A Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Stations One through Six
Is there a fate worse than death? If so, it may not be what you imagine.
;
—The First Station—
And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn... ”enemies of society,” as you call them.... Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more!
— Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
#
It was an act of war. Pure and simple. But the world courts didn’t get it—didn’t understand that there was an essential difference between an act of war and garden variety terrorism. No one was innocent in a war. Everyone was either an ally or an enemy. Murder did not exist. Liam Connor knew that, if none of his accusers did. And he knew that one land’s butcher is another land’s hero.
That knowledge supported him through the trial and fed his natural courage, tested and fired through years of fighting. Courage allowed him to stand, unblinking, while the prosecutor read the charges and the witnesses described the carnage. While mothers wept and fathers hated him in silence. He’d confessed, as well, to the killing of a policeman in Derry a month before. It made no sense to conceal it; he was going to prison in any event, and was not ashamed to have done it.
He was not a terrorist, he told the jury; he was a soldier. His act was political, his intent to bring world attention back to Ireland. The Sinn Fein might consider her freedom won. He did not. Freedom was not a matter to be compromised.
He was found guilty on twelve counts of first degree murder. The jury called for the death penalty. He’d expected no less. He would be a martyr as well as a hero.
###
—The Second Station—
Human imagination long ago pictured Hell, but it is only through recent skill that men have been able to give reality to what they had imagined.
— Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays
#
He was transferred to an international prison facility outside of Prague. He saw the protestors as his transport pulled through the gates, milling in the sharp sunset patterns of umber shadow and orange light, their placards waving, condemning the death penalty. He gave them no thought.
They put him in an antiseptic cell next to an American. The two cells shared a wall with a transparent section that darkened and lightened at the whim of the gaolers and a door of sorts composed of gleaming metal bars that could retract into the ceiling—at the whim of the gaolers.
Through the transparent panel Connor could see the American as he sat on his bunk, pale and sweating, wringing his hands. He whispered to himself and addressed the ceiling as ‘God.’
Connor sent a glance at the ceiling of his own cell. There was a water stain above the bunk. Or perhaps it was a shadow—it was hard to imagine a stain would be allowed to exist in such sterile surroundings. Squinting, he saw it as a guardian angel—here the wings, there the long flowing robes. He wondered what the American saw hovering over his bunk.
When he could stand the babbling of Bedlam prayer no longer, Connor rapped on the translucent barrier between him and the American. “Hey!” he said. “What’s your name?”
The young man blinked at him, eyes pale and watery in a damp, gray face. “Uh...Roarke.” His voice was as clear as if the barrier were made of fishnet.
Connor smiled. “Good Irish name,” he said. “What’re you in for?”
Roarke giggled nervously and shrugged, then straightened his shoulders. “I did my wife and kid,” he said.
Connor tried not to look appalled. “Why?”
Roarke radiated a halo of machismo. “She was cheating on me. Kid probably wasn’t even mine.”
“So you killed them?”
The shoulders sagged; the halo evaporated. “Yeah.” He blinked and squinted. “Yeah... Oh, God,” he said to the ceiling, and started to sob.
Connor lay down on his bunk.
###
—The Third Station—
If it’s heaven for climate, it’s hell for company. — J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister
#
“Hey, you! Irish!”
He woke with a start and stared across the cell. The little American was hunkered down on his haunches, peering at him through the transparent panel, looking like a faded orangutan cadging peanuts.
“Connor,” he said. “The name’s Connor.”
“The terrorist?” He pushed forward, steaming the transparent barrier. “They said they were sending an IRA terrorist up.“
“I’m a soldier. We’re at war.”
The American laughed. “Right. You and nobody else. Did you know Ireland is about the only place in the world that’s not at peace?” he asked, suddenly pert. “I read that in TIME magazine. Really embarrassed the Sinn Fein. Doesn’t do a whole lot of good to sign treaties when a bunch of fanatics won’t give up the fight. The only place in the world that’s not at peace.” He repeated and shook his head. “Man, I sure wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”
“I’d say you have enough on your conscience already.”
