The Four Stages of Cruelty (16 page)

I did and I didn’t. I thought of Ray MacKay, oxygen mask lowered to his chin, and couldn’t get the hard lump out of my throat.

“I want you to do me one favor,” Ruddik said.

He put a business card in my hands.

“There’s an Internet address and a password on this,” he said. “Go to the site and see for yourself.”

“What is it?” I managed to ask.

“A video. Just watch it. Let me know if it reminds you of anything. If it does, and you want to do something about it, call me.”

Then he opened the door and was gone.

If he thought Fenton wasn’t watching, Josh would have snaked his way through the hallways back to the kitchen. Instead, he opened the door to the yard and stepped out. The air was cold. The night was dazzlingly bright, the cold air crystallizing into sparkles all around him. The noise of the cart crashing and banging across the uneven stones was louder than he expected. He stopped. No one else in the entire world existed except for him. He was the last man alive. Two pills in his hand. He had no idea what they were. He looked up into the sky, just like Fenton told him to. The sight of the stars piercing the empty blackness took his breath away. The thought of his own little life in the midst of so much dense space made him tremble. He took the pills, swallowed them hard. How good it was, despite everything, to be alive.

A hundred feet later he thought of the sentries in the guard towers. They’d be astonished to see him moving about. No doubt they had him in their sights. A sniper shot. A bullet in the back of his head as a final joke. Could Fenton arrange something like that? Checkmate. The paranoia was upon him. It happened no matter what drugs he took. The fear of total loss of control. The sense that he was under someone else’s influence.

Reaching the cafeteria building, Josh expected to wait in the cold until the duty guard roused himself, but the gate was ajar and Josh simply pushed the cart in on his own. In through the cafeteria, marveling at his own sense of direction, he emerged into the kitchen. Roy was gone. Jacko sipped from a tin cup, smoking a cigarette.

“Where’s Fenton?”

“He sent me to fill up,” Josh said, lifting one of the large empty containers from the cart and placing it under the spigot of the cooking pot.

“I’ll get that,” Jacko said, and stumbled over.

He stirred the hot chocolate with the huge wooden paddle, peered in to examine the contents. “Needs more water,” he said. He reached down and grabbed a plastic mop bucket, then poured the dirty water into the steaming cocoa.

“Oh, shit.” Holding the empty mop bucket in his hand and looking down to the place where he had grabbed it from. Another bucket beside it, this one filled with clean water. He chucked the mop bucket across the room and picked up the wooden paddle again.

“Advice from the cook. Go easy on the hot chocolate.”

“Roger that,” Josh said.

He went back to D block through the hub. There were moments when he didn’t know how many steps he had taken, how much time had passed. He kept remembering what he was doing, waking up to his present awareness, realizing that he was pushing a cart down a long hallway in a prison. His heart had never beat so rapidly. He felt as if his face were on fire. He knew his teeth were shedding. There was a finger inside his skull, scraping at the inner shell of his cranium with a nail, a hollow sound he realized mimicked the squeaky wheel of the cart.

He couldn’t find Fenton. Not waiting in the hub, not waiting outside the nest in D. The mess was gone. The jack was nowhere to be seen. Josh didn’t know what to do. “Hot chocolate and doughnuts!” he yelled, and behold, the gate opened and he was drawn inside, pushing the cart before him. He went from cell to cell on his own. The men said things to him, he spoke back. There was no communication to it, no connection.

Back in the hub, all the ranges finished, he crossed over to Keeper’s Hall. He saw a roomful of guards. They called out to him, and he stopped and wished them a happy New Year, offering up his wares, the last box of doughnuts. They grabbed the box from him and chewed and stuffed their faces. Released, he pushed on down the hallway, more minutes gone by, and realized he was lost. Then he heard a strange sound, a faint animal growling, and pushed on farther, turning a bend. The noise was coming from behind a door, and for some reason, some unexpected bravery or curiosity in him, he pushed
the door open and peered inside. A female CO, her shirt unbuttoned, her breasts free, stood in the middle of the room, bent over but facing him, her hands braced on a table, her long hair dangling, her blue uniform pants in a pile on the floor. Behind her, thrusting hard, was Fenton, the widest smile on his face Josh had ever seen, recognition mixed with pride even as he maintained his rhythmic dance.

“Connie! We’ve got an audience!”

The jack’s face lifted and stared at Josh, her mouth rounding, her eyes widening, a pleading expression. “Oh Jesus Christ.”

