Time of the Locust (10 page)

But there had been this look that remained in Horus Thompson's eyes, even after the code violations and thresholds they broke with him. It reminded him of the look of the seventh woman in the jungle. A kind of certainty. Breaking Horus Thompson was important, because it was atop the minced souls of men that Black Plains had been built. Stotsky did not have a name for the fracture point, but he knew what it looked like, and he had seen it on the faces of countless other inmates, something that crept into the eye when it looked back from a narrow, desiccated place. Something that crawled in and stayed. In spite of Stotsky's efforts to achieve that frequency to which he could key this prisoner's—every prisoner's—vulnerability, that coolness in 02763's eyes remained. Horus Thompson looked up at him from a tub of water, from a pool of urine, through the brownish-red rivers of muck running from his eyes, with such gameness. A bewildering sweat formed under Stotsky's collar when he saw it. He had wanted to drown the prisoner then but decided instead to bury him alive, to suffocate him in the confines of the earth.

And the warden couldn't put his finger on the threat this inmate posed, even now. What was it about him? If he could have gotten away with blocking Horus Thompson's allowance of sixty minutes in the confinement gym for more than three months at a time, he would have done it. But he knew that this hastened dementia, and although he was not yet ready to pull the cord that led to madness, he was nevertheless reluctant to face the possibility that such measures might have no effect on this rodent. For these reasons, Warden Stotsky limited his thoughts of 02763 to the steady knowledge that he was encased in rock, three levels below him.

Sometimes, though, in the quiet of the shifting hallways, the warden thought about what he feared the most: the chance of escape. Not physical escape, since every precaution known to man had been taken to block all manner of leaving Black Plains except in a body bag. Rather, he worried about the possibility that an inmate's sins and the sorrows and years of misery could somehow be pushed back like the pane of a window in the mind and allow him passage to someplace else. And if that were true, it meant that what they said about the Mummy, the longest incarcerated inmate, was true. And it pained Stotsky to think, even for a second in the deepest of privacy, that there might very well be a way to jump the fence of the world without dying first.

Above, fluorescent lights flickered and the shadows in the corridor shifted their positions and he thought of his wife. Stotsky had taken a wife, reluctantly, after washing the blood spatter of ­Vietnam, the pig stalls, and all the rest of it from his face. It had been the advice of his commanding officer the day he returned stateside. “Get a wife,” the man had said, after reading Stotsky's psych evaluation, after a long silence. “It'll help you remember what life was like before all of this.” After his debriefing and out-processing, the young Stotsky tried to digest the superior officer's advice. The memories of the foreign place he had left were like blood smears turned to dark ink now, with the unknown fingerprints etched in by unspeakable stories, immortalized in silence.
Get a wife
rang in his head as he went to a bar that night. He smiled at the friendly waitress who served him and took her back with him to the room he was renting. He married her, and he loved her, he thought, even as he beat her. Eight months later, when he got to the police station and was handed the report, he found that he had again been ­outwitted by will. His eyes raked over the words: “single-car accident.”

He mulled over a long description of the tree they said she must have willingly crashed into. How there had been nothing mechanically wrong with her vehicle. How she had missed the last three appointments with a social worker. That given the initial autopsy, which indicated that she had been pregnant, her file read, “presumed suicide.” Stotsky had never decided on his final feelings about the pregnancy. At first, he felt a surge of anger, as if some important property of his had been confiscated without his knowledge. But he was more bothered by the fact that his wife had chosen the tree over the life she was living with him. That even though she yielded to him in every way, he still had not had the final say in the end.

In spite of himself, the thought of children would cross Stotsky's mind on his birthday. More and more, as time went by, he was struck by the finality of leaving no one behind. For all he accomplished with Black Plains, there would be nothing but ashes. In spite of the facility, over which he held God's mercy and wrath, his life was as finite as the years scheduled out for the condemned men he ruled, and he could not see his way to push what troubled him aside and climb through the windows of his own castle.

But when Stotsky was putting on his tie in the morning, when he was pouring his coffee in preparation to face the unyielding stance of the Rockies and the glory of the fortress in his charge, he had to put away such thoughts, for he could not bear to make space in his mind for the fears of small men, peering out at a world that had thrown them away.

Jimmy Eckert was waiting for the warden to respond.

At length, Stotsky nodded to the guard and sighed. “You did right by informing me, Eckert. You can go,” he said, waving him off.

“Yes, sir,” said Eckert.

Stotsky watched the guard back away into the shadows from which he had emerged.

Alone again in the corridor, Warden Stotsky walked on, pushing thoughts away and welcoming others. The silence in the vast facility was profound. It was something the administrators always complimented Stotsky about when they visited. “How can there be seven hundred twenty-nine people locked up in all this quiet?” they had asked. It was an astonishing feat, they marveled, indicative of the atmosphere of absolute control that Stotsky maintained, a control that was in danger at any given moment without vigilance. At this, Stotsky was heartened. If one understands the nature of a thing, Stotsky reasoned, one can know its capabilities, its look, feel, and movement beneath fur and flesh. Black Plains was a man-made wonder, a technological success complete with automated cameras, self-contained lights, water systems, and pressurized doors. The Great Room was a masterpiece of machinery and orchestrated labor. When Stotsky took the reins of Black Plains years ago, when it first opened its gaping mouth, he even had the banner “WORK SETS YOU FREE” set on the Great Room wall himself.

