Authors: Brandon Shire
The third time four year old Bruce shit his pants his father carefully undressed him, sat him down, and procured a mayonnaise and shit sandwich that Bruce was to eat before being beaten. The uncomprehending crocodile tears he shed held no sway over his father’s fury. In fact, it seemed to Bruce that the incident only opened the door to all that happened to him later. And there was much that happened.
By the time someone took the time to look past all the labels he acquired for his violent behavior, he was eight. When they moved him into foster care the social workers had to annotate the pock marks on his hips and buttocks from where he had been strung up and beaten with a nail studded board; they had to procure special shoes because his heels had been turned into pin cushions by the needles that pierced his flesh every time his weary young body fell back from keeping his nose in the ‘nose hole’. Social workers were also required to explain to the potential foster parents that he was somewhat incontinent because of the innumerable, and somewhat large, objects that had been shoved up his backside. They did not mention the common sexual abuse, or the animals, or the fact that he had trouble sleeping when not tied to the bed. Those things were best left unsaid.
Needless to say, Bruce bounced through a plethora of foster homes before he garnered himself the label of ‘unredeemable’ and was referred to the care of Dr. Minot in the hopes that he could perform yet another miracle. But it only took Bruce a few days on the dayroom floor before he threw the whole subculture of Sanctuary into chaos.
He looked ten, but he fought like a wildcat. He spewed a litany of expletives at anyone who had, or assumed, authority or control. The orderlies called him feral, and approached with pepper spray and truncheons in hand. They didn’t try to subdue him, but merely clubbed him or sprayed him senseless enough that they could drag him off to the Bug or back to his cell.
The predators in the dorm fared no better, Bruce sought them out before they could even think of making a move on him. He was used to the abuse. He enjoyed it, relished it and claimed it as his own rightful attempt at love. He would hop from bed to bed, ministering to adolescent desires while he searched for some proof of his own worth.
That was how he came into my room.
He crept into the room one night while I was sleeping and dove under the covers for my piss-hard penis. After battling for a few unfocused moments, I pried him off of me, stood him outside of my bed, and wrapped a blanket around myself as I sat up.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked him.
He stood there, hands on hips, sneer on his face, eyes gleaming with outrage, and began taunting my masculinity; cajoling and angering me to the point that I nearly turned him over and gave him some of the same sadism that I knew he had sparked from others.
But instead, after a deep breath and after realizing that all I could offer to assuage his pain was my own arms, I put my hands on his small soft shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. “Not like this, Bruce. You’re welcome here, but not like this,” I told him, my thumbs rubbing the soft curves on his neck.
A visible sadness crept out from behind all that anger, but only for a moment.
His lip trembled then firmed. He stepped into my embrace and tucked himself under my arms, propelling us back into my bed with a chuckle.
I covered him with small kisses, held him like crystal still warm in my hands, and tried to teach him all the tenderness that Robert had taught me. After a time, he became soft with anticipation, malleable with the delicious warmth I gave him, and drowsy with the fragrance of affection. But it wasn’t to last. Even though he came back regularly after that night, I knew that he had delved too deep into the utter and absolute loneliness within himself. He wouldn’t take even a drop of the vulnerability he’d opened himself up to with me. I had witnessed his self loathing, the unbearable self-hatred he carried, and I knew about the deep yearning he thought himself unentitled to.
I ran my hands over the small curves of his body and looked at him in the pearly din of the security lighting outside my door. He had his chin tucked into my chest and his arms curled up around my neck. Watching him sleep like that you would never have known how unpopular he was with the staff and other wards. He was too much trouble, brought too much heat, and never allowed words to be caught in his throat. His gaze was so intense that twice already he’d had his nose busted by someone who had flared under its pressure.
He stirred when I wiped at the tears of useless empathy filling me and overflowing. I kissed his forehead and pressed him to me as he looked up at me with a light innocent expression of perplexion. His hand moved with only a slight hesitation and touched a tear on my cheek.
“Why?” he asked in a confidential whisper, rubbing the liquid of my tears between his fingers before putting them lightly on the tip of his tongue.
“Because you won’t,” I told him.
He held my eyes for a long moment, and then looked away, his own eyes suddenly glassy and unseeing, before he nodded.
On the last night that he came to me, I realized that he had not touched one soul since he’d been at Sanctuary. His body had, but he himself had not once felt the warmth of another’s compassion, not even from me. I tried to put this out of my mind, but when he started to cry, I knew that he had realized it too.
It was a sad smile that surfaced when I asked him what was wrong. He only shook his head as if it didn’t matter, a violent shudder sweeping through him before he got up and left.
When I awoke the next morning he had already set his plans in motion. Long used to the taste of his own shit, Bruce had just taken one of the judiciously dispensed conically shaped paper cups and filled it with his own feces as bait for the animosity of one of the orderlies that we called Sergeant Grish. Orderlies had no rank of course, just as we wards had no numbers. We were wards, they were orderlies. But he was Sgt. Grish; a big dark haired man who found the little bit of Sioux in Bruce reason enough for this ex-marine to harbor a grudge.
But it also seemed to me that every time that Sgt Grish stepped on the floor, Bruce would run from whatever cubbyhole he had secured himself in and provoked the man until even Grish tired of beating him. But beat him he would. Even when, after a while, it was no longer for the fun of it, but simply necessary to maintain his authority.
