John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He got to his feet—saw headlights swinging into the alley to his right. He turned down a narrow walk between the restaurant and the next building, feeling his way along in pitch darkness; moving back toward the restaurant’s front. Smelling urine, garbage. He emerged onto the sidewalk. The Ford Hydro was gone; it was around back. And there was a cab just letting a young couple out in front of the restaurant. He ran to it, got in before they closed the door, slid a fifty-newbux note through the slot to the driver. “Go anywhere, fast!” he yelled. The driver saw the bill, and the car squealed away from the curb.

Stoner watched through the rear window. He didn’t see the Hydro. The dumbshits were still looking through the alley. The cab turned a corner and he felt a ripple of relief. Ditched them for now. Unless they had a surveillance bird on him too. He glanced up at the sky. No telltale silvery fluttering. But the birds were small; you never knew.

He’d have to contact Brummel directly, somehow. Tomorrow, if he got through the night alive.

There were forty beds in the county jail’s hospital room. Charlie was lying in the bed nearest the door, trying not to hear the shouts and babbling and jeering of other patients—other prisoners.

He gave up trying to get comfortable on his back, moved to his right side. That hurt too. He shifted to his left side. After some more experimentation he found that if he remained on his left side and tucked his knees up near his chest, bunched the sheets up under his sore kidney, he could minimize the discomfort. Now and then he reached under his sour-smelling, grimy pillow and let his fingers play over the plastic cigarette lighter he’d found in a refuse barrel. Some guard had thought it empty. But chances were there was a light or two left in it.

The prison infirmary was bigger than he thought it would be; danker, darker, more foul-smelling. It was shaped like an enormous Quonset hut, walls curved into ceiling. The only windows, shaped like quarter-moons lying on their straight sides, were near the ceiling; they were metal-meshed, flyspecked, never opened—probably never could. The light from the windows and the ceiling fluorescents was a sort of milky glare. There was no screen, nothing to read except the heap of printout magazines over by the door. The old metal beds creaked at one another constantly, as if groaning for the infirmary patients, and the patients—or prisoners, or victims, or stray animals—complained and cursed. Half of them were tied to the beds with plastiflex restraints; the orderlies came rarely, so the prisoners were forced to foul themselves and to lie in it.

The place was bedlam, and the shouting, the groans, the idiotic hoots and the weeping—everyone here in pain, most everyone condemned to more pain and death—the noise of the place scared Charlie. He found himself reverting to a kind of infantile state of terror, the fright only an infant can feel, a fear primordial in its depth, all-consuming. He was caught in the State’s garbage disposal; the noise of this place was constantly grinding away, and the sound of it was the sound of the gnashing steel teeth of the State, its teeth gnashing bones and flesh.

Charlie was trying to screen it all out. Think of it some other way, he told himself. Think of it as the noise of a storm.

He lay on his side with his eyes screwed shut.

His mind was busy. It cut his situation into segments, and cut the segments into smaller segments, and parsed the little segments into sorted heaps.

He could blame the Hollow Head. The place that was a drug. That’s why he was here. Because of what the Place had done to Angelo and to him.

No. It was his own weakness. His psychological original sin. His own tendency to… what had the school psychiatrist called it when Charlie was in seventh grade? Disassociative neuroses? The need to disassociate his mental focus from himself and things around him. Drugs worked best. It was old news: he’d done drugs because they freed him, blew away his problems and anxieties.

And the Hollow Head, of course, was more than a drug. It was living drug paraphernalia; instead of you swallowing the drug, the drug swallowed you. All-encompassing. Real disassociation, internal and external at once.

When you left the Hollow Head, you were exhausted, sick, maybe greasy with self-disgust. Vowing never to go back. Same old story, same old hard reality.

Because you always found excuses, your feet turning toward the place without your thinking about it.

When you realized you were going to cop a buzz, you argued with yourself. Maybe only so you could say to yourself, “I tried, I fought it.” But with never any real conviction in the fight.

Sure, it scared you. You’d seen the burnouts. You’d heard the stories of things happening like what had happened to Angelo. You were scared of the place, of the addiction.

Drugs, and the Hollow Head. The cycle had been eating him alive. So he’d gotten into the Resistance. He’d joined them, he knew now, more to escape from drugs than for ideological reasons. He believed in the Resistance passionately. But deep down he was there because he’d thought it would save him.

It hadn’t saved him. The drug thing was like one of those movie monsters you thought was killed—and it rises up again and again. Out of water and out of flames, neither drowned nor incinerated.

And he’d shot Angelo into himself; he’d gone mad for a while; he’d killed a cop. He was judged and convicted. The sickening thing was, he understood the conviction very well. He didn’t even have the consolation of feeling that he was an innocent wronged. He’d walked a tightrope over a vat of shit, and he’d fallen into it.

There was no appeal. He was here only till he healed up just enough to participate in the circus they’d make of his execution. Every day the doctors would examine him; treacherously, his body would repair itself, and with every improvement he was a little closer to his execution show. There were cameras in the ceiling, and the men in restraints were mostly the ones the cameras had caught mutilating themselves to put off their executions. He had a few days, as much as a week, and then they’d execute him.

The NR didn’t know where he was. It probably couldn’t help him, anyway.

He had an absurd image of his mother coming in, shouting at everyone, straightening it out, taking him away from here. I’ll be good, Mom. Just get me out.

Shit. He didn’t even like his mother.

The only way out of here alive was escape.

His hand closed over the lighter again. It was sweat-glossed with his touching.

Sometimes the guards came in and searched the beds for improvised knives, drugs, anything. Fouling your bed wasn’t enough to keep them from searching it. They just made you clean it up first.

Next time they searched, they might find the lighter. Stiff as he was, now was the time.

He rolled onto his stomach, pulled the rancid sheet over his head and over the pillow, as if trying to blot out the light so he could sleep. He lay still for a while, smelling himself, sour but reassuring, in the gray semidarkness, hoping anyone watching on the ceiling cameras would think he’d fallen asleep.

Twenty minutes, till he was sweaty from being under the sheet, and then he reached under his pillow, found the lighter. He put it between the palms of his hands and began to rub it, warming it up with friction and body heat so the small amount of gas that was in it would expand, rise to the nozzle.

He pushed his head under the pillow, making a little hump under it so there was enough air for the lighter.

He decided he’d rubbed the lighter long enough. He flicked it, watched the sparks breathlessly.