Untouchable
GUARD: “Burrows! You awake? Know what I read? ‘Nothing focuses the mind quite like knowing one will be hanged in the morning.’ Mark Twain said that.”
I’m skinny with hard arteries and it’s difficult to stand without breathing hard, so I balance myself against the skinny dingy cot which takes up a third of my cell, trying to urinate into the hole they give you. Just a trickle. In spurts.
I will in fact be hanged in the morning. Or worse. They allude to it, they make bets on at the desk around the corner, past the black alloy bars of the door and the thicker black bars of the gateway. They’re purposely not quiet about what’s coming to you, but purposely vague: “Permanent Conditioning.”
My forehead is swollen and bloody from hitting it into the wall. They laugh like they think I think I’m trying to make them care.
In the corner, there’s a little spider with seven legs that’s been looking up at me, lonely.
I can’t describe to you exactly what the blue paint smells like, but it’s persistent. Every inch of wall surface here is caked with it, four layers thick. Easier to paint over than to wash off. Smells like vomit, maybe, like vanilla and egg-whites. It’s constant, you can never get used to it.
There is no medical treatment.
“Goodbye. Goodbye. Bad people.”
The guards, the hall-monitors, the social gatekeepers, to be human is to be fascist. They hurt you to prove that they can. Then go home and jerk off thinking about it, or sing to themselves while they rearrange knickknacks on the mantles above the fireplaces in their sterile, manicured living rooms.
There’s a blue-grey bowl on the floor I kick around when it’s empty. It slides across the concrete with a satisfying krrrrrshhhk. I’d rather be anywhere than alone with my thoughts.
GUARD: “You’re a piece of shit.”
When I was younger, I read about the Untouchables in India. They had a tight caste system, and if you were a part of a lower caste, you could never rise out of it. And I used to think, “why not leave? Just go two towns over where nobody knows you, and start over new and fresh.”
But that’s not how it works in this world. They will sniff you out. It starts when you’re young. If they smell the difference on you, they’ll make sure you know, and once you know, you can never make eye contact again, or stand straight without shaking when under their gaze. You can walk a thousand miles and every face will scowl at the stench of you. And treat you as you deserve, or less.
You can declare who you are, but unless you learn and adopt their social mannerisms and cultural signifiers and navigate the obstacle course of their dialects and traditions and surnames and occupations, you are what they say that you are. Under the hot sun of their contempt, you crack and wither.
“Goodbye, monsters. Go.” I mutter to myself a lot, it’s like a Tourette’s, but really I’m barking down an old memory. It works, surprisingly.
Argent Burrows, AG 643972. Scheduled for Permanent Conditioning. What names we give ourselves!
We think we give our children names that will change the course of their entire lives. That this baby will be treated in such a way as to become “Brittany” when they could have been molded by the mob into the “Mackenzie” they would have been if we’d decided for them differently. I wasn’t really kidding when I suggested to our son’s mother that we could name him “Doctor,” “King,” or “President.”
When we write about ourselves, we can choose our own names. We’re the heroes of our own narrative. Marion Robert Morrison. Norma Jeane Mortenson. Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner. Argent Burrows.
But to sustain it off the page? To pass? That requires an actor, a very smart liar. Some of us, we untouchables, even if we can muster a lie, can’t believe ourselves. Much less gather a cult or navigate a dinner party.
You’ll be punished for trying. Or not trying.
You scratch through the persistent blue paint with your fingernail like you’re doing an archaeological dig. You meet the ones who slept here before you and suss out their suffering by reading bloodstains and patches of painted-over food and feces. I do, I do.
Some of you were lucky to be born with healthy bodies and healthy minds. “Fuck you, I’ll kill you.”
When I was 21, I joined the Army. I served four years with an airborne reconnaissance unit. We did training exercises all over Europe. I got to see some sights. I had a deployment in the Middle East and even got a commendation when my unit located and evacuated a downed crew in the mountains.
At 25, I left the service and took some time to find myself. I wandered around aimlessly. Got into drugs, had some beautiful experiences. Eventually, I graduated to meditation and long-distance running.
One time on a sailing trip in the Aegean, I helped rescue two Greek fishermen after their boat caught fire. Swam a line over to them and got them over to our boat until the Coast Guard showed up.
Then another time, one Summer in Tangiers, I found myself in the middle of a hotel robbery and managed to talk one of the thieves, just a kid, into putting down his gun and leaving with his friend. I think about him, sometimes, and wonder if he cleaned up his act. He was more scared than the folks cowering in the lobby.
For a while I worked in international security and traveled a lot in Western Europe and North Africa. Once I crossed the Sahara in an old Land Rover with a Norwegian hippie called “Brewsky.”
I met a beautiful woman in Paris named Claire, and we were off and on for years. We made a beautiful baby boy named Célestin. She never wanted to marry, and she's still the only friend I fully trust.
In my early thirties, I moved into international consulting. On assignment in Morocco, I learned that a local businessman had been using a supposedly abandoned airstrip to move stolen antiquities. My entanglement with that situation lasted a couple years, but I won't be expanding on that.
I bought a house overlooking the Mediterranean. I learned to pilot a helicopter. I became a competent homemaker. I took up painting (poorly). I had friends all over the world. I was never wealthy, but I prospered, and I was fit, and I took nourishment from life. I always used to say, “life is beautiful when you meet it halfway.”
