Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

Knock knock , I knock, but Junior Walker doesn’t answer. Knock knock knock. Knock knock knock knock , one or two knocks every so often louder or more rapid than the last, along with an occasional SOS, but I get no response. A word from the guards that I’ve lost all my privileges for the next day would be a welcome response, but no guard comes. Maybe I should stick my head out the cell door and see if a guard’s around. “Any prisoner so much as sticking a single finger joint through the cell-door window when opened,” Commandant Ep said that first day, “will be afforded the most serious punishments for this act.” “Please specify what punishments,” Captain House said, “so my men can know what to expect, which is clearly stated in article six of the internationally recognized Sashburton-Tang declaration.” “Let your men expect the most serious punishments that life can assuredly ill afford.” Thank you, sir.” And to us: “You heard the commandant, men. No sticking not even a single joint through the door window unless you want to be afforded the most serious of punishments that life can definitely not afford, agreed?” “Agreed,” we all said, slaves to living, our voices one. Thank you, Captain House. Thank you, Commandant Ep.”

I fall asleep and dream of marching again, though now I’m the officer in charge of a company of hotdogs, sizzling steaks, baked potatoes, bottles of French Bordeaux and chilled American Chablis, fresh-cooked deveined shrimps with a cocktail sauce on top and lemon wedges on the side, all marching five abreast till I command the food to halt and one by one to march up my body and into my mouth. The marchers become disorganized and retreat once they reach my waist and disperse when they land back on the ground. I begin eating my fingernails and then my fingers, but my hunger’s still not sated. I bellow “Deveined shrimp, bottles of white and red, franks, steaks, spuds, re-form into single lines and march into my mouth, hup, two, twice, no; mut, rut, vier, hup.”

I hup myself out of sleep. It’s morning. Door’s still open. I pound on the cell wall and yell This is Jamie Namurti, goddamn you, and someone answer me right now.” I scream that I’m starving, “dying of thirst besides,” and for the benefit of the remote control camera I grab my belly and drop to the floor in pain, but no doctor with food or guards with warnings about penalties incurred by prisoners for cutting up in their cells come bustling down the corridor to me. I stand up, raise my middle finger to the camera, and stick my head a few inches past the door.

Nobody’s in the corridor, the cell block seems deserted. I shout at the camera the only Chinese words I can think of: “Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Kai-chek, Tao teh-king, Li Po, I Ching, dim sums”—those meat-and fish-filled delicacies I used to get in San Francisco tea parlors between classes at the Art Institute—“Kiangsi stew, mushi pork with three extra pancakes, sweet and sour bass with steamed bows and all the cold rice beer I can drink,” but nobody comes to order me to quiet down.

“Abe, Pule, Rick, Dom, Junior, Milkmore, Kunstman, Coneymile, Captain House,” but none of my fellow prisoners answer. “Commandant Ep,” I shout. “Soldier Hsi”—the guard who likes to call me pig. “Han, Tz’u, Shih”—the three guards who bring my food. “Chin, Chan, Tun, Yin, Shan, Shu, Wong, Wang, Wing, Went, Wu”—names I yell because they sound Chinese. Then I say to the camera “I’m sorry, but my hunger and thirst have totally overwhelmed my self-protective instincts and common sense. At the count of three I’m going to have to leave this cell to find the kitchen, though all you have to do is say ‘Don’t come out,’ and I won’t. So please don’t squeeze any triggers. Do not use guns under any circumstances. So I’m stepping outside my cell now — one, two, three,” and I throw my only bar of soap out the door, but no one shoots at it. The soap bounces a few times before breaking apart like a soda cracker. “Next, I’m coming out — the real Jamie; no inorganic impersonation. Presenting — your attention, please — the one and only in the gorgeous living flesh,” and I step gingerly into the corridor, look around, do a brief frenetic Navajo dance of peace I learned from my father, end it with a leap in the air and my heels clicking just before I hit the ground. Nothing. And all the cell doors are open I see, as I slide down the corridor’s linoleum floor. And no grimacing guards in the glassed-in monitor room at the end of the corridor, though all the monitors are on, showing, among other things, our ten empty cells. Maybe my fellow prisoners were shot, but why would the Chinese shoot them and leave me? Or taken out for questioning and I was left behind by mistake, my cell door — last one at the other end of the corridor — left open by mistake; by mistake, the corridor door left open also and the monitor room left empty. But I’ll never know unless I try to find out.

The kitchen’s on the same floor as the cell block and seems to have been deserted in a hurry: food still in stove pots and tea in cups. I drink lots of water and eat about a quart of cold rice. Then I go downstairs, announcing along the way that an unarmed peace-loving American prisoner by the name of Jamie Namurti is heading this way, admittedly unauthorized to be out of his cell but please don’t shoot, as he’s an intensely harmless chap who only wants to know why no one’s around and why his food wasn’t brought to his cell and why his cell door and the cell block door and, it seems, all the doors in this prison were left open.

Nobody’s in the building, so I walk across the compound to the radio studio and then the television one, but they’re like the rest of this ghost prison. In the television studio, I sit at my regular place on the bench to think what I should do next, rise as if ordered to by Guard Tu and sit in the interviewee’s chair, face the lifeless camera and make the kind of confession I always wanted to.

“No, you goddamn ninnies, for the three hundredth time I was not on a spy flight for America and, in fact, am not in the American Air Force or even an American. I’m the legitimate handpicked rightful revolutionary heir of the great Mao — rather than the bureaucratic New Class fakes now in control — so you’re all under arrest. Actually, I’m the great-grandson of the illustrious Sun Yat-sen by a previously unknown pre-teen marriage arranged by my great-great-grandparents, so now you’re all most certainly under arrest. All kidding aside, me and my fellow flyboys here, well, we were over China not to spy on her but to seek asylum in her, when one of our country’s most effective anti-asylum missiles caught us in our contrails, knocking us for a few unaeronautical loops though not hitting our plane in time to stop us from landing it on your munificent soil. The truth is, and I see no reason to lie or joke around about it anymore, we were on a spying mission for China against American fleet forces in the Pacific when Vietnamese naval batteries, thinking we were scouting for an expeditionary brigade of Japanese to reestablish military imperialism in Asia by Asians, gunned us down. Okay: our sole reasons for transgressing your territory was to end the border dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia, return Sabah to the Philippines, Thailand and Cambodia to the Khmer, reunite the Koreas under the Silla kingdom, Japan under the Yamoto priest-chiefs, Burma under the Toungoo dynasty and China under the Kalmucks, and really get things moving again in Asia, really get the job done. The absolute truth now? I want to go home. I miss my mad Aunt Rose, I adore my loony Uncle Sam, I’m even a little crazy about you, China, wherever you are, whatever you might be.”

I stay in prison for three more days, sitting in Ep’s elegant office chair and giving the most extravagant orders imaginable to a thousand functionaries, sleeping in his bed with a photograph of his beautiful wife, smoking all his Cuban cigars and drinking his plum brandy, cooking up wild tasty dishes in the officers’ kitchen and working myself back to pre-prison shape in their pool and gym. But I’m very lonely and also curious to know what’s going on outside, so I fill a knapsack with food, canteens of water and a blanket and go through the main gate and head south, thinking that with a lot of luck and muscle I might reach Kowloon, walk across the bridge to Hong Kong, and sneak onto a ship leaving for some country like Japan or Australia.