Inglehart's Monsters Pt. 1

The official reports weren’t exactly accurate as to what happened. The doctor and his experiments dove deeper into the pseudoscience based on the occult beliefs of Doctor Inglehart rather than the hard biology that I and the other students had expected. We were mostly pre-med students in our final years just before our entrances into the programs each of us had picked out. I had been the exception; I was a psychologist with a thesis in the work of criminal institutions and how they break people. The story we were fed was that we would be working with the patients Doctor Inglehart had been working with for years. This was the first time students had been allowed to go to his clinic which had been on the edge of scientific advancement and insight which all four of us were ready to be a part of, but then we saw what had been happening.

            Doctor Inglehart had been, at least up until I saw what he was doing, a great hero of mine. A survivor of the childhood atrocities of the Holocaust and an immigrant and refugee to the Americas when only a child, he had always been proud of his history and told everyone who would listen of what happened. How when only six he had seen the medical experiments which his Jewish ancestry had been seen by the Nazi scientists to be perfect for them, since as Inglehart had said, “We had been as close to humans as they could possibly believe.”

            When we all exited the bus which had picked us up, the first thing we saw was the isolation. The prison which Inglehart worked as a part of had made me sick when I first saw it. The panoptical set up gave me an intuition which, even as I think back to it now, makes me feel as if I have to turn over every object and look at each of the dark corners in my room for the cameras which was being used to make us feel uneasy.

            The octagonal ring of the first six floors gave rise to the grey obelisk which rose only twice as high as the ring. At the top of the obelisk was a glass tip which fed back into the, upon closer review, octagonal walls of the tower. Each level had glass looking out to the surroundings. At this point I almost threw up. Once I had the realization that someone maybe watching me at any time forced me to walk more upright and with a rigidity which my mother would be proud.

            Doctor Inglehart’s diminutive but powerful figure was there to welcome us at the door of the prison. Above him, the desert’s brightness reflected on the words “Sum ego factum est mors exterminatore mundorum”.

            I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

            The wolfish smile broke the saggy flesh of the small man, a hardy laugh and a surprisingly deep voice as he said, “Welcome to my home, my own world.”

            If at this point I know what stood before me, I would have left. Except that I had no idea. Instead of screaming and crying and fleeing like I wish I had now, I followed the man before me. The man who had spent his life trying to find out the inner most workings of a person, to see where evil was and to end it; this man looked to create a utopia of created and crafted human beings living outside of the realms of human evils to make us the God which had failed him and his family.

            All of the hallways that snaked through the facility ran behind the cells. We were given a tour of the facility from the side which we would be working on. The cells, as Doctor Inglehart explained, had the opening facing the tower. The prisoners had to look at the Tower all day within view of the few around them. A barbed fence on the other side of the cell kept the prisoners far enough away from the Tower, Inglehart had said, with the prisoners close enough to see what happened to those that misbehaved. To see the ramifications of socially misbehaving or doing things seen as evil from the outside world had lowered the prisoners’ rebellious nature in check.

            As we were walking through the hallway, I took a look into the small frame before me and saw a small figure huddled on the side of the cell, the side with the bars and door going into the courtyard. The cell was only eight feet wide by ten feet long with a roof of what would seem to be seven feet. Littered on the floor were torn paper and destroyed books. Each of the pieces of the paper had a chicken scratch all over them. What I could see of the man’s arms had scars up and down his forearms and as his head moved up I could barely make out his eyes.

            But I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw Doctor Inglehart standing there with a large smile. His deep, warm voice came out like it had been full of honey, “Come, we are almost to where you will be living and working.”

            I followed him with only a slight look back at the window as we made slow steps away from the prisoner and his cell.

****

The rooms we were to be staying in were warmer than the hallways had been. The colours all played and mixed together in a way which made me realize just how sleepy the trip had made me. The warmth of the desert from outside wafted its way through the open windows on the wall, revealing the ocean of sand on the outside of our home for some time. 

