Time of the Locust (11 page)

Method II. Monopolization of Perception

Result: Fixes attention upon immediate predicament; fosters introspection. Eliminates stimuli competing with those controlled by captor. Frustrates all actions not consistent with compliance.

Method III. Induced Debilitation and Exhaustion

Result: Weakens mental and physical ability to resist.

Method IV. Threats

Result: Cultivates anxiety and despair.

Method V. Occasional Indulgences

Result: Provides positive motivation for compliance. Hinders adjustment to deprivation.

Method VI. Demonstrating Omnipotence and Omniscience

Result: Suggests futility of resistance.

Method VII. Degradation

Result: Makes the cost of resistance appear more damaging to self-­esteem than capitulation. Reduces prisoner to animal-level concerns.

Method VIII. Enforcing Trivial Demands

Result: Develops habit of compliance.

Stotsky spun around again in his chair. Yes, that was the order of things, the necessary mythology that made Black Plains a masterpiece. The code was the pith and tithe of one day to the next. And like the real hell, this was a torment from which there was no escape.

Amenta

H
orus Thompson, inmate number 02763, sat on the floor in the corner of his cell. It was the time of the lunar eclipse in the solitary confinement wing, the cusp of a perpetual dim, gunmetal light. It was the time between shifts from blinding beams to deep-space darkness and back again. Such things were on some sort of timer, but Horus was not able to recognize the pattern. He sat in the gray stillness, the nerve endings needling his backside like pins in a cushion. His eyes twitched in the gloom, trying to catch some stray ray of light that might stimulate his corneas. The cement on which he sat sloped toward the center of the floor, where it met a small corrugated drain, which held Horus and the meager contents of the cell like a sink. He couldn't always see the drain clearly, but he knew always that it was there, the threads of copper and green around the drain drawing his eyes as he wondered when he would liquefy and run down its open mouth.

Horus could still remember the pull of gravity when he first arrived at Black Plains, how the elevator scaled down each sublevel, the click and scrape of metal that grew muted as it neared the lowest level. He had ridden it down with the guards slowly, and it landed at Secured Housing elegantly, as if touching down on the surface of the moon. The elevator doors hissed open with the release of pressure, and he was led to a cell door on the day that would begin his life in a crypt. The day he would enter Amenta, that ancient Egyptian underworld where the sun had set and rose no more, where the dead and all last things were buried, where the lingering spirits roamed. He stumbled over his chained ankles as he was brought down the corridor by two guards, their demonic faces shifting in ghoulish delight like holographic jack-o'-lanterns. A consecrated silence descended when they arrived at his designated vault.

The steel door slammed open, and Horus beheld Amenta: four walls, a thin mattress atop a bed of concrete, a sink, and a toilet. The ceiling was embedded with some contraption behind bulletproof glass that dimness obscured. He could feel a weak stream of air from somewhere, a maddening riddle against the impervious look of the cell. The rest of it was a thick dreariness that filled the cavity like a dingy foam, and Horus was overwhelmed by the sensation of being plunged into something. He felt he was about to enter the dense atmosphere of a chamber, filled with an unnamed substance meant to dissolve him. He would later freeze this moment in his mind and understand that this substance was time itself.

Horus was pushed inside.

In the first seconds, he was struck by the sense that he was again, somehow, in a basement. But this place was secreted beneath a sprawling miscreation, a living institution of which he was the blood host, and there were no steps leading up and out to the world. He looked into the space of his demise and tried not to see his uncle Randy's face.

“Take a look, rodent,” one of the guards said. That was when doom welcomed Horus at the end of the eight-foot box, as his senses washed in like a tide and crashed against the walls. He looked about and witnessed the enormity of his end, drawn and atrocious. “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story he read so many times in his school years, one that began to speak to him, materialized in his head with every inhalation of the foamy air. He was Poe's ­Fortunato now. He could smell and feel the mold and damp. Horus was ordered to move forward. The two guards put him facedown on the stiff bed, unshackled him, and left him there.

