Prisoner 31

I am Prisoner 31 at the Maebashi detention Center. This is Gunma Prefecture in central Japan, in the shadow of mountains and far from the sea. My real name comes from a book about a seagull, but that name is the rarest of visitors and is of little use now, appearing only in my dreams and petty bureaucracy. To be honest, it’s not much of a loss -- almost nobody within several miles can pronounce it correctly, anyway. This is my seventh day here, but only my first with a notebook and from a quick glance at the obligatory prison calendar carefully plotted on the inside cover, I see that today is Tuesday, April 11th.

The cell is empty, my mouth is dry, and the rain sighs in the middle distance. It is sometime after lunch but before dinner. That is as precise as I can be -- time is known only by deduction here. Time, that is the first thing you lose, but it is not taken away from you. Far from it -- you have it in such obscene abundance that it becomes meaningless. Inertia settles like a scab and nothing happens, all at once: you are dirty but cannot wash, you are thirsty but do not own a cup, you want to walk but cannot stand to move. Although I am tired, I do not have the luxury of resting today or making some excuse for a plan. Instead, I will attempt to record the days and, in capturing them, free myself.

My hair is long and wild and I am unshaven. My grandmother gave me her dark curls and my mother gave me her eyes of blue, but my mistakes are mine alone. I am a left-handed Libra, slightly taller than I am short and a bit heavier than light, with broad shoulders, narrow wrists, and crooked teeth. As far as I know, I am the only American in this facility and probably the only foreign devil within several miles. Politically, I am to the right of most Republicans and to the left of most Democrats. Astral Weeks is my favorite album and the Urusov Gambit is my favorite chess opening, while as Black, I dabble with the Sicilian. The most famous person to come from my hometown is President Harry S. Truman, but he ordered the US Air Force to drop atomic bombs named “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I try not to bring him up too much.

My uniform consists of a lime-green, polyester track suit about 2 ½ sizes too small, a pair of black underwear, and a t-shirt of mysterious color. An emasculated black pen is in my hand, a blue notebook is in my lap, and a pair of white tube socks sits neatly folded by my side, precisely parallel to my thigh-bone. My sandals are sitting obediently outside the cell door. They are brown and plastic and two sizes too small, too. The pen, tracksuit, and sandals belong to the jail, but everything else belongs to me. For some reason, this distinction is of immense importance. Word has it that we’ll get a change of clothes at some point. I’m not picky, but any other color and a bigger size would be nice. At night, it all goes into a locker without a lock at the end of the cellblock.

Most of the men here are Yakuza, the career criminals of Japan. Their arms and back are decorated with tattoos of dragons, fruit, flowers, or mystical sigils. Aside from the tattoos, their most interesting habit is probably the occasional removal of the end of their pinkie finger. It may be a ritual punishment or an initiation, but I don’t want to ask. Although they are not saints they do have one virtue: they are friendly to foreigners. I probably shook hands with every man in the cell block that first day, including most of the guards -- they all wanted to try the exotic custom with a native. There was some shoving, so a guard formed them into a jostling line and, like a visiting politician trailing in the polls, I shook each eager, mutilated hand.

Aside from the missing fingers and the mural-sized tattoos, the easiest way to tell the amateurs from the professionals is by our clothing. The track suits are correctional semaphores, the brighter the colors and better the fit, the more likely that the wearer has been here and done this before. Yakuza supply their own, while the rest of us settle for whatever the guards decide to give us, regardless of size and color. This explains why my cellmate’s canary yellow outfit fits him perfectly, while I have three fingers of hairy ankle showing.

Unlike American jails, they let us wear our street clothes if we want, but nobody does, either because they are less comfortable or perhaps because they are painful reminders of normal life. They are not so terrible as uniforms go – we are uniformly irregular. In our mismatched outfits, we look like suburban dads at a weekend soccer game. (In all fairness, though, the guards are no luckier: their uniforms remind me of Iron Curtain train conductors.) The rare exceptions to this rule are men on the way out: they stand at the cell door in their street clothes like skittish grooms with idiot grins, tucking in their shirt-tail as they await their child bride.

This facility is bloodless, spotless, and efficient. We are confined to our cells for more than 23 hours a day. In our block, there are eleven cells, set side-by-side and completely identical except for their occupants. They are seven paces long and four paces wide. Three men can fit on the floor, sitting cross-legged, or sleeping side by side. The walls are a creamy, eggshell white, composed of concrete slabs standing shoulder to shoulder. Two parallel seams run vertically up the walls, across the ceiling, and down the other side, dissecting the room into three equal parts, like the segments of a giant worm. The floor is covered in the same bare, no-nonsense, mottled brown carpet found in the offices of Assistant High School principals throughout the world.

There is nothing else in the cell. There are no chairs, beds, shelves, desks, tables, or decoration of any kind -- we eat, sleep, and sit on the floor. Everything takes place at ground level, the rest is emptiness. The stark simplicity is unbearable -- there is nothing for my mind to grip but the certainty that my life has capsized. Our only elevated act is pissing, shitting, and pressing our thumb over little red boxes. The only piece of “furniture” we have is a 2-foot-square brown cushion that we sit on flat or fold in half for a pillow -- the first bit of “jail lore” I learned. Although it is thin, rough, and unadorned, it is essential because it makes the primary activity here, sitting still, possible. The acoustics are great -- too bad I cannot sing.

