The slant cross
The last words of Peter kept coming back to the brain of Dale and it was shouting out in his head now that they were here in a hall; a different hall, a wider hall with about a thousand people dressed in the same orange prison uniform that he was wearing and even more guards dressed in tough soldier uniform and with a full panoply like people working in a gas chamber. All the prisoners were part of long rows and columns from the back of the room down to the middle of the room, well spaced-out and as organised as queues could get. There was entire decorum in the hall, no single sound in the room from anyone; all the prisoners placed their hands behind them and faced their front, not daring to look at the terrifying armed guardsmen with powerfully automated rifles facing them at the opposite walls that bordered the room. There were twelve officers in the front of the room staring at them with undecipherable dangerous eyeballs. Dale looked beyond the men who were about to address them and on the frontier wall, all he could see was a metal cross engraved and placed eerily aslant into the wall that was meant to serve as the symbol of The Redemption.
THE REDEMPTION! THE HOPE AND DREAM! LET ME BE REDEEMED, DEAR LORD. SAVE ME! SAVE ME! Dale prayed in his mind as he watched one of them step forward ready to address them. The name of everyone was written out with probably, markers on pieces of wood and concealed by turning it upside down, just the way The Death Toast was performed.
Dale kept praying silently, locking his ears to whatever the men were saying.
‘This is THE REDEMPTION; every one of you held as captive in this prison’s fate is to die!’, he said as he walked around the prisoners. Dale shivered at the shout of his last word, he had heard die, death, dying more than any other thing he had heard since he came here and it even meant more putting you and die in the same sentence. ‘Fortunately, a retribution which is very unmerited by you, scumbags, savages, despicable incorrigible set of animals has come for you. THE REDEMPTION is the only faith you have to live and only one person, is although unworthy of it, has a luckier destiny than the rest of you’, he shouted and his voice echoed across the empty room.
‘EEL!’, he shouted to one of the officers.
‘Sir’, one of them ran out and gave an obsequious pose.
‘I instruct you to go and pick one of the planks, it’s time to set someone free!’, he declared and there were murmurings vibrated across the inmates whose hopes had heightened.
Officer Eel grinned in pleasure as he walked over to the table and kept staring at it, as if he was going to get a shock if he touched anything on it. He stretched to the far end of the table and grabbed a wood, leading to more murmurings across the room.
‘Silence!’, the man who seemed to be the boss shouted to which they immediately complied.
The officer marched up with the material in his hand that had someone’s name on it and handed over to the boss’s hand with his head bowed. Dale’s eyes met with that of Pierson and they were looking just the same; hopeful, tensed, scared.
‘The redeemed prisoner today is-‘, he said and turned the wood over for the first time to look at the person being saved. He looked across the rows and loved the palpable tension among all of them. ‘It’s someone from the twelfth ward!’, he said breaking half of the bombshell leading to protests, disappointed shrieks and shouts of hopes among some of them, leading to the gunmen shooting in the air multiple times which shut them up again.
‘It’s an Anderson!’, he said again knowing fully well that there were three brothers in the twelfth ward but this time there was no shout. Only turn of heads to the three men who were standing side by side, staring at the officer ready to hear if it was their turn for freedom. ‘Anderson Philipps’, he said and this time there were roars among the prisoners, disorganising themselves and going haywire unhappy with the news.
Dale stood with the rest of his five friends, Peter included watching Phillipps hug his brothers who was sobbing uncontrollably.
Phillipps seemed to be murmuring somethings amid tears but they were inaudible. ‘Phil, I wish I can get to see you again!’, the other one said with his sight blurred with tears. ‘We’ll miss you’.
Some other members of the twelfth ward hugged Phil. ‘Have a good time, we are happy for you. Good luck’, they said.
Some of the armed guardsmen walked up to them and pulled out Phil. ‘It’s time to go’, his brother said. ‘You go start a new life, okay?’, he said as he wiped his brother’s tears. The men dragged him off away from the room as the other men watched in awe or bewilderment or sadness or disappointment or wicked envy.
‘Everyone return to your cells before you are made to do so with a bullet in your thighs’, the announcer shouted from a loudspeaker.
Everyone wandered sluggishly out of the room. Dale heard a sniffle from Barry that made him look up at him. ‘Are you okay?’.
