more from Stragview
https://www.reddit.com/r/Erutious/comments/10bar1v/crying_in_the_night/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
https://www.reddit.com/r/Erutious/comments/x4ctid/stragview_stories_strange_tastes/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Do you know what it’s like to be trapped somewhere with no chance of getting out?
Do you know what it’s like to wonder if you’ll wake up tomorrow on this side of the veil or not?
These are things I’ve been struggling with while in prison, and it seems that a very different creature has come to Stragview. It’s not a beast that the Warden can control, and it isn’t something his enforcers can threaten or lock away. It came in with a sneeze or a cough, riding on someone’s shirt or hands, and it spread through the compound like wildfire.
The inmates call it K Flu, the guards call it Regis Strain, and those who get it call out for death more often than not before it comes. It’s a super aggressive lung infection, and if not treated properly, it literally drowns you in your own mucus. It started slow, a couple of inmates and a couple of guards could be heard coughing and hacking, but soon it was all over the compound. Dorms were quarantined, inmates kept indoors once a few of them tested positive, and violence was never far off.
I caught it two days before the Stragview Riots, and it nearly got me killed.
I’m not a violent man. I’m in prison for five years after a home my father left me collapsed, and I was unable to pay to have it cleaned up. I’m twenty-four, a high school dropout living paycheck to paycheck, and if I couldn’t pay to have the place fixed, how was I supposed to pay to have it cleaned up? I worked six days a week to keep my bills paid, and when the cops came to serve me court papers for “criminal littering” I was shocked. I didn’t even know that was a thing, and I’ll admit that I might have reacted badly. I didn’t mean to bump the cop as he tried to push me against the car. I didn’t mean for him to fall and break his elbow on the concrete stopper at the gas station I work at. I tried to tell this to the judge, but he didn’t care. I had never been arrested in my life, but suddenly I had injured a Leo and got myself five years for assault and criminal littering.
That’s how I came to be sick inside of the High Custody dorm, and how I almost got killed.
When I woke up with a cough, I was suddenly very thankful that I didn’t have a bunkie. My old roommate had been taken to the infirmary a week before, and I bet he was the one who gave it to me. I managed to hide it for a day, but as it got worse, someone must have noticed. I woke up on the second day to find inmates pushing me out of my bunk as they took my stuff and put it by the door. It was afternoon, I had slept through dinner as the fever started getting high, and I must have been coughing because they had discovered my sickness. They put me on the door, telling the officers that I had to go, and threatened to hurt me if I didn’t get out.
“We aren’t getting sick because you wanna hack up a lung.”
“Shouldn’t have been swappin slobber with your old bunkie.”
“Get the hell out, kid, before we make you feel even worse.”
They were backing me into the door, pushing me in mass, when the door opened and I saw three officers coming in to see what was going on. One of them shoved me towards an officer at the back, and he put me in cuffs and took me to confinement. I didn’t know why I was going to the box, but I knew it was better than where I was leaving.
“Sir, listen, I think I might be really sick. I need some medicine or something. Please, help me,”
“There’s a whole wing in seg for you guys so you can hack and cough together all night. Medical comes down all the time, so you’ll get all the care you,”
We both looked up as the siren started going off and when the inmates in H dorm started pouring out, he ran me to the confinement gates and locked them behind us. Inmates were howling for blood, and as some of them hit the tall chain link gate, I was pretty glad to be inside it. Some of the orderlies were standing on the sidewalk, looking dumbstruck at the sight of so much chaos, and as the guards in G dorm came out to see, the officer who had brought me told them to back up because he had one more for quarantine.
I was dragged down a little hall and tossed into a cell by myself. I asked him what was going on, but he just ran the door closed and opened the little flap, demanding that I bring his cuffs back. I let him uncuff me, turning immediately to ask if a riot was going on, but he closed the flap and ran off to help or hide or whatever he meant to do.
I was left in the cell with no clue what to expect, and no company except for the hacking and screaming of those around me.
The first night was the worst. I lay on the cold steel and listened to the sounds of the riot as it went on outside my window. They couldn’t get past the barbwire fence that surrounded segregation, so they took their frustrations out in other ways. I smelled smoke a few times, pretty sure they had set one of the dorms on fire, but my cell faced away from the compound and I couldn’t be sure of what was going on. I would have complained about sleeping on a cold metal bunk, but it actually felt good against my skin as I lay there. My fever was rising and I shivered and sweated in turn. I had been wearing my thermals when they took me in, which helped some but as they soaked up my sweat, they didn’t help my shivering much.
