Escape

Twelve years of confinement in this prison now, and for the last few little has changed and almost nothing has happened of note. You could say that I have finally adjusted to life here. I have become accustomed to its uniformity and can almost no longer imagine what change would be like were it to occur. At least, I cannot imagine it in a realistic manner. Of course I fantasise about change almost constantly: I dream of escape and revenge, or more often these days of windows or wallpaper. But these imaginings have no coherent quality, they are absolute dreams, untranslatable into the terms of my real experience: stones and dirt, food and exercise routines, the modest geometry of the space within which I am confined.

It wasn't always like this; it took me many years to achieve my inert state. The first few years of my life here were by comparison very eventful, though I was unable to appreciate this at the time. The most important event was annual, when the prison overseer would visit to administer a few hours of simple torture to mark the anniversary of my incarceration. This was my only human contact. I wondered whether this man was a particularly literary sadist and had read The Count of Monte Cristo and taken the idea from there, or whether perhaps this commemorative treatment was common practice in certain prisons and Dumas had simply incorporated reality into his novel. Whichever it was I never found out; in all the years of deprivation I never once felt the urge to engage him in conversation.

For the first few years the physical pain of the torture was unbearable, given that the rest of the year was spent at a level of nearly zero physical stimulation of any kind. But as time and boredom wore my expectations gradually down I began to somewhat look forward to my anniversary days. One consistent feature of the torture programme was its predictability; it only ever occurred on this single day and never lasted more than a few hours. The certainty of relief became a comfort, and the period immediately after the cessation of pain a bliss, with the knowledge that an inconceivably long time would pass before I ever felt such pain again. With time, the torture became associated with its own cathartic aftermath and was, although not a pleasant, an exciting experience. Did my tormentor sense this? Or did he simply get bored? Whichever it is, the yearly torture has now stopped and I am utterly alone (even my food is served to me mechanically).

A somatic residue of the anniversary programme remains but is fading: a slight shiver of distress or excitement that builds in my body at a certain time of year. It is this and the changing patterns of light occasionally glimpsed through the food hatch that enable me still to calculate the approximate passage of the years. It also appears that I am aging. I was twenty-six when I was first brought here, which must make me close to forty now. Without mirrors, it is difficult to gauge the change, as the face is always the greatest indicator, but my body appears flabbier, and not quite as strong.

This might be due in part to changes in my lifestyle. When I first arrived, thoughts of revenge were foremost in my mind. Although at the time I had formed no detailed plans, I knew that whatever they were they would require me to be strong and agile, ready to to fight. So I exercised. And there being little else to do I did it almost all day and developed a muscular physique that now seems to me quite ridiculous when I think of it. In those days it took several men to subdue me in preparation for the torture. In later years both my weakness and my compliance made the task a great deal easier.

As I plotted, and later simply fantasised, my escape and revenge, I began to dream of it, increasingly frequently until I dreamt the same dream every night. I dreamt that somehow the walls of the cell were filled with holes about the size of a fist. As I looked around, I saw that even the floor was so perforated. I could glimpse the outside world through some of these, in all the details that back then I still remembered clearly (or at least believed I did). I soon gained an element of initiative within the dream and most nights would attempt to force myself through one of these holes, or sometimes through several of them at once, an absurd technique that nonetheless always appeared to make sense in the fevered reasoning of the dream state. But I would soon find to my great distress that parts of my body were too firm and too solid to be forced through the spaces.

This recurring dream upset me so much that I entered a period of depression that I suppose lasted for some months. I stopped exercising and stopped plotting, and I found it hard to sleep, although this at least offered some relief from the nightmares. I realise now that this slump was most likely brought on by the slow realisation that there could be no escape, and that the dream was a manifestation of this terrible intuitive knowledge. I recovered. I suppose that since there was no simple way of killing myself in the cell, a recovery of sorts was inevitable as I adjusted to the shock of isolation without prospect of relief.

I still occasionally experience the dream, although now my body is always soft enough to be pressed through the gaps, and is sometimes almost soup-like or a sort of spiritual vapour. I also no longer dream of reaching the outside world as I squeeze out. Any thought or vision of the stimulation and complexity of normal life is quite distressing to me. I dream instead that I seep out of my cell where it is suspended above a uniform, calm blue ocean.