'#17'

It all started one night around eight months in. I’d been doing the standard routine, five nights a week, sometimes six, starting always at ten pm and out by eight the next morning. I liked it, for the most part. It was easy work. Before that I’d always been on my feet, stacking shelves or serving drinks. With this I had my chair, my throne. I could come in, shake hands with the guy who’d done the afternoon shift and then settle in, my dinner in the little fridge in the office space, a book or a crossword or whatever to keep me entertained in the dull moments. There were plenty of dull moments too, but it was still the best job I’d had up until then. I got a lot of reading done, which was good. I find it hard to read usually. My brain doesn’t focus too easily.

 The work was simple, like I say. I sat in front of the wall of monitors with the security footage on it and made sure nothing shady was happening. It almost never was. Because I did the night shift it meant everyone was locked in their cells and so all I was really looking out for was anyone trying to chisel through a wall or, more likely, offing themselves. There were a few of those in my time. One guy tried to hang himself from his bunk with his sheets, but he was too tall, so he just ended up stood next to the bed, wearing the sheets like an oversized scarf. You shouldn’t laugh, but these guys are the scum of the earth, you know. I have little sympathy. Someone did nearly manage it once, a shorter, smarter guy, so I had to trigger the alarm and radio the guards. They were in there pretty quickly, lifting his little legs up to take the weight off his neck and cutting the sheets off of the window bars. It was one of the more exciting things to have happened in the time I was there, if I’m honest.

 I’d started to think I could see myself staying in that job for the long run. It was all very comfortable. The pay wasn’t bad either. I was putting on weight, something I’d never really dealt with before, but I figured I could start running or just eat less on the job. Easy. No problem. But then it started.

 It was summer. I remember because it was always light when I was leaving, which I liked. We had a new inmate come in. #17. They don’t tell us what they’re in for but you find out soon enough, ask the guards and they’ll spill. This guy was murder, like most of them. The only ones who weren’t in for it had tried and failed, shot someone who ended up living in a robbery or revenge attempt or something. He’d succeeded though, this one. The story was he’d had an argument with a guy at a market about the price of something, tried to haggle him down and the guy had refused. He left, came back twenty minutes later and shot him, point blank. Didn’t shoot anyone else or himself, which is rare. Just turned and left. The police caught him halfway on his way home, strolling along the sidewalk like he was coming back from the movies. Creepy stuff.

 His lawyers had gone for the insanity plea. It was probably his idea which, if you don’t know, is a pretty fucking dumb move whichever way you cut it. If you’re not insane and you go down on that charge you will end up out of your tree within a month anyway. Those kinds of institutions are not the sort of place you want to be if you’ve got anything like half a brain left in there. Either way, the plea didn’t work and so he went down like the rest of them, and the state sent him to us. How they decided this guy wasn’t insane I’ll never know. To kill someone like that in the first place, that should be enough. But what he did when he got here…he clearly belonged in the nuthouse.

 I didn’t think anything of him at first. He was just a new guy. Another number. The day guys told me in the handover that he was nothing special, not as far as the population of this place goes. He’d gotten into some scraps, which is normal for the new ones, some of the others testing him out, all ritual, really. He got it pretty bad from one of them, but they said he’d held his own well enough and after a couple of weeks he’d settled in. It’s pretty cliché stuff, but if you stand up for yourself you have it a lot easier, unless someone really decides they don’t like you, in which case there’s not a whole lot you can do but pray to whichever God you like and find out that he’s not listening.

 No, at first, he was just another face.

 It was a month or so in that it changed. I did a couple of day shifts, filling in for a guy who was on leave because his kid was sick and they could only find a guy for the night shift. I didn’t like the day shifts much, felt weird going home at night and being on the same schedule as most of the rest of the world. I couldn’t say why, but it did. I was coming into the station, the room where I worked, which meant I had to walk past the yard while the inmates were out there during rec hour. Normally, I’d never see them in person. They looked a little more normal, just people in orange boiler suits, all huddled around like kids on a playground. This one guy though, #17…it was like something from a film. A horror one, you know. The kind of film you watch and then keep an eye out when you’re walking down the street for a few days after.

