New Taboos

by John Shirley

  Then she was spun about, her arm painfully wrenched, and pushed through the open door …

  An autoguard was waiting outside, its eyeless face scanning her.

  She was afraid of the autoguards. She let Gull and the autoguard shuffle her off, the chains clinking, through corridors and glass-wired metal doors, another corridor to a freight elevator where she stood trembling between the robot and the man as the wide gray box descended.

  Then she was escorted along a damp corridor in a basement to a door with a little window, and into a room where the light never went out, and there was a foam rubber pad on a bench built into the wall … a seatless toilet …

  She tried to talk to Gull as he took off the cuffs. “You can help yourself by reporting this, now, to Priority Media, and to the Justice Department, Samuel …”

  “Breakfast is at seven,” he said, leaving the little room. The lock clicked sharply, making a definitive statement.

  3. SEPTEMBER

  Phil. It had to be Phil.

  He denied I was on assignment from Priority. He must have. But why?

  Faye turned over on her bunk, facing the wall.

  He misunderstood. Thought I was threatening him.

  She picked at a paint bubble on the concrete wall and shivered. The chills were back. The place where they’d shot her in the rump with the tracker burned. She suspected the wound might’ve become infected. She hadn’t submitted to the tracker without fighting. They’d had to hold her down. She didn’t remember an alcohol swab.

  He seduced me and dumped me and yes I guilted him a little to get the assignment. But I didn’t threaten him.

  She looked up at the scratched-in graffiti on the wall. “I am a jewl,” it said. “I sparkle like a jewl. I’m a jewl buried underground.”

  Buried underground. Phil thought I was going to tell his wife. Thought there’d be a divorce and he’d lose custody of his boys. So he set me up. Put me in here.

  She heard the scrape of the tray coming through the slot in the door. She could smell the food. It made her feel sick to smell it. She’d stopped eating a while ago. Food just came up if she ate.

  She’d stopped trying to talk to the guards, too. Stopped demanding her phone call, stopped demanding a lawyer. Demands got her no response, none. Which was a response itself.

  Someone will come looking for me …

  But they probably wouldn’t. She had no siblings, no boyfriend, no close friends who’d search for her. Maybe I can get Phil a message. Tell him I didn’t mean what he thought. All is forgiven. Just get me out. He knows people.

  The light flickered.

  She looked up at the caged bulb, hoping for a power outage. It was burning steadily. She’d tried to break it already once but it was out of reach

  She looked back at the paint bubble, and widened it a little, working at its edges with her fingernail, concentrating.

  The light flickered.

  She looked quickly up at it.

  It wasn’t flickering.

  Phil. It must’ve been him. Or …

  The light.

  She looked up at it. It burned steadily.

  Faye closed her eyes, and put her arm over her face. She could smell herself. She’d stopped washing a few days earlier. Maybe a week.

  She breathed in her own smell. It was an interesting smell.

  She felt the chills again …

  “Girl, you got to learn how to do time in solitary.”

  The voice was womanly but it seemed to lilt a bit too much. Faye felt a sponge on her neck.

  “How’s that feel?” the voice fluted.

  Faye opened her eyes. She was lying on her back, looking up at a man who wore some kind of makeup around his brown eyes; eyeliner and blue shadow. He was smiling down at her, and it was the first genuine smile she’d seen since she’d come across the border into Arizona Statewide. He was dark-skinned, lanky, with big hands. He had his black hair tied up in a bun on top of his head. He wore an orange jumpsuit, and a trustee badge.

  “Look at you, finally waking your ass up!” the man said.

  Faye looked around. She was in a hospital bed, wearing a clean prison shift, in an infirmary of some kind, not large, with white walls. Light green curtains partially blocked off her area. She shifted on the bed and felt a tug at her right arm, saw an IV needle attached to a soft plastic bottle hung on a thin metal pole. A bubble was moving slowly up the IV tube, as if it were escaping.

  She tried to move her left arm but it was cuffed to a rail running along the bedframe. Still in prison. “How long have I been here?”

