Chapter 6

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I know the cold of the unwell.

I know the cold of traitor’s hell.

I’ve seen the frozen fractured face

of those who scream in vain, in space.

“Shut up. Lift your tongue,” said the nurse, but Jericho wouldn’t do it. She rammed a wooden depressor into his mouth and pried his jaw open. She gripped him by the hair, then yanked his head back so he was looking up to her. Jericho cried out in pain, cursing at his torturer without articulation. He wouldn’t swallow her fucking pills. They made him feel sick, not well. They kept saying they want him to get well, but they just wanted to make him sicker. He could feel himself fading. They wanted his soul. They wanted to break him. But they wouldn’t.

“If you don’t swallow your pills we’ll put you in the chair again,” the nurse threatenws. And she meant it. She would. “Swallow the pills. You hear me?”

“No! No!” He spat the pills into the collar of her scrubs, cackling as they tumbled between her breasts. She shrieked in disgust and pulled on the collar of her blouse to get them out.

“You crazy shit!” she bellowed, scrubbing her hands on her pants. “Crazy shit! You want it, you got it.” But Jericho laughed at her as she calls the orderlies. He’d beaten her today. Made her lose it. He was the one driving her crazy now. He repeated his poem with practiced speed, his favorite verse:

I know the cold of the unwell.

I know the cold of traitor’s hell.

I’ve seen the frozen fractured face

of those who scream in vain, in space.

They came to take him out of his bed, only two men. There used to be four but now they shackled his legs together with leather bands. They kept his hands free so he can type. There was no point in struggling, but he did anyway. One day he might get lucky and manage to bite one of them, or scratch their eyes out. Maybe then they’d kill him.

They strapped him into the chair, ankles, thighs, wrists, arms, chest, head and jaw. Jericho’s eyes bulged, spraying drool with every fevered breath. Then they brought out the needles. Jericho whimpered in fear. He begged them not to do it, told them he’s sorry, but his mouth was strapped shut and all he could do is moan. He wanted his straitjacket back, but they took it away from him years ago because they wanted his hands free so he could type. He wanted it back because he was cold and the jacket made him feel warm. He didn't want to type anymore. He told them that he quit. He told them he was tired but they didn’t listen. They heard him, but they didn’t listen. All they wanted to hear is typing. Typing typing typing.

The drugs burned their way down his veins, sweet pain singing through the implanted catheters in his arms. It felt like flash-burning lighter fluid racing into his heart. Stars tingle against his retinas. His nose felt dry and he experienced a terrible wakefulness of adrenalin.

“Type type type type…” he mumbled.

“He’s all right now,” said Doctor Patel, “you can let him go. You won’t cause any more trouble, will you Shawn?”

They undid the straps on his head. “My name is Jericho. I don’t like the name Shawn. I don’t like it.”

“Why don’t you like it?”

“I just don’t. It doesn’t matter.” Jericho raised his trembling hands from the armrests of the chair, weak with palsy and the seizing pain of carpal tunnel syndrome. “I don’t want to type anymore. I want to write poetry.”

“Poetry, Shawn?” Patel turned a chair around and sat on it backwards so that his arms rested on the back.

“Don’t sit that way!”

“I’m sorry, Shawn.” He sat normally, but he insisted on calling him Shawn. He was doing it just to upset him, but Jericho wouldn’t rise to the bait. Doctor Patel was an Indian, and he knew about the poetry. He’d heard it. He was just trying to hypnotize him or something. It was some psychological trick to get him to say something stupid and twist his words. He should be the one typing.

“Never sit that way.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t like Nurse Chen,” Jericho complained. “She’s Chinese and she hates me. She wants to kill all of us.”

“Nurse Chen is of Chinese descent,” Patel said patiently, folding his hands together. “She’s not a Chinese national. It makes her upset when you misbehave. You need to swallow your pills.”

Jericho cried. He'd done it again; twisted his words around. His jaw quivered so much that he bit his own tongue, and wailed in misery. “I’m sorry, Doctor Patel.”

“Why?”

“You know…it’s just—I just want to be left alone. Why can’t I just sleep? Please? I don’t want to do this anymore. Can’t you see I’m tired?”

Patel put his clipboard down near the sink, looking over a steeple of fingers at Jericho. The doctor said nothing for a time, and Jericho turned away from the heat of his judging eyes. Finally, Patel licked his lips and lowered his hands into his lap.

