SHE WAS ENGLAND

a short story

written by

CHRISTOPHER HAYDEN

MODUS ARTS GROUP 2013

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Copyright 2013 by Christopher Hayden All Rights Reserved.

MODUS ARTS GROUP

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SHE WAS ENGLAND

When he was in prison they told him he was dying. A doctor had been brought in from the nearest town to re-examine him one afternoon when he couldn't get out of bed to go do his mopping in the common hallways of the old, concrete, penitentiary annex. The doctor was a young man, fox-faced and bespectacled, dressed in casual attire. Without a stethoscope or even a 'Visitor' pass hanging around his lithe neck, he looked to his doomed patient like a college student. The doctor helped with his own ungloved hands when they had to move him from the bed to a wheelchair so they could roll him down to medical. The three guards wore gloves. He tried not to cry out but the pain in his middle-gut got the better of him. To his own ears he sounded like a woman giving birth. It was that bad. And it was worse when they moved him from the chair to a gurney. He shrieked like a child. For him, Inmate #940126, this was the worst thing. The screaming. The shame of having these people hear him. The pain itself was almost unbelievable. Taken together with the shame it made him yearn for death in a way he had not since the early weeks of his life sentence. Seventeen years had come and gone without his feeling quite so desperate for oblivion. The World beyond the walls and fences had ceased to exist as a tangible reality the way early morning slowly dissolves into the less-sweet phases of just another day. Another day. Another day. His mind was a closed book sitting on a high shelf in a quiet room. The words printed on the pages of that book pressed against each other, unchanging, as the paper mildewed. The stories those words formed went untold and unexamined. Time unfolded as time will. Prayers and wishes and hoping for death had been replaced, by degrees, but only by Nothing. Being alive in that place became tantamount to the grave. No need to die. For the most part, in the most important ways, he already had. By the date of his first parole board hearing he was already so far gone that, without even thinking, he used the back of the official denial letter to keep cribbage scores. He had served his time in docile repose. Never getting into much trouble. Never starting any worth mentioning.
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Laying flat on his back, looking up at the water-stained foam panels in the suspended ceiling of the medical examination room, he spoke to the doctor. Despite himself, there was a dire hiss in his voice. "Please don't start poking your fingers into my belly." "I'm not going to do that." the doctor assured him, standing just out of his peripheral vision. "I don't need to do that." "I'm worse." said the inmate. "You are worse." said the doctor. "Can they cut it out?" "No." He almost said something else and stopped himself for fear of sounding womanish and scared. He knew there must be at least one guard within ear shot. And so he just lay there trying to breath in a way that would not hurt too much. The doctor came into view wearing blue latex gloves and holding a syringe. For one ripe and lovely moment the prisoner thought this might be a death cocktail such as you would pay a veterinarian to use to put your dog to sleep. His mind flashed on the warden and the assistant warden sitting in an office in the administration wing, each of them smoking a cigarette and looking at a black telephone on the table - waiting for it to ring so they could be told it was done. He used to clean that office every other day. "I'm going to give you this now." The doctor said. "For pain?" "For pain." After that he didn't have to go back to his cell. They made him comfortable and several hours later they packed him up and drove him by ambulance to the campus of the old state mental hospital. One of the old asylum buildings had been rehabed for use as a hospice for terminally ill inmates from the prisons and jails scattered around the various counties. He was doped to unconsciousness for the ride and never laid eyes on the exterior of the old cement dungeon for the insane. They rolled him in and took him up several stories in an ancient and massive cargo elevator. He woke up alone in an old fashioned hospital bed with a bladder full of urine. The room was grey and cavernous and cool. There was a stainless steel bedpan on the nightstand and he tried
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but could not pass his fluid due to the effects of the opiates which they were now going to give him until it was over. A male nurse and a woman physician catheterized him without his even having complained. Then they gave him another injection and a glass of orange juice. The injection was nice but the juice was heavenly. In the prison system itself they almost never gave real fruit and vegetable juices to the inmates. Too expensive. With meals, the prisoners got a variety of flavors of powdered drink mix. Spilled on a tile floor and allowed to set for a few hours, the stains would never go away. You could strip and buff and wax and repeat. There was a cherry Swastika on a cell floor in the seclusion unit that had been there, it seemed, for decades. What that might imply as to how your own insides dealt with the stuff led many men to forgo it altogether in favor of ice water. He held the plastic glass to his lips and pulled the orange juice into his mouth in small dollops. Liquid sunshine. Memories of childhood breakfasts at his