The New Guy

I come out of the hole feeling the way I always do when finally being allowed to rejoin the general population: disoriented. Discombobulated. Vulnerable. Skittish. Basically, whatever word you can think of that means that by the time they let you out, there's nothing you want more than to crawl back in.

Of course, the hole ain't really a hole, or at least not anymore. I mean, come on, we're in the twenty-first century, for Pete's sake. Nowadays, solitary confinement is more like that time-out shit the kiddie shrinks on TV are always talking about. You’ve got to sit quietly by yourself and think about what you’ve done and yadda yadda yadda. If you ask me, that shit don't work – I'm a prime fucking example. Only been in here six years and already racked up two of 'em in solitary.

I’ve always been what my ma called a hothead. I don't know why I'm like that. But say we were playing cards and you were having an especially lucky day and kept winning. Well, by my second losing hand, I'd feel my pulse speed up and my face get all hot and by the third or fourth, you'd be picking your teeth from between my knuckles. That's just how I am.

I got thirty years for being a hothead. My girlfriend told me she didn't want to see me no more so I made sure that she wouldn't ever see anyone. I only wanted to talk to her when I showed up at her apartment, but when she tried to close the door in my face, I snapped. The jury decided that it was premeditated. But if I had planned that shit, I would’ve brought my own rope instead of strangling her with the cord from her hair dryer.

So anyway, when they let me out of the hole this time, my cellmate is gone. They transferred him to God knows where. I don't care, as long as I don't have to hear his mouth no more. Those first couple of days back in general, you'd think you'd be so happy to see other people that they could talk all night and that'd be all right. But me, I always feel like I'm outside of myself or something, having some kind of out of body experience. I used to think that kind of stuff was bullshit, til I got locked up.

I have two days alone and then on that third morning, they bring in the new guy. He's probably the last person you would expect to see in a supermax. He's a little pipsqueak, maybe a hundred thirty pounds in his boots, looks like he should be a librarian or accountant – even wears these stupid little bifocals. He don't look up from his shoes when they let him in, and the guard has to tell me his name: Douglas.

And if you know what's good for you, that's what you'll call him, not Doug or Dougie. But I'll get to that later.

Thirty days in solitary, and then only forty-eight hours before my life changed forever. Had I known, maybe I would’ve done better. I don’t know, go get some help for my temper, see a doctor and maybe get put on some kind of medication so that I would just go on a bender after a breakup, like normal guys. But like they say, hindsight and all that.

Me and Douglas get along fine in the beginning. He keeps to himself, reads big books with tiny print, mostly. He ain't trying to be my friend, don't want to sit with me at chow time or hang out in the yard. I earn my eleven cents an hour in the laundry and they put him…well, actually, I don’t know where they put him. I just know that there are twenty-five hours a week that he ain't in our cell, and that's fine by me. A man needs his space, you know?

We’ve been cellmates for five weeks before my curiosity gets the best of me. "What are you in for?"

He looks up from whatever he's reading and takes off his glasses. "Why do you want to know, Steven?"

I shrug. "Just making conversation."

He stares at me a long time, and I start to feel…what's the word? Uneasy. Like I had reached out to pet a cute little Cocker Spaniel only to realize, right as my fingers grazed its fur, that it was rabid. "I killed my family," he says. "I had a wife and three kids and I killed them."

"Oh." I want to say that there's no way he could’ve done it, but he's in there with me, ain't he? "What'd you do, shoot 'em?"

"No, I used my bare hands."

My eyes automatically go to his hands – pale, slim, dainty. "Bullshit!"

"I assure you, Steven, it is most certainly not bullshit."

"Okay, okay, I was wrong. Lighten up, Dougie."

"My name is Douglas." It's real quiet-like, just loud enough for me to hear, but the way he says it makes me think that it would only take one losing hand for him to rearrange some guy's face.

Still, though he claims that he kills people with his bare hands, I can't imagine that he'd ever be much of a threat to anyone. The guy is a real lightweight, you know? The kind of guy that, twenty years ago, I would’ve been beating up for lunch money on the playground. I figure he's all talk. Maybe he thinks he has to sound tough now that he's on the inside. I could’ve told him there was no need to fake it, that doing time would toughen him enough by itself.

