Chaingang

“It takes time. And one hears such questions frequently. Let me give you a rather bizarre illustration to answer your question. Here is a rare survivor of a brush with Cell Ten.” He passed a photograph of a guard with a black patch over one eye. “He liked to call occupant by name and take other familiarities while in the cell and during transport. Occupant managed to hide a tiny piece off a bar of soap. We keep it as a kind of training artifact.” The doctor produced a small vial and held it up.

“Would anyone like to speculate what this is?"

“It looks like a fleshette made for a .22 handgun,” one of the officers said.

“Excellent. It's a dart for a blowgun. The body of the dart is soap that occupant managed to anneal in some fashion, then carefully reshape, harden, and sharpen to the tiny, needlelike dart you see. Interestingly, the feathery material happens to be rodent hair. The machinelike precision of the craftsmanship is quite typical.

“We never found the blowgun itself. Some speculated that it was part of a drinking straw and that occupant swallowed it after shooting the correctional officer. The dart struck the man in the left eye. It had been dipped in feces. The eye became infected, and as you can see—or rather, as you can't see—he lost it.” The doctor almost had a note of pride as he explained the way the incident had occurred.

“Occupant's many skills include a martial art of considerable obscurity, one fighting technique of which involves the control of an acute and focused halitosis. It is my belief that one of the occupant's methods of passing time during incarceration is to practice control of vital signs—respiration, heartbeat rate, and so on—and that this martial skill is honed even while wearing a facial restraint. I further contend that one of the ancillary benefits of this odd discipline is increased facility at expectoration. The dart was—in my opinion—expectorated.” There were a couple of nervous giggles in the room, immediately stilled by his look.

“The halitosis technique is called ‘breath of death.’ Bizarre, to be sure. Once you become better acquainted with the occupant of Cell Ten, I can assure you that you'll find nothing whatsoever humorous about the possibility of occupant spitting a feces-poisoned dart into your eye—from some eight feet away, I should add—or forcing a column of foul exhaled air into your face when you least expect it, blinding you perhaps for just the half second it takes to head-butt you to death, or sever one of your carotids with his teeth.” He looked into each face for a moment. He was certain he had their attention.

“And now we come to the reason why we've chosen the Cell Ten Observation Room for this initial meeting,” He glanced at the thick gray curtain behind him.

“Let me tell you a story."

The room itself was unthreatening in appearance: brown steel door and steel-rimmed observation port, over which a heavy security curtain had been drawn. Dr. Norman stood in front of the curtain, facing the small room. The men and women stood uncomfortably close, and there was some of the awkwardness one feels in a crowded elevator as one waits for ones floor. Norman, whose disciplines were in the mental sciences, chose his settings with the greatest care.

“An infant, a male Caucasian baby, was found in the garbage dump outside Kansas City, Kansas. The baby, filthy, on the threshold of death, was rushed to a nearby emergency ward. The infant miraculously survived. It was placed into a local orphanage maintained by the state. It suffered neglect, however, and the child was one of several children surviving when the orphanage was investigated and subsequently closed down. The word ‘surviving’ is one we encounter repeatedly in this story.

“The baby boy became a textbook victim of the foster care system. There was a pattern of accidents, some reported and some not. Injuries. Abuse and neglect. Once again the boy was abandoned. Once again the boy survived.

“He was ‘adopted,’ if that is the correct word, by a woman who was in charge of several foster children. Later it was learned that she was a former prostitute with a history of alcoholism and child abuse, and it was while in her brutal hands that the little boy suffered his most traumatic exposure to various forms of sadism.

“Both the child's foster mother and the man who called himself the boy's stepfather kept their charges tied up much of the time. But this child had ways that apparently infuriated them. They kept him in a metal box with a few air holes in it, in a stifling, dark closet, and chained under their homemade bed. He was forced to remain motionless for long periods, usually in total darkness, and to lie in his own urine and fecal matter. When he made a sound he was savagely beaten.