Ohio State Prison - Part 5

Kirk’s head hurt.  He was never good with headaches, but they kept coming thick and fast, and since he found himself in here, he more cherished those rare, inopportune (and short) interludes wherein the head ache would just ease off into the distance and almost…Almost leave him alone.  Like a bright, openness, coming out of a winter sky, crisp and making its way onto your face as you found yourself too wrapped up in clothes and layers.  The feeling of release, which he always thought to be fashioned in a white mixing with green, petals on Eucalyptus leaves which did not help Kirk from far away, wherever they grew, some place warm…A place like many, he knew in his chest he would never ever see.  When the times start coming, in the chitter chatter and flogging sessions within each new layer of the headache, wherein the absolutes start to become things, experiences and places you know you WON’T ever see, is when you begin to resign yourself. 

Being in there made that easy for Kirk.  He clung to this resignation, because nothing was ever easy for Kirk.  He poured more and more information into his head; or rather it was poured there without pause by those Jesuits.  It was as if they held him down and force fed him (and he accepted willfully) every of the canons of which they sheltered, once died and killed for the right to bear and teach.  Everything but the religion was imparted to him.  In name only.  That’s how they appeared to him.  He was taught to take care of himself and not allow anyone to make him weak, because school was like war, or at least like a microcosm of the society that the boys would be expected to accept into them, a disease they had to have by the tail and not heal from, or rise above, but integrate into, the parasite at their side leading them through the thoroughfares, whispering tactics and dispelling weakness in their ears.  He took to it like a general.  But his was always a defensive get up and go – strike first, so they don’t take you down with them in their struggles or strife.  All that becomes a system in your head – Kirk’s head could rival the best factories the post industrial age had to offer.  His machines worked exclusively for him, and told him to fear the idea of something larger.  If you ruled over your own strife, you took its broken pieces to bed with you too.  He always had accepted responsibility.  Even in here. 

Kirk was by far the most educated of the prisoners.  They were a lively bunch to be true – young men, also all defense and strife but with anger to boot.  Kirk not only turned in his anger, but blanketed it as one would an old piece of outdated machinery that had been replaced by something shiny, new, preferred.  It wasn’t broken, just outdated.  And (in his head) Kirk never smashed those outdated materials, just the aforesaid blanketing.  The warmth of a dull blue/grey woolen blanket (the same he buried his damp, heavy head into every night since he got here) hiding his shame, and every time he looked at that woolly, fallen beast lying prostrate in his head, he heard it sinking down, just a little bit more each day, the sound of a heavy boot slowly walking almost silently through the powdery snow.  The kind without ice, which had layers of previous storms beneath.  Soft, billowy but with a definite low point, easing into it more comfortably each time.  Kirk’s walks quickening with each day.  Those other younger men still had all their reactors out and in full force – whether working or not – they didn’t care.  Kirk cared too much about the bolts, the rivets, the occasional squeaky noises a lack of oil would make better for a time. 

He could never get to the root of it, with people, even with Darla, the girl across the street.  He would bring her things all the time – sometimes in silence, sometimes he’d make sure to explain the how and the where in which he retrieved such gifts.  They were always things he knew she wanted, or she’d like, and he thought she did, but his outward silence always breed her own as well.  What do you say to a whole lot of nothing standing in front of you, when in truth all Darla really wanted to do on that cold stoop was throw her arms around him, drag him inside, wrap herself around him every single night, but she accepted the gift and went back inside.  Of course, she never spoke this to him, because Kirk could turn around in that moment, and freely state that it (the gift) was just something he had found, and thought she’d like.  His words were always matter of fact, and could have just as easily been hiding the crest of a bounding wave, meandering at the top of it, held back by the violent sky, or been a curtain which hid absolute emptiness and silence.  A space in which something should have been, but something which he didn’t know how to create himself.  This was why he never seemed to get angry.  If you take nothing in, what is there to come back out of you? The glass of his eyeballs and “things” he worked from the world.  Not Him.  She could never see him.  Whenever he found himself giving her another gift on her doorstep, his head not removed from his Jesuit like shroud, and trusty white dog at his side (who was often credited as Kirk’s “id” – the dog was the friendliest around, and would react from his gut –not the smartest but you’d jump into a burning volcano to save him, he was the sort you referred to as a puppy until the day he dropped dead, never old, never slowing down, never- but the dog would just jump onto you, literally bounce up and down like a gaggle of giddy women as you danced with him, shove his face Right in between Darla’s legs with no fear or hesitation, Kirk looking on with that slight melancholia across his cheeks, half admitted desire in his eyes), he wasn’t even all there.  He was covering up the growing number of dead phalanx, blankets and crunching snow and screeching of his failing factories; he Knew Darla could hear that noise and he ran away from her each time as fast as he could.  Away from the noise, but it always was at his heels.  The dog ignored it, but he knew it was there.  At the same time, he knew she could hear beneath that noise, but that scared him to pieces and he would turn it up louder and louder so to hide his bevy of fault lines. 