Barry simply nodded in response and itched his reddened eye.
All the prisoners in the fifteenth ward seemed to have forgotten about their missed chance on The Redemption few hours ago; they were all settled down in the settling room- the room nearest to their general cellhouse where they had been talking the last night. Everyone was busy talking, arm wrestling, joking and playing cards, some of them stayed in corners smoking smuggled cigarettes and then there was Tristan and the rest of his crew still trying to adapt to this new place, watching everyone do their thing with his head on his hand.
‘Is there no clock in here?’, Michael asked Peter who seemed to be dozing on his seat. He definitely didn’t hear.
‘There is no clock in here, no need for it anyways’, Pierson said.
‘Yeah, we just got to wait for time to fly by quickly and wait for the next whistle’, Barry added.
‘It seems time flies a lot around here’, Tristan mumbled.
‘What?’
‘Time flies a lot around here’, he repeated.
‘Yeah’, Barry replied.
‘It flies like an arrow’, Tristan said and they all turned to him wondering what he was saying. Tristan had that stupid face he always put on when he was telling jokes at the old clubhouse in Gollogher but it melted away and the morose face was back. They all turned away from him with no remark. ‘And a fruit flies like a banana’.
Dale laughed out loud. The other ones tried to hold it in but there was no way Tristan’s jokes went with their fulfilling its mission. They all burst out in small laughs. ‘God, you are never serious, Tristan’, Michael said and tried to stop smiling.
‘Yeah’, Tristan said and sniffed his nose still looking as sober as a judge deciding on a court case, it was hard to imagine if he was the one who just gave that joke. ‘And I think that’s why people don’t believe when I tell them I might die soon’, he said, looking sorrowful with a cold voice. Just when everyone thought he was saying something really emotional, he said, ‘But I’m dead serious’, he said and this time the laughs got extremely louder that everyone turned to their side.
‘Sorry, we’re sorry’, Dale said shamefully at the tough faces of the rest of them. The place was embarrassingly silent and they could still feel the eyes of every other person placed at them staring annoyingly at them.
‘You know’, Tristan started again, this time everyone was listening to him. ‘Before I came here, I was working at a calendar factory but I got fired’, he said bitterly and looked as if he was going to cry. ‘All I did was take a day off’, he said. The reaction from everyone was laughter and lots of laughter, so loud that it woke Peter up.
‘And then I went home, I was really depressed, I couldn’t sleep, I went up to my table and wanted to read a book with my lamp but then I couldn’t find my lamps, any of them. I couldn’t have been more de-lighted’, he said and they all laughed again.
‘So I got mad and I yelled at my wife, she got mad too’, some people chuckled. ‘And so she refused to follow me to a nude beach. I think she was just being clothes-minded’, he said and of course no punchline could get more humorous than that.
Peter laughed too and he kept wondering how these super-silly jokes had managed to get everyone laughing so loudly. It had never happened in the entire time he had been here. The only time he had heard loud noises was from outrage of anger and shrieks of violence amongst themselves. The mouths of everyone in the room had probably never cracked open for the slightest of laughs or even a smile since they walked in there.
‘She ended up divorcing me and so I thought, what was left for me in this broken bad world of mine. Out of depression, I swallowed some food colouring I saw on the kitchen table. The doctor said I was okay but I feel like I have dyed a little inside’, he said again and they couldn’t stop laughing. Then Tristan smiled back at them. ‘Thank you, Thank you’, he said and looked at his other comedian friends who were also laughing.
They all clapped for giving a reason to even smile, for giving them the best jokes they ever heard so that they had no choice than to crack up in laughter, for his courage to even think of telling jokes. No one had ever done that, no one had ever tried.
‘And then what happened after that?’, one of them had asked.
The blowing of the whistle stopped everyone. ‘In the next one minute, all of you should get your bodies into your cells, or else you wouldn’t like yourself!’, a voice echoed out from a loudspeaker, stationed in the corner of the room. It had been attached to the central station where the announcer had spoken from.
At once, everyone stood up and ran without control squeezing through the little door, toppling everything in their wake over and rushing into their different cellrooms. Only the strongest could make it out first.
‘Dale! Hurry!’, Michael shouted as he went into his own cell. Dale ran as fast as he could and just as he got to the front of his cell, he could hear the screech of the automated prison gate about to get shut.
