The Last Bender, Chapter 23

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

          The cell was a cage in the middle of a large white tiled room; it was a cage in a tank. Three people sat under the blinding lights. There were no beds or chairs. At one end was a metal pail.

          I entered the cell and they shut the gate. The tank was totally silent. Hazel flipped through my forms. She looked me in the eye and said, “Bartell, ya didn’t fill in next of kin?”

          I was certain I never saw any such thing on that form. “I’m sorry. Linda Malone. She’s MetroHomicide. 834-3213. Ask for Linda Malone.”

          “Aaah, we won’t be needin’ it. Hopefully.”

          She left but the cop hung back. He called me to the bars. The bite burned and throbbed. If the thought of his rubber flesh hadn’t disgusted me, I would have bitten him back. It was an insulting way to hurt someone. I stared at the loud red marks and then at his face. What he lacked was inflection. Juice was a personable sadist; there was something there to marvel at in a state of total fear and fascination. It’s why a guy like that never goes unstaffed. But this cop, all he had going for him was his teeth. He showed them off and said, “Monozone, huh?” chuckling softly before walking away.

          No one in the tank budged. They sat or lay silently on the cold tile floor. Two men and one woman. Each dressed as I was. Each studying the palm of their hand. One of the two men was older. He looked unhealthy and breathed heavily through his mouth. He lay on his back with his knees up and hands propped open like a book on his belly. The younger man was maybe fifty. His face was angry. After a few minutes of palm staring he started to squirm and fuss like a sleeping three year old, constantly searching the bars with his small dark eyes. The woman was in her forties. She had a pretty worn tread. She sat cross-legged and watched herself in her hand, as if it were a mirror. I had the sensation when I looked at her, that I could hear her thoughts. She counted to a thousand very slowly. She worried about her car. I decided to speak without first considering that there might be a reason for the silence. I began with, “So,” and made it all the way to “uh,” when an air horn blew my brain apart. The three inmates continued to stare, now through bulging eyes. The woman mentally begged me to keep my mouth shut.

          In vain I strained after any incidental sound, a ticking watch, a gurgling pipe. At length the older man stood up, huffing, and pissed into the pail. Then he lay down again, exactly as before.

          The bars were black and spaced a few inches apart. Everything else was white. After a while, as my horror of confinement began to bubble up, foreground and background started to shift. No matter where I looked, black and white would eventually jump in and out, a nauseating vibration I could only avoid by not quite looking at anything, or by looking at myself. Even if I stared at one of the other inmates it would happen. So I adopted a half stare, removed my slippers and began the task of minutely examining my feet. They were starting to look like my father’s. I was both pained and amazed by it.

          No way was I going to sit there overnight. I began to obsess on the idea that Hazel would call Linda and she would come down to bail me out. How she could do that without a judge or hearing was a mystery I began to explore in depth. The simplest solution would be to assemble a group of twenty well-trained soldiers with assault rifles and light canon and proceed directly (through downtown Brill, avoiding the Ruth Snyder bypass, since a game was sure to be on by now) to my place of confinement and issuing via bullhorn the sternest of ultimatums. The twenty or so would be dressed in urban combat fatigues and riding police vans to avoid suspicion. Linda and Helen would each lead a group of ten.

          The other eighteen members of this assault team were as yet faceless, so I spent a lot of time lying there and visualizing each one. Unfortunately, no sooner had I arranged russet locks beneath a camouflaged helmet, set high cheekbones above full lips, tightened the strap and dusted off the loose fitting shoulders, than I would forget the details, the trim Prussian mustache, the downy forearm, the triangular jaw, the bodacious rump, the flat posterior, the bulging quads, the soft nails, the squat thumbs and all the rest of all the rest. Then, collidiscopically, each fell into a different place. So that the squat thumb emerged from the high forehead and triangular jaw got matched up with bodacious rump and so on and so forth. Faced with my own monstrous army I began to despair of ever being delivered from the suburban dungeon.

          Everything was exactly as it had been when I arrived. Everyone had taken a piss but me. After a while I began to detect a subtle joy in this most rudimentary animal behaviour. There had to be more to life than draining piss into a bucket, even if we couldn’t talk or look directly at each other. The bacteria in your gut have it better than that. And what an inversion that was, that hell’s circle of shit was superior to this.

          Having assembled and disassembled enough twenty-woman platoons to re-fight the first Punic War, including ambulance drivers, archers and chuck wagons, I settled back into a glum consideration of my feet, wondering how on earth they had gotten so hornlike. I always thought my feet were very sexy and one of my main selling points on the meat market. There was a time when I lovingly lingered over each sleek toe with clipper and file. I lavished the finest socks and shoes on them and on cold nights sat with Corrie watching the news, soaking my proud pedestals in Epsom salts. There were never any coarse black hairs sprouting up from the knuckles. The nails weren’t thick, split and yellow. Husks of dead skin hadn’t protruded from the delicate line of heal and ball. Maybe now, even if I agree to leave the Glory Hole, abjure anonymous floozies, punt seductions of androgynous nihilists, renounce sidewalk intercrural trysts, I will still go mateless. It was not just my perversity but these poor cloven hooves that doomed me, both of us ruined beyond repair.

          A brief but spirited struggle for breath awoke me from this bitter mental spelunking. Once the old man had successfully mastered his extraordinary wheeze, everything returned to normal. Whoever monitored us was sufficiently on the ball to distinguish involuntary, reptilian noises from encoded human ones.