Roarke laid his palms flat against the panel, smearing it with oily little streaks that were quickly broken down by the citrifier in the material. “They say,” he almost whispered, “you blew up a school bus full of little kids. How the hell could you do something like that?”
“The price of freedom is often high. How the hell could you do what you did?”
Roarke’s mouth wriggled. “Troop cuts. Lost my job. Army was my life. Couldn’t stand losin’ them, too.”
“Dead’s not lost?”
Roarke started to shake. He got up and moved away from the bars, wiping his hands on his pants...over and over. “I’m payin’ for it. God, two days!”
“That's when the axe falls?”
Roarke threw his head back and looked down his nose like a startled horse. “Naw. I did a deal. Instead of death, I get The Light. The God-damned Light.” Connor could hear the capital letters.
“What light?”
“S’got some doctor’s name—uh... Z’gorsky—something like that. The Z’gorsky Wave—that’s what the doctors call it. Everybody else just calls it The Light.” He glanced back over his shoulder as if ‘it’ were prowling the corridors.
Connor shrugged and shook his head.
“It’s an experiment. They told me if I’d participate in the experiment, I didn’t have to die.” Roarke giggled and his Adam’s apple bobbed like a fishing float. “I said ‘yes.’ Jesus, now’m not sure.”
Connor sat up. An alternative to death. “So, what’s it do? Brainwash you?” He’d lived through brain-washing and torture. He glanced down at his three fingered left hand—even that.
“I don’t know.” Roarke swallowed, making a gulping sound. “To hear them”—he jerked his head toward the corridor—“you’d think it was worse than dying.”
Connor puzzled. “Them?”
“Listen.”
He did. Out of the background noise of the cellblock he picked out a high-pitched gibbering.
Roarke grinned manically. “J-Block. The one’s who’ve ‘seen the light.’” He giggled at his poor joke. “Maybe I was better off with the shot. ...When’re you going up?”
“Three weeks.” Connor shivered involuntarily. He hoped Roarke hadn’t seen it. He wasn’t afraid to die.
“Hey, why’d you confess to killing that cop? The kids were enough to get you hung.”
“What does it matter? It’s not as if they can kill me more than once.”
“Yeah, but a lot could happen to you before you die. I heard rumors about what they do to cop-killers.”
“In this nice little safe house?” Connor chuckled. “Who could break in and get to me?”
“Who says they’ll need to break in?” Roarke went to sit on his bunk. “Dinner real soon,” he said, smiling affably. “Food’s pretty good here. Better than Army chow.”
The food was good, but Connor’s hunger was overwhelmed by the pungent, metallic taste of terror that wafted up from J‑Block. On the way to the cafeteria, he listened. There were voices that shrieked things like: “I won’t eat, damn you! You can’t make me eat!” There was a keening wraith‑voice that chanted “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” in an endless litany. He concentrated on not getting the food stuck in his throat. Then he slept.
When he woke the next morning, Roarke was full of news. The prisoner in cell A25 had tried to kill himself with a plastic spoon. “Tried to choke himself,” he said soberly. There were dark circles under the diluted eyes. “They took him to the hospital for an imp.”
“A what?“
“Nutritional implant. Your stomach shrivels up, but you don’t starve. Read all about it in a medical journal.”
“You read a lot.”
“Not a whole lot else to do unless you’re into pumping iron. I been here for two months. Lawyer's been trying to get me a retrial—you know, a sanity thing. Huh! I don’t think they buy that any more. Anyway, my appeals ran out, so-“ He shrugged. “Isn’t your lawyer trying to get you a lesser sentence?”
“No chance of that.”
“He could ask about The Light. I mean, after all you’re a celebrity.”
“So, where do you do all this reading?” asked Connor.
“Library. Anybody can use it. Even terminals like you. We go after breakfast. You can have books or disks. I look forward to it.”
Anticipation, mused Connor—a precious commodity among the damned.
