941770009
by Anderson Peguero II
They caught me one night when I was high out of my mind, and they fought with me and threw me on the ground, and they booked me. Next thing I know I am on a boat in the dark, night everywhere except the top tips of the waves, The Island looming like a massive gargoyle in front of me. I was so high that night that I honestly don’t remember what I did or said. My mother just died, and I wanted to see her again. I hope it didn’t work; I hope she’s not watching me anymore.
They have taken everything from me. I am just one of many and none of us have any say.
They threw me in with maybe thirty others in a holding cell in the middle of the night and told us nothing. The sun came up and went down again and nothing in the meantime. There were men who gouged out their eyes and some of them died and also there were others who goaded men into fights so severe that one of them would end up dead. Randomly a guard would enter the holding cell and pluck one of us out. No explanation, no names being called. They didn’t bother to take the corpses out until the smell was too much for them to stomach for even a minute, and then they’d just haul out as many as two men could handle and leave us with the rest. We looked to each other with fear and confusion multiplied by hunger and psychosis, and we clung to the corners as much as we could without touching another. There was only a drain in the middle of the cell where a man would go to piss or shit and even that they did apprehensively because at least two men since I’ve been here were beset by the flies hovering over the dead and one of them died of malaria or something and the other got so inflamed near his ass that he screamed and asked for death for two nights straight.
Everyone here to a man is damaged. Even and especially the guards. There are few of them and little they do but lecture us on how we deserve this fate. They have to believe that, or they will go mad, madder than us. They have this haze in their eyes of one that’d seen war. I’d never seen war, but I realized it had to be something like this. Incomprehensible. Unjust. Immortal.
If only I knew then that there was to be no further freedom. I’d have killed myself, too. The dead are the lucky ones.
When they pulled me, I was given no adjudication, no charges, nothing. Only a cell of my own with no window. Food given through a slot twice a day. Nothing else.
The solitude robs me of everything. Before long I yearn for the horrid tortures of labor and servitude I’ve heard whispered await the lucky ones. The laborers can’t earn any wages or privileges but at least they see other people, at least they see beyond four decrepit walls.
Very soon I realize there’s no point in thinking of escape. There are gates, checkpoints, cameras, guns everywhere. Even if I did get through that, I’d have to swim for hundreds of miles--there’s nothing else on The Island but the jail.
I dream of the sky, the sun on the sea, hot sand between my toes, oil of pasta slipping down my chin, wind blowing my hair about me…
And others. I’ve read that Hell is other people, but I would prefer to be imprisoned with others. No, I’d prefer to burn in Hell.
I used to dance in the clubs and the streets with pretty women. I’d gotten into cafes and fashion events without knowing anyone, just because of my style and my charm. (They’ve taken my clothes and replaced them with rags.) I had a career and a business I was planning on starting soon. I paid my taxes. I used to read, write, argue, and have ideas. I used to sit for hours laughing, drinking, and theorizing with my friends. So many songs I miss hearing. The books I’ll never get to finish, the love I’ll never be able to find…
I feel myself aging and I know my children are growing. What does their mother tell them about me? Did they ever look for me? If I have grandchildren, will they look like me?
Like most, I’m “diagnosed” by a quack that glances at me and I’m given medication to help with my “rebellious behavior.” The medication makes me sluggish and fat. The only food I get six days a week is half a loaf of bread and fruit. (On the holy days we get cheese and chicken legs.)
You punch the walls, you tear out your hair, you beat your chest. Then you scream all your breath away and you wonder if you ever had a mouth or a voice. The body is not meant to be erased like this. With nothing left you retreat to your mind, in the face of the incomprehensible you try and rationalize, even if you know there are no answers. Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this? Why can’t anyone help me? Why can’t anyone save me?
You were born a beast, and you return to being a beast.
The natural response when you realize you are so hopelessly trapped is to end yourself. Surely oblivion is better. Everything becomes so hopeless this begins to look attractive and sensible.
I’ve tried. Starving, hanging, poisoning, maiming. They don’t let you succeed. The state is omnipresent. They know; there is a gas they spray into your cell that knocks you out in seconds. When you wake everything is gone and you’re a little sore somewhere. Maybe there’s sticky fluids on your lip still. Maybe you’ll cry. What else can you do? Anger is useless.
Criminals are an expense the state would, in theory, like to do without. Why, then, protect my life from myself? I was able to rule out the fact that the state actually cared about me getting “justice” or “rehabilitation” as my crime was almost certainly an invention. No, I see it was by design that all this happened in the exact way it did. My body belongs to the state, and it can do nothing with my soul.
This was a disquieting realization, and I sat with it for a long time. Looking my dehumanization in the eye caused it to consume me and hasten the process. I began to forget. Importances: How old is my oldest now? When is my birthday? What is my name?
