Shay Savage - Otherwise Unharmed

My chest tightened as memories flooded over my brain like an ice-cold shower.  There was a time I thought I understood people when I really didn’t—not at all.  A single conversation changed everything.

“Do you know what she said to me?” I asked Mark.

“Who?”

I turned my head toward him, but my vision was focused entirely inward.

“The wife of the journalist guy who was killed in the video.  You remember that guy?”

“Yeah, I do.  You told them to kill you instead of him.”

“Yeah, that guy.”  I nodded, remembering.  “His wife came to the hospital in Virginia, and they told me who she was before I ever talked to her.  My stomach was all tied up before she even walked into the room.  I mean, I’d watched her husband die, ya know?  I couldn’t do anything about it.  Even though I told them to kill me, it didn’t make any difference—they wouldn’t listen.  I think they wanted it to be him because he wasn’t military and because he did have a family.”

I shifted and bumped the edge of the metal bed with my shoe.  The clang from the springs reverberated and caught my attention.  I stared down at the base of the bed, saw the loops meant for restraints again, and could nearly feel the sandy walls of the hole around my shoulders.

“What did she say to you, Evan?”

I shook my head a bit to clear it.

“She came up and sat down next to me,” I said as the detail of the memory returned.  “For the longest time we just looked at each other, and eventually I couldn’t take it anymore.  I started blathering about how sorry I was and about how I tried to get them to take me instead, but they wouldn’t listen.  I probably would have dropped down to my knees and started crying, but she stopped me.”

I turned my head to Mark and looked him straight in the eye.

“That’s when she said it was all okay,” I told him.  “I figured she was going to start telling me how it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do—the shrinks in the hospital in Germany had said that—but she didn’t.  She told me it was okay because she was glad.  She was glad he was gone, and now she and her girls could move on with their lives without constantly being in his shadow.  She said he was never there for them, and now that he was dead, she could use the insurance money to start up the flower shop she always wanted and he wouldn’t support.”

Mark’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

“She didn’t fucking care,” I told him.  I could feel the tension in my voice as much as I could hear it.  “She was happy he was dead.  I was willing to die for him—a guy whose name I didn’t even know—and the person who should have cared about him the most didn’t give a shit.”

My sides and stomach tightened up as I remembered the look of…of elation in her eyes as she told me about her business venture and how excited she was to be her own boss and run her own company.  I had watched her and waited for her to tell me he was smacking her around or doing things to their daughters that he shouldn’t, but she said none of that.  He just hadn’t liked the idea of her going into business on her own instead of working her steady, corporate job.

My throat seized up, and I forced myself to swallow.  It hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to what was happening in my head.  I needed to crawl back inside again.  I needed to stop thinking and stop remembering.

But I couldn’t.

“That’s when I figured it out,” I said quietly.  “People live and they die, and it doesn’t fucking matter to anyone around them.  Whatever happens, happens.  People move on, and they’re probably better off because of it.”

“That’s what changed you,” he whispered.  “I knew there was something that made you different from how all the reports from your rescue described you.  I should have pressed you before when I first thought there was something about that video you weren’t telling me.  I assumed it was something they did off camera—something classified.”

I shook my head.

“I’m very good at being who I am,” I told him.  “Don’t blame yourself.”

“Who are you, Evan?”

I shook my head.

“Doesn’t matter.  Not now.”  I’d fucked up far too publicly, and I couldn’t hide it.  It occurred to me that Rinaldo might never refer to me as “son” again, and I leaned back against the head of the medical center cot and closed my eyes.  My heart was starting to race, and I feared losing the handcuffs and a bit of privacy weren’t going to be enough to allow me to sleep.

“It matters to me.”  Mark’s voice was quiet but earnest.

I shook my head.

Nothing about the conversation was going to go anywhere, so I ended it with my silence.

With the illness of the inmates identified as the flu instead of the breakfast sausages, I was permanently assigned into the general inmate population to make room for the physically sick.  I remained in the same maximum security cell, and there was always a guard outside of it, but at least I wasn’t shackled to the bedrail constantly.  I was even allowed into the prison’s gym to work out and up to the top of the building for a little outside time.

Basketball hoops and prisoners hanging out and smoking filled the triangular shaped exercise area at the very top of the building.  I wasn’t much of a basketball player on a good day, and I hadn’t had too many good days recently, so I stuck with sitting up against the wall and alternating between staring at the cloudy sky and staring at the cement under my prison-issue sneakers.

My head was swimmy from lack of sleep, so I closed my eyes and tried to stop the accompanying nausea by swallowing repeatedly.  It helped a little but not enough.  I had been thinking about my dog, Odin, and wondered if I would be able to sleep if he were allowed in a cell with me.

Lia should have him now as one of the arresting officers had promised.  She would take good care of him—I had no doubt about that.  He liked her, too.  He’d taken to her pretty much the moment she lay down in my bed, much like I had taken to her.

“Arden, right?”

I opened my eyes and looked at the heavily muscled, thirty-something guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a distinctly Mexican accent but didn’t recognize him.  There wasn’t any reason to respond to him either, so I didn’t.  He wasn’t to be deterred and sat down next to me.

