Red Sky: Chapter 21

There is no light in the box. There is no food in the box. There is no time in the box. There is only blackness. Usually at night one’s eyes adjusts to the darkness. In the box there is nothing to adjust to. The darkness stays dark, the blackness envelopes the body. I only knew my hands and feet were there because I could feel them. I only knew I wasn’t dead because of the beating of my heart.

I sat naked in the pitch-black darkness curled up on myself. My limbs folded using one another for support. My forearms resting on my knees until my hands got tired of dangling in front of me. I would rearrange, pushing my elbows back as far as I could, so my hands could rest on my knees. This was the extent of my movement in the box. Back and forth my elbows went in order to keep the blood flowing and my circulation from cutting off.

I would try to lift my knees, so my feet would have more room and not be compressed against the corners of the box. But if my head lifted with my knees it would hit the hard ceiling above, so when I lifted my knees I had to simultaneously duck my head, flexing like a contortionist. This maneuver gave both my legs and my neck something to do besides straining in the same position hour after hour. It was the lone form of exercise for my crumpled body.

There were no exercises for my back. It stayed locked into place slowly deteriorating. I could feel the vertebrae compressing. My back could survive a day in that position. After twenty-four hours those vertebrae would solidify into cement.

The first day, I didn’t want to think about my resting body at all. My body was superfluous to my existence. Locked in the darkened womb of the box I was only a mind. My body existed as neither a blessing nor a curse. It didn’t exist at all. My mind drifted away from all physical sensations and expanded. It moved into the vacant space my body usually inhabits. I dreamed, of course. My entire first day was spent in and out of sleep and in and out of dreams. When I was awake I would float through memories. When I was asleep I would float through dreams. There was little difference between the two.

I was able to mark time by the muffled sounds from the great hall. I could hear the inmates when they marched out in the morning and when they marched back to their cells for the night. This was how I knew I had survived my first day in the box.

*

The first day I could pretend I was only a mind, the second day my body reminded me it was there. A body can rest in one position for twenty-four hours, but after a day that rest becomes confinement and eventually that confinement becomes pain. The lack of movement in my limbs strained muscles beyond what any physical exertion could apply. I wanted to be able to extend my legs just a little bit more. To stretch out my back another few centimeters. To move my elbows a little bit to the sides. But I couldn’t. My body stayed within the same limited range of movement working on the same muscles hour after hour until those muscles burned. When they were done burning those muscles seized up. The pain lingering as my tendons unraveled.    

It was difficult to become lost in my head as my shoulders and calves throbbed. I would be in the middle of a dream when a sharp sting would pierce one of my muscles and my thoughts would puncture as well. I would try to reach up to feel the area that was in pain, to rub the sting away, but I couldn’t move enough to reach it. The sting would grow. A tumor spreading from a single point above my right collarbone down my arm until my entire right side felt a perfect discomfort.

I heard the inmates when they got up in the morning. I listened for Hades' voice. I kept listening, leaning my body so I could get my ear closer to the metal door, even though no one was ever taken out of the box after one day. I strained my neck trying to touch my right ear against the cold metal.

The sound of the combined footsteps of over one hundred inmates was unmistakable. There was an endless thudding as they walked out of the prison block. My hopes of exiting after only one day were gone.

You hear everything when you are alone in the dark. You wait for the next sound, the next noise, even if it’s the quiet shuffling of your own appendages. I thought I could hear Max. There was a whisper seeping through the wall in front of me. Maybe I was hearing voices. Maybe it was a ghost. The ghost of 71, the malevolent inmate. Maybe the box was driving me insane.

As the whisper continued in a low decibel, I realized it was Max reciting his ever-constant monologue. It was comforting, like we were back down in the mine. Max couldn’t stay quiet even if you put him alone in a box. I smiled as I wondered which story he was telling or which theory he was working over. It’s easy to take his monologues for granted in the dissonance of the mine, but in the quiet of the box I found them reassuring. His monologue was a soft lullaby as I drifted in and out of consciousness. By focusing on those whispers I could get some relief from the ever-growing discomfort of my body. It was the way for my mind, which had been enlarged that first day, to save me from a body that was reclaiming its space.

*

By the third day the box is like being buried alive. But worse. At least when you’re buried alive you’re lying down. Three days curled up in a ball like a snake eating its own head is unnatural for a body with two arms and two legs and a spine. The mind had fended off the body for two entire days. On the third day the fight was over, the body was back in charge and slowly killing me.

