There’s a big
clock in the detainment facility. It hangs at the end of the long row of cells.
Prisoners, or tenants, as we’re supposed to call them, to make hem feel more at
home, can see the clock from their cells. It is visible in every cell. I know
because I’ve walks past every one and checked over my shoulder to make sure I
could see the hour, the minute, the seconds tick past.
I asked one of
the staff, the elderly ones who have seen so many tenants they don’t want to
hear why they’ve been detained, why the clock was there? It woudn’t do the
tenants any good to see the time. IF any of them were counting days they would
know that it didn’t matter how many days they counted. Their sentences were perpetual.
There was nothing to do but look at the clock and watch time pass and known
that each second is not a countdown, just a breath. But then I thought, that
was probably the point.
The staff of the
detainment facility are organized into sectors, each corresponding to a sector
of the facility. The tenants within the sectors might be categorized by the
severity of their punishment, the severity of their crimes- sorry,
misdemeanors- by the amount of time the tenants have spent here, or by any
other criteria. The truth is, I have no idea. But there are six sectors, and
the newest staff begin in sector F.
New staff were
recruited out of academy. I remember the day Ellis and I were spotted by the
recruiters in secondary academy. The recruiters, staff from sector B, had told
us they were from the Vaccinations Council and they were going to give us new
pills to boost immunity and prevent topical infections and sexually transmitted
infections, as they did annually. They gave us each small paper cups and, when
we held them all out, came around again.
The students on either
side of me tilted their cups back. Their throats bobbed. I looked into my paper
cup.
But there was
nothing inside of it. I looked at the floor, to see if I’d dropped its
contents, but there was nothing there. None of the tiny liquid gel capsules that
tasted like fluoride and benzadril. When Ellis saw that I hadn’t taken mine, he
tilted his empty cup toward me with a quizzicall expression and mouthed that
his was empty.
Mr.Axe looked at
our empty cups and said, the pill isn’t going to swallow itself. And going down
your throat is the only place its going to go. Ellis was too nervous to speak,
so I told Mr.Axe, in case he’d gone blind, that the cup was empty.
Twenty-seven
pairs of eyes turned to me. I felt all of them.
Mr.Axe told me
that if that was the case I could take my empty cup to the principal’s office
and see what he had to say about it. I offered the empty cup to the gentleman
from the Vaccinations Council and told him that, if he could see it, he could
have it.
He didn’t even
take the cup from me.
The tenants in
sector C are nothing special compared to the tenants in sector D. They each
have their own strange punishments, their own tasks and rules, like any other
tenants. One in sector C told me once of the way hunger is eating away at him.
I’ve never seen him eat, and I have delivered his food to him for three years.
It sits on a tray just out of his reach, next to a glass of water, so clear
that the small minerals in it may as well be visible.
He never touches
the food or drink. He never can. But he will try. Every morning he stands,
eager, when I bring his tray in. He shuffles to the bars and slides onto his
belly, to stick his arm through the bars. Then, he’ll shift to his side,
straining, dutiful in his attempt to eat. He tells me about his throat and
tongue, thirsty from thirst and hunger. His eyes role back, his pupils dilate
and contract. He clutches his hollow stomach. Each day it must eat his insides
a little more.
He asks me if
I’ve felt real hunger before. Of course I have. I’m hungry all the time coming
out of these sectors. I want to tell him that he isn’t so special. That every
tenant has problems, sentences, obligations, illusions, unattainable fantasies.
I would feel worse for him if he told me about the fatigue, or the spacelessness,
the airlessness or the fact that he would never see his children again. That
makes the small creature of my sympathy sit on my shoulder and bite at my ear.
I have to remind
myself that he must have done something awful not to be fed. I have to remind
myself that when any of them appeal to me.
I tried to ask
him once, what did he do? He only pointed to the milk carton on the tray and
licked his lips.
After the pills,
Ellis and I were sent to the principal’s office. We were made to sit on opposite
sides of the room, so we could not touch. It was winter. Our school uniforms
consisted of layers of pants and undershirts and blouses and vests and jumpers.
We couldn’t have touched anything but our fingertips if we’d wanted to.
The recruitors
from sector B came into the office. There was a man and woman, both took a seat
at a desk in front of Ellis. I watched the back sof they heads while the woman
took something out. His was cut sternly, like the hair cut of a soldier or a
banker. Hers was a severe plait, braided closely to her head, the way the girls
in the academy did their hair in early summer.
The woman
withdrew a feather from her bag. It was large, not a downy, soft feather of a
young bird, but the hard, un-malleable feather of an eagle. It was as long as
her forearm, with prongs so soft it swayed as it was held still. The woman
instructed Ellis to hide it in he room, somewhere she would never see it.