The next morning, I wake up and roll over to find Douglas sitting cross-legged on his bunk, staring at me. I heard that they used to have bunk beds in the double cells, but there was a bunch of complaints about bed-wetters and guys disturbing their cellmates, shaking the bed when they got friendly with themselves at night. So after a bunch of concerned relatives on the outside raised a fuss, they switched out the bunk beds for two singles. That meant getting rid of the desk in each cell, but anyone that wanted to write something could either do it in bed or at the library. But I would be okay with a little piss or getting rocked to sleep if it means he can't watch me like that anymore.

"How long is your sentence, Steven?" he asks. No "good morning," no "sorry for creeping you out," just straight to business.

"Call me Steve." I don’t know why I say that, but who knows how you're supposed to act after you catch some dude watching you sleep?

"All right, Steve. How long is your sentence?"

"Thirty years. Got twenty-four more to go."

"And you're what – early, mid-thirties?"

"Thirty-three," I answer, wondering why the hell he wants to know.

"You'll be fifty-seven when you're released."

"Yeah, so?" I don't like thinking about that, how I'll be starting my life at an age that some people actually retire. By that time, I probably won't know how to act. How will I find a job? Or ask a woman out? Being a convicted felon is bad enough for your dating resume, but I'll bet that finding out I strangled my last girlfriend would be a hell of a mood-killer.

"You seem upset," he calmly observes.

I sit up. "I am upset. First I wake up to find you staring at me like some kind of pervert and now you want to go and talk about how old I'll be when I get out. Hell yeah, I'm upset."

"Fifty-seven is quite young."

"Please. Fifty-seven ain't young. Hell, forty ain't young and I'll be there in seven years."

"That's how you really feel, is it?"

"Yeah, that's how I really feel. What kind of fun does anyone have after forty?"

Douglas looks amused. "I must say that I disagree. Once you're released, you can still make a life for yourself."

"You're just saying that because you're old yourself. How old are you, anyway?"

"My age is of no consequence."

"Oh no?" I get up to take my morning piss. "You're a piece of work, you know that, Doug? A real piece of work."

Just as I'm pushing down the elastic waistband of my prison-issue pajama bottoms, something hits me like a bag of bricks. I'm thrown into the wall face-first and my nose hits the concrete with a loud crunch. There are spots, first white then red then black, swimming before my eyes, and the last thing I hear before I lose consciousness is, "My name is Douglas."

They keep me in the infirmary overnight because of my concussion. Then they run all kinds of tests because they think I lost the few marbles I have. I tell them what happened: in that split second after I'd gotten knocked into the wall, I thought maybe we were having an earthquake or something and that the ceiling had collapsed on me. But when Douglas was talking to me (My name is Douglas), he was right over me. The bag of bricks that had hit me was him – it was like he'd flown off the bed or something, or at least jumped because I swear on my ma that he was actually crouched on my shoulders while I was still standing. The nurse tells me that I slipped and knocked myself out pretty bad, and what I described to her was just a nightmare. But I know what happened.

While I'm in the infirmary, two inmates commit suicide. Now, it's not so uncommon for a guy to off himself every now and again. Hell, living in this place, day in and day out, with no hope of anything ever being good again, can get to you. I never think about offing myself, not seriously, anyway, but I can see why someone would. What was weird about these two, though, is that neither one had much time left. Big Stan only had another two years, and Bucky had a parole hearing in a couple of weeks. And they were cellmates. Two cellmates calling it quits together is unheard of in this prison. But the most suspicious thing, or at least to me, is where their cell is.

Right across from mine.

What happened to make the two guys across from me kill themselves? What did they see? Douglas says he don't know nothing, only that he woke up and heard the guards talking about them both hanging there, dead as doornails.

Yeah, right.

On account of my broken nose, I'm allowed a day off work, which is kind of nice. They have me on some pain medication that makes me real sleepy, so I think I'll just nap while Douglas is out doing whatever the prison has him doing. But every time I close my eyes, I can feel the weight of him throwing me against the wall, hear the sound of bones in my face cracking like thunder, taste the blood that ran into my mouth and down my throat.