The hunger hits. I often wondered if there was anything in those pastes and shakes or if they were empty imitations of food. We joked it would be better to starve than to try to choke down another helping of paste. In the box I learned I desperately needed those nutrients. My mouth went dry. I smacked my lips pretending to taste the grass of the purple shake. I moved my fingers as I tried to mime the eating of the paste to trick my mind into telling my body I was receiving my normal daily intake of food. No amount of trickery could make the dryness in my mouth go away. If the second day was the revenge of a body that had been contorted into an unnatural position, the third day was the revenge of a system that wasn’t receiving nourishment.

The whispers were gone. I listened for the entire day, hoping to hear one of Max’s monologues. Why had it disappeared when we both needed it the most? I called out to him, but there was no response. I began to fear the worst. Maybe three days was too much for Max. Maybe he was the one that wasn’t going to make it out alive.

After the inmates returned for the night, after we heard the thundering of footsteps, I finally heard Max again. Loud piercing screams came at regular intervals. They sounded like a high-pitched whistle filtered through the walls of the box, like a little hole in the metal was allowing wind to squeeze through.

After the screams came loud thumps. He was throwing himself against the walls of the box. Thump after thump. I yelled for him to stop, trying to calm him, but he couldn’t hear me. All through the night I heard thumping. Max wasn’t sleeping. He needed to rest. The body might be able to survive without that sleep but the mind wouldn’t.

*

By the fourth day death is an enviable alternative. I suppose this is why they always vary the amount of time in the box. If I'd been able to count down the days, even if it was a week, I would have been able to make it. But not knowing when I would get out or if I would ever get out, made the torture unbearable.

The screaming and thumping had stopped. I was no longer able to think rationally. The lack of food combined with the constant darkness had taken away my ability to be human. I no longer felt concern for Max, not because I wasn’t concerned, but because I was no longer capable of any abstract feelings or thoughts beyond trying to find the briefest of relief from the pain. All of my muscles were on fire. There was no part of my body or mind that hadn’t been touched. I was engulfed by acid, my sanity melting away by the minute. A fifth day? Would I survive a fifth day? Did it even matter. Had I even survived the first four days or had I been broken, a wild dog tamed. Would I involuntarily flinch whenever Hades approached me after that fourth day? Would I instinctively do anything asked if they threatened me with the box again?

The fourth day, I survived the fourth day the same way a cadaver survives an autopsy. I was wrecked. Time didn’t exist. I no longer listened for footsteps or Max’s voice. Five, six, seven days, it didn’t matter. Hades could leave me in there for weeks. I was no longer alive. I was jelly. I had no more facilities than the most basic of organism. I had passed death.

*

After four days, we were let out. When the door opened, my eyes burned from the light. I kept them half shut as I crumpled to the floor. After several seconds, I was able to open them wide enough to see work clothes in front of me and Max standing beside me. I was glad to see he was still alive and intact. I smiled a smile that I kept inside. We had both made it. But then I turned slightly, just enough to see his face, and I could immediately tell he wasn’t the same. Where my mind regenerated in the brightness of the floodlights of the prison block, his mind remained dark. His eyes were wild. I could hear manic breathing. It would take time, I told myself. For some it takes time for the mind to return to the world.

Hades gave the order and we began to dress. My fingers struggled to open, corkscrewed in on themselves. I peeled them back to grasp my uniform, which felt wet and slippery as it slid out of my grip. The lance was only centimeters away, ready to speed up the process. Using my teeth as a third hand, I was finally able to put on the pants and the work shirt.

To my left, Max was struggling with his shirt. I stepped over to help him and that’s when we both got the collar. After the first electrocution, the guard standing over me, Zero, told me to go ahead and help Max. When I moved again to help, he stung me a second time paralyzing me as Max continued to struggle, his shirt dropping to the floor. Max picked up his shirt and struggled again. Zero kept the juice on me until Max was completely dressed. I could smell singed hair when he finally let me go from the paralysis.

Zero smiled. I tried to smile back in defiance, but my mouth couldn’t move. My face muscles were frozen from the electric charge.

Max and I marched out with the rest of the inmates. Neither of us said much that day. We made it through the eighteen hours in the mine and then sat quietly in the cafeteria for an hour before going back to our cells. I didn’t wait for the shower, collapsing onto my bed in soiled work clothes. I assume Max did the same. We had both made it back and would get to enjoy a normal night’s rest. We had survived the box. The bastards hadn’t won yet.

Next Chapter: Chapter 22
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