by Jeremy Bates
Did two of me exist simultaneously in this dimension? Or had we swapped spots? Was there a doppelganger back in my universe, locked up in prison just as I was locked up here? Or had he evaded such an inimical fate? Was he instead settling into my life? Living in my house? Assuming my job? Tucking Damien in at night—?
Crack.
I looked at my hands. I’d snapped the pair of chopsticks I’d been holding in half. I cast an apprehensive glance at the door, saw no guard at the window, and tucked the broken sticks into the bottom of the basket.
I resumed working.
Sometime later.
I had no idea how much time had passed, but judging by the mountain of paper-cased chopsticks I’d amassed I guessed a lot.
For the past while I’d been having trouble keeping my eyelids open. They were slipping shut with more and more regularity. And then they simply didn’t open again, and I sank like a rock into the murky waters of sleep…
∆∆∆
…something was tapping my head. I snapped open my eyes with a start. A string of drool dangled from my mouth. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.
“I am awake,” I grunted, squinting up at the guard hovering over me. It was the one with the decent English who’d read me my punishments the day before.
“No sleeping,” he said, still tapping my head with his foot.
“Fine,” I said, flinching from his touch.
“No slouching.”
I sat straighter.
“No stopping. Keep working.”
I slipped a pair of chopsticks into a paper sleeve.
And then another.
And another.
And another…
∆∆∆
After I ate lunch, Foot Fetish and another guard took me from the cell. I was convinced they were taking me for an afternoon visit with Jaws. I was immeasurably relieved when I ended up not in an interrogation room but a concrete exercise yard enclosed in tall walls and wire-netting.
A few dozen prisoners—half wearing street clothes, the other half in green jumpsuits—were shuffling around, zombie-like, nobody speaking.
I joined them.
Before I’d completed a circuit around the yard, a guard with a bullhorn barked feedback-distorted orders I couldn’t understand.
The inmates quickly organized themselves into three platoons. I slipped into the one closest to me, standing at attention like everybody else.
We began to march, military-style, in concert with the guard’s repetitive shouting. When the front three columns of men reached the wall, the platoons spun around and marched to the opposite wall.
And so it went. Back and forth, back and forth. Everybody goose-stepping and swinging their arms to the height of their shoulders and chanting five mantras which I translated roughly as:
Always be honest.
Sincerely report.
Always be polite.
Keep a helpful attitude.
Be thankful.
I added my voice to the brainwashed folderol so I didn’t stand out—though given the treatment I had received thus far in the Tokyo Detention House, the hypocrisy of the mantras were not lost on me.
∆∆∆
Ugo Ndukwe was sitting in the same spot in the communal room he’d been in the day before, his bald head shining like a lamp under the fluorescents. I slumped down next to him with a weary sigh.
“You look very tired, my friend,” he said, a note of concern in his voice as he set his novel aside.
“Really?” I said cynically, leaning my head back and closing my eyes. “I feel wonderful.”
“Hey!” he said, gripping my forearm. “What are you doing?”
I opened my eyes. “Huh? What?”
“You cannot sleep here. It is against the rules.”
“I was not sleeping,” I said. “I was merely resting my eyes.”
“That is not allowed either. You will be punished.”
“Fuck the rules.” I glared at the guards. “Fuck them too.”
Mini Vin Diesel stiffened, and I had the impression that he was contemplating moving away from me.
“I apologize, monsieur,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “It has been a long day.”
Mini Vinny hesitated, then nodded understandingly.
“I stink,” I remarked, sniffing an armpit. “Are we not allowed to bathe here?”
“Three times a week—though don’t expect a Turkish spa. The length of the shower is nine minutes in the summer, and twelve minutes in the winter. This includes undressing, drying off, and dressing again. The guards use an hourglass to measure this time exactly.”
I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the image of a guard watching inmates shower while holding an hourglass in his hand. But I had no laughter inside me right then.
“Here,” Ugo Ndukwe said good-naturedly, producing a packaged cookie from his pocket.
“I cannot accept that,” I said, though my stomach insisted otherwise.
“I have more, my friend. You can use something to lift your spirits.”
I accepted the snack and tore open the package. My first instinct was to stuff the entirety of it in my mouth at once, but I knew that would be a waste. This was a delicacy. I needed to savor the flavor and texture of it for as long as I could.
I broke off a small corner of the cookie and placed it delicately on my tongue. The taste of melting chocolate was divine.
“Aaahh…” I moaned, smiling in borderline ecstasy. “Where did you get this?”
“There is a small store that sells food here.”
“Sells food?” I swallowed what remained of the cookie and popped another morsel into my mouth. “Do we get paid for our work duty?”
Mini Vinny nodded. “We don’t get wages, per se. Instead, we receive a gratuity each month of three thousand yen.”
About a dollar a day, I thought, my stomach souring with guilt. “Thank you,” I said, handing him back the uneaten half of the cookie. “It was delicious.”
“No, my friend, finish it.”
“Your generosity is too much, monsieur. It was delicious, but you purchased it with money well-earned. You should enjoy it. Please.”
Mini Vinny hesitated, then plucked the half-eaten cookie from my palm. He rewrapped it quickly and deposited it back in his pocket.