            The other students and I all made hasty introductions in our cramped living room with one another. Gary was the tall, lanky one. His large hands belied the grace within them and the skill with which had made him a promising surgery student. Lana was only a few inches shorter than my 6’1” frame. Her auburn hair shone and she had the warm smile of a paediatrician. Bart was the one built like a football player. He had been a promising running back until a major concussion made him give it up, but he was a master at physiology and the mental aspects of injuries. 

            I must admit, I seemed out of place. I had only been, as I said before, a student of criminal psychology stemming from my fascination with Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. I was writing my thesis on the institutions of justice and how to rehabilitate the prisoners and the proper prison build for control of those under lock and key. 

            We all dispersed as we looked at our sleeping quarters. The colours followed us into the sleeping quarters. I placed my few bags down, my few belongings which I felt my life would be tolerable complete with a laptop, a few books and a number of pens. I had left my phone back at home in San Jose, I didn’t think I would ever have a need for it while I was working. My warm, bare walls caused the sleep to tug at my eyes as I sat on the edge of my bed. I had a few hours until Inglehart had said he would be back, so I stretched out and went to sleep thinking of the man in his cell.  

****

The cool afternoon air woke me up before the knock at my door did. As I opened it I hastily put on a long sleeved shirt on. Bart’s wide, dark face welcomed me back to the land of the living.  “Inglehart’s here, we’re about to head out to his quarters for dinner.”

            The deep voice echoed in my room as I nodded understanding. Closing the door quickly, I went through all the papers I had brought with me and sources I would need for the paper. I found the pen I needed and walked out into the living room. Everyone had dressed up for the night except for Inglehart and me. I must have looked confused as Inglehart laughed.

            He was still in the same brown scrubs he had been in this morning. Lana had put on a short, iridescent blue dress. Bert had a button up shirt with khakis tightly spread over his broad frame. And Gary looked as if a Muppet put on a suit.  Seeing Inglehart in his scrubs made me comfortable as I nodded in agreement to the question that Inglehart posed to me.

            The warmth of the living quarters died quickly as we walked into the hallway of Inglehart’s prison. We followed him downstairs and toward what I thought was the direction of the Tower. I asked Bart if I was right or if I needed to fix my direction, but he needed warmly to my question.

            “It is. I know you study prison systems, but what you should do is look at the way the prison is set up. It’s almost like a spider’s web. We live on the outside, but we have our own strand going to the tower. The stairs,” he pointed behind us, “are hidden to make it seem like there isn’t a way out if a prisoner happens to breakout of their cell. So, it’s almost set up to make a person go insane if they aren’t meant to get out.”             I looked at him with a new admiration. His knowledge of the intricacies of the prison’s architecture was remarkable. I poked into why he knew that.

            He laughed, “My girlfriend’s professor helped design this prison. She does architecture and his last consulting job was on the type of prisons we set up now,” he looked at me as we were heading down to the near of the end of the hallway, “all of them are based on Doctor Inglehart’s design to create insanity of those guilty members of our society.”

            The hallway opened up to a large dining hall. Scarlet walls enclosed us as we stepped quietly into the room. A feeling of the far away castles in the Eastern European countries inhabited by our childish nightmares was rested in this room. In the centre of the room was a long brown and wooden table with five chairs around it.

            We all took our seats in the table. Each person was only an arm length away from the other as Inglehart took the seat at the head of the table. His small frame came only up to the middle of the seat. The quick arm movements from him brought out the food from the other room.

            The first guards we had seen all day came out. Large framed men carrying platters full of food placed the trays before us. The grey and brown uniformed men were in and out in only moments with our hearty, German feast placed before us.

            “Please, eat and I shall show you the fruits of my labour,” Inglehart’s deep voice echoed in the room. “Please.”

            The pork was sliced into thick pieces or stuffed into the casings of sausages. Sauerkraut was boiled with the meat left over from the pig. Potatoes and rye bread were left to round out our feast. As we finished the last bit of meat, a heavy, dark chocolate cake was brought out as a sleepy silence feel over us. Inglehart had been talking the entire night. Prisoners and their inhumanity, the want to look to see if we can find our human emotions, the way in which by using those that have become a stain upon the society, we may advance our understanding of what human beings are.

              As the sleepiness overcame us all I could make out of the blurriness I could see a grotesque coming closer to me. Before the black finally came, I felt hands.