In the morning, our three victims awakened to discover that they had magically grown a horde of stray eyebrows, and immediately went bonkers! We were waiting and saw them point at each other and gesture and literally run around in circles, swiping at their foreheads as though they were trying to dislodge a face full of creepy-crawlers! All six of the other members of the group stood there, each of us silently laughing our ass off. We were joined by three matrons, and they weren’t silent at all; I was sure their belly laughs could be heard throughout the prison.
The senior member of the triple finally made it into the bathroom and began to frantically pull at the glued-on eyelashes, which she was certain were stray brows that had mysteriously erupted in the night. I had only glued them at one end so she was mostly able to pull them off, apparently experiencing a sexual charge every time she did it, as I had hoped. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, she was grabbing at her numb pussy, obviously somewhere just short of a thundering orgasm.
She fell to the floor and rolled around, completely out of control. Meanwhile, the second member of the triple had rushed in to tweeze her eyebrows.
The matrons completely lost it in a display of hysterical laughter the likes of which I’d never seen. When the second woman stumbled out, also close to orgasm and also falling to the floor in awesome need, one matron had wet her pants, and the two others were crying from laughing so hard.
The third girl had been shaking with disgust at the hairs on her brows while she waited to get into the little bathroom and pluck them off. Afterward, she joined her triple sisters on the floor, writhing in sexual need as the first one began to calm down.
It might have been a cruel joke, but it was a joke nonetheless. I didn’t feel bad, I felt happy and satisfied to have broken up the dullness of the place for a little while. When I found I’d scored some points with the matrons, however, I didn’t feel so happy about what I’d done. If they thought it was so great, I must have stepped over a boundary I shouldn’t have crossed. At that realization, I felt more like a traitor than an entertainer.
Fortunately, those triple sisters didn’t seem to hold it against me. Later that day, I saw them acting out what had happened and silently laughing about it. They saw me and waved good-naturedly, to which I waved back and mouthed, “I’m sorry,” in Arabic. They all flashed me the universal okay sign.
**********
The prisoner’s workload was surprisingly light, so I was able to spend a lot of time outside. I eventually got used to the hot, desert sun on my naked body. Despite being a dark blonde, I managed to get pretty tan, and was almost as dark as Altaf, who tended to avoid the sun.
You might picture the place as a medieval slave-labor camp, but it actually wasn’t like that at all. They didn’t treat us very well, and punishments were swift and severe if anything went wrong. Without a doubt, we were subject to control 24/7. After all, they built that control into our bodies and our minds. However, when things were quiet, you could tolerate the place, if the boredom itself didn’t drive you crazy. Of course, our controllers would try to prevent us from going crazy or, at least, do anything crazy like attempt suicide, even if we went around the bend.
I saw that happen to a woman out in the yard one afternoon, about a month after my mostly-unsatisfying tryst with Altaf and Erij. It was a month or so after the woman’s first auction appearance. I think she’d expected to be bought and, thereby, escape from this controlled, restrained, monotonous hell. She was bitterly disappointed when that didn’t happen. All of us were just sitting around, looking at the other inmates in the yard. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a rapid motion by this very skinny young girl, clearly a hazil, or a gaunt inmate, who was probably about nineteen. She jumped up off a picnic-like table where she’d been sitting with her head in her hands, and proceeded to run around the yard, right up against the fence and the buildings bordering the yard, waving her hands in the air and making strange faces at no one in particular.
The three matrons in the yard at the time stood there and watched her for several minutes. Finally, they noticed her actually foaming at the mouth from her uncontrolled exertion in the stifling heat. A matron near me pulled out her controller, fiddled with it for a moment, then looked up while pushing the dreaded activate button. The girl instantly collapsed to the ground, sliding across the scrubby sand on her face and the front of her naked torso with her legs bent up behind her.
She just lay there as the matrons moved toward her, one of them pushing a wheelchair that was kept in the corner of the yard for just such purposes. They managed to get the thin, lanky girl, who couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds, into it and immediately wheeled her to the infirmary, apparently to clean up the nasty scrapes on her face, her little breasts and her stomach.
The next time I saw the guard who had frozen the girl in mid-stride, I asked her, through a few signs and a lot of pantomime, what had happened to the girl. She told me they’d cleaned her up, kept her in the infirmary overnight for observation, and then paralyzed her from the waist down to prevent her from running around anymore, if she had another fit like the one that day. The doctor thought keeping her an almost concentration-camp thin hazil was a bad idea; she believed the food restriction was contributing to the girl’s confusion and mental instability. The matrons thought it would be “fun” to see if they could really fatten her up, so they pushed to get her reassigned as a zenay vizhiden. There happened to be an opening for the extremely fat, so that’s where she got reassigned. They’d try to more than triple her weight, a process that might take a year. Until she reached the new target, the poor girl would remain paralyzed, and wouldn’t be eligible for the auction.
That matron, who wasn’t all that bad a person in my experience there, thought the whole thing was hysterically funny, and a great joke to play on the pathetic girl. To me, it was another example of the underlying cruelty in this entire society.