‘Aah!’, he shouted as he leapt into his cell at the very last second before the gate got locked. Everyone had made it and the sound of hard-breathing was audible across the hallway in the middle of the cell rooms.
Dale remained on the ground trying to regain his bearing. He had leapt and fallen really hard, bruising his elbow and had probably dislocated his knee joints. He managed to moan silently and take in the intense pain he was feeling in his bones. He rolled to his side, grinning his teeth in agony and managed to raise himself up to the metal chair.
‘The lights are about to go out, let there be total decorum! Good night, make sure you dream in silence and beg your stars that you don’t talk in your sleep because you will pay for it!’, the man from the speaker shouted again.
Dale crawled over to his metal bed before the light went out since he might not find the exact position in the full darkness. After about two minutes, darkness descended harshly making him shut his eyes. There was nothing to see at all, he just lay over the bed and forced sleep to come.
His eyes were forced to open at once as he heard the whistle rattle in his ears. He had managed to sleep without rolling over today on the short metal bed that was not even large enough to contain him. All the previous mornings when he awoke, he had found himself sleeping on the cold ground.
‘You are given forty minutes to tidy up and get yourself presentable!’, the loudspeaker blasted into his ears. He looked out of his cell and he could see the person opposite him also waking up, stretching and yawning, waiting for sleep to clear completely out of his eyes before he began the daily hustle. Dale rushed up and wandered around the little room he was locked in and getting ready for another depressing day at the prison.
All the cell rooms in the ward were the same size and provided the same items for all the prisoners. It was five feet by nine feet and a height of seven feet. The bed was a steel cot fully folded against the wall and unfolded when they needed to use it because there was no enough space for it, there was a steel shelf by the side of the cot also attached to the wall for sitting, there was another steel shelf that was a little longer and a little higher up on the wall for placing their clothes and other items. They were given three orange uniforms and one black, the other items they had were a toothbrush, tooth -powder, towel and a cup. There was a sink at the back of the tiny room and a toilet.
Dale rubbed his eyes, walked to the sink and poured water from the tap over his face. He went over to the toilet to empty his bladder. He looked in irritation at the murky colour of his urine- it looked dirty brown liquid painfully sipping out of him. He emptied his bladder and grabbed his tooth brush.
‘You have twenty minutes, you vermins!’, the loudspeaker shouted and the voice of roaming around, water rushing, legs bustling around in separate cells also got louder.
Dale pushed open the tap and poured water into his cup. He rushed it into his mouth, rinsing out the powder. Unfortunately, there was no mirror in which he could see his teeth from unlike the bathroom in Gollogher but he still shone his teeth anyways to the wall. On dropping the items he had used for his teeth-brushing, he grabbed his towel and rushed into the bathroom door. Each of the cells had its little bathroom that was sort of constructed inside the wall. It was tiny, exceedingly tiny – Two feet by two feet, and was six feet tall. He walked over to the tap and put it on, letting it pour into the pail under it. As he waited, he pulled off his clothes exposing his body to the freezing cold and ready to cope with the misery of more unbearable chills his body would face bathing with the extra-nipping tap water. However, he also knew he couldn’t waste more time. Without thinking, he took the bowl and poured the water over his body. Usually, the first was always the most unendurable. He rushed the water over his body, bowl after bowl until the bucket was half-empty. He grabbed the sponge which he’d smeared with soap and scrubbed all his body roughly.
‘You’ve got ten minutes left!’, the announcer shouted again. Dale rinsed his body and used the towel to dry himself. He put on his orange uniforms and went back quickly into the room, tidying up everywhere and making everywhere clean, as was the instruction of the officer.
He then waited at his door waiting for it to screech open, hoping there would be no complaints from whoever was coming to inspect.
Nine prison guards walked in each with lead blocks, they had come to do the daily count. The doors opened.
‘Move two steps forward’, one of them ordered and of course none of the prisoners dared do otherwise.
‘Your hands behind your backs’, he shouted again.
It was Officer Weinstein, the man in charge of their ward, Ward 15. He looked fierce, really fierce, his face looked grotesque and the quality was even more pronounced with one large scar he had on the side of his head, that made it look like it had been split in half.
A man behind him walked across the ward and counted them as he went along.
