By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 5: Home Is Where They Won’t Let You Leave

The sun hit my eyes and almost knocked me out; in those windowless rooms I’d forgotten that there was any such thing as sunlight.  I heard guards screaming around me; I felt my shoes smacking the concrete as I tried to run.  Then I heard “Squat!  Gear on the ground!  Squat!  Gear on the ground!  Squat DOWN!”  I saw lines of prisoners crouching, their gear stationed in front of them, and other prisoners, lowering their gear, preparing to squat.  Somebody—that old guy from the Uniform Room—stumbled, spilled his stack, then bowed and fumbled and bowed again, while a guard stood above him, shouting.  I made it to the third line and crouched, heart pumping out of my chest as the last of the prisoners got in position and the guards made a circle around us.  At least these guards didn’t have rifles.

But where was I?  It was a giant field covered with concrete—old concrete, the kind you see where some big building used to stand, and now there’s nothing left but the floor.  Around it, other old concrete, a city of old, yellowish buildings . . . .  What did Gordy say?  He said they’d repurposed some of the warehouses, and the old factory floors . . . .  Afterwards, they must have given all the buildings that coat of Soviet paint . . . .  Covers the weather damage, anyway . . . .  Smokestacks are still there . . . .  Must be the railroad on the other side . . . .  But thinking about real estate couldn’t make me forget the pain spreading up my legs.  The pain of having to squat on the pavement like a toad!  Whatever might exist in my head, my life was totally dependent on the choices of these men in their little light blue shirts.

Thank God, a guard moved forward and began to speak: “Stand at attention for Major Xing!”

A short, thick-looking Asian walked on from the left.  Everyone rose, squared his shoulders, and turned his eyes forward.

“Major Xing will now address you!”

The underling stepped to one side.  Major Xing began to speak.

“Criminals!  You have COME to your DESTINATION.  The gates are SHUT.  This is now your HOME.”

His accent was strong, with foreign sounds and strange tricks of emphasis.  Like his flunky, he was speaking from a long way off, as if to prevent any chance of contamination, but every word was distinct.

“This is your HOME, because it is the home for CRIMINALS!  This is the place where criminals are PUNISHED and CORRECTED.  Your correction will start with the TRAINING TEAM.  For three months you will be a member of the TRAINING TEAM.  In that time, you will be TRAINED to live in this facility, and you will begin to correct your THOUGHT.

“As a CRIMINAL, you have many mistaken thoughts.  WRONG thoughts.  You do not know even who you ARE.  So we will HELP you with this knowledge.

“When you come to PRISON, you have many QUESTIONS.  This prison will give you ANSWERS.  Turn your head to the RIGHT.  Look at the SIGN.”

What?  For “answers,” look at the sign?  But yes, now that he mentioned it, I could see a lot of signs.  Signs all around.  The closest sign was the one “to the right.”  It was hanging over a gate in a fence on the far right side of the pavement.

“This sign that you see answers the IMPORTANT QUESTIONS about your LIFE.  The sign says: ‘WHO are you?  WHAT is this place?  WHAT are you doing HERE?’  These are the THREE QUESTIONS.  And the sign gives the answers!  I will again ask the questions, and you will REPEAT the answers which you see on the sign!”

He asked the three questions, and in unison we read the answers from the sign.

“Who are you?” he barked.

I AM A PRISONER!

“What is this place?”

THIS IS A PRISON!

What are you doing here?

I AM HERE TO SERVE MY SENTENCE!

“Again!  Louder!  Again!  Louder!”

We chanted the words, louder and louder, until they echoed like thunder from the yellow buildings on the other side of the concrete slab.

“These words will GUIDE you!” he shouted.  Then he stepped aside, and the flunky came forward again.

“Thank you, MAJOR XING!  Criminals!  You will now proceed to the Training Team!  Pick up your gear!  Hold it in front of you!  Hold it OUT!  STRAIGHT in front of you!  Now step in place!  One two, one two, one two . . . . ”

Our feet pumped up and down, marching without going anywhere.  Then “Criminals!  Right FACE!  Step FORWARD!  One two, one two . . . . ”  The men in light blue shirts melded us into a dark blue line, pointed in the direction of the sign hanging like a billboard over the entrance to Dante’s Hell: “I AM A PRISONER!  THIS IS A PRISON . . . . ”  The gate was steel mesh; the fence was topped with razor wire.  Yes, this was a prison.

