Prisoner Story Pdf

1 The Fourteenth Elizabeth By Tom Schultz The fourteenth Elizabeth arrived at the penitentiary on a drizzly afternoon in the spring. The prisoner was returning from his walk around the yard, his damp granite beard giving him the appearance of a wet terrier, when he spotted the new guard smoking a cigarette under the cement overhang of the barracks. But the guard would not become the fourteenth Elizabeth until the next morning, when he slid open the narrow slit in the prisoner’s cell door and dropped through a clean orange garment and a plate of lukewarm oatmeal which rattled circularly on the floor. From his bed the prisoner watched the guard’s hands, much younger and pinker than those of the ancient thirteenth Elizabeth he replaced, and knew immediately the person to whom they belonged. Then the twenty-seventh Matthew stuck his baton through the door slit and rattled it around like a rod in a triangle to make sure the prisoner was awake, and the prisoner let out some formless grunt in submission to the racket. The prisoner laid there awhile after the echoes of the baton had faded, his head propped upright against the cold cement, and thought about his children for the first time in a long time. Something about the fourteenth Elizabeth’s plump, youthful hands had shaken him momentarily from his stupor, and suddenly he remembered why he had named the guards after his children: not because of any affection or resemblance but because he did not want to forget. But it didn’t matter now. The memories of his children’s faces had receded somewhere within the fog of his mind, rendering their names mere vestiges of a former life. At any rate his Matthew and Elizabeth had most certainly matured past the point of recognition during the thirty-odd years of his incarceration. How old was he? Fifty-five? Sixty? He couldn’t be sure; there was no way of knowing. The prisoner examined the backs of his own withered hands as if their wrinkles might provide some clue as to his age like rings in a tree stump. But his hands only sagged blankly back at him. “You’re old. What more is there?” they

2 shrugged, and the prisoner knew that they were right. He noticed that his fingernails had grown almost to the tips of his fingers and knew that sometime soon the twenty-seventh Matthew would come by to pluck them off again. He sat up and put his feet on the cold cement. The plate of oatmeal was odorless and gray. He groaned as he reached for it and picked it up and began eating the goop with his hands; he had not been provided utensils for some time. Indeed, there was nothing at all in his cell except for a metal toilet and yellowed mattress with a splintered wooden frame. He awoke every morning staring up at a crack in the ceiling, a crack whose tiny crevices had over time branched out like a winter tree and whose countenance had slowly etched itself into the back of the prisoner’s eyelids. The crack represented the only distinct feature of his cell and the only thing that had changed at all since he had arrived. The prisoner regarded his relationship to the crack as something like that of a botanist observing a plant grow on a distant planet; the prisoner remembered when he had first noticed the crack sprouting from the north corner of the ceiling, and he was proud that it had grown into such a fine specimen, but he knew he could have no real effect on the crack’s growth and maturity. Still, the crack was dear to him. He spent many hours gazing up at it, tracing its lines with his eyes, trying to predict exactly where it would branch to next. Aside from the crack, his walks were the most interesting part of his day, and they constituted the one hour he was allowed outside of his cell. He wasn’t sure why they made walks a part of his routine. He assumed it was because they wanted to keep him relatively healthy, but that begged the question of why he was even kept alive. Sometimes, during the first years he was there, he could hear the hum of cars on a highway as he walked along the southern wall, and he anticipated that portion of his day more than any other. But as he grew older, the traffic dwindled and finally stopped altogether. He still listened every time he walked along the south end of the yard, but he hadn’t heard the sound of a car for what was probably the better part of a

