I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here. Years, I imagine, years I spend pulling down my trousers and shitting in a hole in the middle of the room that I locate by groping in the dark. For years I feel the floor dampen with the contents of that hole when the guards choose to flush it. I sit in sewage in the dark for years. Water and bread come through a small slit at the bottom of the door, and I hunger for that meager thread of light as much as I hunger for the food.
The dark is thick and palpable, pressing up against my face, my hands and arms. It’s moist and warm at times, cold at others, though it could be my body that’s changing temperature through its fevered sweating and shaking. After a time, I no longer need to use the hole, my systems slowing. I can feel all those workings hunkering down into hibernation, only my mind spinning at its regular speed, possibly even faster, frantic. My name is Roscoe T Martin. My wife is Marie, my son, Gerald. My friend is Wilson, and I’ve condemned him to my father’s coal mines. “Thanks for the extra hands,” my father says. “Came around to my side, after all, didn’t you, Son?” Catherine asks for a story: “Tell me the one about the cat and the fox.” Marie and I are walking the village streets, the dam so close, the water loud and rushing. Our village has a church, an infirmary, Marie’s one-room school with its double doors and windows, its clapboard painted a dirty red. The streets are dusty clay. Near the water, old claw-rooted cypress trees are draped with Spanish moss, cottonwoods tuft their seeds, boulders and shelved rock croppings offer seats. I am twenty. I am eighteen. I am an electrician. A laundress courts me and a nurse, but I only have eyes for the teacher.
“You’re the teacher,” I say, startling her in the dining hall.
“Yes.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Teach?”
I nod.
“When they disobey, I hit them on the hand with a yardstick.”
I laugh and tell her I’ll have lots of children. We will have so many, I know it. Sons and daughters.
Faraday speaks in my ear: “Chemical affinity depends entirely upon the energy with which particles of different kinds attract each other.”
I know, I tell him. I know. But there are forces here in the dark I don’t recognize, their attractions great mysteries. I don’t know what I should awaken and what should stay hidden. Help me, Faraday. Give me a spark.
“Hah!” laughs my father. “Electricity doesn’t reach down here.”
But then the door opens, and the light bleeds through my eyes quickly, shuttering them closed.
“Son of a bitch!” I hear someone shout. “Who the hell approved this without an order?”
There is no answer.
“Martin!” the voice shouts. “Come on out of there!”
I have my back to one of the walls, my legs angled out in front, just a foot from the hole that is my toilet. The lids of my eyes allow themselves to lift into a slit, and I see the warden himself is here to save me. I tell my feet to move toward my body, to prepare for standing. Come, I tell them. We will gather this body into a small thing and push it up the length of this wall. My feet are slow to respond, and before my knees have fully bent, the warden shouts, “Jesus, pull him out of there.”
Hands are under my shoulders, and I do everything to force my mouth into speech, but they are pulling before the words can come, and the sound that escapes me is black and wet.
The guards put hands on their clubs, and the motion makes the noise louder and louder until it finally breaks into the sound of an actual word.
“Please.”
I am a coward.
“Please,” I say again, my voice thick. I cradle my right arm like the dead thing it is. “No clubs.”
The guards look to the warden.
The warden looks to me. “Watch him close. Now come on out into the corridor, Martin.”
I pull myself forward into the brilliant light. I know it’s dim, the bulbs dampened and covered, but it’s a cloudless sky to me, sun on water. I breathe it in.
“That’s it,” the warden says. “Now, it stinks like hell in here. Do you think you can let these gentlemen lead you to my office without making any more of those damn noises?”
“Yes, sir.”
I don’t know if it is good to have my voice back.
I should tell the warden that the stink will follow us, my clothes and skin thick with the contents of that hole.
We’re able to get to the administration building through hallways and doors, never stepping outside, though I want a breath of air more than I want anything. I want the dirt of the yard under my feet.
I’m ashamed to enter the diamond-shaped lobby.
The guards from solitary accompany us to the warden’s door, then he excuses them.
“Are you sure, sir?” one asks.
The warden doesn’t answer, and I follow him into his office. The man’s desk is wide and clean. The lamp on it has a green-glass shade, and the windows let in a heap of light. My eyes can’t take it all in.
The warden leans against his desk, pulls a cigarette from a box, lights it. “Show me your shoulder, Martin.”
“Sir?”
“I’m giving you an order, and you are to follow it. Show me your shoulder.”
I set to unbuttoning my shirt, a slow endeavor. I have to shake my left arm loose before I can pull the sleeve from my right. The shirt is stiff in places, smeared and filthy. My undershirt stretches tight against the spot.
The warden smokes. “That one, too.”
It’s an impossible task.
“So long as you have one working arm, you can get a shirt over your head, Martin.”
This isn’t true. But I tell the warden my shoulder is fine. “It just needs a day or two.”
“You don’t think you’ll need to shed that shirt before then? You’re ripe, Martin. Worst-smelling man I’ve ever let into this room. Now pull your damn shirt off or I’ll do it for you.”
I take a breath and grab on to the fabric at the back of my neck, pulling it as quick as I can over my head. The right side of my body howls, ribs to pit to neck, then back down my arm to the pointed brown tips of my fingers.
“Good Jesus.” The warden tucks the cigarette in his lips and leans in close to inspect. The smoke tastes good. “That’s a hell of a shoulder, Martin.” He’s smiling. “Guard or inmate?”
“Corner. Corner of the cell house.”
He keeps smiling. “Brick doesn’t leave a mark like that. Have you gotten a look at it?”
“No.”
He opens the closet to a length of mirror on the inside of the door. “All yours.”
I can see his suits hanging inside, a few changes of shoes, a pair of work boots, a coat. A tan cowboy hat sits on the shelf overhead, and a couple of red and blue ties hang on hooks set into the wall.
I haven’t looked myself in the eye for some time, and it’s my face that scares me the most when I find it in the mirror. The time in solitary has given me a stubbly beard that does nothing to cover the bones jutting out of my face every place they can. The skin around my eyes is dark, and the eyes themselves seem to be sinking, as though I’ve slept every night with stones on them. My hair is rough and oily and strung with filth. The scar on my stomach stands raised against the skin, red still, and then, there is my shoulder — a great, contorted mass of purple and blue and red. The mark of Beau’s club stands out clearly, a deep rut in the line of my body, deeply purpled with spiderwebs of burst blood vessels. The whole shoulder is shiny, the skin stretched tight over the pooling of liquids. It’s a great blister, and I’m taken with the desire to slice it open and watch it drain here on the warden’s floor.