Alone, I stand in my bean slot. I've been in this cell ever since my arrest. Other convicts talk legalese, about appealing their guilty verdicts. Headphones I'm unable to remove (neat trick, "Officer Ricky," thank you 50 Cent) force me to hear voices from Treachburg. "I can't hear him," referring to my daily exercise on the stationary bicycle, cueing me that I was under surveillance and, "He doesn't have to do that," as I rearrange my genitals getting off the bike. They objectify me, as if profiling a sex offender or an immigrant without papers. "Where'd he get that shirt," implying I have an offshore account when, in reality, I got the shirt in a "Free" box across the street my house. Treachburg appeared generous, but their generosity amounted to overkill of all my Constitutional rights.
I must have committed unstated crimes. I pulled Buck Rogers Time, not believing I'd ever be released. When a federal court found me guilty, the judges, military lawyers, and even my own court-appointed attorney jammed flexible coiled-metal exercise bars up their assholes. Had I violated Title 18, Section 2257: no sexual performer was under eighteen years old? A C/O sat in my cell and showed me the taped rectal orgy. I used to plunge a bar into me as I saw watched YouPorn clips. I had dreams as a civilian and now a prisoner—green, blue, magenta, and vermilion, happy colors flowed throughout them—of a gigantic penis-shaped machete erupting semen as I bring the blade down onto thousands of necks, my accusers' heads lopped off their bodies.
Without remorse, the guards make me see 80,000 in a packed stadium as the verdict was read, pronouncing me guilty by holding banners reading, "ADAM WON'T DO IT AGAIN." My face digitally lit the sky above the stadium, blotting out the moon and stars.
In Treachburg, I heard clicks inform me that I'm under surveillance. How, you ask, do I know that? The Edge of Sanity death metal band played on Spotify as I listened with headphones. As furious and loud the band played, a somber voice unconnected to the music spoke directly to me: "We've interviewed hundreds of unnamed sources, each informing us of your past and present. A cadre of neurobiologists discovered choices you would do in the future, all prohibited." I was a speck of dust in a forgotten closet. Why me? Or was it because I was thinnest, frailest category of being?
I sat naked in front of the monitor, touching its sexual images, a polymorphous perversity. Not in the Freudian sense pertaining to infants no older than five, but I watched MRI images of fetuses in wombs to crones and male hags, and all ages in between. I've been observed and heard by surveillers for a decade, and I scream at the spot where the wall or window clicks, "DON'T RAPE ME ANYMORE." As if an atheist like myself could expect an answer from the universe's invisible gods let alone from the Intruders. Treachburg's citizen-beasts betrayed me no less than the Devil could. I wanted them to feel the hell inside me that they created.
Walking down the street, an abnormal traffic flow moved past me. Taking the garbage to the Dumpster, located in tenant parking, a motorcycle drove by, its pipes purposely made louder to torment me. As I walked downtown, often a car drove very slowly, parallel to me, and my only defense against this constant harassment was giving the driver the finger. I gave the finger to a driver and he said, "Have a great day." Yesterday, before walking downtown, I exchanged hi's with a neighbor woman, and when a car paralleled me, I screamed, "Fuck You," my usual combative profanity. As I offered the driver another FU, my neighbor walked past me, and I said," Not you." Obviously, she won't speak to me again. Divide and rule, ancient military strategy: My intimidators loved to separate me from a small core of townspeople I imagined sympathized with me. But all of Treachburg's population was little Adolf Eichmann's.
I used a four-legged mental cane since my balance is poor due to botched spinal surgery. Do I hear the sound of music Dr. Menegle? Three times skateboarders have grabbed the cane from my hand, and I fell as they whooshed downhill. Cop cars will go around the block two, three, four times on a one-way street as I walk toward them.
Mouthing, "Fuck you," at them, even a deaf person could read my lips. I feel orgiastic pleasure, one approaching sexual release whenever I reject cops' domination.
I take sleeping medication before bed, and then the entire neighborhood silences, an aberration, as is everything in this town, ever since the Twin Towers collapsed. My devil-plagued opposition messages me: We won't let you get your sleep, Adam, we'll make sure you'll have at least a nervous breakdown, better that you do something rash after we've made you an insomniac. After two weeks of miniscule sleep, I was so tired, the kind of fatigue which makes me vulnerable and malleable. I heard first my wall clack (they're here, the digital thugs) a voice whispered to me under the blankets: Get up, Adam, take that machete, walk the nighttime streets, spot your victim. When you're about to swing the blade upon a passerby, our federally-sponsored MQ-1 Predator will shoot a Hellfire missile into you, scattering your unrecognizable, gooey remains. Lies or an inconvertible kingdom of death?
The siren wakes the prisoners. A boss opens my cell door, unlocks the headphones, hands back my civvies. He brings me food, the kind of big, good meals most death row prisoners order before executions. He hands me papers. I read that I'm able to leave. The processing takes an hour. I walk through a town I named SuperMax Inc. They gave me the money I had in the bank. To save, I hitchhike a thousand miles in the opposite direction of Treachburg. A drone follows overhead. They could fly thousands of feet higher. To hell with their judgments. How long with surveillance continue? Forever?
Forever.
George Sparling says, "I live on the North Coast of California. I like the death of rain, each drop blood from the Void. I'm currently reading Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling. Suffering and pain bleeds on every page. My real life is the space between words on a page, a blank. Though an atheist by default, I have a print on my wall by John Martin, a 19th Century painter of "The Great Day of the Divine Wrath," fiery red flame, its dark, catastrophic clouds cracking earth apart, relief at last that our stinking entrails have sunk into oblivion."
del.icio.us