And Fenton laughing. And Josh fleeing down the hall, the cart rattling wildly until he abandoned it and ran into the hub. Somewhere the tick of a clock struck twelve, and a thousand voices roared in mock celebration, like a beast awakened. He walked as fast as he could, almost a run, sweat on his neck, voices in his ears, and broke for the tunnel to the infirmary and home.

It was only when he got to the infirmary that he allowed himself to slow down. The gate pushed open. It shouldn’t have been open. Why was he able to walk right in? The cells were completely dark. Only a single row of fluorescent lights to show his way. There was no one at the CO desk, no one in the common room, no nurses. How would he get into his own cell? He desperately wanted to find his bed bunk, splash water on his face to steady his racing heart, and sleep. His cell door was open. It shouldn’t have been open. But he didn’t go inside. Instead, he walked to the end of the hallway as though compelled, turned the corner into the cavern of the intensive
care wing, each bed in its alcove, and saw the cage surrounding Elgin’s bed.

“If it isn’t himself,” Roy said.

The cage door was open, and Roy sat on the edge of Elgin’s cot, weighing it down. Josh looked to his left and his right. There was no CO anywhere. Vague memories of a party somewhere. Fenton fucking someone. He couldn’t put the pieces together.

“They took his leg off today, can you imagine, and still our friend promises us the hurt.”

With horror he gazed down the torso. Amputated? The blanket on the bed was suspiciously flat on the left side, but Elgin was awake, his uncovered eye darting back and forth between them. His arms were bound by the Velcro restraints attached to each side of the bed. Josh imagined Roy slipping the restraints on while Elgin was sleeping, then sitting patiently and waiting for him to wake up.

“What a surprise to see Crowley’s little bitch,” Elgin said.

Roy shushed him.

“We’ve been talking, Lawrence and me. He’s filled with bitterness. All the pain he’s caused in this world and he wants to cause more. He hates you something awful, Josh. It’s remarkable, really. He thinks you’re going to finish Crowley’s work and that means you need to be stopped. Do you want to tell Josh what you said you’d do to him a few minutes ago?”

“Fuck you, Wobbles, you cocksucking—”

Roy ripped the bandage off Elgin’s face and shoved it deep into his mouth. The mottled spots of blood made Elgin look like a motorcycle crash victim, all road rash. His good eye
bulged with anger. His body undulated against the restraints, working them.

“You needed to go through me,” Roy was saying. “No one gets into the City without me.”

Elgin bucked and lunged, thrusting upward. He struggled to open his mouth around the cloth.

“What are we going to do with you, Lawrence?” Roy asked. His face was the picture of reasonableness. And he put his big, meaty hand across Elgin’s mouth.

Josh had never seen a hand so large. It filled the trench between Elgin’s chin and the tunnels of his nostrils. It embraced Elgin’s face and suctioned down on it. It became the center of stillness in a writhing, bucking, undulating mass.

“There, there,” Roy said.

The calm voice distorted Josh’s understanding of what was happening. The frantic, biting, lunging force on the bed, each thrust to the sky more violent, more hate-filled.

“Shhhh,” Roy was saying. “Don’t fight it. There ain’t nothing you can do.”

And Josh, without understanding whether he was commanded, bidden, or destined, threw himself over Elgin’s body, weighing it down, knowing then and there that he was eternally damned, wanting it to be over as quickly as possible, wanting Elgin to die. The wind must have been howling outside, the snow pounding down like hail. The world was a cesspool of seething hate.

The body burst upward with a violent thrust for air. Roy whispered into Elgin’s ear, calming him, telling him it was going to be all right. And for a second Josh thought it was true;
the great muffled howls were gone, the rolling chest was becalmed, but the air was polluted with a stench, a foul mixture of piss and shit.

Josh fell back, still feeling how Elgin’s heart had beat wildly, begging for release before stabbing upward with one last electric jolt. All of it over now, the calmness back. Roy undid the Velcro restraints and tsked about the raw welts on the forearms, rearranged the sheet, tucking it under Elgin’s torso with a grimace. He replaced the bandage on the half of Elgin’s face, like a badly fitted toupee.

“If I were you,” Roy said, “I’d be in my crib an hour ago.”

I didn’t remember driving home. I wasn’t aware of the world around me until I pulled into the driveway. I was awake but moving without thought. Inside the house, I pulled off my boots and parka. In the kitchen the cat’s water bowl was filled with bloated pellets of food. The fridge was leaking again, and I stepped in the pool of water with my sock foot. I stripped in the bedroom, folding my uniform over the dresser, feeling sallow and flabby, and put on a shirt, sweatpants, and slippers.

