Trapped in a long night...
A long time ago, I had a memorable phone call from a friend of mine, a real heart to heart, after he had been arrested, jailed for about three weeks, then released on bail. After all these years, many of the details are his: his voice, his emotion, his descriptions; though I know many the details, now, after so much time has past, are definitely my own...
The arrest itself was apparently tame. He was pulled over for speeding, then his name flagged a call for arrest when his information was logged. On the way to the police office, he had a friendly chat with the driving officer, chatting about the sunshine and the city passing by. It was all fairly upbeat, minus the handcuffs and the separating wire grid.
At the station, he met more officers who gave him cookies and coffee, sharing stories about their wives. While the paperwork was being filed, my friend began to think that he was not going to be released, and that he would need to work out a strategy, think of who to dial when he got his one phone call. But everyone was still chatty, and he was still wiping cookie crumbs from his mouth. He sat comfortably on a bench by an officer's desk; he walked around freely, without handcuffs; he went to the bathroom without supervision.
As the sun began to set, the officers began to change shifts. One approached and said, it's time. The officer led him down a corridor, down a hallway, through a door with a keypad, then past a line of jail cells.
The cells had bars. They had thin woolly blankets and beds next to steel toilets, everything strapped on the walls. The officer led him to one cell, pointed him in, then grabbed the bars on the door and slowly slid it shut. My friend said he was still smiling when the bars closed and locked; he'd even thanked the officer and said goodbye as he was turning out the lights.
After the sound of footsteps died away, the room was silent, except for muffled sounds and sirens. In the cell, my friend turned. He looked up, and he looked down. He sat on the bed and bounced, felt the rough fabric and eyed the toilet. He counted the bars, and he felt them. He stood and paced from one end, then to the other, then to the other, and finally to the other, and then right back again.
As the seconds crept, the air began to feel heavy. He tried shaking the door, but it didn't budge. He pressed at the lock, then whacked it. He plucked his hands down the row of bars like harp strings. He kicked at the bottom and punched at the top. He felt the concrete wall and smoothed his hands down it, looking for cracks. Three times around, four times around, then right back again. He looked up at the security cameras winking at him outside the cage.
He thought of escape, of jailbreak. He thought about gangsters, movies with explosives, and all kinds of devices you can make from tin cans. He thought about Alcatraz and aliens, his mother's face and knives, and all sorts of card tricks that you can play alone if you only had cards.
The oppression sank, and sank into him until it was almost unbearable, until the woolly blanket beneath him scratched, and the smell of stale sweat and toilet water seared his nostrils. Until he realised that there was no jailbreak, that there was no getting out. He was in a cage; the bars were real. This was no simulation, no reproduction, no game.
I recalled his phone conversation today as I was laying on my bed, fully clothed. It struck me that my dark blue dress blended into the colour of my dark blue duvet, until I all but disappeared into one dark, dark sombre blue colour.
As I lay on my bed, my week started spiralling around me. I started with a bit of a wry smile, thinking of this or this, that or that. This thing had collapsed this week, how unfortunate. That thing had gone awry, how ironic. And where was this that I was missing? And who was that person I lost?
I tried my hand at being optimistic. I tried counting new days and good times. When that failed, I tried to count my losses and leafed through ideas to even the score. As those thoughts expired, I resorted to self-pity, to anger and fury, to drudges and grief and Tom Waits. And when all things were made worse, I sought comfort. For the first time in recent memory, I desperately needed to talk, to reach a human voice, a loved one.
I held out my phone and dialled. I tried Amna, but she was asleep. I tried friends, one then another, but the phone rang on. I tried mom at work, I tried her at home. I tried my father at work, but he was gone. I tried my brother at school, I tried my aunt. I went through my contacts and mentally checked them off: tried, would never, couldn't stomach him right now.
One thing, then another, until I was left laying there looking up at my ceiling, blending into the dark blue of my duvet and the dark blue of my carpet, and the dark blue of the night outside. All I could think about were bars, strumming those bars with my hands and walking around in circles in my cell. Everyone outside, out and about, and I am held in, thinking of gangsters and explosives and tin cans.
I'm having a really shitty week.