the prisoner's dilemma

a prisoner is starving to death in his cell - by choice?

The prisoner’s dilemma

Santino raised up his hand to knock on the inside of the cell door and - hesitated. 

He was so, so terribly hungry, the hungriest he’d ever been in his entire life. When his eyes grew so tired that even the unwavering fluorescent light of his cell could no longer keep him awake, he dreamt of Nutriloaf, the s**t-colored mass of extracted beef, half-risen flour and expired kidney beans the guards served inmates in Administrative Segregation judged unfit to handle cutlery. His psyche protected him from his favorite foods. Thinking about his mother’s tlayuda or carne asada on the grill only deepened his hunger, sharpened the knife in his stomach. Nutriloaf was his only waking hope, now: a grubby little slice lying on the dirty concrete of his cell like a Christmas present.

But that would mean that one of the guards had been out there, watching him while he slept. He shuddered. If the guards are figuring out things like pushing a Nutriloaf through a feeding slot, how soon before they learn to insert and turn a key? 

He had no way of telling time, now that the guards were not delivering his food or taking him out of his windowless cell for his daily exercise period. The classic solitary routine had stopped entirely when the terrible noises resounding throughout the prison began. First, there was a sound he had never heard before, like a great brutal octopus shrieking and gibbering through a war horn; Second, the grunts and roars of a murderous troop; and finally, the surprised shouts of men used to thinking of themselves as predators giving way to the begging and pleading of prey.

Such was the report of Davis, the black guy in the cell at the end of the Ad Seg hall. He was the only one on the whole unit that could see the bloody blonde inmate’s face pressed up against the sally port that connected Ad Seg to the rest of the prison. “Oh, s**t! Oh, guard! Guard! They killing him! They killing him!” His voice grew higher. “They eating him!”

Who? Who was eating him? That and a thousand more questions were written down, rolled up and pulled on kite strings down the hall to Davis’ cell. Davis didn’t answer. Santino knew Davis by reputation and nothing else; he was supposed to be a big time Blood. At the time, Santino had thought Davis was clammed up because he was too much of a big time Blood to answer kites from nobodies on Ad Seg. But maybe there was another reason he was silent. He’s sure quiet now. - we’re all quiet.

His silence had put them all to sleep, that first night. F**k him if he thinks he’s too good for us, Santino had thought. We’re all going to find out in the morning, anyway, and then he won’t be so special. The other inmates must have come to the same conclusion, because that first night had passed like any other in the prison. Santino did not know how many of those other inmates were left in Ad Seg with him. They were all silent now. There was a discipline to the silence, a discipline of fear that had grown out of the last time they’d talked, after the first sleep. Five or six sleeps ago, maybe. The hunger made him forget.

Prisons are noisy places - normally. Even at night, when the world is asleep, there’s usually two or three a******s f*****g it up for everybody else by yelling about the Dear John letter they just got from their wife or screaming for a guard because they just can’t take it anymore. But night does not remotely compare to morning, when the inmates, especially the ones in solitary, are woken up all at once as the guards turn on the sun. The cacophony that erupts as a couple thousand ignorant fools remember all at once that the boredom of an 8x6 cell is about to be relieved becomes a habit, then a reflex, until you practically wake up yelling.

That’s exactly what happened, after that first hungry sleep. He’d woken up yelling, demanding his three hots and exercise period, demanding proof that the inversion of caged predator and prey was neither dream nor nightmare, but hellish reality. 

He didn’t see them at first, but he sure heard the guy that did. It was Davis, again, the big-time Blood. “Oh f**k!” the Blood yelled. “Motherfucking squid face n**ga!” They heard a heavy thwack and a screech as the Blood must have kicked out and - “Lord, it ripped my leg!” Pain was in his voice. “Suckers - f**k you, squid a*s b***h!” His voice grew higher into a screeching plea and the inmate diagonal across from the Blood’s cell shouted “They putting their faces in! They putting their faces in! Shut ya motherfucking food ports!”

Santino immediately pushed his a*s against the food port and braced himself against his cot, thanking God it was screwed to the floor. He kept his back to the cell door window and his eyes firmly to the ground. The noises the Blood was making were bad enough. Cries for mercy had given way to long, panicking moans, but that was not the worst thing. - The worst thing was the writhing, slavering slurps coming from outside his cell, down the hall. The slurps did not stop when the Blood’s moans did. They did not stop for far, far too long.

