How could I say no? Single me. No children of my own. No brothers or sisters with cute nephews and nieces. No parent to look in on. No husband or boyfriend to fear offending. No presents to buy. I needed the cash. A bubble shift was as good as a night on the couch, except you got paid for it. With all the inmates snug in their cells and a complete lockdown enforced, there would be little need to pay attention. Safe, all-seeing, and powerful, requiring no physical exertion. If you kept one ear cocked for the radio and your partner kept his mouth shut, sweet dreams awaited.
So I said yes—before I learned that Cutler would be my shift partner, a man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut for more than two minutes at a stretch.
Still, when we settled in for the duty after a dinner of pizza and chicken wings ordered in special by Baumard, even Cutler seemed subdued by the night and the long shifts leading up to it. The floor of the bubble was raised inside, and you felt like you were floating above the ground. The caged and glassed windows ran a complete circle around and above you, giving you full vision of the main hub. At night you kept the lights dim. On the console desk you had black-and-white cameras directed at fixed spots in the hub’s major access points and the corridors of each wing. The grainy screens showed concrete,
stone, and steel bars, like images of shipwrecks in deep water.
“Wish I was home,” Cutler said, letting out a yawn. “Wish I was pretty much anywhere but here.”
I rogered that and tried to keep my eyes from falling shut. The chicken wings, so tasty in the moment, had made me feel bloated and drugged. Soon Cutler was sleeping, his head thrown back, his bulbous neck doing something tuba-like to the snores that bellowed forth.
Naturally, given such peace and quiet on such a blessed night, I succumbed to dark thoughts. My life at Ditmarsh had the taste if not the quality of failure. The job was a trap born of a momentous decision in my mid-thirties to enlist in the military before it was too late. But in my glorious 187 days of boots on ground in Iraq, all I did was live on a base, guard trucks, and feel grimy and sunstroked. The CO bit had not been in the plans. As soon I returned home, I looked into law enforcement, but there was nothing local going on. Then my father got sick. Despite feeling resentful about the situation that put me in, I took a job with the state corrections service to stay near at hand, and I ended up at the oldest penitentiary in the system, where none of the teachings and tactics I learned at the six-week corrections academy training course seemed to matter. The cliché of prison guard life was for real. I felt as if I too were doing time. My life outside was pared down, my belongings, my relationships, my routine all simplified. In Iraq I’d thought about friends and relatives all the time, wrote letters, sent intense feelings through e-mails, pictures, jokes. After my first year at Ditmarsh I stopped working so hard at keeping people near. And nobody seemed to notice.
I sat and counted the reasons I wished I had said no to Baumard’s shift. Then I saw the sign.
In the middle of the bubble was a hatch where the floor opened up, and under it was a stone staircase going down to the armaments room below, and below that to the sealed-off dissociation holding cells we called the City. Above the door, on the wall, was an old fallout shelter sign: two yellow triangles on the bottom, one on the top within a circle. Except someone with a sense of humor had unriveted the sign from the wall and secured it upside down, like a distress signal, and scrawled the letters NOYFB beneath, like a Latin expression on some crest. NOYFB meant “none of your fucking business,” and it was typical CO machismo. When I saw the mark in Crowley’s comic book, I’d felt some vague recognition, but it was not until I was leaning back in my chair at the console deck and staring at the upside-down fallout shelter sign that I made the connection. Good God, I thought. How had that sign ended up in the drawing of an inmate?
It wasn’t my job. None of my fucking business. And still I rose from the chair, gently, so as not to disturb Cutler, and walked over to the hatch.
Once, it had seemed like a juvenile prank, but the fallout shelter sign was ominous to me now, as though the menacing face were guarding the entrance to something wrong. The most common reason to descend the hatch stairs was to check the armaments or urinate in a corner, an unlikely act for me. We stored weapons down there along with assorted tools like fire hoses and canisters of chemical agent. Off the armaments room were four brick-sealed alcoves. Once upon a
time, those alcoves were the beginnings of tunnels that led to other buildings within the complex, a means of escaping in case of dire emergency, but they were closed now, and anyone stuck in the bubble during a major disturbance would be holed up until the cavalry arrived.