Ahead was a long, one-story building with a line of barred windows at the top.  The door was open, and the guards herded us in.  One of them scanned our ID badges and told us where we had to go.  “Cell 10” in my case.

A line of prisoners was already waiting in front of the gray door painted with a big white 10, one of the long series of identical steel doors facing each other along a wide concrete corridor.  A guard waited impassively as the line grew.  He was a young, short guy, built like a fireplug.  We stood at attention, holding our goods in front of us.  Then he spoke.

“Criminals!  I am Sergeant Wong.  And this is CELL TEN, the place where I will be locking you UP.”

Again, the accent was strong, but he could be understood.  In fact, he couldn’t have made his message plainer: he was the man who was now in charge of me; he was the man who would be locking me up.

“You are about to enter the CELL.  As you PASS, I will inform you of the number of the bunk to which you have been ASSIGNED.  Once you are inside the cell, you will place your gear on your bunk, and you will stand at ATTENTION before your bunk.”

He unlocked the door and swung it open.  It was all steel, and three or four inches thick.  The only exception was a little observation hatch at eye level—which was closed with a steel plate and secured with a padlock.  Inside the outer door was an inner door.  This one was made of bars, like the cell doors you see in movies.  He unlocked it and ordered us “Inside!”  As I passed him he scanned my badge and said “Bunk 4.”

When I stepped into the cell I remembered the word that Gordy had used: “transparency.”  I saw everything in the cell at a glance.  It was a narrow room with concrete walls and a barred window at the end.  Against the wall on either side there bunks lined up lengthwise, head to foot, four double bunks in each line.  The bunks were narrow; the aisle between them was the width of two of them.  You can figure the dimensions for yourself: 16 bunks, eight on each side, four lowers, four uppers, and you’ve got a cell about 25 feet long and 12 feet wide.  I took it in with one claustrophobic glance.

Bunk number 4 was an upper, on the left.  I put my stack of prison shit on top of the bunk and stood at attention next to the guy that was assigned to number 3, a white guy with no obvious characteristics except that he was somewhere in his 20s.  Of course, no one had any characteristics anymore, besides being in prison.

Sergeant Wong strode in, trailed by a black guy in a prisoner suit. “7930 will instruct you in cell maintenance” the Sergeant said, then turned and left, banging the two doors behind him.  Now I was locked—actually locked up–in a prison cell, where I would have to listen to a convict “instructing” me.

Inside his convict uniform, 7930 was a thin young man standing as stiff as a pencil, with eyes that seemed to be looking at something invisible far, far away.  As he talked, he rocked slightly back and forth on his little blue shoes.  “I will start by exercising you in how to take care of your bunk.  If you take care of your bunk, your bunk will take care of you.”  He turned to the gear on the nearest guy’s bunk and extracted a bedsheet from the stack—puke yellow, like the underwear.  He showed how to wrap the sheet around the mattress and tuck it in and smooth it until it was absolutely flat.  There was, already, a blanket on the bunk, which someone had carefully folded into a neat little cube.  He shook it out, folded it up, and (“watch now—watch very carefully”) made it into a cube again.  “We call these our tofu cubes.  You will learn how to make them.”  Again he shook out the blanket, spread it on the bunk (“make sure you are watching”), and used his long thin hands to bend and smooth it into a cube.  “That is how you must do it.”  Having said that, he pulled off the sheet and shook out the blanket, dumped them both on the floor, and told the guy who had the misfortune to be assigned to that bunk, “Now do what I did.”  The guy spread and tugged and folded and made a total mess, while we all looked on.  This guy was 40 years old.  He wasn’t a really old guy.  But he was huffing and sweating.  Doing the sheet wasn’t the hardest part.  Doing the cube was a problem.  “Again.  Do what I did.  We are waiting.”

On the fourth try he got it.  “The secret,” the instructor said, pronouncing the key words in a grad-student way, “is to make your edges precise.  Very precise.  Now the rest of you know what to do.  Do it.”

The rest of us tried, over and over, while our instructor paced up and down on his little toes, saying we must do it again.  “In Paris, we do it until it is perfect.”  After an hour or two, 16 bunks had been made in exactly the same way, and their blankets, neatly folded in exactly the same way into a tofu cube, had been set in exactly the same place, “at the foot of your bunk, one hand length from the end, one hand length from the closer side.”  Our other gear had been stowed in an entirely uniform way under the bottom bunks, with the gear of the “top convict” occupying exactly one half of the space and the gear of the “bottom convict” occupying exactly the other half.  Those spaces were originally occupied by our pillows, which we were now told to place “at the head of your bunk, one hand length from the end,” et cetera.