When the door to Ad Seg crashed to let them all know it was over, he relaxed his tense and aching muscles for a moment and looked over his shoulder. There, looking at him through the window, were the dull red eyes of what was left of Sergeant Heimdall, the day shift Ad Seg supervisor. The jovial fat-cheeked spawn of two hundred years of redneck Minnesota Germans had been transformed into a slavering, fanged beast with blood smeared across all three of his chins. The inmate could see Heimdall’s great polar bear hands on the window glass, so what was making those meaty, rhythmic thumps against the door? And why was there still a pushing pressure against the feeding slot?

In the present, Santino shuddered. He did not want to think about that. He especially did not want to think about what had happened to the Blood, and why his voice had gone from angry and masculine to high and panicked, and -

Enough. At least Heimdall had gotten his. It was cold comfort, but the guards transforming on the outside into the piece of s**t pigs they were inside made sense to him. What kind of a man chooses to make a career out of taking away people’s rights, out of torturing people who made a mistake? Heimdall wasn’t the worst of them, but he also wasn’t the best. The pig ran his fat mouth about actions having consequences every time Santino wound up in Ad Seg, whether it was his fault or not. And Santino knew that Heimdall pushed the Nutriloaf tray through the slot too fast on purpose, so that it would fall on the dirty concrete. He’d heard from an old head that Heimdall hadn’t done that in the beginning. He’d been taught it by another guard.

What kind of man? What kind of men make a career being in charge of the people with the least power in the world? That was the other thing. Heimdall wasn’t the worst; the worst was all of them together. Each one could be brutal or decent or worse than any prisoner in the facility on his own. But together? Santino remembered coming across a dude named Waterson back when Santino still worked in the hospital wing as a cleaner. Waterson was in a coma, with eye socket, jaw, collarbone, forearm and leg fractures. He was a mess of contusions and cuts. Several of the contusions were shaped suspiciously like boot prints.

“Damn, playboy,” Santino had joked with the dude laying in the bed next to Waterson, an old black dude with leukemia who had been down since he was 23 years old. “What did this dude do? Fight the whole Aryan Brotherhood?”

“Attempted suicide. Man made a bad mistake. He fucked Quillin’s b***h,” sighed the old man. “He got her pregnant.” Quillin was the duty sergeant for the max yard. 

“How the f**k did he do that? He escaped just to f**k some dusty fat redneck b***h?”

“No, young blood,” the old man gasped. “Quillin’s b***h up in here. Quillin got a side piece guard, I guess. She must’ve looked at it the same way, going after inmates. Waterson seems to have paid for her error.”

“What, he jumped? Waterson?” Santino was confused. “Was he afraid of Quillin?”
The old black man looked at Santino. “He should have been. They saying it was attempted suicide, and in a way I suppose it was. But really…” he stopped, gathering his breath. “Really, they made him run a riot gear gauntlet, naked as the day he was born.”

Santino imagined Heimdall and Quillin and thirty other guys like them holding batons and plasteel shields, chins spilling over the helmet straps, pear shaped bodies making riot armor look like a third grader’s halloween costume. That’s what it is, really, thought Santino. These f*****g guys are losers in the real world. Wife cheats on you, let off some steam on some prisoners. They need to dehumanize us to feel powerful.

It was the one thing that nobody could disagree with - no matter what you did, nobody deserved this s**t. Nobody deserved the beatings, being treated like s**t all the time, the dehumanization. Sticking together, not snitching, was the one thing that gave them any sort of collective power in the prison. Working with the guards, betraying your fellow convicts, that made you lower than the lowest piece of s**t. That was the code. And now he didn’t even have that. He sighed. Couldn’t snitch if I wanted to. 

He turned back to his cot and picked up the soggy strips of cotton he’d ripped from the cot with his teeth. He turned the tap on his cell’s sink such that only a trickle of water filtered out�" - enough to wet the cotton strips, but not enough that the pipes started to bang along. Once the cotton strips were soaked again, he slapped one into the corner of his mouth and began to chew the water out of it, like a cow chewing its cud. It was better than nothing. He was so f*****g hungry he was starting to look at his-

“Ay,” said the sink in a whisper. “Ay.”

His head shot up off the bed.and a part of himself he’d forgotten about since childhood despaired. He knew hunger could cause hallucinations, psychosis, even. Was this the beginning?

“Ay, n**ga, ay.” Whispered the sink, again. “I heard you turn on the water - that means I’m not the only one on this block still kicking. Who you is?”

***

“Ooh hoo hoo,” Santino whispered, after the Nazi toilet reported his move. “I think he got you now, playboy.” Santino’s Nazi toilet was playing chess against his sink. Santino was the spectator and referee - since the chess game was all in their minds, somebody had to be the impartial judge and record keeper. Experience suggested it turned into a shouting match, otherwise.

