Episode 137 · Night Count

The guard had worked nights at the remand prison for nineteen years, and in nineteen years he had learned that nothing good arrived after dark.

The van came at ten past eleven, in the second week of December. Its wipers were still going, though the snow had stopped an hour before. Two officers brought the man out between them, handcuffed, in a gray shirt that was too big for him and a coat someone had thrown over his shoulders. One of the officers carried an envelope. The other carried a folding wooden chair.

The guard signed for the man. Then he looked at the chair.

— What’s that doing here?

— His, said the officer with the envelope. The investigator said to bring it.

— This isn’t a holding cell. Personal items go to storage.

— Then store it. I was told to bring it. Take the rest up with the investigator.

The guard wrote the chair down on the property sheet, under the coat, a watch and a wallet with no money in it. One folding chair, wood, used. He had never written anything like that before. The man watched him write it without a word.

— It’s all right, the man said when the guard looked up. I only need it in the mornings.

— Here you need what the rules say.

— Then that’s what I’ll need.

He said it politely, without any edge, as if it were an ordinary thing to say. The guard looked at him more carefully. Thin, narrow face, chestnut hair, straight eyebrows. Not tall. Not the kind of man you would look at twice in the street. The guard had read the papers, like everyone. A couple killed in their own house in Vineward, and the son shot on the path outside, who had lived. He had expected someone else. He always did, and in nineteen years he had never once been right.

They put him in the east wing, on the ground floor, in the last cell on the corridor. It had a window up near the ceiling, narrow as a letterbox, facing the yard.

On the first morning, after the six o’clock count, he saw the man through the hatch as daylight began to reach the yard. He was not on the bunk. He was sitting on the floor in the middle of the cell, cross-legged, in the strip of light that came in through the window. His back was to the door. He did not turn around when the hatch opened.

The second morning was the same. And the third. Every morning the light fell in a slightly different place, and every morning the man had moved to sit exactly in it.

Once he heard him speak. Not to the door. To the empty cell in front of him, low, the way a man talks to someone sitting close.

— The stove went out. There were eleven beds.

A pause, as though someone had answered. The man nodded slowly, the way you nod when you have been corrected and know it.

The guard shut the hatch without a sound. He could not have said why he took the trouble.

He’d be sitting on that chair, if we let him.

The guard did not know why the thought bothered him. He asked the shift chief whether the chair could be released from storage. The shift chief just looked at him and said no.

The man did not ask again. He did not ask for anything. He ate what he was given, he said good morning and good night, he cleaned his cell, and when the other inmates shouted at him through the walls in the first week, he did not answer. By the third week they had stopped shouting. The guard could not have said exactly when. It was simply quiet in the east wing, in a way it was never quiet anywhere in the building.

In January, the cold came properly. The river froze at the edges, and on the second Monday of the month the old boiler under the administration block broke down. For two days the whole prison ran on space heaters and blankets. The inmates complained, the guards complained, the director complained on the phone to someone in the city.

The east wing stayed warm.

Not hot. Just warm, as if someone had left a stove burning somewhere close. The guard put his hand on the radiator in the corridor. It was cold to the touch. He put his hand on the wall beside it. The wall was warm.

On the third day, when the boiler had been fixed and everyone else had forgotten about it, he went out into the yard at two in the morning to smoke. The snow lay thick against the walls, everywhere except along the east side. There, at the foot of the wall, the snow had melted in a strip as wide as a man’s arm, and the paving stones were dark and wet and steamed faintly in the light of the lamp.

He stood there and smoked his cigarette down to the filter. His left knee, which had ached every winter since a fall on the stairs twelve years ago, did not ache. He noticed that only on his way back inside, when he climbed the steps and felt nothing.

Other things started after that. Small things, the kind a man on nights learns not to write down.

A man in the east wing who had never in his life held a pencil properly began drawing ships on the walls of his cell. Not childish ships. Sailing ships, with every rope where it belonged, and the waves under them drawn the way only someone who had been at sea would draw them. When the guard asked him where he had learned, the man looked at his own hand and said he didn’t know.

Another one sang in his sleep. Every night, the same few lines, in a language no one on the corridor could recognize. During the day he could not remember a word of it.

Two cells down from him, a man who had broken his cellmate’s jaw in October cried for an hour without stopping and then asked the guard, very politely, whether he could have a broom to sweep the corridor.

The guards changed too. The guard saw it in his colleague first, the older one, who had worked the east wing for even longer than he had. The older guard began counting the doors on the corridor out loud when he walked past them. One, two, three, all the way to the end. Then he would stand there for a moment, as if the number had come out wrong. When the guard asked him about it, the older guard laughed and said it was nothing. The next night he counted them again.

The guard did not tell anyone about his knee.