3 decade. The silence behind the wall evoked some nameless dread in his stomach which was not easily stifled, and for the eighteen hours after the walk he was left utterly alone to contemplate what had happened to all the commuters just beyond the massive wall. He had long ago stopped trying to fill his alone time with activities. When he was younger he would make up songs or do sit-ups or masturbate to pass the time, but now he could not muster the enthusiasm for anything, and at any rate those activities had since been prohibited by the guards. He had once tried to compose an autobiography entirely in his head, but he couldn’t even finish the parts about his childhood before the mental strain of memorizing those thousands of words exhausted him. For a few years he spent his days arranging dust on the floor of his cell into vast and intricate landscapes, and once for an entire month he occupied himself with an ant colony that had found its way into his cell until it was exterminated. But now he only stared up at the lightning-bolt shape of the crack, sometimes thinking, sometimes just laying there. Sometimes he would hear the sound of water dripping somewhere in the pipes outside his cell, and he would count the drops and picture the pool swelling. The worst part of his incarceration was not the terrible food, or the bare cold of his cell, or even the social isolation. The worst part was that despite the eternity he had spent utterly alone, despite his utter powerlessness to contact the outside, and despite the terrible repetition of each passing day, he was still acutely, agonizingly sane. He had expected after some years that he would eventually drift off into a lunatic haze that would insulate him from space and time themselves. But even now the minutes passed painfully, and he still shivered uncontrollably every night in his coarse orange drape. And despite it all he was still himself. Or at least he thought he was. Nighttime was when he did most of his thinking, and he considered it a terrible vice. In the early years he had dwelled much upon his wife, and he had often sobbed audibly from missing her so intensely. But time had worn away his love for her, especially after he began fantasizing about other women, and at any rate he expected she had probably re-married since his disappearance.

4 He could still recall with stark clarity the night of his incarceration, and he often replayed the events in his mind as he went to bed. It seemed an innocuous affair at the time, and he was annoyed rather than afraid as he pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of the highway on his way home from the florists on a Thursday night thirty years ago. He went willingly into the squad car, confident in his ability to dispel whatever misunderstanding had occurred and wondering when he would be able to call home and explain why he wouldn’t be home for dinner. But there was no trial, no sentencing, and no appeal. He was simply escorted without fanfare into a small, barren cell with cold, glossy concrete walls and a small crack above the bed. And there he stayed. The first few months in his cell were the worst of them. He was possessed by a terrible indignation at his mistreatment, screaming at the closed porthole in his cell until he lost his voice, invoking habeas corpus and embarking on long tirades about the miscarriage of justice he had suffered. He fought with the guards and did not go willingly on his walks. He refused to eat or to participate in the daily changing of his orange garb. The guards responded mechanically, beating him without mercy or cruelty, and by the end of the first year he was a bruised and emaciated vestige of his former self. He had grown weak and could no longer struggle; he figured it was something in the food. Still, his faith in the law was so firm that it took him several years to begin making plans of escape. The realization came to him one morning when the second Matthew forgot to shut to door slit after tossing through the prisoner’s breakfast, and the prisoner spent the first part of the day peeking out at the prisoners in the cells next to his as they were one by one escorted on their walks. Some were the around the same age as the prisoner, in their early thirties, but some were old, nearly ancient, and bright pale with reddish irises. They looked as though they’d been there for an eternity, and this thought drove the prisoner to near-frenzy. The decision to escape at that moment became absolute, and the prisoner began to spend his time scheming, testing the strength of his cell walls, observing the behavior of the guards, and scouring the sand for useful trinkets as he trudged along on his daily walks. If he saw something especially useful, like a paperclip, he

5 would pretend to stumble and snatch it covertly as he was picking himself out of the dust. But most times he never saw anything. A few times, he attempted to befriend new guards. Their faces changed as old guards quit and new guards were hired, but their names remained Matthew, for the guard on the left, and Elizabeth, for the guard on the right. There was a significant turnover for the Matthews: they seemed to come and go almost twice as fast as the Elizabeths did, so that after the first decade of his incarceration there had been seven Matthews but only three Elizabeths. The second Elizabeth stayed on for almost six years, during which time the prisoner thought he could detect an unspoken connection with him. Sometimes he would nod to the second Elizabeth as he exited his cell for the daily walk, and sometimes the second Elizabeth would nod back. But one day the second Elizabeth simply disappeared, replaced by a young, babyfaced third Elizabeth who frowned perpetually and spared him no brutality with his baton. The sixth Matthew proved susceptible to certain forms of coercion. The prisoner discovered this after catching the guard on several occasions watching him masturbate through the tiny window at the top of his cell. The prisoner was perturbed at first, and hated the sixth Matthew for his perversity. But after a few weeks the prisoner realized how to use the sixth Matthew’s tendencies in his favor, and one day when he saw the sixth Matthew’s head appear through the window in the top of his cell, the prisoner turned to face him, his orange raiment unzipped to his knees, and began exhibiting himself to the sixth Matthew in ways he would have never disclosed to his wife. When he finished, he got as close as he could to the window and said in his now raspy voice, “You best be nice now or I’ll tell the third Elizabeth.” The sixth Matthew seemed puzzled but apparently got the point, allowing the prisoner to smuggle assorted knick-knacks into his cell and even giving him more food than usual. After only a few months of putting on shows for the sixth Matthew, the prisoner had collected an array of safety pins, pop tabs, cardboard strips, and pieces of twine. He had no idea what he was going to do with any of it, but he figured it was a start.