Around me people screamed and yelled, wanting food or medicine or someone to curse at. No one came in, though. Not that whole night as far as I can recall. Whatever was going on outside the walls of my cell had begun to peter out, and as order was restored, the compound became quiet. There was the occasional shotgun blast, the shouts and curses of those who refused to lie down, and the low hiss as someone put out a fire. I dragged myself to the sink once or twice, the toilet too, and at some point, I fell asleep.
I woke up to a guard banging on the door to tell me that lunch was there. I saw a brown paper bag on the floor of my cell and guessed that breakfast had come while I was asleep. Another bag joined it on the ground, but as I tried to sit up, my head spun. My mouth was full of cotton and my cheeks were hot to the touch. My cough sounded wet and felt thick in my throat. My breath was coming out ragged. I was much sicker than I had been the day before, and as I tried to ask the officer when medical was coming around. He just closed the flap and moved on. I drank some water, my throat grateful for the moisture, but the food in the bag held nothing for me. I had no appetite, no desire to eat at all, and I went back to lying on my steel frame. I slept till night and then lay in the dark as I tried to get back to sleep. I was reeling in my own skin, feeling the heat baking off me, and as I looked at the bottom of the bunk that hung above me, I started to see the lines there performing a play just for me.
The various numbers and gang signs and names and other things that countless inmates had scratched there moved across the beige plains like animals. They hunted each other, lived with each other, banded together, and as they went about their lives, all I could do was watch. I lay splayed out and panting as the little play became my whole world. It all zoomed in, hyper-fixating itself upon me as I silently drank it in like mana.
When someone called my name, I turned my head groggily and realized that a pair of eyes were looking at me through the flap.
“Quincy? Roger Quincy?” she asked again, sounding annoyed.
That was me, I realized, but I could have no more gotten up to see what she wanted than I could have told her the date.
“Has he been like this the whole time?” she asked someone I couldn’t see.
“Pretty much,” said a gruff voice I didn’t know, “He came in right before the riot the night before.” “Well, if he doesn’t want his meds, I don’t have time to worry with him.”
They shut the flap then and went on to the next cell.
It didn’t mean anything to me then, but thinking back on it now, it’s odd to hear yourself spoken of like you don’t matter or you can’t manage for yourself. It was like being a child and hearing your parents talk about what was best for you, though somehow worse because you know that these individuals don’t have your best interest at heart. You are meat to them, pure and simple, and I realize now that they wouldn’t do much until I was dead or unresponsive. I was trapped, at their mercy, and as the door to the quad slammed shut, I went back to watching the pictures on the ceiling dance and play.
The sun came up, but it didn’t matter either. I lay in my sweaty clothes and baked in my fever. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think straight, and when breakfast came, I heard the guard sigh as he told me to pick up my bags before they attracted ants. He moved on again, not bothering to ask how I was or if I was okay. I blinked and it was dark again, and when I coughed, I gasped in surprise as my air seemed strangled. My mucus had formed a pinprick for me to breathe through and as I hacked to make the hole bigger, I spat up a glob of dark-colored phlegm. It wasn’t red, but it was a dark, dark green that made me feel a little sick. I tried to get up and drink some water, but my body was so weak that I couldn’t do much but roll off the bed and flounder on the concrete.
I had hoped that when one of the guards noticed me they would get me some help.
In that, I was disappointed.
I don’t know which guard it was, but the one who came by twenty minutes later looked in and rolled his eyes at me. I was halfway between the bed and the toilet, dragging myself forward with each painful pull, and when I heard him breathe out in exasperation, I looked up. We made eye contact for a few seconds, mine pleading with his unimpressed gaze, but he shook his head before walking on. He likely saw dozens of other inmates in the same state, some undoubtedly playing it up so they could get attention, or moved to medical, or something as simple as a cold or hot shower, but at that moment, all I needed was for him to be a human being, and he failed me.
I lay there on the ground, still dragging myself along like a dog, until I got to the sink. From the concrete floor, it looked as tall as Everest, but there was another option. My eyes began to leak as I looked at it, seeing the bowl of the steel toilet, but I could no more pull myself up to the sink than I could have pulled myself onto the top bunk.
I did manage to flush it first, and the water inside was cold and not as gross as I would have thought.
I splashed some onto my face, sucking it out of my mustache as it dripped into my mouth, and lay back panting as my fever raged. The water hadn’t done much to cool my fever, and I scooped a few more handfuls onto my face when I was able. It seemed to evaporate on my skin, and I could tell it was high by the way my vision swam. I had to be running at least a hundred and one, more like a hundred and two, and as I leaned against the wall, I felt myself time-traveling. I would blink and lose hours, watching the sun slide from one side of the cell to the other.
That’s why it took me so long to remember the man I saw leave segregation.
