CELL 8
CELL 8
Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström
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© 2011 by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström
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ISBN 978-1-4027-8715-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4027-9016-4 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Wednesday Afternoon, 1500 Hours
IT’S NOT THE FACT THAT HE KNOWS HE’S GOING TO DIE. IT’S NOT THE FACT
that he’s been sitting waiting for four and a half years. That’s not it.
The punishment, the real punishment, is knowing when.
Not “later.” Not “when he’s older.” Not at some point in the distant future, so distant that he doesn’t need to think about it.
But
precisely
when.
The year, the month, the day, the minute.
When he will stop breathing.
When he will feel no more, smell no more, see no more, hear no more.
Ever.
Only someone who has been condemned to die at an exact moment in time can understand how hellish that is.
The uncertainty makes death almost bearable, allows you not to think, because you can’t possibly know—but he knows.
He knows that he will cease to exist in seven months, two weeks, one day, twenty-three hours, and forty-seven minutes.
Precisely.
HE LOOKED AROUND THE CELL. THAT DISTINCTIVE SMELL. HE SHOULD BE
used to it by now. It should have become part of him.
He knew that he would never get used to it.
His name was John Meyer Frey and the floor he was staring at was piss yellow and unnaturally shiny. The walls that assailed him had probably once been white and the ceiling over his head screamed of damp, the round stains on the greenish background making the fifty-five square feet seem even smaller than they actually were.
He took a deep breath.
Worst of all were the clocks.
He could cope with the endless corridor of countless iron bars that kept anything that wanted to escape locked in; he could put up with the sound of rattling keys that bounced off the walls so your head felt like it would burst and your thoughts were shredded. He could even put up with the shouting of the Colombian in Cell 14, which got louder and louder as the night wore on.
But not the clocks.
The corrections officers wore huge fucking wristwatches in fake gold and it felt like the hands were taunting him whenever one of them passed his cell. At the far end of the corridor, on a water pipe that ran from the East Block through to the West Wing, was another one—he had never been able to fathom why, it seemed so out of place, hanging there, ticking away, unavoidable. Sometimes, he was certain of it, he also heard the church clock in Marcusville strike: the white stone church with the tall, thin steeple on the square that he knew so well. In the early morning in particular, when for a brief while it was almost silent and he lay still awake on his bunk, searching for something on the greenish ceiling, it pierced through the walls and counted the hour.
That’s what they did. Counted. Counted down.
Hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, and he hated knowing how much time was no longer left—that two hours ago his life had been longer.
It was one of those mornings.
He had lain awake nearly all night, twisting and turning and trying to sleep, sweating and feeling those minutes. The Colombian had shouted more than usual; he’d started around midnight and continued through the night until sometime after four, his fear ricocheting off the walls in the same way that the rattling keys did, his voice getting louder and louder by the hour, something in Spanish that John couldn’t understand, the same thing, over and over again.
He’d dozed off around five, didn’t look at a clock, just knew that it was around then; it was as if time was inside him, his body counting down even when he did everything he could to think about something else.
Half past six, no later. He woke up.
The smell of the cell assaulted him; the first breath made him gag and he hung over the dirty toilet bowl. It was more like a porcelain hole with no lid that was far too low even for someone who was five foot seven. He had gone down on his knees, waiting to spew, and then had to put his fingers down his throat when it didn’t happen.
He had to empty himself.
Had to get rid of that first breath, had to get it out; difficult to get up otherwise, difficult to stand up.
He hadn’t slept through a whole night since he came here, four years ago now, and he had stopped hoping that he ever would. But last night, this morning, had stolen more from him than any other morning or night.
It had been Marvin Williams’s second-to-last night.
About lunchtime, the old man would be escorted down the secure corridor, over to the Death House and into one of the two cells there.
His last twenty-four hours.
Marv, who was his neighbor and friend. Marv, who had been on Death Row the longest now. Marv, so wise, so proud, so different from the other madmen.