mother's house near the ocean. The same male nurse who'd stuck the tube up his prong asked him if he wanted "some more O. J." He nodded, suspicious he was being taunted. They weren't really going to give him all the juice he could drink, were they? The nurse was used to it. Had seen it many times. He told the dying man, "If you can get up, and you should if you can, there is a cooler out in the kitchen with juices in the drawer and ice cream on the freezer side." He smiled and added, "You don't have to ask anybody. It's there for you." "What if I can't get up?" "I'm here for you too." The nurse patted the corner of the mattress, down near his feet. The gesture drew the dying man's eyes to the nurse's hand. Thick fingers. Pale skin. A bit of curly hair protruded from a dark green sleeve, growing in a tuft at the back of the wrist. He followed the arm of the nurse up to his face and looked at him. Salt and pepper curly hair. A widows peak. He reminded the prisoner of Colonel Paul Tibbets from the Hiroshima bombing documentary they had played at least twice a year in the prison gymnasium on movie nights. But the association was fleeting and neither disturbing nor reassuring. It was
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simply a matter of the shape of the man's face, the set of his eyes and that distinctive widows peak. "What time is it?" "Seven. The sun is going down." The nurse walked to the big, heavily grilled window and pulled up the shade. Light streamed in and caught the dying man by surprise. He winced and the nurse instantly lowered it again. He moved to the side of the bed. "Would you like to try to get up?" He nodded and took a deep breath. As the nurse turned down the blanket and sheet in a synchronized movement, he found that he could sit up and did. When he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood, the nurse stepped back and gave him room to take a step. "Where can I go?" The man asked. "Well. The unit here is pretty small compared to what you are probably used to. This is your room, obviously." As the nurse talked he made gestures and motions to encourage the man to head towards the doorway. As they crossed the threshold and stepped out into the hallway the nurse told him, "Take a left towards the day room. Take a right towards the kitchen." He looked to the left and saw that the hallway terminated a few yards away. Beyond - a large room with chairs and couches full of natural light from big windows. To his right, about twice as much hallway and a dim little room lit by a small orange bulb stuck in a ceiling fixture. "You said there was more juice?" "Yes sir." The nurse smiled. "And ice cream." He turned his back to the sunshine and started a slow, careful stroll. The nurse watched him go for a moment and then went into the day room and disappeared. When he got to the small modern refrigerator - an anachronism among the otherwise ancient appointments which amounted to heavy oak tables and chairs crowded into a very limited space - he pulled the door open and smiled like a kid. Juice. Orange juice. Grapefruit juice. Apple juice. Cranberry. All in little square bottles that stacked neatly. He looked around guiltily before grabbing two orange juices with one hand and two apple juices with the other. He let the door shut on its
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own spring and moved to a table. Taking a seat, he drank the juices slowly and with great relish. It occurred to him that this was as good as it was ever going to get. Life was closing down and death was coming fast. He sat there drinking. Everything was fine. He neither cared about living nor feared death. He just didn't want it to hurt. Given the free hand they were exhibiting when it came to the morphine, he felt confident that it would not. His eyes found the fridge and he contemplated the fact that there was ice cream in there too. His thoughts flew back to the prison and all the poor saps trapped in healthy bodies with no fruit juice or ice cream....or morphine. He almost dared to smile but then stopped himself out of the superstitious notion that being smug might jinx the whole show. He then recalled with rare detail something that happened the second or third day of his prison sentence. Going in, he'd been young enough and innocent enough and soft enough to have good reason to be terrified. Standing in his ill-fitting prison blues for a morning roll call, monsters to the left of him and monsters to the right, he had heard a quiet voice from inside his head which said, "You are going to be okay." It had never happened before that long ago morning and it never happened again. Hearing voices. But for that single vertiginous moment all his new prisoner's substantial anxiety and fear and doubt had evaporated. He felt the same way now. #940126 was sitting in that same chair in the kitchen, working through his second little tub of chocolate ice cream, when the other terminal patient on the unit made his presence known. Spoon halfway between his mouth and the dish, the prisoner suddenly felt a slight swish of air on the side of his face. A tall, horrifically thin man had all but snuck up on him before gliding past him to the refrigerator. Dressed in pajamas and a frumpy robe, the man retrieved a bottle of apple juice and then turned to face him. He had sores all over his bald head and face and neck. They were reddish, each one bigger around than a penny. The sores looked wet and hot. His sunken blue eyes had patches of black wrinkles which descended halfway down his cheeks. They looked at each other for a moment. "You must be the new guy." he half whispered from deep down inside his throat.