It wasn’t until that moment, when we had finally “understood the procedure” and everything about our bunks was perfect, that I understood what the bunks literally were.  They were steel frames, very tall, so tall that every bottom convict had a little steel ladder built into his bunk, for use of the top convict in climbing into his own place.  That much was clear from the start.  But what all the tugging and folding kept me from realizing was that the thing built into the frame, the thing on which I’d have to sleep, was just a thick slab of plywood, and the “mattress” was just a slab of plastic about three inches thick.  And that’s what the pillow was made out of—plastic.  That’s right.  You see this puffy little plastic object; you realize it’s supposed to be a PILLOW; you look for the pillow case, and you realize there isn’t one.  Then you know: instead of your beautiful soft king bed with the night tables next to it and the delightfully responsive mattress and springs and the soft shiny sheets and the warm, warm comforter, what you have is a plastic mattress, a plastic pillow, one rough, coarse, bottom sheet, and a blanket folded into a cube—all the same color, puke yellow or snot green—all resting on a piece of plywood.  That’s what you have to sleep on.  But it’s all perfectly arranged.

There was, however, a little more to see about the cell.  At the back, separated by a short concrete wall, was a space that our instructor called “the rear room.”  There wasn’t any door on it; you could see the window high on the back wall from any point in the cell, and even count the bars on the window.  But it was the rear room.  “I will show you the uses of the rear room,” the instructor said.  “Bring your pails.”

We picked up our blue plastic pails and trooped back to watch him explain.  On the right was a counter containing a “sink.” It was just a steel trough, six or seven feet long, with three spigots above it.  Above them was a rack with spaces numbered from 1 to 16, and lines of hooks numbered the same.  “In your pails, which you will keep under your bunks, you will find a washcloth and towel, and a plastic cup.  You will place your cups in the place on the rack corresponding to your bunk, and you will hang your washcloth and towel on the hooks.”  We did so.  Fortunately the “towel” was as small as the washcloth, so it was a good fit.

“Here,” he continued, pointing to a steel locker across from the sink, “are your cleaning supplies.”  He opened the locker to display a broom, a mop, some brushes, and a giant container of some kind of soap.  “Officer Wong will appoint you to your cleaning duties, which you will fulfill each morning and evening, using these tools.  Are there any questions?”  How could there be?  But there was.

“There’s the sink—where’s the toilets?”

The question came from a tall, lanky, apple-cheeked prisoner who looked like he was fresh off the farm.  How did that guy get to Paris?  Were there that many meth factories out in the countryside?

The instructor was displeased.  “The toilets are there,” he replied, pointing at the area next to the locker on the left side of the room.  He didn’t say “of course,” because that was included in his attitude.

What we saw isn’t easy to describe.  The floor next to the wall was covered by a thick sheet of white porcelain.  Puncturing the sheet there were two holes, side by side.  Each of the holes had, on each side of it, the outline of a foot, embedded in the porcelain.  The four feet pointed forward.  “Those are your toilets,” the instructor said.  “You gotta be kiddin!” the farmboy said.   “These are your squat toilets,” the instructor said.  “You turn, place your feet on the feet, and squat.  Then you relieve yourself.  Then you wipe yourself.  Toilet paper is there, in the rack.  On the wall.  Then you flush.  There is the button.  There on the wall.”

We were all staring hard at the two holes in the floor.  It was like someone had died and was being buried down there.  “Of course, you will want to limit hard use of these toilets to urgent needs.  They will need to be cleaned, each morning and each evening.   Also, the smell . . . .  You may squat while shitting”—he pronounced the word as if it were a technical and scientific term—”but squatting is not required for urination, so long as your stream is directed into the hole.  You are permitted to urinate at any time.”

We were trying to absorb the information, as he went on.  “But this is not the only provision for hygiene.  Every morning and evening you will be allowed to use the facilities in the Wash Room, located at the end of the corridor.  You will go to the Wash Room with your pails and washcloth.  In your pails you will also discover a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a small plastic razor, which you will use each morning.  Your pail is to be used for shaving and face washing.  You will place it under the spigot, wash yourself, and rinse your washcloth.  You will also rinse your shaver and toothbrush and return them to your pail.  During that time, you are also encouraged to shit.  You will return to the Wash Room in the evening, when you may repeat the basic process.  In the evening you will also shower with the aid of your towel.”