###
—The Fourth Station—
There are only two countries: heaven and hell; but two conditions of men: salvation and damnation.
— George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island
#
They went to the library after breakfast. Connor spent his time ferreting out articles on the Zagorsky Wave. What he found made little sense. He understood the claim that the Wave affected the workings of the brain, but the terminology was impenetrable. He knew precious little about neural pathways or endorphins or what happened during REM sleep. There were references to sodium amytal, the so-called ‘truth serum’—something with which he was familiar.
That afternoon, he asked his attorney if he could cut a deal to be part of the Zagorsky experiment.
“A lab rat, Liam? Are you sure you want that?”
“Beats the alternative, don’t you think?”
The lawyer stared down at the lapels of his impeccable blue suit. “What do you know about the Zagorsky process, Liam?”
“I read some about it, today. Fancy name for brain washing. Kind of like going to a salon instead of a barber shop.”
“It’s a little more than that.” Counsel jerked his well‑groomed head toward the corridor. “You may have noticed that some of your fellow inmates are..."
"Mental? Hell, this place is more Bedlam than prison. Grown men trying to choke themselves with plastic spoons. But I'm not mental.”
The lawyer gave him a long, steady look, then said, “I’ll see what I can do. But I think you might want to talk to your man with the spoon.”
Connor pondered the meeting as he stood in the yard that afternoon, watching nearly naked tree limbs toss in the chill wind, stubborn leaves clinging to them like bright stars fallen and tangled in the twigs. Mountain peaks gleamed above the walls, pristine and white. It was a most pleasant place. One could do worse than to live out one’s life here. Except perhaps for those who seemed bent on self-destruction—who seemed to Connor legitimately mad.
Was that the effect of Zagorsky’s Wave? He crossed himself. God...suicide. Never that. As long as there was life, there was hope. He flexed his half‑ruined hand and felt the wraith-pain of the missing fingers.
That evening in the library, he read more about criminal medicine—about how lobotomizing the violent supposedly made them forget what it was to be violent. Was that what the Wave was about? Making someone forget why he’d done what he’d done? Did they think Roarke could be redeemed by clipping a few neural pathways?
Redemption. Was that what it was about? Redemption was not something the criminal justice system generally concerned itself with. If the Wave was some scientific way of redeeming souls, it hardly answered the human conception of justice. If it was a form of truth serum, they’d have no reason to use it on him. He’d never claimed he wasn’t guilty of blowing up that school bus. He’d told the truth at his trial and the truth had damned him in the eyes of a jury that did not understand the nature of the struggle. Some things were simply larger than life.
He liked the sound of that. It read like an epitaph: Some things are larger than life.
###
—The Fifth Station—
Suddenly to realize that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned—it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting that most of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope...that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.
—Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence
#
On Roarke’s day, they took him at sunrise. He was white-faced and terrified; his stubble of mousy beard stood out on his face as if every pore were squeezed tight. He seemed about ready to beg for the death his attorney had worked so hard to put off.
They brought him a Protestant minister. He’d told Connor he was Protestant the first day. “I s’pose that means you hate me, huh?” he’d asked.
“It’s not that simple.”
Now he was begging information from the minister, a weary‑looking man with bottomless, dark eyes and a mouth devoid of smile lines.
“Tell me, please,” begged Roarke. “What’s it like? Will it hurt?”
The minister hesitated. “I don’t know what it’s like, son. But I promise you, there will be no pain.”
Roarke went away down the corridor with his two guards and his frayed minister, feet dragging the shining tiles. Connor watched the surveillance cameras swivel to follow the little parade, then went back to his bunk.
Later that morning, he tried to pry more information out of the library’s medical journals. Difficult, even with a dictionary. Rather than occluding select involuntary background neural processes, he read, the Wave produces the opposite effect. It defeats the natural occulting influences of the conscious.
