A new Dale
The next morning set them up to another horrible day ahead, horrible by default. The men called all of them out and counted them, looking pleased and satisfied with the grave looks on the faces of the prisoners. The daily count put them at eighty-four, thanks to the elimination. The new internees seemed to be getting on well.
‘Tristan Klyce?’, one of the wardens called with a diffident face. ‘Follow me’
Tristan sighed, ready to cope with another morose face of Samantha and have to repeat the words he had said the last time in a more explicit way.
He reached the calling room and there were other prisoners in there, resting their head against the soundproof walls listening to the wobbly, comely voices of their loved ones through the telephones. He was led to Samantha in the last booth line where she always was. Only that this time, he wasn’t going to cope with only the face of Samantha, there was another face, another severely cute face, a smaller face.
‘Oh My God!’, Tristan’s mouth opened as his eyeballs bulged as he stared at the face of his son. ‘Oh my goodness’, he said again and desperately struck his hands against the glass, wishing the glass could just turn invisible and he could feel the smoothness of his son’s face and scent his sweet baby smell. ‘That’s our son’, he said with a laboriously trembling voice as he looked up at his wife’s face. She looked different too, the beauty that had hidden behind her pregnancy was back again, shining more than ever. Her honey-coloured eyes and there was something like a smile at the corner of her mouth that was enough to rekindle the dazzling prettiness than only her could exude.
‘Yes, that’s our son’, she said with a low voice into the telephone. ‘He looks so much like you’, she said again. Tristan’s eyes went back to the boy. He was staring back at him with careful eyes as if he had seen Tristan before but of course, he was barely two months, he was still colour-blind.
‘Yes, he does’, he said and the trembling of his voice sounded more distinct. As Tristan kept staring at his son, there was an emotional surge that came from nowhere and it reached its peak. It usually rarely did but few life-changing things like this forced it to open and when it did, he broke down in tears. He suddenly knew he was going to cry, not the normal kind of tears, a kind of tears that only broke out of him like a spillage when he knew that he had lost something. Someone. The last time he had cried like that was under an elm tree in a silent, dark parkland the night he escaped from home many years ago, it was a special kind of tears that marked the gruesome, needless end of his mother. Who he was about to lose was even more fazing because the person wasn’t dead, they were in front of him and he really wanted to be with them but he also knew that he would not be able to do such.
He placed his palm over his eyes as the tears sprung forth. As much as he wanted to stop the loud wails, they also broke forth from his throat. He remained like that for minutes until he tried to gather himself together and then return the telephone to his ear. He kept his face down as he heard Samantha trying to console. She was the one who actually needed to hear those exact words but he wasn’t strong enough to hold himself together in front of her and his son. He looked up again at his son, when he looked at him, he saw a reflection of himself. He saw a jaunty, playful, happy boy who would grow up and try to follow his own dreams too. Tristan wished he was able to help him do that.
‘We are going to call him Andrew James?’, Samantha asked and her face was smiling. Tristan nodded and sniffled. ‘He is going to grow up to be just like you’, she added.
‘Samantha’, he called and looked up at her, it was time to tell her what fate held for all of them. ‘I..I love you’
‘I love you, Tristan. A whole lot’
‘And everything that I have done since meeting you was with you in my mind. Even before he came, I always wanted the most colourful of lives for our future family and I worked for it’
‘Tristan, you tried. You did everything you could’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t enough and I want to tell you something that you need to know. The only way for us’. He looked at Samantha and he didn’t like the expression on her face, she seemed to guess what he was going to say and she didn’t seem to like it already. ‘In here in Boorbunk, no one ever comes out of here, everyone is sentenced to life’, he said and stopped. ‘I might never get to be a great father to Andrew James, he might never get to know him as one. As bad as that is, I think that he also doesn’t need to’
‘What? I..’
‘Samantha, you’re beautiful, you’re still beautiful and there are still hundreds of people out there that you will get to love. I don’t want you to come here to me anymore’. As Tristan said it, he expected the glass to shatter apart or for the earth to quake but all that happened was he could see water rushing down the eyes of Samantha, she was utterly speechless. ‘I am never going to get to do certain things again and so Samantha I want you to go…’
‘I will never leave you’, she said amid tears.