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"Just came in from Frampton." #940126 told him. "Frampton. Ugh. How long did they give you?" the tall corpse of a man asked him as he frailly and gently slipped his long frame down into a seat at the next table. "They didn't say." He answered. "They're supposed to tell you when they sentence you." the man said solemnly. It took a moment to process. "Oh, I thought you meant-" The tall man cut him off with a hideous, feminine cackle that rang of homosexuality. "It was a joke!" he hissed. "Funny." he told him non-committally. "I'm sorry." the pocked up man said insincerely, studying the newcomer's face with a kind of intrusive and birdlike intensity before looking away quickly. His posture changed, denoting something like a mood swing. As if the failure to find humor in his wise-crack had burst a bubble and left the fellow suddenly laid low with despair. "That's okay." He told him. "They gave me life plus twenty-five." The tall man didn't respond so he added, "That was seventeen years ago so, you know, I owe the state eight more and then I'll get going on the life part." The other man was instantly chuckling, too hard to sound real. But if his delight was a fraud it was a very convincing one because his mood lifted again and with it his posture improved until he was sitting up almost perfectly straight, still giggling. "Life plus twenty-five." the man parrotted. "Is that all?" "I've always felt it was quite enough." "I'll bet you did." the man conceded before quickly asking. "How old are you?" "Writing a book?" "No. A screenplay." the fellow quipped before breaking into yet another chorus of womanish hysteria. "Don't you know who I am?" "No." #940126 told him dryly. "Who are you?" "Do you care?" "Sure." "I'm Maddox Maines."
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This was a surprise. He certainly knew that name. Everyone in the country and most people on the planet knew that name. Maddox Maines the serial killer. Mad Dog Maddox. Mad Maddie. Maddie the Max. There were a dozen permutations in the common parlance. Most serial killers get one nickname. The Zodiac. The Nightstalker. Jack the Ripper. But the peculiar alliteration of Maines's name lent itself to variations and the media had never confined itself to a single version. #940126 forced himself to stay in his seat and remain in a stationary repose. He fought off an overwhelming urge to look back at the doorway in the hopes the nurse or a guard or SOMEONE was there. Anyone to dilute the pure evil of this fucking sicko's presence. Maddox Maines was one of the most famous, most prolific and most savage killers in the history of American jurisprudence. This was bad. Wasn't it? What kind of screw-over was the state pulling? Sending him here, now, to die with this freak. Decades ago, Maddox had been a nightclub owner in the second largest city in the state. He'd hobnobbed with rock stars and Hollywood royalty. Years before his crimes became common knowledge, Rolling Stone had published an interview with him because he had managed, season after season, to get the biggest music acts in the world to play his club. Bands that could fill a soccer stadium three days in a row were thrilled to come do a couple sets in his relatively miniscule place. On a stage less than a foot high, the intimate performances frequently featured all-acoustic sets from the hardest rocking bands on Earth. Maddox, in a rare, second-tier celebrity way, had been the toast of Europe and North America. The television cameras made a point of capturing his long, lithe, distinct form at every Grammy Awards ceremony for a decade. He'd be sitting with an actress or a female vocalist, smiling wisely and looking cooler than Elvis in his tux and tails. The only problem was that, in the tradition of H.H. Holmes, his nightclub - which he had designed himself - was really a horror house of V.I.P. rooms with hidden trap-doors and a maze-like secret sub-basement, hidden discretely beneath the foundation of the building. This served as his torture and killing chamber. For years he had hidden in plain sight. His M.O. was to mingle with the club patrons and, when it crossed his fancy, to pick out a victim