“Cool it, greaser,” whispered back the Nazi toilet. “My mind is always fourteen hundred and eighty eight moves ahead. Relay the move. King takes Bishop H6.”

“Yeah, yeah, supreme clam chowder,” Santino shot back, smiling. “Just get ready to make my board when you lose, pendejo.” The toilet might be a Nazi, but he understood that you had to be a fair referee in order to play the game yourself. It was the only way to guarantee that people would play with you in the future.

“King takes Bishop H6,” Santino whispered into his sink pipe. “How you doing, Doughboy? Keeping your dick up?”

“S***s is wild, bro,” answered the sink, also known as Doughboy. “It’s fucked up - I’m hungry, but the thing that’s f*****g me up the worst right now is that I can’t exercise. It makes sense, ‘don’t burn calories you don’t need to, we in this for the long game,’ but goddamn I’m so f*****g bored.” 

Santino paused and reflected for a moment. After taking the bishop, Doughboy was now ahead in the chess game. On the other hand, Doughboy was ahead of his toilet in terms of total victories right now - 15 to 11. Doughboy beat the Nazi toilet when he was careful - but he was not always careful, Santino noted. If at some point they discovered a way that he could get an intermediary between the sink and himself, he was confident he could outmaneuver him. For now, Santino’s possible game partners were restricted to the Nazi’s sink and Doughboy’s toilet. The Nazi’s sink was a fine chess partner, but Doughboy’s toilet could hardly be convinced to play chess at all. Barney Fife, as Doughboy had nicknamed his toilet, did not have a sink partner for reasons Santino didn’t want to think about. 

“And this Barney Fife n**ga,” Doughboy continued through the sink pipe. “My toilet. He don’t help none. Barney Fife m**********r, he’s fat. I can hear it in his motherfucking voice, slobberin’ a*s. Talking about he hungry. We all hungry. Been here the exact same amount of time, we all the exact same amount of hungry. But all I hear from this n**ga is crying and moaning.”

“There’s always one, playboy,” whispered back Santino. “That’s prison, bro. You know. Somebody always gotta f**k it up.” 

“Yeah,” said the sink. “But usually that means their a*s. Consequences. You know he talking about saying something?” These days, consequences ain’t just for him.”

“You on top of that, player?” Santino shot back. “Can’t let him f**k it up for all of us.”

“S**t,” sneered back the sink. “I’m playing this n**ga as well as I can. Same way I’m playing your Nazi, bro.” He paused, then said, “Ng4. Tell the whiteboy ‘checkmate.’”

***

“Hey, greaser,” said the Nazi toilet. “How you holding up?”

“Bout as well as I can, peckerwood,” Santino responded. He was lying in bed, trying to squeeze his stomach closed with his bare hands. “Got a move for me?”

“Nah, my toilet is still thinking,” replied the nazi toilet. “However, he sends his regards and would like to ask after the health of the jiggaboo’s toilet, old Barney Fife. How’s he doing?”

“He’s hungry,” replied Santino. “Barney Fife don’t think we’re real, and he ain’t sure that Doughboy is real, either. He thinks he’s in hell - think we’re all being punished for what he did.”

“If that’s true, then f**k him,” said the toilet, gloomily. “If we’re being punished for what he did, I mean. What did he do, that’s so bad?”

“Murder,” replied Santino. “Least, that’s what he admitted so far. Murdered a dude over drugs, I think.”

“Well, I’ve got pretty bad news for all of us, then,” snorted the Nazi toilet. “If this whole thing is over one drug murder, then it’s going to happen three more times when they start counting my crimes.” 

“S**t, bro, this is fixing to get complicated if they count mine,” the inmate laughed. “These zombies are going to have to flee from the cops drunk in a stolen prison and kill like thirty dogs and cats by crashing the whole a*s prison into a pet store.” He slurped on his wet strips of cotton. “And I guess find a s**t ton of fentanyl in the prison’s trunk.”

The quiet cackles of the Nazi toilet vibrated the pipes momentarily. “Thanks, brother,” came the gruff whisper a few seconds later. “First smile I’ve had since s**t kicked off.”

There a short, embarrassed silence where the toiled realized he had forgotten to be racist. Then:

“Do you - do you think we’re being punished?”

Santino hesitated. They did not need another Barney Fife on their hands, but he also needed to maintain trust with his toilet. He relied on these games, these conversations. He could not afford to lose them.