‘You’ve got to. Andrew is going to be a really good boy, I can tell. Go on and…’
‘I will never let you go, I can’t…’
‘Samantha, please do it. I am doing this because I don’t want you to get hurt. The place is…’. Tristan was going to say, The place kills people but the rules that they had been fed with when they first reached there prevented them to exposing anything other than the life sentence that other people knew them to be sentenced to. Any secret revelations to the public led to instant execution, as everything they were saying was clearly recorded somewhere else. ‘I am never going to make it out of here. I am not going to allow my problems to hold you down’
‘Do you really have to do this?’, Samantha said crying louder, more agony in her voice.
‘Your time’s up’, the warden alerted, the same bored look on his face.
‘Goodbye, Samantha’, he said and it sounded different because the goodbye was meant to mean until a perpetual end.
As Tristan walked out, he couldn’t move his head from the crying face of Samantha and his baby wrapped in her hands.
He walked back slowly and by the time he returned, the rest of them were eating at the diner. He picked his tray and sat by the side of Barry who returned from the prison soon enough. He didn’t even last more than a day in there. ‘Is everything okay, Tristan?’, Barry asked.
Tristan really wished he didn’t have to talk. He looked away and he cried again, louder and with hotter tears this time. ’Tristan’, Barry called and moved his hand on Tristan’s back. ‘Are you okay? Common, talk to us’, he said but Tristan’s tears had hooked him desperately, cascading down from his heart. ‘Stop crying. I don’t know you like this’, Peter said and came closer to him. Every other person was watching, wondering what could make such a humorous guy cry so badly. It was the first time they saw him so broken.
It reminded Dale of Tristan while performing some of his jokes, he was fond of saying ‘As broken as a Boorbunk Bay lawbreaker’, he had probably just said it as a hilarious play-on-words, an alliteration of the letter ‘b’ but here it was, playing out as a real instance.
‘What’s wrong with Samantha?’, Barry asked. Tristan didn’t reply.
‘Who is Samantha?’, Peter asked.
‘His wife. His girlfriend’, Dale replied.
‘She is good, she has put to bed’, Tristan said after stopping the tears.
‘Oh my goodness! You have a child?’, Peter asked.
‘A son’, he said.
‘So what’s the problem?’, Peter asked and as he said that, the cause of the sadness dawned on all of their faces.
Tristan didn’t eat throughout the day until dinner, spending the whole day moody, fast a-thinking. He managed to drink the coffee at dinner and then watch yet another horrendous sight.
‘Five minutes more!’, the warden shouted just as he always did and he looked across their faces. Every person was done with their main meal and coffee was what left for them all to deal with. ‘Hey, you’, he said and he looked at the four new internees, they were all sitting together. ‘You should learn to stop sipping that coffee as if you were people with prestige because you are not and that is one of the things we were made to point out to you.’, he said but the men remained silent, looking away as if they weren’t even listening to what they were saying. ‘You bloody worthless poor masses who have taken it up yourselves to do wrong things and now you come here and drink coffee like that. Criminals! Captives!’, he shouted hard at them. The rest of the prisoners watched the warden speak. No one knew why he had said it but it could have been only for one reason and it was working.
One of the men who felt the most aggrieved with those words stood up. He was huge, well-built and he looked really angry. ‘Why would you call me a criminal when you know I am not? You are the ones that are the bloody killers, shoot people for doing nothing!’
‘Yeah’, the man said and gave him a mocking look, satisfied with the provoked reaction of the man. ‘Now, sit down Orville! And learn to eat like a prisoner, like a nobody that you are’, he said and started to leave.
‘Sure, as long as you keep being a mother-fucking bloody punk. Jailer!’, he said and sat down.