I needed to get out of this place. Why hadn’t anyone I knew before come to rescue me and get me out? Had they really been misled about my location, as ghost Tia had said?
To this day, I’ve never known for certain why I appeared to be abandoned by my family, friends and colleagues. I suppose in my heart-of-hearts, I believe many people must have tried to find and rescue me, but the Kingdom of Salat had made me disappear. That’s what Tia essentially told me, when she said I’d been lost accidentally, assuming there was actually a Tia spirit, and Tia wasn’t just a projection of my bewildered, tired, unhappy mind.
At this point, it no longer matters, though I’d like to know. If I could find out, or if I never did, it would make no difference. I could never go home now to Destiny’s family - if that’s who I was - or Karimah’s family, or …
**********
More months passed. I found it increasingly hard to imagine my life before this place. That life seemed like something I’d read about or seen on television, not anything I’d experienced myself. I was pretty sure that I used to have two or three names, like Destiny Michele Hutton. Now my only name was Karimah. I wasn’t sure whether or not that had been one of my names before – I didn’t think so - but I had this mental itch that told me I had been Destiny for real. Now, Destiny was lost to me, along with my destiny.
Oh well. I was simply Karimah now. I suppose it didn’t make much difference. Here in the prison, it didn’t make any difference at all.
**********
I was sound asleep one morning, a month or two after my eyebrow gluing joke. I usually managed to sleep until awakened by the morning call to prayer, fajr, which was broadcast loudly all around and within the prison, about an hour and a half before dawn. That morning, at the time I thought was fajr, there were a series of huge explosions, like cannons or mortar fire right next to my bedroom! All three of us leaped off our cots, our hearts pounding out of our chests as the booming continued unabated.
We couldn’t decide whether to take cover or investigate. Something was clearly wrong. The othe
r women in our group rushed out into the main corridor and we followed them. The explosions seemed to be coming from everywhere. Dozens of women were running along the main corridor in every direction. A few huddled together in one corner or another.
I pointed down and Altaf, Erij and I tried to find a door to take us to the small basement level beneath the dormitory wing. Erij found it and we dashed into the stairwell. The booms within that confined space could be felt in your bones. We dashed down the stairs.
As we emerged into the basement, I thought I heard music in the background of the explosions. At first, I thought it was simply my ears ringing from the never-ending bursts of cannons. Then it hit me.
Booming cannons. Sounds like cannons, not modern explosives. Background music. I threw my hands in the air and started silently laughing until I was shaking in amusement and tears ran down my cheeks.
Seeing me, I think Altaf assumed I was so afraid that I was crying with terror. She put her arm around me to comfort me. I shook my head and tried to indicate that it was alright, and that we had all been rudely awakened by the cannons in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, apparently playing through the call-to-prayer speakers!
It took a while to explain that last part via my poorly-constructed pantomimes. I think they both got it, but I doubted either had heard the music before. Even if they had, the prankster who had done this (my hat’s off to her or them), had somehow boosted the cannon track and quieted the music track, or eliminated it altogether.
As I was finishing my impromptu charades, the booming stopped. Everything was deadly quiet. I motioned for all of us to return to our room. I suspected the matrons, once they stopped shaking, then pissing themselves, then laughing at the stunt would start a pogrom to find the responsible inmate or inmates.
I was right about the investigation. An hour later, having shaved and showered, Erij, Altaf and I were sitting at our table smoking, when three matrons showed up and started tearing our place apart, having just finished doing the same to our group sisters.
They were making a mess of everything; I was lamenting the fact that we’d have to clean all this up when they were finished. Oh well, it would at least be something to do. The hilarity of the event was worth it.
Then the matron who was ripping my cot apart lifted the mattress, reached down, and held up what looked like a mobile phone with earbuds attached! It turned out to be an old iPod. It had been lost by one of the guards who, apparently, was into Western classical music. You guessed it. It held an MP3 digital copy of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture! I was in deep shit.
I might have been able to convince them that it’d been planted there, if I hadn’t developed the reputation for practical joking. Or maybe not. As it was, I was tried once again in a kangaroo court consisting of the warden, a matron, and the guard who owned the iPod. My English-written statement, which they’d had translated into Arabic, carried no weight.
The warden was her usual stern self, though I thought I saw the beginning of a smile and a gleam in her eye, when the matron read an account of what happened. More likely, it was her amusement of finding the American girl she disliked in trouble again.
Someone (me apparently) had either picked the pocket of the guard who had the iPod, or he had accidentally left it somewhere and the perpetrator had found it. Apparently the guards and matrons were allowed to carry iPods, but not mobile phones (which wouldn’t have worked in the Control Institution anyway, because it was many miles from any cell tower). The perp had broken into the room that held the audio system that automatically produced the call to prayer by broadcasting a recorded voice over the prison’s speakers. She had hooked up the cannon track to both stereo inputs and downloaded the MP3 file, overwriting the fajr call to prayer.