“I don’t know,” he answered, truthfully. “We’ve all thought about it. The rapture? Apocalypse? Government experiment? But none of it makes sense. Nobody floated up to heaven, nobody disappeared. They killed the minimum and medium security guys first, and so far the dudes that got it worst are the guards. How does it make sense? It don’t.”

“I thought about that,” said the toilet, slowly. “The pigs got it worst, for sure. And all those dudes in the dorms, no way they’re paying that many families off. So probably not the government.” He hesitated, then spoke again, carefully. “But the government doesn’t decide what’s good and bad.” He paused on that, as though expecting an argument, and then continued. “The pigs are here because they want to be. Same way you get a job at Kinko’s. Some are good pigs, some are bad pigs, but they’re all here because they want to be paid to do this - they want to be paid to work in hell, punishing people who made a mistake.”

“So what, you think the guards got it worse than the prisoners because they choose to do this? This is their punishment? And then what about us, bro? Why the special treatment? You think maybe we’re all just secretly innocent, got snapped up by the prison industrial complex by mistake?” He wiped spit out of the corner of his mouth. “One problem with that, homie - I absolutely did everything the government said I did, and a whole lot more.”

“That’s what I’m saying, brother,” the nazi toilet replied, earnestly. “We’re not here by mistake. For us, this is the plan.”

Santino started to speak and stopped, appalled. “Bro, don’t none of us want to be here. This is - the system is set up to trap people like us, people who -”

“Choose to keep doing bad s**t?” answered the toilet. “I’m not here because of my motherfucking magnanimity, brother. Matter of fact, I’m here in Ad Seg right now because I stabbed a dude in the liver with a sharpened toothbrush end. Skinheads told me I had to do it, there was no other option besides doing it that kept me on the yard and out of protective custody, but I also wanted to. Because I knew on the outside, when I was selling drugs and beating m***********s down, I knew I was coming back here. And I knew what I would have to do when I came back, and I still did all the s**t I did outside. So what does that mean? It means it was my plan.”

Something changed in his voice, and he stopped. When he started whispering again, it was as though he had something stuck in his throat. 

“It was my plan to do all the bad things I did. I’m a bad man.”

“But this?” shot back Santino, incredulous. “Nobody deserves this. Not the guards, not me, not even you, cabron.”

“I hope so,” came the miserable refrain. “I hope so.”

***

“Sup,” said Doughboy through the pipes. “Sup with you?”
“What’s up with me is I would eat you right now, playboy. Toenails and all.”

“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, my brother.” Doughboy hesitated for a moment, then spoke confidently. “We might got us a little problem, here. With my toilet. Barney Fife ain’t hearing me, no more. He’s too hungry and too crazy. Thinks I’m his conscience, or some s**t - that’s how I was keeping him hanging on. But now he’s ready to give up.”

“I sense you intend to make a proposal, cabron. Skip the preamble.”

“Right now ain’t s**t to do but wait silently,” he started. “This can’t go on forever. However many days it’s been, one of these days some Navy Seal m***********s is going to bust in here with M16s and jam these demonic m***********s up. In the mean time, this Barney Fife n**ga could start hollering for grub at any moment. He do it while you’re asleep, it’s a wrap. Those tentacles’ll slip in and that’s all she wrote. Where it’s at right now is I got my hooks in the m**********r. He’s ready to give up, and one push is gonna do it. I’ll lead him to the precipice, telling him his conscience is finally ready to let him die, and that all the corners of his mind agree. That’s when you all shout, ‘Do it!’”

“Damn,” Santino said. “Damn, playboy. That’s some ice cold s**t.” Am I really considering doing this? He asked himself. S**t, that whiteboy was right. I’m a bad motherfucking man. “Might be too ice cold, bro. For sure we would catch another charge when the cavalry shows up -”

“If we don’t do it, all the cavalry gonna find is whatever tentacle monsters s**t out when they done eating n**gas, n**ga!” replied the sink. “How is this different than dealing with a problematic m**********r on the yard? He talking about talking! Snitching! Snitching that he hungry, this fat, smelly, loser m**********r. We was on the yard, you’d be the first to shank his a*s. He no good!”

“It feels different, bro. It feels - “

“How it’s different, bro?” His sink demanded. “How it’s different. There’s always some a*****e f*****g it up for everybody else. Thems your words exactly.”

***

“Come on, playboy,” Santino whispered to the Nazi toilet. “We’re living in the real world. Ain’t no demons or whatever. This is like - a chemical spill, or something. You going to let these irradiated, mutant m***********s eat your a*s while you sleeping because Barney Fife needs his devil dogs?”

