The Prisoners

The guard stood over the murderer’s hospital bed, occasionally glancing at the automatic shotgun propped up in the corner. He looked like a lantern-jawed paterfamilias in the black uniform of the state, his charge one of its many disobedient sons. Though still in an ether-daze from his operation, the murderer occasionally broke wind and giggled, or else mouthed lewd comments about the nurses; for the past day, the guard had understood that these were the murderer’s little jokes, the eccentricities they allowed him, and he ignored them.

The murderer weighed almost 350 pounds and was nearing 70, but they chained him to the bed as a matter of course. He would not escape after the operation on his kidneys, but custom demanded the guard and the shackle. His pointed chin and nose lay like islands in a sea of white fat, the faint stubble rippling over his cheeks and not-neck. His face nonetheless had a strange rawness, as if he had just shaven, as if you would get a faint coating of soap and cold water on your lips were you to bend down and kiss him, which the guard had contemplated.

John Franklin Chorme had been stationed at the hospital to attend to this man. He executed his duty mirthlessly and with no passion. He had few opportunities to speak with his charge on account of the surgery but did not deny him conversation when conscious; like every other convict, the murderer spoke of his rapes and killings so many decades ago, recounting them like a fat child laying out of school who nonetheless impersonates a fever even as he admits his deception. Unflappable, Chorme thought of him as a baby bird; the walls of the hospital room had that grime-spotted blue of an egg.

The murderer had fallen asleep and muttered a low, whistling song; Chorme allowed himself to look on him with his lizard eyes, the delicate lashes shadowed by his cap. An oil-colored lock of hair fell over his forehead, and his wrinkled, virile jaw tensed. Uncomprehending, the murderer lay in an innocent sleep, like a giant infant who had passed out suckling. Chorme longed for the shotgun, to load it with the shells in his front pocket and then unsafety it, but he restrained himself. The murderer attempted to sleep on his right side, but the chain and shackle prevented him.

It relieved Chorme that the murderer was no longer conscious; he either spoke of his crimes or “carried on,” as they say. Chorme could tolerate the boyish obscenity, but he really did not want to hear anything more about his crimes. In truth, these vicious convicts reminded him of the nieces and nephews he had spent time with, as well as the children of the single mothers he had dated years ago. Bashful and falsely modest, the rapists, torturers, and murderers of this world did not really understand what they did wrong and only wanted to placate authority. Their tales resembled a little girl’s account of why she soiled herself in class or the exculpations of a boy caught masturbating; their eyes even took that same glazed look as they went to the ground.

Nurses and doctors occasionally walked in to check the charts and screens. They said nothing to Chorme and had grown used to the shotgun in the corner; Chorme did not even look at them. The nurses resembled the female guards at the prison, brawny and full of rage. There they conducted affairs with the men, but Chorme had no interest in coworkers. He walked the cell blocks anonymously, thin and fearful as a lizard.

After lunch the murderer awoke; confused, his eyes searched the room before his mouth opened in a laugh, exposing pink gums and short, atrophied teeth. Chorme hated his laughter; he hated his merriment and joy. The murderer knew that he did not deserve to live and owed his existence to a whim of the legal system; any man would be in his rights to kill him, though it had never come to that. As such, the murderer became whimsical and even willfully eccentric, seeing himself as a joke that went far past the punchline and only drew complaints from his interlocutors. His laughter could only be mockery, an implicit challenge to, say, pierce his throat with a nail or slice his testicles from his chubby groin.

But Chorme had not been charged with executing him, only standing by his bed much as the California vulture perches on a dead tree in the desert, awaiting the passing motorist to stare down with its filmy eyes. And if not yet a bird, then murderer was the child of some dying hen; soft, fat, bald, and white, he resembled an egg, the sole egg that had escaped the depredations of the fox yet which would squander its fortunate life, hatching into the sickly cockerel that screams against God each morning.  

The murderer looked to the guard, complaining that he had to urinate. Chorme walked to the corner and picked up the shotgun, stroking the black synthetic stock, but put it down when he saw that the murderer would not be quelled. He told him to hush, and he remained quiet for a quarter hour before begging a favor. Chorme initially refused to hear him but found himself compelled to lean down. “I gotta pee-pee,” the murderer said in a voice like that of an elderly woman who, in imperfect innocence, had denied herself every vice but smoking two packs a day; of course, he had never enjoyed cigarettes, preferring other things between his lips. The guard almost went to the shotgun but, collecting himself, sent for a nurse who soon arrived.

A muscular dark woman in gray scrubs came in, asking, “Is someone’s tube hurting him?” The nurse lifted the bedsheets along with the murderer’s gown; a catheter had been inserted in his penis, itself buried in fat and pubic hair. Chorme saw the tube running out of the shapely purple glans and thought of how it had been thrust into so many mouths, vulvas, and anuses, all unwilling. The murderer was a younger man then, and it was not aproned by his paunch and bloated pubis. If he had been given to normal urges he might have fathered ten children. He did not let himself look at her removing the catheter to apply a numbing gel and decided that if he grew visibly hard, he would ask her to draw the curtain around the bed. Nonetheless, she got done without disturbance, looking at the shotgun and then smiling at Chorme before she left.

