What Is Time to a Pig? Page 3

  “I mean, it’s a real penguin . . . from the north pole or wherever. Not a nun.” Tommy kept telling the joke and Gloomy nodded as if listening while he stood on his tiptoes, watching the pipe insulation disappear.

  The tide kept running. The rock was up on its haunches now because the tide was going out, garlands sagging down to the sand sculpted around its base. A helicopter circled like an injured bug far above the fire.

  Gloomy’s side hurt. This was only his third day back on the job, following an attack. He had had to fill out a wellness form, lie to the doctor, and write something in his official journal, which he hated to do, but not as much as he hated being on Ward 11 with the meat pumps. The clinics were full, and Gloomy would rather be out in the rain with his broken ribs and infection anyway because he so loved being a fire tender.

  The attack had been over before he was aware of being hurt. He was in a crowd outside the pharmacy. He didn’t need any meds, but as he pushed his way around an inmate, he felt pain run up his side: sharp, then dull.

  Gloomy remembered men walking quickly away, the sound of their footsteps receding as he stared up at himself in the smoky glass ceiling. Soon there was an alarm and the sound of closing doors. Blood spread across his white shirt and down his tan pants slowly, like a time-lapse image of a flower blooming on TV.

  Gloomy didn’t know who had shanked him, and he wasn’t that concerned as long as it meant he could have a single unit. He was back in population, which was not the usual drill, but Gloomy didn’t file a grievance because being in protective segregation was worse than being in the hole.

  Protective seg was twenty-four-hour lockdown with three hours a day in a private yard so you could throw a ball at a bare hoop. You never saw the other convicts, but you could hear them. Protective seg was full of rapists and snitches. They were the worst kinds of talkers. These were men who gained advantage by insinuating themselves into whatever nonviolent nature you had left. They attached themselves to you like sea anemones to a tarred piling. Once they had you in a conversation through the bars there was never a moment’s peace. You would hear their dreams, anxieties, and fantasies. They were always niggling for a confession from you. Always looking for a bond. Gloomy had once spent a stretch in protective seg with a towel wrapped tightly around his ears. He was glad to be back in population now even if it meant he might be killed.

  Gloomy turned a burning two-by-four over and flipped it into the flames. The guard kicked another box of scrap wood over toward the fire. They were supposed to go through all the materials to make sure there wasn’t any contraband or dangerous materials. Gloomy was serving a life sentence, so he had a high-security rating: SR-100. The SR rating should have made it illegal for Gloomy to have his hands on any sharp tools or materials that could be fashioned into tools. But the truth was that Gloomy was a thirty-four-year-old lifer who would do anything the guards asked rather than risk losing this job, which got him off the main campus.

  The construction site was to be the new women’s facility. There was a stream of federal dollars for prison construction after the Soledad and Pelican Bay riots and the corrections strike of 2021.

  The California riots and corrections strike had been uglier than the Arizona riots in the seventies and had changed the prison industry forever. In the summer of 2021, prisoners started killing and dismembering guards, spraying the walls red with arterial blood. After the first four days, they naturally turned to the snitches and trustees. After the first seven days, all structure in the convicts’ community was lost, and the killing became a random and chaotic ballet of suffering. Prisoners eventually became hungry and fatigued by the weight of so much death. Some tried to escape and were shot by snipers on the perimeter. The prisoner representatives asked for nothing more than humanitarian relief akin to a peacekeeping force to be sent back into the prisons. But by then the corrections officers had called for a strike. They were not going back in to face the survivors of the worst prison riots in American history. Not without a new contract, at least.

  So the new federal program came into being. The Republican president maintained that it was a new era and communities had to take a proactive stance toward prison reform. This was to be the new Public-Private Partnership where business, government, and community would usher in a new era of public corrections. Public correctional facilities would become as important and as ubiquitous as public education. Prisons were good for communities—particularly the small rural communities of the west and the north.