So I try to read but I'm getting nowhere with that because I ain't never read too good, and that's when I spot the box with all of Douglas's crap in it. I’ve seen him digging around in there and I know there ain't nothin interesting in it, but that don't mean I don't want to take a look. Before I can talk myself out of it, I pull it from under his bed and am pawing through it. Just like I thought, there's nothing there except a few old pictures and a bunch of books written in languages I don't know. I can only recognize English and Spanish, and that's just because sometimes the N's have little squiggly lines over 'em. I make sure to put everything back like I found it, and when Douglas is let back in after dinner, I'm on my bed eating my tray of food like I ain't did nothing. As usual, he goes to his box and pulls out a book. It's real thick and has a green leather cover with no words or pictures on it. I watch out the corner of my eye as he flips it open and begins to read.

I'm finishing my banana pudding when I realize he's staring at me again. "What?" I finally say when he don't say nothing.

Slowly, he brings the book up to his face and takes a deep breath. Then he turns it sideways and does the same thing. Front cover, back cover, sniffing it like a dog. "Have you been going through my things?" he asks quietly.

"Nope." I get up to put my tray through the slot for Maintenance to come pick it up. I'm scared, real scared, shaking so bad that I have a hard time aiming right and I drop my tray. Douglas hops up to help me clean up the mess, and I flinch.

"It's quite all right," he says, smiling at me for the first time ever. But the smile is cold, and nearly as frightening as knowing that he watched me sleeping. "Curiosity is a natural thing."

"Well, natural or not, I ain't touch your stuff." I finish wiping up my mashed potatoes and put the tray in the slot.

"Fine, then." We get back on our beds and I pretend to read. "Can I ask you something?" Douglas says. When I peek at him over my magazine, he adds, "It's nothing personal."

"Okay." I have to bite my tongue to keep from calling him Doug.

"Where are the death row inmates housed?"

It's an odd question, but then again, he's an odd little man. "Over in Baker."

"Baker?"

"The Baker Building. It's that white building that's far off to the west. You can see it from the yard if you stand on one of the benches." Those of us who aren't on death row but still need extra supervision stay in Kowalski; folks with lighter sentences get to stay in dormitories in Redding Hall. All of the buildings had been named after old wardens. The current warden is the first female in the prison's history. After she retires, I wonder if there'll be a Bitch Building.

"Thank you, Steven. You've been quite helpful."

"You're welcome," I say automatically, not knowing how I could’ve helped him. He lies down and turns his back to me then, and eventually I fall asleep.

Douglas is already sitting up when I'm yanked from sleep, heart pounding, by the lockdown alarm. The alarm reminds me of going down to the docks with my dad. He would hang around, asking for work. My job was to stay out of trouble, and I would watch the tugboats coming in, and they had horns that sounded just like this alarm.

There is a series of three short blasts, followed by one long one. This happens three times, and then the only sound you can hear is all the guys asking what was going on and who got out.

"I assume you know what this alarm means," Douglas says to me.

"Yep."

"Care to enlighten me?"

Actually, I don't, because I hate how he talks like he's a professor or some shit, and there's something not right about him so I'm wishing I didn't know him at all, but everyone likes to feel smarter than someone else, you know? It's nice, knowing something he don't, so I go ahead and tell him. "Someone broke out," I say. "Lucky bastard."

He looks surprised. "Lucky, you say?"

I snort. "Hell yeah. Being on the outside, no one telling you when you can eat and sleep and fucking fart all the time? That's all I want."

"But don't you think that living on the run, always looking over your shoulder, never really being able to relax, would dampen the exhilaration of being free?"

I actually think about it for a moment. "Nah," I decide. "You mean to say that you can relax here? That you ain't always looking over your shoulder?" He's crazy to think I would prefer life in the joint than on the outside, even if I was on the run. I want to be able to walk into a restaurant, order a burger however I want it, wash it down with a cold beer. Thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.

"But surely you believe that some of these men belong here, do you not? For some people, this is the best thing for them."

"I guess," I say, lying back down and facing the wall so he can't see me wiping my eyes. Maybe some of these guys belong in here, but not me.

Word gets around that it's someone from Baker that got loose. The news shakes me up a bit. Those guys are locked down tighter than anyone, and there are cameras everywhere. They have all of 'em on suicide watch, too, which is pretty stupid to me because I figure you can save the state a whole lot of money by just letting some of those guys execute themselves.

