When I wake up, it takes me a moment to adjust to my surroundings, to take in the environment around me. The first thing I notice is the silence, perhaps because my eyes are less adaptable than my ears. The silence is complete and final. There is not one decibel of sound around me. As my eyes focus, the first thing they see is bright white. Sterile. I look around, and see that I am in a room, slightly larger than my cell. I am on a bed, stainless steel, as are all the furnishings in the prison.
I have heard stories of this place. Men – convicts- have talked about it. Not to me, directly, nobody would dare afford me such a privilege as knowledge, but I have spent the last two weeks doing nothing but listening and reflecting, and it has been to some avail. For example, I am aware that the room I am in is not one of the countless cells, or a holding room, but solitary confinement.
I also know that the general stay here is roughly twenty-four hours. They seem to think a man will break in twenty-four hours of… nothing. How wrong they are. I have interrogated men, held them for days on end, and they have not broken.
I realize that I am thinking of myself in third-person. 'A man' will break. Not me. I am no longer on the other side. I am no longer the breaker. I am the broken one.
Slowly, groggily, I sit up on the bed. There is an immense pain in my nose, and tentatively, I touch it. It is covered in gauze, and I guess it must have been broken by the guard. I wince, looking for any other damage. Besides a few expected bruises, I am unharmed.
With nothing else to do, I reflect, back to my trial. The memory is not pleasant, and I have tried to suppress it for the duration of my stay here, but with nothing to distract me, it comes flooding back with a vengeance. Small pieces, the important and disturbing memories, rotate in my mind.
Michelle's face. My mother and father in the back row. My father holding and comforting my mother. Michelle's tears. The intent listening of the jury. The scratching of the court artist's pencils against the paper. The tapping of the reporter's keyboard. The color of the oak of the judge's stand. Michelle shaking with sobs. The crackle of the microphone on the witness's stand. The foreman standing up. Michelle screaming with the verdict. My mother crying. Jack hugging Michelle, holding her as she collapsed. The cuffs against my skin.
It is odd how the smallest of memories can trigger the most powerful emotional reactions. Something as seemingly unimportant as a sound, a feeling, a quick visual from a distance, can cause a grown man to cry.
I am using third person again. It can cause me to cry. And it does. Sitting there, on the bed, garbed in the orange of a convict I put my head in between my knees. I press it into my hands, and I cry, my entire body shaking with sobs. All that I have suppressed for the last two weeks rises at last. I am destroyed, and for once I let it show.
