Red Sky: Chapter 32
After three days, the box was opened and I saw light again. My body felt raw and exposed as if all my skin had melted off. I fell onto the ground. It took a few seconds for my legs to start functioning. Zero gave me only one second before using the lance. The electric jolt shot through me. I tried speeding up, struggling to put the uniform on just like the first time I’d been let out. The shocks from the lance kept coming. They didn’t stop until I was fully dressed.
I stood looking out at the prison block. All of the inmates were standing at attention. Hades stood across the floor ready to shout instructions. For a second, as his eyes met mine, I thought he was going to put me back in the box and taking me out was a cruel trick. I submissively looked away hoping not to draw his anger. Orders were given and the inmates started marching. I felt the lance in my back once more and followed, ready for the hot morning air of the moon.
*
The memories changed everything. There was a primal side to my existence that had been buried deep within. That side of me was lost during the space-time jump. It came back when I needed it to kill the Lion. It wasn’t self-defense, it was a hatred that emerged from somewhere in my soul.
Max and I were the last pair to go down that morning. The guards were stationed at the base of the elevators when we reached the pit. Then two more came down behind us. There was no opportunity to talk with other inmates. The increased presence of the guards scared everybody off. All of the teams slowly migrated away.
I thought the two extra guards were going to shadow us, but they stopped at the edge of the pit when we journeyed down the tunnel. I was ready for the Snake with an axe, ready to strike at any moment. That moment never came. The several days I’d spent in the box had given me a reprieve. Instead of spending that time consolidating his power, the Snake spent it slithering for his life. I had always thought he was the Lion’s second in command, only he wasn’t. He was the Lion’s partner, that is all, and now that the Lion was gone there was a vacuum at the top. We would hear stories of vicious fights within the Lion’s old faction, of the Snake in over his head. He had more important things to worry about than getting revenge. His entire group had turned on itself.
Max and I were both catatonic at the dinner table now. Neither of us engaged with the outside world, fighting demons, alternately withdrawing and dreaming of impossible escapes. Com looked at us as we sat there, two potted plants accepting their daily intake.
“I miss chicken,” he said out of the blue. “Tomorrow night, I’m going to order chicken for dinner.”
He took another helping of paste and watched the thick green jam languidly drip off his fingertips back into the bowl.
“May I take your order for tomorrow night?”
He was looking at me. I didn’t want to play his game.
“How about yours?” He turned to Max.
Max sighed. The rest of the table thought we were crazy.
“This place is depressing enough without having to stare at you two all night.”
I gave a thin smile. It was the best I could do. The pool of blood followed me everywhere, tracking off my shoes leaving dark red footprints with every step.
He pulled me aside when we were walking to line up after Goodwell’s latest report.
“I know it’s weighing on you, taking another life. It will always weigh on you. You had no choice. You were only protecting yourself.”
I’d heard it more than once on the red moon. I'd even heard it from Com before, that when you take a life it stays with you and follows you for the rest of your days and that is the price you pay for killing someone. But what is that price, really? The other person had everything taken from them. They don’t get to live with regrets and the haunting of ghosts. They’re gone. Forever. How can one feel sorry for a murderer when the victim has ceased to exist? The price that we pay. It’s nothing compared to what was taken. I was going to be haunted by her ghost for the rest of my life. That’s not even a price to pay. She doesn’t get the chance to be haunted, she doesn’t get the chance to be visited by anybody.
Com believed there was another place. He had faith in things he couldn’t see or touch or comprehend. I didn’t even have faith in those things I could see and touch and comprehend. I had faith in nothing. If Max’s theory of our innocence gave me back my pride a year earlier, the visions of the pool of blood had taken away everything except my life. The cruelty is that I was still better off than Aya. Maybe it was time for me to take one of Com’s manuscripts. Maybe his dreams would be the antidote for my past like Max’s fantasies once were.
My cell got smaller that night. It shrunk every year on the red moon, but never in a consistent way. It would remain the same size for many months and then contract before my eyes over a period of a few nights. When I was released from the box the second time, that’s when it shrunk the most. It was now hardly bigger than the box I had just left. Eventually, that cell was going to crush me.
*
I missed other forms of life. Sitting in my cell at night staring at the walls trying to sketch another picture from memory, I missed not having any other forms of life around. The sterility of my environment was suffocating. It was as though Goodwell decided the shoebox and the mine weren’t enough to punish us and removed every other life form from the moon, so we would have nothing to keep us company.