“It’s just - I know I’m already a murderer, but somehow -”

“I don’t mean to say it like this, brother,” said Santino, more sternly. “But it’s also the rules. You signed up for this. For this, most of all. He’s f*****g it up for everybody. He got to go.” He hesitated. It’s a risk, he thought. But it’s a worse risk to let this Barney Fife m**********r kill us all. “If you can’t follow the rules, I don’t know if I’m talking to a man, no more. And conversations like this? They for men.”

The game of telephone went pretty much the same across the networks of sink and toilet, the Nazi reported. Convincing the network of men of the necessity of pre-emptive self defense was easy when each man realized how quickly and easily he could become an island. As agreements filtered back through the nazi toilet to Santino, he found himself shocked at how much more sophisticated the plan became as each man tried to convince his neighbor of its necessity. The collective agreed to the plan provided it proceeded as follows: once Barney Fife was on the precipice, his sink would have to turn his water on full blast. When everyone else heard the water barrelling through the pipes, they’d turn on their own sinks as though raising daggers against Caesar; when the pipes began to sing their crescendo, only then would they shout 

DO IT!

At the top of their lungs. That would be the end of Barney Fife, but it would also be the signal for them all to crush themselves against their food ports to keep out the hands and tentacles of their keepers. 

Santino had no idea, now, how long he had not slept. It wasn’t safe - the Barney Fife m**********r might cry out for food at any second, and then they’d all make a meal. He tried to doze with his head against the food port, but he wasn’t quite tall enough to keep the port from leaning a little at the top. Plus, his dreams now were terribly disquieting, full of bloody landscapes and terrible, tall octopus creatures that sailed across roiling oceans in great fanged navies with massive sucking tubes that stole all the rushing water  -

He shot up straight. Rushing water! The pipes were going. He slammed his tap on as if he was crushing an enemies nose into the ground; all around him, pipes filled with water, and suddenly, a deafening cry:

“DO IT!” 

He heard himself scream it as well. There was a moment of silence, and then:

“Oh, you manipulative m**********r!”

“DO IT!” Santino cried again, and many more chimed in. “DO IT!”

“We’re not alone? We’re not alone? It’s not just me?” cried Barney Fife. “And you all join him in killing me, you m***********s? This is what you do to me? Guards! Guards! I’m f*****g HUNGRY! HUNGRY!”

A cell door slammed open next to the sally port. The dull eyes and fanged mouth of Sergeant Heimdall rose from view where he had been lying in front of the inmate’s cell door. The inmate quickly slammed his a*s into the foot port, but another face rose behind Heimdall, features distorted and purple but still recognizable.

“You were a pretty good sink,” snarled what had once been Doughboy Davis, formerly a big-time Blood but now rocking with a different crew. “But you’ve been a real bad man.” His eyes glittered black and red, filled with impossible shapes and absolutely no desire to explain anything he would ever do. A chitinous horn cresting out of his wide forehead trumpeted a terrible noise, like that of an octopus gibbering and shrieking through a warhorn. 

Sergeant Heimdall turned the key to Santino’s door and suddenly the monsters were all over him, a whirlwind of limbs hurling Santino out of his cell and into the hall. They yanked him up from where he fell and frogmarched him to a cell. Through the window he could see a tubby, gentle looking black man, still shouting “I’m HUNGRY!” Davis, Sergeant Heimdall and the other guards grabbed one of his hands, splayed out the pinkie finger and pushed it through the food port.

“FEEDING TIME,” roared Doughboy through serrated teeth. “Eat up, it’s the only food you’ll ever eat again!”

Santino howled as Barney Fife chewed through his pinkie finger, then his ring finger. He stopped shouting “I’m HUNGRY!” out of his bloody mouth when he broke one of his front teeth on the inmate’s middle finger knuckle. How he got back to his cell he did not know, but he almost forgot his hunger, lying there, nursing his mangled hand. 

“FEEDING TIME,” roared the sink once again, and the inmate’s head snapped up in despair. But it was a different face in the window, this time - a bearded, white face with a swastika tattooed on his cheek. Beneath the Nazi’s terrified eyes, his hand hung through the feeding port. 

“Eat up,” roared the sink. “It’s the only food you’ll ever eat again.” Santino got to his hands and knees. The pain from his hand almost made him forget his hunger. Almost.

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Reminds me of the novel, "Alive"....
but these are bad guys forced to be even worse...but proves that cannibalism sometimes is something we are forced into.
j.