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- always a young man - and lure him to a dark corner of one of the many small lounges scattered around the warehouse-sized building. When you are a young, twenty-something clubbie, drinking and stoned and relaxed and a supercool big-shot like Maddox Maines takes you aside and whispers in your ear that the real party is going on in the next room, you crouch down and slip through the hidden door he shows you when no one is looking. And then you are never heard from again. "I take it you've heard of me." Maines hissed. "Sure." #940126 admitted. "Who hasn't?" Maines took this for flattery and chuckled gently. #940126 did a very good job of appearing to stay relaxed even as his internal tension began to wind and tighten until he started to feel the glow of the fire of the cancer in his entrails. Maddox had killed dozens. Scores. The killing went on so long that, a couple years after his state trial, a Federal Grand Jury was convened to investigate whether Maines had been assisted by his connections in city and state government. There were rumors of Freemasonry and Satanism and large outdoor ceremonies a la Bohemian Grove, complete with Israeli security and gay pornstars. An anonymous source ponied up a cassette tape that got leaked in the media. On that tape, Maddox Maines and a former state governor - a Jew by the name of Caspberger - were heard to be drinking liquor and snorting cocaine and discussing the very peculiar idea that when you ritually torture and fuck and kill someone - if you do it 'right' that victim becomes your slave in Hell for eternity. They would be yours to terrorize and rape and disembowel and castrate forever. In the end, no one was indicted. Caspberger committed suicide a few years later. Jesus fucking Christ.... #940126 knew that Maines had spent many many years in solitary confinement. His entire sentence, in fact. Not for punishment. For protection. The idea of it was especially pleasing. And seeing the man riddled with the effects of whatever vile, viral infection was now eating him alive was equally gratifying. He looked at Maines and then down at the table again. Sitting in the strange, orange colored light from that one little bulb in the ancient asylum kitchen, Maines began to fidget in the
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absence of any further conversation. He looked at the new guy and said. "Do you want me to leave you alone?" "Sure." he replied. Maines shrugged his shoulders and took a long time to stand up to his full height. He shuffled his slippered feet to the door. Without turning back, he said, "Good luck in the next world." "Fuck you, faggot." #940126 told him. It wasn't just his imagination. It probably wasn't even due to the presence of the fiend. His guts really were starting to flame up again. he contemplated that it could very well be the unusual presence of the natural acids in the fruit juice that was starting the fire. Without panicking, without anxiety, he stood up and headed for the hallway. He found the nurse who reminded him of Tibbets busily playing a game of solitaire with a deck of cards on a small podium with a sign on it that said, "Nurse's Station." The nurse looked up and smiled. "He's as weak as a kitten. He can't hurt anyone anymore. Don't worry." "I wasn't." #940126 told him. "Good." the nurse said. "What's wrong with him?" "Where do I begin?" "Why is he dying?" "Full blown AIDS." He said. "Can't you tell? The blisters?" "He's had AIDS all these years?" "He caught it in prison." The nurse told him. "I thought he was P.C." He said back. "Down in Turlington. In 'the tombs.' Total seclusion." "Apparently love always finds a way." The nurse said. Standing there with his middle burning, the dying man liked that. He liked that a lot. He liked this nurse with his atom bomber's face and his vicious wit. "Would you like some more morphine?" "Yes please." "Can you rate your pain on a scale of one to-" "Eight." he cut in. "But its getting worse fast."