Ellis bit his
lip and took the feather. The woman shut her eyes, as did the man, and Ellis
waited before prowling quietly, so quietly, to principle Bell’s desk. Bell kept
a taxidermied bird on it. The face was stretched into an eternal shriek, wings
constantly poised for a flight that would never happen. They accepted the
feather easily. It was the same colour, nearly the same size. If you hadn’t
seen Ellis put it there, you wouldn’t have guessed where it had gone.
When the
recruiters opened their eyes, their gazes seemed to fall, as one, on the desk.
The woman squinted her eyes at the bird for a long moment and told Ellis that
if he wasn’t willing to try, there was no point. Ellis protested that he did
try, but he had failed to put the feather where she would not see it. She told
him, noticing was not the same as seeing. She might not have noticed the
feather, but she had seen it.
Ellis’ shoulders
ducked. I was envious, as he slouched out of the principal’s office. I was
still sure that I’d done something horrible, in the time that Ellis and I had
been in the nearly empty office.
Then it was my turn.
When they’d both closed their eyes, I took the feather, stood up without being
careful (it didn’t matter how much noise I made) and tucked the feather into
the woman’s plait.
The woman sighed
and told me that she knew it was there, that if she reached around to feel it,
she would be able to grasp it with her fingers.
So look at it, I
told her. She almost spun her head, trying to see it.
Sector C is
wider in structure than the previous three sectors. As though it needs more
room for the punishments, more space for tenants to pull large objects over the
grooved and hilly floor. They can push them quite far but one, or all, of them
lose their grip. Their hands ache with the strength it takes. When one falters,
so do the rest, right behind, like children bumping into one another.
One of the other
staff, a warden called Calli, goes into one of the cells each day and hacks at
the stalks that grow there. Tall reeds that look like they’d be more
appropriate on a river’s edge, drifting up between bars and against the walls.
Calli takes a scythe in and hack away at the tops. Though I don’t see the cell
more than once a day, I hear crying from it, after the floor is covered with
stalks and the fluff of the weeds.
There is a clock
in this sector, in all sectors. Sometimes I time the amount of time it takes
for a warden to dig out the liver of a tenant, or for it to regrow, I once
asked about medics, for those with particularly gruesome punishments. I was
laughed at- rightly. Then I asked about the severity of the punishments, and
what makes one worse than the other. They only look to the clock.
I used the clock
to measure my own time, as well. I didn’t age, inside the detainment facility.
Outside it time was heavy on me, on my face. Within it, the tenants never aged,
nor did they die, become sick, or grow. Which was what made the clocks seem especially
insulting.
One of the worst
punishments inflicted on a tenant that I’ve seen is that inflicted upon the Jug
in sector C. He lives in a room that is forever damp, where there is never
enough time between one carrying of water and another, where the floors never
have time to dry. He sleeps on the wet cinder and concrete. His jumpsuit is
stained by the wet dust. His fingers are always pruned.
Each day we
bring him buckets of water. And empty buckets. The full buckets stand on one
side of the room, the empty on the other. He gives them a daunting, but
resigned look, glances at the clock once (most tenants look at it constantly,
or not at all), then begins. He dips his hands in one bucket of water and cups
it. He’s gotten better in the years I’ve been here, at ferrying water from the
full buckets to the empty. He knows how to cup his hands, how to pour the water
without spilling. But it is never dropless. Water seeps between his fingers,
downs his wrists, and a single drop means that he hasn’t transferred all water
from one pail to another.
He spends hours
filling the buckets each day, unable to carry all of the water. He needs a jug,
but we are not allowed to do it, and he knows too well to ask. He glances at
the clock once when he begins, and once when he ends.
His sentence is
not the worst. Not the bloodiest. He has no children, that he’s spoken of, or
hunger, that he’s mentioned. He has never directly a pitiful, hopeful,
despairing, glance to me. But the
sight of water dripping from his hands, the floor stained by hours of work,
useless work, of his face when the first water spills, and every hour awake
after that, chills me.
He wants this
punishment, believes in it. That could be the worst.
When I’m ready
for my promotion to sector B, I come into sector C with my lunch. I keep it in
an insulated lunch box, with entirely reusable packaging. Nothing wasted as I
watch the tenants work, watch their eyes flicker to the clock, ticking down the
numbers until I can go, though they
never can.
I pull up a chair
from the staff room and stand on it, just below the clock.
All of the
tenants go silent. I can hear their breaths, closer to being countdowns, closer
to providing rest, than they ever have been. I grab the clock on the wall, and
bring it down.
Then I go to the
Jug and pull out a Tupperware container from my lunch box. It will take him a
while to figure out how to use it without spilling a single drop, but it’s
better than fingers.
You’ll get
fired, one of them says, looking at the clock in my hands, ticking, counting,
as time goes by again.
I assure them I
won’t. Because I’m sure that the punishment for this is much worse than getting
fired.
Art by Anonymous
Text by Lucie MacAulay