His urethra numb, the murderer lay silently. The guard stared out the window, which showed the macadam roof of a lower level. He resisted the shotgun and tried to think of banalities, but the murderer was overpowering him. The force of all the rapists, killers, and torturers digested in his fat, hairless stomach. He looked at his white, nonexistent neck, which expanded like a frog’s with each breath. If Chorme could simply pop it, or if he could drive a knife into his belly and kiss him as he expired, the tension would go away, but the duties of his job prevented this; at the very least they would fire him.

He had yearned for a hundred convicts, though he would not admit it. Lying in bed after the shift ended, he would squander his seed on thoughts of, say, the muscular man in D-219 who had driven hot nails into the son of his landlady or the thin, mustachioed boy in F-112 who had strangled his girlfriend in a jealous rage. He loved to patrol the blocks on night shift and see them masturbating in their cells; he wished he could come to their aid but knew that procedure forbade him. A few of the female guards, it is true, had violated these strictures, but he was no woman. He envied them, wished he could carry the child of the rapist or lick the elaborate, Persian carpet tattoos of him who had killed a gas station clerk. He would love them tenderly as a woman might, and he would give them pleasure, implicating himself vicariously in their many rapes, murders, and tortures.

But criminals always disappointed him. He had walked with them for years, separated only by his uniform. He had patrolled the cell blocks and stood at the entrance of the showers with truncheon in hand, admiring their hairy, shriveled genitals. Twirling a cattle prod, he had paced the mess hall and listened in on their conversations. Twice he had crouched by a dying man, his back pierced by an angry compatriot with an improvised blade. So many days he had spent in the infirmary or accompanied the elderly to the hospital as today he stood by the murderer. He had known them and spoken to them, even learning their argot; he had grown bold and introduced innuendos, a coarse one once or twice, but they never caught them or rejoined him. They said nothing interesting and nothing shocking. Chorme saw that murderers and rapists were placid, sexless creatures. If he were to kiss them, they wouldn’t know what it was; if he were to caress them between their legs, they wouldn’t understand.

So he was glad today that the murderer did not speak or try to provoke him, though no murderer would be so bold as to importune his jailer. The hairy hand behind the black sleeve would never stroke them, nor would they kiss lips beneath a peaked cap. They hardly even wanted each other, Chorme sadly admitted. He hoped the murderer would watch television; though a convict, he had the right to basic cable when on a hospital trip. Taking his cap off for a moment to run his fingers through his hair, the guard wished they could have done the operation in the prison’s infirmary. The tension never got this bad there, eased by the wet walls of concrete.

The murderer grew restless before dinner. The guard ignored him and occasionally barked at him to quiet down. By this time Chorme’s black brows had grown damp with sweat, and his face resembled that of a frightened dog. The murderer said nothing but occasionally moaned to himself and squirmed in bed; the shackle seemed to be irritating his leg, though he made no requests to ease it. But for a moment Chorme thought he saw a look of simian cunning on the murderer’s face, as if he were planning some crafty stratagem, the very sort Chorme had been employed to thwart. Yet afterwards the murderer lay silently and motionlessly, staring upwards at the Styrofoam paneling.

It happened like this: the murderer turned on his left side and faced Chorme. He stared at him and breathed out as if deliberating on what he would ask. He knew Chorme would deny him and view it only as another obscenity, but bravely he began to speak. His guard turned to him with a scowl; the murderer was not discouraged. As a father begs a last wish of his beloved and only son, not forgetting their closest companionship from the father’s youth and the son’s infancy, not neglecting the long years they both matured, growing in knowledge and love of one another, no, not neglecting the multitude of trials that drove them apart, those great wounds that, though they each forgave the other, they would always carry, no, not forgetting either that hatred that lived within their hearts as strong as their mutual love, just so the murderer asked, “Will you give me a scratch under these sheets? I don’t think none of them nurses will.”

Chorme felt himself plunge, as if he had fallen down a chute with no bottom. He knew, of course, that if he were to lift the gown he would do something unsavory, at the very least sucking on his nipples, but for a moment he considered it. He had not seen any sores or rashes when the nurse lifted his gown, but perhaps he had a welt in some far-flung fold. A mosquito could have flown in and, nursing a tiny puncture, siphoned off his delicious blood. Chorme could only make a childish grunt at the murderer, who cackled and asked, “Well, are you gonna scratch me?”

He walked across the room to the corner, reaching into his front pocket. He thought the gun a sort of high-powered flyswatter, some convenience to do the necessities and be locked in a closet at the end of the day. He had shot it at the target range, where he saw his face in the mirror by the booth; the gun made an effeminate report, and after each shot his face contorted like an aged dame slapped by someone far beneath her station. It was not the most pleasant aspect of his job, but for $21 an hour with overtime, he would accept it.

Oh, the murderer, the murderer, the murderer!