Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

Now it has been eight years since I stepped inside these prisons.

In a small room, two guards told me to take off my clothes. I asked them why. Our voices echoed. They repeated the order. I began to unbutton my shirt. I took off my shoes. Razor wire lay coiled beside the exit. I stripped off my jacket and pants, unthreaded the tie from my collar. I stood in my undergarments. “Continue,” a guard said. He pointed at my socks, gestured lazily at the rest. I removed my undershirt. I removed my socks. I took off my underpants. Everything was thrown into a bin. The concrete was cold as frost. One guard started sorting through my clothes. He crouched. He set aside my belt, tie, tore the elastic from my underpants. “What are you doing?” I said. The other guard told me to lift my arms and came wearily toward me. He began at my feet, feeling the spaces between my toes, then scraping the backs of my knees with his fingers, and up to my armpits, my splayed hands, and in every touch I felt the grubby casual-ness of his hands, and I thought of the hundreds of other men he had touched like this, in the middle of the night. I shuddered. He pulled back my ears, rubbing the insides with his thumb. He felt in my hair. He made me close my eyes and pushed at my lids, like a pawing animal. Suddenly his fingers were in my mouth, around my teeth. His hands tasted of vinegar. I gagged. Then he made me take my penis and show that there was nothing else between my legs. He told me to turn and I felt a new dread. But he did not touch me. He ordered me to pull apart my buttocks, to squat, but he did not touch me. He walked back toward the other guard. They told me I could get dressed.

The buttons had been torn from my clothes. My wallet had been taken. My shoes were missing their laces. “Through that door,” they said, and I wiped my mouth, and I passed from one circle of hell into the next.

Men in grey uniforms took my photograph.

“What is your name?” someone asked.

“What is my name ?” I said. “You don’t know my name ?”

“Please state your name.”

They pressed my fingers onto inkpads, then onto a shiny card, like a postcard, somewhere to jot a holiday message.

“Profile,” someone said, and they took another photograph. My wardens were not monstrous. They seemed tired. They seemed like fathers and brothers. They led me under buzzing electric lights, past painted brick, up and around and through a maze, deeper and deeper, and part of me tried to remember the turns, senselessly, fruitlessly, as if I might escape and run and then be free. We came to a corridor where it said on a plaque, INVESTIGATION — INTERROGATION, and I recoiled, clawed back to where I had come from, and for the first time a guard struck me, hard, across the side of my shoulder. I could have stepped away in jong sao , fought, punched my one-inch punch, and pivoted to a kick. Instead I crumpled inward, stumbled, caught the end of my tongue with my teeth. My shirt cuffs fluttered at my wrists. I climbed a metal grille stairway with nets on either side, to catch the suicide attempts. At the top of the stairs I came to a wide desk, like in a draftsman’s office. They told me to stop. “Sign,” they said. It was a list with the title REGISTERED LIVES. The other lives were hidden by a metal plate. Only one line was visible — a bare strip of paper for me to register my life, and then the metal plate would descend by one line, and my name would be hidden, and the next prisoner would see just the bare space for his or her ink to drop.

Lev Sergeyvich Termen

I went through two more sets of doors and into a cell.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO anticipate what will be our worst thing. Our worst things are not all the same. Hunger, thirst, fatigue. Or fear. I used to think that heartbreak was my worst thing. It is not. In a certain way, heartbreak is a reassurance. There is no reassurance in hunger, in thirst, in fatigue. Or in fear. These things are hollow things, un-things. I have learned that there are certain absences you can keep and hold; and other absences, like lost memories, which you cannot.

I WAITED IN MY cell for a hundred years. I do not know how long it truly was. Time becomes senseless over dilating hours. The room was rectangular and dimly lit. There was a hole in the ground. There was neither bed nor bench and the walls were strafed with rows of iron nails, pointed outward. The nails were to prevent a prisoner from leaning against anything. It seems nightmarish but the reality was so dull, so mundanely cruel. Those nails could have been used to build things.

I stood until I could not stand anymore. Then I sat on the floor, in my sagging and unbuttoned clothes. I sat. I sat. I lay down and turned on my side. In a cell, you gradually begin to count: bricks, tiles, the string of seconds. I began to list primes, counting upward. 223, 227, 229 … “What is today?” I asked myself. “It is the morning of Friday, March 10, 1939.”

I closed my eyes and cried. I roughly rubbed my face. I clasped my knees and counted. I decided I would not cry again until things got worse.

There was a slot in the cell door through which the guards could look, and it never opened. Who had brought me here? I wondered. What had brought me here? Had I betrayed my country somehow? Had I been mistaken for someone else? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov?

I did not sleep because I did not think I could sleep but I wish I had slept; I wish I had slept. I wish I had taken that silent and undisturbed century to curl up on the cold floor and dream.

Then the door opened and I was grabbed by the shoulders and dragged, shrieking, down the hall. Most shocking was the suddenness. They grabbed me and lifted me and dragged me, even though I could walk, and this violence tore the wounded shriek from my lungs. They brought me into a room, thrust me onto a chair that was bolted to the floor. A bright light. Two men in silhouette. A ventilation grate breathing hot air from above.

“What is your name?”

“Lev Sergeyvich Termen.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

“You are at the heart of Soviet intelligence.”

I exhaled. As sifu taught me, I held on to the end of the exhale, extending the moment in silence and stillness before beginning the breath that follows.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why do you think you are here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I will ask the question again: Why do you think you are here?”

“I don’t know.”

One of the silhouettes moved toward and past me, illegible, and I thought it would strike me. It did not strike me.

INSTEAD, THEY TOOK ME from the room. I was brought to a new cell, this one much larger than the last, with dripping arches and the smell of shit. It was full of bodies. Not corpses, but scarcely people: bodies in spring coats, shirts with buttons torn off. The cell, as big as a classroom, was walled in rust-red brick. There would have been room for a few dozen to sit and rest, but instead the floor was swollen with a hundred men, ashen and dying, or simply fearful; standing, teetering on trembling knees.

The cell door closed. I smelled the bodies, the uncovered toilet, and slipped into these prisoners’ woollen folds. I did not understand this room — why we stood like passengers in an elevator, awaiting the next stop. There was hardly room to stand, let alone to sit, but still, but still. And so I sat, with murmuring around me, Indian-style with my knees upraised, until the cell door thudded open and the guard shouldered in, like a cyclops. They must have had peepholes all over, to see one man sitting in the throng. He was huge and dark, with a grotesquely friendly face, and he landed a blow upon my ear, roaring, “ON YOUR FEET.”