There was a small sign next to the door that he missed before but now, with the light, he could see it. It was written in what looked like Russian. Russian? He looked again. Really? Really. There it was. It was unmistakable. There were letters that seemed to be backwards, and others that were clearly not English. Brain freeze. People suffering from hypothermia often report confusion in their thinking. That has to be it. He blinked and tried to refocus. What was he doing? Oh, yeah.
He returned to the futile pain of pounding his fists on the door. He kicked it with his boots, feeling the dead vibrations of the cold shimmer through his leg. He screamed as loud as he could and kept screaming and kicking until, from somewhere—some interminable distance away—he thought he heard a faint sound. Shussle. Click. There it was again. Shussle… Click.
The sound grew closer. It grew closer still. He could hear it through his own pounding and the kicking but the command from his brain to cease his protests had not yet reached the rest of his body. Seconds later, he saw light through the window and watched an inner door open into the small vestibule behind the window. He heard a faint, unrecognizable noise, and then a face appeared at the small, square opening, looking out at him. The face stared at him awhile, squinting its eyes and shaking its head. No voice could be heard, but he could tell from the round and exaggerated syllables the face made with its mouth that it was shouting, “Go away!”
Clay pleaded to the face. It was a man’s face, and a man should have compassion, shouldn’t he? His thoughts marched through the muck of his mind before spilling out of his mouth in his cold and frozen language. “Hypothermia,” his tongue spat out. Somewhere in his brain he thought that this should be enough, but he forced his face to form more words. “C’mon! Dying! Need Help! Nowhere… to… go. Can’t go! Need to warm up, that’s all. Don’t leave me out here, man!” He didn’t know if the words were intelligible or not. He didn’t know if they could be heard, but this is what his brain told him he was saying.
The face of the man in the window refused. It shouted back, and Clay could now hear a voice, although the sound was muffled and distant. “This is a secure facility! No one is allowed in here. You need to go away! You can be arrested or shot. Just go away!”
Clay laughed. He was hysterical. “Arrest me then! Or shoot me,” he shouted, laughing heartily through his weakened state. He hoped that the face could hear him. He had to will himself to concentrate. “Arrest me! Please.” Then his voice dropped to a whisper, and he leaned his head on the glass. “I’m dying. I’m as good as dead anyway.”
That’s it, he thought. I’ll just die right here. Yelling again, he made his closing plea. “If you don’t let me in, I’ll just die right here in the doorway. Then you’ll have to deal with my body in the morning!” Each word was exaggerated in elongated, shallow syllables. “If you don’t open up right now, I am going to lie down here and… I’ll die, man. I’ll just go to sleep…”
As he said those words he felt a bone-aching tiredness wash over him like he had never felt before. Sleep. He looked at the face in the window, and a Whitman quote streamed forth out of him before he could even think of why he remembered it: “I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” He shouted the line at the face in the window and the face looked back, as if it was considering how beautiful death might be, how lovely it would be to see it. Then the face dropped out of the window and disappeared.
Clay felt his whole body slump and suddenly recognized the tension that had gripped him while he had been pleading for his life. He strained his eyes in the mix of dark and light and shadow, looking around for the best place to lie down and die. Going painfully to one knee on the frozen concrete, he was just about to sink into the snow when there was a rattle of keys at the door. The lock turned and the door slowly opened. Clay turned to look behind him but was instantly blinded by the light as he stood to his feet. He heard the voice that had just been shouting from behind the door.
“Get in here. Quickly.”
“Thank you,” Clay muttered, stumbling through the doorway before the body of the man at the doorway. “Thank you.”
“Listen, pal,” the man said, dipping his head in an attempt to look Clay in the eye. “I don’t know what you’re doing out in this mess, and I really don’t care. Don’t ask me for anything, don’t ask any questions, and only speak when you’re spoken to. You got it? I can get in big trouble for letting you in here. You got any weapons?”
“No.”
“You have any warrants?”
“Any what?”
“Warrants. You wanted for anything?”
“Ummm. No, sir. Nothing I know of.”
“Don’t be cute. You do or you don’t.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, that’s good. At least that’s something. OK,” the man said, pointing to a chair across the tiny vestibule. “Sit over there and be quiet.” Clay stumbled to the chair, almost falling from the weight of his burden as the heat from the room rushed into his body. The man lifted Clay by the arm and helped him out of his backpack.
The man was tall, solidly built, and clearly not very happy. His hair was thin and wispy and brown and he spent a good deal of time trying to cover that fact, if the swirls on his head were any sign. He wore black fatigue pants and a black windbreaker with the word SECURITY printed on the back in yellow. He looked Clay up and down, then unzipped the backpack and rifled through it for a minute.
“Anything in your pockets?” the man asked, brusquely.
“A fish,” Clay replied without thinking, only then remembering that he still had the brown trout in his pants pocket.
“A fish?”
“One brown trout, sir. Gutted and scaled. Possibly frozen.” Silently he got permission to pull out the fish. Clay extracted the fish, still wrapped in the plastic bag.
“I won’t even ask what that is all about.”
The man looked at Clay from head to toe again, then did a quick and cursory pat down before shaking his head again. “A brown trout. Now I’ve seen everything. Ok, man, here is the deal. I’ve got a holding cell here by my office. You can use it for tonight, but you’ll be unceremoniously kicked out of here in the morning. And I mean it. I can get you some coffee and a little bit of food. Maybe I’ll cook your fish. I might even be able to dry your clothes. But you are out of here in the morning even if hell itself has frozen over, you understand?”
“Yes, sir. Out in the morning.”
“Ok, then. My name is Todd, Todd Karagin, Officer Karagin, but you can just call me Todd,” he said. He turned and walked back through the second door, indicating that Clay should follow him. He continued talking as he walked. “This place is a juvenile detention facility, but don’t let that make you think you’re in a day care. This facility is for long-term, hard-core criminals. Murderers. Rapists. That sort of thing. This ain’t Oliver Twist. Some of the people in here will cut you up like you cut up that fish.”
Clay tried to look around as he shuffled after Todd, but he shivered so much that his teeth ground together and his vision vibrated and was cloudy and dark.
“I am… Cl.. Cl… Clay. Sorry. I’m very… cold.”
“Ok, Clay,” Todd said, leading him down a small hallway before stopping to open a series of locks on a door. He motioned Clay through and Clay walked along the hallway feeling the thaw in his face as he worked his jaw to get back his feeling in it. “Here we are. In here.” He felt a hand on his shoulder as Todd guided him into a lighted cell to his left. “Let’s see if we can get you warmed up. We call this place ‘The Tank’. It’s your standard temporary holding cell. There’s a heavy blanket in here and a pillow. Strip your clothes off and wrap yourself in the blanket. I’ll go get you some warm clothes you can wear. I hope you don’t mind prison orange.”