  The revitalized American economy, in conjunction with the telecommunications and computer industries, began building a whole new style of prison. Gloomy was now serving time in Stevens, a three-year-old high-security work facility built on Yakobi Island off the coast of southeastern Alaska. Named for a powerful Alaskan senator (who had been convicted, then pardoned for accepting expensive gifts from powerful lobbyists), Stevens may have been a model prison at the time, but the new women’s facility being constructed would be an even finer example of confinement, control, and protection. Olympus had originally been intended as one of the few maximum-security prisons for the upper echelons of criminals, but after the nuclear exchange it became a holding station for suspects and terrorist debriefing in what had been one of the biggest embarrassments in nuclear whack-a-mole that the spy world and security agencies had ever known. There was a mass murderer who had been featured in a popular movie and one drug lord from Mexico, but truth be told there weren’t enough prestigious criminals in America, so Olympus filled up with terrorist wannabes; uncharged suspects from Korea, Saudi Arabia, the Gaza Strip, North Dakota; and a surprising number of people from Harlan, Montana, along with some run-of-the-mill criminals from old-fashioned prisons, or “gladiator schools,” in Texas and around the country.

  Gloomy was ostensibly serving a life sentence. But at first they moved him around. No one knew where he was and they kept him moving, so if he had confederates out in the world they would not know where to find him. Only Gloomy’s lawyer could find him, but that didn’t matter because Gloomy never wanted to speak with her. Probably because everything about his arrest and conviction was hurried and covered in the smoke and mirrors of “national security,” his sentence was to be carried out in a media black hole where no one could see or photograph him. The government was not done with Christopher McCahon.

  Gloomy tried to do his time as peacefully as possible, but he could not settle in anywhere. If that meant getting outside to look at the birds and watch the fish jump, that was what he aspired to do. He didn’t think about the past. He didn’t care to remember how young he felt when he first came inside, or how old he felt after his first month. The first nights after being transported from a pretrial facility to the hard rock where his life was going to end are lost to Gloomy now. No memories remain of his early incarceration. But there are lessons, and those lessons have a backdrop. He’s not sure if it happened to him, but he knows that every new client who comes in cries until they fall asleep. All night in every lockdown, the new fish cry. Some call out names. Some stifle coughs and choking sounds, as if the grief in their lives was trying to jump up out of their chests.

  On a transport bus once—Gloomy couldn’t recall which one, and the state had been boarding out its prisoners at the time—there was a white kid with a new haircut and pimples staring out the grating welded over the bus windows. The kid watched the passing buildings warily, as if each one were a wild animal clawing its way toward him. “Is that it?” he’d ask breathlessly as they passed some institutional white buildings with metal fencing. “Is that it?” Some old convict from the back yelled forward, “Just look at the wire on top of the fence. What direction is it leaning?”

  The boy looked and said almost as if to himself, “It’s tilted toward the outside of the fence. So what?”

  “So, you ever hear of anybody ever wanting to stop people from climbing into a prison?”

  Then the bus was past the place, and the kid leaned back in his seat and started to cry. He was cuffed to an older con and this older man turned away in a perfect gesture of indifference and contempt.

  After the California riots, American prisons became cleaner, more like high-tech cattle pens, just as the new public schools are today. Olympus looked more like a fortified junior college than it did an old-style stir. The warehouses and communication center resembled gymnasiums. The largest building was the four-acre clinic unit. From the outside, the prison’s tannish gray walls matched the island’s rock bluffs, and the blue metal roofing recalled the sky on a late fall day when the first snowstorm was breaking.

  All the housing units were two stories. The first floor was called “Earth,” and the one above it was “Heaven.” Earth was where the prisoners lived and worked. Heaven was where the guards looked down on them from catwalks. Men lived in units or “cubes.” Six cubes were joined into “suites” that had a common room and work stations. There were monitors built into the desks at the work stations, and each workstation had both styles of input pads. There were plug-ins for headsets. The walls were white with pale blue outlines of mountain peaks painted at eye level. Each suite could be locked down from the main control; the whole facility could be separated off into no larger than hundred-foot areas.