Black thumbprints are scattered around the walls like pre-historic cave art left by a long-dead race. Just inside the door, seventeen black prints have been arranged in a crude arrow pointing towards the floor and a single, perfect thumbprint marks each corner of the toilet window. Tall and narrow, it always seems to be squinting to see us better. These designs were a mystery until I discovered the source of the ink.

You see, when we “sign” our documents, we use a thumb-print instead of a pen, so my predecessors used the leftover ink to decorate the cell with their true names, our corrugated flesh. But since each “signing” leaves only enough ink for one good mark, these images are the work of several men over time who could have been strangers, family members, or even mortal enemies. This collective activity is a good thing, so I add one more thumb-print to the base of an obtuse angle, completing the symmetry, irrefutable proof that we have been here.

The light doesn’t change much. We have one window on the back wall of the cell, but it is a blind eye, opening only on the hallway running behind the cellblock. Down the hallway to the right, there are a few large windows on the far wall that open directly to the outside, our only source of natural light. The closest one has metal bars, as well as gleaming metal shutters like horizontal shark gills. Everything is kept closed tight most of the time, but on some sunny days when the clouds, shutters, and whims of the guards align just right, we get an oblique view of the outside world and its over-rich star.

Two long, fluorescent tubes set in the center of the ceiling light the cell, but despite the harsh glare, nothing ever casts a shadow. The metal grill over them looks like one of those old metal ice-trays with the handles we used when I was a kid. Upon further inspection, I notice that there are brackets for a third tube, but oddly, only two are installed. Maybe they are trying to save money on lightbulbs. They are turned off at night, but even then, a much smaller, third bulb comes on and keeps the corners lit. For now, I fold the sleeves of my tracksuit and drape them over my eyes like a blindfold to keep out the light. Another bit of “jail lore” I intend to learn is how to sleep under these conditions.

The toilet occupies the far-left corner, about 1/8 of the cell, with space for the door to swing outwards. It is the definition of Spartan. A stainless-steel stool is in the center, molded to the floor. The squinting window is on the left wall, facing the rest of the cell, making anyone using the toilet easily visible in profile: your left side if you are standing, your right if seated. It’s low enough that I’m forced to stand with my knees bent and feet spread wide when I’m taking a leak to keep my pecker out of the public eye. Sometimes I go in and stare at the ceiling, just so my face is hidden for a little while.

There are two stainless steel circles side by side on the right wall, one as wide as the length of my hand, the other twice that. In the middle of the small circle is a metal button that flushes the toilet. The button is broad and chromed with a red dot in the middle. It makes a satisfying “click” when pressed, as if triggering a device that can dunk continents, not flush a jail toilet. In the middle of the big circle is a shallow, concave shelf with a drain that serves as a sink. The button that flushes the toilet also activates a weak jet of water which disappears through three oblong grooves in the shelf-sink. Sometimes, I watch the water drain away to a few quivering creatures, a fight to the death between surface tension and gravity, just like us. The top left of the toilet door has no corner, just a graceful curve, presumably a safety feature against homemade nooses.

Of course, what makes a cell a cell is not the walls, but the bars. Rolled steel is cold steel. Twenty-one run from floor to ceiling across the front of our cell, the bottom half sandwiched between waist-high, transparent plastic and a thick wire mesh. There are eight bars on the window in the rear wall, next to the toilet door. All the bars and metal fixtures are pale green, the same as the toilet door. Why pale green, I wonder? Have studies shown that is soothes the criminal mind? Probably -- there are studies proving everything these days. The only break in the bars is a small, shuttered hatch where our food and documents pass. It’s the same size as the return slot at my local video/comic store, but now I am on the wrong side.

My only complaint: This god-damn pen has been altered so that only the very tip sticks out of the plastic sheath, making it necessary to hold it at a perfect 90-degree angle to the paper at all times or else it will not make a mark. Again, for safety reasons, I presume. This makes it useless as a weapon, but painful when used to write. I wonder about the 3rd-World factories that make these “prison pens” and if the workers steal them for their children, forcing them to learn the alphabet with mangled utensils. Still, this nib-less pen is better than a keyboard – buttons are only fit for numbers.

As I write about writing, a guard glides past, folding a finger against his palm for each man. Yes, the word “glides” is far better than “strolled” -- to one in a cage, all movement is flight. After he is gone, I realize that I would kill to walk 100 feet in a straight line. My thoughts are clearest when my head is raised and I am in stride, one foot off the ground. Pacing is the obvious cure, but standing on my hind legs brings on a minor case of vertigo, and in a room so small, walking is just a brief pause between rotations -- I spin and spin.

A word about names: they do not fit in cages. On Day 5, when I first got the idea to write this, it occurred to me that characters need names, but I had no way of naming anybody because the guards refer to each other only by rank, while etiquette and the language barrier keep me from getting personal information from the other men. Since there were no names, it was necessary to make them by hand. It’s also possible that the owners of the names might not want their jail time to be immortalized in verse. They may think that this is nothing to write about -- they may be right. The final reason is personal. I’m forced to answer to an odd number, but by naming others, I can even the score. This is a subtle sort of power, a lesser species of rebellion.

Footsteps approach from down the cellblock. They are coming for my pen and notebook, but I don’t mind. My hand is getting sore and no sunny aphorisms spring to mind. I’m sailing by the stars now, carving dark waters, but not alone, for you are with me.