Posted by nigel1 on July 14, 2002 at 15:45:26:
It was almost that time again, his favorite time. Sure, they had a tube up his ass, and a tube down his nose, and maybe it was just one tube that went all the way through him. Sometimes it felt like that. A slanting line of sunlight moved so slowly across his wall, he thought he might weep. This is how he told the time, by the shadows on the walls, and the changes of seasons glimpsed through the window blinds. The blinds were almost always closed. It did him good to see a trace of sun. The outside world was still there. May it serve me well, he thought, through a haze of pain. May it serve me well. He always knew when it was time again. He reached the same pitch of agony every day, as that time approached, and every day he came very close to yielding, but so far he had not, and he hoped he never would. Inhuman treatment had not destroyed him yet.
It was as though he withheld his very shit, his guts pained him so, but it wasn't that, because of the ass tube, which never allowed the withholding of anything. Willynilly, as he liked to think, the tube carried his wastes away. They were beyond his control. So too the piss, by virtue of a catheter.
He waited for what felt like a long time. The time approached for his great spiritual nourishment. His soul had needs of its own, for art, and for music, and for gentle touches. He had nothing but the song. It had to stand for everthing else. Intense longing cramped his belly, making his eyes water. He had only the one moment, each day, when beauty entered his life, when he could feel something of humanity live within him. As the time approached, he could feel the tears collecting, but he held them back, as always, for fear that someone would notice and conclude that their tortures were breaking him. He recalled a lost love. Her corpse frequently drifted through his reveries. A single blast from a 12 gauge shotgun, full in the face, settled her fate. Maybe that was why they kept him here. It was hard to remember. Or maybe the problem was that he'd fucked the body afterwards, fondling and sucking amid smears of blood and brain, shards of bone. He couldn't recall that time very well, not every lurid detail. Then again, maybe he was the one who got the facefull of buckshot, and he was in hell. That would make the fate of his lost love a deep mystery-- unless they killed her, too.
He was a minimalist by necessity. He loved to do imitations, working with what they left him. It was gratifying to pose as someone else. Freddy the Freeloader was one of his favorites. His disguises were so subtle, no one ever detected them. He was fairly sure of that. But one must try! Lacking arms and legs, and most of his face, nothing very elaborate was possible. Still, he contrived to create an aura about himself, of good old Freddy, or Johnnie Cash, which was another old favorite. With the aid of his good eye and his belly and what remained of his chin and torso, he generated a disguise, and wore it until the mood suited him to abandon it. He had to be silent, lacking a tongue, so no dialects were possible. Besides, part of his mouth was sewn shut, stitched from the inside like a cadaver's. In happier days he had been very good at dialects. He could sing, too, doing a good Jimmie Rogers imitation.
No, he wasn't the one who had been shot in the face! It had been his girl. They'd been out in the woods someplace, and he had his shotgun in the window rack of his pickup, loaded as usual. And he had the hallucination that while he and his girl were getting it on in the woods, with the help of some beer and Southern Comfort, a couple of good ol' boys walked up on them, and butt fucked each one of them with their deer rifles, grinning and laughing and having a great old time, until one of them took his (goddamn it he couldn't remember his own name-- he was The Man Without A Face and the Man With No Name!) shotgun out of the pickup and shot his girl in her face! And fucked her! And shot her again in her dead cunt! It was a double-barrel job. And then with both rounds fired, they threw the thing at him and he caught it and he remembered how it was sticky with blood, but he threw it down because it made him sick. Worst part, maybe, was when they told him to fuck that bitch if he wanted to live, and he did it. At least, he got on top of the ravaged corpse, and blubbered and rolled around on it, and begged for mercy, please don't kill me, please don't kill me-- but after a while he realized he was alone, alone with his murdered girl. Yes, he had killed her. It got clearer and clearer as time went on, under questioning, hell yes, he killed her, he didn't know why, he just did it, see, maybe it was the reds he was doing at the time, he just went crazy and imagined those two rednecks, and then, no, he didn't IMAGINE those two rednecks-- he lied! That's what he did, he lied! There never were any two rednecks and by god he'd killed in hot blood-- LUST MURDER!
It took her a long time to die. Instead of shooting straight into her pretty face, the killer (HIM! HIM!) fired at an angle, under her jaw, grazing upward, so her cranium didn't just get filled with lead shot and blow away, but her facial bones were torn off. She was drowning in her own blood, unable to scream or moan. All during the rape, afterwards (HE DID IT! IT WAS HIM!), she had tried to grope at the mangled bloody cavity that had been her face, until the very moment her life dribbled out of her. The cartilage, the muscles, the defining bones of her face, the soft globes of her eyes (he couldn't recall what color they had been), were all gone. He must have raped her while she wriggled and kicked, feeling perhaps more energy in her hips than he had ever known before, except he just couldn't remember that. He didn't remember cumming. He was just on top of her, smeared with gore, and she was dead, and he'd become a necrophile-- among other things. And although he remembered very well the muzzle of his shotgun proping between her legs and into her pussy, he couldn't remember seeing her crotch blown apart, the intestines surely flying like a nest of pink snakes-- he must have closed his eyes. When he opened them the snake's nest was gaping wide open and all the little snakes were dead.
It was coming! The song was coming! And there it was, immense, faceless as a god, bigger than life, something approximating a Grateful Dead concert, where they've gotten too stoned out for music, and they're creating divinely inspired waves of feedback, lashing a wind-swept desert through an arsenal of Celestions, stacked in towers ninety-five feet tall, but far, far away, on some other planet, cold and harsh. You could hear it if you really tried.
In the prison, every day, precisely on schedule, the sanitarians turned on the incinerators. They were gigantic forced-air furnaces, fan-blown, with very efficient precipitators to catch all traces of ash. The fifeen-hundred horsepower motors driving the fans vibrated throughout the complex, creating myriad harmonics, rich sonic tapestries at the very threshold of audibility. Years ago, when the installation was new, the noise was much worse. Every move on the part of the contractors to improve the situation made it worse. Finally, an acoustics expert was hired to "tune" the vibratons into ranges the human ear would find soothing.
Furnaces were the prison's heart and soul. They burned the day's accumulations of slops: arms and legs, noses, teeth, eyes and eyelids. Testicles and fingers, toes and toenails, random bits of gouged flesh, but no transplantable organs. Coffee grounds and sanitary napkins, used hypodermics-- all were consigned to the flames. It was the most advanced Death Row facility in the land, designed to stifle once and far all the public demand for justice. Above the main gate was inscribed the motto: EAT DEATH SCUM. But it could just as well have been: BURN BABY BURN-- A PIECE AT A TIME.