          To pass the time I decided to do some stretches and push-ups beginning with head rolls. I lay down on my back and did one leg lift. As I beheld my foot against the blazing banks of lights, the air horn reduced my insides to oscillating jelly. Then a voice said, “Number Seventeen. Exercise is strictly forbidden.” Then another pureeing blast of the horn for good measure. I distinctly heard the words ‘you idiot’ and noticed the woman glaring at me. I thought, how could I know? To which came the immediate reply, ‘It doesn’t take a genius.’

          Eventually I too had to pee. I made a big deal about walking over to the bucket and lingered over it, dreading the inevitable conclusion, which came not with a bang but a dribble. By now I was quite cold and sore. The floor was tile. There are just so many parts of the body soft enough to sit on. When I started to scratch some stubborn itches in hard to reach spots I was again told not to exercise.

          Forget about sleep. And there was nothing to eat. Once a man pushed a trolley through stacked with steaming, steel-domed plates. The smell of frozen peas and gravy mashed potatoes wafted by. Just as I had gotten the savour deep within my lungs, an exhaust fan rumbled on and all trace of odor vanished.

          Between the trolley and the next thing that happens stretches a period of time so featureless I cannot characterize it in any way. For this very reason it was impossible to endure. Although I survived and know from that that survival is possible, I have no idea how I did so. Somehow the damn Urizen jailers had discovered a way to create a sort of time-vacuum. As near as possible they made one’s period of confinement eventless. I think of these hours as my Veal Period. Ah, but their conceit sometimes broke down. Running the smooth ride was the usual contraption of ramshackle gears. The rattling trolley of food was one such instance. Meant to torture us, it became a form of entertainment.

          The first major interruption, after my various failed attempts at revelry, was the arrival of a new guy. This let me off the hook. Now I could hold my hands like blinkers; now I could pump out waves of indignation when his attempt at speech resulted in the sonic seizure. He was a mere youth. He looked like origami in his paper shirt and pants.

          The pail got dangerously full. Now every time someone peed all eyes were nailed to the rising level.

          As the new guy settled into his Veal Consciousness I realized that each of my predecessors had had the same experience. So these entertaining punctuations, after enough time, became in themselves monotonous. Once one had ceased to be the new guy, or observer of new guy, one was only left with observer of new guy becoming old guy observing new guy in infinite regress. The only thing that didn’t change in this was the experience of the horn, which was as shattering the last time as the first. It got so you dreaded the arrival of the next new guy before the current new guy even discovered the Laws.

          There was one Law I didn’t discover until after the first new guy arrived. My dweeb days should have been far behind me; my compeers viewed me with particular disappointment, when I rose up to greet the second rattling trolley and grasped the bars. I had expected the horn, actually. By then I knew anything I did that didn’t advance a state of atrophy would earn me life-shortening blasts of the air horn. I was willing once again to plunge us all into the Siren’s abyss, if it meant subjecting the son of a bitch pushing the cart to it. Little did I suspect that a malevolent genius (as opposed to a banal functionary) lay behind the design of our prison. Because instead of the horn the entire cell, bars and floor surged with electricity and we became one shaking, bent filament. When the current stopped we lay moaning, a heap of limbs trembling on the cold tile. Then, when the trolley was gone, the horn finished us off.

          “Number Seventeen. Keep away from the bars.”

          Five new guys arrived. Three women, two men. It was getting so we almost touched. The air was a little ripe, even with the chill. It was all the fear and the silence. With so many inmates, it was getting hard not to look at anything. Yet the optical effect remained. The paper clothes were white. So only flesh colored the world. Yet to look at it was to disturb the only refuge any of us had.

          The single human body is no bigger than an nth. In a nightmare it can be as vast as an ocean or chasm or forest. This is the depth of the labyrinth winding in on itself. The body is infinitely small, permeable and vulnerable. It spends its little time in wars of the spirit trying to lose consciousness. In defiance I tried to inflate my mind. I figured if a woman can expand her cervix to push an eight-pound baby out then I can inflate my mind like a giant bag. I wanted it to bulge through the bars. Ego was a pair of stretch spandex pants going to the limit of a potbellied mind. Thoughts would stretch beyond recognition, a scattering of pixels like constellations, expanding in all directions.

          I no longer recognized or saw anyone in the cell. My mind experiment had failed miserably and my thoughts felt sore with abuse. I tried getting an erection, with the idea of a sort of walking wet dream undetectable by the monitors. There was little hope for success here and I withdrew from the challenge after achieving a paltry quarter inch bob.

          And so I lay there.

          When the bucket ran over only the newest guys moved.

          Absolutely nothing. There is nothing left to describe but the passage of time and the relatively autonomous chemical exchanges that occur between the body and the environment. I had entered a kind of sleep where dreams are like bottles hurled from cars at brick walls. By the time the buzzer came I had learned not to look at anything. I had learned not to speak or move in a purposeful way. I had learned that my thoughts were futile.

          “Number Seventeen. Please stand.”

          The apathy around me generated from its minute differences a resentment that grew massive, out of which blossomed galaxies of envy. I sent psychic Valentines. As the guard walked me out I thought, all this time alone and not once did I think about the case. Hell, I always wanted a job I could leave at the office.