Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

The snake didn’t keep prisoners from hating. Hate, Bits thought, was good therapy for a man who was buried alive.

He began having dreams about a long, green, luminescent serpent. It would be after him, intent on devouring him. When Bits saw the snake his heart began to race, and then — it was always the same — he would feel a tingling in his arm and the snake’s flesh would evaporate, leaving only an empty skin draped over a grinning skeleton.

Every morning Bits awoke exhausted from the drugs and the unrequited hunger of the snake.

The only things that a convict could look forward to were meals, harvests, free days, and jog time.

Jog time was alotted to every prisoner. It was the optional daily regimen for aerobic exercise, mainly running. There were long black corridors with padded floors where the prisoner could run as long as he kept his heart rate within the range prescribed by his snake pack. The first few times Bits couldn’t run more than ten minutes before he had to stop. When his heart rate fell below the appropriate cardiovascular level the purple dotted line flashed, indicating that it was time to return to the cell.

At the end of three months Bits could run for two hours at a time. These were his best moments, the only times he felt free.

Three weeks after the second harvest a Free Day was granted.

The Free Day, Bits learned, was a random holiday that happened anywhere from seven to twenty times a year. On that fortuitous day there were movies and reading lamps with books and censored magazines; there was a music center for loud Jacker tunes and bedrooms set aside for health-cleared and consenting couples or triples or quads to have nonviolent sex together without black marks or inhibitor injections. Prisoners were free to move about, though only after reserving the time, down the many avenues of colored lights in blackness or up on the plantation grounds. There were basketball games and Ping-Pong and porno shows in 3D vid chambers that played all day long.

One of the most exciting events was the gladiatorial arena — the Circus, as Roger called it — where men fought nearly to the death. Regardless of all the control exerted by the snake packs and the monitoring systems, convicts still developed grudges that taxed their bio-limits and the more expensive drugs dispensed by the snakes. This problem was alleviated by these grudges being settled on Free Day.

The period lasted for twenty-four hours and was followed by a rest period of twenty-four hours more. Bits was first made aware of the holiday when he awoke to a flashing strobe of red light that woke all of his cell mates.

“Free Day,” Jerry said, leaping up from his mat. He was still limping a bit from the scorpion’s sting but the snake pack had saved him.

Soon all the men were up and talking. It wasn’t long before they were voicing their preferences to the void and were off following varied colored lights to their desires.

In less than five minutes everyone was gone except Bits and the white man Stiles.

“You gonna choose or what?” Stiles asked angrily.

“What’s your problem, white boy?” Bits retorted.

“I do what I do without a nig peanut gallery if you don’t mind.”

“Why don’t they put you with the white boys if you’re so unhappy with us, Stiles?”

“Nuthin’ I’d like better,” Stiles said. “But they don’t want all of any in one pot. You got cells up to six white men but there’s still a nig or spic in the cream. That way they got a backup spy if somethin’ goes down.”

“And you’re mad at me?” Bits said with as much sarcasm as he could.

Stiles gave Bits a hard stare and then said, “I could never trust you people. You were born to stab us in the back. It’s you who took our good white world and made it into a mess. Raped our women, stole our jobs.”

Bits paused a moment as if he were digesting the white man’s words. But he wasn’t thinking about what Stiles had said. Bits was a worldwide revolutionary. He defined himself as a class warrior, and though he suffered the pain of racism he did not exclude other races from his side. He knew that over 80 percent of American-backed prisons were non-white. He knew that crime by blacks against whites was negligible compared to the crimes committed by universities and corporations. But he also knew that he could never convince Stiles of their common cause.

“You and me, Stiles,” he said slowly. “It’s you’n me.”

“You wanna fight me in the Circus?”

Bits pointed at Stiles and then at himself, then curled both of his hands into fists at his waist level. He knew that there were computers recording and deciphering every word and gesture, that the computers were linked with vid monitors. At the first sign of rebellion Roger would be warned and either he or Stiles would be transferred.

“Fuck you,” Stiles said, which was his privilege on a Free Day.

“I want to go to a library if you have one,” Bits announced to the powers that be.

Over the next few weeks Bits began to have a different sort of disturbing dream. He would find himself sitting at Roger’s desk, in the faux open sky, doing math problems on a reusable paper-screen. At first everything was going fine, but then the numbers began to wriggle on the screen, becoming three-dimensional, growing red fangs and claws as they did so. They’d jump off of the paper-screen and chase Bits into the blackness of the prison’s interior.

The numbers mutated into serpentine equations that breathed fire and crackled with electricity. Soon after the monsters appeared Bits would be injected with a sedative. But later in the sleep period the monster equations would rise again, and be squashed again. Each time the dream would unfurl a little further.

He was sure that this was no ordinary dream, that it was a message. But he had no idea what the significance was.

After many nights the dragons assumed names like Master Slasher, Ten-Foot Stamper, and Gutter Gutter. Bits began a nightly meditation to empower himself, allowing him to make friends with the demons. As he overcame his fears the snake pack’s medications decreased.

After six months of meditation Bits managed to attain a dream state in which he could exist side by side with his monstrous nemeses. Like different species at a watering hole, the calculate-demons and Bits lived a wary truce during his sleep.

Both Moomja and Needles were taken from the cell in that time. Moomja lost over fifty pounds and spent half the time in the infirmary. He became lethargic, unable to rise at the waking hour even with the pep injections from his snake pack. Finally he was led off by a blue and green line which never returned.

Some weeks later Needles started singing an improvised song. It was a blues song with many repeated lines. He insulted Roger and the guards and called Angel’s Island a concentration camp for freedom fighters. Needles sang until the sleep hour and beyond. In the morning he was gone.

Bits hardly noticed these departures. His time was spent studying the lifelike equations. Whenever he thought that he was unobserved he’d make fists at Stiles.

After sixteen Free Days, what Bits figured to be two years and some months, he was ordered by a bodiless voice to follow a red line until he came to his destination.

While he walked he wondered what life was like on the outside. He thought about his mother and brothers, revolutionaries all, and his father the cop. He wondered what Stiles had meant at the last harvest when he came close to Bits’s left side, with the wind blowing in his face, and mouthed, I’m with you.

Had he understood Bits’s offer after all this time?

Bits had tried again and again to beat the snake pack. He awoke at the right time and forced himself to sleep. He followed every order and never spoke when he shouldn’t. He worked hard and slept in silence. In the blackness of the cell at night he spoke softly with Loki and Darwin and Jerry, and the new guys, Everett and Charles. He spoke to everybody but Stiles, whom nobody liked and who liked no one.