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"Why don't you go to your room and I'll meet you there." "Okay." He turned and headed for his bed. True to his word, the nurse came in shortly with an injection needle and two small plastic cups laid out on a tray. In one cup, water - in the other, two little white pills. "I'm going to give you something a little stronger and see how it suits you." The nurse said. "Plus these pills are Dilaudid. You can have them too." He ate the pills and drank the water while sitting up on the edge of the bed. Then he lay back, swung his feet up, waited for the needle. The injection was like sliding down into a warm bath. After the nurse left he actually caught himself not breathing and had to make a solid, conscious effort to fill his lungs two or three times. Then everything was fine. With a smugness that no superstition could dispel, he lay there on his back and realized fully and completely that he was actually out of prison. And for good, too. Yes his days were numbered and yes most of his life had been, by his own estimation, a goddamned shameful waste of oxygen. But he had made it. He had handled it. He had done his time like a man. He'd never been punked. A White Supremacist prison gang had at one time tried to recruit him to their numbers and he had managed by his own wit and humor to beg off the invite without getting shanked in the shower or fucked in the ass. The top lieutenant of the gang had even been his cell mate for several months. This was about five years in. Twelve calendars ago now. They had gotten along pretty well considering what a egotistical maniac the fellow had been. True Hitler Complex. Not exactly a sociopath. Not psychotic in the least. But just mean. Dangerous. In prison for violence and looking for opportunities to perpetrate more in the name of cash money and the White Race. When he could not entice #940126 to jump in and join up he had spent days, weeks, trying to prevail upon him on grounds of racial patriotism and the theory that "the Jews were eventually going to use the Blacks and the Hispanics as a mob-army to decimate and wipe out White European Aryans in 'their own traditional territories' here in North America and they would use the Muslim immigrants to pollute and enslave Europe itself. The White Supremacist's name had been McCammon, though he was only 1/4 Irish but 3/4 Portuguese. #940126 never mentioned it but
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always wondered if McCammon knew the true history of the Portuguese conquest, colonization and related African slave-trading in Brazil. All the race mixing and whatnot. To mention such a thing to such a man as McCammon would have been a truly clinical act of suicide for sure. Instead, with his back in a corner and McCammon demanding that #940126 step up and swear an oath to soldier in the coming race war, he had calmly and very cleverly painted a picture of the world that went along the lines of, "Listen, Mic. (He had called him Mic as a term of affection.) My Nazi brother. If there ever was a race war you would see the true dark side of humanity emerge - not from the Whites you see on the news dressed like the old German Nazis, heads shaved, screaming 'White Power! Heil Hitler!' No." He had paused for effect then. "Those guys would all be the first to be rounded up by the Feds in a worthless attempt to cool things off. And you know this, Mic. And when the Jews finally stir up the Blacks and the Hispanics and you start to see the battle lines form - the shit starts to hit the fan - rumors and then televised news of massacres of White people, first in the big cities, then other places. Then it will happen." "What?" McCammon demanded, looking dour but irresistibly titilated. This was his favorite subject, of course. "Then what will happen?" "The skinheads and the White Nationalists will be locked down or maybe even executed by the Feds. So it won't be them. It can't be them. They are too visible. Too easy to pick out. Too easy to catalog and surveil and entrap. The Jews are good at that stuff. Look at fucking Israel. Instead it will be the car salesmen and factory workers and teachers and coaches and dentists and architects and all the folks who live in nice little suburbs and usually mind their own business and don't even think about racism or the history of slavery. They obey the law and stay out of prison. Until they feel that threat. That heat. I'm talking about a sleeping giant of proportions and characteristics that could very easily make Nazi Germany look like two weeks at summer camp. When we are collectively provoked to the point of actually being scared and feeling the need to organize and act, the rest of humanity will find out what it really means when they call us White Devils. The grim reaper