And from the beginning of his time in the mausoleum, when Horus Thompson was not made to submit to hoods, strip searches, cell raids, penis measurements, or water torture, he was plagued by two great tormentors: Light and Dark. In the darkness, he tried to keep track of the passage of months by counting the occasions he was allowed to see the sky. One-hour sessions in a special roofless cubicle, which seemed to be about every sixty days. Or was it every ninety? And when darkness completed its course, the inverse (Light) circled around to take its place with the scowl of twenty-four-hour fluorescent lights. The bright white drilled through his crusted eyelids, unremitting beams of judgment that pierced his pores and shrank his pupils to specks of dust. The light rained down, drenching Horus in thousands of watts, until he was convinced that the Dark had been a thing that dwelled only in his imagination. At the height of his confused senses, he awoke in the pan of a polar desert, shivering under a white winter sun. His head banged on as his ears rang, as he swooned. He felt as if he were falling from some great height, falling through the earth.

Then all the pivotal moments before the instant of arrival in the sepulchre broke away and fell into the substance that was enveloping him. The moments flashed like the disintegrating frames of a silent black-and-white movie: his mother's smile, his father's bloody chest, Manden's blank stare, the police lights running along the walls of his house. There was the image of the contents of the bathroom trash: crumpled tissue, a spent razor, and the inky dot of a pregnancy test.

Worst of all were the flashing images of Brenda the Beautiful lying naked on the bed. The sight of the worried, ruined landscape her face had become. Horus felt he needed to begin erasing those images as soon as he sat on the bed that night and waited for the police, as soon as the sirens approached, as soon as the gavel fell. He needed to forget the long licorice locks that framed her magnificent watery eyes and the coconut oil that dressed her supple legs. He needed to forget her dark berry lips, round and firm, her slender frame and inviting hips.

Brenda the Beautiful. The erection that once overtook Horus when he thought of her vanished in the undertow of grief. Formaldehyde filled the blood vessels of his member now. The miracle once manufactured in his loins by the millions ceased, the turbines and pistons shut down, rusted and inert like an abandoned steel mill. Brenda the Beautiful. He wished to God that he never met her, that he never saw the test in the trash can, the mark of a new life that caught aflame and would grow without him. By doing what he had done, he killed his own past and future and buried his chance at a family. Thinking this, he turned to Brenda slowly as the cops approached that night, as if moving through primordial water. He discovered in those seconds that not speaking was easier than what remained in ether.

He was unable to manage more than a glance at her tearful face that day in the courtroom, those same pained eyes that would look back at him through Plexiglas for the next twenty-five years, for the rest of his life, asking him silently,
Why?
It was a question he would never be able to answer in a way that Brenda could understand, and the look of her eyes through the glass would have meant a different kind of death that he could not stand. “I am dead to you,” he'd said. And he said it out of love, a mercy killing of everything he knew she would cling to, of all he would never find the words to say. The divorce he would later ask of her would erase the rest.

Horus did not want to think of such things, and yet they rose before him in his mind every day like the sun. And his first vow to himself after the prison doors slammed shut, when everything went black and cold, was that he would will it all not to be there. And after the dementia and the mania and the death wishes that the vow would bring, there would only be the sounds that lingered in his mind, echoes left as if in an empty house: the wheels of the car on the highway that night he drove to Upstate New York, the rhythm of the windshield wipers, the driving rain, the gunshot. There would only be the echo of policemen knocking, the verdict, and the gavel. The structure of why it all happened had yet to come into full being. When it was ready to form, he would know and understand it himself.