“I met you once,” he claimed.  “The name’s Pablo.  I ran snow for your boss before I got caught for possession with intent.  I got sentenced to six-to-ten, but they haven’t gotten around to moving me to Marion yet.”

He still didn’t look familiar, but his story rang a bell.  There were three guys busted about a year ago, and I assumed he must be one of them.  I still didn’t see his relationship in Moretti’s business as a reason to acknowledge him, though.  There were probably twenty guys in here at any given time who had relationships to the organization in one way or another.

Pablo continued to talk anyway.

“I heard about why you’re in here,” he said.

I took in a long, deep breath before leaning forward and resting my arms on my knees.  The cement beneath my heels was cracked, and I kicked a bit of it with my toe to knock a loose chunk of it away.

“I got the routine down here,” Pablo said, “so if you have any questions or anything…”

His voice trailed off as I sighed and looked up at him darkly.

There was a scar on his forearm that was certainly the result of a knife fight, and his calloused palms were indicative of someone who liked to spend his free time lifting weights and proving he had more testosterone than anyone else at the gym.  The belly hanging out in front of him and the cigarette made it obvious he wasn’t a health nut at all.  He was more than likely one of those who just liked to brag about how much he could bench press.

“Do I look like I give a shit?” I asked him.

He paused and licked his lips nervously.

“No,” he admitted as he looked to his pocket to pull out another cigarette.  “Still, if you need anything, I’ll help ya out.  While I’m still here, anyway.”

My eyes wandered over him.  He had a lot of upper body strength, but his legs weren’t as strong.  He either did a lot of lifting and manual labor activities, or he just hated doing squats at the gym so never worked out his legs like he did his arms.  He had a variety of uninteresting tattoos that were obviously done by a novice artist, probably in exchange for coke, and short-cropped, black, greasy hair.

I watched the cigarette dangling out of his mouth and wondered what Jonathan was doing right at that moment.  I also had a clear memory of leaning back against the side of the motor pool to sneak a cigarette with a young private in my unit.

“Got an extra one of those?” I asked.

“Sure,” Pablo said.

He handed me a smoke and a pack of matches.  It was too windy to use matches, so he handed his own cigarette over to me so I could monkey-fuck it to light mine.  The smoke burned in my lungs in a way that was immediately familiar and long-forgotten at the same time.  It took a couple tries before I got the hang of inhaling again.

Pablo remained silent for a while as I finished the cigarette and ground it out into the cement crack beneath my shoe.  I tried to breathe normally for a minute as my lungs attempted to remember how to deal with the smoke and whatever other shit they put in those things.

“You want another one?”

“Not now,” I replied.  “Thanks.”

“You let me know,” Pablo said.  “I’ll hook you up with some if you want them.”

I nodded.  I wasn’t sure if I really wanted another one, though.  My lungs still burned, and I coughed a couple of times, which caused Pablo to snicker quietly.  He shrugged a shoulder when I glanced at him and raised an eyebrow.

“You gonna kill me for thinking that’s kinda funny?” he asked.

Other times—other days—I would have.  Well, I would have considered it anyway.  At the moment, I wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind.  I obviously didn’t have a gun on me, and though I was quite sure I could get a shiv of some kind delivered to my hands without a lot of trouble, they were messy.  If I was going to kill Pablo, it would have to be with my hands, and that was just a lot of effort for a chuckle at my expense.

“No,” I finally said, “I’m not in the mood right now.”

He let out another laugh, but it was a nervous one.  He seemed to be getting the idea that what I said hadn’t actually been a joke and it was best for him to remember who the hell I was.  I might have been a little lost inside, but no one else needed to know that.

“I guess I’m lucky, then,” Pablo finally said with a short exhale through his nose.  “Still, though, if there’s anything you need, I can probably get it for you while I’m here.  You want weed?”

“I don’t touch the shit,” I informed him.  Even when my unit needed a little break from reality and would sneak a bit of pot, I never indulged.  I never stopped them from doing it, but I didn’t like the idea of being out of control at all.  Even drinking more than a couple of beers or a glass of good scotch was rare for me.

“Well, if you think of something, I’m here for ya, man.”

“Thanks.”  I didn’t mean it, but the response came out automatically.  I didn’t give a shit about some snow runner and what he could bring to my fucking jail cell.  He probably considered himself all kinds of useful in here but not to me.

I didn’t want anything.

After an hour, we were all led back down to the common area, which wasn’t a place I wanted to be.  I went back to my cell for lack of any better options and leaned my head against the back wall where I could see out the window and down to the street.

The building was a rather strange one architecturally.  It was triangular instead of the usual rectangle, and from the street, people could see the seven-foot tall windows of the cells covering the twenty-seven-story building.  Lots of people likened the sides of the building to an old-style punch-card because of the window slits in the pale, cement walls.

I wasn’t sure exactly what floor I was on but could tell I was up pretty high—certainly more than half way up the nearly thirty-story building.  There was a single bar going through the center of the thin window from top to bottom, just in case anyone was crazy enough to try to escape from so high up.  Crazy or not, people had tried, and a couple had even succeeded.  When I looked out of the south-facing window, the view kind of sucked.  I could see the Harold Washington Library, but that was about it.  All the cool stuff was to the North and East.