  The ceilings to Heaven could be opened anywhere to allow armed teams to enter an isolated cube. The prisoners could be gassed to the floor, cuffed, and extracted from the cube without an extraction team ever having to actually enter a large hostile territory. In Heaven, the rooms and corridors of Earth could be controlled like a mechanical maze, and because of this convicts were not allowed on the catwalks of Heaven. The entryways on and off the secure catwalks were the most secure areas of the prison. No p
risoner was ever allowed up, and if you were caught there, you were “tagged”—meaning killed.

  There were still high jinks among the convicts: blanket parties and beatdowns, rapes and sexual predation. There were dealers and bankers but nothing that wasn’t in some way or another allowed by the prison administration.

  As far as Gloomy knew most of the boys at Olympus were there for “the rest of the day,” meaning they were serving life sentences. This made it somewhat more mellow because there were older convicts from other facilities and not many crack babies or maniacs trying to crawl their way out. Most guys were trying to do easy time. There were fewer snitches at Olympus than at McNeil. There were fewer guys looking to make a deal, mostly because if you were on the bench for the rest of the day, there were fewer deals to be had. It was a work facility meant to pay its way. The lifers were given meaningful work to do in exchange for a relatively safe place to live. If you wanted to stay political or be a bloodletter, you were usually sent down to one of the killing farms in Texas or to the exchange prisons in Mexico.

  The younger prisoners frightened almost all the older prisoners in the American penal system. The old men were relatively weak and physically vulnerable, while the young ones—the gladiators and guerrilla boys—were crazy. They really didn’t seem concerned about survival. In some police precincts you might see an officer lose patience and stick a gun in a man’s mouth to get him to confess, but the young ones were more likely to get an erection than they were to confess. Violent death was familiar to them. A head shot would be the last big rush. There were few ways to accommodate men like this. The new prison design reflected what it took to contain the violence on the streets of America. They were the containment boxes, the machines that separated good Americans from their wayward children.

  Gloomy had done a fairly decent job at staying healthy. He got to move and breathe uncirculated air on the construction site, and he knew there would be no end of work as long as they kept building prisons. The prison industry had become the perfect vehicle for the redistribution of federal money; technically all the new jobs created had to be put out for the best bid, but nobody could compete with existing industry. In fact, industry was complicit in the creation of this cheap labor. The expanded use of convict labor had caused some squawking from some union heads, but there were always trade-offs. Higher-paying administrative jobs were created for the “free” population and the lower-skilled positions—keyboarding and “channeling” the complex switchboard systems—were perfectly suited to prison workers. And these jobs were counted as American jobs, which were always a win for politicians. Any job not going to an illegal immigrant was so much the better at election time. There were illegals in jail, of course, and though they claimed there had been no illegals building the prison, according to the locals working out there, there were plenty non–green card Mexican skilled laborers on the subcontractors’ crews who signed on for the specialty painting, rocking, and pouring jobs—the hard stuff that union guys didn’t want.

  So, too, there was money to be skimmed off the top and into campaign coffers, as has always been the case in American politics. Prison work was flush with money—enough for everyone: legal, illegal, bosses, and gangsters—just as long as you could make prisoners work for nothing and the government kept printing the cash.

  The new women’s prison was being built with the best of laser and fiber trunk management. Prison workers would be taking credit card orders from the Philippines and reserving rental cars and hotel nights in Bangkok, all in a completely closed and secure “Island 3000” communications system. Inmates would scan NSA files for keywords or try to find patterns in coded bank transfers, never knowing what kinds of cases they were working on or what countries they were dealing with. And from there, they worked their way up to more preferred work as their diligence and reliability improved.

