.

  How?

  Had I moved them that way myself?

  Surely. I felt with my tongue; a tooth loose.

  Weird then that I saw a cigarette butt and a pink rubber glove. They didn’t look washed up…weird. I photographed them but didn’t remove them. They were too high to have washed up.

  People would pay well for my photos of the Time Ball Tower and the prisoners. People love that stuff.

  I hoped

  for silence, but they made shifty noises like mice scratching at the wall. “Quiet or I’m boarding up the windows for good and taking out the lightbulbs and you can spend eternity in the dark.”

  It drove me crazy and made running the red flag tempting.

  I touched the red flag. I could do it, run the thing up and I’d be home in a day. Then I thought of the keeper saying, “If you ever feel like running the red flag, run the yellow and promise yourself absolutely you can run the red the next day if you still want to.”

  The red flag was stiff with disuse, its folds dusty.

  I ran up the yellow. If two days passed with no new flag, they’d send out the boatman.

  I didn’t want to be one of those pariahs. Those losers.

  The red flag was there, always there. It helped me sleep at night, helped me not obsess or freak out. I can always run the flag up, I thought. In an emergency. If I was injured, not so much.

  The Ball dropped.

  The Ball dropped.

  I ran

  the green flag.

  I thought about the money.

  The money.

  The money.

  And the fame.

  And the success. People would call me brilliant. Like Madame Curie. Or Annie Lebowitz.

  This was what I wanted for myself. This renown. This memory of my name. I didn’t want to die unknown.

  I printed

  out their last words for them, stuck them above their heads next to the photos of their atrocities.

  “I never did what they said.”

  “May God forgive me and welcome me.”

  “Tell them to be strong and do not let the bastards get them down.”

  They weren’t particularly inspiring. I read them aloud as the rain fell like diamonds in the bright sunshine outside.

  I needed to add the last words to their medical files so hunted them down. I wanted to find the secret places, anyway. I knew there were some.

  On return two days later (I had tired of their voices and needed a break), I found them desperate for attention, for me to notice them.

  “We know stories,” they said. “We can tell you truthy things.”

  “Anyone is capable of murder. We’re just the idiots who got caught.” The grandfather said this. I had realized he was the least repentant of them all. “Your lot are no better, but they get away with it. Look at the early days, where they killed each other and themselves. Proof right there. Killed others too. Lots of ladies.”

  I didn’t want to respond to that.

  “Lots of ladies. Didn’t you ever notice? Young ladies leaving town and not going home again? All at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “A teacher once, remember? She’s calling out names, all the children of the town, but that didn’t stop him?”

  “Stop who?”

  They couldn’t remember. She hadn’t come home, that nasty fifth grade teacher, and no one had cared.

  No one had looked for her.

  The light came in, those few minutes a day when it did, and I took some quick snaps.

  Photography’s all about light and timing.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “Look at the light out there.”

  One of them had been a photographer, but I didn’t even want to think about what he’d photographed.

  “Light has changed over the decades,” he said.

  We talked about it. A long, slow discussion.

  Light and shadow are important to the photographer. Some of them will play with it for hours; I like to let it be what it will be. Whatever is, is. That’s my idea of perfection.

  The Photographer told me, “We remember light poorly. We know we were lit, but how? I remember it all. The Quality of Light has changed, as if the very air itself is different.

  “How will light shine in the future? Will it glow from the ground, will it float particle-like in the air? Will I be able to see it or, by then, will my eyeballs have dried out, solidified?

  “When I was a boy, we lived by the light of the fire and the sun, so we kept time with the sun and no arguments about bedtime.

  “Each source of light glows differently. If it was possible to bring these lights to me, I could tell you what era we are in, simply from the form of it. The light. Some people are transported by smell; I am transported by light.

  “We can all identify the sunlight of each season. Winter and summer. You know what season it is from the way the sun shines. I know what century it is from the glow of the light.”

  It was actually really interesting.
r />   “You need compassion, though. If you are to be great.”

  “And you can show it now,” they said. They clamored for the sun, “Let us in, let us in.”

  “You’re too evil for the sun.”