I tried in vain to convince them that I had no idea how to do what had happened, that I’d never touched an iPod, knew nothing about their system or downloading to it, and had no knowledge of how to break into a locked room. True, some of the women in my group were cat burglars, another had worked in the Eritrean equivalent of a Best Buy in computers and electronics, and still another had been a computer programmer.
Then it hit me! There was a burglar, the Best Buy woman, and the programmer in one triple – the one I had pulled my eyebrow joke on! I hastened to point this out by writing it down. The guard seemed to have enough English to translate it for the others, but, in the end, it didn’t make any difference. I’d been caught with the goods. Besides, I was an American, and Americans all knew everything about technology. Yeah, right!
They found me guilty, of course, and I braced myself for something awful. At this point, the humor of the prank was lost to me and my heart was pounding with horrible anticipation. The last time I had faced a tribunal like this, I had lost my teeth!
When the judgement came, I was surprised, and actually relieved. They sentenced me to six weeks of leg paralysis to keep me out of trouble. In addition, in the hopes of adjusting my attitude to make me behave seriously, my face would be frozen like Altaf’s, for the same six weeks. That was it!
A moment later, the matron judge produced a controller. I felt the inevitable tingling in my head, and then my body went dead from my waist down. I immediately pissed myself, right there in the chair facing the trio. Two matrons entered from my right. I recognized one as the matron who had first brought me into the prison proper, and had mentioned that she and another had frozen poor Altaf.
The two stood there pouring over a controller, making changes and adjustments and in general arguing with each other. I could see the warden becoming impatient. Just as she was about to speak up, one of the matrons exclaimed, “We’ve got it!”
The tingling in my head returned, and my face went dead.
I wheeled myself back to my triple. My face was immobile. I tried to smile and frown but nothing happened. At first I thought they had somehow frozen most all of the dozens of muscles in my face, but, thinking about trying to make any expression at all, I realized that I couldn’t figure out how to make my mind communicate with my face anymore. I couldn’t smile, or frown, or look scared or excited, or anything else, because I didn’t know how. It was exactly like not knowing how to talk anymore.
When I wheeled back into our triple rooms, Altaf and Erij weren’t outside where we had yard time, but were waiting for me, in the hopes I would come back and not have something horrible done to me. I waved when I saw them. Erij smiled, Altaf pushed up the corners of her mouth, and both hugged me in my chair. Using signing, they asked me how long, and I told them six weeks. They seemed as relieved as I was.
Altaf looked at me curiously and I nodded and used my fingers to push up the corners of my mouth, then pointed to myself and nodded again. I indicated it was for six weeks also. I saw a tear form in her eye and she hugged me again. We were two women with broken faces.
After supper’s gruel, I happened to see the three triple members I had tricked, and who I was sure had set me up. They looked at me curiously as I wheeled over to them. One asked how long and I told them. Then I pointed to them and nodded my head while punching my right fist into my other hand. They knew that I knew. I couldn’t be angry, though; they had cleverly retaliated and I had to admire their creativity. I stopped punching, used my fingers to push up the corners of my mouth into an Altaf smile, and then began to clap.
It was almost worth it to see the big smiles breaking out on their faces, when they understood I wasn’t angry, that I got it. They each came over, gave me a hug and a couple pats on the back.
Overall, not bad, I thought. There are still real human beings, with positive human characteristics like cleverness, teasing and laughter, left in the Control Institution for Delinquent Women.
**********
Six weeks later, I was returned to normal with a few weakness side effects in my legs again and in my face. The first thing I did was smile until I thought I might break my face myself.
As time went on, I became more and more comfortable in my s
kin. This bothered me a lot when I thought about it, and there was plenty of time for introspection. I tried to put my contemplation in some perspective. One day, I concluded that I, Karimah, and everyone around me was insane. There was no other explanation for what had and was happening to me. I felt terrible at that realization, but I also knew I was at peace, because then I could open myself to whatever they did to me, and know I was going to accept the changes which would move me along the path to whatever I would become.
I knew it wouldn’t be the mystical, lost Destiny, or the Karimah I was then, but it would be someone.
Her name turned out to be Dohattn, though I had other lives to live before I was that person.
In Arabic, dohattn means “cuddles.”
Chapter 14 – Happiness in Slavery
More months passed and Altaf’s last auction was coming up. That is, it would be her last, unless an exception were made, and she was permitted to take part in the auctions beyond her one-year of eligibility.
No one thought that was likely. Apparently, no buyers were interested in an otherwise pretty, plump, 20-something woman whose face was a frozen tableau … of nothing at all.
At various times during Altaf’s eligibility for the auction, I thought that surely the matrons responsible would restore her face, to increase the chance that someone would buy out her contract. That was a goal the matrons had for all prisoners. Apparently, part of their responsibilities was to push inmates out into indentured service, to save the Kingdom money and keep the prison population manageable. Nevertheless, they refused to repair Altaf, in spite of her clumsy, sign-language pleading and entreaties from Erij and me. Apparently their “cleverly conceived adjustment” (their words) to the poor girl’s disposition was too rich of a joke to warrant undoing, in spite of their need to push prisoners out.
Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1) Page 27