Inglehart's Monsters, Pt. 3

The records were highly censored. I read through all of the records over and over again, black marks were littered all over the pages. Names were deleted even though dates were left there. Names were replaced by numbers, signifiers for each prisoner. The unemotional signifying of the prisoners brought the stark realization of those cameras from my old office: there are no humans here. People littered the solitary prison cells as I looked from the new office from the Tower, but they weren’t humans. They were closer to being an animal caught in a trap. I waited for the gnawing off of limbs.
It had only been about a week since Bart had been placed into the facility here. Inglehart had been specific in keeping what he had done under wraps until we could figure out just what had happened. All of Bart’s symptoms seemed to just point to a complete mental breakdown. I tried to keep him under observation for days in isolation. He never moved from the corner of the room. He only rocked back and forth in the far left corner from my vantage point. This was the work Inglehart had told me would give me the experience I need to work with the prisoners.
The first week I had working with a prisoner came as a shock to me.
The prisoner displayed the typical traumatic disorders associated with isolation; dissociative personality disorder, paranoia and a developing multiple personality disorder. His physical body had deteriorated to a point of what appeared to be acutely related to psychosomatic illnesses, or Munchhausen’s Disease. Prisoner 764 had spent an entire week of his time with me speaking of how he had been sick ever since his second week of his tenure in the prison.
Every other prisoner displayed the same tendencies of dissociative personality disorder, including a personality override. Each prisoner had a minimum of three personalities, one of which appeared to be violent towards themselves, if not anyone within arm’s length.
The last day will stick with me until I die.
The time together had been just as it always was with Prisoner 764. His continual litany of woes and illnesses brought him to the point of death. As I was working on his prescription of opiates, he jumped across the table between us. He knocked over the chessboard. Sinewy fingers wrapped tightly, squeezing my neck. I was becoming light-headed, almost blacking out as the guards ran in, faces hidden by their masks.
I struggled to my feet and screamed at the prisoner. I was swearing, promising, praying that the prisoner would be put into the desert around us to die in the sand. As I was screaming, I barely noticed the guards place a hand on my shoulder. I barely noticed the needle be pressed into my neck. I just remember the black.
****
I woke up in Inglehart’s dining room. The crimson walls and high seatbacks were as imposing as they were when we all first got there. I sat and my bags were placed by the door which we had been forbidden to open.
Inglehart shuffled in looking over his notes.
I sat motionless as he sat across from me. His saggy, wrinkled flesh was contorted into a face of seriousness. He began to tut as he read the notes. Long minutes felt like hours as I watched his bright blue eyes skirt the page in the same place.
He finally looked up at me and had his wolfish smile as he spoke the words which I knew were coming, “You’re going home. You have finished your research.”
I nodded and began to rise.
“Wait,” his voice cut into my muscles as I lowered back into my seat. “You have not been told why. Wouldn’t you like to know what you are allowed to bring back into the world from here?”
I searched his face. He turned his attention back to the stack of papers and began to split it into two distinct piles. He worked quickly and deftly, hands moving only as fast as they could. Finally, he reached the end of the stack. Inglehart smiled at me and made his wrinkled hand push the smaller stack to me.
I didn’t reach out but looked at the other stack. He followed my eyes down and smiled.
“This shows too much of what I am doing here, too much of the eugenic quality of my work. After all, a Jew that believes in purifying humanity is quite an outrage. Especially if that Jew has numbers etched into his skin.”
He leaned forward to meet my eyes, “the monsters I keep here are specifically kept as not to be able to breed anymore. I do not go out of my way like I was forced not to breed, these monsters are whole; a gift I was not given. However, you have caught onto how these men may have no communication and or lobotomies, so I think it’s a win-win. Take your things and go.”
“Doesn’t this take away from the whole fact of being human? You do not give them a chance, you don’t rehabilitate. There is no chance of salvation here.” My voice was becoming shaky as I met his blue eyes.
“Do not play this game. You know as well as I, salvation is a lie. No one has salvation,” he slowly stood up. “That crucifix around your neck is a lie. That was what Bart saw here, no isolation or mental lapse from separation. He saw the human condition; we are born to be slaves and to hate. This is my evolution, my way to breed out the people who cause these problems. No homophobia, no racism, no one there to kill or inflict pain on anyone the way my mother met!”
His voice echoed through the hall as he stood rigidly. Slowly, he sat back down and threw the other stack of papers into the fire behind him.
“Sometimes, those few who have had a chance must be erased to ensure that they never be brought back.” His voice became small as he looked at his shaking hands, “the violent have become a scourge on our society. This is my way to pay it back, to eradicate those violent and to physically force it out of them.” He moved his hands slowly up his sleeve to look at the numbers in his skin, “I stand up in spite of no one doing that for me. No cares what happens to them, just like they don’t care about the victims, they only want to make sure it never happens to them. Selfish machines are all we are. Now go.”
****
I don’t know what happened to the others. I was ushered out of the place. I left after what he said. The desert air filled my lungs outside.
I got onto the bus waiting for me and looked at the gates.
I did not become death, but I had dinner with him.



Fins.

Inglehart's Monster's Pt. 2

It must have been a bad dream. I woke up being told that it was. The others had made it seem like it had been an odd shared dream, but nothing more than that. No one had a dream of a grotesque figure with oddly lined faces grasping at them with faux hands like I had. Each had remembered that they were taken back to their rooms in a sleepily, alcoholic stupor. I shrugged off my fears of Inglehart and his monsters as being nothing more than fear induced nightmares. I had spent the entire trip to Inglehart’s prison reading his reports on the atrocities he had seen.

            The nightmares must just have been those catching up with me.