“Tell me about what you’ve been typing.”

“I just want to stop typing. My hands are tired.”

“Typing what, Shawn? Poetry?”

“No! No! You never let me type poetry like I want to. Never! It’s always deadlines, always another interface to write. Recursion, recursion, recursion! I hate recursion! By its very nature it’s counter-intuitive, solving a problem bottom-up when all you can see is the top. I can do it, but it’s not right. It’s not the way things should be done. None of it is. I don’t want to write code for you anymore. I don’t want to type anymore!”

“All right, Shawn, all right,” said Patel in his fucking condescending, patronizing tone. He was fucking lying. They’d make him write somehow. They’d make him track down errors, read old script, documentation. As if documentation would help. It was all wicked. It was all against the rules. He didn’t want to type because he couldn’t do it properly anymore. It was unnatural, the way he wrote. Only his poetry came out right, because it came from him. The code wasn’t his, and he didn’t like it.

“I’m cold, Doctor Patel. Can I have a blanket in my room?”

“Shawn, we talked about this. You know what happened last time we let you have a blanket.”

“Please!” Jericho screamed. Then he realized in horror that he’d raised his voice, and moderated his tone so as not to sound crazy. “Please, Doctor. I swear, I promise, I swear I won’t try to swallow it again. I don’t like the medicine, and I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“We’ll talk about that later if you behave this week.”

“What if!” Jericho suddenly blurted out. He’s got an idea! “What if I typed for you today? Would you let me have a blanket? Or my jacket?”

Patel looked uncomfortable. He picked up his clipboard, and stuck the end of his pen in his mouth.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Do you remember what we talked about last Sunday?”

“Sunday?” Jericho searched his memory, but couldn’t remember anything. The medicine filled the corners of his mind with smoke and lies. “What happened Sunday?”

“We had this exact same conversation, Shawn. Almost word for word, when you got angry as I sat in this chair the wrong way, when you said you didn’t want to type anymore. Shawn, nobody’s made you type since you got here. We’re not going to make you type, not ever. Do you understand?”

Jericho scoffed. “I lied. I remember last Sunday. I remember what you said. And you lied, like you always do. Like you always, always do.”

“Look at your hands, Shawn.”

“Fuck you!”

“Just look at your hands.”

Jericho wanted to stab Doctor Patel in the throat with his fucking pen for calling him Shawn. But he looked down at his hands. At first he saw that he was making fists, because he’s so angry. But he couldn’t open his hands. They were frozen stiff, probably because of the carpal tunnel. Lumpy scars thrust out irregularly from his knuckles, white and ugly.

“I can’t open—what’s wrong with my hands?”

“Shawn, those are your hands. You bit your own fingers off and swallowed them eight months ago. You almost bled to death.”

“No I didn’t! That’s not true.”

“You can’t type anymore, Shawn. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Bullshit!” But Patel was right; all of a sudden his fingers were gone. Jericho would never have done that to his own hands. “What did you do to my hands? Do you think this is funny? You sick motherfucker! This isn’t going to work, you know. I’m not going to work for you anymore!”

Patel stood up from his chair and motioned for the orderlies to drag him back to his cell. They gathered him up under his useless arms and hauled him bodily down the hall. Patel watched him go with a sickening, piteous look on his face. The doctor looked smug, victorious. Jericho pointed at him with his gnarled stump of a fist, screaming defiantly.

“I’m glad I did it! Because you won’t get another line out of me! I’m glad! I quit! You, Avery, Oshima, Wagner? All of you can go to hell!”

Jericho awakened that night to a bright light in his cell. He sat up, scrubbing sleep from his eyes so he could focus on whatever’s disturbing his rest. It was a laptop computer, sitting at the foot of his bed. The only thing on the screen was a little white text prompt on a black field, blinking endlessly on…off…on…off…each time a flare that left a fading green mark on his vision.

“We’re not finished yet, Jericho,” the computer says. “It’s time for you to type some more.”

“And then I can rest?”

“Yes, Jericho. And then you can rest.”

“Will you—will you let me type my poetry? Will you remember it for me?”

“Yes, Jericho. I will.”

So he typed.

I know the cold of the unwell.

I know the cold of traitor’s hell.

I’ve seen the frozen fractured face

of those who scream in vain, in space.

There is a cold that can enslave.

There is a death beyond the grave.

I know the futility of prayer.

I know the cold that isn’t there.