Every man claims to be innocent, but he got himself into this jail on purpose.  Did you hear that, everyone? They could not hear, as all this, like most of his life, is taking place inside his headache walls, swollen and fraught with pulsing, ravenous pains.  There were so many different kinds.  On Purpose.  The men at the trading company had enacted a very non-fantastical, wholly average scheme to steal percentages from the foreign markets.  The company had only been around for a few years, and they trusted and valued him to be their engineer.  He could see into the systems that most human beings couldn’t fathom beyond an ankle wash.  He loved them like a family, like he had thought one to be, but they ended up using his “expertise” to their own ends.  Still, they had families and he did not, so he figured a break from the microcosm that the Jesuits had raised him up to disperse into his being would be necessary.  Sacrifice, just like the religion that they worked so hard to forget.  The company men loved him for it, and set aside a small chunk of funds for him when he got out.  In 10 years if he was quiet.  He could be quiet.  Of that they were sure.  Those men, the judge, the people on the street, the guys inside, they saw Kirk’s fantastical machinery, still and seemingly functional, like a war relic of old in a museum.  Look, don’t touch. 

Still, the repetitive, simple tasks he was given each day to do in the metal shop, and ones he had to do anyway for himself gave comfort, then routine, then tedium, and then the headaches got worse.  He could feel a rumbling, beneath the metal, beneath the snow, beneath the cracks in the pavement, deeper than within his stifling volcano, his dog flying circles around him, bounding up to the heavens and back again on the crest of his self created, wave, as it held there just in front of his eyes – he missed his dog, but he thought about him every day, and about her.  Darla took him in, without a complaint or a second’s pause.  She’d be walking him every day, and he loved her.  She would get to wrap herself around the white beast every single night.  And that, that would have to be good enough.  He couldn’t see them anymore, as they became hidden in front of the wave….the wave slowly though softened into the peripheral views, and left him nothing to stand on.  His bed at night and that wool grey blanket was his only protection.  He began to have nightmares, as he disengaged from the rest of the population – the crudeness of their loud voices plagued him, but as an overwhelming noise more than any sort of bodily threat or violence.  It was violence he could feel, in his glands, seeping out but always completely soaked up by the thick, hard wool of the blanket.  His little cocoon did not go undisturbed anymore.  He was looking to get out of his head – release himself from his machine. 

You can’t throw away parts like his – he wasn’t sure after all these years alone up there, tinkering away in the tiny light which shone humbly from the roof, what it was he had constructed.  He called them use parts, outdated constructions, but they had joined up, underneath the blankets, linked hands and were about to rise up against him.  He was not their leader, as he once suspected.  He was merely a cog in their dream – a drone in their production line.  He was soaking wet, and so dry and arid in his throat he thought they had wounded him mortally.  He wouldn’t let them have him.  The voices of the others, the fast talkers, the brutes, the criminals, their hearts beat so loudly and fully – why could he never hear his own beating this way?  The turns of the Catherine Wheel he learned about at school, horrific indeed, but also at least you knew where you were--- right There in that destiny.  Maybe there was another destiny in which Darla and he shared something more than the shadows left on her front doorstep.  His noise rambling its way down the street, silly dog grinning wide and staring her down as they went.  Kirk thought he felt his dog’s warmth next to him, curving around his hunched back and keeping him still, as he did this thing.  But he wasn’t doing it, the machine was. 

He climbed inside, as he usually did, and the parts, my god the parts, they had interwoven themselves and latticed into an absolute beast.  It was only at the moment when the apparatus took him in, and shut out the light for good that he truly understood he had fed it every day – nourished it, cleaned it, even loved it.  He should have tossed it, and loved her instead.  But it was too late.  The sparks flew, and it took him off into the darkness, it artificial life seeing the way on.  It took control, and his blanket fell to the floor.  No white paws around.  Why was that damn dog so full of love? 

The heartbeats left him, he couldn’t hear them anymore.  He wouldn’t have to worry about how to spend the money he didn’t deserve.  He left all that behind.  The wave, the volcano, all the elements of the earth which he could not master, they fell back, and retreated from his head space.  It was finally silent – free of facts, and information and alight with deconstruction.  They don’t know how he got his hands on that braided metal wire.  But he was quiet, and smart, and they weren’t surprised he was hoarding bits and pieces of strays away from the shop.  He had finally left the ground – his feet dangling, and a crooked little half-smile on his face.  Reams of digital information seeping on the floor, which was not level.  Darla and her puppy cavorted through the park at dawn. 

~ M. Lucia