Gallows Humor

They call it Gallows Humor.

What do you call a man with minutes left to live?

Condemned.

What do you call a man with a rope around his neck and nothing under his feet?

Executed.

What do you call traitors awaiting execution in a small cell?

In those last moments, friends.

“Do you think we’ll win the war?” 

“Do you think reinforcements ever came?”

How little the answers to these questions matter when nobody asking them will live to see the final battle.

It is odd and feels insincere how one can mourn somebody who was a stranger only hours ago, but in these cells there is no “one” left, there is “us” and “we” die in batches every hour on the hour.

“Did you have a family?” already talking about themselves in the past tense. This is what it really means to be a ghost. If only their bones could pass translucent and weightless through prison bars and dungeon walls. If only the ropes would hang limp and weightless with only a specter to hold.

“A wife and two sons” and from the tone of his voice it is clear that they were among those killed by the fires of the great purge.

“I had a girlfriend.” The younger one responds, his voice similarly sad.

The older asks, “Was she purged?”

“No.” and it sounds like it should be a happy answer until he clarified “She’s the one who sold me out.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“I'm not, she did the right thing. She’ll have our daughter in two months.”

“What are you going to name her?”

“Hope.”

The older man resists the urge to blurt out what a cliché name that is for a child born in times of turmoil, but instead he just repeats “Hope”.

They call it gallows humor.

What do you call a man who begins weeping in terror whenever the cell door opens?

Matthew.

What do you call a boy who shouts and swears and beats his hands against the bars until he collapses in impotent exhaustion?

John.

What do you call the silent man seemingly made from stone?

Peter.

What do you call the young, gloomy guard who knows every day that he could wind up on the other side of the cell wall?

Luke.

There isn't much of a punchline.

They call it gallows humor.  

There are the little things they do to stay sane, like pitching pebbles at the guards.

There are the things they do to blow off the steam of building insanity, swearing openly against the crown.

There are things they do when they go insane anyway, the wailing and self-mutilation like minks on a fur farm.

These are all, in their own way, a sort of joke.

The younger of the two men wonders if the sunsets still paint bright pink gradients in the sky or if, without their eyes to see it, the sky turns as grey as the prison walls. He wonders if weeds still spring out of the dirt, if corn still grows high in the fall. He can’t imagine a world that has not been drenched and hardened in filthy concrete. Wouldn’t that be a funny joke? To escape these walls and only see cement flowers, slate skies.  

“Where were you from?” The older man asks. Conversation if only for a respite in the silence.

“Out east.” The young man answers, “We have a tilapia farm.”

It is tempting to correct the use of present tense, since he has nothing now, but such curtness threatens to plunge them back into the loneliness of waiting.  

“We grew potatoes.” He offered. “It wasn’t a boring life and before the war I wished for anything to come along and make life more exciting. Then the war came, and all I could do was wish for my quiet little farm back.”

“We were never bored.” The young man answers back, starry-eyed, “Nothing is boring when you are in love.”

“Was she pretty?”

He already knows the answer before its spoken: “I think she's the most beautiful woman in the world.”

They call it gallows humor.

What do you call it when somebody has killed you and you still love them?

Pathetic.

What do you call mourning the still-living?

Love.

What do you call loving the dead?

Hopeless.

“How much longer do you think we have?” The younger man asks. He tries to form an image of that coming hour that he can make peace with. He will step calmly from the cell, dignified, he will not beg for his life. He will walk to the platform and, with a placid expression, he will allow the rope to be wrapped around his neck. It will break instantly at the drop, no undignified thrashing and strangling. His bowels will not empty down his trousers when life leaves him.

“Who knows?” The older man responds. “It could be hours. Could be days. They’re feeding us, so it might even be weeks.”

Weeks in these cells, he thinks, would be worse than any hell he might be sent to in the afterlife. This cold stone purgatory full of ghosts still anchored by time to their doomed flesh was haunted by defeated moans and the cheesy stench of so many unwashed bodies packed into such a small space. Could anything survive weeks in these place? Were they waiting to kill them before they finally let their bodies die?

As if prompted by that thought, the cell door opens and a guard reads out the older man’s number, in addition to three others. With death calling, he finds the air has turned to the same cement that the walls were made of and he cannot will his body to move through it. He is dragged to his feet.

“It was nice talking to you.” He is half-sarcastic. He stumbles, head light, and every face in the cell morphs to become his own. He can already feel the tightness in his back, the itching fibers of the rope, the short drop that he imagines will feel like flying.

He throws a wink and a smile on his way out.

“See you soon.”

That's what they call gallows humor.