 I caught sight of him at the end of the bleachers. It was my fault, sort of, they say not to look at them, but it was my first time seeing them all in the day and I couldn’t stop myself. I looked up as I was coming to the door for our tower, where the station is, and I ended up looking right at him, straight in the eyes. He was looking back, which wasn’t a problem, apart from that it made me feel uncomfortable. I shrugged it off, looked away and kept my head down, didn’t think anything of it. It was only when I got to the station that it started to get strange.

 About ten minutes after I sat down, they all came back inside. The day routine was new to me, so I spent a bit of time reading the handover note, learning the schedule, refreshing my mind on the codes for different incidents and everything. When I looked up to scan the screens I saw him on monitor #12, stood in the lunch line with a tray in his hand. He was looking straight at me. Well, straight at the camera. I ignored it, checked the rest of them, going in sequence, like you do, but I couldn’t stop coming back to #12 and seeing if he was still there, still looking. He was. Every time. Even when the line moved, he didn’t look down or ahead of him. None of the others seemed to notice it either. It’s really fucking weird behaviour, especially at lunch. You couldn’t pay a guy to be calm in that room. Everyone’s always looking over their shoulder every two seconds, making sure someone’s not about to come up behind them to try to gut them or grab their food. But it was like he was alone in there, like nothing going on around him was real. And they all left him to it.

  It went on like that the whole shift. After lunch he was in the kitchen, on work detail, prepping the evening meals. I remember it like it was my mother’s face. The only time he wasn’t staring straight down the camera was when he had to walk somewhere and carry something. He was peeling vegetables at the sink, staring straight up, straight at me. At one point I thought I saw him cut himself, catch his thumb with the peeler, and he didn’t even flinch. He did it all through the yard time too, didn’t talk to anyone or get involved with the ball or anything. Just sat at the end of the bleachers, staring at the nearest camera. It was easier then because he was a little further away, but still, I couldn’t shake it from my mind. I barely looked at any of the other monitors that whole shift except the one he was on. My book and my puzzles stayed on the desk. The cinnamon bun I’d brought, too. I didn’t feel hungry that day.

  When the time came to handover I told the other guy, the fill in guy, about it, pointed him out on monitor #13. He said –

‘You’re new to this, aren’t you? Forget it. There’s always one like that, every place like this. He’ll do it for a week and then get bored. You watch.’

 I hoped he was right because I really did feel freaked. The next day when I came in I asked the morning guy what he thought about it, if he’d seen anything like it before.

 ‘Huh?’ He’d said, looked at me like I was dumb. ‘I haven’t noticed anything. Which guy?’

 ‘#17,’ I’d said, and pointed him out, ‘that guy.’ I knew where he was from walking past him again, except this time I’d only looked from a distance. He was talking to someone, trading a pack of cigarettes for something.

 ‘No, nothing from him,’ the morning guy said.

 ‘Ok…weird…’ I said, then we did the handover and he left.

 I put my stuff down, went to get my coffee from the kitchen and when I came back there it was. Monitor #6. Clear as day. Whoever he was talking to had walked off and he was back at it, just sitting there, staring. I figured he must have seen the other guy leave the tower and so clocked that it was just me in there, again, and gone back to it. It made me angry. I don’t know what I’d done to this guy except look at him, but if he was gonna be like this for all of these day shifts, I was going to take it personally. How could I not? I thought of ways I could get him back, things I could ask the guards to do to mess with him, restrict his yard time or fuck with his food. Whatever his problem, I wasn’t going to take it lying down.

 It carried on the rest of the week. At times it made me laugh, when I’d forget about it for a while, read or go and heat up my lunch and come back to find him still staring, unaware I’d not been paying him any attention. What a loser, I thought. What a weirdo. Let him do it. What else has he got to do. Other times it got to me, made me real angry. I wanted to hit the monitor he was on sometimes or go out into the yard and face up to him. I was armed on the job too, like you’d expect. I’m not the best shot but I figured I could get him from the observation spot. I imagined it a lot: lining up the sight, feeling the recoil, watching him drop. Problem solved.