Normally, I would’ve been happy, and a little jealous, if I heard that someone broke out. But it don't take no genius to figure out that there's something strange about a death row inmate escaping the very night that the weirdest guy behind bars found out where they live.

I don't sleep at all that night. Douglas, on the other hand, sleeps like a baby, sawing logs until the wake-up bell rings. I feel like shit in the laundry that day, and practically collapse at bedtime. I have all kinds of strange dreams. In one, I'm in the prison all alone, and though my cell door is open and it looks like I can just walk out of there, I'm terrified. I hear someone coming – not footsteps, exactly, more like the sound of nails on the concrete, like there's a dog walking toward me. I peek out the door and there, at the end of the hall, is something that looks like a person mated with a bat. It's real tall, like six or seven feet, and it's got feet like a pig, you know, split in the middle. I can't see its face except for glowing red eyes and two horns on top of its head. Huge wings that look like leather sprout from its back, and the thing flaps them a few times and the dream is so real that I actually feel the wind hit my face. It steps toward me so I hurry and go in my cell and slam the door but I turn around and see that it's locked in there with me.

I wake up screaming and pissing the bed, my mouth dry and heart pounding. Douglas is on the can with a book in his lap. "Bad dream?"

"Yeah," I say, and it isn't until I hear how shaky my voice is that I realize I'm crying.

I ask for a transfer, but you can't get one without a legitimate reason, and I ain't got one. Plus, with my record, they ain't going to be bending over backwards to do me any favors any time soon.

One night I wake up and look at the bunk across from me and it's empty. I swear on my ma. There are a couple of reasons that they pull you out of your cell, but never in the middle of the night unless you're sick. Douglas was fine at lights out and besides, if he was that sick I'd have to be the one to call for help. I go back to sleep and when the wake-up bell rings in the morning, there he is, in his bunk where he belongs.

The next morning, though, we get the lockdown alarm instead of the bell. This time, Petey's gone. He was doing an eighty-year stretch for offing this guy's family after he didn't pay Petey back the fifty bucks he owed him. Crazy as it sounds, Petey really was a good guy. He was kind of an old-timer so he always had words of wisdom for us young bucks. I'm going to miss him, and I don't say that about too many folks around here.

"Hey Douglas, you're smart," I say that night, after lights out. "How do you think those guys are getting out?"

But he starts snoring. I know he's faking it, but I don't call him on it.

That night, I dream about the bat-thing again. In this one, I'm asleep in my bunk and wake up because I hear some weird noises behind me, kind of like a rustling but there's a liquid quality to it, too. I'm afraid to turn over because I know what I'm going to see. The window in our steel-reinforced cell door filters in some light from the hallway, and usually all I can see in the pale patch on the wall by my bunk is the ghost of the chicken wire in the glass. As I stare at this, though, the shadow of a horned head rises into view.

I can hear it breathing, can even smell it. When we were little, me and my brother had found a dead dog by the stockyards, and we went and looked at it every day, and by the fourth day it smelled so bad that we both puked, but even that didn't smell as bad as what's in my cell. The shadow head turns, and I know it's looking at me because I can see the glow of its eyes on the wall. I know I should shut my eyes, pretend I'm asleep, but I'm too scared to even move my eyelids. Then it turns away and is messing with something under Douglas's bed. It growls, and suddenly I'm so sleepy that I can barely keep my eyes open. As I drift off to sleep, it growls again, something like words, and my brain feels like it wants to understand but is too tired to do it.

When I get up the next morning, Douglas is gone. They ask me a whole bunch of questions, but I don't have nothing to tell 'em. They search the cell but all they find are a couple of books and I get so sick of them and their investigation that I mouth off and wind up back in the hole.

I have a hard time sleeping at night now. I'm scared the bat thing is waiting for me in my dreams. I'm afraid that it's coming for me and it's going to do to me whatever it did to those guys everyone thinks escaped. I know it's out there, somewhere, and even if it's on another continent, that's not far enough because it knows me. And when I do finally doze off, I hear what it growled at me in the end:

"Goodbye, Steven…for now."