Quicksand (45 page)

—Can we still vote? There's an election coming up.

Patrick didn't know.

—Hey, I called out, does anyone know if we can still vote? For some reason, that was very important to me at the time.

—No, the answer came back from another cell. I was devastated. We were voiceless again, like children.

Other than being free from the omnipresence of advertisers for the first time since infanthood, this next phase of my life was to be principally about violence. Random. Indiscriminate. Institutional. Sexual. Being disabled, the third-highest risk category after gay and transgendered, I'd always feared I would fall victim to the single most underreported crime in all three of our societies: hospital, regular, prison. Now it turned out that my old terror of random violence was dwarfed by my fear of systemic violence. Sure, nobody was going to mistake my body for a garden of earthly delights, but that didn't make me unrape-able. And worse luck—I'd be at crotch height to everybody.

Your Honor, in the miasma of sweaty feet, shit-smelling soap, and masses of uncircumcised penises fermenting in unwashed underpants, I got into countless he said/he said arguments, had my pain medication stolen, was rocketed down corridors with another paraplegic named Ted by old-time-y white supremacists on gladiatorial afternoons, was gnashed on by the serial rapist Paul “Episiotomy”
Williams, discovered I am genuinely claustrophobic and somewhat agoraphobic, a crowded prison being the worst of both hells, and was allowed—no, encouraged—to soil myself by guards who also, I noted, loved confiscating hearing aids from older inmates. And I was the beneficiary of endless lessons: A kind smile does not mitigate but aggravates violence; the enemy of my enemy is still my goddamn enemy; cruel and unusual punishments are seldom unusual . . .

The most important lesson, however: In lockup, you don't go once more into the fray, the fray comes to you. Case in point. A bald man mouth-breathing at the door of our cell.

—Who are you?

—The skin is the largest organ in the body.

—Uh-oh.

In a flash, a group of about seven adult children of absent fathers crowded the cell, the hefty, blank-eyed types of criminals who make their victims dig their own graves, either to intensify the horror or for simple practical reasons. They wheeled me out of my cell and down the corridor and through a set of doors—unlocked by a winking guard—and into H division. Fuck me with a hadron collider. I knew exactly where we were going. When we got there, Elliot clambered down from his bunk and held his hands out as if warming them against a fire.

This is not how Elliot looked in Mimi's photographs. He was bigger, more muscular, and now with a broken nose, missing teeth, scarified cheeks, jittery left eyelid, and veins pulsing in his temples. He was the whole package.

—What happened, Vesuvius? All plugged up? You bodiless snake. Welcome to the caves. Morrell has been fucking her for months and what have you done to stop him?

It was weird to hear that familiar voice pouring out of that toothless face.

—How the fuck do you
know
that?

—How do you think, genius?

It only now occurred to me there was nothing supernatural in his omniscience.

—You've got someone there, someone in the residence pretending to be an artist. Elliot lowered his head and peered up at me with a sick smile.

—There are two types of prisoners. Bears that hibernated too long and
landlocked children with a sea wind of their own. Jesus. What's going on there? Your spasticity could thresh corn. You're in for how long? When I get out I'm subletting a schoolgirl's virginity for the summer. Don't breathe so much. The air in prison is hallucinogenic. You do know I overpowered the inmate that had been paid to protect me
and
pocketed the money, so Mimi is fucking Morrell to pay me to protect myself. You know that, right? You know that when I was in Eastern Europe with Mimi, during the last fake exorcism I felt a demon pass out of her body and enter mine. I never told anyone that before.

During this strange disconnected monologue, I realized, in a sort of dawning horror, he wore his own knocked-out teeth in a necklace. I had the bizarre sensation that if I dared to turn around and look, the images his mind conjured would be projected onto the cell walls behind me. He rolled his eyes as if in reference to the drudgery of terrorizing me, then abruptly looted his own shelves and piled books in my lap. Thomas Merton. Angelus Silesius. Simone Weil. Meister Eckhart. Emanuel Swedenborg.