  Things got crazier when the day shift guy came back (his kid recovered) and I was back on my usual beat. I remember the first handover, coming in, exchanging the usual greeting, saying it was good to have him back. I asked him about #17, and he said the same thing as all the other guys. No issue. None of the staring. The guy was like anyone else.

 Because it was a night shift I’d come in out of sight and so I assumed, hoped, really, that he didn’t know I was there. To my horror when I sat down and looked up there he was, in his cell this time, looking straight down the camera. I think I had a panic attack. I can’t be sure, I’ve never had one before, but my heart started racing and for a minute I thought I might pass out. He barely moved, not once, just sat on the bed, hands flat on his legs, staring. After a minute I got up, paced around a little, thought to radio it in, but then I got a hold of myself. I lit a cigarette (technically prohibited but fuck it) braced myself and I sat and stared right back at him. I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve, but if he can sense me in here, I thought, then maybe he can sense me fighting back, not cowering, meeting his eyes. It sounds crazy, I know, but by this point my head was in shreds.

  So, I did. I sat there, in my chair, and I stared at him. I don’t think I looked at any of the other screens for half an hour, maybe longer. The rest of the inmates could have offed themselves or tunnelled out or dissolved for all I knew. I fixed him, right in those beady, hollow eyes, and I didn’t move, didn’t flinch. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that kind of determination in my life. I was so focused. Extremely tensed.

  At some point I guess I started to zone out. What is it, forty minutes the human mind can concentrate for before things start getting hazy? Somewhere around that time I guess, I started to think. Not like, random thoughts, more of a flashback. It was when I was a kid, growing up in Eugene (Oregon.) I was remembering this day we went out to the ponds. It was a spot we’d go to all the time, throw things in the water, set fire to stuff under the bridge, try and hit birds with stones. The usual kid things. This boy from our neighbourhood, Martin something, came with us because someone’s Mom had insisted on it. He was weird: walked funny, didn’t speak, always looked down at the ground. We ignored him; he just followed us around.

 After a while we got bored. There wasn’t really anything to burn other than grass and it had rained the day before so that was no good. One of the kids, Jamie Neal, whispered that we should play a trick on this Martin kid, but he didn’t know what. I said we should push him in the pond. We told him we were going to stand at the edge and watch for fish and catch them with our bare hands. We said we did it all the time and our Mom’s were always really happy and impressed when we came home with the fish. There were no fish, obviously. He looked nervous but he smiled a bit and so we knew we had him.

 We went up to the edge, to a spot where we knew the water was deep and we told him to stand in front of us and see what he could see. It took him a minute, he was nervous as all hell, but he went, stood right on the edge, peered over. You couldn’t see shit in that water. It was me who did it. I ran up, pushed him hard as I could and he went in, face first, barely had time to get his arms up in front of him. We turned tail and ran, laughing our little heads off. It was some hilarious shit to a ten-year-old. I looked back once, didn’t see him, but I didn’t care. In the end we all went home just before dark. We had wings for dinner, I remember, with ice cream after. It was a good day.

  When the police asked, we told them we didn’t know what happened to him. We said he’d run off not long after we’d got to the ponds and we shouted for him but couldn’t find him so, eventually, Officer, we left. My mom asked me why I didn’t tell her he’d run off and I said I didn’t know. They found his body a few days later. There was a service for him at our school. I’d see his Mom around town, looking like a ghost. My mom never asked me about it again but, somehow, I think she knew. I think she just couldn’t bring herself to think it. I’d blocked it out of my mind, told myself I’d never think about it again. Somehow it was always there though, always on the edge of things, whispering in the moment and weighing on me. It was only when I sat there looking at the monitor, straight at #17, that it came back like it did. I couldn’t move. I cried. I thought of my pistol in the holster.

  He stopped after that. #17, I mean. Went back to acting normal again, talking to the inmates, doing his work with his eyes forward. Never stared again. I left the job not long after, went back to bar work. I never told anyone about what happened with #17 and the flashback and that kid, Martin. Not much point now, I figure. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that. I still think about it sometimes, about #17, those eyes, the staring. Gives me the creeps, it does.

 *