Below the armaments room was the City. The old dissociation unit had cells so small and dark and inhumane that after a history of bad incidents and suicides and accidental slips, the door had been finally closed for good. I’d never been down there. The welding had taken place a few years before my time. The warden declared that sealing off the City was a gesture symbolizing the beginning of a new era. The old-timers were not happy about losing the best threat they’d ever possessed. The new dissociation range was like a stay at a Holiday Inn by comparison.
I felt gravity itself pulling me down. I would merely look, duck down quickly, and make sure the door to the City was still sealed shut. I gripped Cutler’s damp shoulder until he blinked.
“Sorry,” I said, guilty for stirring him. “I’m going down below. Something’s not right.”
He reached for his baton and rubbed his eyes to wake himself up.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be right back. I just want you to know where I’ve gone.”
Before I descended the stairs of the hatch, I wanted someone to know where I was going.
The armaments room felt completely cut off from the world above, the bricked-up alcoves like four blinded eyes.
The staircase to the City below was behind a heavy wooden door in the west wall, which was blocked by crates. A good sign, I thought as I heaved them to one side. There was a key hanging on a hook on the wall above it. Not so long ago, jailers had carried rings of such keys. The old padlock was as heavy as a cannonball. The lock opened, and I pulled the doors back.
“Everything okay?” Cutler called down. I could still see his shape in the entrance above me.
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s all fine.” Hoping it so.
The air that lifted up to me was mildewy and cold. I shone my flashlight on the wet walls and the narrow rounded steps. It was a steep walk down, and I had to lean back to avoid hitting my head. When I reached the bottom and came to the second door, I saw the propane canister on the ground.
They just left the goddamn blowtorch right there
. I felt my anxiety soar. A bar had been fitted back into place to keep the door locked from the outside.
The worst feeling in the world came over me.
“The lock’s been cut,” I shouted.
“What?” I heard.
Cutler did not come down. I should have turned back. This was all the evidence I needed to get the Keeper down here. But I felt laden with obligation and amped by the need to know, a desire to see what I had discovered. The door was thick and sodden. I could smell a thin odor of piss in the cold air behind it. The sounds changed and became less muffled as the world opened up into an expansive darkness. I heard something move, probably a rat, and stamped my foot and shouted to scare it off. The silence returned, but I could no longer believe
it was an empty silence. “Crowley?” I called. My voice was deadened by the thickness of the stone. Before me was a pitch-black hallway. Shining my flashlight along the floor, I saw angled shapes like craggy rocks and realized that the entire hallway was cluttered with garbage. I made out broken computer terminals, upturned boxes of files, a weight-lifting bench, a metal bookshelf on its side. It was as though I’d stumbled on an abandoned warehouse or a flood-decimated building. The jutting rock created more shadows along the walls. The right wall was rough-hewn, while on the left I saw a row of doors with little space between them. My breath came rapidly, and I tried not to imagine larger shapes in the darkness flitting off whenever I moved my flashlight beam away. Some of the doors were shut; others were angled out of their rooms in disordered fashion like a series of unmade beds. I moved an inch forward and stopped. Anything could be down there. It would be better if I checked each cell in turn.
Opening the first door and looking in, I saw that the cell inside was barely long enough for a cot. Again, the room was filled with scattered garbage—a broken riot shield, an old cafeteria table. In the corner of the floor I saw a small, irregular hole with two raised stone rectangles straddling it. Rats came up through those sewer lines, I figured, probably had crept up even in the days when men slept inside. What a place to put someone. I shone my light on the walls within and saw graffiti scratched into the stone. I told myself it had been there for decades.
“Crowley?” I called again, irrationally, and part of me believed he might emerge from the darkness, blinded by the flashlight, babbling incoherently.
The second and third rooms were cluttered with garbage, too, their walls covered in more graffiti scrawls. By the time I got to the fifth room, I couldn’t take my eyes off the shape ahead of me.