The warden looked back, those words had hit him in a way that he didn’t like and now he was going to go all out. He rushed at Orville, about to land a punch on his face but Orville was no such a calm person to steady his face because someone wasn’t wearing an orange uniform with them and was dressed in a shirt with a darker colour. He held his hand and pushed him with all force making him fall over the tables. At this point, most of the people were on their feet watching the every turn of actions. Speaking about turns, there seemed to be a lot of drastic turns that evening.
Ten men walked in, all in the grey clothes of the wardens and the lead blocks in their hands and they held it in a way that sent the startling signal to everyone that those weapons were going to be used on someone very soon. They all rushed up to Orville Jackson and they wasted no time in hitting the heads of the blackjacks on Orville, making him fall from his chair and scream as each of the rocks hit all over his body. They kept hitting him endlessly, this time focusing on his head, his neck and his throat. He kept shouting but never begging them to stop.
‘Stop hitting him!’, one of the men who sat with him shouted.
Dale’s eyes opened beyond normal, wondering if they were ever going to stop hitting him. The metalhead was killing him. ‘Stop! Do not kill him!’, ‘Please!’, ‘Do you want to kill him?!’. People kept shouting but no stopping, the hits continued and so were the screams of pain from Orville. Blood had filled everywhere, every part of his face seemed to be broken already, he had no throat anymore, it was crushed.
Comparative silence soon came. There was no shout from Orville anymore but the thumping continued and the force could be heard. The rest of them remained silent and were left to miserably imagine the depths of pain that would be reached with the weapon crushing someone’s skull. Dale couldn’t keep his eyes open for too long but closing his eyes made him focus only on the sound of the jabs. The sound of the blocks had changed, it wasn’t like they were hitting something solid, it was like they were busy pounding something squashy. Dale opened his eyes and took a peer at what was left of Orville and surely, surely it didn’t look good. It was like munched-up pasta with a lot of stew as the coating all over it. As Dale looked at it, revulsion congealed like ice in his stomach. There was blood everywhere and his brain was spread-out over the tiles, its grey colour was minced up with the ubiquitous red. It was just as if he was decapitated.
The ear-splitting scream from one of them who he had been sipping coffee with explained it all.
Something in Dale’s mind said: Look at where fighting has got him. He had become only a mesh of cartilage in a stream of plasma.
The men yelled at them to vacate to their cellhouse which they did immediately. They all walked into their relaxing room and waited there. Peter sat by the side of Tristan and placed his hand on his lap (Tristan). Tristan looked at him and then looked away, not ready to talk or to hear what anyone had to say. But Peter talked anyway. ‘Today marks three full years that I’ve spent here’, he started and everyone was watching him already. ‘I left my family behind, I left my daughter behind and now that it is three years, I still cope everyday to keep the memories behind to look ahead at what the future holds for me, what fate has for me. If it is death, I am ready. That’s the spirit of being in here. And Tristan my friend, I want you to think like that. I know you love your family’
‘Oh, you do? Then, I am glad you do and there is no way that I am going to feel normal without them in my life. My friends are dying. We came in here five, we are now three’, Tristan replied.
Peter kept silent and looked up. ‘I know, I know how you feel, being a father who wants to be the best to his child and then he’s denied that opportunity for nothing’
Tristan looked at him because Peter’s word exactly framed what part of the entire malevolent situation made him feel so torn-up. ‘My childhood life…’, Tristan tried to start but then he broke into tears at the thoughts, every part of his goddamn life seemed tough to speak about. ‘It was rough and my father abused my mother and he beat her every day, I coped with that distastefulness everyday’, he said and Dale knew it must have felt like the revulsion that had congealed coldly in his stomach when he watched Orville Jackson die. It was probably like that and that was because both the stories had ended the same way.
‘My father was the first man I hated, the only man I hated. Oh God! How much I detested him, hated him because he killed my mother!’, he brayed amidst endless mourns. ‘And I fought that each day. Those thoughts came to an end the day that she had my baby and it was replaced by an inward determination to train up my son in the most loving way possible but it surely didn’t happen. We were smuggled in here for nothing at all!’, Tristan wiped his face, even though the tears kept rushing out. The veins at the side of his face had popped out and his sweaty crying face had turned red. It was a dispiriting sight to see the most interesting, the coolest, the most gregarious guy in the room tear up so hard.