‘Hey, look up, let’s see your face!’, Weinstein shouted to one of them who was bowing his head.
‘Number three! Number four! Number five!’, the other man kept counting, moving along the aisle with his heavy clumpy shoes clattering hard on the ground.
‘Number eighty-three! Number eighty-four! Number eighty-five! Number eighty-six..’. Dale swallowed hard as he could see the man walking up to his position, he didn’t know how to keep an eye contact and not look down in front of those grim-looking prison officers. He gave a long sigh and looked straight in front of him, promising himself not look elsewhere until the men left the cell.
‘Number eighty-nine!’, he was at the front of Dale now and he looked him right in his eyes for what seemed like a whole day to Dale. ‘Ninety’, the man said and stopped counting.
Dale stayed in the last cell of the ward and that was why it was more difficult for him to reach his own cell the night before.
They all walked out without saying any word and it was then that Dale found out that he had not only being keeping his gaze straight but he had been holding his breath. With relief, he gave a long, heavy sigh and he looked to his left to see Pierson. Pierson was number eighty-nine, Michael was eighty-eight, Barry was eighty-seven and Tristan was eighty-six.
The next whistle they heard meant time for breakfast. It was the best period of the day for the inmates because it was the only pleasurable thing they enjoyed in the place. They were able to enjoy meals that they had no access to, outside the place.
They all went in a queue and they picked up their trays, marching a step at a time to their seat and waited till the officer-in-charge for that time to finish his daily ranting. As soon as he stepped out, talks started momentarily.
The Humour sect sat together with Peter and now, more people seemed to be joining them.
‘Eeh!’, one of them called, smiling as he walked up to their table with his tray. ‘What’s up?’, he greeted as he shook hands with all of them and then sat. ‘Hey, Calendar Man’, he called to Tristan as he shook hands with him.
‘Yeah’, Tristan replied and laughed.
‘Hey, everyone take a look at the most messed-up man in here’, the man shouted to signal the other prisoners about Tristan.
They all laughed and clapped. ‘Are you going to continue with your jokes today?’, one of them asked.
‘I might.’, Tristan replied feeling so impressed with himself. More people joined the table with their trays, ready to have a conversation with this guy who seemed so cool, even in the coldest of places. Boorbunk bay.
‘Was your life really that messed up?’, the first man who had joined the table asked.
‘Hmm?’
‘I mean, did you really work for a calendar company and have such a rough life?’
‘No, no I didn’t’, Tristan said, not feeling very comfortable talking, not after the strict orders outlined for them.
‘So, what did you do?’, another person asked.
‘I was a comedian. In a clubhouse’, he said.
‘Oh, I see’
‘And what about you? I saw you all talking yesterday’
‘They work with me’, Tristan said.
‘Wow. You’re all comedians? Wo!’, he exclaimed.
‘Not really, we all tell jokes though but we don’t function as comedians. We entertain, in general. He and I do the jokes, Barry and Michael sing and sometimes tell jokes too’, Pierson said, pointing to each of them as he mentioned their names.
‘That’s cool. Where’d you stay?’
‘Crawdown District, Gollogher’, Pierson said.
‘And what does he do? He is your little brother?’, the man asked again, referring to Dale. Many people had always pointed it out that Dale and Pierson looked like brothers, but biologically they weren’t. None of them were blood-connected.
Pierson took time to swallow the large amount of pasta he had rushed up into his mouth and then he spoke, ‘No. He is not’, he said and laughed. ‘He is one of us, part of our band, he is an entertainer too’
‘But he doesn’t do singing or dancing. He does magic. Magic tricks’, Pierson declared and it was as if that was the most interesting thing that they heard that someone did.
They all shook hands with Dale who hid all the happiness he was feeling in his cheeks. ‘Thanks’, he shyly whispered to them.
‘He is really good at it. Aren’t you, kid?’, Pierson said.
Dale nodded quickly.
‘So you both tell jokes. Who tells better ones?’, Peter asked.
‘He’s sillier’, Tristan declared, referring to Pierson.
‘Really?’, the other inmate who seemed ever astonished by every word that the men spoke asked.
‘Of course not, no one gives better puns than Tristan’, Pierson said.
‘So, you are Barry and you are Michael?’
