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By Root 13936 0

mop rags provided for this purpose, he was kicked down into it face first several times but this did not really hurt any. Then they stood him up against one of the bare walls and Fatso, assisted by Turnipseed and Pfc Hanson both of whom had been on shift in the messhall, gave him his workout, relieving each other whenever they got tired. The only time they actually used a grub hoe handle on him was the last time Fatso told him to get up off the floor and he couldnt and Fatso gave him the grub hoe handle across the shins, splitting open one of those old footlocker scars, and he got up. But outside of that, the only other battlewound he got was a small cut from Fatso’s GI signet ring of the Army’s spread Eagle, under his right eye which was closed by the time they took him out of the gymnasium and led him down to the Black Hole. In general, they refrained from hitting him in the face and he could see that The Malloy’s instructions were valid when he remembered Angelo’s face.

There were moments when it was difficult to keep from getting angry and saying something nasty or doing something regrettable, as The Malloy via Angelo Maggio had warned him it would be, but he kept reminding himself over and over how it was him who had asked for this in the first place not them, to get into Number Two, and that in the second place they were not enjoying it in the third place, as Fatso told him, any more than he was, and that worked.

“This is hurtin us worse than it is you,” Fatso told him.

The Black Hole was beyond the gym at the end of the right arm of the T. You went down a short flight of steps. There were four cells in a row on one side. They were all empty. They threw him into the first one. There was a small barred hole at the very top of the door that he could reach with his hand but not see out of, and at the back end of the bunk of iron pipes was a #10 can for a latrine. When they brought the bread and water three times a day they shoved it in through a sliding steel panel in the bottom of the door. The cup was heavy cast iron so he could not break it. He thought it was all very professional.

It was the Black Hole he had been scared of more than anything else because he knew he could not do The Malloy’s system any more than Angelo could, and when he had first heard the footsteps receding and then the closing of the trapdoor to the stairs he had had a bad moment. With the door shut it was very quiet. All he could hear was the measured dispassionate blows of his own coldblooded heart that did not seem to give a damn what was happening to him. That, and the more or less regular sigh of his breathing. He had not realized how much noise a human body made in just staying alive and it scared him because it seemed such an unstable way to preserve something as important as life. He began to be afraid that the noise, which irritated him and kept him awake, would suddenly, for no reason, stop.

He remembered what Angelo had said about utilizing that first sense of relief, but he did not feel any relief, and he was afraid to let himself doze off for fear the noises would stop if he quit listening to them.

By evening, when they brought his first meal, he had changed his mind and decided he might as well give The Malloy’s system a trial after all. He had thought the guard bringing the meal was Fatso coming to take him out because the three days were over. When he found it was only the guard bringing the first meal, he knew definitely he must try The Malloy’s system. He remembered not to eat the bread but he drank the water.

The funny thing was it did not seem hard at all, when he tried it. The only way he could ever explain it to himself afterwards was that he had been very worn out and had not had a very tight hold on his mind. His mind had kept slipping away from him. At first he had a little trouble concentrating on the black spot and pushing the thoughts aside, but they seemed to be very weak thoughts, and finally they just stopped altogether and the black spot got very large and his mind went off somewhere into it. He could feel