I fired up my computer. It took a long time to start. I looked at the business card, blank except for a strange URL,
one of those nonsensical number-letter strings that spam addresses sometimes use, and a password: NOYFB. I launched the browser and typed in the address.

A space came up for a password, and I typed that in, too. The screen flickered and changed, and a video screen popped up. I watched it load and I hit the play button. A home movie started up. Credits came on, “Midnight Walk” appearing in bold white font, like words on a computer screen. Then PowerPoint candy canes and mistletoe came fluttering down the screen like snowflakes. The screen blinked, and suddenly a subtitle appeared: “Produced by the Ditmarsh Social Club.” A symbol below like a trademark. Three inverted triangles, encircled, the glaring pumpkin face. What the hell was the Ditmarsh Social Club?

I felt a pin-size hole in my stomach, the beginnings, no doubt, of some kind of terrible gut-eating cancer. The person holding the camera strolled the hallways of Ditmarsh. A row of covered cell doors with wide slots at waist and floor level. The dissociation unit. The camera stopped before a cell, and a hand knocked almost politely on the metal door. In response, other hands from within were thrust out and cuffed. The door opened, and a CO went inside, visible only from the chest down. A minute later an inmate emerged in shackles. Worse, I realized, he wore ski goggles with aluminum foil in the eyes. He had on heavy ear protectors, the kind airplane flagmen wore to block out all sound. Blind and deaf, he was led forward by the arm, a troop of six unidentified COs surrounding him. A voice called out hello, a muffled echo. A door opened. The camera was outside. It was nighttime. The
camera panned up. The walls of Ditmarsh were revealed from inside the yard. There was no snow. Stars in the night sky above. I heard a voice. “Fuck, it’s cold.” I didn’t recognize the person who spoke.

The scene cut. A door opened to a roomful of people, one of the meeting rooms in Keeper’s Hall. Party whoops welcomed the camera. The camera swiveled back and forth as though greeting people on the left and the right. Then it was placed on a tripod. A face peered into the camera as if to set it properly. I recognized Droune. Then it was back to legs.

It was as though I were watching a frat party. Typical macho CO behavior. The alcohol was flowing, the voices were loud and raunchy. If Ruddik wanted to prove to me that the guards jerked off on company time, brought in liquor and music, well then he’d proved it, but that was hardly my business.

Then some of the behavior started to get outlandish. One of the COs had dropped his pants and was shuffling around the room. I saw what must have been a female CO doing a slow grinding dance to the music, like a stripper, and wondered if it was Connie Poltzoski, a gruff woman in her early forties. A hard drinker and smoker. Debasing herself in front of a roomful of ten or twelve men. None of it looked good on camera to someone like Ruddik. But I kept watching.

The video changed again. The party must have ended or become subdued. I could hear footsteps and voices with clarity. The camera was picked up this time and thrust into a hideously made-up face. Lipstick-smeared mouth. Dark mascara eyes. A scared look. When the camera pulled back, I
recognized the inmate. What was his name? The transvestite called Screen Door, wearing a strapless cocktail dress. She was slender and timid but still looked gangly and manly, awkward on high heels. The camera tilted up and around, and I saw that every CO in the picture was now wearing a hood. I was so startled by the transformation that it took me a moment to understand. The hoods were gray flannel. They were loose. They slumped to the shoulders and needed to be adjusted and shifted often.

I watched helplessly as the hooded COs converged on Screen Door. They forced him to stand on a chair in his high heels. The camera panned up, and I saw that Screen Door was wearing a bedsheet rope around his neck. His eyes bulged in terror. He was crying. The muffled voices told him to shut up. One hand held a Taser close to Screen Door’s body, and Screen Door leaned away from its touch, as if he could imagine it going off at any moment. I heard someone spitting obscenities. Screen Door was guilty of numerous crimes. He was a pipe-sucking homo. He didn’t do what he was told. He needed to be dealt with. The chair was kicked away. For one awful moment Screen Door was suspended in the air, and then he collapsed in a heap on the floor. The laughter overwhelmed the sound of the video.

Then they pulled him up and noosed him again, even as he begged for his life. The screams were horrible. The chair got kicked, and he fell the same way, and to the COs it was just as funny, even as Screen Door coughed and spit. After he was mock executed a third time, a CO lifted him up and embraced
him with his arms. Then he spoke and told Screen Door that he’d been saved, that he was born anew. Someone laughed and told him to sin no more. I didn’t recognize any of the voices.

The screen blackened. Somewhere in the darkness I heard a car honk hysterically, and I realized the new year had begun.