Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“You,” the Voice called out to the others inside the cell. “Bring the new prisoner here.”

Once again the preacher felt the agonizing sensation of many hands grabbing him at once, then carrying him from the back to the front of the cell. His head was still spinning, but somehow he managed to make his feet touch the ground, even as he was being held up high by his armpits. When he reached the bars at the front of the cell, he grabbed them and held on tightly. The men who were holding him up must have felt his unexpected surge of strength; they released him and left him standing on his own.

The Voice was now only a few inches from the preacher’s face. It broke into a halting laugh.

“You’re a lucky man,” it was saying. “This is your lucky day, you lucky man.”

The metal bars slid open, displacing his grip on them; then the shadow grabbed him and slammed him against the outside wall. He couldn’t tell how many people were there, in the cell or in the cramped corridor between the wall and the cell. His body crumpled, his legs buckling under him as he slipped to the slimy foul-smelling ground.

The Voice ordered him to get up and follow it down the corridor. Was he moving or were the walls, caked with blood and fecal stains, moving on their own?

“Hurry up or I’ll leave you here,” the Voice said.

The preacher didn’t want to be left there, squatting in the squalid limbo between freedom and imprisonment, between life and death. He thought of his wife and his sister, imagining himself moving closer to one and farther away from the other. His sister would survive without him, he told himself. She was strong; she had always known how to do for herself. She had her faith, no matter that unlike him she’d remained a Catholic. She also had his house, which she could sell if she needed money. She’d just begun that cosmetology course. Once she was done with her course, she could work as a beautician or open a shop. The only thing that worried him as far as she was concerned was her epilepsy. Even when she was a child, she never seemed to accept or understand that she was epileptic, coming up with all sorts of mystical reasons for her seizures, everything but the disease itself. He hoped she would never choose to have children. She’d had one of her seizures at the beach while watching their young brother and had let him drown. It’s possible that his wife had also had epilepsy, had died from it. But he couldn’t be distracted by these things now. The Voice was slipping away from him. He had to focus, concentrate all the strength he had left on his legs. Using the wall to support his weight, he climbed onto his feet and followed.

There was light waiting for him at the end of the corridor, all of it spilling out from one room, which he assumed was his destination. He could see a little better now. Maybe the urine cures had helped.

Dozens of eyes were peering at him from behind the cell bars on either side of the corridor. Some of the prisoners whispered, “Bonne chance.” They also thought him lucky. He was going to be released or he was going to die. Either way, he was going to be free.

Anne loved miracles, read about them whenever she could, listened to religious radio stations for testimonies of manifestations of the miraculous in everyday life. Her reawakening was a miracle. Once again she had returned from the dead. Her body was aching from whatever contortions the spirits had put it through, but she was back now and she wasn’t alone. The shoeshine man, Léon, was standing over her, holding a kerosene lamp while peering down at her on the ground. He helped her onto a chair and asked if she was all right. She nodded.

He had bad news, he said. Her brother had been arrested at the church. It seemed like an army had come for him. It didn’t look good. He’d learned that they’d taken him to Casernes.

She had seen Casernes, the mustard-colored building that looked like a warship, anchored in the middle of downtown Port-au-Prince. They’d walked past it that same morning when he had taken her to enroll for her course. The cemetery was not too far away.

She didn’t take long in deciding to go.

“Excuse me, Léon,” she said. “I can’t stay here.”

He handed her a cup of water. She sipped some of the water, used the rest to wet her face, then got up, walked past him, and sprinted out the door. He ran after her, but could not keep up.

When she looked back, she saw him standing in the middle of the empty street, holding the lamp up with one hand while trying to motion for her to come back with the other. Standing there, he looked like both the angel of life and the angel of death, she thought as she continued running.

The death chamber was not what the preacher was expecting. He thought he would see all kinds of animate and inanimate contraptions, from killer dogs and voracious snakes to crosses to nail the prisoners side by side, heavy river rocks to grind their skulls, ice picks, clubs and knuckle-dusters, guillotines and syringes for lethal injections. The preacher was frankly disappointed when he staggered into the nine-by-twelve-foot mustard-colored prison office and forced his bloody, swollen eyes farther apart only to find the same large man who had taken him from the church sitting behind an old desk that took up half the room and the blurry vision of a single lightbulb dangling directly above the fat man’s head. The room was hot and foul-smelling with the stench of body fluids mixed with tobacco. The Voice shoved the preacher toward the fat man’s desk, which the preacher nearly toppled onto.

The fat man asked the Voice to bring in a chair and the Voice rushed out and came back with a low sisal chair the size of a child’s rocker, the kind of chair the peasants called a “gossiping” chair because it made it so easy to squat and chat. The chair was much lower than the fat man’s desk, and it was obvious that the height and size of the chair were meant to make the preacher feel smaller than the fat man, who was a whole lot larger than most people anyway.

The preacher decided to squeeze himself into the chair, which squeaked and swayed unsteadily beneath him. The fat man signaled for the Voice to leave the room and the Voice did so immediately. Even though the wobbly metal mustard door was still open, the size of the room made the preacher feel as though it had been suddenly sealed shut.

The fat man got up from behind his desk and strolled to the preacher’s side. From the preacher’s angle, the fat man seemed quite massive, like some kind of ambulant mountain on giant feet.

“Listen, I’m going to tell you something,” the fat man began in a rather slow, scratchy voice. To the preacher’s wounded, much-pounded-on ears, it sounded as though the fat man was speaking from inside a bucket. “All I want to tell you is that you must stop what you’ve been doing.”

The preacher was feeling restrained in the little chair as if he were chained to it. The tiny bloodsucking pinèz bugs, which inhabited such chairs, were already digging through his now torn and filthy pants, mining his buttocks for their nourishment. The preacher didn’t dare move or scratch himself. Obviously the fat man had some childish game in mind for him. The fat man was going to give him hope and then take it away. He would be questioned, then returned to his cell to wait for his execution or for the next inquisition, which would be even more brutal than his capture.

The fat man was moving closer to him, extending his hefty hand as if to help him out of the small chair. This was probably one of the subtle torture methods the fat man used, reasoned the preacher. He made you uncomfortable, then pretended to relieve your discomfort so you’d feel grateful to him and think he was on your side.