By Morowa Yejide
Jimmy Eckert walked swiftly through the massive front gate of the Black Plains Correctional Institute to his car in the cold night air. Chafing wind cut into the folds of his jacket, chilling him. Wispy blond hairs whipped about his balding head as the cold rouged his pale nose and cheeks. The walk ended a double shift he’d started the day before, when the sun was already recoiling behind the Rocky Mountains, when an ashen shadow spread over the plains behind him like an evening tide, swallowing light as it washed over the Supermax facility.
Now, in the dark, he hurried to his car. The parking-lot lights were out, and there was a quarter-moon visible in the starry sky. He had memorized the way and knew the paces, the spaces, the distance by heart. As on so many black nights, the stars looked down at him through the veil of eternity in that cold, familiar way. And like other such nights, when he looked up at the distant constellation of stars, detached observers of all he had endured, he thought of the fire. The blaze that had burned the barn, his family’s livelihood, his inheritance, to the ground.
The sound of horses screaming shook him awake in that long-ago time. He ran out into the black night, a wedding quilt of dark velvet over the land. Clouds snuffed out what lay beyond the sky. In the full dark, in the split-second slide of reality and unreality, he could see only the nebula of fire in the distance. The barn burned brilliant, like a dying star. In those moments, he could not explain what froze him there, mute and shirtless. The clouds cleared then, like a great curtain moving across a stage, all the better for the stars to see the spectacle below. He had looked up at them in the seconds his mind was able to pluck from the flypaper of awareness and beheld a cold, unfeeling audience.
The seconds smeared into time and dripped like wax. He arrived at the inferno first and stood before it as he would before an altar of death, awestruck by its grandeur and terror. Waves of crimson and gold climbed to the sky in spectacular peaks and crashed down onto the falling beams, the screaming horses, the billowing white bushes of burning hay. He stood hypnotized in the heat and glow and wax melt of dream and purpose. From the edges of the barn, he could just make out the figure of one of the great black beasts. The money and years his father spent breeding perfection made no difference in the blaze. Its coat melted into black oil and ran freely in the flood of liquid fire. What might have been left of the other horses dissolved into the sound of his father shouting, “You left the lantern in the barn!” The one he had been using earlier that evening because he liked to polish rifles in the deep calm of firelight? He did not want to believe what his father was saying. No, of course he hadn’t left the lantern there. It had been someone else, that other part of himself that would not have thought such a slipshod act could lead to such devastation.
As the fire swept aside their lives, the stars looked down at them all, unchanged, unmoved by the singular event that was to shift the course of their destiny. The fire burned everything to the ground, and those same stars watched as his family tried in vain to right what could not be altered. Guilt and bitterness coated Jimmy Eckert like the mess from a slop jar. Years later, when he learned about the inevitability of all things within Black Plains, he came to understand that it was fate that held him transfixed before the fire. It held him now in the vise of daily shifts.
The wind swooped down from the Rockies, and Jimmy Eckert shivered, pulling his coat tighter over his body. All those years ago, when he had tried on his black polyester uniform for the first time in the mirror, he did not know that his shift would be the start of his own prison sentence. He didn’t realize that he was beginning a life on the inside that would change him into someone who could not function outside the walls of Black Plains. He would not have thought that the facility would author his destiny when he first reveled in his uniform and weapon, the license given to him to inflict his will.
He could no longer see beyond the Rocky Mountains. He no longer felt himself to be a free man. He could not hear man’s flurry of murder and procreation, debauchery and virtue, living and dying. He stopped watching television, since he could no longer relate to simplistic scenarios solved in hourly frames. He had long ago stopped wearing a watch and threw all his clocks away. Women, enigmatic creatures that they were, held little interest for him, and he had no patience to decode the endless combinations of their words and feelings. He could take himself in his hand or take an unfortunate to bed. The pithy feeling was the same, an unremarkable sensation that gathered and dispersed. He had become one with Black Plains. He breathed its stale air and tasted its tinlike water even when he was alone in his dead parents’ house. His pillow and bed were framed in concrete. At night, when he closed his eyes, he saw only steel doors and stone floors. He dreamed of scalps rippling with ringworm and rotting flesh. He awoke to the sound of a loud buzzer in his head. There was no escape far enough away from the facility. There were no books, no fiction or autobiography, that could capture what he came to inhabit, for the world outside had nothing to do with the world in which he lived.
