The Blood Artists

There was no night or day inside Lewes, no windows or clocks, only crudely made calendars upon which to X-out the dates. She napped in a chair while Maryk worked in the infirmary operating theater, and while he slept off his cascades she sat at the guard station off B unit and pondered her interrupted life, her interrupted body. She didn’t feel whole anymore. She felt like something salvaged from a junkyard, something that Maryk had stitched together, just to see if he could get it to work.

His attitude toward her had changed since she fled B unit. Properly humbled, she was now taken everywhere by him, in some strange way like a student. She stood by the cots as blankets were drawn off one prisoner after another, the sick continually unveiled. The shock of it was gone by then and each one looked the same to her. As Plainville stripped them of personality, it also seemed to strip them of their faults, their predatory natures, exposing the small, frail souls that live in all creatures. The smell too, like the unwavering tone in her ear, no longer dizzied her. The sounds inside the hermetically sealed prison block — moans, shuffling footsteps, creaking carts — were like the sounds of her dreams. B unit was a tomb constructed of iron and concrete, and every noise was a long time dying away.

She stood inside the vacated cells. She looked out through the iron bars painted dull red, and saw where the paint had been picked away: pitifully pornographic nail scratches to wile away the time. She rested on concrete beds jutting out of concrete walls. She picked through the abandoned belongings: books stacked on the seamless shelf above the toilet, unframed photographs curled from the incessant heat, rolled pairs of clean socks, false teeth. She riffled through Bibles thumbed to twice their original size, the cheap leather spines cracked, pages bookmarked with postcards, letters, photos. In one she found obscenities scratched into the New Testament margins, and reading them, she could hear the prisoner’s perverted voice.

She was an apparition to them. She was a ghost. She wished she had something more to offer them than strangeness, mystery, distraction. Maryk, on the other hand, comforted without caring to or even trying. His manner alone consoled the condemned as he moved from bed to bed, working over each man with the same taciturn precision. Their red, fevered eyes grew tame in his assured presence.

“Magnificent,” he said, standing next to her later at the railing overlooking the unit from the corner of the highest her. She would have answered the incessant moaning with a long, shrill scream; Maryk lauded it. “The decay,” he went on, looking like a man standing at the rail of a steamship leaving a quarantined port. “The utter rot.”

His words were blasphemous to her. She remembered hearing her father downstairs, and knowing from the direction of his groans that he was laid up in the living room, and knowing from their timbre that he was shivering: this man, her father. She and her brother had been forbidden to go downstairs. They had been forbidden even to see him. Her mother brought them food and felt their foreheads and throats with a smooth gloved hand, brave at first, but becoming more and more emaciated with each visit, until finally she stopped coming at all. Melanie held her brother — for the first time, as well as the last — and rocked him as he shivered in her arms, his eyes growing dull and viewing something farther and farther away. The phone still rang with sick, frightened voices that didn’t know yet that her dad was gone away.

She had been among the last to feel anything, and as such, was a witness to it all. The long drive out to the hospital, through the dead town and the familiar, empty intersections, past men and women in yellow space suits pulling instruments across driveways and lawns. The grotesquely overgrown plants and trees. Earlier, she had euthanatized every pet in the kennel, rather than have them sicken and die alone. She had held each little unsuspecting head as their bodies went limp.