The room was left silent with everyone suddenly unmovingly sober, some of them had delved into the thorny lives they had outside Boorbunk and how they were struggling to make their lives better and to make their deepest dreams come true but it had led them to a penitentiary at the tail of island that surely didn’t give a damn about what the people were crying for. ‘And the diminishing part is that, we don’t even have a chance to explain ourselves and tell them that we did nothing wrong’, one of them shouted.
‘I’m sorry, Tristan’, Barry added.
‘Yeah but that’s ain’t going to change anything. All the good pasts are never going to come back, all my past aspirations are never going to come true. I’m never going to see them again and it’s killing me, it’s killing me! I was going to marry Samantha! And now, the best I can do is stare at the face of my smiling son through a sheet of glass’, Tristan replied.
‘Yes, it’s hard to take in, knowing there is no hope whatsoever’
‘Outside this place, we were all orphans metaphorically or not. Orphans of poverty, of war, of depression and in here, we remain the same, orphans of injustice and incarceration, orphans of death’, Barry said. ‘I really think that it’s the same outside just like it’s in here and there is no difference. No difference at all’. ‘Outside we still have to fear for everything, even as comedians… and musicians, we know that there are terrorists on the prowl and we heave a sigh if we make it through this week. It’s just like in here. The Death Toast. There’s a blood sacrifice every month and just as we can’t make it out of this place, it was also almost impossible for us, mere masses to make our way out of the misery we face on the streets everyday of our lives’. ‘The Redemption is that one way, that one chance we get to change our lives but this is Dexter, we are not likely to get such chances’, Barry said and everyone was watching. It was the most weighty, the most revealing thing that they had ever heard and it was really the terrifying concept behind everything so far. The terrifying truth. ‘And the fact that our voices are not heard is a clear show that Boorbunk Prison is an extension of our lives outside of here. We shout each day but we are not even heard out at all and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it! So, I want all of us to know that this is just like every other place we have stayed. Only that through here, we get to see everything clearly through a magnifying glass’
‘The only thing to do now is…’, Peter said and grabbed the palm of Tristan on one side and the hand of Humphrey on the other. The person sitting to the left of Tristan was Barry and he did the same too, he held Tristan’s left hand and then held Dale’s hand on the other side. Every other person in the room followed and then their hands were tied together in a chain. ‘The only thing we can do is to stay as a family and learn to just embrace everything… together’, Peter said and that was the message that they all went to bed with.
And so it remained for the next few weeks. Dale performed his tricks to the awe of everyone and Tristan told incredible jokes and then Barry sung, he sung so wholeheartedly just as if Michael by his side. Everyone knew every other person’s name, everyone talked with everyone. No one got lucky yet again in The Redemption and so it remained. They made life as delightful as it could be but it could only last for few days. The Grim Reaper lurking around did not really condone too much light from the people.
They all held out their hands again in harmonious assembly and then slowly opened their eyes after a short prayer. ‘Just wanted to say this’, Peter said and looked at the faces of his peers. ‘Whoever leaves us tomorrow, we would miss you and we all will never forget you’, he said and looked at the people nodding hard, trying to suppress the bacteria ravaging their minds as they stood. ‘It could be any of us’, Peter continued. ‘But until then, have a good night rest’, he said. Just as if the whistle had been waiting for them to conclude, it hooted loudly across the room halfly splitting their eardrums as they ran around to their cells.
It was going to be a pretty long night, Dale thought and sighed as darkness descended over him, leaving him to his thoughts. Of all the things that they had discussed the other night, one of the things his mind unanimously agreed with them with was that things were better together. The rest of them he was going to leave his mind to figure out and discern. It wasn’t really his mind, it was voices playing back mechanically and yet, rhythmically in his head. It was plainly his father speaking loudly to him and his mind trying as much as it could to overcome the short mental restraints and gather it in as whispers.