I asked, “What is your assigned work duty?”
“I assemble parts in the factory for the automotive industry.”
“Factory? I’ve been stuck alone in my cell wrapping chopsticks all day!”
“Do not get the wrong impression. The factory is hardly a social venue. You cannot speak, and you are not allowed to look at anything other than what you are working on. Even the slightest eye contact with a fellow prisoner is prohibited.”
Impulsively I blurted: “I cannot remain here!”
“Unfortunately, the only way to leave, my friend, is to admit your guilt, whether it is real or manufactured.”
“Which would only get me convicted and sent back here.”
“No, not here. This is merely an immigration detention facility. You will be sent to a real prison.”
“Even better.”
“At least you will have a sentence there. You will not be held indefinitely. You will have a future to look forward to.”
For the briefest of moments I contemplated giving up my fight and telling Jaws everything he wanted to hear. But the thought came and went in the flap of a fly’s wings. Because who knew what my sentence for passport fraud would be? Two years, three, five? Toshio received a year for stealing a sandwich.
What other choice do you have? a voice asked me from a dark corner of my mind. If your idea is true, and you’re at the center of some cosmic shell game, then you’re a vagabond with no legitimate identification and no country to call home. So what choice do you—
“Has anybody ever…?” I asked, leaving the unfinished question hanging. “You know…”
Ugo Ndukwe’s already stern face drew tighter, a
nd it took me a moment to realize the clenched expression was one of fear. “That is not something you want to contemplate, my friend.”
“Has anybody…?” I pressed.
He held my eyes for a long moment. “I do not know,” he said. “What I do know is that if you are caught, you will be sent to solitary confinement, where you will be handcuffed, gagged, and left in the dark without a bed or mattress for weeks or perhaps even months on end.”
The barbaric description of solitary confinement rose a prickle of alarm inside me. Yet rather than deter my nascent thoughts of escape, it only galvanized my will.
I would not stay in this hellhole any longer.
I could not.
“Humor me, monsieur,” I urged. “If someone were to try…?”
“It is impossible,” he stated flatly. Seeing I was about to interject, he held up a hand and added, “From the prison itself.” He shrugged. “But from the hospital? That would be a different matter.”
“Go on,” I said intently.
“There is a hospital in the prison that provides basic care,” he explained, “mostly for the growing number of older inmates. For acute or specialized care, however, inmates are taken to a general public hospital—Horikiri Chuo Hospital—a few blocks from here. That was where I was taken when I was…mistreated.”
“What happened?”
“I killed a cockroach.”
“What!”
“Hush!”
We looked at the guards standing at their stations, but they seemed to be staring off into their own thoughts—and it struck me that they were almost certainly as bored as the prisoners they lorded over.
“It was nighttime,” Ugo Ndukwe told me quietly. “I woke up to find the cockroach burrowing into my ear. You can imagine my horror. I pulled it free, threw it to the ground, and smacked it over and over with the sole of my slipper. Hearing the noise, a guard burst into my cell. I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t listen. Then he called me a name.”
“A name?” I said, not understanding.
“If you have not already observed, the guards here do not accept foreigners as their equals. It is why they treat us as poorly as they do. You, as a European, are viewed more favorably than someone from a country such as mine, someone who has skin the color of mine…but make no mistake, you are still an uncivilized foreigner to them.”
“What name did they call you?”
“What does it matter? It was insulting enough that I struck the bastard in the face.”
“And the guard beat you?”
“Very badly. When I came around, I was in a private room in Horikiri Chuo Hospital. A police officer was posted outside the room around the clock, and he accompanied me wherever I went for tests. But.” He tapped his knobby index finger gently on the table. “He was the only police officer I saw. I was there for two days. And he was the only police officer. I remember thinking at the time that had I been able to get past him—I don’t know how I would have accomplished this, but I remember at least thinking that had I been able to—I might have been able to stroll right out through the hospital’s front door like any other outpatient.”
As I contemplated this, a wicked bubble of excitement—I might even go so far as to call it something bordering on hope—inflated inside me. At the same time, however, I couldn’t help but be skeptical. Escaping from prison shouldn’t, couldn’t, be so easy as slipping past one guard.
I mentioned this.
“You are forgetting what kind of prisoner I am, my friend,” Mini Vinny said. “A rapist? A murderer? No, I am nothing more than a common asylum seeker. And this is not a maximum-security prison. It is a detention facility. The majority of prisoners being held here are no more threatening than I am. People seeking a better life. People who have overstayed their visa. Lonely old men who have no other place to go.”
“Only one policeman…” I mused.
“Only one policeman,” he agreed.
“But to get to the hospital…”
“To get to the hospital, my friend,” Ugo Ndukwe said gravely, “you are going to have to get royally fucked up.”
Chapter 18
The middle-of-the night interrogation devolved into a physical beat-down.
Part of the reason for the violence was Jaws’ growing frustration that his intimidation tactics weren’t working, and that I wasn’t going to break any time soon. But the greater factor in the equation, I believed, was my blatant insubordination. I’d adopted a brazen air of insouciance and stubbornness, which clearly got beneath Jaws’ thin skin—so much so he’d resorted to throwing me against the wall several times, pounding me in the gut, and kicking me while I lay helplessly on the ground.