The dictionary was American, but he figured the word definitions had to be fairly close. Occlude, he read, to close or shut off; obstruct. He shook his head and looked up ‘occult.’ As he expected, it said something about supernatural influences. The second definition wasn’t any clearer: Available only to the initiate; secret. And the third: Beyond human understanding.
Beyond the understanding of Liam Connor, at any rate. “Hell!” He gave up in a flash of temper, closing the books. Damned scientific voodoo. He wouldn’t be half-surprised to find out this whole business was some slick psychological shell game intended to drive the inmates mad. Smoke and mirrors. He’d seen the state Roarke was in this morning. The man was primed to go mad. The mere suggestion that some unknown fate awaited him might send him over the edge.
But he wasn’t Roarke. He wasn’t some guilt-ridden chauvinist. He hadn’t destroyed his own family and, with them, any dignity or integrity he might have possessed.
His lawyer appeared while he was still sitting in the library‑-no longer reading, but just watching tongues of autumn flame dance in the trees. They went to a small, gray, glass-fronted room with a flat-screen monitor set into one wall. They sat at an austere table across from each other.
The lawyer folded his hands atop his fine leather briefcase. “The judge feels your crime warrants letting you enter the experimental program. The press is all over it, of course. Have you seen the crowd in the forecourt?”
“I saw a bunch of sad-looking rowdies when they brought me here. What’s it to do with me?”
In answer the lawyer turned to the television screen. “Voice ID—John Woods. SecureCam, forecourt, please.”
The screen leapt to life. It showed Connor a rabble among which no two looked as if they’d come from the same neighborhood or stock. They waved placards, they held hands and prayed, they stood in mute dissent. They were adults of all ages, they were children. Closest to the camera’s watchful eye, was an entire family: a woman with hair the color of black cherries, a weary looking man with a three day growth of graying beard, a girl who possessed the same deep auburn hair as her mother. Pressed against the woman’s breast was a photograph of a young girl who could only be daughter to her and sister to the other girl.
God in heaven, he thought, who brings a child to a place like this?
As if she’d read his thoughts through the camera eye, the girl raised her eyes to the lens.
Connor glanced away. “I suppose these folks think I should be executed.”
“They're divided. Some believe the Z-Wave is a superior alternative to the death penalty. Others believe it meets the criteria for a cruel and unusual punishment. They want the execution to proceed...as a kindness.”
Connor gazed thoughtfully at the display. “And those?” He gestured to the family.
“Which?”
“The couple there with their girl. What do they want?”
“They’re from Kilhenny,” the lawyer said.
It was answer enough. "Death, a kindness?”
The lawyer tilted his head and studied Connor at a cant. “They say there are worse things than death.”
“They are full of shit. Nothing you can live through is worse than death.” He unconsciously twitched his half-hand, then focused his eyes on Counsel’s studious face. “Stop your lobbying. They’re not going to repeal my conviction, and I’d sooner face Dr. Zagorsky’s wee light bulb than an infuser full of poison. I’ve been studying this Wave thing and I think I’ve figured it. I’ve watched how they twitched the poor bastard in the next-door cell all to pieces before they took him. It’s nothing but a high-tech light show, but by the time a guy gets there, he’s a guilt-bomb just waiting to explode. It’s all up here, you see.” He tapped a finger to his forehead. “They play games with the mind and then put on the show. And when it’s all over.” He snapped his fingers. “But I don't snap. I already know that. Christ, there isn’t a kind of pain made that I haven’t lived through.”
Counsel pursed his lips. “Liam, what do you remember about the Kilhenny bombing?”
“I remember all of it.”
“Do you? You watched the bus burn?”
“Hell no. I was a little busy trying to get away—for all the good it did me.”
The lawyer nodded, watching his fingers tap the table top. After a moment of hesitation, he put his briefcase onto the tabletop, opened it, and pulled out a collection of papers. He spread them out on the table.
They were not papers; they were photographs of children. Of families. "Recognize any of these?"
"No." Liam felt anger flare behind his breastbone and tamped it down. This was a stupid ploy.
