New Taboos (5 page)

“Not any on the books,” Rudy said.

“I should talk to them.” For a moment she found she couldn't quite speak, then she asked, “Rudy—is this what … Is it …”

“Yeah, Rudy said. “These women are kept here for people to use. Not for other prisoners. I mean, they're here for big shots, and prison personnel. When they get old enough they get harvested … Oh
fuck!”

The lights were going on, starting down the tier, flick flash flick flash, as if stalking down the hallway toward them. Faye blinked in the sudden blaze of light.

Rudy looked around, eyes widening. “Shit—Carlos we got to get back before …”

Too late. The autoguards were coming from both ends of the cellblock. Behind one of the autoguards came Rita and Gull staring coldly at Faye as they marched toward her. They seemed quite confident behind the rolling, flashing machines.

“Do
not move,”
the autoguards said simultaneously.
“Remain exactly where you are.”

Faye sat in the warden's office, across from his desk, her wrists cuffed in front of her. The hand cuffs were linked by a long shiny steel chain to ankle restraints. She wore a prison ID badge on a thong around her neck. She was still in shock, feeling unreal.

She was sitting in the warden's office, across from the desk. Sitting at the desk, silent and nervous, was a pale, nearly chinless man in his midsixties, wearing a white shirt and tie, with a badge that said,
Howard Skaffel, Assistant Warden.
Rita stood beside him, her arms crossed against her chest, face expressionless. Gull was waiting just outside the door. Faye could hear him shift his weight out there from time to time.

“Are you a Muslim, Faye?” Rita asked.

She'd called her Ms. Adullah before. Now she'd switched to that condescending use of the first name that people in authority chose when they were treating you like a bad child.

Just get through this. They can't do this for long. Eventually they have to let you go. They're just trying to scare you.

“A Muslim?”

“Your father was Muslim.”

“It's not an ethnicity. It's a religion. I'm not a believer.”

“You're half Palestinian.”

“I'm partly Arab, if that's what you mean. My mother was Italian American. Is this some kind of Homeland Security question? I had to be completely cleared before they let me in here, you know. You have my Four Pass. Look at it again.”

“People make mistakes in granting clearances,” Skaffel said, looking at the ceiling. The assistant warden hadn't looked directly at her the whole time she was here. He pursed his mouth. For the first time he looked at her—only momentarily. Then he looked down at the papers on his desk. “We have a court order here, based on your trespassing, and the Probation Collections review of your debts. You're thirty-two thousand dollars in debt, young lady.”

She snorted. “So? Who isn't, who went to college? I missed a couple of payments when the
Trib
folded, true, but …”

“You should've discussed that with Debt Court.”

“I did! I was given an extension.”

He glanced up at her and tapped the paper. “Probationary only. Your probation has been revoked. PCI took your case to Judge Gipps this morning.”

“This is absurd. I want to speak with my lawyer!”

“You waived that right,” Rita said softly.

“What? When?”

“We have the paperwork.”

“I never signed any such thing.”

Rita shrugged. “We have your signature.”

“That's not my signature and you know it. You don't want me to talk about what I saw in Subpod 18—”

“If you continue shouting,” Skaffel said, looking at his hands, “I'll have Samuel take you to Unprivileged Custody. You won't like UnCus.”

Had she been shouting? Faye realized she had. She controlled her tone. “Just get me a lawyer. I'm a journalist. I was sent here by one of the country's biggest media companies. They're not going to let this …”

“Do you
suppose,”
Skaffel said, studying his fingernails, “that this is, what, 1975? We're in touch with Priority Media. They deny giving you permission to use their name here.”

“That's not true. You saw my paperwork!”

“Faked. That little bit of fraud is a felony.”

“I don't believe any of this. Put someone from Priority on the speaker phone.”

Skaffel ignored that. “We have found that you're a debt felon. The Privatization Act of 2021 gives us the right to arrest and incarcerate you until you've served your term or paid your debt—”

Nothing to lose.

“You know what I think, Assistant Warden Skaffel?” Faye said, leaning forward to catch his eye. “I think you're really, deeply ashamed of what I saw in Subpod 18—”

“Gull!” Skaffel bellowed, standing so suddenly his chair pitched over behind him.

The door opened, Gull creaked into the room in his squeaky shoes. “Yes sir?”

Skaffel's voice was a hiss now. “Take this inmate to UnCus.”

“I'm a journalist, not an inmate and you know it!”

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.”