It is my pen, too. With it, I write my story, again and again, in the walls. So I don’t forget. So it becomes real.
I think of: Conrad’s hands; Rachel’s dark hair; Lena’s rosebud mouth; how, when she was an infant, I used to sneak into her bedroom and hold her while she slept. Rachel never let me—from birth, she screamed, kicked, would have woken the household and the street.
But Lena lay still and warm in my arms, submerged in some secret dreamland.
And she was my secret: those nighttime hours, that twin heartbeat space, the darkness, the joy.
All of this, I write.
And so truth shall set me free.
My room is full of holes. Holes where the stone grows porous, eaten away by mold and moisture. Holes where the mice make their homes. Holes of memory, where people and things get lost.
There is a hole in the bottom of my mattress.
And in the wall behind my bed, another hole, growing bigger by the day.
On the fourth Friday of every month, Thomas brings me a change of linens for the cot. Laundry day is my favorite. It helps me keep track of the days. And for the first few nights, before the new sheet is soiled with sweat and the sediment of dust that sifts down on me continuously, like snow, I feel almost human again. I can close my eyes, imagine I am back in the warmth of the old house, with the wood and the sun, the smell of detergent, an illegal song piping softly from the ancient record player.
And, of course, laundry day is when I get my messages.
Today I’m up just before the sun. My cell is windowless, and for years I couldn’t tell night from day, morning from evening: a colorless existence, a time without aging or end. In the first year of my imprisonment, I did nothing but dream of the outdoors—the sun on Lena’s hair, warm wooden steps, the smell of the beach at low tide, swollen-belly rain clouds.
Over time even my dreams became gray and textureless.
Those were the years I wanted to die.
When I first broke through the wall, after three years of digging, twisting, carving the soft stone away with a bit of metal no larger than a child’s finger—when that last bit of rock crumbled away and went spinning, tumbling into the river below—my first thought wasn’t even of escape but of air, sun, breath. I slept for two nights on the floor just so I could feel the wind, so I could inhale the smell of snow.
Today I have stripped my cot of its single sheet and the coarse blanket—wool in winter, cotton in summer—that is standard issue in Ward Six. No pillows. I once heard the warden say that a prisoner had tried to suffocate himself here, and ever since, pillows have been forbidden. It seems unlikely but then again: Two years ago a prisoner managed to get hold of a guard’s broken shoelaces and choked himself to death on the metal frame of his cot.
I am at the end of the row, so as always, I get to listen to the rest of the ritual: the doors creaking open, the occasional cry or moan, the squeak of Thomas’s sneakers and then the heavy thud, the click, of the cell doors closing again. This is my only excitement, my only pleasure: waiting for the clean linens, holding the filthy sheet balled in my lap, heart fluttering like a moth in my throat, thinking, Maybe, maybe this time …
Amazing, how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.
The bolts slide back. A second later, the door grinds open and Thomas appears, carrying a folded sheet. I haven’t seen my reflection in eleven years—since I arrived and sat in the medical wing while a female warden cut off my hair and shaved my head with a razor, telling me it was for my own good—so the lice would stay out.
My monthly shower takes place in a windowless, mirrorless room, a stone box with several rusted showerheads and no hot water, and now when my head needs shaving, the warden comes to me, and I am bound and locked to a heavy metal ring on the door while she works. It is by watching Thomas, by seeing the way the years have made his skin puff and sag, carved wrinkles into the corners of his eyes, thinned his hair, that I can estimate what they have done to me.
He passes me the new sheet and removes my soiled one. He says nothing. He never does, not out loud. It’s too risky. But for a second, his eyes meet mine, and some communication passes between us.
Then it’s over. He turns and leaves. The door shuts and the bolt clicks into place.
I stand and move to the cot. My hands are shaking as I unfold the sheet. Inside it is a pillowcase, carefully concealed, no doubt smuggled up from one of the other wards.
Time is really just a test of patience. This is how it works, how it has worked for years: a pillowcase one month, occasionally an extra sheet. Linens that go missing and aren’t looked for, linens that can be torn, twisted, braided together.