Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [37]
But then there would be a clank and a rattle at the door, followed by the smell of the food, and everything would rush back into him as the smell of the food hit him and aroused him and he would begin to tremble and slather and giggle, quickly locating his bucket and passing it out in exchange for the food and the cup of water; and for a few seconds every sense in him would rush into full operation and his mind would unfold in a glorious picture of what the food would be, and he would stick his fingers into it, whatever it was, and he would begin to gobble the food wolfishly, stuffing it into his mouth and swallowing, greed and terror knotting his stomach so badly that after only a few seconds he would feel engorged, and as likely as not begin to vomit up the food. Afterward he would lie back, panting from the exertion, and wait for the excitement to pass; then he would slowly and carefully eat what was left, and then drink his water. Then he would sit cross-legged in the middle of the cell, waiting for the reaction. Because sometimes they put soap powder into the food, he did not know why, and he would have to put up with the humiliations of diarrhea for hours. Jack never knew whether his food was going to be dosed or not; he could not, after the first few times, taste the soap, or feel the grittiness on his teeth, and so he would just have to sit and wait for the first cramping pang to hit him. There was no question of not eating; when they put the food into his cell he gorged himself without thought. It did not matter if they fed him twice in an hour, the same thing would happen. After a while he did not even hate them for it.
When he was first thrown into the hole what bothered him most was not the lack of a blanket, the cramped space, or the early terrors of the dark; it was the fact that he was naked, that he had been stripped of his dignity. It did not matter that there was no one to see him; what mattered in increasing dimensions of hatred was the humiliation of his nakedness, which seemed to deprive him of any kind of pride, took away his self-esteem, his humanity, his right to think of himself as a man. Squatting over his bucket, waiting for the next hapless squirting from his agonized bowels, he would dream of a future in which they would eventually let him out and there would be somebody there for his rage to murder; dreaming of the glory of that murder. It was a thought he clung to as long as possible, and it was always the last thing to desert him as he slipped again into nothingness: they had taken away his dignity, and he would kill them for that.
He went through self-pity very quickly. It occurred to him after he had been in endless darkness beyond all question of time that he would die in there, simply die of the immense loneliness, and that when he died no one would know about it for days, and when they finally did find out, they would unlock the door and remove his body and put it into a wooden coffin and bury it somewhere, without a marker, and that they would put into the files that his case was terminated, and that Jack Levitt was no longer an administrative problem. He would be dead, and gone, and nobody would mourn his death. They would be relieved, because they could terminate his file. They would get a sense of satisfaction from having the whole file completed, and maybe they would send to the orphanage and get all the papers on him there, and send to Portland and get the police report on him, and write to the places he worked and get his work cards, his pay records, every piece of paper on earth with his