6 Then one day the sixth Matthew was replaced by the seventh Matthew, a lanky moustached Italian, and the prisoner’s mattress was overturned to reveal his collection of trinkets, whereupon he was deprived of his outdoor time for a full month. Towards the end of those thirty days of solitude, the prisoner began to contemplate ending his life. It was a rational decision, made not out of desperation but because after a decade of unexplained captivity, it was the only thing he had left in his power to do. They had taken control of his body, he realized, and if his body was theirs than he had no problem destroying it. He did not care about what happened to his soul, as he had little use for it when it was trapped in a corporeal prison he did not command. The only decision that remained was whether to accept the seizure of his body and the imprisonment of his mind, or to deny them the perverse pleasure they took in sapping it. It was true, he knew, that his soul belonged not only to himself but to his children, to whom he had once devoted his life. But he also knew that his children would no longer even recognize him if he did manage to escape, and that he had already failed them as a father. There was no undoing that. Despite this profound epiphany, it took several years for him to muster up enough nerve to concoct a suicide plan. But even beyond the initiative, it was not obvious how he would end his life. He could not simply stop eating; he had gone on hunger strikes in the early years and wound up in the sick bay, sucking nutrients from a tube under heavy sedation. He considered drowning himself in his toilet, but the metal seat was not wide enough for him to fit his head through. He thought that perhaps he could convince one of the guards to kill him, but when he asked the eighth Matthew, he was immediately put under suicide watch and he was no longer provided with utensils for his meals. Like a balloon held down by a fraying string, his separation from his physical self became more acute with each failure, and each degree of severance frenzied him a little more. Once again he became uncooperative and combative with the guards, except that he no longer possessed the physical power to resist.

7 He became delirious, mouthing formless words and formulae to himself at night and suffering from intense bouts of claustrophobia in his icy cell. He tore at himself with his fingernails until the guards clipped them off and once rammed his head against the wall repeatedly until the guards were forced to sedate him and put him in the hospital wing. On an especially frigid morning some days after his feverish psychosis had peaked, he lay on his mattress refusing to exchange his old orange garment for a new one. The guards shouted through the porthole, threatening him with their batons, but he simply rolled over and ignored them. His cell door was thrust open and Matthew and Elizabeth entered, Matthew clutching his baton and Elizabeth holding a pair of scissors. Matthew (who was the thirteenth Matthew since the prisoner’s arrival) beat the prisoner a few times on the back until he submitted and allowed the seventh Elizabeth to begin cutting off his garment. But as Elizabeth began cutting the thick fabric around his stomach, the prisoner thrust himself onto the scissors, driving the twin blades up and into his body cavity. The pain that shot through his body invigorated him, and the prisoner suddenly found new strength. He had caught both Elizabeth and Matthew off-guard, and he drove the scissors deeper into himself, stabbing what he thought might be his bronchial tubes and watching the bright red blood spill from inside him onto the gunmetal grey of the scissors and drip into dark spots on the concrete below. He threw his head back and laughed maniacally as he sprayed blood from his mouth and Elizabeth tried to pry the scissors out of him, cackling as though he had just delivered the puncline of a searing practical joke at the guards’ expense. When Matthew finally did the scissors out, the prisoner stuck his fingers into the red slot in his stomach and began scratching and prying, trying to tear the hole larger, his fingers slippery and soaked in a gorgeous red, his orange intestines seeping out from inside of him. He screamed wildly at his own glorious triumph, blood dripping down his chin like wine at a feast. Then the thirteenth Matthew hit him in the mouth with a baton and he fell to the floor, unconscious and missing his some of his bottom teeth.

