The Cold Room

originally published in the Birmingham Arts Journal

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard.
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.

(Bob Dylan, ‘George Jackson’)

After booking, they take him to the last door on the right, put him in and shut the door. The color of the walls is something approaching anti-psychotic pale avocado. This room is the freezer. The locked door has one long smeary window. Straight ahead is a metal bunk, something meant to hold a bed but lacking anything resembling a bed. He sits on it, then leans over to squint closely at what appears to be, nah, not mouse turds arranged in letters.

Twenty, maybe thirty feet above the entrance are the large vents shooting the cold air into this relatively small room. All around the vents hang bits of white paper and it takes him a while to suss this out but eventually he understands that previous occupants had spent a lot of time throwing wet toilet paper at the vents in an attempt to make the place a little less icy. It had not worked.

It reminded him of an art exhibit he had seen not two weeks previously.

Loud noises as lines of prisoners, some in orange and some not, move past his door.

Right inside the door is the metal toilet and next to it a water fountain of sorts. He drinks a lot of water. The toilet is not smelly but he was unable to conceive a case of diarrhea bad enough to make him use it. At the door’s window he catches an administrative eye. He mimes holding a phone to his ear: “I need to make a phone call.”

Guard: “Okay, hang on, in a minute.”

The bulky man with weapons and flashlights bouncing around his waist comes back and takes him to the phone bank but alas, when he tries to make the call, he realizes he has no glasses and it’s not going to work. He can’t see to call, and so unsuccessfully tries to ring up someone who might give a damn. Someone who might be wondering whence has he evanesced at sundown on a Sunday night. Nothing. It is a complicated phone system.

“I’m sorry, your number cannot be completed as dialed.”

“Where’s my glasses?”

“Sorry.” Now he is escorted back to the noticeably chillier room.

He sits, waits to be told when and if he may be released.

To the right of the single cot, on the wall just a few feet away, is a brief crimson button alongside the dots of a speaker, but he is certain it is there only for decoration or perhaps the amusement of those outside. He speaks into it a few times, but it’s almost certainly not working. An ironic “For Dsplay Onlie” is scratched into the brick behind the stained stainless steel panel.

Breakfast of one almost-cooked hard-boiled egg plus cold dry toast comes in at some point, but he’s not ready to eat it, even though the guard tells he should eat it.

“Drink a lotta water too. Helps when we test you later this morning.”

“Test me?”

“Yeah they’ll test you to see if you can get out.”

Clomping black-shoe echoes ring off down the hallway outside this room’s door, sounds he tries not to interpret too unpleasantly.

He’s not sleeping. He hears the sounds of an office. A change is taking place outside the room. Random rambling voice-sounds. In what appears to be the dead of night — though this room is brightly lit by high-flown fluorescence — a Caucasian dude, a flunky, comes by mopping floors. He looks like the down-fallen son of a former State Supreme Court Judge.

At another point, a great gang of guys who looked as though they had been doing landscaping march past his door and there is a clanging that indicates incarceration. What was their crime? It must be nearing dawn — there was a certain bustling movement in the administrative office outside his door, the shift-change thing.

Yet, after another indistinguishable space of time — he keeps punching the button on the wall — here come the landscapers out again. Freed? To trial? Doors slam. Men yell and scream-sing in a room down the hall. You cannot smell coffee brewing but you know it is somewhere.

Jesus it’s cold in here.

He shivers again and again, serial shivers, teeth-chattering shivers, rolling abdominal shivers until a simple idea slides into his semi-demented brain: he rolls to his side on the icy metal cot — what cruel expert on corrections told them to create just one small cot of iron? — and shimmied his pale, short-sleeved ocher t-shirt up enough to cover his ears, his head slipping down behind the cloth, bearded chin tucked down to breathe warmth into his solar plexus. If he slept, it was quite unsound.

He practiced his yoga breathing, slow and steady, but the control of aching thoughts was beyond his expertise.

He put into his mind’s eye the faces of people who, it was possible, still cared for him.

Once he saw someone standing outside his locked door, looking in at him as he looked through the glass windows of the lemur home on visits to the local zoo. It was hard to tell, but he thought he saw a smile on the person’s face.

The door grunted. The person entered, motioned at the prisoner. “Come on, we’re gonna test you . . . “

“For what?”

“To see if you can leave this morning.”

© 2019 Thomas N. Dennis