He paced circles in the cell and tallied the pulses of his heart. He once tried to stop it by sheer will, but the thing marched stubbornly on. In the torturous silence, when his bug-eyed stares at the walls of the cell stretched taut, he was plunged into obsessions of the natural world, the realm that seemed to function without the sun. He marveled over the female menstruation cycle and the magic of bears hibernating. Under the weight of time, Horus pondered such things, until he could no longer remember his own face. Shadows, those illusionists that subsisted on panic and fear, dislodged themselves from the edges of spaces, accosting him. He curled in a fetal position on the stiff bed that first night, watching them float down to him and recede, loom and ebb.

Horus wondered if it would have been better to be on death row. In the execution line, there was a semblance, at least, of some appointed time to end it all. There were others he imagined, like himself, housed somewhere in the hallways within hallways, rooms within rooms. And these condemned souls knew a specific date was set when they would surely die. He wondered if the lethal injection that awaited them was a nervine, a relief, even, against the hours that led to more hours, days that led to other days.

Somewhere in the cavernous corridors, Horus could hear the cackle of the beast he called the Bean Hole Man, the prison guard Jimmy Eckert. Sometimes Horus thought that he and the Secured Housing guard were the only inhabitants left in the world, that since the earth plates shifted and all of the dinosaurs died, it had been just the two of them. When Eckert wanted to taunt Horus, to remind him that torment would prevail for all his living days, he spoke of old man Edward and his decades in the penal system. “The Mummy,” he called him. “Old Edward tried to escape another federal facility years ago,” Jimmy Eckert said, sneering through the envelope-sized slot of the steel door. That was how old Edward was transferred to Black Plains to die.

The guard enjoyed telling Horus that he was bound for Edward's fate, that the old man who had already been inside Black Plains for decades had been institutionalized in other places totaling forty-seven years, the longest of anyone. The walls claimed his mind. “The Mummy's only joy is the Great Room,” the Bean Hole Man said, chuckling. He spoke of the horrors of the Great Room, a crucible of machines and hisses, where men lost fingers and limbs in the faulty equipment, where buzzers announced the shifting from one rote activity to another, the movement of every inmate timed. “Only the lucky ones are allowed to slave there,” the Bean Hole Man whispered to Horus through the slot of the cell door, peering in with his dilated, Ouija-board eyes, “to be flogged by the minutes and the hours.”

Horus wanted to ask the Mummy what it was that he had done, if the Act was ever committed by anyone at Black Plains. Written in the invisible scripture of the prison, the Act was the cardinal sin of speaking aloud about that which had been responsible for one's imprisonment, the highest offense. For nothing that happened outside of Black Plains mattered. It was no longer real. To speak of the Act that led to imprisonment meant that something of meaning outside of Black Plains had actually happened and therefore existed.

One day, as Horus stared at the wall from his bed, he saw from the corner of his eye a cockroach making its way. The fat roach crawled across the ashen wall near his face, brazen and without fear. It stopped as if to look at him. Horus stared back. He couldn't remember when he had started eating roaches in the times when Light reigned, when his brain turned that corner where such an idea was not repugnant. He had learned in the thick solution of time that the mind was free to bend itself into new shapes of being. He couldn't remember how he developed the quick-twitch skill of catching a roach, looping his forearm up and around as it ran frantically across the back of his veined hand, so that it leaped from the cliffs of his fingers and dropped into his mouth.

The roach had been busy on its way, crossing what for it must have been like kilometers over the span of the wall. Horus assumed it was headed for a meal at the toilet, where there was always a generous lining of microbial slime and water. It seemed to stop and look at him with curiosity, and Horus could see its antennae rotating in their sockets. Perhaps the insect thought that the threat that existed with other humans did not exist with this one, and it stopped to take a look. Horus thought of swiping at the bug to startle it away or snatching it up and chewing its insides between his teeth, but the roach scurried on and disappeared into a crack.

And it was during these cycles of rule by his two great tormentors (Light and Dark), in the seventh year of condemnation to the solitary confinement wing of Black Plains Correctional Institute, that Horus came to understand the great drain into which he was being emptied day by day. Like an equation, he was being reduced.

That was when Horus found the Catacombs.