8 He woke up in sickbay some time later, unable to move anything but his eyes due to the sedative. He spent what thought was a month in the hospital wing being nursed back to health, and then he was dumped unceremoniously back into his cell by the thirteenth Matthew and a new Elizabeth. He was only a passenger on the vessel that was his body, now nothing more than an corpse with puppet strings. He no longer decided whether he lived or died. There was nothing to do. After the scissors debacle, he forgot about his attempts to kill himself, resigning himself to his daily walks, eating his food in good faith, and complying with the guards. He paid heed to his senses and instincts and not much else, waiting for the day that he would finally be too weak to lift himself out of bed. He only hoped that when that day came, the guards would be kind enough to let him expire. But that day had not come. And now, on the first morning of the fourteenth Elizabeth, the prisoner lay on his bed examining his hands and remembering all of this for the first time in a long time. His contemplation was interrupted by the rusty opening of the door slit. Light shone through, and something dropped to the ground before the slit closed abruptly closed once again. The prisoner hopped up out of the bed, surprised a little by his own youthful spring, and walked over to the object. It was something completely foreign, and it took a minute for the prisoner to realize it was an envelope. The prisoner stood staring down at it for a moment. He picked it up. It had weight. He slid his finger along the top, neatly opening the envelope, careful not to tear it too badly, wanting to conserve the paper for later. He cupped his palm and held the envelope upside down over his hand, and into his hand fell a wrought iron key. He clutched it with his fingers and walked over the door, struck with the realization that after all this time he had never noticed the keyhole on the inside handle. Hesitantly, the prisoner inserted the key and twisted the handle. In one smooth motion, the door opened and the fourteenth Elizabeth stood silently outside with his finger to his lips.

9 The fourteenth Elizabeth beckoned and turned and walked down the whitewashed hall of the cell block, and the prisoner crept behind him. They made their way down past the other cells, and the prisoner saw that their doors had been opened as well, no signs of their former occupants apparent. The fourteenth Elizabeth turned down a foreign corridor, and the prisoner followed closely behind in a terrified glee. At the end of the hall they reached a large garage, and the prisoner was escorted into the passenger side of a dark blue sedan. The fourteenth Elizabeth climbed into the driver’s side and they were off, away from the prison, driving along the outside of the southern wall of the prison and onto a flat, expansive highway. “Where are we going?” he asked the fourteenth Elizabeth. “To see your children,” the fourteenth Elizabeth replied, “I’ve tracked them down. They’re very anxious to see you.” The prisoner didn’t say anything more, because his throat had clenched tightly and he could not make out the fourteenth Elizabeth’s expression through his tears. Instead he rolled down the window and felt the warm breeze on his face. They rode in silence for a long time. When the sun was at its peak they passed a school, and the prisoner was relieved to see children again. He looked around for Matthew and Elizabeth but the car was moving too fast for him to distinguish any of them. They began to pass familiar landmarks, and the memories frozen in the back of his mind began to thaw. At sunset they reached the old house, and the fourteenth Elizabeth beckoned for the prisoner to get out of the car. The prisoner complied, and the fourteenth Elizabeth drove off without fanfare, leaving the prisoner standing on the freshly tarred driveway. The prisoner wiped his forehead, which seemed to have rid itself of wrinkles, and marched up the driveway to the front door. He knocked three times.

10 When there was no answer, the prisoner creaked opened the door and stepped into the foyer. But on the inside, his house was unfamiliar. Someone had remodeled. The floors were white linoleum and the ceilings were tiled with fluorescent lights. The prisoner walked into what he knew was once the kitchen, now converted into some sort of doctor’s office. Four figures stood peering down at a body on a turquoise gurney, and as the prisoner approached no one seemed to notice him. Then one of the figures turned, his head lit by the intense white lamp shining over the bed, and the prisoner was pleasantly surprised to see the smiling face of the Fourteenth Elizabeth. The prisoner moved closer and peered at the body on the bed, which was shackled with electrodes and an IV. The man on the bed looked like a much older version of himself. He stared at the man’s emaciated face, eroded and deflated like a popped piece of bubble gum, and felt the world around him begin to darken and dissolve, and before he lost consciousness he heard one of the figures standing above his body remark to the fourteenth Elizabeth, “nice save, Todd. We almost lost him there.” And the fourteenth Elizabeth smiled and handed a pair of pliers to the twenty-eighth Matthew, who sighed and said to no one in particular, “well, I guess we might as well get his fingernails off before he wakes up.”