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doesn't wear a hoodie and baggie jeans, friend. He wears a business suit or golf pants or maybe a tight fitting bright orange cycling outfit with a matching helmet. His capacity for violence and mercilessness is exceeded only by his ability to think like a IBM card machine - cold, calculating, heartless, fearless. Resourceful and cruel and coming across the field of battle in irresistible numbers no one else on this continent can even come close to matching. Seriously, Mic. We've got nothing to worry about." And that had been that. McCammon had climbed up into his top bunk and laid quietly for a long time. "You talk good." "Only when I mean it." Not long afterwards, Mic got himself sent to solitary for strongarming some new kid for his shampoo and Ramen noodles. They must have transferred him out when his seg time was done. #940126 never saw him again. And he sure as fuck didn't join any gang. The Whites left him alone. The Blacks left him alone. He lived on a combination of what the state gave him for free and would pay him to clean. After he quit drinking commissary coffee, his facility job funds allowed him to eat the equivalent of an extra meal every day. He didn't smoke. Didn't mess around with drugs. Almost no disciplinary write-ups. He took care of himself. Went out to the yard to walk every morning and every afternoon. Push-ups before bed. He participated in some groups. Poetry class. A.A. meetings. Bible study sometimes; sometimes not. Time unfolded as time will. Another day. Another day. Another day. Across the span of a very few number of days his condition deteriorated dramatically. His body weight dropped so quickly that they stopped encouraging him to get out of bed, to save his strength. If they needed to move him from the ward to some other section of the hospice they did it on a rolling stretcher instead of a wheel chair. Drinking juice and eating ice cream became all but impossible. Too painful. He was going fast. His mind held up pretty well beneath the twin onslaughts of the multiplying tumors eating him from the inside out and the everincreasing quantities and concentrations of pain medications they were
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now pumping into his arm via a permanently installed butterfly I.V. He received most of his nourishment this way also. He stayed in his room. He stayed in his bed. He found that lying on his side was preferable to being flat on his back. For him, the hardest work of the day was turning. He would spend a couple hours with his right shoulder pointed at the ceiling and then something would make him begin the excruciating process of switching. He spent most of his energy trying to remain still and breath easily. Nurses and doctors came into his room and went out of it like the cast of a film being played at triple speed. There were times someone would speak to him and he simply couldn't respond. The nurse with the widows peak worked out a blinking code with him. That man did everything a person could to treat him with dignity and respect. Laying in bed with one rail-thin arm slid up under his pillow and the other curled and pulled to his chest, his thoughts went back back back to when he had been very young. His father had been a mean drunk. His mother a battered punching bag. When Pops got picked up for beating the woman for the fourth or fifth time she finally left him. She took their bright eyed little son with her and moved half way across the country. She loved him but she was a cold person. Had had a hard life. They were not close and did not touch or hug very much; when they did there was an awkwardness, a pulling away too quickly; something empty. She worked as a waitress and put herself through a junior college. By the time he was old enough to need braces she could pay for them, working as she did as an administrative assistant in a general hospital. In high school he performed poorly and got into trouble. She gave him mewling lectures on how important it was to be honest and work hard and cried tears when he would disappoint her with his grades or when the police came looking for him. With very little provocation she was known to explode in stress-fueled rages and scream at him that he was "just like your father!" She bought a small ranch-style house in a decent neighborhood and things were pretty good there. The neighbors were a wonderful family with two daughters his own age with whom he played kickball and learned to play the piano from their father, who had been an avid,
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amateur jazz musician from Chicago. Their mother had been a British lady with an accent she never lost. If his own mother was hardboiled and cold, the neighbor woman had been as soft and sweet as minor chords played with one hand in the higher pitched keys of their family's upright piano. Laying there in his death bed, the sunlight sneaking in around one edge of the shade, he remembered that British lady whom he had lived next door to during several of his formative years. She was funny in a manner he would, later in life, see reflected in television and cinema comedies made in the United Kingdom. Living next door to her had been something he took for granted when it was still happening and which he missed sorely and hurtfully years later. She was never patronizing towards him like her two daughters could be. He never saw her angry, nor her husband. They were magnificent. She used to invite him to afternoon tea and taught him about the Royal family and Piccadilly Circus and the war speeches of Winston Churchill, which she had heard first hand as a little girl and which she had several of on vinyl records that she would put on and listen to sometimes. Try as he might, eyes half open, peering wearily at the edge of sunlight sliding in around the heavy edge of that window shade, he could not remember the last time he had seen her. Yes, for him, she was England....

- CHRISTOPHER HAYDEN Burlington, VT July 2013

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