As I was led bruised and bleeding back to my cell in the early hours of the morning, one thing became abundantly clear: I was going to have to attempt something much more daring and rebellious than acting like a recalcitrant ass if I wanted to get sent to the hospital that Ugo Ndukwe had told me about.
Chapter 19
The next day in the exercise yard I paced in anticipation and fear. This was the moment I had been planning for all morning.
When Big Daddy Drill Sergeant arrived, a pair of Ray-Bans perched on the bridge of his nose, the prisoners formed three platoons and, in step with his guttural commands, commenced marching.
I didn’t chant the hypocritical mantras, and I only gave the goose-stepping and arm-swinging a half-assed effort.
Big Daddy noticed right away and stomped over to me, shouting into his bullhorn, “Ichi-ni! Ichi-ni!” One-two, one-two.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, without improving my form.
The drill sergeant yanked me free of the platoon with such force I stumbled to my hands and knees.
Bending over, he pressed the bullhorn right up against my face and began spitting all sorts of incomprehensible insults.
I clocked him.
Big Daddy staggered away from me, stunned and shocked. His Ray-Ban’s had flown off his face and now lay a few feet from him on the ground. I leapt at the asshole, throwing a haymaker that grazed his left cheek. I seized the back hem of his jacket and yanked it up and over his head, “jerseying” him as players do in ice hockey fights. I landed two solid uppercuts to his gut before the other guards arrived. They came at me from all sides, punching and kicking like a bunch of pansies.
One of them got me from behind.
His right arm slipped around my neck, while his left arm pressed with suffocating force against the back of my skull. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. My vision turned white and spangly. I shuffled backward in the hopes of knocking the guard over and breaking the chokehold.
He remained on his feet and applied even more pressure. I clawed at his forearm pinching my throat. I couldn’t pry it free. Everything began to go dark and the strength and fight left my arms and legs.
Sputtering, I sank to my butt, realizing with black doom that the guard was strangling me to death. My last coherent thought before my consciousness faded to nothingness was that this had not been one of my better plans.
Chapter 20
Smiley and I lay next to each other in the snow burrow we had dug, our breathing slow and frigid, our bodies stiff and unmoving. Earlier, while we’d been hiking through the evergreen forest, our blood had been pumping, keeping us relatively warm. Now our body temperatures had plummeted. My face felt encased in a mask of ice and my chest oddly hollowed. Both my gloved and ungloved hands, as well as my booted feet, itched and ached.
Thanks to countless weekends binge-watching YouTube documentaries, I’d learned a little bit about how humans have adapted to live in frozen environments. Inuit hunters in northern Canada can hunt in the dead of winter without gloves due to the web of surface capillaries in their hands opening every so often to release a fresh infusion of warm blood into their fingers. Aboriginal Australians, during near-freezing desert nights, can enter a light hypothermic state while they sleep to suppress their bodies from shivering until the sun rewarms t
hem in the morning. And perhaps most impressive of all, Tibetan monks have been known to raise the temperature in their extremities through meditation alone.
Unfortunately for me, I was neither an Inuit hunter, an Aboriginal Australian, or a Tibetan monk. I was a bony kid who got the sniffles at the first whiff of winter and whose cheeks turned a rosy red after only a few minutes in sub-zero weather.
Now, as my body began to tremble violently and uncontrollably, which I knew to mean the onset of mild hypothermia, I decided it had been a mistake to hole up in the snow. I pushed up my frosted jacket sleeve and checked the glowing numbers of my wristwatch: 10:51 p.m.
“We need to g-go,” I said through chattering teeth.
“Where?” Smiley replied, her voice sounding cold and brittle in the dark. “Nowhere to go.”
“Bottom.”
“Bottom?”
“Of the mountain. Roads there.”
“Too far.”
“Can ski…”
“Ski? Only one s-set.”
“Go slow. I s-s-stand on b-back.”
Smiley was quiet. After a long moment, she agreed. I rolled away from her, my Gore-Tex jacket crackling like wrapping paper, and crawled stiffly out of the burrow.
Above me, a glowing skein of stars filled the black expanse of sky. The gibbous moon hung low over the alpine forest, casting silver beams of light through the boughs of the white-mantled firs and pines. It might have been a beautiful night scene had it not been for the invisible and deadly cold.
I helped Smiley to her feet, then plucked her lime-green Rossignol skis from the snow, which she’d planted vertically like twin flagpoles. I set them in parallel lines in front of her. She toed her boots into the bindings and clamped down her heels, locking them in place. I stepped on the skis behind her and gripped her waist.
“Ready?” she asked hesitantly.
“Go slow.”
She pushed off with her poles. When we gathered a little speed, she turned the tips of her skis together in a weak-kneed snowplow while keeping her arms scarecrow wide for balance. Although our switchback descent down the mountain wasn’t very fast, it beat walking. Even so, the muscles in my legs had long ago cooled and contracted and cramped up, and after only a few minutes my thighs and calves were burning with the strain of remaining in a fixed position.