It was as if Black Plains, the Secured Housing Unit, Warden Stotsky, the horses, the liquid fire, and the stars—everything—had always been. It had always been as it was in the swirl of time. He began to ask himself difficult
questions with difficult answers. The kind of time Jimmy Eckert had come to know was born of something else. He didn’t know if it was evil or justice. It did not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. He was certain of one thing: he was bottled in it, along with the prisoners he guarded.
Jimmy Eckert fumbled with the frozen lock on his car and got in. In the world of the facility, the inmates held infinite combinations, infinite possibilities of wretchedness. He observed them for the specimens they were, for the natural enemies they were. In the showers, each held his own genitalia, the last of what he was, the last of what the prison would take. Each of them with his reasons for crimes committed. And when Jimmy Eckert looked at them, he saw only that they were once males, not men. And inside Black Plains, they were no longer males, they were rodents. There were exceptions, of course. Anomalies. But not enough to change the numbers. Not enough to change the form of the prison state, this hidden nation. None of any of it mattered in Black Plains, a realm unto itself, a world away from the world.
Sometimes, when he stepped into the vomit-green walls of the receiving room for ID check-in, he pushed his baton into its holster and was struck by the fact that he was not permitted to carry a gun, nor had he ever fired one. But in such a place as Black Plains, his real weapon was more powerful than batons or bullets. His weapon was control and the deathlike stillness that came with it. The only currency to be had by any of the rodents was worthlessness. He had earned a wealth of it himself; he would dole it out to those who earned the right to receive it. He reminded himself of these facts daily, as he nodded to the guard at the elevator, as he prepared for his descent. Each day, the elevator awaited Jimmy Eckert to escort him to the underworld, where the souls in the Secured Housing wing writhed in cages seared with fury. Where fluorescent light embedded in the concrete beamed like an Alaskan midnight sun, and he, the falcon, roamed a fiery, encased sky.
He spent every day ambling down the wing, the line of solitary-confinement cells standing eternally at attention, the seal of each steel door interrupted only by the slot through which he would shove a tray. He would pick up the stack of food rations to be distributed to the fated men and begin walking the row slowly, pushing rations through each slot. He could hear the rodents in the wee hours of his shift, the conversations they had with themselves or other personalities inside of them, how their voices changed to mimic other people. Sometimes he wondered if what they talked about had come from reality, or if it grew from what Black Plains ladled into their minds.
From behind the door marked 02763, there was usually silence. Staring at that door always filled Jimmy Eckert with excitement. He would stare at the numbers stamped onto the steel, listening. He had grown tired of knowing the ending of each prisoner at the beginning. But when he stood by Horus Thompson’s door, he imagined that something was growing inside of the cell, something coveted that he had a hand in creating, a thing he came to own. And it was in certain moments, like when he opened the bean hole and pushed the tray through, that Jimmy Eckert felt as if he was feeding something besides a prisoner.
And sometimes it seemed, even in the wretchedness of small acts of rebellion, that Horus Thompson was trying to move to a place where he could not reach him, where Black Plains could not reach him. It reminded Jimmy Eckert of the Mummy. The old man was a sort of mascot of Black Plains, with his weeks of eating three beans a day and cupping his own urine and swallowing it. The Mummy refused food numerous times before escaping into the opaque realms beyond insanity, to which there was not even a window for spectators. He assumed the old man’s mind was too feeble even for nightmares or babbling, and he lived in his own sarcophagus. He worried that 02763 might follow.
He turned the ignition over and listened to the engine struggle with the cold. These were concerns that he could only admit in the backwaters of his mind. Because he needed Horus Thompson there to punish, to talk to, to listen to, to act as an accelerant of his misery—the only feeling he had left. They talked, if you could call it that: him peering through the bean hole to whisper and 02763 writhing in silence, in delusion, in rage. Jimmy Eckert hated and needed all of this. He had given up understanding why.
He put the car into drive. And as it moved forward, he was overcome with the creeping feeling that his relationship with the prison was the relationship he would have had with a whore. Even in brief moments of pleasure, he wanted to strangle the life from her. The years had become one repetitive motion, one rising and falling of the moon. What was left at the start and finish of each day was the call, the obligation, to step through the ruthless jowls of Black Plains yet again. He sat in his car and listened. The wind whipped in short bursts. Coyotes bayed from distant lairs. It was cold and getting colder. Dark and getting darker. He ground his teeth and pulled out of the parking lot. The Rocky Mountains pressed against the starry sky. Through the frosted glass of his car, he could not see the white flickers of the stars piercing the black, but he felt their mockery as he drove away.