It all had the dreamy feeling of something unreal, and when I heard the snap of the stretcher being opened, I pulled myself up to the window by sheer curiosity. Out in the block, the guards were wheeling a man out on a stretcher. He was laying on a strange glossy blanket, and I saw the nurses take his temperature and check his vitals. One of them took the stethoscope away and shook her head, the other zipping him into the bag as they wheeled him away.
I can’t be sure this happened, it could have been a fever dream, but I remember it with an oddly crystalline clarity that leads me to believe the memory is real.
Morning meds never came, but when someone called my name later, I jerked awake and realized it was afternoon. There was another sack lunch on the floor, and ants were making a trail to it. The flap was down, and the nurse was shaking a cup of pills for evening meds. I stuck my hand up so I wouldn’t miss it, but the nurse did not spill them into my hand.
“Wheres your drink?”
I looked at her, the words sounding like the reverb on a speaker as I tried to make sense of them.
“Your water, you need water to take these pills with. Get your water.”
I looked at the sink, finding I had some strength left in my legs as I tried to put them under me. I shook like an old man, my balance tentative, and as I shuffled for the sink, the nurse spat at me to hurry up. When I got to the sink, I stood there for a few seconds, trying to figure out what was missing.
Then it hit me.
“I don’t have a cup.” I half whispered. “Shut the flap,” she yelled to the guard that was escorting her, “I don’t have time for his nonsense.”
The flap was shut, and I was left standing at the sink until my shaking legs finally brought me down to the toilet. I started to cry. I was going to burn up in here. Was this where I would take my final breath? I took the opportunity to splash some cold water on my face, soaking my hair and shirt, which helped some. I was wet, but I was colder, and I started to shiver as I pulled the blanket off my bed and slept sitting on the toilet.
When I woke up, I heard the faint sound of a different nurse as she passed out pills in the early morning.
I had minutes to get ready and I meant to be ready.
I looked around for something to use as a cup and my eyes settled on a sweating carton of milk that sat beside the door. I had missed the evening meal, it seemed, and the milk inside was warm and likely no good to drink. I dumped it out with shaky hands and filled it with water from the sink. After washing it a few times, I was just filling it again, when the flap came down and a pair of eyes peeked in.
“Quincy?” she and I shook my milk carton as I held out my hand.
“Glad to see you’re feeling a little stronger,” she said, though she didn’t sound glad.
She pressed a few pills into my hand and closed the flap, her cart rumbling on as I lifted them to my mouth. I didn’t even ask what they were, I swallowed them with some of the water from the milk carton, gagging as they stuck to my dry flesh. I worried I was going to choke on them for a minute, filling the carton again as I drank more. The carton gave the water a mealy taste, but it was cold and I was glad to have fresh water as opposed to toilet water. I leaned back then, waiting for the pills to do their work, and watched the wall as another play was put on for my amusement.
The chips and knicks, the graffiti and the pictures, they all became stars, constellations that danced and dipped just for me. They wove through a celestial byplay, telling the stories of their birth, their life, and their eventual death. I was spellbound by it all. I sat with my scratchy prison blanket pulled around me, like a homeless drunk too gone to know he’s watching nothing but air.
When breakfast came, I forced myself to eat a little of it, and as the sun rose behind the plexiglass, I passed out and time traveled again.
I woke up as someone called my name for lunch, reach out so they didn’t simply drop the tray on the ground. I found I had a little appetite. I ate a little food before falling asleep again. I woke up in the afternoon for meds again, ate dinner, and found I was a little stronger. Someone noticed I didn’t have a mat and brought me one. Someone offered me a shower and I took it. The hot water felt good as I stood underneath it, and I realized that I wasn’t as unsteady as I had been. I went back to sleep when I was put back into my cell, and woke up when the nurse called my name so I could get my morning meds.
Much like the constellations, I danced my own dance and one day I woke and realized I felt normal again. Whatever I had been afflicted with had passed, and I was deemed well enough to leave Quarantine. I was given a shave and a haircut, and when they sat me down in the chair in the barber shop, I wondered who that hobo was in the mirror. My hair and beard had grown long while I sat in the box, and I wondered how long I had been there. The compound looked different than when I had gone in, but still much the same. Buildings had been repaired, the grass was regrown, and I guessed that I had spent a few weeks in segregation. While I sat, they had decided that I might be better suited to an open bay dorm, and I was placed in E dorm.
That was the end of my time in Quarantine. It wasn’t years and years spent behind the door, but sometimes I can still remember that odd time of my life. I could have easily died back there without anyone being the wiser, like the man I remember them wheeling out in a bag, but I didn’t. I survived somehow, and now I’m afraid I will lose that time. Though painful, that’s why I’m writing it down. I want to remember how I was treated, the way I was looked at as a subhuman, so I remember not to treat others that way.
I’ll be released soon, God willing, and I never want to find myself in a place like this again.