  “We’re not so bad. Look what people do now. What they do is far worse than anything we did.”

  I didn’t tell them we had a list. The evil of men’s hearts list. The wish list. I’d added to it myself, this list of names, famous and obscure.

  I’d also brought a list with me of those who were supposed to be dead. But what if? What if they were here? I’d researched some of it and was surprised to find how many of these terrible people I don’t know. Terrible things happening elsewhere that we have no knowledge of. Names mean nothing, faces the same, unless you know the history.

  A man they called the granny killer was on the list and would have been here if he’d lived. Or was he one of them, the secret prisoners kept in isolation?

  The texting girl who’d killed two pedestrians then texted, “2 drunk 2 care.”

  And the two men who adopted a child then put him into their pornographic movies. If they were here, I’d lock them in the box for months at a time. The photo I have of them is a good example; photos lie, big time. Last photos of murder victims smiling next to their killers. These two men look sweet.

  The woman who poisoned her son with salt. So many characters. The child killers. The terrible kidnappers. No one would argue here.

  Ariel Castro, who kept three women imprisoned for decades. Killed himself in jail, they reckon.

  Even the gentlest souls want these people punished.

  “We’re better than that,” the prisoners said. “We’re here for political reasons. We’re political prisoners, you know.”

  I really laughed at that one and they joined in. Like fingernails on glass. So awful I could feel it in my teeth.

  “What do you think of that, Sugartits?” Grayson said.

  “It’s Phillipa. My name is Phillipa. If you won’t call me Keeper, call me that.”

  “We would have called you Pip in my time,” Wee Willie Winkie said.

  I had a drink to drown out my idiocy in telling them my name.

  The Time Ball Tower was supposed to be a deterrent, where you’ll go if you commit terrible crimes. But the people who commit those sorts of crimes don’t imagine they will ever get caught. That’s one of the problems of the prison system. The ones it needs to influence don’t think they’ll end up in jail. The ones who are terrified of jail probably won’t commit the crime anyway. And like Lucifer, most of them get worse after punishment and imprisonment.

  The Ball dropped.

  They said,

  “Did you wash the windows, Pip? Check the supplies? Change the ropes? You haven’t, have you? Out of order! Out of order!”

  The Ball dropped.

  My stomach

  ached, and I wished I was hungry, to fill it with carbs or dried fruit or something. I craved fresh iceberg lettuce: crispy, juicy, flavorless.

  I forced myself to rise. It was no good sleeping all day, as tempting as that might be. You had to keep occupied.

  “Just one more hour of sleep,” I said, the sort of thing you want to say to a housemate or a lover, a momentary whinge. I slumped in to the prisoners. Sneezed.

  “Are you sick? Because we don’t want it. Not unless it’s life-threatening.”

  “I think it’s just the sawdust.”

  “Come on, give us a kiss, ay? Give us a dose, Pip.”

  The prisoners convinced me to go back to sleep. “Good for you. Keeps your skin soft.”

  “You can sleep when you’re dead,” I said automatically, because we all say it.

  “You can sleep after you’re dead, too,” they say. They were trying to manipulate me, overpower and force decisions on me.

  “You only want an hour,” the grandfather said. “You deserve it.”

  It stank in there. I needed to change the sawdust.

  “Leave it for the other one,” they said.

  “You mean the next one? The next keeper?”

  “No, the other. The cleaner. Comes in when you’re asleep. Cleans up. Looks after the secret prisoners in the basement.”

  Were they distracting me? Lying to me? Hard to tell at times. Renata might know, but then she thought the best of everyone. Of most people. And if she was here, she would have done for them long ago. I wondered if I should have told someone what she was doing. It hadn’t occurred to me before now. Some people, I guess, would have reported it.

  I asked the prisoners if someone else really did come in, if it was just the keepers. If someone came in to replace the wine, the whiskey.

  “The cleaner.”

  “Who?”

  But they’d say no more.

  This triggered a childhood memory. Another story we used to tell to terrify each other. I thought it was silly and didn’t really understand it.

