Shackles

It’s not as much of a loss as it might have been two or three weeks ago. I can get by without it now. If I need conversation or music in here, I’ll create it myself.

After all, don’t psychologists say that talking to yourself is one way of validating your own existence, reassuring yourself that you’re still alive and kicking?

The Thirty-Fourth Day

Thought for the day:

For weeks before all of this happened, ever since that ugly case involving the Purcell family, I contemplated retirement. Talked it over with Kerry, and she was all for it-provided, she said, I was sure I wouldn’t grow bored and discontented. Not me, I said. Detective work is no longer the be-all and end-all of my life, I said. I can find plenty of things to do, I said, plenty of ways to occupy my time. Bored? Discontented? No way.

Well, bullshit.

What is this if not a kind of forced retirement? This filling up of my days with endless routine, marking time until the Grim Reaper shows up? No purpose in my existence here other than survival; no purpose in retirement, either, other than survival of a somewhat less painful variety. I’m miserable now, confined to this room by chains I can see, feel, hear slithering along the floor whenever I move. If I were home, retired, rattling around my empty flat all day, wouldn’t I be just as miserable in the long run? And just as chained? Invisible chains, sure, much longer than this one and allowing me much more freedom of movement, but still confining in their own way?

I’m a detective, dammit. That is not only what I am, it’s who I am. I hate the business, I hate the things I see, the people I have to deal with, the actions I’m sometimes forced to take. But hey, who says you have to love your job to be good at it, to take satisfaction from it, to need it to give meaning and fulfillment to your life? I’d wither up and die in the chains of retirement, just as I’ll wither up and die if I don’t escape from these chains. I know that now. I should have known it all along.

When I get out of here, I am not going to retire. I am going straight back into harness. Find the mad dog first, and then resume my duties at the agency and keep right on working until, God willing, I die in bed at the age of ninety after successfully completing one last case.

Retirement is hell, so to hell with retirement.

The Thirty-Sixth Day

The stench in here is bad and getting worse by the day. Garbage is part of it, but the worst part of it is me.

I’ve filled up two of the cardboard cartons with empty cans and cookie and cracker wrappers. At first I didn’t bother to rinse out the cans before I dumped them into the cartons; but then the food remnants began to rot and smell, and I had to spend part of a day cleaning them out with soapy water. Now I rinse each can thoroughly as I use it. Still, the accumulation of them and of the microscopic food particles that I wasn’t able to wash away have gradually built up a sour odor. The odor in one of the cartons got so bad that I pushed it out into the middle of the room, to the full extension of the chain, and then skidded it over to the far side of the room. If this were spring or summer, I would have ants and maybe mice and rats to deal with on top of everything else.

But the real problem is my body odor and my clothing and the two blankets. Washing out my shirt and underwear and socks once a week, using nothing but a bar of hand soap, doesn’t do much to get rid of the soaked- in sweat smell. Sponge baths don’t do much to cleanse my body, either. I’m afraid to wash my hair, matted and greasy as it is, because of the threat of another bad cold, of pneumonia. And there’s nothing I can do about the blankets or the cot or my coats or my trousers.

All of this is as much an indignity as the rest of it. I’ve been turned into a filthy, rank-smelling bum-I have been made unclean.

I hate him for that, too. As if I needed any more fuel to keep the hate burning high and hot, like a fire on the edge of my soul.

The Thirty-Ninth Day

I’ve given up scraping at the wall around the ringbolt with flattened cans and the edges of can lids. It’s wasted effort, pointless and frustrating and psychologically debilitating. I am not going to escape that way. In all this time I’ve managed to scrape a circular furrow around the bolt no more than an eighth of an inch deep. At this rate it would take me a year, maybe two, to work through the log to the outside. And I’m more convinced than ever that I would need to work all the way through in order to free the bolt. He didn’t just imbed it in the log; no, he drilled a hole straight through to the outside, fitted the bolt into the hole, and then fastened it in place with a locking plate of some kind. I’ve never doubted his intelligence, his cunning, his thoroughness. It would be a mistake to doubt them now.

What I can and still do doubt is his ability to foresee and effectively block every conceivable method of escape. There is something he overlooked, something I’m overlooking. There has to be. I’ve believed that all along and I’ll keep believing it until I find the weak link in the chain… metaphorically if not literally.

The Forty-Third Day

Funny, but old memories seem to come bobbing up to the surface lately. Things I haven’t thought about in years, that were lodged and forgotten in the depths of my mind, most of them from my youth-and I don’t understand why, here and now, after all the days in this place.

The house where I grew up, for instance. It was in the Outer Mission, in a little Italian working-class enclave near the Daly City line. Big rambling thing, built in the twenties, part wood frame and part stucco, with a fenced-in rear yard that had a walnut tree in its exact center. I used to climb the tree when I was a kid, sometimes to pick walnuts when they were in season, sometimes just to sit and think or read. Drove my ma crazy until she decided I was old enough not to break a leg climbing in or out; then she quit yelling at me to put my feet on the ground and keep them there.

That memory of my ma, and others too. She was a big, sweet-faced woman, hiding a load of pain and sadness under a jovial exterior. My old man was one reason for the pain and sadness. My sister Nina was another: Nina died of rheumatic fever at the age of five. I don’t remember much about her, except that she had black hair and black eyes and she was very thin; I was only eight when she died. Ma couldn’t have any other children and so she lavished all her maternal love on me. I was lucky in that respect. If she’d been anything like my old man, the whole shape of my life might have been different.

She loved to cook, as did most Italian women of her generation. She would spend hours in the kitchen, making Ligurian dishes from her native Genoa. Focaccia alla salvia, torta pasqualina, trenette col pesto, trippa con il sugo di tocco, burrida, tomaxelle, cima alla Genovese, dozens more. Lord, the aromas that would fill the house from her kitchen! Garlic, spices, simmering sauces, frying meats, baking breads and cakes and gnocchi e canditti. I can close my eyes now, even here in this place, and it’s as if I’m back in that big house surrounded by all those succulent smells.

There was one Sunday when I was twelve or thirteen-a feast to celebrate the wedding of one of my cousins. It was a warm day and we ate in the backyard, on tables covered with white linen cloths, and there was accordion