solitary

Solitary

Henry Gibson walked the four corners of his confinement. His world was gray. The walls and floor were gray. His sink, his bunk, and his toilet were all gray metal or cement. He had lived three years in a gray cement and metal box. Supermax, they called it. Henry called it his gray coffin, and he had been buried alive.

“Left, left, left, right, left, left, left, left, right, left.” Henry sang, his cadence perfect as he paced the gray eight-foot by ten-foot room.

“You sing like a rooster crows, Henry, an intrusion on the silence.”

“Good morning, Blake,” Henry said as he stopped near the slot in the metal door.” I have missed your ugly voice since yesterday's meals. You might visit me off-schedule for once. It would make your day.”

“I have brought your breakfast and a new book. Would you be so kind as to slide your last book through the slot?”

Henry did as asked: “Do not spoil me, Blake. One book a month might make the other buried men jealous.”

Blake laughed. He slid the new book through the slot and then the meal tray. Henry held up the book in the dim light. A Purple Place for Dying by John D Macdonald, a Travis McGee novel

“Cute, Blake, cute. At least it's not the Gray Man.”

“I aim to please Henry.”

The slot shut, and Henry knew that Blake was done with him for today. Blake Days, as Henry called them, were good days. Just a sentence or two from another human being were drops of water to a parched man dying in the desert.

Henry propped himself on his bunk, back leaning on the cement wall. He wanted to start reading before the lights went out in his cell. He imagined the coming of darkness as a sunset. Days with the light on around the clock and then darkness around the clock were staples of his confinement. He never knew when either would change.

As he read, he fell into the story. He watched the seagulls play in the wind, soaring and plummeting repeatedly. Swooping down as a gull, he imagined he felt the white sand scratching between his toes and the waves flowing around his feet, falling back into the sea.

: Maybe I will come back as a seagull in the next life. That would not be bad,” Henry said aloud. Henry was his best conversational friend; he knew he was talking only to himself, but that did not matter. An imaginary friend was better than no friend at all.

Hours of light passed, and then Henry dozed, the fitful sleep of the damned. A sound woke him, a sound he rarely heard, the sound of his cell door unlocking.

“I will lay here for thirty minutes before going to the door.” He waited for Blake's voice, or any other guard's voice, to ring out, telling him to present his wrists for shackling and then escorting him for the rare hour under a real sun

Minutes seemed like days, but no commanding voices came. Henry sat up in his bed, feet on the gray, concrete floor. He sat for another thirty minutes

“I was dreaming that I was on a beach when you woke me, so this had better be damn good,” Henry called out to the door and beyond.

He got up and went to the door, gently pushing it open. No one screamed for him to return to his cell, so he stepped out and into the hallway.

He saw nobody in the hallway. What he saw were several piles of what looked like dust. He knelt, scooped his hand into the pile, and then brought it close to look at. He thought it was dust and ashes, all mixed in with sand.” What is this? “He thought. He let the remaining sand in his hand fall and stood up and wiped his hand on his prison outfit. Henry looked in the cell next to his through the slot and saw only what looked like another pile of dust on the bunk. He returned to the pile in front of his cell. He knelt and sifted through it. He produced two objects; one was a gun, and the other was a badge the guards wore.

“This is just crazy,” Henry said as he walked down the hallway, stride by stride, pile by pile. Every door that could block his path had been opened. He walked out of the prison into the glaring light of day. He had looked in other cells on his way out of the prison and into the yard, and everywhere, he saw piles of ashes and sand.

Once out of the prison gates, he walked towards the city. Cars were strewn everywhere, and inside, there were more ashes and sand. Henry was not in the least bit squeamish, so he opened the door of a Buick SUV and scooped the ashes and sand out of the driver's seat. He got in and saw the key fob in the cup holder where the driver had left it. He expected the car not to start, but it did, so he put it in gear and drove towards the city center, never seeing a living soul. He had never seen this city except on TV and in magazines, which he had been able to read before prison. He drove down a large street, which he saw was named Colorado Blvd on the street signs. He navigated his way around untold numbers of cars, trucks, bicycles and mopeds, skateboards and dog chains, and piles of dust and sand. He parked and got out.

Henry walked from shop to shop, business to business, office building to office building, and the results were always the same. He did not encounter another human being, pet, bird, or animal of any kind. Trees remained, trees and plants of many kinds. The Blight, as Henry later named it, seemed only to take humans and animals.

Henry skirted piles of ash and sand as he went into a deserted market, deserted except for the ‘mounds’ as he came to call them. Behind the meat cases, all were mounds. He helped himself to a couple of bananas, ignoring vegetables like kale, which he wished had been turned to ash. All the while, anger built up inside of him until he finally picked up a large can and screamed as he threw it through the market's front window. It did not make him feel better.

 Henry left the market and walked down the street. He got into a black Mercedes and drove to the next city. If he ran out of gas, he abandoned the vehicle and got in another after sweeping off the driver's seat. When the fresh produce was gone, he ate out of cans, but he did not have to do that much, for there were plenty of harvest foods that he could walk into a field and eat

“I pretty much talk to myself all the time now,” he said. “I like it. No one disagrees with me”

Over the next two years, Henry traveled across the country many times, never encountering another human being. He came to believe that he was the last human on earth. He had never been able to contact anyone in another country or continent. Finally, he came home to the supermax prison that he had walked out of two years ago.

“It's time to get straight, Henry, time to man up, time to put the Genie back in the bottle, so to speak.” Then Henry cackled, not a happy sound, but he was done with happiness now, another dream left in the dust. The mounds were mostly gone, blown away in the wind or washed away in the rain.

He found wood in the trees around the prison and built a burial pyre outside the prison using chairs and tables from inside the prison walls.

“You have walls everywhere, prison, my old friend, and there is no escape this time.”

Henry put all his kindling under the pyre and lit a torch. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a large bottle of valium and a large bottle of oxycodone he had lifted from a pharmacy along the way.

“No need for prior approval on these now is there,” he said to the wind. He started swallowing the pills, chasing them down with Jack Daniels whiskey that he had enjoyed mightily during his travels.

“Breakfast of champions, “Henry giggled, the pills starting to work. The torch that he held started to drift downward, finally falling out of Henry’s hand when he became unconscious. Landing on the kindling, the flames caught there and soon smoke and flames rose into the sky. Henry, now dead, started to catch fire, but there was a smile on his face as if he had found the answer to some great question.

On the hillside overlooking the prison, a woman watched the last events of Henry’s life unfold.

“Adam, come here.”

He came and wrapped a muscular arm over her shoulders. The woman pointed to the fire below.

“That was the last of them, every human on the face of this planet, along with all animal life.” She hugged Adam closer, placing Adam's hand over her breast. “Now, we can start again.”