"They're-"
"I know who they are. Or at least who you'll tell me they are. Kids killed in the bombing. You'll not catch me in a moment of sentimental weakness." He pushed the closest photo—a school yearbook shot of an auburn-haired girl—back across the table. He didn't have to ask to know that it was her family praying him to death in the forecourt. She was the image of her mother and sister.
"Her name was Heather Rose."
Liam shook his head and smiled. "You'd make a lousy shrink."
The lawyer showed no embarrassment at being caught out. “You’ll go in three days...Wednesday,” he said, gathered up the photos, laid them in his briefcase, and left.
###
—The Sixth Station—
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is Hell,
And where Hell is, there must we ever be.
—Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
#
Connor heard Roarke’s high-pitched gibbering before he reached their cell block. He passed the departing minister in the corridor.
“Didn’t hurt, eh, reverend?”
The worn out eyes surveyed him and he swore they missed nothing. “Physically, no.”
“Ah, merely destroyed his mind?”
The man uttered a ghost-laugh. “No. Not that either.” He moved away, clutching his naked Protestant cross.
Roarke was on the floor of his cell, banging at his head with closed fists. “He saw-he saw-hesawhesawhesaw!”
Connor got down on his haunches at the barrier between their cells. “Roarke!” he called. “Army boy!”
The pale eyes found him and fixed on his face. They were awash in tears and startlingly transparent. He could see through them right into Roarke’s soul. Right into his complete and utter emptiness. He was a vacuum. Sucked inside out.
Connor shook himself. “What happened to you? Can you tell me what happened?”
Roarke’s mouth twitched. “It’s a room,” he said softly. “Just a room. Looks like a—a”—he giggled—“like the places Jenny gets her hair...” He blinked and his mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
“A room?” prompted Connor.
Roarke nodded. “With a chair. The Light is over the chair. You...I sat down. No straps. You just sit. And they turned on the Light and-and then it was Dark." He whimpered. "I smelled her perfume."
He began to gibber again, pitch rising. Then he flung himself at the door of his cell and thrust his arms through the bars. “For Godsake! Please! Please! Please!”
Connor rocked back on his butt and covered his ears. “Please what, dammit?” he yelled. “What the hell do you want them to do?”
Roarke’s face turned toward him, pressed against the metal bars, twisted with anguish. “Kill me! Oh, God, please make them kill me!” His eyes lit suddenly and he moved away from the door toward the connecting wall. “You! You kill people all the time.”
Connor backed away, repulsed. “I’ve no reason to kill you.”
Roarke put out his hand. “Please.”
Curiosity nailed him. “Why?”
“Because I saw...” Madness began to seep in and lap around his eyes. “He called me 'daddy.' Oh God, Cody!”
“See what? Who’s Cody?”
“Me.” He disappeared into himself, then, and all Connor’s attempts to reach him failed.
While Connor lay awake, Roarke slept, exhausted, on the floor next door. It was not a quiet sleep. He twitched like a dying insect, mumbling and grinding his teeth. The grinding was bad—worse when it was interspersed with his whimpered pleas: “Take me please take me please take me...” Litany of the damned.
Morning brought no relief. Roarke didn’t go for more than minutes at a time without lapsing into his guilt-horrors. That meant Connor got no more than a catnap, but he'd lots of time to wonder what kind of deal he’d struck—as perhaps he was supposed to wonder. Perhaps, having observed that he was not, like his near neighbor, a guilt-burdened lunatic, his captors had settled on sleep deprivation as a means to soften him up. They’d be disappointed. He knew as much about sleep deprivation as he did about other forms of torture, and seeing Roarke like this only made him more determined not to succumb.
They took Roarke away to J-Block while he was in the library. Connor didn’t see him again. After, Connor wondered if the whole thing wasn’t a scam and Roarke an actor playing a part.
###
End Part One
Click the <next> link below to read the second half of A Cruel and Unusual Punishment.
copyright 1999-2010 by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
www.mayabohnhoff.com
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