  All the packing boxes at the construction site were marked with Chinese logos. Gloomy had seen so many of these logos over the years that he just ignored them now. He was burning another spool of excess wire when a tine of his fire tool clicked against a hard object in the thick ashes beneath the fire. He flipped it to the side and looked carefully at a sparkling gem-like object. It was melted glass from yesterday’s fire. The wire had spun glass inside, and if the fire got hot enough the glass melted and pooled in the ash. He had seen many of these, but he didn’t dare pick one up even if it had cooled off. An object like that would have been valuable contraband. A cooled glass chunk could slip fairly easily into a body cavity and would not be picked up on a metal detector. A good-sized chunk could be fashioned into several remarkably deadly weapons.

  “Then the penguin says, ‘I swear it was ice cream,’” Tommy said to one of the construction grunts eating a doughnut next to him, and they both laughed and turned away from each other. Tommy patted his gun, and the construction grunt looked half embarrassed and tried to finish his snack so he could get back to work.

  Gloomy was absorbed in looking at the glass. Isn’t that just the way, he thought to himself. “Isn’t that the way.” The glass was beautiful. Gray to black but clear in some places. It was maybe a pound of curve and flow. As Gloomy stared at it he thought perhaps he could see the face of a saint. He didn’t know the names, but he could see a woman in this abstract bubbled figure.

  “How lucky,” Gloomy said, and Tommy looked at him quizzically, then sipped his coffee. With the shattering of militant Christianity, the free Bible groups had been outlawed in American prisons. There were the April 19 groups and the New Left Christians. It had gotten so bad that the book of Revelation could not be preached at all and the New Christian services had to stick to prosocial, nonviolent themes. “McBible,” the convicts called this new institutional Christianity, or “Scripture Lite.” April 19 groups hailed back to the days when neo-Nazis began to merge with the David Koresh gun-loving Christians, and they all took common cause with the poor children killed by the FBI when the good reverend called the cops’ bluff in Waco on April 19, 1993. Later McVeigh had blown up the Oklahoma federal building on the anniversary, and the American far right made a holiday out of April 19 and it stuck.

  Gloomy vaguely remembered being a Christian. He still read his Bible, and sometimes pieces of scripture or an image of some biblical figure would come into his mind unbidden. Lately Gloomy was trying to remember his old beliefs and his childhood, but his mind was all jumbled up.

  Gloomy was burning a wooden box with the strange construction logo on it, but he preferred to look at the molten glass. He thought maybe a miracle was something different from what everyone thought. He had once believed in miracles. He remembered that. Some voice (was it a woman’s? It seemed high, almost like the hiss of the wind) spoke directly into his brain. “Look at a snowflake,” this voice said explicitly into his ears, “and then look at a whole city covered in snow. That is a miracle of planning and design.”

  He had heard the voice periodically for the last month. It didn’t frighten him, but he wondered what it might be doing in his head. This voice covered his brain during sleep like warm syrup and he was grateful for that.

  “What if miracles are different than anyone supposes?” Gloomy said out loud. Tommy shook his head and made a “cuckoo” gesture, swirling his index finger around his temple before turning away, but Gloomy kept talking to himself in a low whisper. “What if someone threw some sand in the air and it came down in a heap.” Gloomy turned a burning board over with his fire tool. “What if he did it again and it came down a little different? What if this person kept throwing sand up in the air for a whole year?” A raven circled the beach, landed, and waddled toward the fire. “Nothing but throwing sand up in the air and looking at the pattern. What if he did that for ten years? Or a hundred years or a hundred million years? And what if he threw the sand up in the air and it came down in the perfect likeness of a man? Wouldn’t that be the miracle?” Gloomy kept thinking as he looked down at the molten glass figurine. “Wouldn’t that be the miracle?” he said out loud in a conversational tone. He bent down to pick up the cooled molten glass. He heard Tommy pull his weapon off the shoulder clip.