Today was no exception. One look at Bruce’s small rapturous face and Grish went right over to investigate and confiscate the unauthorized delicacy. That the odor failed to alert Grish came as no surprise to any of us, the stink of shit and fear was pervasive enough in Sanctuary that we simply ignored it.
When they finally clashed over Bruce’s ill-gotten prize, it was like a grizzly and a weasel fighting. The weasel was slippery and elusive, quick enough to dodge most of the blows, but ultimately overcome by sheer brute strength.
Grish’s leer was triumphant, almost ecstatic. He had engaged, conquered and relieved this small boy of one moment of unauthorized happiness, and he wanted to make sure everyone in the dorm saw it. But his smile suddenly faltered, there was something wrong that he could not quite comprehend. And in that one tiny moment of awkward indecision, Bruce struck.
He swung up with his free arm, retrieved his phantomed prize and smashed it into Grish’s smile. The dorm exploded into riotous laughter as Grish vomited. When he gagged and inhaled the shit further into his nostrils, he puked again, emptying his stomach while simultaneously trying to extricate shit with his fingers. The dorm swam in hysteria, the boys curled over and fought for breath while Bruce danced around Grish in a silent torment of mime.
When he finally recovered, he scooped Bruce wordlessly over his shoulder and stomped from the dorm. Bruce didn’t even fight; he just hung there, his green eyes filled with a comical relief, his face colored with the hue of acceptance, and his smile hinged easy with the knowledge that his only elixir from this hateful existence was death, which he had just purchased for himself. He knew it and I knew it, and there was nothing either one of us could have done to stop it.
As many times as I had been there myself, it was easy for me to see him strapped into the Bug; the sole of his foot strapped bare on the harsh metal plate, sweat dripping from his brow, down his chest, from his small hairless buttocks.
The rubber silencer would be crammed into his mouth to keep his screams from piercing his tormentor’s ears; the vents would pull the charred smell of his flesh from their nostrils, antiseptic would freshen the spot where his bowels had voided in his struggle to escape; and at the last, the very last, his small body, rank with the stench of misuse, would be whisked away by a green garbed drone to keep the stain of his existence from paining anyone’s eyes. All that for a cup of shit and a lifetime of reinforced self-worthlessness.
No one there from Children’s Services to witness the silence deafening the room. No juvenile judge come to smell the hot vapors from his body. No parent to witness that last teardrop glisten before it fell and shattered on the floor. He went alone, like a dark dreamy shadow to stain heaven’s doorway and mock the god that answered.
And me? I was left with the knowledge that I had showed him the cold dead tree that was his unreachable heart, the unending sky that was his endless rage, the frigid breeze that society had warped from his once tender soul.
Me.
I showed him that.
It was my first attempt at suicide.
My next solid memory was of awakening in a small cell with a hard metal bed. There was a bright orange steel door in front of me with a large Plexiglas window set into it. This was not Sanctuary. It was too quiet and it smelled different.
It didn’t take but a minute for me to realize what had happened. They shot me up with dope and shipped me off somewhere, maybe to a darker hell. I didn’t know at this point.
What I guessed was that an investigation had probably begun into Bruce’s death, he was a state ward after all. Grish would have disappeared and we all would have been shipped as far and as fast away as possible.
But I had new terrors to worry about now. I rolled from the bed and posted myself in front of the window. There was nothing to see but a bigger cinder block wall and the long hall that stretched to either side of my cell. In other words, nothing. I yelled and got only an echo back. There was nothing to do but wait. So I sat, and waited.
Eventually a boyish looking young man came to my window and stood looking in, but not at me. His eyes were vacant, his non-cherubic face speaking of years of inner torment. He was a man cowering in a boy’s body.
“I stopped fearing men the day I shot my daddy,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“He used to beat me. Make me strip down and lay me over the bed. Sometimes I’d wait hours. That was the worst. The waiting.” He looked deep into the chipped aging paint and saw his other life. Perhaps a jackknife in his pocket, his initials carved into a tree, his pants too short and worn down to scrim. I couldn’t say specifically, but his inflection hinted deep country poor, his chinless face a long line of too-close relatives.
He broke the conversation off as abruptly as he’d begun it, turning his attention back to the dust mop he carried.
“That’s Joseph. Gang-raped in juvie after he shot his father. Until he turned seventeen he was the party favorite, then they shipped him here. He’s, uh... not right anymore.”
I glanced at Joseph covertly, conscious of my own curiosity, appalled by it, yet aware that he was well lost in his own world. “How long has he been here?” I asked, having seen many of his like at Sanctuary.
“Five, six years. Long enough.”
Long enough for what, I wanted to ask, but Joseph’s companion stuck his hand through the slot in the door and stalled my question.
“Rodriguez,” he said as I clasped his hand as much as the cuffs would allow.
“Benedict.”
He tilted his head at me through the Plexiglas. “No, you have another name.”
I blinked and tried to withdraw my hand but he wouldn’t let go.
He smiled curiously and released my hand; deciding to let a conversation go that I was obviously uncomfortable with. “Welcome to the Birch Building. Where'd you come from?” he asked.
“Sanctuary.”
His smile faded. “Oh.”
He was a short man with dark Latin features and an accent that matched his name. He seemed pleasant, jovial even, but there was something about him that made me uneasy.