He heard Todd return into the office, so he joined him, breathing deeply and trying to look pleased and excited at the thought of a meal.
“I cooked up your brown trout, Clay, and I didn’t have any tartar sauce, but I do have the bottom scrapings from a jar of mayonnaise and an ounce or so of dill pickle relish if you want to make something of that. I also found a half a packet of Saltines and a tomato.”
Clay nodded to him and said “Thanks.” He wasn’t sure if he could eat now that he thought there might be children starving only fifty feet away from him. He nibbled some on his fish, and he could feel Todd’s eyes on him as if the guard expected him to offer some kind of critical review of the meal.
“Do you all eat pretty well here, Todd? I mean… is prison food as bad as they make it out to be?” He snapped off a piece of cracker and choked it down before taking another sip of coffee.
Todd looked at him, amused, and then shrugged, “Well, usually we do alright, but things have been a bit tight this week. What with the storm and the lack of power and the disruptions and all. We’re a little low on manpower and most of our deliveries haven’t made it.” He rocked back in his chair, trying, and failing, to look nonchalant. “I suppose with this nor’easter, it might stretch on a little longer, but it’s not like we’re freezing and starving out in the blizzard like you were an hour ago.”
Clay took a larger bit of the fish, and he felt his stomach growl and he felt guilty for it, but he chewed with some intensity now. Todd took a long drink of his coffee then got up to pour himself another cup. “So what’s it like out there, Clay? How bad is it from what you’ve seen?”
Clay was happy for the diversion, and between bites of fish, filled Todd in on what he knew, at least all of the basics. He related his trip across the bridge, but left out the part about Veronica, offering only the parts that he had seen on her television. He told Todd about his ride with Clive, leaving out any details about Clive the man but sharing what he knew about the stores stripped of products, and about the gas lines, and about how the people walking on the highway seemed to be like zombies, their eyes dead like shark’s eyes… doll eyes.
“They weren’t zombies or undead or vampires or anything like that, they just looked like it, you know?” he said. This, he supposed, was the veil of civilization peeling back, the line of civility stretching ever thinner.
Just as Clay was finishing his story, and his fish, he heard a muffled sound coming from down the hall. THUMP. The sound seemed heavy, as if a body had been thrown against a wall or a bird had flown into a window. It was jarring. It reminded him of a tree falling in the woods in winter, after the crack, in that long, slow moment before the top slams into the snow.
THUMP.
Clay looked up at Todd, and he saw the guard’s countenance fall. Fear, mixed with anger and confusion marched across the tall security officer’s face, and he seemed to be frozen in place, unable to move.
“Todd? Um… What was that?” Clay asked, sitting up straighter in his chair.
THUMP. Louder. Somehow closer.
There seemed to be a loud clatter, off in the distance, like a car wreck a dozen blocks away on a foggy day in his Brooklyn neighborhood, and Clay could barely make out voices and screaming. The sounds were as if they were in a freezer or a coffin buried deep someplace and the vibrations were deeper than the clatter.
THUMP… Closer.
The last one was loud, and Todd jumped to his feet, finally motivated to action. He spun around to the cabinet behind him and pulled out a large bat, a stun gun, and a handful of handcuffs.
THUMP. Louder. The sounds of breaking glass and screams.
“Todd?”
“Get in the cell and close the door! I’ll lock it behind you!”
THUMP. The sound of wood splintering.
“What is this, Todd?”
“GO! NOW! Into your cell! They’re trying it! It’s a jailbreak! RUN!”
Clay hopped up from his chair, his tray spilling onto the ground and the coffee, thankfully cooled, landed down the front of his bright orange prison jumper, drenching him. He sprinted down the hall, his mind reeling, and as he turned towards his cell he could hear that the inmates had breached the second door with a loud crash of what sounded like wood and steel and glass, and now voices could be heard, yelling Russian words, and there seemed to be fighting and shouts and yelps.
Todd pushed him from behind and Clay landed hard on the concrete bunk, his shoulder smashing painfully into the cinder block wall. “Gonna turn out the light and lock you in, Clay! Don’t make a sound! They’ll kill you, man!”
The light snapped off.
He heard the lock click into place and the keys rattle in Todd’s hands and Todd’s panicked footsteps as he raced back towards the office. Clay stared up at the extinguished light, and the bulb, clad in heavy metal mesh, was visible now as the element faded to black. His mind connected it with the light in the entry vestibule that had clicked on to herald his safety and salvation and he heard the door across the way splinter and complain as the weight and pain of hunger and despair and freedom crashed against it.
CHAPTER 7
For some men, the world is an autoclave. A steam engine bearing down upon them. A tumbling aerial swan dive into a lake of uncertain depth. There is no society that stands behind them, no motion to follow their leadership, no positive reviews in the daily papers. Life is merely, as Hobbes said, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Life for such men—for (perhaps) most men throughout history—varies little in substance from that of the animals. Cattle in their stampede, sharks in their chum-fueled frenzy, armies of driver ants with their smothering razor-sharp jaws lined in charging columns… each of these bears a striking resemblance to the worst expressions of human nature in its unbridled chaos. And in the long catalogue of such expressions, from war to neglect to terrorism, little compares to a prison riot.