My name--what is my name?
When they break you, they know they can use you best. That’s when you become one of the laborers.
I am summoned before the sun rises and I am brought back after the sun has set. I dig, and I scratch, and I search alongside others who have been similarly annihilated. You can see it in our eyes. You hear nothing from our mouths. No songs, no prayers, no moans, no whispers. It is only through an encounter with another that the self is illuminated but the opposite of discovery is devastation and being surrounded by others as empty and formless as yourself only exacerbates how little of you remains, how inescapable your fate.
In the mines, we extract ore under the earth where there are pitfalls and deposits of poisonous gas which kill you before you realize. Landslides of rock which fall upon you without warning. We work without stopping and we are the lucky ones. There are workers who dive for weeks beneath the ocean to dig for resources and to build the underground highways running to the mainland. I’ve seen for myself the soup of a man pulled from the depths after a decompression gone wrong. Then there are the old men who are pulled to work in the factories, where massive machines regularly accidentally reduce them into mincemeat (on purpose). Once, a guard joked to me that the chicken legs we look forward to every week are really human meat. To me, that doesn’t change a thing at all.
Some whisper we are helping to build some great machine god. Everyone has questions and no one has answers. I like to believe the most fantastical, that we are helping the empire build vessels to ride into space with. Maybe things are better there.
It’s been years now and still I feel more of myself slipping away. My thoughts are rambling, incoherent; it’s taken me an incredible amount of time just to write down this sentence. I curse the state even if I am the state. I am the violence and indiscriminate oppression and therefore I am evil, I deserve this, and I deserve to live, to multiply and never die. I will live on in the birthing and the killings of the empire. I was evil before because I was an individual, I convinced myself I have rights and a will, with ego I imagined I was I and never they.
Now I have seen the truths of things. The state is spectacular. It is clever and ruthless. No man will defeat it, because man is bound by the heart and the mind; the state suffers from no such limitations. It is designed by the most heartless and run by the most foolish, the idealistic ones who believe their cruel work is done for the greater good. But for the state there is no greater good than its own survival.
We’ve won. It was only a struggle of attrition for the predator to pick off the prey.
I’ve finally begun to refer to myself as they do: as a book and file number. Nine four one seven seven zero zero zero nine. I repeat it to myself as I work. I repeat it to myself at night to soothe my sorrows and my aches. It is reassuring and relieving. It absolves me. No one can miss or hate a number. No one will mourn a number. A number has no regrets, no grudges, no desires, no destiny. Ninefouronesevensevenzerozeronine. Ninefourone…
They have taken everything from me. I am just one of many and none of us have any say.
They threw me in with maybe thirty others in a holding cell in the middle of the night and told us nothing. The sun came up and went down again and nothing in the meantime. There were men who gouged out their eyes and some of them died and also there were others who goaded men into fights so severe that one of them would end up dead. Randomly a guard would enter the holding cell and pluck one of us out. No explanation, no names being called. They didn’t bother to take the corpses out until the smell was too much for them to stomach for even a minute, and then they’d just haul out as many as two men could handle and leave us with the rest. We looked to each other with fear and confusion multiplied by hunger and psychosis, and we clung to the corners as much as we could without touching another. There was only a drain in the middle of the cell where a man would go to piss or shit and even that they did apprehensively because at least two men since I’ve been here were beset by the flies hovering over the dead and one of them died of malaria or something and the other got so inflamed near his ass that he screamed and asked for death for two nights straight.
Everyone here to a man is damaged. Even and especially the guards. There are few of them and little they do but lecture us on how we deserve this fate. They have to believe that, or they will go mad, madder than us. They have this haze in their eyes of one that’d seen war. I’d never seen war, but I realized it had to be something like this. Incomprehensible. Unjust. Immortal.
If only I knew then that there was to be no further freedom. I’d have killed myself, too. The dead are the lucky ones.
When they pulled me, I was given no adjudication, no charges, nothing. Only a cell of my own with no window. Food given through a slot twice a day. Nothing else.
The solitude robs me of everything. Before long I yearn for the horrid tortures of labor and servitude I’ve heard whispered await the lucky ones. The laborers can’t earn any wages or privileges but at least they see other people, at least they see beyond four decrepit walls.
Very soon I realize there’s no point in thinking of escape. There are gates, checkpoints, cameras, guns everywhere. Even if I did get through that, I’d have to swim for hundreds of miles--there’s nothing else on The Island but the jail.
I dream of the sky, the sun on the sea, hot sand between my toes, oil of pasta slipping down my chin, wind blowing my hair about me…
And others. I’ve read that Hell is other people, but I would prefer to be imprisoned with others. No, I’d prefer to burn in Hell.