Diazepam enema. Marv would be dribbling by the time they came to get him; he would be drugged and docile toward the end. He would slowly and drowsily consent to be escorted out by the men in uniform, and by the time they locked the door of East Block, he would have forgotten the smell.
“John?”
“Yes?”
“You awake?”
Marv hadn’t slept either. John had heard him tossing and turning, walking around and around his tiny cell, singing something that sounded like children’s songs.
“Yes, I’m awake.”
“I didn’t dare shut my eyes. D’you understand, John?”
“Marv . . .”
“Scared of falling asleep. Scared of sleeping.”
“Marv . . .”
“You don’t need to say anything.”
The bars were off-white, sixteen ugly iron bars from one wall to the next. When John stood up and leaned forward, he did what he always did—he put his thumb and index finger around one of the bars, encircling the metal, holding on. Always the same, one hand, two digits, he enclosed what enclosed him.
Marv’s voice again, one of those deep baritones, calm.
“It’s just as well.”
John waited in silence. They had spoken to each other ever since he came here. On the very first morning, Marv’s friendly voice had helped him to get up, to be able to stand up without losing his balance. The conversation had continued ever since, and was still going on; staring straight ahead through the bars at the wall opposite, for several years, without being able to see each other. But now. His voice caught in his throat. He coughed. What do you say to someone who is only going to live for a day and a night more, then die?
Marv was breathing heavily.
“You know, John, I can’t stand waiting any longer.”
They read quite a bit. John had never read before. Not by choice. After a few months, Marv had forced
Huckleberry Finn
on him. A damn children’s book. But he’d read it. Then another one. Now he read every day. So he didn’t have to think.
“What will it be today, John?”
“Today, I want to talk to you.”
“You have to read. You know that.”
“Not today. Tomorrow. I’ll read again tomorrow.”
Marv. The only black man in town.
That was how he used to introduce himself. That was what he’d said that first morning when John’s legs didn’t want to work. A voice from the other side of the cell wall, and John had reacted in the way he always reacted: he told the voice to go to hell and eat shit. The only black man in town? John had seen for himself when the four guards had escorted him down the corridor and opened the door and then locked it for the first time. Not many other white men in East Block. He was on his own. Seventeen years old, and more terrified than he’d ever been in his life. He’d spat at the wall and kicked it until small chips of plaster powdered his shoes and he had shouted
fucking nigger, I’ll get you
until his voice was hoarse.
And so it continued in the evening. “Hi, my name’s Marv, the only black man in town.” John didn’t have the energy to shout anymore. And Marv had just carried on, told him about his childhood in some hole in Louisiana, how he had moved to a mining town in Colorado, that he’d visited a beautiful woman in Columbus, Ohio, when he was forty-four and gone into the wrong Chinese restaurant at the wrong time and seen two men die at his feet.
“Are you frightened?”
Death. The one thing they couldn’t think about. The only thing they thought about.
“I don’t know, John. I don’t know anymore.”
They’d talked without stopping all morning, so much to say when time would soon cease to be.
They’d watched others being escorted out; they knew the procedures that were written down in the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s manuals and that hung on the walls all around, telling you how you would live, hour by hour, in your last twenty-four. A female doctor had been in earlier, put diazepam in a tube up his anus, and Marv was slowing down now as a result. He slurred as he tried to keep control of his words and it sounded like he was dribbling out of the corner of his mouth when he spoke.
John wished he could see him.
All this, to be standing beside someone and yet not, to be close to someone and yet not be able to touch him, not even put a hand on his shoulder.
The door at the end of the corridor opened.
Hard heels clacked on the piss yellow.
The peaked hats, like caps, the green-brown uniforms, the shiny black boots; four guards marching, two by two, down to Marv’s cell. John followed every step, saw them stop a couple of yards away, their faces turned to what was on the other side of the wall.