Threads

He is on day seven of his opus, I never thought someone could shit this much, and I don’t know how he got it to the right consistency, but every night, the fecal matter is perfectly suited for drawing the staff on the cement wall and each music note is dotted with a perfect thumbprint. The eighths, the quarters, the crescendos, the time signatures all come together in a tune that I can’t stop humming. He stops at 4am and from my tower, on the digital screen where I can perfectly zoom in, I take a photo. By 6am the hose comes to spray down the cell and destroys his stinking, elegant masterpiece.

I took this job out of a need to support my father and his own stinking elegance. Dumping sugar and whiskey in his tea cups, legs amputated at the knee from the diabetes, he only cares that the cash comes, and that the whiskey follows. At 6:45am, nearing the end of my shift, I pen the sheet music into my notebook. Pop no longer reaches the piano pedals, but he can still play, and when I get home, I prop up a new torn-out page onto the music desk over the keys. He’ll wheel himself over with more whisk-tea in a YETI tucked in the chair.

By now he has about a dozen pages. He made me order real pre-printed staff paper so he can properly write out the music without the confusing notebook paper lines in the background. I don’t know his plan after that. I’m not allowed to talk to the prisoners, only watch. Every day, every shift, I watch them. I don’t know the name of this music. My father has studied music since he was a teen, he hasn’t heard this music before. We can only assume the prisoner is the composer. And I don’t know when The Composer is up for release. I think maybe never by his behavior. He knows he is watched. He continues his grand creation.

While The Composer works with his fertilizer, The Gardener tends without. Except she doesn’t tend to a real garden. She weaves hers. She is of some Asian descent, though I don’t know the specifics. These screens won’t give me the personal details I crave. I can only guess and imagine. The prisoners aren’t allowed many items, and yarn isn’t allowed. Thread, however, is. One can assume that thread isn’t strong enough for hanging. One would assume wrong. The Gardener spends her hours making tiny weavings of leaves and flowers with nimble fingers, eyesight so bad, she could do it in the dark. And she does. My cameras are infrared, though, which is how I am able to zoom in and see the fragile red wisteria vines grow longer and longer. One night I could have sworn she was looking at me, she stared so long into my camera, I craned my neck back as if a fist were in my face. She had wrinkled features and squinted even in the dark. I wasn’t used to being looked at. I am the watcher. How dare she watch me back, I thought for a fleeting moment. My senses came back and I realized she was merely stretching her back. I turned to another monitor, uneasy for the first time since I took this job. 

The Influencer is my favorite, and least favorite, to watch, because she loves being seen. She knows how to get things and the guards sneak in all kinds of things for her. She can’t stop producing content. If she stops, things do not go well for her. She starts tearing out her hair and picking her skin raw. She still has scars on her scalp where the hair won’t grow back. But a guard found her a “new tonic” for alopecia sufferers that smells like coconut and is “all over TikTok.” 

She is currently talking to the magazine picture of an iPhone 13 that she pasted to the wall. They wouldn’t give her a Ring light so she drew one with some yellow chalk. Later she told her “followers” about a new beauty regime. She crushed the chalk against the cement floor and mixed it with the watery “orange juice” from breakfast. An energizing oil-absorbing mask to make her skin glow. I couldn’t see her face as she applied it but I imagine the acid had to burn the parts of her skin scratched bloody when they wouldn’t give her the lamp.

Today she is dancing. These are the days that are actually hard to watch. I cringe as she sings a song about Wide Open Spaces and thrusts her hips and flaps her hands as if she is in her living room in the Lower East Side in Tory Burch athleisure, and not in a 8 by 12 cell in ratty grey sweatpants and government issued slippers. She prefers to go topless. The reason why she is hard to watch. I’m glad her phone is glued to the opposite wall. I don’t feel quite so bad about the lack of clothing. 

The one thing I have never understood about being monitored (or not…they never know if I’m watching), is the clothing thing. Some prefer to wear nothing. Some everything. Some topless, some Winnie the Pooh (another thing I will never understand). If I were alone in my cell and never met me, The Watcher, would I care about clothing? The Watcher could be anyone, though surely a stranger. Yes, I have a name, too. I’m a character in this story. I get up every day and put on a uniform. My office is a wall of monitors. My job is watching sad reality tv. I pop five different pills a day for my mood disorder. My employer doesn’t know and as far as they are concerned I am a blank slate with no criminal history, no disabilities to prevent me from doing my work, and I don’t take vacations. I have no family to vacation with, save the alcoholic father they don’t know about. My paychecks keep him alive. 

Yesterday though, I went to the big box store to get his whiskey and insulin, and I found myself taking a shortcut through the craft section. Colorful bolts of fabric lined the shelves and I found myself gazing at the red geraniums on a particular piece of muslin. The pattern repeated like a vine and I thought of The Gardener and her thread. How many hundreds of hours would she spend on those flowers? How many millions of minutes will I watch her? I pulled the bolt from the shelf and brought it to the woman to cut. “How many yards?” she asked. “Uhh…two.” I stammered.

I went home and tore those woven pieces of fabric into long strips, tying them together, the threads meeting each other again in knots. I could never weave, my fingers are shaky and fumbling. They feel numb. I think again about The Gardener. Against my better judgment, I managed to find out her name. It’s surprisingly easy in the prison, if you know what kind of information to trade. The janitor who is on his smoke breaks when I leave for the day has always begged to see inside my office. I finally allowed him five minutes on the condition that he get me a name. Cell 806A. One name. The Gardener has a name and a crime. Murder. Her husband. I find scant information online. A police report here, a dropped charge for assault there. An expired order of protection. And then a stabbing. No trial. No family. Just a cell and a garden.

I make the final knot. I step up onto the chair. I kick away the chair. The threads, they hold.