Promotion

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