From the ages of eight to eleven I lived in a basement apartment with my father. There was no sunlight in that apartment. A shed had been built over the front window by the owner of the house. The back was no better, a long porch blocking out all light. Trying to get oxygen to circulate through the apartment was difficult, open windows brought in dust not air. Because of the general humidity of the city, mold grew along the walls and ceiling. By the end of our first year, my father and I had developed a cough that would last the rest of our stay.
We shared that apartment with many ants and spiders and crickets and spider crickets and other types of bugs without names or classifications. Those bugs rightfully thought the basement was their domain. My father would chase them around the apartment with little success.
I didn’t mind the bugs. I felt bad when I had to kill them. Sometimes, I would watch the ants as they climbed along the back wall marching from spilled crumbs in the kitchen to their home base somewhere outside our back window.
When my father finally discovered that trail of ants, he made me put down a liquid that eliminated them. Carcasses piled up in the corner of the apartment. I felt like a general who had committed genocide. It’s not that I enjoyed sharing an apartment with all of those insects, I just didn’t want to be the one responsible for killing them. I wanted to be able to close my eyes and have them disappear without being responsible for that disappearance.
Because of the lack of oxygen and my worsening cough, I would leave the front door open for long periods to try to get fresh air into the apartment. There was no screen, so mosquitoes and even more insects would find their way inside. My father hated this. I would have to negotiate with him on how long to keep it open.
When I was nine, I left the door open a little too long and a dusty brown finch flew into our apartment. It bounced around the moldy walls desperately trying find its way back outside. The panicked bird crashed into so many walls it fell limp onto our bathroom floor.
I rushed over to it. Its beak was broken. Its left wing hung loosely from its body. I bent down to pick it up. My father yelled at me to stop.
“Don’t touch it, it might be diseased,” he said. Given our living circumstances I wondered if we were more likely to pass on disease to the bird than it was to us.
I hovered over the bird. My father came up behind me, carrying a broom.
“What do we do now,” I asked, worried about the bird’s survival, my hand tracing its body from above trying to soothe it.
“Put it out of its misery,” my father said.
I lowered my head to ground level and looked in the bird’s coal black eyes. Its body was twitching, its one good wing still flapping.
“It’s still alive,” I meekly protested. “Maybe it will get better.”
“There’s nothing anybody can do for it.”
My father moved in, standing directly above me. “You should stand back now.”
I hesitated, still holding out hope the bird would recover and miraculously fly away. “Get up. Get up.” I whispered, urging it on to survive.
My father took his hand and guided me behind him.
“You might want to close your eyes,” he said. But I kept them open and watched the horror unfold.
With a swift blow, the broom came down on the little bird. It made an excruciating squeaking noise. My father followed with more blows, maybe a half a dozen more before he was satisfied and the twitching and the chirping stopped. Feathers had come off in the brutal process and were lying scattered next to its now motionless body on the floor.
“Get the dustpan,” my father directed.
I walked into our old-fashioned kitchen, which was decades, maybe centuries, behind the latest technologies and found the dustpan. Without speaking, I brought the pan to my father and held it out for him. I think he could see the moisture in my eyes because he felt the need to reassure me.
“Don’t worry, he’s in a better place now,” my father said as he bent down and scooped up the brown finch.
This did not reassure me at all, but made me angry. Angry at my father for what he had done. Angry at the bird for being dumb enough for flying into our apartment. Angry at the circumstances that made this death possible, maybe inevitable.
I did not cry or more accurately I do not remember crying as I ran into the little alcove that served as my room. I would have slammed my door if I had one, but there was no door to slam, so instead I flung myself on my bed.
The front door closed as my dad brought the bird’s body outside. There was a spider web below my bed in the corner of the room. I stared at it.
As a nine-year old I wanted to believe in a world where nothing dies, where nothing ceases to exist. If my father was a more emotional man he might have come in and described how the soul of this little bird had ascended or perhaps would be reincarnated and everything would be fine. How the world will continue and there would be no need for me to worry about such things because it was all part of one happy natural process that leaves all of humanity better off. He did not do this. He came in to my room and switched on the holo-box to my favorite program.
I didn’t turn to the holo-box. I kept looking at the dense interconnected strings of the spider web. Reflexively, I brought my hand across the web bringing it down. Then I closed my eyes and buried my head in my pillow.