Sitting in the darkness, back pressed hard against the cold concrete bunk, Clay felt a terror well up in him that he had only felt once before in his life. His mind, still addled from the sense of displacement brought on by the effects of hypothermia and shock, flashed back to that moment when he was on the phone with Cheryl after the crash. It was the only thing he could hold on to, and it was also the worst. That infinitesimal micro-second when he just absolutely knew that everything he loved had just been taken from him. That was it. That was the moment. Sheer terror. Helplessness. Fear.
The sounds of violence punctuated the air and he closed his eyes wanting to wish himself invisible amid the pandemonium of Hurricane Sandy crashing outside his cell. What? No. This is not Hurricane Sandy. Sandy’s gone. Cheryl’s gone. Back in prison now. No, this was not the hurricane. Sandy was merciful.
Now there was loud shouting—sounded like Russian—and he could clearly hear Todd, though the words were in a language he did not understand, pleading as if for his life. Clay understood the language of pleading fluently. He had practiced it and was attuned to its inflections and lexicon, the nuances of its verbiage. He had pleaded with Todd to be let in; the inmates had pleaded with him for help; and now Todd was pleading for his life. He heard a shriek amidst shouts and what could only be described as a gurgling noise as he searched through his mind for some escape route. He hadn’t left himself one. He waited and held his breath.
More commotion now and the sound of upturned furniture and a turbulent ruckus as another door somewhere relented, pummeled into submission. Maybe they’ll just go. If they would just go out the same doors Clay had come in, they could get away. The entrance vestibule was right there. The fence was down. Is the blizzard still raging? Are they smashing in the doors to my left, or to my right? Can’t tell. His heart was pounding in his chest, and he could feel his elevated pulse in his eyelids.
And then there was silence. Blessed relief. Are they gone? He tried to calm his breathing and slow his heart rate and he took several deep diaphragmatic breaths trying to force himself to calm down. Panic never served
anyone. He swallowed and listened and waited. Then he heard the jingle of keys. Panic. His heart racing again. Please let it be Todd. Please let it be Todd.
The key was in the lock now and before this fact had time to register, the reinforced wooden door to the Tank flew open and Clay was seized in the grip of a mass of humanity. There was shouting and anger, violence and the smell of unwashed bodies in the air, and he was enveloped in dark color and dragged out of the cell by his hair and his arms and feet. The lights in the hall had been extinguished and glass lay on the floor and as he was dragged down the hall his skin slid across it in dark, jagged slices. He kicked and tried to rise but he was thrown to the ground and fists and elbows began to fall on him like rainwater. Clay moved to cover his face and tasted blood in his mouth as a boot stomped his head against the cold concrete. His ribs were crushed by shadows and his feet were held down and someone stood on his arm and ground a heel in.
The beating lasted for an eternity. In reality it was only a moment but the brain fills in the spaces of such moments and the fluidity of sensory overload becomes a kind of infinite regress. The electrical impulses in his brain fired their neurons like scattershot in slow motion replay and then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. He heard spit fly out of the shadows, felt the saliva in his beard, and there was a final kick… that was the one that hurt… landed next to his right eye and he saw stars—not stars but fireworks, firing upwards like rockets—and he felt like he was about to lose consciousness.
Criminals.
For a moment there was silence. The storm passed along the shores and the calm was felt, and there was more Russian spewed at him, angry and vicious, but it was only the lapping of waves on the banks. He collapsed against the cold of the floor for a moment then was dragged back into his cell.
The shuffle of shadows left the room and the door closed behind them and he was left alone in darkness and pain.
****
Clay laid in the dark with his eyes closed. He listened for the sound of movement but heard none. After a moment or two, convinced he was temporarily safe, he raised himself from the ground and stumbled onto the bunk. Feeling for his pack on the end of the bed, he was overwhelmed by a need to protect it. He quickly stuffed it under the bunk and draped one of the blankets over the lower end of the bed so that the pack could not easily be seen from the doorway. Then he reached inside his jumper and ran his hand along his ribs feeling the tenderness under his touch. He reached up to touch his eye and felt blood dried on his face, but couldn’t seem to find any cut. The marks on his body from the glass were superficial scratches, but his jaw ached and his eye was on fire.
Having taken inventory of his body, he now leaned back onto the bunk and tried to lift his legs to lie down but was unable to manage it for long because of pain and soreness coming from his back and kidneys. Not knowing exactly why, he pushed the thin mattress off the bed onto the floor and lay down flat on the cold concrete bunk and the icy smoothness on his back and his bruises immediately started to numb the pain. He laid there for a moment, embracing the numbness.
Turning over to his side, he tried again to imagine all of this away, and, thinking clearly now for the first time in a very long time, he began to count the stupid mistakes he had made since leaving Veronica’s place there in Harlem. That, he thought now, was the first and biggest of them.
****
After what may have been five minutes, or an hour, or three, Clay heard the lock turn again and the light flicked on and a head looked in, then a few more.