But the crowning achievements were the three sublevels omitted from tours and annual facility reports: level one was a security floor that divided the sea level from all the other sublevels; level two was a storage and supply floor for the entire facility; level three was Secured Housing. Supermax. Secured Housing was completely self-contained, with its own ventilation and water system separate from the rest of the facility. Tubing ran through it and beneath it, and life and death were connected to a shutoff valve that controlled air, water, and lighting. The administrators weren't given tours of this hidden jewel, although they read Stotsky's modified report about it. They shook the warden's hand, enthralled but eager to return to sound and sky. Black Plains was a petrified Noah's Ark, immobilized for all eternity in the hardened soil of Colorado, beneath the glare of the Rockies. The facility had been manned optimally, Stotsky reminded himself. He had been able to keep the population busy, more or less, ensuring that their focus remained inward and strained, guaranteeing total immersion in the Black Plains world. His world.

He reached his office, a great wooden door with his name embossed in gold, and walked in. As always, a feeling of ease and leisure washed over him. He sat down in his chair, ignoring the stack of papers waiting for him. Instead, he looked at his collection of Greek marble figurines lining the top shelves of his many bookcases. His books, which filled the shelves of his office, were elegantly bound with emerald-green and blood-red leather. There were rows and rows of scholarly works on psychology and the history of penal traditions over the centuries.

He even had a special edition of the 1842 travel journal written by Charles Dickens,
American Notes for General Circulation
, about his touring visits to a series of prisons. Stotsky went over and pulled it down from the shelf, as he did often, to reread what he liked to call the “opposing view” to his job, to the institution he upheld. He did not read it because he agreed with any of it, nor was it because he was trying to understand something he might have missed in all his decades of experience. Rather, he read it as a reminder that others looked upon his world in the extremities of right and wrong. But he knew that this was only because as outsiders looking in, as mere aliens visiting, they could never know the natural laws within the walls that formed the nature of the beast, the living, breathing structure built by man but which, by man's oppression and depravity, submission and rebellion, had taken on a life of its own. The blue satin bookmark was right where he left it, and he opened the book to read once again:

“Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver's shuttle, or shoemaker's last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. . . . He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years.”

Stotsky read on and stopped at one of his favorite parts.

“And though he lives to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter night there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors. . . .

“I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.”

But the whole business had gone on
, Stotsky thought, closing the book and returning to his chair. It was preserved by the millions who committed every act imaginable, by the countless who were guilty but not sorry. And it was for those whose acts could not be imagined that places like Black Plains Correctional Institute existed: the child rapists and murderers who laughed and jeered about the long list of children the authorities would never know about; the men who had chopped their families into pieces small enough to fit into a deep freezer; the drug kings and human traffickers who had lost count of how many they killed or made disappear. Worst in Stotsky's mind were the enemies of the state, those who had no respect for the centuries-built power and authority that come with the military or police and had taken law and order (or chaos) into their own hands. It was not so much what these types had done that bothered Stotsky; rather, it was that they felt they had the power and authority to do it.

He spun his chair around to Biderman's Chart of Coercion pinned to the wall. When Stotsky had first made warden, he'd gotten it retyped according to his own liking, and had the word “victim” changed to “prisoner” (there had been no distinguishable difference in his mind) and “effects” changed to “results,” and had the text enlarged into a poster and framed. It hung behind his massive desk like a piece of art. And just as he liked to read from his books of the opinions of those who would never understand the world in which he breathed, he liked just as much to recite Biderman's chart, which had been written in the language of rules that made places like the Black Plains Correctional Institute work.

A social scientist at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Dr. Albert D. Biderman had written and later published what was to ­become known as Biderman's Chart of Coercion, a delineation of tactics the Communists had used on U.S. Air Force prisoners of war in North Korea. In letters over the years, Stotsky and Hanamitsu had discussed the document at great length, and they had agreed that the techniques noted were no different from what they­ ­themselves had seen and done in their own war careers, and were consistent with the behavior of overseers and enforcers throughout the ­centuries of time. Stotsky had liked the chart at first glance. There it all was, in written form, the process and ­tutelage—the ­science—of breaking the will of another. And when he thought of his time in the jungle, of the question of will, he felt that the ­Biderman chart articulated the beginning of an odyssey that he would, time and again, bring the Black Plains inmates through, the nature of which he was sure his father knew. And so Stotsky faced the beautifully framed chart and read it over as he had done a thousand times before:

Method 1. Isolation

Result: Deprives prisoner of all social support of his ability to resist. Develops an intense concern with self. Makes prisoner dependent on captor.