  You had to stay clean. Keep your bedroom clean, because if the cleaner came he cleaned everything, even your blood, and that’s how people get leukemia.

  I didn’t know what leukemia was. A boy at school was called Luke and he was a pain, but that was all I had.

  Now the title “The Cleaner” gave me a chill. Who was he? And why was he secret even from the keepers?

  To be cruel, I told them stories of the real world.

  “You should see the restaurants. And the waterfalls. And the places you can go and the things you can eat and the movies you can watch. The lessons you can learn, the books you can read, the music you can listen to. Humans were meant for this. They are wasted otherwise.”

  The Ball dropped.

  I drank the whisky. Too much. But there always seemed to be more, somehow, and my favorite blend, as if there was some magical fairy leaving presents for me.

  The salt deposits on the window were beautiful. I’d taken over two hundred photos already, but there was no limit. I had some beautiful backgrounds. I had a brilliant idea for a business; provide these for people to place their own photos in front of. I pictured wedding parties with this beautiful background. It was a great idea.

  I was lost in the beauty of it. The inmates looked more like ghosts in comparison. Slumped like ghosts. Gaunt, skull-like, skinny, ill, almost incapable of speech. Some keepers called them ghosts. Some called them the bones. I called them straifs.

  My real project was to capture the nature of the Time Ball Tower. The slowness of movement. I took the prisoners in very slow exposure, giving them more chance of movement than I would otherwise get. I brought with me photos of the fossils found at Marble Bar, Western Australia. Some of them 3.5 billion years old.

  They said, “That’s us! We’re old fossils!”

  Another said, “Nah, we’ve always been this way.”

  They were liked trained dogs. Adoring, attentive, needy. It was good to be the master. On the mainland, it sometimes felt (looking back, from the tower) as if I was the one who was the dog, taking orders, doing as I was told.

  The Ball dropped.

  We are

  all shut-ins to one degree or another. The keepers in the Club, sticking to themselves. The prisoners and Burnett, without a choice. My patients, sitting in their too-soft vinyl chairs, their only pleasure the occasional fart.

  It felt strange to know so much about the keepers. They were stony-faced, mostly, although they smiled after a few drinks. They joked around, they looked after their loved ones, they held down jobs. But there was very little “give” about them. Very little truth. So to have read their journals, to understand them, was odd.

  The Ball dropped.

  I headed

  down for a swim.

  They begged me to take them downstairs. “It’d take you forty years to build a raft, the speed you go. And you’d drown yourselves, anyway. How about I leave a rope down there and you can tie a rock to your necks? That’d only take you a decade.”

  We didn’t rely on electronic devices to tell us t
he time in the Tower. Just the ball dropping, and a paper calendar they’d sent with me. Each day, I awoke and checked the events marked by the day; birthdays, and dates of historical significance and arrivals.

  So I knew when the new prisoner was expected.

  They hadn’t given me details. I wouldn’t know who it was until they got here. I didn’t tell the prisoners, although I was tempted to share. Gossip, guess, all that. I wanted someone to talk to.

  Number Sixteen heard the boat first. He was obsessed. You barely heard from him unless a ship was passing. He’s the one who’d kept his sister in a small dark hole.

  “Boatman,” he said. “Sending a replacement for you. They know how much we love you and want to punish us.”

  I’d never get used to hearing words like that coming from the mouths of husks, empty ugly cases.

  I waited downstairs, desperate for a glimpse of the boatman.

  He was the first real person I’d seen for a long time and he was beautiful.

  He waved wildly. “Phillipa! How are you?” His voice seemed insanely loud, and he spoke so quickly I could barely understand him.

  The prisoner was tied in a straitjacket. Gagged. Her eyes were yellow.

  I begged the boatman for news, feeling like one of them as I did so, and he gave me over an hour. I barely spoke, just listened, but oh God I was tempted to go back with him. Forget all my stuff, just go.

  But the money. And my project. The idea that this was my chance at fame and I might not get another.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of dying unknown. You might be remembered if you live in a very small town. But for what? And by who?

  He unloaded two cases of goodies for me (I’d unpack them later, fresh stuff I ate locked away from the smell of the prisoners).