  “’Bout two days, girlfriend. I’m Hortense.”

  “Faye.”

  “Oh I know, I seen your charts. You had an infection where they shot you with the tracker. Your fever’s way down, though.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll bring you some soup. Here, let me adjust the bed, get you sitting up …”

  Faye waited, still sleepy, dazed, the five-minute wait seeming more like an hour, before Hortense bustled back to her, working extra girlishness into her walk. At some point, Faye had started thinking of the man as a woman.

  “See, in solitary,” Hortense was saying, sitting the Styrofoam bowl of yellow-orange soup on the little steel table beside the bed, “you got to find a way to stay busy. You can exercise and make up poems, find something to do, keep your head on straight. Here …”

  She carefully lifted a spoonful of the soup to Faye’s mouth. It tasted of pumpkin and beans; delicious, probably because she was so hungry.

  “Even the soup wears orange here,” Faye said.

  Hortense laughed.

  “I can feed myself.”

  “Girl, let me finish giving you this bowl, I got to make myself seem useful in here. You know what, I made up poems in UnCus—I put one on the wall, about how I felt like a jewel.”

  “Oh! That was my cell!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, your poem … kept me company.” It seemed like the right thing to say.

  Hortense was pleased. “They give you anything to write with?”

  “No. They didn’t want to encourage anything like journalism.”

  Hortense chuckled, gave her some more soup, and then became grave. “The guards … the human guards? You can trade stuff, you know. You’re not someone who’d think of it, right off. But most likely you will later.”

  “Trade? … Oh.”

  “You make the offer, they come in, and cuff you to a pipe on back of the toilet and … it’s usually a blow job. That might get you a book. Magazines. First time he brought me some fishing magazines! What I want with fishing magazines? I wanted InFashion”

  “You sound like you heard something about me—you knew I was in Unprivileged Custody. Heard anything else?”

  “You going to ask me if I heard about your case?” Hortense shook her head. “Just heard a story they were really mad at you and you were a reporter. Girl reporter! Seems like a hard job. I get out, I’m going to go back to haircutting school.”

  “You know when they’re letting you out?”

  “I’m a short-timer, girl. Four weeks and four days—If I don’t mess up. Even a little screw up is bad. They find an excuse to keep you, they will. Some people … my friend Rudy, he and Steve messed up big. They’ll never let him out.”

  “They have to let him out sometime if they’re not convicted of murder …”

  Hortense shook her head sadly.

  “No, girl, they don’t have to. This isn’t government, this is corporation stuff. They make their own rules here. You got to twist yourself around like a rubber band, stretch yourself into any shape they want. They punish people in here. They … Well, I found my way. That’s all.” She extended the plastic spoon. “You eat up now.”

  Faye swallowed some more soup. “How about someone like me?”

  Hortense shrugged, and seemed to be considering a reassuring response.

  “For real, Hortense. What do you think�
��ll happen to me here?”

  “For real? I heard you were going to tell on them. About Sub 18, all that other. I never heard of anyone reporting on them anything they didn’t want said. I don’t know what they’re going to do with you. I surely do not. But they’re not going to let you go. The McCrue company’d lose too much money, girl.”

  4. OCTOBER

  “Absconder unit for someone like you,” Rudy was saying, “is probably on the way to somewhere else. Maybe psyche eval, remand to the crazy pod. Maybe Sub 18.”

  “I’m not staying in prison,” Faye said firmly. “I’m …” An autoguard trundled by on its wheels, watching them without turning its plastic and metal head, and she finished lamely, “I’m … just not.”

  She was outside—but inside too. They were each allowed one hour in the outdoor exercise cages which extended out from the back of absconder unit—they were steel mesh open-air pens with a gap of about five feet between them. It felt zoolike. Several human guards stood together, talking, across the courtyard area from her. Lockiffers, the prisoners called them. But being out here where she could see sky and sun was an enormous relief. Faye looked up at a wispy cloud, elegantly attenuated, startlingly white against the blue sky. She couldn’t remember looking at a cloud so closely before—not since childhood. Or seeing a sky quite so perfectly turquoise-colored.

