Michael Seidlinger - The Strangest

None of them look genuine.

I am left to a room that’s just a big table and a few chairs. One light from above, concrete on all sides. I am cuffed in a way that my arms are crossed behind me. There is a crick in my neck that I try, for a while, to get rid of but then let it stay. It gets worse but then other aches start forming.

The human body is a lot like how I feel right now.

But that fails to make any sense.

It is enough for me to think about, but I don’t really get anywhere, the thoughts pulling toward another thought, but mostly it has everything to do with what is immediate and physical. The pain is unpleasant.

It is probably on purpose.

A man in a suit walks in.

He introduces himself as my lawyer, as appointed by the judge for the trial to commence in a handful of days.

Left with little more than my ability to interpret, the lawyer sits down, buries his face in the file folder, and begins lecturing me.

“Human rights. Basic human rights,” clears throat, “food, shelter, family, friends, and employment. They are inherent to society, indeed, but for your alleged criminal behavior, you will be losing these basic human rights. There will be food, you will be given shelter, but you will no longer be able to congregate with society. You are a poor fit, and you shall be wise to understand this. As your lawyer, I am paid by the state to tell you what you need to know. Your case is highly stacked against you. There’s enough here,” he starts repeatedly tapping the file folder with his finger, “there’s enough in here to send you away for good.”

He stops.

Looks at me.

I am looking at him.

I’m supposed to look at him.

I think I am supposed to look at him.

He doesn’t speak, glares at me. It’s like that — and I’m usually good at it as long as I imagine a person’s eyes as something other than someone looking back at me. If it isn’t a person, I am more able to stare.

But I blink and he keeps staring.

Then he says, eyes still on me, “There’s only one shot. One thing that’ll save you.”

And then it’s like I already know.

And he seems to agree, nodding.

He closes the file folder.

In silence, he sits there staring at me, hands folded on top of the file.

Pain rushes up my back, and it’s enough to get me to ask for what I will not receive. I ask if I can see my file.

“Everything in this you already know.”

I tell him it might help me. I tell him there might be a lot in there that I didn’t know about. I tell him it might help me help him.

“If that is correct, you have no chance.”

The lawyer looks down on me, looks at me as yet another fuckup. He has judged me and will continue to judge every little thing I say and do.

I begin to feel sick.

My stomach churns, and I can hear the lawyer telling me that it’s too late to change anything. The damage has already been inflicted.

The video is online, viewed by millions.

Then I throw up. For that I get a different lawyer. The lawyer drops the case, which means he has deemed me unfit for representation.

There’s nothing left to do but bring me to my cell.

It looks like all the other cells: A thin cot that creaks when I sit on it. Walls rough with washed out graffiti. And an old desk and wooden chair. Either left by another prisoner or provided by the prison are a handful of well-worn books and one pad of paper. The only thing that’s different from the others is a toilet chipped on one side so it leaks out puddles of water with every flush.

I look at the pad of paper.

I look at it for a long time. Look at it like I’m waiting for everything to catch up to me.

Everything is already here.

I’m the one that needs to catch up.

But like my incarceration, I am unable to see it in anything but fragments. I sit here, thinking about how I should think. The thoughts do not come; I can feel an aching that does not come from any arm or muscle, it pains me in a way that keeps my stomach loose, ready to do away with the food I have not eaten, the drink I have not drunk.

I stand on the balls of my feet, bothered by the thinness of the prison issue shoes given to me. I feel it all rise up at once.

I throw up phlegm and thin trails of blood.

Then I feel better.

I decide that I am afraid. I am afraid, that’s what I’m feeling. I am feeling the fear; the fear of what part of me is visible to the other prisoners. I am afraid of what the lawyer told me. I am afraid of how much hasn’t yet sunk in, mostly because I feel incapable of facing the information.

I fear what I had done, and why it doesn’t seem to bother me.

I fear walking barefoot in my cell.

I am afraid of what comes next.

I am afraid that nothing is left.

I’m afraid of how good I feel when I accept the fear.

I am afraid of the liberating feeling I get when I welcome the inferiority, what I have failed to do, and what I am, as a result, facing with less than appropriate strength.

Most of all, I fear that I will be unable to sleep. When I look at the notepad, I see that I had created a tally of my fears, one that is incomplete. I tear the piece of paper, crumple it up, and flush it down the toilet.

This isn’t he first time I flush down unwanted thoughts.

I watch as some of it leaks back.

Wipe away the stray tears that have begun to form. I am afraid that I won’t last a week in this prison.

I hear the other prisoners calling to me.

They call to me, treating me like fresh meat.

They call to me throughout the night.

I hold back, but everything had already begun to fall apart.

Everything I had held close, revealed.

There would be nothing left to spare.

I would be judged.

I couldn’t leave my cell without becoming violently ill. The officers would push me around, kicking me and throwing me back into my cell, alternating once with solitary confinement.

I acclimate better in solitary confinement and almost assuredly came up with the tactic of consistently doing just enough to be awarded with more time in seclusion. However, it seemed I wasn’t the first to come up with the idea. They told me, “Smartass,

you’re just another piece of shit; you are no smarter than anyone else in this prison.”

Sometimes they forget to feed me.

I am supposed to be like the other prisoners — following a strict routine — but in these first few days, I prove to be what many of the prisoners consider to be impossible, not worth the effort to socialize, only to ridicule. And maybe not even that.

I am surprised by the development.

Moreover, I am surprised to find it quite easy to understand without first having to wonder why.

Very little else is understandable.

But I understood this.

It is around this time that I began to talk to myself. Meurks still existed, and had a lot to tell me. It instantly felt like hearing from a friend but soon felt like being forced to reflect on everything you had done.

This proved to be the worst part.

I wouldn’t be able to silence what poured from my mouth, words full of worry and weakness, even when other prisoners threatened to take my life.

I keep telling myself that I don’t fit in here.

I don’t fit in here.

I don’t fit in here.

I don’t fit in here.

But if that is true, it would mean that even the cruelest people, the people that society had shunned, deemed unfit for basic human rights, considered me less. I am far less than the least.