Steve Toltz - Quicksand

After a half-hour drive, the van halted and the door opened onto an abandoned-looking prison courtyard reminiscent of a library on Sunday. There I was given green overalls and blankets and sheets but no pillowcase. Voices were chanting, ‘Spoiled meat! Spoiled meat!’ I wheeled myself down a corridor into my semi-dark cell where there was a metal bed and a seatless steel toilet and a cellmate who sat nursing more than a few animal fears. That was a good sign. He was afraid of me. His name was Patrick and he told me he was in for recruiting a child to carry out a criminal act; it sounded like there was a good story behind that, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

— Can we still vote? There’s an election coming up.

Patrick didn’t know.

— Hey, I called out, does anyone know if we can still vote? For some reason, that was very important to me at the time.

— No, the answer came back from another cell. I was devastated. We were voiceless again, like children.

Other than being free from the omnipresence of advertisers for the first time since infanthood, this next phase of my life was to be principally about violence. Random. Indiscriminate. Institutional. Sexual. Being disabled, the third-highest risk category after gay and transgendered, I’d always feared I would fall victim to the single most underreported crime in all three of our societies, hospital, regular, prison. Now it turned out that my old terror of random violence was dwarfed by my fear of systemic violence. Sure, nobody was going to mistake my body for a garden of earthly delights, but that didn’t make me unrapeable. And worse luck — I’d be at crotch height to everybody.

XXXI

Your Honour, in the miasma of sweaty feet, shit-smelling soap, and masses of uncircumcised penises fermenting in unwashed underpants, I got into countless he said/he said arguments, had my pain medication stolen, was rocketed down corridors with another paraplegic named Ted by old-timey white supremacists on gladiatorial afternoons, was gnashed on by the serial rapist Paul ‘Episiotomy’ Williams, discovered I am genuinely claustrophobic and somewhat agoraphobic, a crowded prison being the worst of both hells, and was allowed — no, encouraged — to soil myself by guards who also, I noted, loved confiscating hearing aids from older inmates. And I was the beneficiary of endless lessons: a kind smile does not mitigate but aggravates violence; the enemy of my enemy is still my goddamn enemy; cruel and unusual punishments are seldom unusual …

The most important lesson, however: in lockup, you don’t go once more into the fray, the fray comes to you. Case in point. A bald man mouth-breathing at the door of our cell.

— Who are you?

— The skin is the largest organ in the body.

— Uh-oh.

In a flash, a group of about seven adult children of absent fathers crowded the cell, the hefty, blank-eyed types of criminals who make their victims dig their own graves, either to intensify the horror or for simple practical reasons. They wheeled me out of my cell and down the corridor and through a set of doors — unlocked by a winking guard — and into H division. Fuck me with a hadron collider. I knew exactly where we were going. When we got there, Elliot clambered down from his bunk and held his hands out as if warming them against a fire.

This is not how Elliot looked in Mimi’s photographs. He was bigger, more muscular, and now with a broken nose, missing teeth, scarified cheeks, jittery left eyelid, and veins pulsing in his temples. He was the whole package.

— What happened, Vesuvius? All plugged up? You bodiless snake. Welcome to the caves. Morrell has been fucking her for months and what have you done to stop him?

It was weird to hear that familiar voice pouring out of that toothless face.

— How the fuck do you know that?

— How do you think, genius?

It only now occurred to me there was nothing supernatural in his omniscience.

— You’ve got someone there, someone in the residence pretending to be an artist. Elliot lowered his head and peered up at me with a sick smile.

— There are two types of prisoners. Bears that hibernated too long and landlocked children with a sea wind of their own. Jesus. What’s going on there? Your spasticity could thresh corn. You’re in for how long? When I get out I’m subletting a schoolgirl’s virginity for the summer. Don’t breathe so much. The air in prison is hallucinogenic. You do know I overpowered the inmate that had been paid to protect me and pocketed the money, so Mimi is fucking Morrell to pay me to protect myself. You know that, right? You know that when I was in Eastern Europe with Mimi, during the last fake exorcism I felt a demon pass out of her body and enter mine. I never told anyone that before.

During this strange disconnected monologue, I realised, in a sort of dawning horror, he wore his own knocked-out teeth in a necklace. I had the bizarre sensation that if I dared to turn around and look, the images his mind conjured would be projected onto the cell walls behind me. He rolled his eyes as if in reference to the drudgery of terrorising me, then abruptly looted his own shelves and piled books in my lap. Thomas Merton. Angelus Silesius. Simone Weil. Meister Eckhart. Emanuel Swedenborg.

— Read them! An indestructible glut of revelations that I wrote in past lives, he said, making a hand motion as if to caress his aura, and it being that religiousness is always the first resort of the criminally insane (along with public masturbation and matricide), I took them in the spirit they were given and even began to feel easier in his company. As if reacting to my unexpected calm, Elliot punched me in the side of the head, lifted me from my chair and pinioned me to the wall with his big, heavy face pressed up against mine.

— Do you know about the tribe of Benjamin in the Bible?

— No.

— With God’s blessing and with impunity they raped the virgins of the town of Shiloh.

— Oh.

— Have you been beaten with your own wheelchair yet?

— Elliot. Please.

— Are you HIV-negative?

A thoughtful silence seemed the most appropriate response to that loaded question.

— You thought the worst was behind you.

His tongue flicked out and ran over his lower lip. I thought: De-escalate! De-escalate! I was frozen with fear. And here’s where language fails me. Or where I fail language. One of the men pushed his grubby trigger fingers into my mouth then hurled me onto the floor. Fists and shoes came flying at my face and body. I tell you, these substance-abusing hypermasculine narcissistic and avoidant personalities with elevated scores on both the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory and the Abuse-Perpetration Inventory were really letting me have it. One stooped down and picked me up by my armpits then threw me facedown onto the cold steel bed and — here goes nothing — raped me.

Yes, Your Honour, I am going to talk about this.

I guess they’d had the empathy likewise fucked out of them at the onset of incarceration or were disinhibited out of fear of Elliot — either way, adjust your antennae to receive my maximum horror, random citizens who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning, while I recount a memory engraved by meathooks:

Hard hands on my shoulders. A foot on my neck. I felt them tugging my pants off. I said, Be careful, fellas. Raping me is a slippery slope to raping me again. I didn’t really say that. I’m stalling. In truth — I grovelled, flailed, begged, sobbed. I felt abnormal discomfort, as if a distant body part were being removed. Then I felt horrific pain. A running of the bulls, a goring, a harrowing series of thrusts. This is it, I thought, I am being raped. This will be forever in my bio. The single possible consoling thought, that so many had gone through it, was not consoling at all. Every second snuck up on me. My head collided with the brick wall and blood dripped into my eyes and still , I thought, a billion people are worse off than me right now. Then I thought: Turning dead is not the same as dying and the darkest darkness is also blinding and the saddest truth on earth is you only get conclusive evidence of the existence of your soul as it evacuates. My focus shifted from the chalk-white wall to a quarter-window’s view of barbed wire, looming and fanged. If only this were a dramatic reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment and any moment the lead researcher was going to call it off.