  The breeze was coming from the south, wending its way between buildings. She could smell sage, and minerals. She could glimpse other prisoners in other cages beyond Rudy. They were all men.

  “Rudy—how come they’re keeping me here, where I’m the only woman? Letting me come outside like this … Why don’t they put me in some woman’s population?”

  She thought she knew the answer. Hortense had hinted at it. She was hoping Rudy had another response.

  He started to say something, then broke off. A moment later he shrugged and said, “One thing, you got sick. They got to get you well. So. Coming out here helps. And …” He broke off again, as someone walked up to the cages, shoes squeaking.

  It was Gull, hands in his jacket pockets. He ignored Rudy and paused near Faye’s fence, his gaze roaming freely over her. He had a look of speculation on his face. “You have ten minutes more out here,” he told her, before strolling on.

  She thought about calling him back just to once more demand a lawyer, or at least the phone call she’d never gotten. But they just shrugged, if they reacted at all, when she asked for those things. There was one possibility, something as wispy as that cloud. It probably wouldn’t work.

  Don’t think like that. It has to work.

  Rudy watched Gull till he was out of earshot. “Never see that guy around here,” he said, in a low voice. “He seems to be keeping you under some kind of personal surveillance.”

  Faye wondered about Phil. Was this really all down to him? All this time, no one looking for her? It had to be his doing. He just hadn’t seemed like that kind of person. He was no saint. But still …

  Faye looked to see where the autoguards and the lockiffers were. None of them were close by. “Rudy …” She turned her back on the courtyard, making her voice as low as she could and still be heard by him. “There have to be cell phones in here somewhere. The prisoners have to …”

  He shook his head. “Cell phones are bigtime contraband,” he said glumly. “Used to be people keistered them in. But you can’t keister anything now—they got machines that look right through you. I haven’t seen a cell phone in years, except when the guards use them—and even they aren’t supposed to use them except in emergencies. No. Got to think of something else.”

  Gull came into her cell right after breakfast the next morning; a stocky black guard with a heavy belly and yellowed eyes came with him, the man silent, except occasionally humming tunelessly to himself. The black guard had no identification badge on, but he carried a set of handcuffs loosely in his hands. Both men had gas masks hanging loosely around their necks, in case of need. Outside the cell an autoguard waited, eerily silent, somehow radiating alertness. Faye could see its chest panel was open; inside the panel was a row of nozzles. “Be careful,” Rudy called, from across the hallway. He was shouting through the hole in the door. “They got that panel open, they’re full on Dalek! They’ll spray you with ‘ouch’!”

  He’d told her about “ouch”—a gas that suffused your lungs with burning agony once you breathed it in. It paralyzed you with pain. He’d told her about the worm, too, and what had happened to Steve. She wasn’t eager to fight with robots.

  “What do you want, Gull?” she asked.

  “We’re moving you,” he said.

  “For the record, I’m demanding a phone call and a lawyer, again, neither of which I’ve ever had. I demand them right now! I assume that robot records everything.”

  “Not everything,” Gull said blandly. “Come on.”

  The black lockiffer made the bored, twirling gesture with his hand that meant turn around.

  The inside of Faye’s mouth felt desiccated; her heart was pounding. She looked at the black guard, trying to catch his eye. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  He didn’t look directly at her. Like Skaffel. He made the twirling gesture again.

  “Turn around now,” Gull said. “Autoguard, be ready.”

  Faye turned slowly around and put her hands together behind her back. She felt the cuffs pinch down, closing cold on her wrists; she felt the discomfort in her shoulders. It was all becoming familiar.

  “Turn around,” Gull said. “Go out the door. Turn right, ahead of the autoguard, take one step and then stop.”

  Maybe this is all drama to scare me. Maybe this time they’re letting me go.

  She’d had that same thought many times before.