—Read them! An indestructible glut of revelations that I wrote in past lives, he said, making a hand motion as if to caress his aura, and it being that religiousness is always the first resort of the criminally insane (along with public masturbation and matricide), I took them in the spirit they were given and even began to feel easier in his company. As if reacting to my unexpected calm, Elliot punched me in the side of the head, lifted me from my chair, and pinioned me to the wall with his big, heavy face pressed up against mine.

—Do you know about the tribe of Benjamin in the Bible?

—No.

—With God's blessing and with impunity they raped the virgins of the town of Shiloh.

—Oh.

—Have you been beaten with your own wheelchair yet?

—Elliot. Please.

—Are you HIV negative?

A thoughtful silence seemed the most appropriate response to that loaded question.

—You thought the worst was behind you.

His tongued flicked out and ran over his lower lip. I thought: De-escalate! De-escalate! I was frozen with fear. And here's where language fails me. Or
where I fail language. One of the men pushed his grubby trigger fingers into my mouth then hurled me onto the floor. Fists and shoes came flying at my face and body. I tell you, these substance-abusing hypermasculine narcissistic and avoidant personalities with elevated scores on both the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory and the Abuse-Perpetration Inventory were really letting me have it. One stooped down and picked me up by my armpits then threw me facedown onto the cold steel bed and—here goes nothing—raped me.

Yes, Your Honor, I
am
going to talk about this.

I guess they'd had the empathy likewise fucked out of them at the onset of incarceration or were disinhibited out of fear of Elliot—either way, adjust your antennae to receive my maximum horror, random citizens who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning, while I recount a memory engraved by meathooks:

Hard hands on my shoulders. A foot on my neck. I felt them tugging my pants off. I said, Be careful, fellas. Raping me is a slippery slope to raping me again. I didn't really say that. I'm stalling. In truth—I groveled, flailed, begged, sobbed. I felt abnormal discomfort, as if a distant body part were being removed. Then I felt horrific pain. A running of the bulls, a goring, a harrowing series of thrusts. This is it, I thought. I am being raped. This will be forever in my bio. The single possible consoling thought, that
so many
had gone through it, was not consoling at all. Every second snuck up on me. My head collided with the brick wall and blood dripped into my eyes and
still
, I thought, a billion people are worse off than me right now. Then I thought: Turning dead is not the same as dying and the darkest darkness is also blinding and the saddest truth on earth is you only get conclusive evidence of the existence of your soul
as
it evacuates. My focus shifted from the chalk-white wall to a quarter-window's view of barbed wire, looming and fanged. If only this were a dramatic reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment and any moment the lead researcher was going to call it off.

Elliot put his frightless eyes near mine and gave an equine snort. I thought: If only I could pull off a classic thrust behind the collarbone to the ascending aorta or smash his ribs causing fractured bone fragments to lacerate the bladder and intestines so digestive juices and feces will pour like the Ganges into his peritoneal cavity, but I had no weapons; I was overpowered. A second rapist joined in. I wanted to vaporize or disintegrate, like in my old fantasy, and
liquefy in my sleep or be a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye cruising through space and time before disappearing in a violent white flash. I was a well filled with blood. I was all chasm. I was broken in two, in four, in eight. I was torn asunder. I was wolfed down. I was dividing into an embryo and being born again. Again! This time into who? Who knows? This was a psychiatric emergency. I sank and didn't resurface. Good-bye, self, we'll meet back and reintegrate later. An inmate, I noticed, was filming this on a camera phone. So
that's
out there somewhere. A stream of my blood soaked the mattress where my head lay. I thought of Natasha Hunt. Of Jin. Of the Red Army sweeping into Germany in '45. I thought: Violated is the absolutely right synonym for rape. And: If I could get my hands on those husbands and fathers in certain cultures (Is-
cough
-lamic) who stone the raped for promiscuity. Or maybe I thought these things after. At the time I was swept away in the countervailing horrors and geysers of rage as, I imagined, blood-borne pathogens moved through my mucus membranes. Let's face it. From year dot to right this minute the mindblowing rate of forced intercourse is
the
biggest thorn in the side of every single floated theory of basic human goodness.

—Shut your mouth, bitch.

—Consider this a warning.

A warning?
Jesus.

