The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

Sensory deprivation was for Luther Trait the ultimate freedom. Like the boy in the closet, he transcended consciousness, able to project himself to any place and time in every manner of being except the realm of the physical — the very realm he was working on right now.

The door opened and Warden James stepped inside. He had paled during his tour at Gilchrist, same as his prisoners. Trait had not seen him in perhaps two years.

“Initiate a search log,” the warden said.

The doctor had a clipboard prepared, snapping on examination gloves as he faced Trait. The egg salad on his breath was stomach turning. “Does the prisoner request an X ray in lieu of a digital search?”

Trait nodded.

The warden shook his head. “No more than two non-medical abdominal X rays per year.”

The doctor was bored with this routine. “Sign the waiver,” he said, holding the clipboard up to Trait.

Trait was looking at the warden. Not with malice, just studying him, tracing the veins beneath the thin veneer of the man’s pallid face and wondering if the face of a prison was the face of its jailer.

“Prisoner refuses to sign,” declared the warden, taking the clipboard and pen from the doctor and authorizing the search.

The doctor started with Trait’s ears, curling them inward and running his fingers behind and inside, his sickly egg breath pushing into Trait’s face. He tipped Trait’s head back to fully expose his nostrils, then probed them with a short nasal speculum. He held Trait’s jaw and slid a plastic bit between his teeth to prevent him from biting, then used a wooden blade to lift Trait’s tongue for inspection. The doctor’s latex thumbs entered his mouth and fished out the insides of his cheeks. This was the intrusion Trait enjoyed most, a white man checking the quality of his teeth. He felt aligned with his slave brothers, slaves who built the South, who built the pyramids, who built everything. All this time the warden watched him patiently.

The riot sticks in the hacks’ hands were truncheons, yard-long black sticks tipped with steel ball bearings. “Rib spreaders,” they were called, separating the ribs without breaking them or leaving any bruises or marks. There was a symbolism in those sticks, only partly phallic, of the agents of the state reaching through the bars of the rib cage of a free man to get at his soul. Trait slept with wet toilet paper stuffed in his ears, to keep out their hammering on the bars every hour on the hour, ostensibly checking for sawed pieces but really just banging on a man’s mind, whacking away at his sanity: Bang! Bang! Bang ! He had to fight to survive, every step of the way.

The hacks tore apart the back of Trait’s prison shirts, seamed in Velcro for just that purpose, sliding it down over his manacled hands to expose his back and chest. His shoes were removed and his feet inspected, the soles and the spaces between each brown toe. The stun belt was removed and one hack grasped his cotton pants at the elasticized waist and pulled them to his ankles, and the doctor lifted his dick for inspection, then his sack. Trait remembered the first time he had stood for this, in a county lockup outside Milwaukee. He had proudly urinated in the examining guard’s face. But he was young then and his anger had lacked focus.

“Bend over the table.”

The Nubian kingdom fell in the fourteenth century as claims on the Nile by outside countries were defended and won. Aside from a few artifacts and ruins, none of the Nubian culture survives today except the language. Even the name was taken away. The lesson of history, as Trait understood it, was that every great empire believes itself the anointed, the eternal, the last. And every great empire eventually falls.

“What could she have had?” said Warden James.

The warden’s face was near his own, his voice was soft and intimate in his ear. In five years, he had never once addressed Trait directly.

“What did you think she could possibly have had for you?”

Like flashes of true insight to a cloistered monk, communication was a rare and beautiful thing to a man in total isolation. In a life as rigidly controlled as Luther Trait’s, there was no room for coincidence — and so the woman’s visit, scheduled one day before the beginning of the beginning, had demanded his courtesy. The message he had expected from her, in fact the only message she could have carried for him at that late hour, was one of abortion, of the failure of their great plan. His relief at her ignorance eclipsed his displeasure at the distraction her visit had posed, at that very late hour when demands upon his concentration were at their highest. No — she had been sent to him for some other reason, one that he had not as yet divined.

Trait looked at the warden’s venous face, his dewy eyes, so impassive and near. He pitied the man left holding the keys in a kingdom of open doors. The doctor continued his manual prodding, an exercise in humiliation, a thorough search for something when they knew that nothing was there. As the cold steel table chilled his chest, against his bare back Luther Trait felt the burning desert sun, and in his ears he heard drums of war, and water lapping patiently at the sandy banks of the ancient and holiest Nile.

How warm and reassuring was the rambling Gilchrist Country Inn: the warm blond oak of its floors, the ornamental wreaths and pewter sconces hanging on the walls, the framed homilies (“God made us Sisters, Life made us Friends”), the brass registers breathing warm air through the floors. The formal prose of the inn brochure, printed in violet ink on heavy ivory stock, delighted Rebecca.

The Inn is a recently renovated Victorian farmhouse, constructed by descendants of the original Gilchrist family. Located on seven secluded acres just outside the historic town common, Gilchrist’s only lodging establishment is a unique four-season retreat. Its ten bedrooms offer guests a relaxing and comfortable lodging experience, most rooms featuring well-appointed private baths and thermostats for your personal comfort. Bedrooms are spacious and individually decorated with heirloom antiques, a queen-size canopy bed, and handmade patchwork quilts. Afternoon tea served weekends.

The bell on the reception desk — an actual handbell, set next to a spice-scented candle of caramel-colored wax in a squat canning jar — brought the proprietor and innkeeper, Fern Iredale, out of the kitchen. Fern was about sixty, solidly built, strong and broad but not tall, with short salt-and-pepper hair and a relentlessly upbeat manner. She appeared wearing a yellow apron tied over a work shirt, khakis, and moccasins. Rebecca remembered her first visit, and how five minutes chatting with Fern at check-in had completely deionized her urban cynicism. It turned out Fern was a fan of “strong women” thrillers. She had made Rebecca promise that if she ever came near Gilchrist again, she would spend another night or two at the inn and Fern would organize a reading in town. And Fern was so warm and dear that Rebecca could not let her down. There were worse things she could do for herself than enjoy a weekend of Fern’s mothering.

A carton of paperbacks sat behind the desk, ready for the next evening’s event. Fern checked her in, then proudly led Rebecca around to the back of the house via the enclosed farmer’s porch. A painted sign above the communal bookshelves read, “Take a book. Leave a book.” On a small stand on the highest shelf was an autographed, plastic-sleeved hardcover copy of Last Words , with a handwritten sign below it reading, “... Except This One.”

Dinner was an adventure. Vermont cheddar-cheese soup, homemade oatmeal-maple bread, cob-smoked maple ham, potato pie, and maple-butternut squash, with not a green vegetable in sight. Apple cider was the beverage, apple berry the dessert. Guests sat family style at one long table in a room of latticed windows looking out on the night and the trickling snow. Rebecca noted that the sage-green floral wallpaper matched the fabric of the seat cushions, the tablecloths, and the linen.