I wanted to run back to Cutler, to emerge from the darkness with a heavy gasp, as though I’d been underwater. But I also felt the need to see. There was nothing simple about that urge, however. It feathered into multiple threads—a desire to show myself strong and overcome the worst possible fright; an indecent, voyeuristic need that seemed almost pornographic in its insistence; and finally, a tender horror, a grief for human plight. Down here, in the clutter, the sour illness of cruelty. Nothing could be more awful.
His heaviness weighed the door down. I talked myself calm as I reached forward and pulled the door back gently, though my self-control was thin. Then my mouth was filled with saliva, my breath came in short, rapid intakes, and I struggled to see clearly.
The body was naked, suspended from the top of the door, jutted forward as if poised in mid-flight. There was a crusted paste all over his face and neck. The cast on his broken arm was gone, the unraveled chalky cloth strewn around him. He’d used some of that cloth to make the noose. It ate into his neck like an amputee’s blood-soaked bandage. His knees were bent, and he had only to straighten his legs in order to rescue himself. His toes dangled. He was much smaller than he’d seemed in real life.
“Oh, Christ,” I moaned, and realized that I’d been saying it over and over. I wanted to live my whole life without ever seeing
such a thing. But it was too late, and I knew the smell and sight of Crowley would smother me forever.
I backed away, stumbling over a broken chair, the panic lifting me up. I struggled to grasp onto a single clear thought, and I shone my light around, paranoid again that there might be someone else inside one of the rooms I’d skipped. It occurred to me then, with all the horror I’d ever felt, that Cutler could slip the bar through the door as easily as an executioner slips a needle into an intravenous line, and I would be lost in here, too, disappeared forever, a joke among COs for years to come. I tried to calm myself, turn my back on poor Jon Crowley, and stride down the hallway, but then I was running, stumbling, teeth rattling in my mouth.
My light poured over the walls, the drawings different to me now. He must have used his cast, the chalk from the plaster, part of me realized—or did I figure that out later? Each cell room contained its own madness, a bewildering collage of images. At the top of the stairs I saw a last word, more hastily scrawled than the others and much larger, as if Crowley had stood there before the door and scraped the chalk up and down, losing hope: “DIG.” Was it a command or a kind of pleading? I couldn’t process what it meant, but I envisioned corpses, maggot-eaten bodies, flies swarming over an open grave. I slipped as I scrambled up the wet steps, fell so hard on my shins and elbow that my teeth clacked together, and crawled out of the hole and into the armaments room. Only then, when I was safely out, did I yell for Cutler.
Hours later, after the warden and the assistant wardens and all four of the keepers and half the senior COs and two Pen Squad lieutenants had been through, Wallace asked me whether I was all right. I didn’t feel all right. My hands trembled slightly, and though I had moments where I considered myself extraordinarily sharp and lucid, there were dead spots, too, when my focus was utterly inert. The smell was in my nostrils, and I couldn’t get the grip of the memory out of my brain. I saw the graffiti like some viral insanity infecting the stones, spreading outward, threatening to cover every brick and archway in the world above. Wallace mentioned the stain on my shin. I reached down and felt the pain, lifted my stuck pants, and saw the gouge out of my skin. He told me to go to the hospital ward and see to it, then go home, write my reports tomorrow.
I checked my watch. It was three in the morning. I did not want to walk through the tunnel to get to the hospital. I never wanted to walk through a tunnel again.
Outside, the sky was black. The air was sticky with cold. When I reached the hospital wing, I huddled to stop the shivering. It finally calmed down, and I proceeded around the corner and met eyes with the CO at the desk. He wanted to know what was going on, whether it was true they’d found Crowley. I muttered yes and pushed through the door. He asked me if I was all right, and I didn’t answer.
The hallway was dim. I still had my flashlight on my belt. I pulled it out and shone it along the walls, intolerant of any pools of darkness. I could hear the breathing of those men in the utter silence. My steps echoed. I stopped before the infirmary
cell where Jon Crowley had lived in endless purgatory while his busted arm healed. The steel sink and toilet. The empty cot with the single sheet. I remembered the smirk that had greeted me the last time I looked in, and the emptiness of expression in the dead face I’d seen an hour before.