“You alright, man?” one of the heads asked. Hard to see faces, even with the light on. Clay looked at them through the only eye he could open. The flood of light in his dilated pupil caused his eye to water.
“Um… no,” He responded, trying to push himself up with his hands. He felt his body ache at this new demand, but he grimaced through the pain and sat up to look into the faces of his captors. The three young men all had sheepish looks on their faces, almost as if they were embarrassed. It was something in their manner. He couldn’t decide exactly what it was.
They were dressed in standard prison garb, and their faces looked wan and thin. They looked hungry and they smelled of sweat, fear, and elation. The lack of depth perception caused him to see them only partially. He wasn’t sure how to size them up. They looked almost familiar.
“So… ok, good,” one of the faces said in a friendly and almost apologetic way, nodding toward him. He was the short, stocky one with close-cropped hair, black. He had the look of a bulldog. He was small, but muscular, with a barrel chest, despite the evident loss in weight he had suffered. His voice was surprisingly high for a man, soft-spoken, gentle, and airy. After a pause, he continued, “good that you can communicate and that you’re not dead.”
Clay looked up into the young men’s faces and then, unconsciously, his hand rose up to his lips and examined them to make sure they were not badly split or swollen. He didn’t think that he’d lost any teeth. For the most part, his mouth was fine, but as his hand withdrew it migrated to the lump above and to the right of his right eye, and he noticed the eye was closed and that the lump stuck out far enough that the skin over it seemed foreign and unconnected to his face.
“You broke my face,” Clay said, trying to open his right eye unsuccessfully.
The bulldog shook his head, sadly. “Well… technically it wasn’t us who broke your face,” he indicated with his hand to the three young men in the room. “In fact, we tried to warn you off, or at least I did, when I saw you looking down the hallway.” That was why the face looked familiar, Clay thought.
“You could have tried holding up a sign that said ‘get out of here now’ or ‘run for your life’,” Clay said, with not a little bit of hostility in his voice. He looked down at his feet and noticed that the bridge of his foot had a large, blue welt.
“We’d have gotten it far worse than you did if we tried to alert you in any way,” Bulldog said. “But I did try to warn you as best as I could under the situation.”
“And what was the situation?” Clay asked.
“Well, no one in that cell block has eaten anything in a week, and we were on half-rations before that,” Bulldog replied, matter-of-factly. “The leaders in there decided, when they saw you walk in, that maybe you’d be of some help, but instead you took pictures. After they couldn’t get you to help them, they decided to do just what they did. To be truthful, I didn’t think they’d do it. But, as you can imagine, they aren’t particularly… pleased… with your participation or help. Frankly,” he said almost sorrowfully, “I’m surprised you aren’t dead.”
Clay hung his head down and felt the tightness in his neck. “I was going to show those pictures to somebody in order to get you help, you know? I came in out of the blizzard half dead myself, and was trying to figure out how best to handle it.”
“Ahh, yes. Well, they couldn’t have known that, I guess.”
It occurred to Clay that these men—at least Bulldog here—spoke absolutely perfect English. Not a trace of any accent. Not from Russia, not even from New England. Not from anywhere. He spoke perfect accentless English.
“Anybody want to tell me what’s going on here?” Clay asked, painfully arching his back and testing to see if he felt any serious organ or bone injuries. He was pretty sure he had a couple of broken ribs. Couldn’t know if there was bleeding somewhere on the inside.
“Well,” Bulldog said, hanging his head and shuffling his right foot against the concrete floor and pushing on the mattress, “I just told you. It seems you got caught up in a riot.”
“That part I had figured… ummm…. what is your name?” Clay asked.
“I am Mikhail. This tall one here is Vladimir Nikitich and the other one by the door is Sergei Dimitrivich. You can just call us Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei.”
“Your English is impeccable,” Clay responded, icily.
“Why wouldn’t it be? We’re Americans,” Mikail shot back.
“None
of this makes any sense,” Clay said, continuing to feel with his hands down the length of his legs, engaging in an extended medical self-examination as they talked.
“You don’t know the half of it, Comrade,” Sergei sneered, looking toward Vladimir and laughing.
“Listen,” Mikail interjected, “what’s your name, anyway?”
Clay looked up to Mikail, straining to see anything—any light at all—through his swollen right eye.
“Clay.”
“Well, listen, Clay. For the three of us, I am really sorry that this has happened to you. I know that you may not believe that, or you may not care, but it is true. I really didn’t want any innocents to get caught up in what’s going down here right now.” As he talked, his right hand found his own rib cage, and he seemed to unconsciously press against his ribs one at a time as though he was counting them. “You’re in a bad spot. So are we. None of us asked for this.”
“Ok, so you’re sorry,” Clay said, looking Mikail in the face with his one good eye. “So, why don’t you guys let me out of here and I’ll just be on my way.”
Mikail shook his head. “That’s impossible, for two reasons. One,” he held up one finger to illustrate his point, “is that there is one hellacious blizzard going on out there. No one could go anywhere even if they wanted to. Two,” another finger popped up, “is because we’re not in charge. In fact, we’re probably the worst allies you could have right now… except, of course, for all of the other maniacs in this place.”
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