I used to dance in the clubs and the streets with pretty women. I’d gotten into cafes and fashion events without knowing anyone, just because of my style and my charm. (They’ve taken my clothes and replaced them with rags.) I had a career and a business I was planning on starting soon. I paid my taxes. I used to read, write, argue, and have ideas. I used to sit for hours laughing, drinking, and theorizing with my friends. So many songs I miss hearing. The books I’ll never get to finish, the love I’ll never be able to find…
I feel myself aging and I know my children are growing. What does their mother tell them about me? Did they ever look for me? If I have grandchildren, will they look like me?
Like most, I’m “diagnosed” by a quack that glances at me and I’m given medication to help with my “rebellious behavior.” The medication makes me sluggish and fat. The only food I get six days a week is half a loaf of bread and fruit. (On the holy days we get cheese and chicken legs.)
You punch the walls, you tear out your hair, you beat your chest. Then you scream all your breath away and you wonder if you ever had a mouth or a voice. The body is not meant to be erased like this. With nothing left you retreat to your mind, in the face of the incomprehensible you try and rationalize, even if you know there are no answers. Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this? Why can’t anyone help me? Why can’t anyone save me?
You were born a beast, and you return to being a beast.
The natural response when you realize you are so hopelessly trapped is to end yourself. Surely oblivion is better. Everything becomes so hopeless this begins to look attractive and sensible.
I’ve tried. Starving, hanging, poisoning, maiming. They don’t let you succeed. The state is omnipresent. They know; there is a gas they spray into your cell that knocks you out in seconds. When you wake everything is gone and you’re a little sore somewhere. Maybe there’s sticky fluids on your lip still. Maybe you’ll cry. What else can you do? Anger is useless.
Criminals are an expense the state would, in theory, like to do without. Why, then, protect my life from myself? I was able to rule out the fact that the state actually cared about me getting “justice” or “rehabilitation” as my crime was almost certainly an invention. No, I see it was by design that all this happened in the exact way it did. My body belongs to the state, and it can do nothing with my soul.
This was a disquieting realization, and I sat with it for a long time. Looking my dehumanization in the eye caused it to consume me and hasten the process. I began to forget. Importances: How old is my oldest now? When is my birthday? What is my name?
My name--what is my name?
When they break you, they know they can use you best. That’s when you become one of the laborers.
I am summoned before the sun rises and I am brought back after the sun has set. I dig, and I scratch, and I search alongside others who have been similarly annihilated. You can see it in our eyes. You hear nothing from our mouths. No songs, no prayers, no moans, no whispers. It is only through an encounter with another that the self is illuminated but the opposite of discovery is devastation and being surrounded by others as empty and formless as yourself only exacerbates how little of you remains, how inescapable your fate.
In the mines, we extract ore under the earth where there are pitfalls and deposits of poisonous gas which kill you before you realize. Landslides of rock which fall upon you without warning. We work without stopping and we are the lucky ones. There are workers who dive for weeks beneath the ocean to dig for resources and to build the underground highways running to the mainland. I’ve seen for myself the soup of a man pulled from the depths after a decompression gone wrong. Then there are the old men who are pulled to work in the factories, where massive machines regularly accidentally reduce them into mincemeat (on purpose). Once, a guard joked to me that the chicken legs we look forward to every week are really human meat. To me, that doesn’t change a thing at all.
Some whisper we are helping to build some great machine god. Everyone has questions and no one has answers. I like to believe the most fantastical, that we are helping the empire build vessels to ride into space with. Maybe things are better there.
It’s been years now and still I feel more of myself slipping away. My thoughts are rambling, incoherent; it’s taken me an incredible amount of time just to write down this sentence. I curse the state even if I am the state. I am the violence and indiscriminate oppression and therefore I am evil, I deserve this, and I deserve to live, to multiply and never die. I will live on in the birthing and the killings of the empire. I was evil before because I was an individual, I convinced myself I have rights and a will, with ego I imagined I was I and never they.
Now I have seen the truths of things. The state is spectacular. It is clever and ruthless. No man will defeat it, because man is bound by the heart and the mind; the state suffers from no such limitations. It is designed by the most heartless and run by the most foolish, the idealistic ones who believe their cruel work is done for the greater good. But for the state there is no greater good than its own survival.
We’ve won. It was only a struggle of attrition for the predator to pick off the prey.
I’ve finally begun to refer to myself as they do: as a book and file number. Nine four one seven seven zero zero zero nine. I repeat it to myself as I work. I repeat it to myself at night to soothe my sorrows and my aches. It is reassuring and relieving. It absolves me. No one can miss or hate a number. No one will mourn a number. A number has no regrets, no grudges, no desires, no destiny. Ninefouronesevensevenzerozeronine. Ninefourone…
Anderson Peguero II is a writer, artist, and psychotherapist based in New York. The insight he has on the inner darkness and persistent light within the human heart can be seen clearly in his creative work.