  Now she walked out of the open cell door, turned right, took a step, and stopped. She saw a man looking at her from another cell. It was the trustee, Carlos. He was stuck in ACU because he’d been caught leading her to Subpod 18.

  He nodded to her, with no bitterness in his face. She nodded back.

  She heard Gull squeaking up behind her. “Go ahead, on down the hall,” he said.

  Faye walked on, her knees weak. The ACU door clicked open ahead of her, directed by the robot. She walked through, down a short corridor. Another door clicked open. She was in Subpod 18. The walkway stretched ahead of her, concrete and iron on the left, old-fashioned barred cells on the right. But now she was seeing it in full light. She heard women talking to one another, one of them laughing, another crying, another calling someone a bitch hag, “just a fucking bitch hag, just a …” Bitch hag, over and over. They passed a cell where a black woman said something to her in a Jamaican patois too thick to understand.

  The guards were fulsome presences behind Faye. Someone hissed a warning at their approach, and the women’s voices quieted.

  Then she came to an open cell.

  “Enter the cell,” said Gull.

  Feeling like she was sleepwalking, Faye stepped into the cell. The black guard slid the barred door shut behind her.

  “Take a step back, toward the bars,” Gull said.

  She did. The other guard reached through, unlocked her cuffs, and took them. She straightened her arms and stretched.

  “Inmate Gloria Munoz, dinner is in two hours,” Gull said. “There’ll be a consultation after dinner.”

  Faye turned to see who Gull was talking to. He was looking straight at her. There was just the suggestion of a smile on his face. The black guard was walking away; the autoguard was waiting quietly, beside Gull.

  “What did you say?” Faye asked.

  “Gloria Munoz, dinner is in—”

  “What?”

  A woman she couldn’t see in the cell to her right said, “Bitch, that your name, just shut up! You Gloria now!”

  Some of the women laughed. One of them sobbed.

  “You’re not going to pull that bullshit,” Faye said, her voice cracking. She turned to the robot. “You record this! My name is Faye
Adullah, my address is—”

  “It’s not recording now,” Gull interrupted. “You’re wasting your breath. Here, look.”

  He unclipped an electronic wand from his belt. One end of the wand held a sensor; the other end had a little screen, like a smartphone. He pointed the sensor end at her. “Reading your tracker now, and … Look.”

  He held it so she could see the screen. She saw her face on the screen, a miniaturized mug shot. She saw a number under the face, and under that, the name, Gloria Munoz.

  “I don’t even look the part,” she said hoarsely.

  “Guatemalan, illegal immigrant,” he said. “Extensive criminal record. Gloria Munoz. Get used to it.”

  She looked him in the eyes and said in a low, flat voice, “I’m not going to get used to it.”

  He returned the wand to his belt, and walked past the autoguard. It remained behind, for a long moment, seeming to watch her.

  A woman laughed. A woman sobbed.

  The robot rolled away.

  Faye made herself eat part of her dinner, some kind of meat and cheese quesadilla from a package. She washed it down with water from her sink. She went to the toilet, tried to pee. Couldn’t, though it felt like she needed to.

  She went to the bunk and lay down. Her stomach burbled.

  Gloria Munoz. Get used to it.

  She picked at a paint bubble on the wall.

  I should try to talk to the other girls …

  Later. There would be time. She just felt too limp. She felt like a fly badly swatted. Alive but broken, buzzing to itself as it slowly died. Buzzzzz.

  Faye closed her eyes. The women’s voices seemed to merge into the buzzing … After a while the corridor lights went down. They didn’t go out completely. The women got quieter. She heard footsteps, and a cell door opening, voices she couldn’t understand. She turned to look as someone walked by. It was the Jamaican woman, escorted by the heavy black guard, and a robot. She had her hands cuffed behind her.

  “She going to the berdwar,” one of the women said, down the hall a little.

  Berdwar? Boudoir. Rudy had mentioned a special cell …

  Faye turned over on the bunk and picked at the paint bubble. Voices echoed down the hall, unintelligible. Perhaps half an hour passed. The berdwar.