‘No, he is Michael, I am Pierson, there is Barry with blonde hair, there is Dale, our deft trickster’
‘Calendar man, what’s your name?’
‘Tristan’
‘Michael, Barry, Pierson, Dale and Tristan?’
‘Right’, Pierson said.
‘I am Felix and he is Ray and there is Humphrey, of course you know him, he is Peter’, he kept naming everyone on their table and on the other tables.
Dale noticed one of them sitting alone in the corner of the diner, looking really grave and mute. He looked really elderly. His plates were empty and he just kept looking away at nothing exactly. Dale had noticed the same man sitting in the relaxing room the night before when Tristan was telling jokes, he was the only one not smiling, he wasn’t even listening to whatever they were saying. He was only waiting for them to rattle the whistle so he could leave.
Dale paid attention as Felix was about to mention the man’s name.
‘Your time’s up. Get up everyone and walk in a single file out of the diner, you will be assigned to your separate working positions. Let there be silence or else you will be spending the next few days in the hole!’, the voice of the announcer could be heard loudly from the loudspeaker, roaring from the loudspeakers attached in the four different corners of the room. They all stood up immediately and stopped their discussion as they could see some armed officers walk into the room and watch them proceed out of the dining room.
Dale looked over at the chair where he had seen the man but he was no longer there. His face looked really disturbing. In a real sense, Dale believed that was how everyone else was supposed to look, Boorbunk wasn’t a place where happiness was cheap or where smiles was expected from anyone. As the look on that face kept reappearing in the face of Dale, he reminded himself of how dangerous where they were was and the bitterness floating in its atmosphere.
They were taken to the room where they were meant to sew and just like the other times, they worked for about six hours. At least sitting for many hours was better than staying out in the sun moving waste and refuse for more hours. Anyone who dared to sit or cry or attempt to stop working was sure to taste the powerful jabs of the rod of one of the armed guards And when the worst comes to worst, they had taken to the infamous Hole.
‘What would have happened to us if we didn’t make it into our cells before the doors got locked?’, Dale whispered at lunch, remembering the way he had dived in the night before.
‘You will be in big trouble. You wouldn’t like yourself’, Peter replied with cabbage all over his teeth. Lunch was a full meal too. It was a tray full of bread, tea and curd, cabbage and potatoes. ‘Once you are viewed by the cameras, those men would rush in here and beat the daylight out of you with clubs. They wouldn’t stop until you pass out’, he said.
‘Oh My God!’, Dale exclaimed feeling really horrified by the sound of that. He could not imagine the impact of those heavy lead blocks on his bones and yet, he had only escaped by a hair’s breadth the night before.
‘And then, once you open your eyes, you will find yourself in a different place. It is called The Hole’.
‘Yeah, I have been there before, it is a terrible place, you will pray for death’, Humphrey added, staring in the distance with the memories of his travails in the detestable place coming alive like the flashes of a nightmare.
‘You will be tortured night and day and you will be given no food. It is a tiny place, tinier than any other place you have ever been put in. The place is completely dark and there is a very tiny hole to excrete and throw up. It stinks, Oh God! It stunk a lot. It was like a sewer. There was nothing you could do to get out of there and screaming would only get you beaten and your body smashed off into smithereens’, Ray said.
‘Have you ever been there before?”, Michael asked Peter.
‘Yeah, I have been there before, we all have been there before, it is almost inevitable. A little mistake and the next thing you find yourself in this place that you will be staying for probably a week’, Peter said.
‘How do you get out of there?’
‘The only way you get out of there is if there is another person who is to be punished, who will take your place. I spent three days in there, naked, empty, half-dead, seeing darkness all through. I almost lost my mind. Sometimes I scream really, really loud because I can’t think straight anymore. The pain is more mental than physical. Everything might seem terrible around here but it’s nothing compared to The Hole’, Peter said.
‘Is it still on The Boorbunk Bay?’
‘Of course, it is here but you will never see it until you need to. Just as you never see the other prisoners and their other wards until The Redemption’, Felix said.
Just as you don’t see the outside world until…forever, Dale thought and kept eating.
The rest of the day seemed to be simpler and more less burdening. They were at the relaxing room after eating supper, playing around as usual with Pierson telling jokes and Michael later singing some country songs that they all knew and used to vibe to since there was no radio or TV.