Amidst the shuffling of the guards’ feet and the rambling screams of the women, Sarat listened to her neighbor’s voice the same way she listened to her own breathing—passively, without thought. But at other times it was the only thing she could hear, a reminder she was still alive.
Sometimes Sarat talked back to the voice sliding softly through the walls, and in these times she lied. When Elena asked her where she came from, she said South Carolina, and invented an elaborate lie about her escape from the illness unleashed upon that state. She enjoyed lying to her faceless neighbor, and enjoyed that the neighbor seemed to believe it. During the worst of her Visitations, when after weeks of mistreatment she returned to her cell hallucinating with pain, it provided some small comfort to retreat into a wholly fabricated existence.
Still, she resisted. The Visitations came in waves—sometimes the woman in the neatly pressed suit didn’t come to see her for months at a time, until Sarat allowed herself to believe that perhaps the interrogations had finally come to an end. Sometimes, the woman seemed a permanent resident of the island, and would call on Sarat almost daily. Weeks alone in the rooms of Sound and Light dulled her senses, until the world beyond arm’s reach became a muddled nimbus she could no longer decipher. The positions in which they shackled her slowly wore the cartilage from her knees and warped her back into a curving column of pain. Still, she resisted.
IN HER THIRD YEAR on the island, Sarat participated in a hunger strike. Elena said women from every camp were taking part, refusing to eat or drink anything but water. She said some women had already been doing it for weeks. She said one had even died from it—a suicide of sorts, something the guards called “Going asymmetric.”
She said the women had a list of demands, chief among them freedom. Failing that, they wanted their loved ones flown in to visit; lawyers from the Red to represent them; and the right to something whose name sounded foreign to Sarat’s ears (she assumed it to be a drug or a religious text). The women in the solitary cells demanded time in the communal yard, a chance to see the sun.
Sarat made no demands. She could no more imagine negotiating better treatment from her captors than negotiating the stinger away from a scorpion. Her silence was the one weapon they could not pry from her; to hand it to them in the form of hopeless appeals seemed to her an act of high cowardice, a tacit admission that the brutal kinetics of Sugarloaf obeyed some kind of law. For the same reason she refused to meet the ones they called humanitarian envoys, who swooped in on Sugarloaf every few months with looks of stern disapproval plastered on their faces, for the same reason she spat in the face of the woman with the neatly pressed suit, for the same reason she tore the pages of the one book they allowed her and glued them with smeared shit to the slit of her cell door—for the same reason, Sarat made no demands.
Instead she simply refused to eat. In starvation she took the levers of torture out of her torturers’ hands and placed them in her own. In starvation she found agency, control.
A week into her strike and concussed with hunger, she was taken by the guards to the medical facility.
She was led into a room with high white ceilings. Black sheets covered the windows and muted the sunlight. The room smelled familiar to Sarat—it was the smell of rubbing alcohol. She remembered the last time she saw her sister.
A single cot, raised to the incline of a dentist’s chair, stood in the center of the room. Laid out on a steel table nearby were a set of hypodermic needles, a coiled rubber tube, a box of disposable gloves, and two bags of clear fluid.
The guards lifted her onto the bed. She felt straps tighten around her wrists and around her ankles and around her chest. Viselike restraints locked her gaze to the white empty ceiling.
At the edge of her periphery she saw one of the soldiers standing at the table. He wore a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck but she knew he was a soldier. He uncoiled the rubber tube and affixed it to one of the fluid bags, which he then attached to a metal stand. She watched out the corner of her eye as he began applying a glistening, mucuslike substance to the end of the rubber tube, before Bud the guard stopped him.
“No need for that,” Bud said. “She’s a big, strong girl.”
Amidst the convulsions that followed, they fed her. The white ceiling to which her eyes were locked began to fill with brilliant stars. The cot shook; she felt the hands of the guards holding her in place. The acidic aftertaste of the feeding fluid crawled up her throat and leaked out her slack mouth. It tasted of her insides.
Midway through the feeding, a gust of wind sheared the black sheet from one of the windows. A beam of sunlight entered the room. Sarat closed her eyes and felt the warmth that grazed the very ends of her toes. Faintly, very far away, she heard the sound of children playing.
FOR THREE DAYS in January a storm rattled the island. The rain made a sound like the patter of huge insects crawling on the prison walls. The women huddled and screamed in their solitary cells.
The storm spared Sarat her daily feeding. Hunger returned this time as mercy. On the fourth day, her cell door opened, and Bud came inside. He arrived with the usual entourage of guards but he made them wait outside. He closed the cell door behind him.
She knew it was him before he appeared, the meter of his steps down the hallway a fingerprint. It amazed her sometimes, how much she knew about a man she was supposed to know nothing about—the way his cheeks reddened when he cursed her, as though the sound of his own voice infuriated him; the way his upper lip drew closer to his nostrils in a feigned expression of disgust whenever he told a lie. She knew him the way animals know the weather, and from some indefinable thing living in the very presence of him, she’d learned to divine the severity of impending storms.
But today she could not read him. There was a calmness about his hollow eyes; the veins of his neck untensed. She detected in his stocky face the expression of a child on the eve of Christmas, impatient and electric with anticipation.
He sat at the foot of the bed. Instinctively, Sarat recoiled. She smelled the mess tent breakfast on him, the smell of fryer oil. He looked at the place by the bed where Sarat’s last trickle of vomit had dried into a sand-colored crust. He chuckled.
“Tell me, do you believe in any of that Hindu shit?” he said. “They got a book about it in the library here; got so bored one night I started reading it. You believe any of that stuff about coming back as a toad or an ant or something if you were real bad in your last life? I mean, I saw what you did with that Bible we gave you; I know you’re no Christian, so maybe you believe in that stuff.”
Sarat said nothing. Bud cracked his knuckles. She waited for the cheeks to redden, the vein to emerge, and she readied her mind to take her to a faraway place.
“I’ve been thinking about that for a while now,” Bud said. “Because I got to thinking I must have done some real terrible shit in my last life—burned down an orphanage or something. That’s got to be why I ended up here, stuck playing babysitter to a cageful of goddamned animals.”
The slit in the doorway opened. A guard looked inside. Bud waved him away. In that moment Sarat imagined lunging at his sweat-glistened neck, digging into the skin with her teeth. But what her mind imagined, her body no longer had the strength to do, and when again he turned to her and put his hand on her knee, she spat in his direction but what came out was spittle.
“But see, then I got to thinking I couldn’t have done anything too bad, right?” said Bud. “I couldn’t have done anything too bad, because then I would have come back as you.”
He patted her softly on the knee and then he stood.
“Remember when you first got here?” he asked. “Remember how you used to press your face against the cage like a dog, trying to get a look at the water? Well, guess what, Sara Chestnut? We’re going to take you to the water.”