Yeah, but all that is a lie. That's what you like is a liar. You don't like a survivor who hunkers down and merely persists. You can't use that story to sell each other anything. I never went anywhere. I never did anything.
A war hero doesn’t sandwich himself between oversized couch pillows to try to disappear, while outside the boys wait for you to materialize, where they will take their aim, laughing, hurling hard green oranges. The ceiling looms an inch over your head, your prone body limp on the sandy tile floor, entangled in sullen gravity, listening to their running and cackles as years go past. Cool story, bro.
Sorry for the dissembling. The truth is relative. Who am I, even. My friend the spider has lost another leg. Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.
They beat you like a dog, then mock you for running under the porch. Beat dogs don't act like you want them to act. They've learned what a human hand is for, lost trust forever.
GUARD: “But you're not a dog, you're a man. Allegedly.”
Mark Twain wasn’t the one who said that about being hanged. The quote was "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It was Samuel Jackson, talking about William Dodd.
“Monsters!”
Muttering to myself. Barking at bad memories. Breathing in vomit-blue paint fumes all through the night. Thinking bleak thoughts. But this is more or less what I need you to know about me.
As a child, you end up with two choices. You can ask yourself, “What do they want from me? How can I be what these cruel bitches want me to be?” That's what a lot of little girls learn to do. Boys too. They study what other people expect of them, then try to give it to them. That’s the easy way, if you’re equipped to comprehend the unwritten rules.
Or you can be your confused self and shoot the world the bird and stand wide-legged with a fierce frown staring right into the faces of the bastards holding up a mirror to a world that’s wrong. They’ll ridicule and humiliate you. And you end up here in the end, emaciated, with a left arm you can’t lift higher than your shoulder.
Thinking these same blue thoughts over and over.
“Goodbye. Fuck you. Bad people. Go.”
With blue walls, you don’t know that the dawn is peeking.
Then there are the pretends. Did I mention them? The ones who want you to know they’re your friend. In the end, they always turn on you. “I never liked you. I used you and I want you to know it.” Sometimes they say it out loud. They call you “It” to someone else standing there, so you can hear. Is that the last thought I’ll ever have? Such an icy skewer.
The world’s an old queen. I’m just getting started. But I’m out of time.
GUARD: “It’s time, Burrows.”
Actually, the quote was Samuel JOHNSON: “The hangman will expect you to be punctual regardless of whether you have yet taken your breakfast.”
When the guard unlocks the door, I’m ready. I’ve been saving my energy.
I close the distance with three long strides and ram the toothbrush shiv into and out of his jugular. He tries to cover the slurping hole with his hands, but already dark blood is gushing down his chest, soaking his grey uniform. Within seconds, his body slumps and slides down the bars of the cell. Blood pools black in the dim light.
As I confiscate his baton and scan the hallway, I know you know this is not true. I listen for footsteps. We’ve made a lot of noise. Has anyone heard the commotion?
My legs are trembling. I look left and right. I bolt for the hallway, truncheon held high by my one good arm, ready to crush someone’s skull. Metal coils of adrenaline and instinct.
I approach the empty guard station. The computer monitors glow blue with spreadsheets, but the black padded leather rolling chairs are empty. In the spaces of the keyboards of the machines are white and orange crumbs. There’s a framed photo of a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter.
The way forward is a featureless hall. The lights are fluorescent, aseptic. The floor is pitted with linoleum tiles like a game board. Vision asunder. There’s nowhere to go but forward.
After a deep breath, I enter the claustrophobic hallway. An obvious lie. No one gets a rebirth.
Blood is caking in the wrinkled forehead of my surely deranged and desperate face. A hallway that gets longer the more I struggle forward. Walls slimy with blue paint. Why aren’t there alarms, voices, bootsteps, pursuit? At the end of the passage, there’s a grey door.
GUARD: “You’re a slippery one.”
I look up at the doorknob. Brass and tarnished, fondled by many fingers. I reach up with both small hands and twist. Lurch through the doorway.
Outside, the sky is grey and grumbling. It’s raining through the trees by the river behind the old house. Spanish moss hangs from the limbs, waving in the wind. Water pools in mildew-peach lichens, splashes of water as raindrops splash water. The path to the river is overgrown, and we stumble over oak roots buried by tall grass. In the neighbor’s yard, a squat orange tree.
Out there, over there, there I am, six years old, up to my thighs in the water by the bank, naked, with long curling yellow hair. I’m standing motionless. I’m beautifully uncomprehending.
The river is swollen with the tide, brown and immense. You can’t see across the shore to the houses on the other side even when it’s not raining. Once I took my kayak to cross, but I got scared halfway and turned back. There’s the little blue kayak, over to the side on the shore, next to the goldfish pond ten feet deep. There’s the old brick barbecue.
“Goodbye. Goodbye. Bad people.”
My little healthy body with a heart that surpassed. A force of nature.
The tropical storm intensifies its heavy breathing. Lightning far out, over the river, with the wind whipping the earth lifting you up into the air with arms spread wide, riding the waterspout, the center of the atom. When you lift your hands to shield your eyes to stop the burning sting, the storm is pelting you with minnows and bream and crabs and hyacinths sucked from the mud and the mud swirling around you in a tornado of black sludge and water-weeds and moccasins and thick brown bubbles, and you know that can’t be so. That simply can’t be so.
Mighty, I swallow the river. I’m breathing the storm. When it thunders, I growl in chorus.
***
Neil Oldman
felt