“So they got real toilets in the Wash Room?” Farmboy asked, his long arms twitching at the bottom of his shirt—the ugly blue prison shirt that hung just over his crotch.

“Yes.  Squat toilets.  Like these.”

After that, nobody appeared to have any questions.  Everybody looked sick.

We were led back to the main part of the cell, where 7930 told us it was almost time for Sergeant Wong to return and “escort you to the Chow Room.”  7930 then discussed “proper behavior in the Chow Room,” emphasizing “the importance of maintaining silence on the way to the Chow Room, within the Chow Room, and when returning from the Chow Room.”  The little man was either a zombie or a robot.  His clear, low, steady voice had me betting on robot.  Before anyone else heard the sound, 7930 detected the officer’s key turning in the lock and told us to line up at attention next to our bunks.

“Bow to Sergeant Wong!”  The Sergeant walked down the aisle, inspecting our work on our bunks.  He found fault with the positioning of the blanket cube on bunk number 5, threw it on the floor, and watched while the convict, a guy who was over 30 but somehow maintained the emaciated look of a club fiend, worked furiously to fix it.  Fifteen minutes later, while 7930 conscientiously observed and directed and the rest of us waited with our shoulders squared and our eyes frozen forward, the convict got it right.  Right enough to earn a grunt from the Sergeant.  To the rest of us the Sergeant said “Stand!”, as it we weren’t doing that already, and informed us that he was now going to guide us to the Chow Room of the Training Team, where we would get our “feed.”  He advised us to “be attentive at all times, and ready to learn.”  He marched us out of the cell, down the corridor, and onto a slab of concrete where a mass of other prisoners waited at attention, their guards waiting beside them.

“Criminals!” a guard shouted.  “Who are you?”

Everyone shouted back, “I am a prisoner!”

“What is this place?”

“This is a prison!”

“What are you doing here?”

“I am here to serve my sentence!”

“Slow march!” the guard shouted, and we shuffled down a concrete walkway and into a building filled with square steel tables, with steel seats attached.

Sergeant Wong pointed us to the tables assigned to Cell Number 10.  We sat and waited with our hands on our knees, eight prisoners to a table.  (“While you wait,” 7930 had told us, “you will place your hands on your knees, palms downward.”)  Eventually a prisoner came out of the kitchen and put a big plastic pot on our table, with a ladle sticking out of it.  A second one brought a jug of water and eight small plastic cups.  A third gave us a pot of peas; a fourth slapped a pile of plastic bowls and spoons on our table.  “You!” the Sergeant said, pointing at a shocked looking Hispanic prisoner.  “Your badge has the highest number!  You will pass out the food!”

High Number was a big guy with a dark, Olmec face.  He stood and looked in the pot.  “Pass it out!” the Sergeant repeated.  High Number frowned, like he’d smelled something bad, but he took the ladle and filled our bowls.  Then I smelled what he’d smelled, and saw it too.  It was a mass of rice with some tumors of brown beans squirming inside it, and something that smelled like fish.  While I was smelling it, one of the kitchen convicts returned and dropped a huge hunk of bread on the table.  “Bread” isn’t exactly the right word.  It was fried bread.  It was passed around, and everyone had to tear off a chunk—no knives permitted.  The peas were also passed. 7930 had told us we had to eat all the food we were given.  After the horrible day I’d spent I had thought I was starving, but I was still swallowing the last of the “meal” when the Sergeant returned, marched us back to our cell, and lined us up for another bout of instruction, this time conducted without the aid of 7930.

By this point, my mind was wandering; I was just looking vacantly at Sergeant Wong.  I told you he was built like a fireplug.  You couldn’t picture the man who could take him down.  The funny thing—I mean the strange thing; nothing about this shit was funny—was the contrast between him and the gear he had on.  Little blue pastel shirt, halted at the waist like something you’d see behind the fast-food counter; cheap little plastic nameplate clipped to his chest (“SERGEANT L. WONG”) . . .  But then, things that fitted him perfectly: thick black boots and a thick black belt with a long black club hanging off of it.  He was like a heavyweight fighter in a Boy Scout suit.  This was the guy that was totally in control of everything I did.