            I was told to report to the Tower’s psych ward to begin my studies. The hallways were subtly changed as I walked to the corridor which would take me to the offices. My bag was slung on my left shoulder with all the books I could find on prisons and psychoanalytic punishment for criminals. Echoes of my footsteps rang through the hallway. Finally reaching the tunnel’s opening one which was, as Bart had pointed out to me, hidden behind the pillar barely a mention that there could have been a staircase if a person was not careful I went to my home for the next several months.

            The office was quite large and gave me a good view of the isolation cells which had made Inglehart so famous on multiple display screens. My office was underground and, as Bart explained to me over coffee this morning, the outside glasses offered only a hallway and nothing more from there.

            “It’s so odd to think that they have the glass which is only ever used for the occasional patrol,” Bart had said in his musical voice. “After all, wouldn’t something like your work –” motioning to me with the hand holding the bacon covered fork “—benefit from actual watching of the prisoners?”

            I nodded as I sipped my coffee, but explained the working of what the glass, especially the one way view of it did. It was like when you see a camera in a store, I told him, the camera for the most part will keep order. You only need to catch one of every four criminals to ever enforce order. Along the lines of–

            “Big Brother.” Bart finished my sentence for me. I had nodded then, but I had looked at the time and rushed out the door. As I looked now at the screens, this authoritarian view of these criminals – thought the scum of the earth to me at that point – scared me. I had never noticed the nausea of being able to watch all of these people all of the time. See their mistakes from the objective god view. Correct them as they went about their day in a lobotomized zombie way. Even from my view upon them now, I could see the scared and nervous actions.

****

The view I had gave the expected results as I had been told the idea. If a prisoner put his hand through the bars I was to record it, their name and report it. As it happened, the prisoners would be given a shock or something, I couldn’t see from what or where – if there had been a generator, it was hidden – but it was highly effective at keeping the people where they were and in the cell. Operators were the only voice I had to interact with for the nine hours I was in the viewing room, excruciating boredom allowed me to work on my thesis and to think of the night before.

            From my vantage point, I couldn’t be sure of the humanity of the prisoners. I suppose that was the point, though. The more you know of these prisoners, the more a person wished to help them. We had been told before coming here of the crimes these men had committed. Rapists, murderers, cannibals and paedophiles had been the justification from Inglehart to bring into this place. Since isolation and possible violence from other prisoners in other prisons may have been perpetrated, the powers that be had allowed a small segment to be taken to this dark Tower in the wastelands.

            I could not understand what had driven these men to do such things. I supposed that’s what made me so obsessed with understanding them. I counted the days until Inglehart had promised me by the letter he sent to place me into a clinical position with the prisoners. It would come in weeks and I would speak, interact and see these monsters face to face. See the Grenwich Killer, a man who had killed six women and used their flesh as fish bait; speak to the Ilium Clown, a children performer that preyed on the fat children he worked with. These men had become my obsession, not in the perverted way of wanting to emulate their atrocities, but what drove them to do it beyond the court transcript of the Ilium Clown’s step-father making the Clown his second in the polyamorous marriage or the Innsmouth Eater by having delusions that his father was the Devil himself. These were the nurture side of the crime, the parts we can see and point to as a way which they could use as a means of getting a lesser sentence.

            I wanted more, I wanted into their synapses. Look at the brain chemistry; see if we could fix them. Explain why people could do evil by more than just stating that people were evil. I counted the days until I could sit and speak to these monstrous people and understand why. I just didn’t know that, despite his false pretentions, Inglehart had been working with this for years. That his way of understanding was archaic, hate driven and more appropriate to the Medieval Ages rather than a time of rational thought and reason. This man was a monster.

****

The days past like this for some time. It had been weeks since we had gotten to this prison. A few of us had gotten on each other’s nerves as our dreams became worse and worse. Bart had been the first to bring up his nightmares to me. He said that in his dreams there was always a grotesque monster at the foot of his bed. Bart always confirmed just how bad it was getting in the nightmares; he was waking up in cold sweats and kept seeing that monster getting closer and closer to him.

            Bart’s mental health finally broke three weeks into our work. I remember the morning since I was supposed to finally be working in the mental health clinic. Bart had not woken up before me as he normally did. I ground the coffee and knocked on his door.

            Each knock was met with silence.

            I continued to knock at his door until I finally had the courage to open the door to his room. His warm purple walls were covered in blood as Bart lay on his bed covered in the gore. The colours of the walls were distorted as the scarlet was only made darker by the warm walls. I must have screamed since Gary came rushing out of his room with tousled hair and in a bathrobe.

            They had been sleeping together. Bart and Lana, that is. They had been experiencing separation anxiety and stress from their work here. They had relaxed by the occasional round in the bed. Gary confirmed who Bart was sitting in when Lana’s room was empty.

            Bart was only laughing and as the faceless guards grabbed him, he said laughing to me, “I got it. I got that fucking ghoul.”

           

****

The weeks progressed on from here as would be expected. Gary and I were given a week off and a psychological examination along with mandatory grief check-ups. Gary was his only because he had lived with them, Bart was my friend and Inglehart was surprised at the amount of grief I was feeling.

            He sat in front of me in his office. The crimson walls, chestnut cabinets all ended in his pale, slight frame. Disbelief covered his face as he was chewing the words over in his head.

            “Withdraw?”

            The deep voice seemed to echo in the room, or just in my head. I tried to form the words. I failed at explaining that I had everything I needed, failed to say that I needed nothing else and just stumbled over the words not forming in my mouth.

            “You want to at least look at the clinic and our patients.”

            He never said prisoners, only ever patients. As if he was trying to cure them.

            “You will need to communicate with them and find out the rehabilitation. Allow the cute to soak into your system, look at the way we have cured the evil within them.”

            I should never have told him that fateful word, that damn yes.