It was over. Elliot declared with a smile that reporting the attacks would result in castration involving bolt cutters, then he winched me up and put a glass shiv to my eyeball and—I'm just giving you the facts, these are the facts—made me perform oral sex on both rapists, at the end of which one of them urinated into my mouth.

Earthlings. Blech.

It would be fine with me, Your Honor, if the ladies and gentlemen of the jury would like a moment to call their loved ones.

In that case, I will continue.

Some weeks, or perhaps months later, I woke with my stomach horribly distended and stabbing abdominal pains. I was drenched in sweat with a pounding headache, my face burning and a tingling on my tongue.

—As my daddy always says, looks like your shit just became manure, son, said Patrick.

Guards came in pairs like feuding siblings.

—What's wrong with you?

—I'm fine. Please just nip down to the apothecary and fetch me some milk of the poppy.

The guards ferried me out to the nearest hospital, where I was diagnosed as having had a transient ischemic attack—a mini-stroke—precipitated by, the doctor said in an annoyed voice, as if I were the only one who'd turned up to his seminar, a high-blood-pressure spike symptomatic of autonomic dysreflexia that was in turn brought on by fecal impactions.

And that's not all! The distension of the abdominal area was unrelated to the stroke, and so they forced me to have barium studies of the upper gastrointestinal tract which revealed a relatively rare spinal complication called superior mesenteric artery syndrome, a compression of the duodenum. This they treated immediately with nasogastric intubation, and when that failed, I was rushed into surgery for a fucking duodenojejunostomy, performed laparoscopically. You know the drill. Unfortunately recovery time was quick, so I was to be back in prison in four days, except that results from my MRI showed a small neurofibroma tumor near the spine.

—What's amazing, said the doctor with naked excitement, is that had you not had your car accident, this tumor might have remained undetected and grown to a size that would have compressed your spinal cord.

—Amazing, I said.

I was wheeled through metal doors with yellow radiation-warning signs, the kind fastened to the top and sides of nuclear-warhead carrying cases in espionage thrillers, into a cavernous room where I was laid sideways on a table and my head molded to a blue semi-inflatable pillow where I had a constant view of the worried-looking cartoon fetus with the uneducated or oblivious mother in an
IF YOU
'
RE
PREGNANT TELL THE RADIOLOGIST
sign, who I heavily identified with (the fetus, not the mother). There was a lot of fiddling, lowering and raising of the platform, signifying ample room for human error; a rotating computer screen's red eye that looked to have achieved intelligence but was keeping mum about it made a sluggish orbit around my body while emitting a low-resolution horror-movie hum. It was called a Gamma Knife. The aim was to fuck up my DNA to make the cancer cells unable to divide while avoiding collateral damage of healthy tissue. Basically, it was six million concentrated volts as invisible as God himself.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, during the months that followed I was transferred from prison to hospital and hospital to prison on a seemingly continuous loop. From the suffocation of solitary confinement to the suffocation of the MRI machine. Inedible prison food to inedible hospital food. Fear of the shiv to fear of the scalpel. I was in prison to be wrecked, in hospital to be salvaged. I often found myself in a hospital elevator with another prisoner who was handcuffed and couldn't cover his mouth when he coughed, or in waiting areas with poor suckers who sat with the placidity of cows or tottered and staggered along the corridors clutching those big white CT-scan envelopes, or in radiotherapy which carried the fear of impending nausea (emetophobia) that was followed by actual nausea from the radiation (no doubt exacerbated by the nurse/doctor treacly chitchat), after which I would then be taken back to prison for the malevolent zeal of sexual violence. No, I will never understand the allure of raping me, other than to fill personal quotas, yet at least once every couple of months, Elliot or one of his men with their nautical faces and neck tattoos lurched out of shadows to drag me into designated nooks and supervision blindspots for protracted attacks, with their all too human casual brutality and zero incidence of erectile dysfunction, impeccably choreographed with the movements of the guards. Or else coming into my cell at all hours. My whole dumb life I always hated being woken, but to be jerked from a horrific nightmare to an even more horrific reality was categorically hellish. My single consoling thought was maybe radiation was transmitted, maybe I was literally radioactive and toxic. I'd think:
My superpower is that I AM POISON.