I dragged my brain back to what he was saying.  It was more stuff about what he called “cell procedures.”  There was a “Schedule of Times and Movements” posted on the wall above the toilets, “listing the times of all movements of the cell.”  OK, I guess I missed that, while I was getting my first look at the toilets; and a schedule might have been more useful if anyone was allowed to have a watch.  Nevertheless, “This Schedule must be memorized.  This is why it is posted in a convenient place.”  Also, he told us, there were two kinds of lights in the cell, a “bright light” and a “dark light.”  The “bright light” would flicker and go off at—guess what?—“lights out,” but the “dark light” would remain on. “There is always a LIGHT in the cell.” he said, with satisfaction.  “There will always be OFFICERS who will CHECK on you throughout the night.”

He strode to the front of the cell, stood next to the bars, and pointed to a useful feature of the wall in which the door was placed.  “Here you see rows of HOOKS.”  More hooks.  Yes, we saw them.  You could see everything in the cell.  “The hooks are NUMBERED.  They are numbered in the order of your bunks.  There is one for YOU.  When preparing for sleep, you will place your boots in the proper places BENEATH your bunks along with your other GEAR.  The toes will be pointing INWARD, toward the side wall of the cell.   You will then hang your pants, shirts, and caps on the proper HOOKS, on THIS wall.  When in your bunk you will wear your UNDERCLOTHING.  Nudity is NOT permitted in the cells.”

Many bows, many yes-sirs.  He urged us to use the toilets at this time, to gain “practice” before our first visit to the Wash Room, which would occur in the morning—“This night is special.”  He then discussed our “sleep conduct.”   “After your visit to the toilets, you may sit quietly on your bunks.  You may SIT on your bunks.  You may not LIE on your bunks.  LYING on your bunks is prohibited when not asleep or PREPARING for sleep.  You will prepare for sleep when you see the bright light flicker.  You will sleep when the bright light is OFF.”

That being said, he departed.  We heard the sound of keys turning and locks thunking shut.  We were locked up for the night.

We looked at each other in disbelief.  The air was thick with “what the fuck!” and “I can’t fuckin believe this shit!”  But after the “food” we’d just been made to swallow, there was a strong movement toward the little room in the back.  We had to line up to do our business, and it seemed that many of us had wanted to forget what kind of facilities we had to do it in.  Now it was too late for denial.  “Dude!  This is fuckin CRAZY!”  If we just had to piss, OK, but if it was shit that had to come out . . . .   Nobody had been on a squat toilet before, except a guy named Nasir, who said he’d used one when he visited his relatives someplace.  He didn’t seem anxious to teach anyone else.

The meal—in fact, the whole ugly day—had my bowels jumping up and down, so I took my turn in line, watching the sinister porcelain holes as they crept closer and closer, listening to the curses coming back from them and the outraged whirl of the TP dispensers as the untrained users tried to clean themselves.  Then I came to the brink.  I pulled down my new blue pants with the stripes crawling along the legs, put my now-dark-blue feet on the hard white feet at the sides of the hard white hole, and squatted precariously above it.  The prisoner behind me in line was one of those gym bunnies whose body laughs out loud at you; even when you’re both buttoned to the neck in a prison suit, it’s obvious who’s got the abs and who’s got the flab.  As soon as I squatted, he squatted beside me.  Close.  Too close.  He squatted like a farm dog, his pants around his feet and his big cock dangling; I was the beta dog shying away from the alpha.  Maybe it was the competition, but maybe it was just that rumbling in my gut: I was able to get mine out a second before he got his.  And I was quicker at cleaning up—I wanted out of there.  But after I left the toilet, I wasn’t “out”; I was just back in the cell.

Prisoners were still making outraged complaints when the “bright light” flickered and slowly shut down.  We stumbled in the gloom, putting our “boots” in the PROPER places and hanging our shirts and pants and caps from the PROPER hooks.  Prisoners who needed to climb a ladder to get into their bunks struggled to get there without breaking their necks.  I was one of them.  The bunk was narrower than I thought.  When I got into it I could hardly tell where to put the various parts of me.  I whirled like a dog when it wants to lie down, running into the wall and almost dumping myself over the side.  The bunks were high; it wouldn’t be good to fall out of one.  But the ceiling was higher; it was so distant that it might have been the sky—a dim, clouded sky, with the “dark light” at its center.  I pulled the blanket over my head; I didn’t want to see where I was.  It wasn’t much help.  The blanket was thick and coarse; it smelled of industrial soap; it was just more proof that I was in prison.  The last time I’d gotten into bed, I’d been a free man.  Now I was a bald head and a set of convict underwear, locked in a concrete cell.  It was too horrible to think about.  I was exhausted.  I fell asleep.

To be continued…