Dale remembered The Transformation Trick he had done and when he was done with it, all the cheers and applauses that followed. He remembered his deceased friend, Carreras walking up to him using his fingers to itch the flesh jingling his left arm, it had flies perching on it. ‘Why don’t you make that rifle and make us use it to come out of here’, he said and he wasn’t joking about it.
Dale had chuckled and then said, ‘Well, we can’t do that’,
‘But why?’
‘Because, the rifle didn’t actually exist’
‘It didn’t exist? What do you mean it didn’t exist? We all saw you change that rat cage to a gun in front of all of us’
‘Common, Carreras. It was a trick. Tricks aren’t magical powers where you just make things exist out of nowhere’
‘But how did you even do that?’
I laughed but Carreras wasn’t finding anything funny and he hadn’t said it to praise the deftness of Dale, he had probably thought about the possibility of leaving the cell with Dale’s made-up rifle. ‘I can tell you but then I will have to kill you first’, he said but Carreras just looked on. ‘It’s all magic. It’s an illusion’. Carreras sighed, nodded and then just walked away in a discomforted way.
And now in the room alone, Dale thought about the last words he had said that day, It’s an illusion, it didn’t sound awesome anymore and he knew why.
The Humour Sect had spent years, entertaining people; he had spent years showing magic to people, making them look in awe and then clap in astonishment. It was really odd to find out that those interesting things only made people forget their worries for some time. Illusion. While magic was all tricks, slide-of-hands, make-believe and not real, it was the same for the whole thing that they did; jokes and recreation kept the worries out, it blocked it out but it was still there; the terrorist group were still there. It was like an hallucination, you definitely would get struck out of such stream of happiness when those men in black, silent and stealthy as foxes, make your children lie out on the floor and then you shut your ears to the loud shouts of bullets. By the time, you lift up your face, the ground is wet with the blood of your children.
Dale kept discomforted with his thoughts, his father whispering to him but it was true. Although they had got no awards from the government or outlandish recognition despite all their work, the fact that their showbiz changed people’s lives could not be overruled. But it wasn’t just enough. They had performed their bit to the society but it wasn’t just enough. They made people happy but it wasn’t enough.
Wait… It wasn’t enough? Dale asked himself. Were they meant to go to each house and save them from the enemy, be a vigilante sect instead and carry guns? Or maybe it wasn’t about me, it was just my mind trying to explain certain things to me.
Above all, Dale didn’t like the way he was feeling about everything. Barry had told him to keep calm but he knew now that above everything, keeping calm wasn’t the key. Keeping calm didn’t mean that any other thing outside the world was going to keep calm with you. You trying your best to keep your internal peace and staying cool all the times didn’t mean the outside world agreed with you. Keeping calm was, infact an illusion and a terrible, devastating one at that. What was the reason for keeping calm if there is really a problem.
But what could I have done? Dale thought and his eyes watered. At that moment, he felt an extreme need to change things. To fight. And die. The voice in his head said to him again.
But this time he felt an aggressive push in him, it was his father with him. The truth was the fear of death, against death was an illusion too. They were all made to think of death as this long, hollow, unending cylinder filled with black, gummy, inky substance inside that once people got in it, they swam on trying to find the surface, eternally in distress.
And now Dale could hear the thick voice of the one man he had looked up to and trusted every word that came forth his mouth, bursting his mental obliviousness, his amnesia or whatever and he could see the whole picture. His father talking to him and his brothers, the pictures moved in the face of Dale as he sat in the darkness. He stood up and went over to the tap to wash his face and as he did, the lecture ended and everything had come on him at once.
Death wasn’t all those things, it was an illusion that everyone falls for. And when you get off the phantasm, you are never got trapped again! He heard the voice. I need you to be warriors in everything, fight for your life, fight with blindness, blind to the terror that the enemy possessed, fight for your selves because only then can all these things change.
Dale walked away from the sink, went to his bed and pulled it off the wall. There was a new resolution, a resolution called A NEW DALE, one whom he had never been before. It was time to go to sleep.